Thoughts On a Train

A Novel about Mozart's Mother

2012-01-27T15:20:00.000-05:00

Since today is Mozart's 256th Birthday, I was thinking about a novel I'd read back during the 250th Anniversary's Mozart Year. It's by Pittsburgh-based author Liane Ellison Norman, published by Smoke & Mirrors Press, and it's called Stitches in Air (a novel about Mozart’s Mother), released on September 1st, 2001. Whether it may not have received much notice due to other events associated with that cataclysmic month or it is merely the fate of many very fine books published by small independent presses which lack the mechanism for wider distribution and promotion, I hadn’t heard anything about it until six years ago while I was googling for information during all the hype surrounding attempts to authenticate Mozart’s skull. I highly recommend it to you and hope you'll be intrigued enough to want to read it yourself, then pass the word on to other friends who might be interested in “a very good read” whether they’re ‘into’ classical music or not.

Mozart at 6

If you’re familiar with Mozart’s story – composing by the age of 5, dragged across Europe as a performing prodigy and dandled on the knees of queens and empresses, then deemed a failure because he was unable to land a job as a court musician and died in poverty at the age of 35 – you’re only familiar with a small part of it, much of it based on all the myth-making that has occurred over the years. There is the context of his era – the second half of the 18th Century, known generically as “The Age of Enlightenment” – that is also often understood incompletely: it is difficult to “let go” of a lot of the legends we’ve all grown up with, but it is also easy to condemn the past because it holds views foreign to our own.

Central to Mozart’s up-bringing but curiously absent from most accounts of it is his mother, Anna Maria Pertl. Granted, you can read biographical accounts of great people without ever finding out much about their mothers but that could be the result of male bias from the historians as likely as it might be from those who decided what historical information was important to keep or discard. As Ms. Norman writes in her afterword, “Enlightenment thinkers, though they endorsed the Rights of Man, were aware that someone had to darn Man’s socks and cook his dinner, tasks they thought women were Endowed by their Creator with the unalienable obligation to perform.” People who grew up aware of the advances made in our own times regarding women’s role in society may not be aware how deep some of these prejudices run: it is this habit of millennia, perhaps, that we can still see struggling reluctantly (often violently) with change as we in the West attempt to “enlighten” the Muslim world regarding the Rights of Women.

Mozart's Mother: Anna Maria Pertl

In most biographies of Mozart, his mother’s story is quickly told. What we know of her life before she married Leopold Mozart barely fills a single page. We know when Anna Maria Pertl was born, we know a little something about her father and considerably less about her mother except that she was married twice and both times to musicians. We know she was four years old when her father died, that the Archbishop of Salzburg’s men confiscated their property for payment of his debts and that she, her older sister (who shortly afterwards died) and their mother lived in poverty. Then she met and married Leopold Mozart, a match that was not approved by his mother because he could do better marrying someone with money and status if he wanted to move up in the world. From there, the details of her life are also quickly told: once married, she bore seven children in eight years, five of them dying in infancy. Beyond this, factual information is scant until she accompanies her son on that fateful trip to Paris when her husband, the usual impresario, was unable to go: she became ill and died there at the age of 57.

To read the letters and other accounts about Mozart’s childhood, you would think Leopold Mozart, a violinist and composer employed by the Archbishop of Salzburg, had created his children parthenogenically, springing from his own musical talent fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. What role Anna Mozart may have had in their up-bringing beyond mending their clothes, cooking their meals and keeping the home spotless we do not know. Leopold required his letters to be preserved because they were a documentation of his travels with his prodigiously talented son and were ways of disseminating the rave reviews and honors being showered upon young Wolfgang to their friends and, most especially, to the court in Salzburg. Anna’s responses were never kept: they were entirely personal and probably only about household and domestic details that would be of no importance. But there are two tantalizing tidbits that surface in these letters, and they generated the seed that eventually helped Ms. Norman flesh out the human figure that is the central focus of her novel.

Anna Mozart must have been able to read music. There would have been no reason for this if she were not musically trained. Leopold sends home instructions for her to go through the manuscripts, looking specifically for two pieces, identifying them by certain musical details – “with the violin and double bass staccato (you will know the one I mean).” Earlier in a letter written home from Italy to both Anna and Nannerl, there was a brief query about the women having three concerts, with Wolfgang adding, “I hope that I shall soon hear those Pertl chamber symphonies.” While we know Nannerl also composed (though none of her music exists under her own name), the fact these were called “Pertl chamber symphonies” must mean they were written by Anna Pertl Mozart. The only other possibility, and very remote at that, might be they had been composed by Anna’s father though there was never any indication he was a composer. But if he had been, it would have been okay: for a woman to compose was to risk social censorship and possibly even be accused of witchcraft.

This is a dichotomy where the Age of Reason nearly comes undone for some of us almost three centuries later: for all the philosophizing about logic and “enlightenment” in general, there was still a woman tried for witchcraft in Germany three years before Anna’s death. In the novel, Ms. Norman mentions several such trials and executions, only one of which is fictional. While this thread is mentioned several times in the course of the story – that if a woman engages in musical composition, she will be neglecting her responsibilities as a wife and mother or that her womb will dry up: at one point, Anna even wonders if her dreams of being a composer herself were responsible for the death of her first three children – I’ll quote from one conversation between Anna and her son, not yet 22 years old, as they take off on the adventure that would lead them, eventually, to Paris:

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“I wish Nannerl had come,” he said. “Mama, just the other day I heard the new Court Composer, Fischietti, say in that heavy way of his, that ‘the weaker sex have not, not in the least, the general intellect capable of grasping the intricacies of musical composition.’ I have heard Papa say something very like that. But Nannerl composes wonderfully.”Anna smiled at him. “Often,” she said, “it seems to me that when many people think something is the case, they cannot see what is under their very noses. Of course Nannerl can compose. It is foolishness to say otherwise, but what is foolish is often taken for wisdom.”
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Nowhere in what history survives about Anna Pertl and Leopold Mozart is there any explanation how they met or why he married her. It defies logic, really, to find an ambitious musician employed at court who wants to succeed to the post of Chief Court Composer who would risk his social standing by marrying a woman from a penniless and socially inferior family. Ms. Norman’s fictional filling in of this important aspect of the story is as plausible as any: sent to the convent to inquire after a composition that had been forwarded to the Archbishop’s chapel from there by the nun’s choir director, he is dismayed to discover the “AP” on the manuscript is a young woman living at the convent, Anna Pertl.

Though he recognizes the talent in the piece, he also recognizes that the Archbishop’s attitude towards women composers – and by extension anyone who wanted to advance in the court hierarchy there – would not permit her work to be performed there under her own name. But Leopold performs a trio of hers, passing it off as his own in order for it to be heard and appreciated on its own merits, which is regarded as the best thing he’d written so far! He feels that Anna indeed has “a genius” in her music, but after they marry and she begins the arduous process of giving birth to and raising children – and the pain of burying five of them – there is no longer any time for composing. The one work she does manage to compose – the “Pertl Chamber Symphony” mentioned above – is written when she is left alone at home while Leopold takes Wolfgang and Nannerl off on their first tour. She shows it to a colleague of Leopold’s she can trust who pronounces it very good, but instead of showing it to anyone else, she places it at the bottom of a trunk. When the family comes home, they are full of tales of their trip: no one thinks to ask Anna what she did the whole time they were gone. It is years later when she and Nannerl discuss this, much to her daughter’s surprise, and they agree to perform the work at a house-concert – anonymously, of course.

But the fact Nannerl has inherited this talent is also a central focus of the story: at one point, the young girl decides she too must sublimate her own talent to the betterment of her brother’s. The results of this and its affect on her personality are only observed by Anna who longs to help her break out of these restrictions – symbolized by Nannerl’s dressing herself in the latest fashions with ever-tighter corsets and more outlandish hair-dos – and even though she occasionally raises these concerns to the husband who once considered she had genius, it only becomes a major contention between them. Nannerl’s case is hopeless: Wolfgang is the family’s only hope.

We know that Leopold lied about his son’s age and probably wrote some of Wolfgang’s earliest compositions himself (or at least wrote them down ‘correctly’ from what the boy may have improvised: they exist only in the father’s handwriting). This ability to fudge the truth was all part of the public relations spin to amaze the world and find a court position for his son. Actually, what he was doing was trying to find a court position for himself – who would logically hire a 10-year-old boy? Yet these slightly twisted facts became the basis of the whole Mozart Legend.

Another recurring character trait is Leopold’s miserliness, clearly evident in the real-life letters. After her first three children died in a little over a year, Leopold later wrote to Nannerl how he had sent Anna to a famous spa. We know nothing of her state of mind before, during or after this visit: the only other thing Leopold mentions is the expense he incurred by sending her there.

Anna observes, in that sense that all mothers can sense, what her husband cannot see: the similarity of Leopold's treatment of his son and the way he himself was treated by his mother, parallels that would increase in the years after Anna’s death. She sees Leopold’s hatred for his mother as a result of these contentions and realizes this could result in the estrangement of his son and a great deal of family pain. But Leopold would not hear any of it and Anna was too afraid to take it further, given the power the husband traditionally had over the wife. This tension flares up in the final chapters when the otherwise docile and usually house-bound Anna volunteers to go with her son on a job-hunting tour when Leopold cannot go himself.

Without his father’s immediate control, she hopes Wolfgang will learn the necessary self-reliance to function on his own and to find a job independent of his father, to break away. And yet when he ends up in some hare-brained scheme Anna sees leading to disaster (as Leopold would’ve predicted), she writes to her husband about it, bringing down the wrath of Leopold in scathing (and historically accurate) letters. She is torn by her desire to protect her son and by her deceit at trying to go against her husband’s instructions, creating a sense of conflict that seems entirely realistic and, judging from what was still in the future, perfectly plausible.

Nannerl, Wolfgang, Anna (by way of portrait) & Leopold Mozart

An advantage over watching Peter Schaffer’s play Amadeus or Milos Forman’s film based on it where one has no idea what is fact and what is theatrical license (Schaffer does not claim to have written a documentary: unfortunately too many people have viewed it as one), Ms. Norman includes an afterword describing what events are real and which are entirely fictional – Anna’s going to the convent, for example – explaining why she invented them or what factual material she used as a basis for its creation. She has quoted from letters but nowhere does it sound like a musicologist quoting letters, tying them into her dialogue as comfortably as if she’d written both herself.

There are small details of character that make Anna a full-blooded person – for instance, the scene where several of her women friends, after helping an old woman in her final days, discover this poor embittered widow had hidden a fortune in coins in her kitchen: what would they do with if this had been their money? One would buy new clothes, another (whom Anna considers house-proud) new furniture, another would travel. Nannerl would give it to her father to help advance her brother’s career. Anna, trying to think what she would do, considered her middle-aged eye-sight and thought maybe she’d get a pair of spectacles. Of course, spectacles cost hardly anything, she is told, so eventually she gets a pair which, during a long conversation with her husband, Leopold fails to notice until she points them out. And then of course, he complains about the expense.

- Dick Strawser

Michael Brown at Market Square Concerts: A Review of sorts

2012-01-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

Normally, I don’t review concerts but I’ll make an exception for Michael Brown’s performance last night with Market Square Concerts’ January recital at Whitaker Center.

First of all, I was looking forward to the program because of the program – and by that I mean the repertoire: one of my favorite and usually under-heard Beethoven Sonatas, the “Pastoral”; an early work by Chopin that is also rarely heard in concert; and a Schubert sonata that is also rarely heard live, the D Major Sonata, D.850. Admittedly, in my former life as a piano player (making the distinction between that and pianist on purpose), I worked on both of these sonatas, so I could claim an additional level of familiarity with them beyond that of a listener.

Secondly, I do not care for the acoustics of the performance space (and this is my opinion, not necessarily that of any arts organization in town I may be associated with). There have been several performances there where the grand piano sounds uneven, awkward, unmusical, whether it’s the acoustics, the instrument or the way it was has been tuned and voiced - or the way it was played.

After some bad weather that, fortunately, left time for streets to be cleared of what snow we did get – people freaking out about 5” of snow the way we used to react to a foot – I was looking forward to a performance by a young pianist who’s just won some serious awards and competitions and is all of 22 years old. Stereotypes are hard to kill – exuberant youth and technical precision, usually the hallmark of the competitive mind-set, often lack mature reflection and soulfulness of interpretation.

And over the years, I have heard a number of technically proficient young pianists arriving on the circuit who can play, even dazzle, quite well. But I tend not to remember their names. Judging from the frequency with which many of them descend below the level of their agents’ expectations, perhaps I’m not the only one with this problem.

It’s not that a name like Michael Brown will be easier to remember, though it certainly helps. What I will remember is hearing a pianist with such a sense of color who can play with such a beautifully controlled soft dynamic level that can tame that beast of a grand piano in a hall generally unforgiving to anything close to a nice sound and blend.

But most of all, I’ll remember a pianist who found such incredible – if quiet and unassuming – joy in the music he offered to share with us.

The "Pastoral" is a more understated work than we normally associate with Beethoven – it’s not famous like the “Moonlight” written just before it; it’s not dramatic like the “Tempest” written right after it; it’s not virtuosic like the “Appassionata” or the “Waldstein” and it doesn’t present the puzzles to solve like the Late Sonatas.

The Schubert is a similarly gentle, laid-back work, the product of a summer holiday spent doing nothing at a health spa while a friend of his recuperated from an attack of gout. Beyond the last three sonatas, all written in the span of a month shortly before his death, Schubert’s sonatas are under-represented in the concert hall. This one has an inordinately long slow movement and a main theme in the finale that can sound just plain silly.

And I could imagine people feeling slighted not to have a thunderous war-horse on the program. If it’s not familiar, fast and loud, how are people to appreciate how someone can play?

If I ever wanted to applaud between movements, it would have been after the slow movement of the Schubert if only to acknowledge the control, the scope and focus of his playing, the beauty of his sound, and his ability to make sense – not to mention magic – out of something that always struck me as diffuse, saccharine and never-ending. Though not technically challenging, this movement seemed the hardest to play and the reason I’d given up on it: too much work for the return. But not in this case.

To call his performance a revelation might be overstepping things but it was clear this is an imaginative interpreter who can get beneath the surface, proving that “playing music” is more than just transferring what’s on the printed page into audible sounds.

By the last movement, with its simple folk-like tune, I could imagine Schubert sitting in someone’s living room, so wrapped up in his own playing that he forgets other people are listening, and I’m drawn into his sheer joy of taking something so child-like – and so different from being childish as it usually sounds with its clock-like toyish charm – and showing it off without any trace of self-consciousness, coming back to it with a sense of wonder after each luminous digression.

In most performances, I would be thinking of “cartoon music” viewed by an adult trying desperately to reconnect with forgotten childhood. If you have ever seen the light in a child’s face while watching some favorite cartoon, untainted by adult experience and there for the sheer joy of it, that was what I heard in this music last night and Schubert’s simplicity suddenly became sublime.

There is a personal element to Brown’s playing that manages to draw you in until you forget you’re in a large auditorium listening to a public recital. It’s not because – as critics complained of Chopin – he draws a “small sound” from the piano (that is not how you play “soft”) but because his quiet playing is so well controlled and deep that it reaches to the balcony as if you’re in a much smaller room. This is what actors call projection and how a whisper can be made dramatic.

This is something lost in a world of amplification where performers play to the gallery, a world where special effects make the movie and a high point on TV is another car crash and explosion.

Many people think of “Romantic Music” as big moments, high emotions, fast fingers and mad dashes of excitement. They tend to forget the softer moments, the magic and pure delight in sound for the sake of sound, the soul that transcends reality to go from the heart to the heart.

Perhaps that’s why these sonatas are not performed as often – because they’re just so difficult to play well.

- Dick Strawser

Franz Schubert's Summer Holiday: 1825

2012-01-19T11:55:00.003-05:00

Schubert in 1825

This weekend, pianist Michael Brown performs a little-known piano sonata by Franz Schubert on his program with Market Square Concerts - Saturday 8pm, Whitaker Center - along with the "Pastoral" Sonata by Beethoven and an early work by Chopin.

You can listen to both the Beethoven and Schubert sonatas here, take a "walking tour" of Beethoven's sonata here, and read about Schubert's changing attitudes toward Beethoven's music here.

This post presents more detail about the busy summer during which Schubert composed that sonata and another work he may have been writing simultaneously.

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Franz Schubert, one of the few great composers from Vienna who could actually call this great Imperial capital his hometown, very rarely ever left Vienna. He was not a concertizing performer or conductor frequently on tour nor did he have the financial means to enjoy traveling for its own sake. He grew up as the son of a poor elementary school teacher and was trained to follow in that profession (which he did, briefly). He was unable to get an opera successfully produced – the most likely way to assured recognition in Vienna at the time – and the only time he ever gave a concert in Vienna that could have produced anything close to public recognition turned out to conflict with a concert by visiting violinist Nicolo Paganini, then all the rage. While the recital hall was full of his friends and people who knew his songs, the room was decidedly lacking in critics who were all covering the Paganini concert.

Schubert had one champion, a well-known if not by then over-the-hill opera singer named Michael Vogl who performed many of Schubert’s many songs (often with the composer at the piano) in the homes of friends and arts patrons in and around Vienna. He introduced Schubert’s music to a wider audience not through concerts as we know them but in informal musicales or musical evenings in private homes – events that, among Schubert’s friends, became known as “Schubertiads.” In this famous drawing by one of Schubert's close friends, the composer is at the piano while Vogl, looking rapturously upwards, sits in the foreground next to him.

A Schubertiad in 1826

Vogl was a towering figure both physically and personally. Given Schubert’s short stature and meek nature, this famous caricature attributed to Schubert’s close friend, Franz von Schober, is probably more accurate than an official portrait might have been. The caption reads “Vogl and Schubert go out for battle and victory.”

Vogl & Schubert, c.1825

Most of the times Schubert was away from Vienna, he was employed as a summer holiday music-staff-of-one for Count Esterhazy (poorer relations of the princes who earlier had employed Haydn) and his job description included giving the two daughters music lessons and being a live-in entertainment center. While there, he wrote a great deal of piano duet music written for various combinations of Esterhazys to perform as well as part songs when the family and their guests would gather ‘round the parlor piano after dinner to sing and entertain themselves.

One of these summers was in 1824 when Schubert was 27 years old. Earlier that year, he had completed the great Octet in F and the “Rosamunda” String Quartet (A Minor, D.804) before beginning the next quartet, the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D Minor, D.810) which he didn’t actually finish until January of 1826. In June, 1824, he wrote a Sonata in C for Piano Duet at Zseliz, the Esterhazy summer estate, plus six other collections of dances for piano duet. Back in Vienna, the next work in Otto Deutsch’s catalogue (which supplies those D. numbers appended to most of Schubert’s works) is the sonata he composed for that hybrid instrument which never caught on, the Arpeggione. There are also several wonderful songs – less well-known but exquisite, like “Nacht und Träume” and “Die junge Nonne” – that could’ve been written around this same time.

In the spring of 1825, Schubert set three texts from Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake,” the third of which became one of his greatest hits (even in his lifetime). Originally called “Ellen’s Third Song,” we know it as the “Ave Maria.”

In April, Schubert began a sonata in C Major for solo piano but never finished it. The next month, he wrote a new sonata in A Minor which was published within a year with a dedication to the Archduke Rudolf (now a Cardinal of the Catholic Church) who had been a friend, student and, most significantly for the future, patron of Beethoven’s. One wonders what Schubert’s future might have been if the Archduke had shown a similar financial interest in young Schubert.

Keep in mind, in May of 1825, Beethoven – then 54 years old – was working on his String Quartet, Op.130.

That month, Vogl intended to take Schubert on a “tour” of Upper Austria (we would think of it as the area west of Vienna, toward Salzburg).

Before they left, Schubert gathered up some of his songs setting texts by the greatest German poet alive, Goethe, and sent them to him. They arrived on June 16th, the same day Goethe received some new piano quartets by his young protégé, the 16-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn received a lengthy letter full of praise. Schubert’s manuscripts were returned without comment.

The travelers arrived in Steyr on May 20th and, aside from a side-trip to Linz and a day-trip to the monastery of St. Florian (future employer of Anton Bruckner, organist), they spent two weeks there before leaving for Gmunden where they spent six weeks.

In these various locations, they stayed at hotels or with friends of Vogl’s. Schubert performed his own music and accompanied Vogl in his songs. A week later, Schubert described his life there, writing home to a close friend, “living there was so pleasant and free-and-easy. At Councillor von Schiller’s [a local aristocrat he referred to as ‘the monarch’ of the whole region] we had much music, among other things some of my new songs, from Walter Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake,’ of which especially the ‘Hymn to the Virgin Mary’ [the Ave Maria] appealed to everyone.” To his parents, he described Gmunden where “the landscape is truly heavenly and [it] deeply moved and benefited me, as did its inhabitants.”

Returning to Linz and Steyr for perhaps three weeks, total – where Schubert found the summer heat oppressive – their next stop was Salzburg for a few days and then the spa at Gastein (Bad Gastein, officially) where they stayed between August 14th and September 4th.

Salzburg, the heavy rain aside, was a disappointment. No longer the city that was considered a vital metropolis, even though Mozart despised it, the government had been secularized (no doubt, Mozart would’ve approved of losing the Prince-Archbishop or at least the one who’d employed him) and, after losing a localized war, ceded to Bavaria between 1809 and 1816. It was now part of the province of Upper Austria where the center of government and economy was Linz. Schubert saw signs of neglect and poverty everywhere, four- and five-storey buildings once filled with families now largely empty.

A valley near Bad Gastein

On their first day, Vogl and Schubert performed for some local aristocrats (Schubert snidely referred to this as an audition) and, on that success, asked to perform the next night at an important social soiree. On the third day, the sun came out and they left for Gastein where, aside from the elation of such a sunny day, he felt “imprisoned” by “the incredibly high rocky walls… and fearful depths below” of a narrow pass where, in 1809, there had been a fierce battle between Bavarian and Tyrolese soldiers.

Vogl, meanwhile, was dealing with an attack of gout and a stay at a spa was probably as much for his benefit as it was to meet a poet-friend of his who was staying there, Johann Ladislaus Pyrker, who, since 1820, had been the Archbishop of Venice. Another guest at that time was Konstanze von Nissen, better known for being Mozart’s widow.

Bad Gastein, Austria

While there, Schubert set two of Pyrker’s poems – Das Heimweh (Homesickness) D.851 and Die Allmacht (The Almighty or Omnipotence) D.852.The plan was to go with Pyrker back to Venice but things changed when Pyrker decided to leave before Vogl’s cure was completed.

Whether he ever met – or even saw – the Widow Mozart is not recorded.

Vogl, imperious as ever – he was, after all, covering all the expenses and whatever we may think of Schubert’s genius, Vogl was doing him a favor by allowing him to accompany his performances as well as travels, meeting possibly influential people – decided at the last minute not to return to Salzburg but to go back to Gmunden and then there, after barely a week, announced they would leave the next day for Steyr.

By this time, Vogl’s attitude was getting on Schubert’s nerves and, no doubt, vice-versa. It would be the beginning of their unfortunate falling-out. Though Vogl would continue to perform some of Schubert’s songs, fewer were now written for him. Vogl took certain liberties with his performances, too, that irritated the composer and as Schubert began looking for other singers to sing his songs, Vogl looked for other accompanists.

Rather than arriving as planned in late-October, Schubert returned to Vienna around October 5th, happy to be back among his party-loving friends. Little was composed during the following months until, at the end of the following January, he completed (or finished revising and copying) the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet which was given its first performance at a music-lover’s home on February 1st.

So, in the midst of this holiday, Schubert composed the D Major Piano Sonata on this program sometime in mid-to-late August while staying at Gastein, waiting for Vogl to get over his latest attack of gout.

However, there’s something else from this summer that isn’t mentioned with any clarity. Apparently, Schubert was also working on a new symphony but said very little about it, in fact nothing one could go on to identify it. Friends wrote back to him, commenting about his new symphony, hoping it might be ready for a performance that winter.

But since the score has never been found, it has been considered “missing” and, since both the “Unfinished” and “Great” C Major Symphonies surfaced only years later, a place was held when later editors were finally publishing Schubert’s works years after his death. His Symphony No. 7 was thus a nonexistent work, this missing symphony of 1825, long known as the “Gastein” or the “Gmunden-Gastein” Symphony.

Ever since Schubert had finished his 6th Symphony – also in C Major – he had been trying to expand the structure of his large-scale works. The two extant movements of the B Minor Symphony (one of several “unfinished” symphonies in his catalogue) were already as long as his earlier complete symphonies. When the “Great” C Major surfaced (sometimes considered “great” in comparison to the earlier “little” 6th Symphony; more accurately a translation of “Grosses Symphonie” which really, in those days, only meant a grander-sized orchestra that included trombones), musicians were scrambling to find this “Gmunden-Gastein” Symphony. Joseph Joachim went so far as to orchestrate the Grand Duo Sonata in C Major written the previous summer convinced it was a piano-draft for an orchestral work and, being on a grand scale, seemed appropriate to become a like-wise grand symphony.

It is now assumed – judging from the watermarks on the paper Schubert used for the “Great” C Major dating it earlier than 1828 when it was thought to be one of his last works – he either composed or at least sketched out much of the Great C Major on this same vacation during the weeks he wrote the Piano Sonata D.850.

Imagine puttering around a spa-hotel (shades of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain) with nothing to do, so you write a sonata and a symphony – especially a symphony like that and then you don’t tell anyone about it!

Yes, the symphony's manuscript is dated 1828, not 1825. It’s probably not a mistake. After all, he had not finished the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet in 1824: he completed it (or revised it or copied the score) and dated it January, 1826.

It’s rare for Schubert to put a work aside and actually come back to it. His catalogue is full of half-finished songs, symphonies, even operas, and for whatever reasons he just stopped writing them. But he did come back and finish this string quartet. Maybe he thought enough of this new symphony to, eventually, do the same?

Anyway, something to ponder while listening to this sonata – what was he doing when he wrote this piece? What else was he working on at the same time? Who knows…

- Dick Strawser

Haiti's Earthquake, Two Years Later

2012-01-12T12:46:00.001-05:00

Today is the 2nd Anniversary of the Earthquake in Haiti.

In several posts from those dark days, (you can follow the thread, here) I wrote about trying to find a friend and former student of mine from UConn, Jeanne Pocius, who was teaching in a music school associated with the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince.

She was there, that day, getting ready for a rehearsal when it struck, the school and the auditorium they were in collapsing around her.As she described it in her account of the quake, “Shaken, Not Stirred: A survivor’s account of the January 12, 2010, Earthquake in Haiti,”

= = = = = = =

As I stood to pass out papers in the jazz band rehearsal on Tuesday, January 12th, I placed my ZN5 camera/phone next to my calendar on the piano’s music stand.

Suddenly, I heard a low rumble, like an ominous timpani roll.

“Oh, no,” I thought, “they damaged a supporting column in the new construction in the elementary school and it’s coming down.”

That thought lasted all of two or three seconds before the floor began to buckand heave like the surface of the ocean in a hurricane, and I knew we were having an earthquake….

“Run,” I shouted, then had no time for anything else but trying (unsuccessfully) to stay on my feet as the stage tilted sharply, first toward the stage right side of the building, then back toward the back wall of the stage.

I spun in a clock-wise circle and fell to my knees, and, alone with God, curled into a fetal position on my left side.

“Okay, Lord,” I said, “if this is it, if You’re taking me home, I’m okay with that. Thy will be done!”

I felt strangely calm, even as chunks of concrete ceilinger were falling on and all around me and the air was filled with choking dust.

People were screaming and shouting “Jesus” over and over.

The piano, at which I had been sitting moments before, was hit by a massive block of concrete which fell just where I had been sitting….

The large panels of lights in the ceiling fell down, with upside-down U-shaped sections between them providing the safe havens that preserved our lives on the stage in the front part of the audience.

The official reports first said that this first earthquake arrived at 4:53pm and lasted for 17 seconds, then that was revised to 31 and finally 43 seconds.

But for those of us who survived being inside of buildings that collapsed on and around us, time as we knew it was suspended and the quake seemed to last forever.

All concepts of space and time disappear when solid ground becomes like jello and bucks like an angry stallion!

- Jeanne G. Pocius: Shaken, not Stirred (Outskirts Press Inc, Denver CO) p.41-42
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That is not the end of it. She continues describing finding and helping the children who were her students there, locating friends and hearing news about students and friends and colleagues who had disappeared or were known to be dead, what it was like to be operating and maintaining emergency make-shift medical triage for the wounded from the surrounding community, often being mistaken by a doctor, using tampons and panty-shields to dress wounds, helping save children and trying to help some who could not be saved.

It is, overall, heart-rending to read her account, what she experienced and what she saw around her. But there is a sense of triumph, having overcome one of the most horrible experiences one might imagine, and slowly beginning to rebuild.

Jeanne (red shirt, right) and a pile of salvaged instruments

It is too easy for us, here, so many miles away, to forget about that afternoon, what it was like those days and weeks and months – and now years – after the catastrophe. Two years have passed and our concerns are onto other stories.

Jeanne continues to bring music and joy to the children of Haiti. She is, no doubt, the bravest person I know and I would gather, judging from her posts on Facebook, one of the happiest despite (or, in a sense many of us could not understand, because of) her experiences.

As we take a few minutes to remember this event, here is a message from the Episcopal Archbishop of the Diocese of Haiti, the Rt. Rev. Jean Zaché Duracin, who, Jeanne says in her post today, “humbly lived on the soccer field at College Ste Pierre with all the rest of us after the quake!”
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Haiti Anniversary Reflection from The Episcopal Church on Vimeo.
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-- Dick Strawser

Brahms at 50: His 3rd Symphony

2012-01-12T07:53:00.001-05:00

Johannes Brahms at 50

This weekend, Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony in one of his favorite works, the Symphony No. 3 by Johannes Brahms (actually, whatever Brahms symphony he's conducting at the time is his favorite: there are only four but how can you pick just one?). Also on the program, pianist Di Wu plays the ever-popular Piano Concerto by Edvard Grieg and the concert begins with En Saga by Jean Sibelius. It's called "Enchanting Escape" and you can join us for this musical get-away Saturday evening at 8pm and Sunday afternoon at 3pm at the Forum (Truman Bullard offers a pre-concert talk an hour before each performance).

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In May of 1883, Johannes Brahms invited a close friend of his to a “little small sad festival” to be attended by only four people. This was the way Brahms intended to celebrate his 50th birthday.

That summer, he wrote his Third Symphony which the Harrisburg Symphony will play this weekend under the direction of Stuart Malina, a self-avowed lover of Brahms’ music.

Here, Sir Colin Davis conducts the Dresden State Orchestra on their Japanese Tour in 2009 (recorded in Suntory Hall).
1st Movement part 1

1st Movement part 2

2nd Movement

3rd Movement

4th Movement
(notice the conductor mouths the words “too loud” to the orchestra even before the music begins! Brahms marks it ‘sotto voce’ and it needs to be whispered, almost inaudible.)

When he was 20, Johannes Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann and there was much prophesying about future greatness, most of which seemed to backfire. For one thing, if he was the heir to Beethoven, where was all this great music? Even though Robert had described his piano sonatas as “veiled symphonies” and Clara had told him, to succeed, he would need to compose symphonies, the symphony he began sketching shortly after Robert Schumann threw himself into the Rhine – an attempted suicide – in 1854 did not become what we know as his first symphony which was completed in 1876, 22 years later.

But he took his time, dealing with negative criticism and taunts from other contemporary composers like Liszt and Wagner. Brahms didn’t want to engage in the typical “on-the-job training” so many young composers have, producing immature works that will be forgotten and only incur further heckling from the crowd demanding proof he was, in fact, Beethoven’s musical heir.

Once that hurdle had been (finally) surpassed – Brahms was then 43 years old – he composed his 2nd Symphony in one summer the following year. The 3rd Symphony came along six summers later. It too was largely composed over one summer.

Brahms had become primarily a “summer composer,” going away to holiday spots (or spas, to be more exact) like Bad Ischl. The summer after his 50th birthday, he went to Wiesbaden, a spa-town on the Rhine (See a modern-day panorama of the city, below, taken from a mountain outside of town, looking toward the barely visible Rhine. Ignore the cell-phone tower on the left…)

A Modern View of Wiesbaden

His choice of location was not accidental.

Brahms had been born in the German city of Hamburg, a great port city on the Elbe River. When he visited the Schumanns, they lived in Düsseldorf, a city on the Rhine where Schumann had been the city’s “music director” and where he composed his 3rd Symphony, known as the “Rhenish.” It was the river he would shortly try to drown himself in.

The Rhine is also where Richard Wagner begins and ends his operatic cycle, The Ring of the Niebelung.

And Wagner, whom Brahms respected to a certain degree despite their rivalry, had just died in February, a few months before Brahms’ 50th birthday.

But the main reason Brahms chose Wiesbaden for his summer composing sojourn was one of its residents, a 26-year-old alto named Hermine Spiess (in some sources, her name is spelled Spies).

Brahms first heard her sing at a friend’s home that January and whatever their relationship was, Brahms found himself writing several songs inspired by that beautiful alto voice.

The first of his songs he’d heard her sing was the delightful, folkish “Vergebliches Ständchen” (which he’d heard her sing, that first meeting: a young man begs his sweetheart to let him in to say good night to her, but she laughs and shuts the window in his face – as Brahms joked after hearing Hermine sing it, “I’m sure she’d let him in!”)

Many of the songs he wrote for her, rather than being the traditional love-songs you might expect, were, despite his flirtations, about unrequited love, rejection or the anxiety of growing older (think “mid-life crisis” 1880s-style).

Hermine Spiess in 1887

Her family lived in Wiesbaden. Brahms jokingly called Hermine his “Rhinemaiden” (after the seductive young water nymphs who initiate Wagner’s “Ring”) and also, after Shakespeare’s queen in “The Winter’s Tale,” as “Hermione-ohne-O” – Harmione without the O.

How much of Hermine is in the Third Symphony remains to be seen. Brahms’ non-vocal music was always abstract but there were often specific associations he might have had in mind when composing it, regardless of what it might mean as a “program,” the dreaded “what-the-music-is-about” question.

Certainly, lots of Brahms’ music makes covert references to Clara Schumann right down to his quoting or paraphrasing what Schumann himself called his “Clara Motive.” And then there’s his Farewell to Agathe von Siebold in his 2nd String Sextet, her name spelled out in musical pitches.

If there is anything referring to Hermione-ohne-O in the symphony he composed that summer, Brahms never hinted at it.

A more likely inspiration was his proximity to the River Rhine which might put a man officially in Middle Age reminiscing about the events of 30 years earlier and first met the Schumanns in a town on the Rhine. From the studio he rented on the hillside overlooking Wiesbaden, he could see the Rhine in the not great distance: did that bring to mind musical associations?

The opening theme of Brahms’ new symphony bears a strong resemblance to a passage from Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony, inspired by the very river that Brahms could see from his summer home.

It has the same kind of “swing” Schumann’s first movement theme has but later, Schumann varies his theme – check here to hear Schumann’s “Rhenish,” at 6:44 into the clip. (In the example above, I’ve transposed it from Schumann’s original pitches, starting on G, to Brahms’ theme, starting on F.) Interestingly, the theme is not really something you can build on: in Schumann’s case, it “closes” the harmonic motion and so Brahms has to open it up to make it a suitable theme he can build on. But perhaps, consciously or not, that is the inception point for Brahms’ inspiration: the proximity of the Rhine and the memory of Schumann’s musical tribute to it.

Whatever Brahms may have thought was behind his new symphony, what secret meanings there might be inside the music, he was completely silent about it. But others saw in it specific references: Hans Richter, who would conduct the premiere, after referring to Brahms’ 2nd Symphony as his Pastoral, called this one “Brahms’ Eroica” after Beethoven’s 3rd. Clara Schumann heard “the mysterious charms of woods and forests [in the first movement]… worshippers kneeling about the little forest shrine.” Joseph Joachim, for whom he’d composed his Violin Concerto a few years earlier, said the finale brought to mind the Greek myth of Hero and Leander: “I cannot help imagining the bold, brave swimmer, his breast borne up by the waves and by the mighty passion before his eyes, heartily, heroically swimming on, to the end, to the end, in spite of the elements which storm around him.”

Certainly, there’s drama in the symphony – as naturally there would be, given the nature of the form – but is Brahms’ 3rd really his equivalent of Beethoven’s 3rd? The unexpected mood of the finale in the dark key of F Minor rather than some joyously affirmation in F Major, might lead you to think of dramatic struggles, but rather than a tragic ending or a final heroic resolution (as he ended his 1st Symphony), Brahms lets the clouds part and, in a very un-Brahmsian texture (but reminiscent of Wagner’s “Forest Murmurs”) brings back the opening movement’s first theme – perhaps his Rhine Motive – as a beautiful benediction. Perhaps, like Wagner’s “Ring,” it all begins and ends with the Rhine?

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been too far-fetched had someone called it “Brahms’ Rhenish”?

Opening Page of Brahms' original manuscript of his Symphony No. 3

Another famous association concerns its opening “gesture,” a musical motive that permeates the symphony.

Schumann had suggested he, Brahms and another of Schumann’s friends, Albert Dietrich, write a violin sonata by committee to honor violinist Joseph Joachim. They were to be given to him anonymously, he would play through them and then try to guess who wrote which movement. Brahms supplied the scherzo, usually known as the “Sonatensatz” (unimaginatively translated as “Concerto Movement”).

Collectively, this is known as the “F.A.E.” Sonata because Joachim’s life-motto, he said, was “Frei aber einsam” – Free but lonely.

Brahms, the perpetual bachelor – he had said he would attempt neither writing an opera nor marriage – joked that his motto was “F.A.F.” – Frei aber froh. Free but happy!

In that sense, the opening motive of the symphony he wrote at 50 starts off with a rising gesture, F–A-flat–F (see red bracket in the example).

The Opening of Brahms' Symphony No. 3 (without the inner voices)

Though our attention is commanded by the Schumann-quoted melody in the violins, in the basses and trombone, you hear the F–A-flat–F motive. A few measures later, it’s in the horns in the inner voices, transposed to C–E-flat–C and again in the trumpets. In the next measure, it’s in the lower strings and horns, this time as B-flat–D-flat–B-flat. After what sounds like a transition to a new theme a few more measures later, it reappears in the lower voices as A–C–A, what seems to be A Minor but it accompanies the F Major resolution before the violins restate the opening chords again, back into the F–A-flat–F pattern. So in the first 23 measures, you’ve heard that “Frei aber Froh” motive seven times, making a full-circle from F back to F!

What’s surprising about this – aside from the fact the motto should abbreviate to F–A–F, not F–A-flat–F – if the symphony’s in F Major (with an A-natural), why is this generating motive in F Minor (with an A-flat)?

It gives his harmony a pungent non-traditional sound: instead of a standard basic chord progression at the opening, he immediately swings from an F Major chord to a diminished seventh that should resolve to a C major chord but instead swings back to F Major before swinging off, once again, to an F Minor chord to a totally unexpected D-flat Major Chord before turning into that diminished seventh chord again but this time resolving as it should to the expected C Major chord which is also the dominant of the symphony’s tonic key, F Major.

Okay, I know that’s a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, but if you wanted to know why this sounds different from, say, the opening of Beethoven’s 1st Symphony (speaking unexpected harmonic twists), that’s why.

It also helps explain why the last movement is in F Minor rather than the expected F Major. And then, at the very end, after all this dark drama, the heavens open up and we hear this tremulous string texture – very unlike Brahms but bringing to mind, perhaps, Wagner’s “Forest Murmurs” – with the opening Rhenish theme in a benedictory F Major, leading not as you’d expect to an ultimately triumphant conclusion (like the 1st) or a joyous celebration (like the 2nd) but a peaceful resolution.

While it was one of possibly only two major successes Brahms ever had at a premiere – the public reaction to his German Requiem was the other one – and has gone on to become an audience favorite. Not quite a year after that world premiere in Vienna, it received its American premiere in New York – at a “Novelty Concert” – and a month later was performed in Boston where several hundred people walked out of the concert in protest of this “new music.”

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Oh, and what ever happened to Hermione-ohne-O?

In December of 1884, a year after the symphony’s premiere, Brahms was honored with an all-Brahms concert in the town of Oldenburg. He stayed with his friend Albert Dietrich (the third part of the F.A.E. Sonata’s committee) and brought with him seven guests including Hermine Spiess. Afterward, Hermine wrote to Dietrich’s daughter,

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“What I value most particularly is to have now enjoyed Brahms as a man. How charming he was with us when we were making and guessing riddles. What delightful hours we spent! …Of course, now I only play Brahms the livelong day.”

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As Jan Swafford notes in his excellent and wonderfully readable biography of Brahms,

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“She had met him more than a year before and spent much of the previous summer [when he was composing the 3rd Symphony] in Wiesbaden in his company. If Brahms had undertaken to court Hermine, and in his fashion he probably had, his approach was remarkably oblique. There is every reason to assume, anyway, as with other “respectable” women, that he flirted full-tilt and kept his hands to himself.”
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The following summer, Klaus Groth, a poet (then 66), sent both Brahms and Hermine a poem, “Come soon!” He and Brahms had a running joke about vying for Hermine’s attention, and so Brahms immediately sat down and composed a song to Groth’s poem and sent it to Hermine. That summer, he was working on the last two movements of his 4th Symphony.

The next summer, he composed one of his most ingratiating songs, “Wie Melodienzieht es mir,” as a musical portrait of “the effervescent Hermine” and sent it to her. She sang it frequently. By now, she was an acclaimed Brahms interpreter, especially of his Alto Rhapsody.

Brahms wrote to another friend that summer, “I’m now getting to the years where a man easily does something stupid so I have to doubly watch myself.”

While he was waiting for Hermine to arrive for a visit that summer, he was working on the 2nd Violin Sonata. That November, he made arrangements for Hermine to make her Viennese debut as her accompanist, singing his songs. Friends pointed out that, his enthusiasm aside, Hermine was not developing as a singer. At that point, one could say their relationship, whatever it might have been or become, had crested.

Meeting again in 1888, Hermine met Brahms at a train stop in Basel and was shocked how gray he had become, though she still saw the youthfulness in his “beautiful blue young-man’s eyes and the fresh, dear features.” (He was 55…)

By now, Brahms comments to friends about any possible marriage is like a paraphrase of Groucho Marx about any country club that would accept him: Brahms would despise “a girl for taking me as a husband.” Before, it had been that he was too poor; now it was that he was too old. (He was, by the way, 56.)

Four years later, Hermine Spiess married a lawyer and retired from her career. A year after the wedding, she died in childbirth, a day after her 36th birthday.

By now, Brahms had passed whatever mid-life crisis may have affected his 3rd Symphony. Disappointed in the failure of his 4th Symphony and the Double Concerto (even with his friends), he destroyed a second violin concerto, a second double concerto and at least one more symphony.

- Dick Strawser

Tchaikovsky's One Minute Work-Out: Trepak!

2011-12-22T19:20:00.002-05:00

One of the things any artist must do – a musician, a dancer, an ice-skater, a skate-boarder – is make it look easy. No one wants to see you look like, “wow, ya know, this is really hard work!”

Here’s a very short dance from Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker” as a case in point (or a “casse noissette en pointe”)…

I know, it’s easy to overdose on Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” at this time of year but one of my all-time favorite dances is the Russian Dance, the “Trepak,” which is part of the entertainment (or divertissement) in the second act of the ballet. (The Trepak is originally a Cossack dance from Ukraine, particularly the area around Kharkov. Here is an example of some standard Cossack dance 'moves' as performed by Russian dancers during an American basketball game (!!!) - see especially c.0:40 into the clip as the one guy demonstrates how they "dance on the seat of their pants.")

In most productions of the complete ballet, the dancers in each of the individual dances that make up the suite perform only their one dance. So, yes, they only dance for about a minute out of the whole evening, but I think you’ll realize how much work they’re doing in that one minute!

In this Royal Ballet production, talk about coordinating dance-steps to music! (The still photo – see above – is not from this video but it is from this production – you can see how high these guys actually leap and how well they’re positioned as if hanging in mid-air.)

I hadn’t seen the San Francisco Ballet production before and while it’s exciting, I’m not sure how it happens, but it looks like all three of them add an extra beat about halfway through – it looks like all their downbeats happen on the music’s up-beats and then they don’t end with the music! But they’re together! Maybe that’s what the choreographer wanted…
This performance, one of many performed by local companies around the country, features three young boys combining dance with gymnastics. Talk about energy!

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One of the great traditions of ballet is the “love duet,” the pas de deux and one of the most beautiful is the one in “The Nutcracker.” This performance, from the American Ballet Theater’s production in 1977, turns the “dance for two” into a “dance for three,” adding the character Drosselmeyer who, in the first act, had presented Clara with her toy nutcracker – after the battle with the mice, he’s turned into a handsome prince (in her dream, that is). Usually, Drosselmeyer is an eccentric toy-maker with an eye-patch who seems at times mysterious and, other times, a bit evil. In this production, he’s more of a wizard (dressed in black like a regulation bad guy) controlling Clara.

Here’s Mikhail Baryshnikov as the Nutcracker Prince with Gelsey Kirkland as young Clara (in some productions, she’s called Marie). Alexander Minz is Drosselmeyer. This clip begins with the end of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy followed by a fast dance for both the Clara and the Prince dancing sometimes separately and sometimes together, then finally becomes the great “duet.”
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While much of the famous suite from Tchaikovsky’s ballet ended up in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, another favorite scene of mine from this 1940 animated classic is their version of another well-known ballet, “The Dance of the Hours.” This music sounds light-hearted and delightful – it’s part of an after-dinner entertainment in the midst of a very bloody opera called La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli.

It has survived countless parodies – including Alan Sherman turning it into a letter a boy sends home to his family from summer camp (“Hello, Mother; Hello, Father; here I am at… Camp Regata”) but none funnier than seeing it performed by dancing ostriches, hippos, elephants and crocodiles.

Naturally, ballet dancers are graceful and exquisite and delicate. And these animals are, well… not so much… There are many inside jokes but I think even if you’ve never seen a ballet before, you would still find it funny. I thought it was very funny when I was 6 years old and saw it for the first time. After I’d played piano in a ballet school in New York City when I was in my late-20s, rediscovering it for the first time in years, I thought it was hysterical. Even now, each time I see it, I continue laughing.

Enjoy.
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With best wishes for this season of holidays,

- Dick Strawser

Beethoven and His Women

2011-12-16T15:44:00.001-05:00

Since today is traditionally regarded as Beethoven's Birthday, I thought I would repost this – a long one, sorry – originally a transcript of a pre-concert talk I gave for the all-Beethoven program on April 15th in 2005 as part of Gretna Music’s Beethoven Quartet Cycle that season, where each pre-concert talk focused on some aspect of “Beethoven and...”

My topic was to be “Beethoven and Women.” Even though I tried trimming it down, there’s still a lot of information. My intent wasn’t to explain the specific pieces on the program but give some personal background that would allow one to hear these works, written at three different stages of Beethoven’s life, in a different context, a chance to think about Beethoven a little differently – maybe not as a hero with some clay on his feet (he was, after all, human, too) but at different stages in his relationships with the women in his life: the young sought-after piano teacher who'd just written the Early Quartets, always in love though never able to obtain the love-he-sought because of his social status... then, with the Middle Quartets, written when he seems to be on the verge of marrying SOMEone and eventually finding (and losing) the love-of-his-life, the Immortal Beloved... then, in the years following that, perhaps resigned to single-hood and dealing with his deafness, the sister-in-law and the nephew, finding a whole different plane of inward existence in the Late Quartets that can still inspire and amaze us today.

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Dr. Franz Wegeler, one of Beethoven’s oldest friends in Bonn, wrote that Beethoven “was always in love – sometimes so successfully that many handsome young men might have envied him!” Another doctor who treated him over a period of 10 years, around the time he composed his middle-quartets, wrote that Beethoven had a preference for graceful and fragile women (which incidentally reflected the physical type of his mother) but he usually kept their identities a secret from his friends and quite possibly from the women themselves.

That may not be the typical image we have of Beethoven the Composer – the titan with the unruly hair and a glower like he’d have lightening-bolts coming out of his eyes as if he were always under the power of inspiration, striding across the ages as one of the greatest creative artists known to man. Knowing what we know of Beethoven, can you imagine him being married: dealing with noisy children, changing diapers, taking out the trash...?

What affect would married life have had on his solitary existence that brought out such lofty or intensely personal statements in his music, like the 9th Symphony or the late quartets? Being deaf and socially isolated was one thing but being alone was another form of isolation: the two together must’ve had some impact on his creative soul. Would domestic bliss have softened the edges? Would there have been domestic bliss? Who knows... the games one can play with “what if” are endless, not to mention pointless.

The first known identity of a woman Beethoven was attracted to was Jeannette Honrath of Cologne - she was blonde, vivacious (what we might call bubbly today) but had a strong feeling for music. Keep in mind Beethoven was around 20 at the time – she was visiting her friends the von Breunings and Beethoven was a close friend of their son Stephan who, as it turned out, was more openly infatuated with Ms. Honrath. Certainly, if she had a choice in the matter, she would probably have chosen the aristocrat’s handsome son and not the headstrong son of a simple musician, however much she liked music. There was also a Fräulein Westerhold – an unrequited flirtation that was probably more a distraction from court business though one he would remember later fondly as “Fräulein von W.”

Perhaps the strongest affection from his days in Bonn was for the sister of his friend Stephan von Bruening, Eleonore. He was introduced to the family originally by the future Dr. Wegeler when the von Breunings were looking for a piano teacher for Eleonore. He would later dedicate a piano sonata to her, but one he left unfinished, around the time he was working on the Op. 10 Sonatas in Vienna, five years after he left Bonn. In writing to her, he would address her as “Adorable Eleonore.” He still possessed a miniature portrait of her 34 years later.

There was also Babette Koch whose mother, the Widow Koch, ran one of the best high-class restaurants in Bonn where many regulars signed a farewell-book for the young composer on the eve of his departure for Vienna. Except for Babette. We know she and Beethoven danced together at a party one time, according to a friend’s letter. She was a good friend of Eleonore von Breuning’s and it seems the future Dr. Wegeler was also much smitten by her, writing in one of his letters that she was the “ideal of the perfect lady.” A year later, Beethoven wrote to Eleonore, “if you see B [Babette] Koch, tell her please I am waiting for her to answer my two letters.”

And there was the singer Magdalena Willman, a soprano from Bonn who sang in Vienna a couple of years after Beethoven had moved there. Her nephew later told the family story how Beethoven had proposed to her but she refused him because he was – quote – “too ugly and half crazy.”

There was something else that would always haunt Beethoven throughout his life: he moved in aristocratic circles, but he was not “one of them” – and however he might feel about his own position in society, society was very quick to realize exactly what he was: from the lower class.

He was of a short, stocky build with a dark complexion marred by smallpox scars, with bushy eyebrows and thick black hair that defied the best intentions of comb or brush... The piercing nature of his eyes may have been the result of near-sightedness (for a while, he wore eye glasses until he was 47) and as he aged, the hair turned quickly gray before he was 50. While there are reports that a visitor would find Beethoven, then in his 50s, decked out in a blue waistcoat with yellow buttons and spotless white pants, Weber remarked when they met a year later the Master was wearing a well-worn jacket with torn sleeves. It was around this time, when he was working on the Missa Solemnis, he was once arrested as a vagrant: the police could not believe that Herr Beethoven would dress this way! He was not the best housekeeper, either. Because he was a perpetual renter, one of his brothers once tried to throw his own social status around by signing himself as “Johann van Beethoven, Landowner” to which the composer responded as “Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain-Owner.” It was another brother’s wife who would become a very significant woman in Beethoven’s life, but more of that in a little while...

Getting back to Beethoven’s early years in fun-loving Vienna: he was much sought after as a piano teacher, going to their homes to give regular lessons in an age when young women, in order to present themselves as marriageable ladies, were expected to be proficient pianists and/or singers, in the days when families were responsible for making their own entertainment, before there were TVs, stereos and even radios. It seems, in retrospect, it must’ve been a good way to meet girls, not that we would normally call Beethoven a Babe-Magnet, but it’s possible today we might also call him “The Defendant.”

Countess Barbara von Kegelwicz lived across the street from Beethoven – the story goes that he would arrive for her and her younger sister’s lessons dressed in his robe and slippers wearing a peaked night-cap, amusing perhaps if you’re thinking an eccentric old man, but Beethoven was 27 at the time. He dedicated his Op. 7 Piano Sonata to Barbara, a sonata he dubbed the “Lovelorn Maiden” (sometimes called the “Amorous” Sonata). Two years later, he dedicated a set of piano variations to her, on Salieri’s La stessa, la stessissima from “Falstaff.” Now, if you remember the story of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor, this is the scene in which Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page compare the love letters they have received from Falstaff and discover they are, word for word, identical. So... could it be an inside joke that Beethoven might have been accused of courting, seriously or otherwise, the Countess Barbara and her younger sister (or perhaps some other ‘lovelorn maiden’) at the same time? It seems too much of a coincidence he should choose that duet to write a set of variations for her! Then, two more years passed by when the Countess Barbara became the Princess Barbara Odescalchi – and a month after her marriage, Beethoven dedicated to her his C Major Piano Concerto, his first major orchestral work. Sounds like pretty serious stuff!

Beethoven in 1803

Ferdinand Ries, one of Beethoven’s students, described him as a hopeless flirt. When they would be out walking together, Ries would catch the Master looking longingly after or winking at some beautiful young woman. At one point, Ries was embarrassed when he showed up at Beethoven’s place for a lesson, where a beautiful young woman he did not know was sitting on the sofa. But Beethoven asked him to stay and play something for them while they sat on the couch behind his back. Then he asked him to play something “sentimental.” Then, “something melancholy.” Then, “something... passionate!” (It must’ve been like having a stereo system with remote control!) Ries later wrote to a friend that Beethoven never visited him more than when he lived in a building next to a tailor who had three “beautiful young daughters” and Beethoven often went over on errands to pick up, oh... some needles...

Giulietta Guicciardi

In 1800, now, around the time he had published his first set of six string quartets, he was giving piano lessons to another young countess, Giulietta Guicciardi. He was 30 and she was 16. It was around this time that Beethoven wrote to his Bonn friend Dr. Wegeler, mentioning the symptoms of his deafness that would lead shortly to the Heiligenstadt Testament, that otherwise “life has been a little brighter for me of late...” because “of a dear fascinating girl whom I love and who loves me.... For the first time, I feel what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of my rank in life” – note he did not say “I am not of her rank.” The next year, he published a piano sonata which he dedicated to her, the one we know as “The Moonlight” Sonata. Many times, these dedications are afterthoughts, but did he write this romantic piece with its stormy conclusion with her – or his feelings for her – in mind? Shortly afterwards, she married a count and they moved to Italy. Many years later, when Beethoven was totally deaf, she came back to Vienna, visited him again and, as he wrote later, she “wept, but I scorned her.”

Teresa von Brunswick

Then there was another student and another dedication for a piano sonata, though not a very famous one: the little one in F-sharp Major which Beethoven always described as one of his favorites – perhaps for personal reasons rather than its musical value. Teresa von Brunswick, a cousin of Giulietta Guicciardi, may have been a little in love with her piano teacher, too. There was one story that Beethoven became so cross with her playing at one lesson, he stormed out into the stormy night without his hat or coat and Teresa went running after him with them like a valet. A servant caught up with her, seized the hat and coat and followed Beethoven himself: meanwhile, her mother gave her a good talking to and sent her to her room, (...acting like that in public over a man like that!). She wrote in her diary constantly about Beethoven as “mon maitre” and “mon maitre cheri.” After Giulietta married her count, Beethoven now turned his interest to Teresa.

Years later, Teresa told a friend who wrote this down long after Beethoven’s death that in 1806, she and Beethoven got secretly engaged, which only her brother, who idolized Beethoven, knew about. This apparently lasted for 4 years during which Beethoven composed his 4th, 5th and 6th symphonies, the 4th and 5th piano concertos, the Op. 70 Trios which I’ll mention in a minute... and the Op. 74 String Quartet, the "Harp." Like so many reminiscences about Beethoven, whether this might be factual or fantasy is open to debate, but the main reason I don’t believe it: I can’t imagine Beethoven, with his independence, putting up with a secret engagement for four years. And then, in the midst of this, he was living in an apartment at the palace of the Countess Anne-Marie Erdödy which was the closest thing to a scandalous affair as Beethoven probably came... he confided in her about Giulietta Guicciardi (but apparently not about Teresa von Brusnwick), visited her at her Hungarian country estate, dedicated the two Op. 70 piano trios to her (one of them, the Ghost Trio; but the other one has one of Beethoven’s most lovely slow movements, as friends of the Countess remarked after hearing them played at her musical parties). Finally, they broke up over same vague nastiness with a servant. For several years, they did not speak, but things smoothed out in 1815 and he dedicated to her the two Op. 102 Cello Sonatas. When money was becoming a sore point with Beethoven and he threatened to take up an offer from the King of Westphalia, she got three of her friends together, including the Archduke Rudolph, to contribute to a pension that would ease Beethoven’s financial worries and keep him in Vienna. Countess Erdödy, involved in some kinds of intrigue, was exiled from Vienna after a family fight that ended in the death of one of her sons – her arrest is described in one of Beethoven’s conversation books in 1820.

Now, all of this business with the secret engagement to Teresa von Brunswick and the possible affair with Countess Erdödy was going on around 1809 – the year the French occupied Vienna, the year Haydn died and the year Beethoven completed the Harp Quartet – and, incidentally, around the time he probably wrote a little bagatelle known as “Für Elise,” though we have no idea who Elise was. He wrote to a close friend in Freiburg to help him locate a wife. She should be “above all beautiful” and could “perhaps spare a sigh for my harmonies,” he writes, but not like Elise Bürger whose moral conduct he found scandalous, something that had brought about her recent divorce – probably not the Elise of “Für Elise” fame. Now, this friend in Freiburg was married to the sister of another of his piano students that he seemed to be infatuated with at this time, the niece of his current physician, Dr. Malfatti. It was also around this time that Beethoven wrote to his old friend Dr. Wegeler in Bonn to locate a copy of his birth certificate because he had plans on getting married. The question, naturally, was TO WHOM? We have him (maybe) secretly engaged to Teresa von Brunswick, involved with Countess Erdödy and now infatuated with Teresa Malfatti (though he did consider her flighty). Oh, and one more piano student: Teresa von Brunswick’s sister, Josephine, who’d been forced into marrying an older man who conveniently died the next year. Probably by 1809, this had pretty much played itself out. Or maybe not...

In 1810, he proposed to Teresa... Malfatti. How would this have seemed to her family: Beethoven was a 40-year-old curmudgeon; the bride-to-be was 18. The proposal, for whatever reason, was turned down. Next year, Dr. Malfatti suggested Beethoven should go to the Bohemian spa at Teplitz to “unwind.” There, among the many guests, Beethoven met the great Goethe – as well as a singer named Amalie Sebald and an actress named Rahel Levin who was with her lover, Count Karl Varnhagen von Ense. He returned the following summer and, apparently, wrote a letter on Monday, July 6th and the morning of the next day, but without adding the year which has left open the question exactly when it was written. We’re not sure he even mailed it – perhaps it was the rough draft they found in Beethoven’s desk after his death in 1827, this letter intended for someone he referred to as his “Immortal Beloved”... And now we come to one of the greatest mysteries of Beethoven’s life...

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(pretend you're reading this in a stentorian, radio-announcer voice) "The genius behind the music. The madness behind the man. The untold love story of Ludwig van Beethoven."

If you're ever seen the 1994 movie "Immortal Beloved" (the one without the Saint Bernard), please forget everything... well, almost everything you saw. It wasn't meant to be a documentary, but a little adherence to some truth might've been helpful.

Beethoven at Karlsbad in 1812

The problem is, while no one knows who the Immortal Beloved really was, this film proposed to examine three possible candidates. Beethoven's own friend, secretary and general fly-in-the-ointment, Anton Schindler, did a good deal of white-washing of Beethoven's life in the years following his death, but he thought the Immortal Beloved was probably Giulietta Guicciardi and even adjusted his ideas about when it was written by whether Giulietta was around at that particular time or not. Most scholars today think the letter (dated Monday, July 6th) was written in 1812 because it describes his arrival at the spa at Teplitz that July (when July 6th was a Monday). Since it was supposed to have been mailed to a woman staying in a town that started with a K -- possibly the spa Karlsbad, also in Bohemia - though would rule out Bettina von Arnim, whom several considered one of the candidates, because she was at Teplitz the same time Beethoven was (so there would’ve been no reason to write to her). I haven’t mentioned her yet... Beethoven wrote that he had met her and was fascinated by “the child” – she was 25 at the time – but she seemed to have an over-active imagination and later published a number of letters which were clearly forgeries, from both Goethe and Beethoven. If any of the women who’ve ever been mentioned as amorous interests of Beethoven’s, Bettina is not really one of them...

But who is the Immortal Beloved? It had to be somebody who was staying at the spa at Karlsbad... and curiously, that summer, Beethoven interrupted his stay at Teplitz and appeared, by the end of July, on the guest list at Karlsbad, though he did give a benefit concert there.

A few years later, he would admit to a new friend, Fanny del Rio, the daughter of the school-teacher (more of them, later), it would appear he had met someone he described as the love-of-his-life in 1811, the year before the letter to the Immortal Beloved. Every musicologist has a candidate for the Immortal Beloved. Some feel it was Josephine von Brunswick, Teresa’s sister, who had recently re-married – conveniently, she had a daughter born nine months after Beethoven’s stay at Teplitz: could this be Beethoven’s child?? But Josephine was in Vienna with her husband. Unless she went there under an assumed name, she wasn’t at Karlsbad that summer.

Another candidate was Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann, who was at Karlsbad that summer and to whom Beethoven later dedicated the Op.101 Piano Sonata – but she had studied with him as early as 1804 and if the later clue that he’d met this love-of-his-life in 1811, then it can’t be her, either.

But he did meet Amalie Sebald at Teplitz in 1811 but she was at Teplitz (not Karlsbad) in 1812 too, not at the same time Beethoven was, however. When he first met her, he was much charmed by her: once, when he went to visit her one evening and she was out, he left a note he signed “Ludwig van Beethoven, whom you should not forget even if you’d like to.” But there are other letters to her from Teplitz in 1812, congenial and flirtatious – she had apparently called him a tyrant which he tried to joke his way out of – but in general, the possibility the Immortal Beloved letter was also intended for her doesn’t make a lot of sense, the styles are so different. She would marry a few years later.

Another woman he met at Teplitz in 1811 was the actress Rahel Levin who was there with her lover, Count Varnhagen, a diplomat who was delighted to meet Beethoven and often acted as a go-between with other noblemen regarding the composer’s need for money. In one letter that summer he wrote that they spent a great deal of time with Beethoven who was “ready to play for Rahel but this must be kept a secret” (why?). The next summer they met only briefly and by 1814, Varnhagen was reluctant to have Rahel meet Beethoven again: perhaps there was a reason Varnhagen thought it wise to keep them separated? The couple finally married that year and it was apparently the last time either was involved with the composer.

It was in 1815, then, the year after the exotic Rahel married her diplomat, that Beethoven composed the song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” – To the Distant Beloved. There are only a few theories about the DISTANT Beloved’s identity but most agree that the Immortal Beloved and the Distant Beloved are two separate women. I don’t know why that should be: in 1812, Beethoven was writing things to a woman he would not care for a married woman to consider (remember, his only opera Fidelio is even based on a story of the faithful loving wife) – so if the Immortal Beloved was unmarried in 1812 but was married by, say, 1814 and was therefore no longer in circulation, would she not have become the unobtainable Distant Beloved? Could Rahel have been both? Short of some other completely valid letter coming to light, we’ll never know.

Antonie von Brentano

There was also Antonie von Brentano, whose step-sister Bettina (herself a bit of a name-dropper) arranged the meeting between Beethoven and Goethe at Karlsbad in 1812 (see drawing, above). Antonie lived in Vienna between 1809 and 1812 and visited Karlsbad that summer with her husband. From there, they moved on to Frankfurt and Beethoven never saw her again. It is interesting to note that that summer she was pregnant with her last child who would be born the following March, a son named Karl.

Curiously, if the period of his infatuations – if not his “secret engagement” – from 1804-1810 was one of the most productive in his creative life, the period beginning late in 1812, after completing the 7th and 8th Symphonies, was one of the driest. There were rumors, during this time, that Beethoven was “washed up” and there were reports he was actually insane: he was aging quickly, dealing with his by now total deafness, and experiencing violent mood swings – for instance, one day writing to a friend he was a vicious dog who should be hauled off to the glue factory and the next day writing to him that he really was a sweet guy and Beethoven’d been mistaken. During these years, he wrote very little – except for “Wellington’s Victory,” some songs (including the song cycle, “To the Distant Beloved”) and the first of the late Piano Sonatas... eventually the Hammerklavier in 1817 unleashed the flood of late works that include three more sonatas, the Missa Solemnis, the 9th Symphony and the five Late Quartets. So what else was going on in his life?

Whoever the Immortal Beloved may have been, one woman it most likely was NOT was Johanna Reiss, his sister-in-law. The film “Immortal Beloved” would have us believe that they met that summer, he got her pregnant but she married Beethoven’s brother Karl instead and gave birth to a son four months after the wedding. This would imply that the Nephew was actually Beethoven’s own SON which would certainly explain his keen interest in the boy’s up-bringing. But if 1812 was the year the letter was written, Johanna Reiss married Beethoven’s brother in 1806 when her son was born, indeed four months after the wedding which caused an on-going scandal between Beethoven and his brother. However, the letter could not have been written that year because July 6th was not a Monday (as it was in 1812), so that is all mere Hollywood conjecture, regardless how theatrical. Salieri, at least, was already the traditional villain in Mozart’s death, having had to deal with rumors during his own lifetime that he’d poisoned Mozart, rumors which didn’t wait almost 200 years before Peter Schaffer’s play “Amadeus” made them famous.

Beethoven had a habit of meddling in his younger brother’s affairs – always fighting with Kaspar Karl about his wife Johanna and then shaming Johann into finally marrying his mistress rather than living openly with her. 1815 was also the year Kaspar Karl died, leaving a 9-year-old son named Karl, and immediately Beethoven went into action trying to gain full custody of the boy, taking the sister-in-law to court as an unfit mother, calling her The Queen of the Night, telling the court that even while her husband was alive, she would meet secretly with her lovers in their home and so on. Small wonder Johanna brought up the rumors about Beethoven’s supposed insanity as an unfit guardian for the boy and eventually debunked the claim Beethoven made about being “of the nobility” (the van/von thing)! Brother Johann, meanwhile, got into the court action by forcing the issue that Beethoven and Johanna should SHARE the guardianship of the boy! The courts’ decisions switched back and forth from one side to the other over a period of years. The composer, a deaf, irascible 50-year-old man who dealt poorly with interruptions, was probably not likely to become an instant good-father-figure to a 14-year-old boy. He put him in Giannatasio del Rio’s school – it was to del Rio’s daughter he confessed what little information we have about the Immortal Beloved’s background – but Karl ran away from there at least four times, going back to his mother each time.

Beethoven in 1823

Over the years, as Beethoven wrote his late masterpieces, he dealt with the issue of living with Karl and fighting with Karl's mother. If any woman ever made an influence on Beethoven’s life, Johanna Reiss, the infamous sister-in-law, made the deepest impact. While we could play “what if” about Beethoven’s deafness, we could also play “what if” about how much more music he might have written if not distracted by these court cases and his nephew's up-bringing.

Fast-forwarding to 1826, Karl, who’d fallen in with a bad crowd and brought considerable grief to his uncle, tried to commit suicide and Beethoven, hoping to hush things up – especially since this was a crime in Vienna – tried getting his nephew into the army, thinking the discipline would do him good and no doubt get the boy, now 19 years old, out of his unruly hair. What was Beethoven writing at the time? His string quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131... and to whom did he dedicate this work? It seems there are no new women in his life, no one commissioned this work, so he dedicated it to Baron Josef von Stutterheim out of gratitude for his help in securing Nephew Karl a commission in his infantry regiment, though I wonder what Baron Stutterheim would make of this long, complex and deeply personal work which the audiences and even the musicians of the day had trouble comprehending.

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I began thinking about the "bad rap" Beethoven's sister-in-law got from all this and decided to do a little more digging. Given all the information that's available about his legal problems with Johanna regarding custody of the composer's nephew Karl, I’ve not come across any non-fictional source from Johanna’s view-point (or for that matter, any memoirs written by her or even a portrait of her). Just because she may have been morally lax in 1806 doesn’t mean she remained a woman of low morals 15-20 years later and would have automatically been an unfit mother for her son Karl. And of course, she also no doubt viewed the composer – whom everybody today would consider a genius – as her insane brother-in-law, so it’s no surprise her attacks may come across more shrewish than merely self-preservational: it was, after all, her son! However, it is Beethoven’s point-of-view that survives.

One thing that didn't help Johanna was having a child out-of-wedlock five years after her husband's death, courtesy of her financial councilor, Johann Hofbauer, badly timed in the midst of her court precedings against her brother-in-law, so perhaps his assessment is not all that inaccurate. The fact that Johanna, who lived into her 80s, never once wrote a word about Beethoven nor tried to defend her own reputation may also indicate there was no reputation to save.

Beethoven himself may have had a fairly "Victorian" moral attitude (pardon the time-bending) which did not always reflect the somewhat looser times he lived in. His other brother, Johann, with whom Beethoven fought constantly, decided he would marry his house-keeper, Therese, who had been his mistress. There are two stories about this: that Johann finally agreed to marry her after Ludwig kicked up a fuss; that Ludwig tried to stop the wedding because she was, after all, only his house-keeper and socially not a suitable woman to bear the Beethoven name. Regardless, Johann comes across unfavorably through the centuries as well, even though as a successful apothecary and land-owner (he had a sizeable estate in the country outside Vienna), he might easily have viewed himself as more successful (and possibly better) than his musician-brother simply on the grounds of financial worth and stability. Certainly, after his brother's death, he tried to cash in on the composer's fame and was generally regarded as all the more ridiculous for it.

Though the term "dysfunctional" may be of fairly recent vintage, the idea that one can pick one's friends but not one's relatives is certainly timeless.

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In March, 1827, months after completing his last string quartets, Beethoven died at the age of 56, and when Schindler went through his Master’s papers, he found nearly indecipherable sketches for a 10th symphony... a letter written in pencil to the Immortal Beloved... and near it, a miniature portrait of... Teresa von Brunswick...

-- Dr. Dick

Elliott Carter: Happy 103rd

2011-12-11T10:17:00.001-05:00

Today is Elliott Carter’s birthday.

Yesterday, I was talking to some students of mine at the State Street Academy and mentioned that the compositions most people consider the first major works of the new 20th Century Style – Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – were composed around 1911-1912. Pointing out that, here we are in 2011-2012, perhaps the first “great” works in what may become the new 21st Century Style have yet to be heard, when it occurred to me Elliott Carter is actually older than Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring.

He was born in 1908.

Last Thursday, several musicians played three world premieres of works by Elliott Carter plus three additional works that had received their premieres in Europe earlier in the year. They had all been composed in the past year.

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Correction: Reports I'd read in the new music press indicated three world premieres and three American premieres on the program. Since I was unable to attend, this was all I could go by. As it turned out, one of those works mentioned in the Sequenza21 post (see below) talked about the Double Trio which seemed to be a world premiere. When I've since found the 92nd Street Y's page about the concert, it indicated the Double Trio was one of the American premieres. Then, to add to the confusion, two short works composed in November were added to the program and announced from the stage! So in actuality, there were four world premieres! Thanks to Joe Barron for the correction: he was there and you can read his review here: love the bit about getting a chance to meet Carter afterwards.
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And Mr. Carter, looking frail but with a twinkle in his eyes, was in attendance and accepted the audience’s applause and birthday greetings, though his 103rd Birthday isn’t officially until today.

(You can read the New York Times review, here. The photograph of Carter (see above) taken at the performance is by Times photographer, Richard Termine. Carter is seated with Carol Archer who produced this program at the 92nd Street Y.)

There is, of course, the amazement that anybody is 103. More amazing is that he’s out and about, attending concerts in New York City. Still more amazing is that he’s sharp as a tack. Perhaps most amazing is he’s still composing.

Follow this post at Sequenza21 by cellist Fred Sherry, a musical collaborator with Carter and long-time champion of his music and, not coincidentally, a close friend.

Basically, Carter called Sherry at various times asking him about playing a certain combination of chords on the cello (“good, they’re in my new Double Trio”), if a viola could hold a high F-sharp for two slow measures (“good, that’s the ending of my new String Trio”) and telling him he’s thinking of setting the poetry of e. e. cummings for tenor and chamber orchestra.

That’s when Sherry decided these new works should be heard to celebrate his impending birthday, No. 103.

Two other new works were brief – a duet for cello and bass clarinet (for Mr. Sherry and Virgil Blackwell who has served as Carter’s secretary and assistant over the past several years) was composed on Nov. 5th, 2011; and “Mnemosyné,” composed on Nov. 17, written for solo violin. World premieres, these were added to the program and announced from the stage.

UPDATE: Elliott Carter (lower left corner) accepting the audience's applause at the end of the concert, following the world premiere of "A Sunbeam's Architecture," composed earlier this year (you can see what a substantial chamber ensemble this is). Photograph by Cory Weaver and posted at Sequenza21.
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In a separate interview reported (unexpectedly) in the New York Daily News, Carter mentioned how in the ‘70s he was writing this vast orchestral works with huge complex scores (and I mean physically huge) that might take him a whole year to compose. But now, due to physical limitations among other things, he prefers smaller combinations and shorter works, producing a series of miniatures, pointing to an even newer piece he'd been working on as a Christmas present for oboist Heinz Holliger which he says took him three days.

When I met Elliott Carter, standing in a box office line at the 92nd street Y in 1978 – he was celebrating his 70th birthday with a performance of all three of his string quartets there – most people then would’ve assumed he’d be ‘retiring’ soon, as old composers often do. So his newest works then – like the mind-blowingly complex vocal piece Syringa which I heard at its premiere – were considered music of his Late Period (you know how Beethoven is divided into three parts, Early – Middle – Late?) but Carter just kept composing and producing a whole range of new works headed in a less dense but rarely less complex direction which, for lack of a better term, people started referring to as his “Late Late Music” or “Post-Late Music.”

Since his 100th birthday, as one recent interview reported, he has completed 19 new compositions.

In 2008, on the verge of his Centennial Birthday, I heard the Pacifica Quartet play all five of his string quartets (see photo, left) and was cheered to see, after the Pacifica commissioned him for another quartet, a sixth, he said “well, in a few years I should be about ready to write another string quartet.”

And yet it’s still possible. 2012 will be a “few years” after his 100th birthday, after all…

(Incidentally, joking recently with the guys from the JACK Quartet when they were in town, their bio says the oldest original work in their repertoire is Charles Ives String Quartet No. 2 which was written between 1911-1913 which means Elliott Carter is also older than their "oldest" piece. Yet they haven't played any of Carter's quartets yet, though they've wanted to work with him. "I wouldn't wait too long, you know... but maybe by then, there'll be a sixth quartet to work on.")

There are two song cycles being premiered this week – the Cummings poems on the 8th and three new songs setting poems by T.S. Eliot for bass baritone and chamber ensemble. These are not miniatures but fairly substantial works given their scope, length and instrumentation.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

For this birthday post, I thought I’d check out a few piano pieces. I'd recently posted the early Cello Sonata (1948) with the Cello Concerto (2000) so this time I want to post the Piano Sonata, another mid-1940s piece, with three short, more recent pieces.

Here is Ursula Oppens, long associated with Carter’s music, playing a piano sonata in the “grand style” that could belong in the repertoire of any pianist who plays the huge B Minor Sonata of Franz Liszt or comparable sonatas by Samuel Barber or Aaron Copland. It may not be what Carter sounds like now but it is one of Carter’s great early works and an incredibly imaginative one that has a lot of Carter’s later fingerprints already evident.

One of these stylistic traits is the juxtaposition of time, something that is fluid as a psychological experience. Like counterpoint in which one independent melodic line is pitted against another independent melodic line, Carter does this with two strands that seem to move in different tempos. It might be easy to explain it as 16th notes moving against quarter notes in Bach except in Carter, the pulse of one strand might be dotted quarters and the pulse of the other strand could be dotted eighth notes. One could be metronomically strict (clock-time) and the other one more fluid, more varied, less “ticky.” That’s basically the distinction in the Cello Sonata where the clock-like piano part (very logical, clean and architecturally Left Brained) is pitted against the rhapsodic cello part (unexpectedly varied, by comparison, emotionally Right Brained and, in a way, “messy”). While not as overt as the later cello sonata, you can still hear this in the Piano Sonata, in addition to the strongly contrasting ideas that are differentiated by, for instance, the opening blocks of sound and the subsequent scurrying passages (one of Carter’s favorite descriptors is the Italian scorrevole).

#1 - First part of Piano Sonata, 1st Movement.

#2 - Second part of Piano Sonata, 1st Movement.

#3 - First part of Piano Sonata, 2nd Movement.

#4 - Second part of Piano Sonata, 2nd Movement.

There are many things that may sound “traditional,” particularly the development and restatement of material (themes, if you will) which is not much different than you’d hear in a Beethoven or the Liszt sonata. Compare the very opening of Clip #3 (on a D moving to a D/C) with the very opening of Clip #4 (where it’s now E-flat and D-flat) which, at 2:00, sounds like a recapitulation on D but instead of a C-natural, it’s now a C-sharp which means the tension is still not yet resolved until, at the end, it reaches a broad and beatific B-major chord, the tonality in which the sonata began.

There’s even something as “academically traditional” as a fugue (Clip #3, beginning at 3:49) which is primarily in B-flat Minor.

Now, fast forward through the next fifty-three years to 1999 and two short pieces written for Ursula Oppens, called “Two Diversions.”

In this first clip, the performer (Marc Hannaford) sets a metronome to the “pulse” of the one time-strand, a slow but steady ticking line of intervals, against which Carter juxtaposes another more varied and often wildly contradictory, rhapsodic line (not very different from what he was doing in the Cello Sonata of 1948) but here, just single notes usually against the clock-like intervals. Even though the metronome you hear has nothing to do with the rhythmic or metric notation of the piece (trust me!!!), it’s a way to help you focus on one aspect of the piece.

Here is the piece in performance (without metronome) by Thorsten Kuhn, recorded on Carter’s 100th Birthday.

Then, one last short, recent piece, a brilliant barrage of notes (mostly single notes one at a time but all over the keyboard), called Caténaires, about 3 1/2 minutes of constantly cascading 16th notes premiered by Pierre-Laurent Aimard on Carter’s 98th Birthday just a few days after he’d received the manuscript in the mail. Here, it’s performed by Sean Chen.

This has been described as “the unlikeliest piano piece” by Elliott Carter who, on the verge of his 98th Birthday, was still experimenting with the idea of how you create sounds and constantly discover something new to say.

We should also be so lucky, at that age.

At any age…

Happy 103rd Birthday, Mr. Carter – and many more!

- Dick Strawser

For additional posts about Elliott Carter and his music, please follow these links:
Hearing the Five String Quartets with the Pacifica Quartet in 2008.
Hearing the world premiere of the Clarinet Quintet in 2008.
The Cello Sonata and the Cello Concerto.
New Works at 102.
Carter at 102.
Carter at 101.
Carter at 100.

And the Classical Grammy Nominees Are...

2011-11-30T22:16:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year again - in addition to being the end of another year's NaNoWriMo Challenge - when the Music Industry announces the nominations for the Grammy Awards which will announce its winners on Feb. 12th, 2012, at 8pm ET on CBS.

And buried in the hubbub are some classical music nominees, too.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
These were the only categories I could find posted at their web-site. Not sure what happened to Chamber Music or Cross-Over - and they seem to have combined "Instrumental Performer Without Orchestra" and "Instrumental Performer With Orchestra" into one category, this year. Hmmm...

UPDATE: According to this announcement made in April 2011, the Grammys have decided to eliminate or combine several categories, affecting primarily classical and jazz divisions. Chamber Music nominations will now fall under "Small Ensembles" and solo albums will now compete with concerto soloists in the same "Instrumental Performer" category.

Classical music is little served by the Grammy Awards - winners, much less nominees, are rarely mentioned when publications across the country report on the Grammys (talk about the 1%...) unless you're checking the New York Times. Classical musicians are now served even less by the attention the Grammy Awards focus on the recording industry. That's a shame.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -

70. Best Orchestral Performance

Bowen: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2

Andrew Davis, conductor (BBC Philharmonic)

[Chandos]

Brahms: Symphony No. 4

Gustavo Dudamel, conductor (Los Angeles Philharmonic)

[Deutsche Grammaphon]

Haydn: Symphonies 104, 88 & 101

Nicholas McGegan, conductor (Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra)

[Philharmonia Baroque Productions]

Henze: Symphonies Nos. 3-5

Marek Janowski, conductor (Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin)

[Wergo]

Martinu: The 6 Symphonies

Jirí Belohlávek, conductor (BBC Symphony Orchestra)

[Onyx Classics]
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

71. Best Opera Recording

Adams: Doctor Atomic

Alan Gilbert, conductor; Meredith Arwady, Sasha Cooke, Richard Paul Fink, Gerald Finley, Thomas Glenn & Eric Owens; Jay David Saks, producer (Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; Metropolitan Opera Chorus)

[Sony Classical]

Britten: Billy Budd

Mark Elder, conductor; John Mark Ainsley, Phillip Ens, Jacques Imbrailo, Darren Jeffery, Iain Paterson & Matthew Rose; James Whitbourn, producer (London Philharmonic Orchestra; Glyndebourne Chorus)

[Opus Arte]

Rautavaara: Kaivos

Hannu Lintu, conductor; Jaakko Kortekangas, Hannu Niemelä, Johanna Rusanen-Kartano & Mati Turi; Seppo Siirala, producer (Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra; Kaivos Chorus)

[Ondine]

Verdi: La Traviata

Antonio Pappano, conductor; Joseph Calleja, Renée Fleming & Thomas Hampson; James Whitbourn, producer (Orchestra of the Royal Opera House; Royal Opera Chorus)

[Opus Arte]

Vivaldi: Ercole Sul Termodonte

Fabio Biondi, conductor; Romina Basso, Patrizia Ciofi, Diana Damrau, Joyce DiDonato, Vivica Genaux, Philippe Jaroussky, Topi Lehtipuu & Rolando Villazón; Daniel Zalay, producer (Europa Galante; Coro Da Camera Santa Cecilia Di Borgo San Lorenzo)

[Virgin Classics]
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

72. Best Choral Performance

Beyond All Mortal Dreams - American A Cappella

Stephen Layton, conductor (Choir Of Trinity College Cambridge)

[Hyperion Records]

Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45

Patrick Dupré Quigley, conductor; James K. Bass, chorus master (Justin Blackwell, Scott Allen Jarrett, Paul Max Tipton & Teresa Wakim; Professional Choral Institute & Seraphic Fire)

[Seraphic Fire Media]

Kind

Kjetil Almenning, conductor (Nidaros String Quartet; Ensemble 96)

[2L (Lindberg Lyd)]

Light & Gold

Eric Whitacre, conductor (Christopher Glynn & Hila Plitmann; The King's Singers, Laudibus, Pavão Quartet & The Eric Whitacre Singers)

[Decca]

The Natural World Of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen

Paul Hillier, conductor (Ars Nova Copenhagen)

[Dacapo Records]
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

73. Best Small Ensemble Performance

Frank: Hilos

Gabriela Lena Frank; ALIAS Chamber Ensemble

[Naxos]

The Kingdoms Of Castille

Richard Savino, conductor; El Mundo

[Sono Luminus]

Mackey: Lonely Motel - Music From Slide

Rinde Eckert & Steven Mackey; Eighth Blackbird

[Cedille Records]

A Seraphic Fire Christmas

Patrick Dupré Quigley, conductor; Seraphic Fire

[Seraphic Fire Media]

Sound The Bells!

The Bay Brass

[Harmonia Mundi]
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

74. Best Classical Instrumental Solo

Chinese Recorder Concertos - East Meets West

Lan Shui, conductor; Michala Petri (Copenhagen Philharmonic)

[OUR Recordings]

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2 In C Minor, Op. 18; Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini

Yuja Wang (Claudio Abbado; Mahler Chamber Orchestra)

[Deutsche Grammaphon]

Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 4

Leif Ove Andsnes (Antonio Pappano; London Symphony Orchestra)

[EMI Classics]

Schwantner: Concerto For Percussion & Orchestra

Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Christopher Lamb (Nashville Symphony)

Track from: Schwantner: Chasing Light…

[Naxos]

Winging It - Piano Music Of John Corigliano

Ursula Oppens

[Cedille Records]
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

75. Best Classical Vocal Solo

Diva Divo

Joyce DiDonato (Kazushi Ono; Orchestre De L'Opéra National De Lyon; Choeur De L'Opéra National De Lyon)

[Virgin Classics]

Grieg/Thommessen: Veslemøy Synsk

Marianne Beate Kielland (Nils Anders Mortensen)

[2L (Lindberg Lyd)]

Handel: Cleopatra

Natalie Dessay (Emmanuelle Haïm; Le Concert D'Astrée)

[Virgin Classics]

Purcell: O Solitude

Andreas Scholl (Stefano Montanari; Christophe Dumaux; Accademia Bizantina)

[Decca]

Three Baroque Tenors

Ian Bostridge (Bernard Labadie; Mark Bennett, Andrew Clarke, Sophie Daneman, Alberto Grazzi, Jonathan Gunthorpe, Benjamin Hulett & Madeline Shaw; The English Concert)

[EMI Classics]
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =

76. Best Contemporary Classical Composition

Aldridge, Robert: Elmer Gantry

Robert Aldridge & Herschel Garfein

[Naxos]

Crumb, George: The Ghosts Of Alhambra

George Crumb

Track from: Complete Crumb Edition, Vol. 15

[Bridge Records, Inc.]

Friedman, Jefferson: String Quartet No. 3

Jefferson Friedman

Track from: Jefferson Friedman: Quartets

[New Amsterdam Records]

Mackey, Steven: Lonely Motel - Music From Slide

Steven Mackey

[Cedille Records]

Ruders, Poul: Piano Concerto No. 2

Poul Ruders

Track from: Music Of Poul Ruders, Vol. 6

[Bridge Records, Inc.]

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

68. Best Engineered Album, Classical

Aldridge: Elmer Gantry

Byeong-Joon Hwang & John Newton, engineers; Jesse Lewis, mastering engineer (William Boggs, Keith Phares, Patricia Risley, Vale Rideout, Frank Kelley, Heather Buck, Florentine Opera Chorus & Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra)

[Naxos]

Glazunov: Complete Concertos

Richard King, engineer (José Serebrier, Alexey Serov, Wen-Sinn Yang, Alexander Romanovsky, Rachel Barton Pine, Marc Chisson & Russian National Orchestra)

[Warner Classics]

Mackey: Lonely Motel - Music From Slide

Tom Lazarus & Bill Maylone, engineers; Joe Lambert, mastering engineer (Rinde Eckert, Steven Mackey & Eighth Blackbird)

[Cedille Records]

Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 4

Arne Akselberg, engineer (Leif Ove Andsnes, Antonio Pappano & London Symphony Orchestra)

[EMI Classics]

Weinberg: Symphony No. 3 & Suite No. 4 From 'The Golden Key'

Torbjörn Samuelsson, engineer (Thord Svedlund & Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra)

[Chandos]
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

69. Producer Of The Year, Classical

Blanton Alspaugh

• Aldridge: Elmer Gantry (William Boggs, Keith Phares, Patricia Risley, Vale Rideout, Frank Kelley, Heather Buck, Florentine Opera Chorus & Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra)

• Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas (Peter Takács)• Osterfield: Rocky Streams (Paul Osterfield, Todd Waldecker & Various Artists)

Manfred Eicher

• Bach: Concertos & Sinfonias For Oboe; Ich Hatte Viel Bekümmernis (Heinz Holliger, Eric Höbarth & Camerata Bern)

• Hymns & Prayers (Gidon Kremer & Kremerata Baltica)• Manto & Madrigals (Thomas Zehetmair & Ruth Killius)• Songs Of Ascension (Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Todd Reynolds Quartet, The M6 & Montclair State University Singers)• Tchaikovsky/Kissine: Piano Trios (Gidon Kremer, Giedre Dirvanauskaite & Khatia Buniatishvili)• A Worcester Ladymass (Trio Mediaeval)

David Frost

• Chicago Symphony Orchestra Brass Live (Chicago Symphony Orchestra Brass)

• Mackey: Lonely Motel - Music From Slide (Rinde Eckert, Steven Mackey & Eighth Blackbird)• Prayers & Alleluias (Kenneth Dake)• Sharon Isbin & Friends - Guitar Passions (Sharon Isbin & Various Artists)

Peter Rutenberg

• Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 (Patrick Dupré Quigley, James K. Bass, Seraphic Fire & Professional Choral Institute)

• The Vanishing Nordic Chorale (Philip Spray & Musik Ekklesia)

Judith Sherman

• Adams: Son Of Chamber Symphony; String Quartet (John Adams, St. Lawrence String Quartet & International Contemporary Ensemble)

• Capricho Latino (Rachel Barton Pine)• 85th Birthday Celebration (Claude Frank)• Insects & Paper Airplanes - Chamber Music Of Lawrence Dillon (Daedalus Quartet & Benjamin Hochman)• Midnight Frolic - The Broadway Theater Music Of Louis A. Hirsch (Rick Benjamin & Paragon Ragtime Orchestra)• Notable Women - Trios By Today's Female Composers (Lincoln Trio)• The Soviet Experience, Vol. 1 - String Quartets By Dmitri Shostakovich & His Contemporaries (Pacifica Quartet)• Speak! (Anthony De Mare)• State Of The Art - The American Brass Quintet At 50 (The American Brass Quintet)• Steve Reich: WTC 9/11; Mallet Quartet; Dance Patterns (Kronos Quartet, Steve Reich Musicians & So Percussion)• Winging It - Piano Music Of John Corigliano (Ursula Oppens)

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

Check back in February 2012 and we'll find out who the winners are!

- Dick Strawser

NaNoWriMo 2011: It's Official

2011-11-30T15:50:00.001-05:00

Yes, I am an author - or so they tell me over at NaNoWriMo where November is "National Novel Writing Month." Every November, they hold their 50,000-word challenge, urging everybody anywhere who has always wanted to write a novel to "git 'er done" (in the American parlance) - or at least to get 50,000 words of 'er done (or, more realistically, of a first draft done).

This year - my fourth NaNoWriMo adventure - I decided to do a complete rewrite of a novel, one of my music appreciation thrillers, I'd started with NaNoWriMo 2009 mainly because I liked the title and some of the characters' names - the plot, not so much. In fact, that original "Lost Chord" was a direct parody of Dan Brown's latest opus, The Lost Symbol and this time around I wanted to remove all parodiness from my latest music appreciation thriller. (You can read about last year's novel, The Doomsday Symphony, here. My earlier parody of Brown's The DaVinci Code can be read in its entirety, here.)

While certain characters remain more-or-less the same - like the villain Tr'iTone and one of his disguises, Dr. Iobba Dhabbodhú, or the Director of Security for the International Composers Alliance Yoda Leahy-Hu, and the beautiful LauraLynn Harty (though I did change her hair color) not to mention other characters like V.C. D'Arcy, ICA Agents Kaye Gelida Manina and Wanda Menveaux or Barry Scarpia - new ones have been added, like Fictitia LaMouche (an on-line journalist whose original name is Felicity Lychpit), teachers like Emilio Fabbro and Dudley Böhm, or the singers Rita Pagliaccio and Cora diLetto (a little more complicated, it's a line from Cherubino's aria, 'Voi che sapete' - at 2:18 into this clip with Joyce DiDonato, you can hear 'Ch’ora è diletto,' this moment of pleasure) and while I'm stealing names from opera arias, let's not forget the yet-to-be-introduced Porgia Moore and Barbra Seville.

I'm also expanding a few walk-on roles from the original, like Garth Widor (an agent of one of the villains, N. Ron Steele, the evil CEO of SHMRG), Peter Moonbeam (a Native-American version of Pierrot Lunaire) and turning Phil Harmon (formerly chief of security for Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall) into Samuel Schäufel (as in shovel), a German version of Sam Spade, the detective from The Maltese Falcon. You see, the biggest change in the setting is moving it from Lincoln Center to (mostly) the Schweinwald Festival in Bavaria (where there actually is a Schweinwald - which means "Hogwood" and I chose it because, back in the 19th Century, there could be a [purely fictional] legendary music school there which could be a kind of musical Hogwarts) and that's where a search is on for something... with clues to be found on a headless Mozart porcelain doll, standing on a map of Malta (why it's referred to as The Maltese Mozart) which was discovered on the site of the old Falkenstein Farm, not far from the even older, possibly haunted Castle Schweinwald.

Then, too, part of the novel's new opening is set in an artist's colony called Benninghurst where the Director, something of a fund-raising wizard, is a guy from Australia named Sidney Drummoyne (Drummoyne is actually a suburb of Sydney). The resident nurse is named Anna Miszklysczewska whom everybody calls Annie M and the house mascot is a little dog named Poco. Stylistic arguments about musical aesthetics involve three composers: serialist Luke van Rhiarden (an anagram of Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus) is accused of lacking a heart while Seth Mazrif (whose names are anagrams for New Age artists [John] Tesh and Zamfir) is accused of lacking a brain. Lionel Roth, a bundle of insecurities who actually becomes a major character, lacks the courage of his own convictions but is peripherally involved in the gruesome murder of composer Robertson Sullivan whose opera, Faustus, Inc. (a corporate version of the Faust legend where Mephistopheles is a CEO named Arachne Webb) will be premiered at the Schweinwald Festival except the recently completed score has just been stolen which means... &c &c

Now, Robertson Sullivan's cousin LauraLynn Harty is descended from the composer Harrison Harty who had studied at Schweinwald in 1880 along with Mahler, Ethel Smyth and Hans Rott. (Harrison, a little-known cousin of Irish composer Hamilton Harty, emigrated to the USA where he became a professor of composition at the Jones School of Music in Indiana.) Late in his life, he married Penelope Pintscher, daughter of the Chicago railroad tycoon, Glutius Pintscher. Penny and Harrison have twin sons, Cuthbert and Norbert (a.k.a. "The Berts") who, after their parents' deaths, are raised by Penny's sister, Nicola Deimler and thus inherit considerable industrial wealth and connections. Norbert's sons are Oliver Costello and Stanley Abbott Harty. Cuthbert's daughters are Catherine (who marries Richard Shaw, becoming Katie Shaw, and their son is Bernard who marries Pashmina) and Mabel (who marries Gilbert N. Sullivan and has a son, Robertson).

Incidentally, LauraLynn’s mother would be Lucille Lewes, her aunt Ethel Clarke, the widow of Uncle Stan (but of course Lucy and Ethel always dreamt of forming a comedy team called Lewes & Clarke). Then there’s Geraldine who marries cousin Martin Lewes, dean of the local college, hence they’re Dean Martin and Gerrie Lewes.

Oh, there are a few other things I've kept: the elevator ride at the Washington Monument, the Night at the Opera parody using the Barber of Seville (also the state room scene transferred to a backstage dressing room), and the "Hu's on First" scene. (You'll have to scroll down for all of these: none of them begin "at the top".)

Did I mention this is a comic music appreciation thriller?

Well, at any rate, 53,473 words of the thoroughly revised (as in "starting-over-from-scratch-almost") version of The Lost Chord are done, but the novel is far from over.

The game, as they say, is afoot!

- Dick Strawser

Those Nasty New Music Guys...

2011-11-26T12:37:00.001-05:00

A champion of the traditional style complained that modern composers wrote only in the newest forms and neglected the tried-and-true forms of the past and used a multiplicity of awkward rhythms and imperfect rhythmic subdivisions of the beat rather than adhering to “the proper use of perfection.” They also indulged in “broken rhythms” and capricious (even lascivious) movement rather than confining themselves, like past masters, to a more modest restrained movement. Some of these new compositions relied on the repetition of such complicated rhythmic patterns often overlapping with similarly repeated melodic patterns to create something so complex, it seemed more mathematical than anything close to the proper attributes music is to instill in the listener (which is why some religious leaders also came out against this new musical style).

It would appear, judging from his comments and those of his colleagues, these modern composers were nothing but a menace – if not to society, at least to the quality of fine art.

So when do you think this stylistic disagreement originates from?

Given the mathematical patterns, perhaps you’re thinking of Arnold Schoenberg and his concept of ‘serialism’ – generally dismissed as more math than music – where patterns of twelve notes (a “row”) could be repeated and manipulated ad infinitum or the next generation of serialists like Boulez and Messiaen who, bored with just serializing pitches, also serialized rhythms and even dynamics.

But since it’s primarily about rhythm and “movement” (in this sense, rhythmic motion rather than the divisions of a larger piece into individual movements), you might think it stems from the complex rhythms of the early 20th Century – Stravinsky and Bartok with their complicated, constantly changing meters, or even the Russian composers of the late-19th Century like Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky who sometimes used meters like 5/4 or 7/8 which they found in East European folk music.

Or maybe it’s between the adherents of Brahms with his legacy from the Symphonic Age of Beethoven who were opposed to the Music of the Future championed by the followers of Liszt and Wagner whose sense of rhythm and harmonic passion (certainly far too emotional for decent people) was certainly more complicated and more “lascivious” than anything composed in previous generations. And it wasn’t just their music – Wagner composing Tristan und Isolde, about a man falling love with another man’s wife, himself fell in love with Cosima, the wife of his conductor-friend Hans von Bülow (and the daughter of Liszt). (And let’s not get into the sordid details of their private lives!) How immoral was that? And the music that went with it… It was enough to make decent people shudder.

Brahms, hearing new works from the next generation composed by twenty-somethings like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, worried about the cesspool that music was rapidly becoming.

Could it go back further? There were, after all, famous stylistic “wars” during the 18th and 19th Centuries, too.

Actually, the first paragraph is a summary of the argument you could read in Jacques de Liège’s monumental work “Musical Speculation” or, more accurately “The Mirror of Music,” Speculum musicae in which he complained greatly about the followers of Philippe de Vitry.

This was written around 1324, give or take a year.

The problem centered around the development of a more detailed rhythmic notation – as opposed to the older ambiguities of the notation in Gregorian chant – which permitted such complexities as rhythms of LONG-short LONG-short LONG-short LONG (in 6/8, the quarter+eighth note pattern) rather than the traditional SHORT-looong, SHORT-looong, SHORT-looong LONG (in 6/8, the eighth+quarter note pattern).

The idea of bringing greater variety to musical rhythms is something that was going on in 1279 but composers of that generation preferred, perhaps diplomatically, to use both patterns and consider both of them “good.” But Philippe de Vitry (see right) preferred to place the “long note” at the front (giving it a certain lilt – the ‘lascivious’ movement his critics referred to) and to ignore the old-fashioned pattern completely.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the introduction of duple time – perfection was based on threes (the Trinity being the model) and to do something in two or four (like our modern march) was to embrace imperfection and deny the Trinity! (Why would you do that?!)

Plus, they wrote only motets and cantilenas (long, melodious solo songs) usually about love, and ignored the tried-and-true forms like the Mass, organum (taking a segment of Gregorian chant and superimposing over it one or two newly composed parts) or the stately conductus (a kind of processional motet).

Even Pope John XXII issued a Papal Bull (in a sense different from the modern slang use of the word ‘bull’) around 1325 not against the theory of this new style but against the practical results of the new art, concerned mostly about the impact it would have on the sanctity of the music sung in the church service, especially considering the tranquility generated by the perfection of plainsong (what we consider Gregorian chant). This new music, with these new and complex rhythms was agitated by so many short notes and disturbed by “hockets” (a rhythmic device with a short rest in one part allowing a note in another part to fill in the missing part – and yes, perhaps it’s the source of our word “hiccup”) and that the use of plainsong (or chant) in these new-fangled compositions was rendered unrecognizable by being (disrespectfully) subjected to such complicated rhythmic devices.

The upholders of tradition called their music Ars Antiqua (also Ars Veterum, Traditional Art), based on the proud history of French music going back to about 1160.

Those who broke away from the traditions of the past, like Philippe de Vitry, called their music Ars Nova or The New Art.

And yet, today, these arguments – and examples of music from both these styles – seem so old and foreign to us, unfamiliar, perhaps even pointless to us today, with our modern technology and cool new techniques and attitudes about listening to music.

If Columbus hadn’t dared to reach India by sailing west, would the world still be flat? Or if Galileo never guessed the Earth was not the Center of the Universe, would men have ever landed on the Moon?

Well… maybe…

- Dick Strawser

Music for Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T14:45:00.001-05:00

When thinking about music for Thanksgiving Day, my ear immediately starts hearing this scene from Aaron Copland's opera, The Tender Land. Here is the quintet, "The Promise of Living," from a 2010 production by the Berkeley Opera Company, sung Paul Cheak, Lee Steward, Amy Foote, Malin Fritz, Paul Murray; conducted by Philip Kuttner and directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer. (Video projection, videography and editing by Jeremy Knight).

The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving

Is born of our loving our friends and our labor.

The promise of growing with faith and with knowing

Is born of our sharing our love with our neighbor.

The promise of living, the promise of growing

Is born of our singing in joy and thanksgiving.

For many a year I’ve known this field

And know all the work that makes them yield.

Are you ready to lend a hand?

We’re ready to work, we’re ready to lend a hand.

By working together we’ll bring in the harvest,

the blessings of harvest.

We plow plant each row with seeds of grain,

And Providence sends us the sun and the rain.

By lending a hand, by lending an arm

Bring out the blessings of harvest.

Give thanks there was sunshine,

Give thanks there was rain,

Give thanks we are here to deliver the grain.

O let us be joyful, O let us be grateful to the Lord for his blessing.

The promise of ending in right understanding
Is peace in our hearts, peace with our neighbor.

The promise of living, the promise of growing,

The promise of ending is labor and sharing and loving.

-- from the libretto by Horace Everett.

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Wishing everybody a blessed and Happy Thanksgiving Day.

- Dick Strawser

The Right and the Left of the Brain

2011-11-22T23:15:00.001-05:00

Technically, the concept existed long before the scientific explanation came about: after all, gravity wasn’t invented when an apple hit Isaac Newton on the head in 1665 (so the story goes). The idea that people had a “dual nature” in the way they thought should have come as no surprise, but it wasn’t until 1968 when psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry published his innovative studies that verbal, analytic thinking was located mainly in the left hemisphere of the brain, and that visual, perceptual thinking was located mainly in the right. Sperry won a Nobel Prize in 1981.

In the old days, regardless of what century it was written in, music could be “classical” or “romantic” referring to the general style – “classical” being leaner textures, more logical, perhaps intellectually oriented and essentially clean; “romantic” meant denser textures, vaguer in terms of formal and harmonic clarity, more dramatic or emotional and, perhaps, “messy.” In this sense a composer in the late-18th Century writing in a dramatic emotional style could be “romantic” during the “Classical” period – think all those “Sturm und Drang” symphonies, or the D Minor Piano Concerto or G Minor symphonies of Mozart. And Mendelssohn, in some respects, could be a “classical” Romantic composer – sharing bits of both styles.

This stylistic dichotomy could also be referred to as “Apollonian” (classical) or “Dionysian” (romantic), going back to the Ancient Greeks (whether they used the distinction themselves or not) – Apollo, the god of such things as architecture (which would be logical, formalistic) and Dionysus or Bacchus, who gave men wine which of course has done little for logic and clarity for millennia…

These days, we mostly use the idea of “Left-brain” and “Right-brain.” And this is basically the gist of Sperry’s work.

While going through some books in a not-that-old box still left unpacked from the last move, I came across a copy of Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence) which was first published in 1979, making it one of the first books to apply this new scientific thinking and applying it to art. My edition was a paperback issued in 1989.

It’s not that I was interested in the art of drawing, but the concept seemed intriguing to me, wondering if it could be applied to musical creativity. I had been reading several books about “creativity” in general which seemed to focus on scientific creativity – the discovery of new theories or the invention of new contraptions – but rarely on musical creativity and then when they did, it often descended into what I would have thought was obvious and very shallow, compared to the in-depth, technical comprehension these authors found in the scientists and mathematicians.

It wasn’t until years later it dawned on me – d’oh! – that scientists understand the scientific mind but are completely lost when it comes to the artistic mind because (for them) it lacks the familiarity and the objectivity scientists need to exist.

The whole premise of scientific research is to “prove” something. Scientist A comes up with a new theory. In order for it to be “proved,” Scientist B has to be able to replicate it and come up with the same results.

If Composer A comes up with ideas about a musical composition, it is highly unlikely Composer B is going to come up with anything close to the same composition! In fact, even if Composer A tries it again, using the same concepts or ideas, his or her realization of them will no doubt result in a different composition even though it’s by the same composer. Oh, there may be similarities, but the artist is always looking for different ways to treat the same ideas whereas the scientist is always hoping for the same.

Yes, you can joke that Antonio Vivaldi wrote 600 concertos that sound like one concerto 600 times but that’s only because, to the untrained listener, the few that we know have a certain stylistic sameness. But like snowflakes, no two of them are the same.

And many listeners who are not musicians themselves can’t quite understand what performers mean when they say “every performance [of the same piece] is different.” Perhaps it’s not different from thinking the river you’re looking at is always the same because the water that flows by is made up of different molecules and so on.

Language also gives us problems in adapting to even the most obvious differences: what comes to mind when you see the word “river”? Is it the great Mississippi River or the Susquehanna River (which, at Harrisburg, is about a mile wide) or the Fenton River which I used to step across in the woods outside the University of Connecticut because it’s barely two feet across (“and you call this a river!” I used to tell my friends there in disbelief). But I digress, kind of…

The world, of course, is designed for people who are right handed. This discrimination is evident even in the words chosen to describe “right” and “left.” In Latin, the word for “right” is dexter from which we get dexterity (skill) (not to overlook the irony of a popular serial killer being named ‘Dexter’). The Latin word for “left,” on the other hand, is sinister from which we get… well, sinister (evil, ominous).

Even in French, the word for “left” is gauche from which we get gauche or gawky, awkward, tacky or sociably unacceptable; “right” is droit from which we get adroit (capable).

In old English, the word “left” comes from the Anglo-Saxon stem lyft meaning weak or worthless, “right” from reht or straight, just and ultimately (by way of the German recht) the word correct.

Enough?(Do we even need to get into politics?)

The duality in the world is also obvious: for example, light/dark, feminine/masculine, positive/negative, winter/summer and intellect/emotion, not to mention the more recent concept of digital/analog.

Ms. Edwards points out (p.38) the ‘L-Mode’ and the ‘R-Mode’ which she differentiates in the letters’ fonts: the L is bold, blocked and basic; the R is like script, full of curlicues and whimsy.

These two modes she describes with basic characteristics:

The L-Mode is foursquare, upright, sensible, direct, true, hard-edged, plain and forceful.

The R-Mode is curvy, flexible, playful, unexpected, diagonal, fanciful -- and she also includes the word “complex.”

Here is a paraphrase of her chart on p.40 which compares similar concepts and how they are applied on the Left-Brain or Right-Brain duality:

L-Mode is verbal, using words to name, describe, define.

R-Mode is non-verbal, focused more on awareness of things but minimal connection with words.

L-Mode is analytic, figuring things out step-by-step and part-by-art.
R-Mode is synthetic, putting things together to form wholes.

L-Mode is symbolic, using a symbol to stand for something (the drawing of an eye can substitute for the word eye; the + sign stands for the process of addition)

R-Mode is concrete, relating to things as they are, at the present moment.

L-Mode is abstract, taking out a small bit of information and using it represent the whole thing.

R-Mode is analogic, seeking likenesses between things; understanding metaphoric relationships.

(I think this might be more easily expressed as abstract, seeing the parts (for instance, data) whereas analogic would see the whole as the sum of the parts first – in other words, L-Mode would see the details, and R-Mode would see the “big picture”).

L-Mode is temporal, keeping track of time, sequencing one thing after another (in order)
R-Mode is non-temporal, without a sense of time (unaware of the passing of time, taking things out-of-order or at random)

L-Mode is rational, drawing conclusions based on reason and facts.
R-Mode is non-rational (I would prefer irrational), not requiring a basis of reason or facts (to reach a conclusion), willingness to suspend judgment.

L-Mode is digital, using numbers as in counting.
R-Mode is spatial, seeing where things are in relation to other things and how parts go together to form a whole.

L-Mode is logical, drawing conclusions based on logic (rational), one thing following another in logical order, for example, like a mathematical theorem or a well-stated argument.
R-Mode is intuitive, making leaps of insight, often on incomplete patterns, hunches, feelings or visual images.

L-Mode is linear, thinking in terms of linked (successive) ideas, one thought flowing directly into another, often leading to a convergent conclusion (obvious)

R-Mode is holistic, seeing whole things all at once, perceiving the overall patterns and structures, often leading to divergent conclusions (not easily explainable but sensed)

Though she implies it within her chart, I would add at least one other :L-Mode is studied, applying rules that are learned to a given situation.

R-Mode is spontaneous, not paying attention to learned rules in varying degrees (being free with them; breaking them on purpose; ignoring them).

I might also add the easy confusion between the two in trying to memorize logically by thinking intuitively – Left-brained can be Logical but also Rational, applying Reason; while Right-brained can be… uhm… well, so much for mnemonics…

If you have to think about which is your right hand and which is your left (especially if you’re an actor and you have to think the opposite of normal when you’re on the stage because what is yourright is not the audience’s right…), you’ll probably have problems telling the two apart. That means you’re right-brained, first of all.

Add to that the seeming conundrum of the left-side of the brain controlling the right side of the body and vice-versa, meaning… uhm… well, let’s not get into that now, shall we?

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A few observations.

Musicians have long called the study of the language of music, “theory.”

“Theory” in science means something that is not yet or cannot be proven.

And yet any music theory teacher drums into you these rules about intervals and chords and how they work together and grades you on any infraction of these rules as if they are facts-carved-in-stone.

But like any language, you learn the rules and then you figure out how to break them. But first you must know what makes them work. Then you can bend or break them to your will IF you have something to replace them with.

(Ah, there’s a grammatical rule I’ve just broken: “never end a sentence with a preposition” or as one of my teachers once put, slyly, “a preposition is something you never end a sentence with.”)

Sometimes we break rules because it sounds more “natural” and sticking to the rules sounds too “formal.” For instance, if you’re talking to children, you’re not going to be speaking in King James English (speakest thou not in the olde biblical style from the 1600s) or in Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. Likewise, if you’re going to compose a fugue (one of the most intellectual procedures in music), you probably don’t want to write in the style of, say, Britney Spears (there is a wonderful parody on-line of a guy who demonstrates how to write a fugue using a Britney Spears song – in the end, however, it sounds more like an old-fashioned fugue than it does a Britney Spears song, but still…)

Aaron Copland once wrote that a composer hears a new piece whole in a flash – the problem is then writing it down fast enough to get it down on paper.

This is what we call “inspiration.”

Since I could never do that, I figured, “well, I guess I’m not a composer.”

The thing is, that’s how Aaron Copland may compose, but it’s not how, say, Elliott Carter composes. Carter usually begins with a different kind of problem – usually one inherent in the instruments he’s writing for, or a more formal or even mathematical problem: something that requires a solution. For him, the inspiration comes later, usually in the different possible solutions that he can come up with and which ones prove to be the most productive in creating further solutions.

Copland’s approach is very spontaneous – Right-Brained.

Carter’s approach is more detail oriented, logical, painstakingly worked out – in other words, Left-Brained.

In the biblical story of Moses (left), he calls upon his brother Aaron (right) to speak for him. I’m not sure there’s a specific reason why – perhaps Moses stammered or Aaron had a more pleasing voice. Or maybe Moses, being the mystical conduit between God and Man, could not speak to the everyday situation, he needed Aaron to mediate for him, to interpret what he said (or what God said through him) so that ordinary people could understand it. In any sense, we get the idea that (Charlton Heston aside), Moses was the Idea Man and Aaron was the Big Picture Man, the Communicator – the Salesman.

Remember, it is Aaron who is forced by the doubters waiting for Moses to come down from Mt. Sinai, to give them a concrete image they can believe in – hence, the Golden Calf. The Right-brain is image-oriented, the Left-brain is abstract, idea-oriented.

When Arnold Schoenberg set the story of Moses as in opera (Moses und Aron which he left incomplete), he approached their roles in a very unique way. Not only did he differentiate the two brothers by making Moses a baritone and Aaron a tenor, he specified that Aaron should be a lyric (not a dramatic) tenor and that Moses does not actually sing but speaks in a form of declamation which is half-sung and half-spoken. Moses cannot approach song – Aaron turns Moses’ ideas into song.

Here is the first confrontation between the two brothers (ignore the picture):
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At 5:30, Moses sings the only line he actually sings in the entire opera (at least, that part Schoenberg completed): "Purify your thinking," he warns his brother, "free it from worthless things. Let it be righteous. No other reward is given your offerings." (The libretto, by Schoenberg himself, in a translation by Allen Forte for the SONY recording conducted by Boulez.)

While the second act concludes with Moses sinking to the ground in despair - "O word, thou word, that I lack!" - the text of the final act which Schoenberg wrote but never set to music is another, more dramatic confrontation between Moses and Aron, a trial in which Aron, a prisoner, is then set free and once set free, falls down dead. Moses' final words: "But in the Wasteland you shall be invincible and shall achieve the goal: unity with God."

By the way, Schoenberg’s method of composing with 12 pitches (which came to be known as serialism, one of the most abstract, intellectual ways to compose in the 20th Century) is extremely Left-Brained, so much that many listeners (and performers, as well) cannot hear any emotion in the music – to them, it has no heart, it’s all brain.

The problem is, not looking back far enough beyond the fact Schoenberg’s music doesn’t sound like “familiar” 19th Century music, Schoenberg came up with a system of organizing pitches (“theory”) that is a substitute, in a way, for the system we call “tonality” which was in use since about 1600, which can be just as systematic and rule-oriented and abused by untalented composers as serial music has been. But I digress.

I would like to point out, though, that when Schoenberg called his opera Moses und Aron, it wasn’t that Aron was the German form of Aaron (which is what most people suppose) and it’s not even that, in this form, it would be 12 letters (analogous to the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale or the basis of his 12-tone rows) – it was that it would not be thirteen letters. For all his logical left-brained rational intellectuality, Schoenberg was a triskaidekaphobe: he had a fear of the Number 13! How right-brained is that?!

Which brings me to one last point for this post: very few people would be completely 100% Left-Brained or 100% Right-Brained. There are lots of tests on-line you can take to see how you fare – the questions may seem odd: when you think your way through a problem, do you like to sit or lie down? I usually skew Left but there’s a good percentage of Right in my scores and that seems to work out in my personality as well as my composing and writing. My scores will be very different if I answer as I might have when I was specifically younger - or respond as a composer or writer as opposed to my personal life. Oddly, my personal life would be more Right-brained and my artistic life would be more Left-brained, a dichotomy that I sometimes find unsettling.But that’s something for another future post.

One of my favorite quotes these days is from a composer usually considered a “difficult” composer, Roger Sessions, who said,

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"Every composer whose music seems difficult to grasp is, as long as the difficulty persists, suspected or accused of composing with his brain rather than his heart -- as if the one could function without the other."
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It is not a question of whether we’re Right-brained or Left-brained but whether we can make a unity out of these internal factions each of us has in ourselves so we can communicate in some way with other people who have possibly very different internal factions.

These internal factions are what make us different from one another. It is what makes us who we are and why people react differently to the same piece of music.

It might explain why certain people identify with certain types of music – for instance, why a Right-brained Person could love Wagner but find Brahms tedious. Or why a Left-brained Person could enjoy Mozart but feel uncomfortable when listening to Berlioz.

Anyway, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it…

- Dick Strawser

Debussy by the Sea

2011-11-15T17:09:00.001-05:00

This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony, conducted by Stuart Malina, performs Claude Debussy’s La Mer, three symphonic studies depicting the sea at various times of the day.

The program also includes other evocative works by Alan Hovhaness - his Mysterious Mountain - and Samuel Barber's nostalgic setting of life in Knoxville: Summer of 1915, plus Maurice Ravel's exotic Shéhérazade, tales from the 1001 Arabian Nights (don't worry, there are only three tales).

The S.S. Malina sets sail Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm from the Forum in downtown Harrisburg, with a pre-concert talk given by Assistant Conductor Tara Simoncic an hour before each departure.

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Visiting the wild coasts of French Brittany in his youth, the novelist Marcel Proust wrote of the sea at his mythical Balbec:

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[With the radiant sun upon the waves] that leapt up one behind the other like jumpers on a trampoline… the snowy crests of its emerald green waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence and a leonine frown, to which the sun added a faceless smile, allowed their crumbling slopes to topple down at last, [one morning it was a] transparent, vaporous bluish distance, like the glaciers that one sees in the background of the Tuscan Primitives. On other mornings… the sun laughed upon a water of a green as tender as that preserved in Alpine pastures… less by the moisture of the soil than by the liquid mobility of the light… It is above all the light, the light that displaces and situates the undulations of the sea, [with the sun’s] tremulous golden shaft scorching the seas topaz-yellow, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky like beer, frothy like milk… as if some god were shifting it to and fro by moving a mirror in the sky. [I was] impatient to know what Sea it was playing that morning by the shore, for none of these Seas ever stayed with us longer than a day. The next day there would be another, which sometimes resembled its predecessor. I never saw the same one twice.
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Proust was not the only author ever to be captivated by the limitless and changeable sea, nor was Debussy the only composer to come under its spell, but Proust, writing of his experiences with the sea along the English Channel coast in the 1880s, seems like a reasonable introduction to the music Debussy composed, having spent some of that time along the English Channel coast in 1904 (for the record, Proust’s Balbec – in reality, Cabourg – is south of the Siene; Debussy’s Pourville, near Dieppe, is north of it.

Debussy composed his musical portrait of the sea between 1903 and 1905 (he may have started some sketches in 1902). He began working on it in the town of Bichain which is actually far inland, perhaps a hundred miles southeast of Paris toward Switzerland, in the historic region of Burgundy. But much of the time he was working on it, he was staying in Pourville (see photograph of Debussy taken that summer in Pourville, though not looking out toward the sea).

Finishing it March, 1905, he spends the month of August on the English side of the Channel, at Eastbourne, and on August 7th he is correcting the publisher’s proofs in advance of the October premiere in Paris.

La Mer may be the longest orchestral work by Debussy, the closest thing we have to a symphony by him, but a symphony in all its Germanic essence would be antithetical to Debussy’s aesthetic. He subtitled it “Three Symphonic Sketches for Orchestra,” a suite, basically, the symphonic in this case referring less to the extended ‘development’ of ideas usually associated with a symphony.

The first movement is entitled “From dawn to mid-day on the sea,” and the final movement is the “Dialogue of the wind and the sea.” These are comparable to the substantial outer movements one might find in a symphony. The middle movement is a light, scherzo-like movement, almost a waltz, entitled “Play of the waves.”

But Debussy is not concerned about themes and developments and modulations and harmonic schemes like Beethoven would be – even though most of the material evolves out of the primal intervals – the perfect 5th – that open the work, a kind of reverse-Beethoven’s 9th, in a way, but just as cosmic (or, perhaps, oceanic).

As marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson noted, like the sea itself, the surface of Debussy's music hints at the brooding mystery of its depths, and ultimately the profound enigma of life itself – after all, mankind carries the primordial salt of the sea in our blood.

Here is Riccardo Muti conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in this 1994 video recording. (The work is complete in one clip.)

(please ignore the fact the poster from Japan refers to it as La Mar...)

Debussy was a very visually oriented composer. Many of his works are small musical miniatures with evocative titles – think of “Claire de Lune” (Moonlight) or “Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” In fact, there are series of short works simply called “Images.” His studio was full of prints of paintings or those postcard-like souvenirs one might find at a museum – images which, given the vagueness of his harmonic style and almost anti-melodic approach to sound earned him the title “Impressionist.”

Usually, we tend to think of “Impressionism” in painting as soft and flexible, playing more with light than substance. This is easy to induce musically by the use of non-traditional scales, especially the whole-tone scale which has no harmonic function we associate with tonality, especially the strong functions of chord progressions like the dominant to the tonic resolution that gives it a satisfying, structural coherence. In several works by Debussy – think Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or, again, “Claire de Lune” – the harmonic vagueness is matched by softer dynamics and even though there are climaxes, they are almost understated.

This is not the style in La Mer. This is at times very muscular music even though it may lack the harmonic bite some feel longer forms need to create forward motion. “Motion” here is like the motion of the sea, as Proust described it in the quote from “In Search of Lost Time” at the beginning of this post, vibrant and colorful – above all, colorful. This is not the French equivalent, sitting on the beach looking out across the sand, of the English pastoral school derided as the “Cow-Looking-Over-the-Fence” school of music.

In fact, Debussy would probably have had little patience with this "soft" approach to music: as a music critic, a career he followed briefly in the few years before he composed La Mer, he reviewed a work by Frederick Delius (usually considered an English Impressionist) as "very sweet, very pale - music to soothe convalescents in well-to-do neighborhoods."

And La Mer is anything but soft, sweet or pale.

Debussy may focus less on melody as he is on the “tracery and ornamenting” of a line much in the way Bach, that most German of composers, might have done, with a grace and suppleness both melodically and harmonically of his beloved Chopin (his first piano teacher was a big fan if not officially a student of Chopin’s). Debussy was just as influenced by the stylization of nature as seen in the landscape prints from Japan, particularly Hokusai whose “The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa” which he had in his studio and which adorned the first printed edition of Debussy’s score. But he was also influenced by the “infinite arabesques” and complex counterpoint of the Javanese gamelan, a unique and exotic sound-world he first heard in 1889 at the Universal Exposition in Paris.

Other influences, perhaps surprisingly, come from Russian composers at a time when Russian music was little known in Western Europe, especially Mussorgsky and his opera, Boris Godunoff, especially his spontaneity and freedom from traditional academic formulas (which caused many to consider Mussorgsky untrained or untrainable and even led his friends, like Rimsky-Korsakoff, to “clean up” many of his scores). He described these as “successive minute touches mysteriously linked together by means of an instinctive clairvoyance.”

In one of those serendipitous moments in music history, I love pointing out the one degree of separation between Tchaikovsky and Debussy – Nadezhda von Meck was a wealthy widow who was not only Tchaikovsky’s generous patron and musical confidant, she hired some musicians to form a piano trio when she visited Paris and traveled with them, taking them back to Moscow for two years where they lived in her house and played music for her and her friends. The pianist – whose additional responsibilities involved playing piano duets with her and giving her daughters lessons – was Claude Debussy.

He was 18.

While in Moscow, young Debussy would have been exposed to a great deal of Russian music, no doubt, though I’ve never read anything he has said about, for instance, seeing Boris Godunoff. Still, knowing that Mussorgsky’s opera didn’t make it to Paris until Diaghilev’s Russian Season in 1908, how else can you explain so many “revolutionary” concepts heard in Debussy’s opera, Pelleas et Melsiande which he began work on certainly by 1892 and which was premiered in 1902?

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Here is a chronological time-line of events in Debussy’s life during the time he was composing La Mer.

Some biographical background, first: Debussy married a poor seamstress named Rosalie (“Lily”) Texier in 1899, after having had a series of mistresses. Only five years later, in 1904, Debussy was already living with Emma Bardac, the wife of a wealthy banker who had earlier had an affair with Gabriel Fauré and whose daughter, Helene, was the inspiration for Fauré’s “Dolly Suite.”

But life sometimes gets messy and Lily did not take well to the idea of a divorce. In fact, in October of 1904, Lily attempted suicide by shooting herself in the stomach, and as the details became public, most of Debussy’s friends withdrew from him. In fact, much of the reaction against La Mer when it was premiered a year later had as much to do with the public’s distaste for the scandal as it did with its confusion over the music.

All of this, of course, is going on in the “background” while Debussy is composing La Mer (or is it the other way around?).

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1903

In June, Debussy writes his last article as a music critic and in July signs a contract with the publisher Durand for a set of Images for piano, including three pieces for two pianos which, in 1908, becomes the Images pour orchestre.

Between July 10th and October 1st, Debussy stays at Bichain (in Bourgogne, about a hundred miles southeast of Paris), his third visit there. During this holiday, he begins work on La Mer and completes the piano pieces Estampes and works on preparing the full score of Pelleas et Melisande for publication (the opera was premiered in April, 1902).

October 14th, he signs a contract with Durand for a second opera, Diable dans le beffroi (The Devil in the Belfry), inspired by a story by Edgar Allan Poe which he thinks he will finish in May, 1905 (he never does).

November 15th, his “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’” (completed in 1894) is programmed on two separate concerts in Paris.

1904

On January 9th, Ricardo Viñes premieres Estampes and on the 16th, Debussy accompanies a singer in the first performance of two songs, including one called La Mer.

During April and May, Debussy composes his “Two Dances for Chromatic Harp and Orchestra,” the Danse sacrée and the Danse profane.

Between August and mid-October, Debussy and his mistress Emma Bardac (the wife of a wealthy banker) stay in cognito at the Grand Hotel in Jersey, then goes on to Pourville on the Normandy Coast (see photo), working on La Mer and correcting proofs for the publication of Masques and Fêtes galantes, also reworks L’Isle joyeuse.

On the 13th of October, Debussy’s wife, Lily, attempts to commit suicide by shooting herself in the stomach. The news appears in the papers on November 4th and many of Debussy’s friends withdraw from him.

1905

On March 5th, 1905, he completes the first draft of the score of La Mer and it will be published in July, made available to the public in November with its brightly colored cover after the Japanese artist, Hokusai (see photo).

On May 4th, Emma Bardac divorces her husband Sigismond; she is a few weeks pregnant.

In June, Debussy publishes Suite bergamasque for piano with its famous slow movement, Claire de lune. The work was composed in 1890 but Debussy did not finish it for publication until this time.

On July 17th, Debussy signs an exclusive contract with his new publisher, Durand and is also placed under a court injunction to pay Lily a month income of 400 francs (which will be paid through his publisher).

From the end of July through the end of August, Debussy and Emma Bardac stay in Eastbourne, England, spending a few days in London before returning to Paris.

On August 2nd, the Civil Court pronounces the divorce of Claude and Lily Debussy. He figures he has, perhaps, two friends left.

On August 7th, he is correcting the first proofs of La Mer

On October 15th, La Mer is premiered at Concerts lamoureux with conductor Camille Chevillard. Debussy complains that the orchestra is under-rehearsed and the conductor is more fit to tame wild beasts than conduct musicians. The next performance, on October 22nd, is better received.

On October 30th, Emma Bardac gives birth to Debussy’s daughter, Claude-Emma, always known as “Chouchou”.

--- Dick Strawser
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The quotation from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, now usually more accurately translated as In Search of Lost Time, is from the second of seven volumes, ”Within a Budding Grove” or ”In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”, in the chapter “Place-Names: The Place,” translated by Scott-Moncrief and Kilmartin, published by Random House

Getting ready to Experience the JACK Quartet

2011-11-10T16:22:00.001-05:00

It's a busy month, here at Dr. Dick Plaza, deep into my fourth NaNoWriMo Challenge - more on that later - but I just wanted to take a moment to point out some activity over at my Market Square Concerts Blog where I've been posting about the impending performance by the JACK Quartet.

The concert is Saturday (the 12th) at 8pm and it's in uptown Harrisburg at the Temple Ohev Sholom (it's on Front Street just below Seneca). And I'll be doing a pre-concert talk beginning at 7:15pm so please consider dropping in for that, too.

For more information, check out these posts:
Part 1 - JACK comes to town
Part 2 - An introduction to three composers on the program: Philip Glass, Caleb Burhans and the Odd Man Out, Guillaume Machaut
Part 3 - An introduction to Iannis Xenakis but more a consideration of listening to unfamiliar (and especially new) music, going back to the days when Brahms and Mozart were "new" and "challenging."

By the way, I'm so excited - Elliott Carter's 103rd Birthday is on a Sunday this year! December 11th - mark your calendars, now! (Here's a post about last year's birthday.)

- Dick Strawser

Halloween and I.T. (Infernal Technology)

2011-10-31T19:38:00.000-04:00

Well, the best-made plans of trick-or-treaters oft get laid (in a manner of speaking).

I spent four hours today, delighted to have discovered a CD transfer of our 1979 performance of the opening scene from Johann Nepomuck Sauerbraten’s IL VAMPIRO and managed to upload it into my computer only to discover, never having tried this before, I have no idea how to get a sound-file posted on the blog. Oh wait, Blogger doesn’t support audio files, right…

Transferring it into a pretty nifty little video, however, with a couple of stills and lots of captioning to make it interesting turned out great until I found out the Windows Live Movie Maker software so highly touted by Windows, at least, is not a system supported by Blogger or YouTube or Facebook. So I will enjoy it on my own computer and tell you it’s really lots of fun…

But I couldn’t let Halloween pass without at least some suitable music, so to start off with, here’s something that sounds like what I felt like after four hours of playing with Windows Live [sic] Movie Maker (so far, Dead-on-Arrival) this afternoon...

Greg Anderson plays Ligeti’s Etude No. 13 (appropriately enough), "The Devil's Staircase."

One of the classic Halloween pieces is this paraphrase on the ‘Dies irae’ by Franz Liszt called Totentanz or “Dance of Death. The dies irae is the Gregorian chant for the “Day of Judgment, Day of Wrath” in the Roman Catholic Requiem text and any good and ghoulish composer from the 19th Century made hay with the dies irae at the drop of a… severed head, perhaps.

Pianist Benita Rose and conductor David Vaughan, former students of mine from the University of Connecticut, were all set to perform the work with the Willimantic Orchestra on Sunday but this kind of freakish snow-storm (perhaps you’ve heard about it) dumped two feet of snow and toppled many trees on the area, cancelling the concert.

So, in their honor, here’s a link to a period-instrument performance of Totentanz by Franz Liszt with pianist Pascal Amoyal and Anima eterna of Brugge (Belgium) conducted by Jos van Immerseel (note, for instance, the ophicleide which was what early-and-mid-19th Century orchestras used instead of a tuba). Since these videos are not available for embedding, follow these links for Totentanz Part #1 and for Totentanz Part #2.

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While most everybody has heard the ubiquitous Carmina burana by Carl Orff, very few would know the other parts of that choral trilogy and hardly anybody would know this piece, actually the last thing he completed, finishing it in 1972. It’s called De temporum fine comoedia which roughly translates as “The Play for the End of Time” and sets texts in Latin, Greek and German in a way that is more typical of Orff’s later style which, most definitely, is not the style we know from Carmina burana.

While I think the opening section with the nine sibyls is much scarier than the section with the nine anchorites, that’s the one I could find on YouTube, a recording with Herbert von Karajan and the Köln Radio Symphony Orchestra, choirs and soloists. Again, of the five parts of this section, only three are available in this country, why I don’t know. But here they are – hold on to your head.

(That is, if the embeds are actually visible - they're pasted into both HTML and Compose windows of Blogger but they don't always show up in the preview... No wonder I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Luddite...)

6) “Upote, maepote, maepu, maedépote… ignis eterni immensa tormenta” Never, never, in no place, at no time – eternal fire, measureless torment…
7) “Unus solus Deus ab aeterno in aeternum” God is One alone from eternity to eternity
9) “Mundus terrenus volvitur” The terrestrial world revolves (I’m pretty sure the next words are not ‘upper case’…)

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On the somewhat lighter side is this classic from the pen of Charles Valentin Alkan, composed more than a century before Monty Python. Here is his “Funeral March for a Dead Parrot.”

Here’s a link to a free download of the full score if you really want to follow along.

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For many people one of the most unsettling pieces of music in the 20th Century is Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, for any number of reasons.

For many other people, another very unsettling image is the Teletubbies. Daniel Capo has managed to combine the two in these videos of two extracts from Schoenberg’s Pierrot accompanied by my own translations of the texts.
Pierrot Lunaire Mondestrunken from Daniel Capo on Vimeo.

The wine we drink through the eyes / Flows nightly from the moon in torrents, / Like a spring tide Overflowing the far horizon. / Terrible and sweet desires / Drift in floods without number! / The wine we drink through the eyes / Flows nightly from the moon in torrents. / The poet, driven by devotion, / Befuddled by the holy drink, / Raises to Heaven his ecstatic head / And reeling, slurps up and guzzles / The wine we drink through the eyes.

And Mondfleck:
A snowy speck of shining moon / On the back of his black frock-coat, / So Pierrot sets out one languid evening, / Seeking fortune and adventure. / Suddenly, something’s wrong with his appearance, / He looks around till he finds it – / A snowy speck of shining moon / On the back of his black frock-coat. / Drat, he thinks, a fleck of plaster! / He wipes and wipes but can’t make it vanish! / And on he goes, his pleasure ruined; / He rubs and rubs till early morning / At a snowy speck of shining moon.

Pierrot Lunaire just got creepier... from Daniel Capo on Vimeo.

Well, that should do it for this Halloween.

Tomorrow starts November which is National Novel Writing Month during which I (and many other crazy people like me) will take on the challenge of writing 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. I’ve done it four times already, and made the goal each time.

This time, I’m doing a complete re-make of The Lost Chord, keeping only the title, many of the characters’ names – how could I just throw away the likes of Yoda Leahy-Hu, Iobba Dhabbodhú, LauraLynn Harty, the villain Tr’iTone and numerous agents with musical puns for names like Kay Gelida Manina or Barbara Seville – but completely changing the plot and setting and divorcing it all from the parody it originally was (if it wasn’t exactly original) of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

It begins tomorrow! Wish me luck!

- Dick Strawser

Baby Huey at the Met

2011-10-17T10:02:00.000-04:00

Going to a concert to hear music performed live is “an experience,” something different than simply hearing music on your radio or iPod. Part of that experience is sharing it with the rest of the audience.

Performers have often said how they “feed” off the audience’s interest (or are affected by its lack) which can inspire or deflate their performance, individually or collectively. That’s often why live performances can be more exciting than recordings: musicians perform better when this sense of energy excites them, perhaps make them more willing to take risks in this one-time-only experience rather than when making a recording for posterity everybody wants to have note-perfect.

While we may all have our stories of wonderful performances destroyed by audience distractions, from cell phones to stage-whispers, it only takes one person in the audience to ruin our experience. It’s something that can be rude to the rest of the audience, maybe just the people near by but often the whole auditorium-full; it can be distracting to the musicians who have worked hard to bring you this experience after hours and hours of practice and rehearsal; it's certainly disrespectful of the music, whether Beethoven cares or not. And if you believe as I do that this can sometimes be a spiritual experience, whether it’s intended to be a religious one or not, it can be disrespectful to [insert name of Deity-of-choice here].

A few years ago, a performance of Schubert’s Quintet with the Miró Quartet and cellist Paul Katz here in Harrisburg was marred by an “eccentric gentleman of a certain age,” and I discovered later it might have been prevented by a more vigilant ushering staff. He had been overheard in the lobby after the second half had begun apologizing to the usher(s) for being late because he had been down drinking in a bar “with the [insert N-word here]” but since he had a ticket, they let him in unsupervised!

His wild gesticulations and irritating conversation destroyed the performance for many people in the audience, though fortunately the musicians on stage were largely unaware of his distraction which endured for the first two movements before he was finally expelled by one of the ushers, though only upon request of an irate audience member who had to get up from his seat, go out to the lobby and demand the drunk be removed from the hall or he’d do it himself!

And during such a sublime piece of music!

I don’t know why this happens, except that sometimes we feel we ourselves are generally more important than anything going on around us. Part of this comes from our being used to sitting in our living rooms watching television where talking during the program is a very natural thing to do: nothing sacrosanct about sitting in your living room. Unfortunately, Carnegie Hall is not your living room.

Maybe I’m an [insert derogatory term for ‘person of a certain easily irritated nature’ here], but when I’m sharing your living room with several hundred to a thousand or so other people, please: the climax of a Bruckner symphony is not the time to be sharing your recipe for bean soup!

I’ve often told the story about my experience with “Baby Huey at the Met.” Curiously, this one didn’t actually interrupt the performance, it was limited only to the moments "outside" the music, but it had me on edge during most of the first act, waiting... waiting... waiting for something to happen. Then, during the first intermission, I realized why he wasn’t going to disrupt the music.

“Baby Huey” was a memorable cartoon character from the ‘50s and ‘60s, a 200-pound duckling created by Paramount Pictures' Famous Studios, a “dense and stubborn” baby duck who seemed to have trouble fitting in with the world around him. I called the man in the seat next to me in the Metropolitan Opera House’s balcony that night “Baby Huey” not just because he was a Large Person. True, at 6'6" or so, and quite possibly 300 pounds, he may have had trouble fitting into his seat if not the world around him, but that is only because his subsequent behavior drew more attention to himself than his already noticeable presence. Had he been 5'7" and 140 pounds and still doing what I’m about to describe, I would merely have come up with a different name for him. The fact he was wearing a yellow shirt under a powder blue sweater amazingly too small for his pear-shaped build (this was in the days before mid-riff-baring t-shirts became fashionable) made the name inevitable: I didn’t even have to think.

In fact, I saw him as I entered the balcony handing my ticket to the usher and knew that my seat was going to be the empty seat on his right.

I just knew it.

Once I had crawled over his lap to get to my seat and settle in, I began reading the plot synopsis of Meyerbeer’s “La Prophete.” This was only the second live performance I had a chance to experience at the legendary Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center since I moved to New York City a few weeks before. The season had just begun and it was an opera new for me. I was, naturally, excited to hear something new, see a production that had been much maligned in the press (and rightly so, it turned out), to hear the great voice of Marilyn Horne in one of the lead roles, and just TO BE at the Met, not for a special occasion but something that could now, living merely a mile away, be a regular occurrence.

I needn’t have bothered reading the plot synopsis. Once he had recovered after my interruption, my seat-mate resumed reading the plot synopsis out loud in a kind of stage whisper not quite lost in the general pre-performance ambience. It was then I realized his right hand was positioned in front of him as if he were holding a microphone. He had a pleasant enough voice and he was, apparently, trying to be unobtrusive. But he read the entire plot synopsis word for word and then proceeded to continue talking about the up-coming performance, mentioning the cast and describing each of the characters. He was playing Radio Announcer, pretending to be the radio host of a Metropolitan Opera broadcast, perhaps inspired by the great Milton Cross who had had that role for 43 years and had died only a few years earlier.

The lights went down, the conductor entered the pit. My seat-mate said, with obvious pride and excitement, “The lights have come down, James Levine is now entering the pit to the audience’s applause – and now” (dramatic pause) “the first act of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s... ‘La Prophete’...” And the music began.

Now, at the time, I had no idea that Fate would one day place me in a radio station’s microphone booth, nor do I recall, as a child, ever playing Radio Announcer. That this was a man in his late-30s, perhaps, was a little more bothersome: my concern, as the music began, was “would he continue to give a play-by-play description of the stage action?”

Throughout the whole (and very long) first act, my Milton Cross Wannabee did in fact never utter a sound. Not that I wasn’t on pins-and-needles waiting for it to happen. It finally occurred to me, he would never do that because Milton Cross would never have done that. I was, I assumed, safe. After a while, I became oblivious to the person I could sense next to me.

At the conclusion of the first act, up went the right hand into microphone position (I wanted to see if he cupped his left hand over his ear) and he said, almost inaudibly under the applause, “And as the Prophet calls for the crowd in the church to baptize him as a prophet, the curtain comes down on the end of Act One of the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s ‘La Prophete.’ We heard tenor Giuseppe Giacomini as the Prophet and Marilyn Horne as his mother...” and so on, just as you would hear on the actual broadcast.

Once he finished what I now know we call “the back-announce,” he got up, stretched to his full height and wandered down the aisle and out into the lobby. I needed to stretch my legs, too, so I went out into the lobby just to stand around and admire the place and "people watch." But I couldn’t help noticing that not too far away from me stood my seat-mate, in his yellow shirt and stretched-to-the-limit little powder blue sweater, holding his hand with his imaginary microphone up to someone holding a drink in his hand, asking him what he thought of the performance!

Ah, it was time for the Intermission Feature!

I made sure I was back in my seat first. Mr. Huey settled down next to me, opened the program to the plot synopsis again, placed his hand in microphone position and reread the plot of the next act. When it appeared intermission was running longer, having already completed the cast list, he proceeded to fill by reading the names of the orchestra members. He was about halfway through the soprano section of the chorus (bad radio, by the way) when the lights came down and the audience applauded the entrance of Maestro Levine.

“The lights have come down, Maestro James Levine has entered the pit as the audience voices its approval with their applause, and our performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s ‘La Prophete’ continues with the Second... Act...” While I'm glad he hadn't thought to interview me, I was hoping he would at least have made up some call-letters for his station, but apparently he had not. Nor did I ever hear him mention his name.

Again, he was silent during the music. During the pauses between scenes, he might do a quick voice-over to explain why we weren’t hearing anything, give a quick mention of what we might expect in the next scene, all good features of a live radio broadcast: once the music began, the microphone-holding hand came down, and he never said a word.

And so it went for what was actually a very long performance (if it wasn’t over just before midnight, it certainly seemed like it). At the very end, he described each of the singers’ costumes during the bows, going on interminably just as the Met broadcasts still do to this day, and when the applause stopped and the Golden Curtain descended on yet another performance at the legendary Metropolitan Opera House, he intoned “And so the Golden Curtain descends on yet another great performance at the legendary Metropolitan Opera House.” I would have disagreed about the “great” but then I wasn’t going home to play Critic and write up a review for my blog (oh wait, I didn’t have one in those days). He got up, carefully tucked his pretend microphone into his pocket and went out into the lobby, satisfied with another broadcast successfully completed.

In all the performances I attended at the Met in those years, I never once saw him again. How could I miss him!? It may have been one of the more memorable performances I ever attended in my life only because of him (the opera, its production and the performance were all, admittedly, disappointing), but at least he did not spoil the experience itself for me, and for that I thank him.

Unlike other people who seem to think it would have been okay to do that during the music. Or to answer their cell-phone: not even to say "I'm in a concert, I'll call you back" but "I'm in a concert, what do you want?"

Backstage after that performance of the Schubert Quintet I'd mentioned earlier, I was telling cellist Paul Katz about the “eccentric gentleman” in the audience he'd somehow missed. He mentioned how, years ago, one man sat himself down, front row center, just as a concert was about to begin, then reached into his inside jacket pocket to pull out... a baton. He proceeded to conduct the Cleveland Quartet throughout the entire performance – and rather badly, Katz noted. It was one of the most difficult performances they ever gave, he said, trying to ignore this man they couldn’t help but see just a few feet in front of their music stands.

Just makes you wonder, out there, just... makes you... wonder...

Dr. Dick

Lady Mondegreen & the Buttocks-Pressing Song

2011-10-12T17:47:00.001-04:00

Okay, it's been a tough couple of months, so perhaps something on the lighter side, this time.

Sometimes we only half-hear things or perhaps half-remember them... They can be embarrassing, when you’re thinking of one word and something that only sounds like it comes out of your mouth: if nothing else, it can take the brain in a whole different direction.

I remember someone who, for some reason or other, had mentioned a new diet plan – the “South Park” Diet. I was trying to imagine how the characters on South Park could actually promote a diet plan: perhaps that was what killed Kenny?

Years ago, when I lived in New York City, I was shopping at Patelson’s Music Store buying some orchestral scores (it’s a shop I referred to as “The Best Little Score-House in Town,” now alas a victim of the present-day economy). Next to me, a harried clerk had taken a phone call from someone looking for the Kodaly “Buttocks-Pressing Song.”

Kodaly – pronounced KOH-dai – was a Hungarian composer (see photo, left) who collected a lot of folk songs across Eastern Europe.

The clerk muttered something about odd folk customs one might find in Eastern Europe (immediately, the whole Monty Python “Fish-Slapping Dance” ran through my mind).

No, no “Buttocks-Pressing Song” by Zoltan Kodaly in stock. He even checked under Kodaly’s colleague Bela Bartok, who also published arrangements of hundreds of folk songs, and found nothing there, either.

Then he asked whether it was part of a set or an individual piece.

“An old English dance hall song?” he said in disbelief.

It turns out she was looking for “Could I but Express in Song.”

Having “googled” this more recently, I found it’s actually a frequently committed occurance, one that’s been around a while – and it’s not an English dance hall song but a sentimental ballad by the Russian composer, Leonid Malashkin.

That doesn’t mean the harried clerk hadn’t heard what he thought he heard.

Over the years, spending much time at a radio station, a colleague was asked about “The Errant Hornpipe” which we finally figured out must be by Handel: two sections of his famous Water Music, the “Air and Hornpipe.”

These are known as Mondegreens – something you hear that’s close but not close enough to win you a cigar.

“They have slain the Earl of Moray / And Lady Mondegreen,” as a famous Scottish ballad goes.

How romantic, you might think.

Except the correct last line is “and laid him on the green”.

It's like wondering who Round John Virgin is in “Silent Night” or why the song called "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" isn't really about a bear at all.

And why is "Shirley, Good Mrs. Murphy" following you all the days of your life?

A friend of mine when she was 5 would sing “We shall come rejoicing, singing in the trees,” apparently because she had no idea what “bringing in the sheaves” meant.

Or another friend who enlivened childhood renderings of “Jingle Bells” by singing about “one whore, soap and sleigh” whether he knew what it meant or not.

A link I keep in my computer for a moment when I need a laugh was inspired by a Mondegreen from Verdi’s opera, Rigoletto, compounded of course by being in Italian but sounding like the tenor (here sung by Pavarotti) has a thing for elephants.

The original Italian is “e di pensier,” which basically means “and her thoughts” at the end of the Duke’s famous aria, “La donna é mobile” (which might come out “ La donna immobile” if it refers to the soprano Jess Enormous).

Now whenever I hear this aria, I can’t get “elephants, yeah” out of my mind!

Dr. Dick

Stravinsky's 3 Pieces for String Quartet: Behind the Music

2011-09-27T15:37:00.002-04:00

The Juilliard Quartet is performing these seemingly insignificant little pieces (I mean, 3 very different pieces in about 7 or 8 minutes of music) which are very difficult to program and sometimes difficult to understand, they're so short.

But there really is a complex context around them, in terms of the music itself, what was going on in the composer's life at the time and the history of the time they were composed, not to mention the significance they play in the development of Stravinsky's style following his most famous work, premiered the previous year, his ballet The Rite of Spring, generally regarded as the work that began what we think of as 20th Century Music.

That's what I explore in this post, "Stravinsky's 3 Pieces: Building Bridges" over at the Market Square Concerts' Blog.

And this just added: a post about the Mozart Quartet, K.464, one of the "Haydn" Quartets, on the program - Mozart & Haydn: The Birth of a Musical Legacy.

- Dick Strawser

An Autumnal Interlude: from Haydn's "Seasons"

2011-09-23T05:05:00.000-04:00

Though it's felt like autumn much of this past week, it officially begins at 5:05am EDT (that's 9:05am GMT) today (Friday, September 23rd) so I thought, after all these posts about very serious things, here's something to just sit back and listen to.

Soprano Gundula Janowitz sings the role of the peasant girl Hanne, tenor Peter Schreier sings Lukas and bass Martti Talvela sings Simon, along with the Wiener Singverein and the Vienna Symphony conducted by Karl Böhm in this classic DG recording of the "Autumn" section of Franz Josef Haydn's secular oratorio, The Seasons.

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Usually,I'm no great fan of many videos you might find on YouTube - copyright issues aside - and rather than spending hours trying to find one that might suit, I thought this one would be good for this post. Not an ideal recording (though, for its time, a fine performance), it also includes the texts in German and a less legible English translation. Admittedly, given the nature of the libretto (which Haydn detested), it might be better not to know what they're singing...

(Aside from other obnoxious issues I've recently been having with posting on Blogger, I can't seem to get these video embeds to fit in here, any more: though I'm using the smallest possible setting available, even smaller custom settings fail to fit. Grrrr... well, like I said about the text, anyway...)

Well, here's an English translation of the text for most of Part III (Autumn): unfortunately, the site I found does not include every number...

21. Overture (Expressing the Farmer’s delight at the rich harvest)
21a. Recitative Hannah
Whate’er the blossomed Spring put in white promise forth,Whate’er the Summer’s sun swelled to a full perfection,now in bounteous Autumn rejoice the heart of man.

22. Recitative Lucas, Simon
Rich, silent, deep, the harvest stands, far as the circling eye can see;The granaries can scarcely hold th’abundance of the flowing fields.The labourer’s pains are now repaid; and as he glances round on every sidethe prospect gladdens his grateful heart.

23. Trio & Chorus Simon, Hannah, Lucas
Thus Nature, with a lavish hand, rewards the toil of man;and in the lap of Industry the mellow plenty falls.Her bounties shine, in Autumn, unconfined.These are the gifts of honest toil:The cottage where we dwell;The clothing that we wear;The produce that we eat.These are the gifts bestowed by thee, O toil, O honest toil.Thou source of virtuousness - uniting every gentle heart:Thou source of justice - protecting every erring heart:Thou source of moral strength - which governs every cultured heart.O toil, O honest toil, from thee springs every good.

26. Recitative SimonWhere once the plenteous harvest wav’d, some uninvited guests appear:scared from the stubble limps the hare, and, scampering, the harvest mouse.The farmer sees no wrong, and lets these creatures take their humble dole.The gleaners spread around and feed on nature’s charity.The clamour of the sportsman’s gun is heard, fast-thundering.With shouts resounding from the hills, wild for the chase, the huntsmen come.

27. Aria Simon
Behold, along the ravaged fields the spaniel goes in search of scent;and still obedient to command, he follows it unerringly.But now his senses are aroused; he hears the chiding voices no more.He races, and in mid-career he scents the game, and stiff, with open nose, he stands.In vain they beat their idle wings upon the surges of the air;though borne aloft they are not safe: the shot rings out from the fowler’s gunand down they fall from the towering height.

29. Chorus
Hark the mountains resound! The vales and forests ring!It is the shrill-sounding hunting-horn - the cry of the hounds and the huntsmen!The noble stag is roused by fear; and eagerly all of the pack pursue.See how he leaps,See how he bounds,O see how he flies!He bursts the thickets and sweeps through the glade,and fleeter than wind seeks the sheltering wood.The hounds have lost the scent; dispersed they seek the latent prey. Tally ho!The clamour of the hunting-horn has gathered them up again. Tally ho!With ardour redoubled, up behind the stag comes again the inhuman rout.Surrounded now on every side, he stands at bayand groans in anguish, while the pack hang at his chest.The clamorous horn proclaims the kill, relaying the glories of the chase,the death of the stag and the sportsman’s joy. Hurrah!

30. Recitative Hannah, Simon, Lucas
The vineyard now its wealth displays, with bending boughs and clusters clear,that swell refulgent on the day, as thus they brighten with their juice.The rural youths and maids, exulting rove the fields, each fond for eachto cull the sweet Autumnal prime, and speak the vintage nigh.See how the loaded vats foam in transparent floods,while in their festive joy the jocund sound re-echoes.Thus they rejoice, nor think of the toil, from early morn to set of sun;but, when they see the juices ferment, their work gives way to merriment.

31. Chorus
Joyful the liquor flows,that by degrees refined,high-sparkling cheers the soul!Hurrah! Produce the mighty bowl!Now let us merry be!Let us drink now, drink in festive joy.Let us sing now, sing in festive joy.Hip, hip, hurrah! Three cheers for the wine!Three cheers for the soil that did no wrong;Three cheers for the vat that made it strong;Three cheers for the bowl we pass along.Let us drink now, fill the glasses,Once more let us drink in festive joy.Hurrah! Let’s praise the juice divine!Hey there! Three cheers for the wine!A band from the village now starts up the dancing:The fiddle is scraping,The organ is groaning,The bagpipe is droning.The children are prancing,The youths to the sound are advancing.The girls in their arms now are dancingAn old country dance.Trip it, trip it, foot it featly!Trip it, trip it, step it neatly!Good fellows all, come fill the bowl! And drain it down!Gaily singing! Laughter ringing! Hip, hip, hip, hurrah!Joyous and jocund, let’s merry be!And now let all the companyIn friendly manner all agreeLet’s merry be this joyful day!Hang sorrow! Let’s cast care away!Let us now both sport and play!Three cheers for the wine, the noble wine, that joyfully now appears!Let’s praise the juice divine. All hail to the wine. All hail!

(...remember what I said about the text? yeah...)

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On this first weekend of Autumn, however, I'll be taking in the first concert of the season with the Harrisburg Symphony conducted by Stuart Malina - a mostly-Russian program with Rachmaninoff's 1st Piano Concerto and Prokofiev's 5th Symphony. The odd-man-out here is Franz Liszt, a Hungarian-born pianist and composer who wrote a series of rhapsodies based on gypsy themes, six of which have also been orchestrated. The 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, the most popular of these, opens the concerts - Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm at the Forum. An hour earlier, the orchestra's assistant conductor Tara Simoncic will be offering a pre-concert talk in the auditorium free to ticket-holders.

Then next weekend, it's the Juilliard Quartet who'll be coming to town, performing the curious and brief Three Pieces for String Quartet by Igor Stravinsky, Janáček’s 1st String Quartet inspired by Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," and one of the string quartets Mozart dedicated to his friend, Haydn, the Quartet in A Major, K.464. That's at Whitaker Center, Oct. 1st at 8pm.

Personally, between all the rain and the flood - geez, the third worst flood in Central Pennsylvania since 1900 - I'm certainly glad to see this summer end. Now for the new season - both Autumn and the 2011-2012 Season!

Winter will be here, soon enough...

- Dick Strawser

Tolstoy & The Kreutzer Sonata: Literature & Music

2011-09-22T11:17:00.001-04:00

I’ve discovered that reading Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata on a gloomy morning is not the best way to start the day.

Preparing the post about Janáček’s 1st String Quartet for the Market Square Concerts blog, I decided I should reread the novella.

If you’re not familiar with it or haven’t read it yourself, you can check out this wikipedian summary, the eQuivalent of Cliffs Notes.

You can read the complete novella here.

(If you think musical terminology is vague or confusing, consider this: a novella, too short for a novel and too long for a short story, is considered to be about 17,500 words to 40,000 words, though National Novel Writing Month (coming up in six weeks) considers a novel to be at least 50,000 words. On the other hand, “in Russian, novella is ‘povest’ (повесть), while novel is ‘roman’ (роман); short story is ‘rasskaz’ (рассказ) and it is the extremely brief form that is called ‘novella’ (новелла).” Perhaps more to the point, a novel has more characters, subplots and development of ideas whereas a novella has more focus on one unified plot from a single point of view.)

Tolstoy’s novella “is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing his wife; in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the 'animal excesses' and 'swinish connection' governing the relation between the sexes."

In an essay entitled “The Lesson of The Kreutzer Sonata”, Tolstoy (photographed here in 1908) explains his view of the subject matter. Regarding carnal love and a spiritual, Christian life, he points out that not Christ, but the Church (which he despised and which in turn excommunicated him) instituted marriage. "The Christian's ideal is love of God and his neighbor, self-renunciation in order to serve God and his neighbor; carnal love – marriage – means serving oneself, and therefore is, in any case, a hindrance in the service of God and men".

Of course, his religious viewpoints evolved over several years and might stem from the summer he began reading Schopenhauer in the late-1870s, while in the midst of writing Anna Karenina, a conversion he then shared with the character Levin. In 1882, he published “A Confession” which documented many of his new-found ideas, rejecting many traditional religious and social viewpoints.

Tolstoy, completing The Kreutzer Sonata in 1889, found himself confronted by controversy when attempting to publish it. Mimeographed copies – and I was surprised to see that Edison had patented a mimeograph machine in 1876 – circulated in Russia until it was officially available in print (see photo, right).

However, the book also ran into problems in the United States in 1890 when the United States Post Office prohibited the mailing of newspapers containing serialized installments of The Kreutzer Sonata, a decision later confirmed by the U.S. Attorney General .

The New York Times reported in August, 1890, that four street vendors were “captured” by a New York City 1st Precinct policeman with cartfuls of “mutilated paper-covered reprints” of Tolstoy’s banned novel, admitting they’d received them from a “Barclay Street publishing house” and hawking them with the sign “Suppressed” in order to attract potential buyers’ attention.

The judge at their hearing was told by the prosecuting attorney that this book “came within the category of indecent literature,” showing the judge a specially marked copy with specifically marked passages.

Justice White, in the Tombs Police Court, apparently found “nothing likely to affect public morals” and felt the peddlers’ offense (“if any had been committed”) was misleading the public by “parading the book as a suppressed publication.” The peddlers and the publishers were then summoned for a further appearance.

Apparently, the case went on to the Common Pleas Court No. 4 in Philadelphia where, on Sept. 24th, 1890, Judge M. Russell Thayer ruled that Tolstoy’s novel, The Kreutzer Sonata, was not obscene.

He was quoted in the New York Times that day as stating in his opinion “[t]he book is a novel, possessing very little dramatic interest or literary merit. There is nothing in this book which can by any possibility be said to commend licentiousness, or to make it in any respect attractive, or to tempt any one to its commission. On the contrary, all its teachings paint lewdness and immorality in the most revolting colors. Nor is there any obscenity or indecency in the language used or in the story told, however it may offend a refined taste. It undoubtedly teaches the doctrine… that celibacy is better than marriage and a higher and purer state of being. And that it is the idea of a perfect Christian life, to which all Christian men and women should aspire. This strikes us, of course, as being very absurd and ridiculous, and as being opposed alike to Christianity and to the best interests of society. It may even seem to us to be the product of a diseased mind, yet the doctrine is by no means new in the world. The same idea was prevalent among many of the early Christians, who looked upon marriage as one of the consequences of the fall, and regarded it as has been said by a writer upon this subject as a tolerated admission of an impure and sinful nature.”

(Reading this 121 years later, I am reminded of the on-going arguments for and against the equality of marriage issues being discussed in our nation’s courts and legislatures today, but I digress… If proponents for the acceptance of marriage – arguing certain historical, social and practical considerations of the time – had meekly acquiesced to the teaching of these early Church fathers, it is very likely there would no Christians alive today to continue the argument.)

The Judge continues, “[t]he hermits and anchorites of the early Christian times considered abstinence from marriage and from all sexual commerce as the triumph of sanctity and the proof and means of spiritual perfection. Modern Christianity, with cleaner and more sensible view of the subject, while it denounces licentiousness, looks upon marriage as a divine institution. Roman Catholics regard it with the veneration of a sacrament, and all Christian sects see in it an institution which lies at the foundation of all civilized society.” (He ignores certain sects, including the Shakers and the Ephrata Cloisters, where celibacy was a requirement of membership, not to mention the Catholic attitude towards its priests and its monasteries.)

The Judge continues, “Count Tolstoi’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ may contain very absurd and foolish views about marriage. It may shock our ideas of the sanctity and nobility of that important relation, but it cannot on that account be called an obscene libel. There is no obscenity in it. On the contrary, it denounces obscenity of every description on almost every page. Nor can the language in which he expresses his ideas be said to be in any proper sense obscene, lewd or indecent. It is not against the law to print or sell books which contain ideas and doctrines upon religious subjects which conflict with and are contrary to the orthodox teachings upon the subject. Every man has the right under such a government as ours to discuss such questions, either orally or in print, if he does so in a proper and becoming manner, and does not in doing so violate the decencies of life. He may call in question and argue against any received doctrine of the Christian faith, if he uses in doing so proper and becoming language but if one should introduce into such a discussion blasphemous language or ideas, or obscene, lewd, or indecent thoughts or words, or should make his description the occasion for reviling and scoffing at the most sacred things, or speaking of them in a profane, abusive, or indecent manner, he would unquestionably be liable to be indicted and punished therefor.

“But a careful and critical reading of the whole book has clearly convinced us that it is not liable to the charge of either obscenity or indecency. On the contrary, as we have already said, its whole purpose and scope is to denounce those vices in the severest manner. The fact that the author in discussing the question of marriage has come to some silly and very absurd conclusions, opposed alike to what is ordinarily conceived to be the Christian doctrine on the subject and the general opinion of civilized societies throughout the world, does not make its publication or sale a violation of the law. The work may be offensive to our opinions and convictions, just as others are which are daily sold in our book stores without objection or challenge from anybody, but it cannot be justly said to be of an obscene or lewd character; nor is it either in its sentiments or language in any degree calculated to minister to corrupt or licentious practices or to gratify lewd desires, or to encourage depravity in any form.”

I particularly like Judge Thayer’s concluding statement:

“The court was reminded upon the argument that the Czar of Russia and the Post Office officials of the United States have condemned this book as an unlawful publication; that the former has prohibited its sale within his dominions and the latter has forbidden its transmission through the mails. Without disparaging in any degree the respect due to these high officials within their respective spheres, I can only say that neither of them has ever been recognized in this country as a binding authority in questions of either law or literature.”

That did not stop Theodore Roosevelt, then a member of the United States Civil Service Commission, from calling Tolstoy a "sexual moral pervert."

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When I started rereading the novella (my 1957 Vintage edition, translated by Isai Kamen, is 115 pages long), I soon realized I had not bothered to finish it the first time around, back in the mid-1970s.

(See photo, right, taken in 1908, of Tolstoy in his study.)

Rather than finding the author’s arguments about marriage “obscene,” I think I simply found the form of the piece – the first 52 pages are like reading a lecture (sermon, perhaps “screed” would be better terms) – tedious. At the time, I was just more interested in (pardon the expression) a ripping good story.

Back then, I was also reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and I practically glossed over (with glazed eyes) the “boring” bits that form the secondary plot of the novel, the bits that are eliminated from any staged or filmed version of the story of a woman who gives up her happily married family life to live with the man she loves. Tolstoy’s theories on agrarian reform and the other philosophical musings as expressed by the character Levin might pale by comparison, like space-filling interludes between the meat of the matter, but they are an important part of the novel's overall scope. (Maybe it’s time to re-read this one, too, since I’d added the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation to my library a few years ago.)

This is no different than his novel, War and Peace which I’ve read at three different stages in my life and found different reactions to it each time. The first time, as a kid, I remember skipping over much of the theorizing on the nature of history to get to the “good parts” with their thrilling battle scenes.

The second time, now in my 20s and in the midst of the Viet-Nam War, I realized how much those “good parts” were effectively and strikingly “anti-war” despite being considered great writing about heroic war-time events.

The third time, more recently, I tended to focus on the philosophizing more than the personal romance of the story which is usually what seems to attract film-makers and what most people tend to remember about the book. Though I was familiar with the story, I still found myself discovering new insights into the characters and their relationships.

(You can read my previous post about the impact of reading War and Peace this last time, during another period of modern warfare.)

So, this time, I persevered through Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and while I still find the philosophical hectoring annoying, I also still find myself wishing somehow Tolstoy had followed the frequent writer’s advice, “don’t tell – show.”

Still, the story – depressing as it is – is a powerful one, particularly once it turns more to the “story” itself, the dramatic conflict between Pozdnyshev and his unnamed wife. And guess what: the building rage in the husband’s narrative is psychologically more compelling than if we were observing it second-hand through an omniscient narrator.

No doubt, had Tolstoy been forced to submit his work to a focus group, it would have ended up being about 60 pages long, if that, all the philosophizing about morality and society and the institution of marriage left on the cutting room floor. Even the violent scene about the murder would be considered tame compared to what one sees on TV these days (been there/done that, in a manner of speaking).

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

With the intensity of such a dramatic situation, it’s not surprising it was adapted to the stage. In 1906, it ran on Broadway (see photos, right and below left). An article in the British newspaper, the Guardian – “The Kreutzer Sonata: Three Degrees of Separation” by Emerson Quartet violinist, Eugene Drucker, a novelist himself – included a photograph from a stage adaptation from 2009. There were several film adaptations as well, three of them between 1911-1915. And of course, there is Prinet’s famous painting, “The Kreutzer Sonata” from 1901 (see header illustration) depicting an event that actually is never described (only imagined) in Tolstoy’s original: a passionate kiss between the violinist and the wife, one hand still connecting to the piano, carried away by the music’s passion.

Keep in mind that the husband in Tolstoy’s narrative is telling the story and much of what he mentions may or may not have happened – like that kiss – implied only in the way jealous minds imagine possibilities, then accept them as likelihoods before believing they are realities.

As I mentioned in the Market Square Concerts blog post, Janáček in his string quartet came to this not as a literal representation of its dramatic potential but as a psychological portrait seen from the vantage point of the wife.

Curiously, in his later years, Tolstoy’s new-found religious attitudes created severe difficulties between himself and his long-suffering wife, Sofia (or Sonya). Their early years may have been marked by “sexual passion and emotional insensitivity,” a comment which makes The Kreutzer Sonata sound a bit autobiographical. She bore him 13 children, five of whom died in childhood (see family photo, below right, taken two years before he finished The Kreutzer Sonata). He died in 1910 at the age of 82, running off during the winter following a bitter argument with his wife, only to die in a nearby train station.

Though Janáček first began working on a string quartet – and then a piano trio – inspired by Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata in 1908, it wasn’t until 1923 that he actually composed the quartet we know by that name. Between those years, his own marriage deteriorated and they had already agreed to a mutual “in-house” separation before the composer met Kamila Stösslová in 1917.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Tolstoy was considered a “Christian anarchist” but also had very strong views about other matters, not just religion and society. In addition to ideas about property and agrarian reform, he also was very clear about his views on art. For instance, he thought Shakespeare lacked any merit: reading the Bard’s most famous plays, he wrote, “not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium...".

His attitude about music is also obvious in this excerpt from Chapter 23 of The Kreutzer Sonata, when Tolstoy’s character describes the affect listening to music has on him. He had invited certain musically inclined friends to a dinner party and a little musicale with his wife playing the piano for this violinist named Trukhashevsky, a man he is already jealous of.

= = = = = = = = = = = = =
“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued. “Do you know the first presto? You do?” he cried. “Ugh! Ugh! It is a terrible thing, that sonata. And especially that part. And in general music is a dreadful thing! What is it? I don’t understand it. What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does? They say music exalts the soul. Nonsense, it is not true! It has an effect, an awful effect – I am speaking of myself – but not of an exalting kind. It has neither an exalting nor a debasing effect but it produces agitation. How can I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position, not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy but I yawn when I see someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people laughing.

“Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another, but why this happens I don’t know. You see, he who wrote, let’s say, the Kreutzer Sonata – Beethoven – knew of course why he was in that condition; that condition caused him to do certain actions and therefore that condition had a meaning for him, but for me – none at all. That is why music only agitates and doesn’t lead to a conclusion. Well, when a military march is played the soldiers march to the music and the music has achieved its object. A dance is played, I dance and the music has achieved its object. Mass has been sung, I receive Communion, and that music too has reached a conclusion. Otherwise it is only agitating, and what ought to be done in that agitation is lacking. That is why music sometimes acts so dreadfully, so terribly. In China, music is a State affair. And that is as it should be. How can one allow anyone who pleases to hypnotize another, or many others, and do what he likes with them? And especially that this hypnotist should be the first immoral man who turns up?

“It is a terrible instrument in the hands of any chance user! Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can that first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies wearing low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted; play it then and do what the music has moved you to. Otherwise an awakening of energy and feeling unsuited both to the time and the place, to which no outlet is given, cannot but act harmfully. At any rate that piece had a terrible effect on me; it was as if quite new feelings, new possibilities, of which I had till then been unaware, had been revealed to me. ‘That’s how it is: not at all as I used to think and live, but that way,’ something seemed to say within me. What this new thing was that had been revealed to me I could not explain to myself, but the consciousness of this new condition was very joyous. All those same people, including my wife and him, appeared in a new light.

“After that allegro they played the beautiful but common and unoriginal andante with trite variations and the very weak finale. Then, at the request of the visitors, they played Ernst’s Elegy and a few small pieces. They were all good, but they did not produce on me a one-hundredth part of the impression the first piece had. The effect of the first piece formed the background for them all.”

( Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata – translated by Aylmer Maude. Signet Classic edition, New American Library, New York 1960.)
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

I’ll close with an anecdote about Tolstoy’s musical taste.

In January, 1900, Sergei Rachmaninoff and the great bass, Fyodor Chaliapin, were invited to Tolstoy’s home, Yasnaya Polyana (see photograph of birches along the main entrance to the estate).

Rachmaninoff played one of his own compositions, then accompanied Chaliapin in his song “Fate,” which is partly based on the famous opening of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.

After the performance, Tolstoy spoke to Rachmaninoff (who was still smarting from the disastrous premiere of his first symphony almost three years earlier), asking him, “Is such music needed by anyone? I must tell you how I dislike it all. Beethoven is nonsense.”

Later, as his guests were leaving, Tolstoy obliquely apologized to the young composer.

“Forgive me if I’ve hurt you by my comments.”

Rachmaninoff, so the story goes, responded, “How could I be hurt on my own account if I was not hurt on Beethoven’s?”

One wonders what he would have thought about the intense and often neurotic music Janáček wrote inspired by one of his most intense and neurotic stories?

- Dick Strawser

Prokofiev & the Chess Match Between Soviet Politics & Music

2011-09-18T12:18:00.000-04:00

Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony in Prokofiev's 5th Symphony at the first concert of their new season - Saturday, Sept. 24th at 8pm and Sunday, Sept. 25th at 3pm at the Forum.

You can read my introductory post on the Harrisburg Symphony Blog which also includes audio clips of an old 1960s recording of the complete symphony conducted by David Oistrakh (seen below, playing chess with the composer).

Prokofiev's 5th Symphony quickly became one of his most popular and frequently performed works. Coming at the end of World War II, it was perhaps one of the most composer's happiest moments, artistically.

But two things happened after the War.

Now, back when he was 3 years old, Prokofiev fell, hitting his head against an iron trunk. He carried the resulting bump on his forehead till he was 28 years old, a few years after he’d composed his notorious 1st Piano Concerto and his “Classical” Symphony (someone joked that perhaps his talent lay in that bump).

Shortly after the successful premiere of his 5th Symphony in mid-January, 1945, Prokofiev fell as the result of a spell brought on by overwork and his typically high blood pressure, suffering such a severe concussion that he almost died. Complicated by the heart attack he’d suffered in the spring of 1941 and which had seriously impeded his work on the opera, War and Peace, he now found his health quickly deteriorating. Basically, he never really recovered from this episode.

His 6th Symphony in the dark key of E-flat Minor, often considered the 5th‘s “dark twin,” was completed and premiered in 1947, even though it had been begun before he started work on what became the 5th. It’s probably more representative of a “war symphony,” especially hearing the first two movements as an elegy on the tragic losses of war.

But then came the political fallout after the war.

Andrei Zhdanov was a party official under Stalin who became the director of the Soviet Cultural Policy in 1946 and one of his first actions was to censor the poet Anna Akhmatova. “The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture,” he said, “is the conflict between good and best.”

Given that, how could government officials react to Prokofiev’s new symphony, his 6th?

In February 1948, four months after the 6th Symphony was premiered, Zhdanov initiated purges against several musicians over the issue of “formalism” which sent both Shostakovich and Prokofiev into creative tail-spins. During the different artistic crises of the ‘30s, both were young enough to either argue their positions or adapt, but now, both of them older and in ill-health, they more or less retreated.

(You can read more about this in relation to Shostakovich and his 5th and 10th Symphonies.)

For many American listeners, it may be difficult to understand this.

Here is Aram Khachaturian – himself an Armenian, not a Russian, who composed during the Soviet era – writing about the definition of the “Soviet Composer”:

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“In the Soviet Union, the composer occupies a place of honor. He benefits by the attention and solicitude of the people. His material comfort is assured. He knows that his work is necessary and highly appreciated by Society. Moreover, he has, of course, deep consciousness of his responsibility towards Society, towards history and towards humanity.”
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During the 1930s, when the new nation was still struggling to create itself barely a decade after the Bolsheviks’ unexpected success in toppling the weak provisional government following the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917, the question was one of frequent debate and discussion as if Art, usually evolving over generations and centuries of cultural development, could be created from above for lack of time.

Prokofiev wrote,

--- --- --- --- ---
“I would describe the music needed here as ‘light serious’ or ‘serious light’ music; it is by no means easy to find the term which suits it. Above all, it must be tuneful, simply and comprehensibly tuneful, and must not be repetitious or stamped with triviality.” h
--- --- --- --- ---

In 1934, the Composers’ Union, the Communist Party’s bureaucratic organization that had oversight of official ideology regarding music and composers, suggested the following guidelines:

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“The main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed toward the victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright and beautiful. This distinguishes the spiritual world of Soviet man and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and strength. Socialist Realism demands an implacable struggle against folk-negating modernistic direction modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art, against subservience and servility towards modern bourgeois culture.”
--- --- --- --- ---

Now, depending on your viewpoint, much of this could be defined different ways: certainly anything that tweaked bourgeois (Western) conventions must be suitable for Soviet consumption. What was more “real” than the stories of real people – or taking great dramatic themes and translating them into modern-day situations?

This “modernistic direction” was soon labeled Formalism, a reliance on bourgeois (or simply “Western”) art forms that were primarily abstract: the structure of a sonata or a procedure like the fugue were examples of “Formalism” to be avoided. Art that was abstract was not “real.”

Attitudes about such issues may change with time and may change drastically and unexpectedly. We might joke about “I didn’t get the memo” but in many cases, artists found themselves in very real danger, politically and personally, if the winds of musical aesthetics changed.

This attack on “formalism” or “bourgeois influences” first began in 1936 with the attack in the press on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and, more or less as a result, hoping to win back good favor, he composed his 5th Symphony. (Again, for more details, read this earlier post at Thoughts on a Train already mentioned).

As it happened, Prokofiev left the Soviet Union in 1918 feeling that, given the strife following the Revolution and the ensuing Civil War there, there was no room for his revolutionary approach to music (besides, all his premieres were being postponed because of the war, anyway). But after failing to find success much less recognition in the United States and creative satisfaction in France, Prokofiev made the decision to return to the Soviet Union in 1935, hoping to reconnect with his Russian roots.

Keep in mind, Prokofiev was no longer the enfant terrible he had been in his early-20s: he was now 44 years old – is it possible this mellowing had something to do with the traditional mid-life crisis? Who knows, but it’s difficult to balance the Prokofiev who said music must be “tuneful, simply and comprehensibly tuneful” with the Prokofiev who’d composed his 2nd Symphony in Paris, a symphony patterned on Beethoven’s last piano sonata, begun when he was 33.

And what is this “formalism” Shostakovich was accused of?

In Western usage, musicologically speaking, it implies music that is defined by the composer’s attention to structural details – its form as well as, say, use of counterpoint or boundary-stretching harmonies – but in the Soviet Union, the implication was music that was too intellectual to be appreciated by the masses - and the Communists were all about the Masses (not to confused with Catholic liturgical music, just to point out how confusing terminologies can be). In fact, Prokofiev quipped that “formalism is music that people cannot understand on first hearing.”

Today, we would express this as an argument between music that is too intellectual versus music that is too shallow, depending on your point of view: is it music of the heart or music of the brain (as Roger Session, a well-known “difficult” composer, said, “as if one could exist without the other”)?

In 1936, Shostakovich was being held up as the Party’s Whipping Boy though soon enough, not just artists in the Soviet Union were contending with the purges brought on by Stalin’s paranoia, often referred to as The Great Terror.

So Prokofiev returned to find his old country violently in the throes of reinventing itself.

And what did Prokofiev write, once he was back on this soil that was once Russia? Unlike Shostakovich, who was becoming primarily a symphonist – and a symphony was considered a bourgeois Western form – Prokofiev composed film scores (attractive to the Masses), large-scale choral works based on texts by “approved Soviet poets” (inspiring to the Masses) and a children’s tale set to music called Peter and the Wolf.

He did not write a symphony until the end of World War II when Party regulations about music were, for some reason, relaxed. Aside from his “Classical” Symphony, his next three symphonies had all been written in Paris: the 2nd, inspired by Beethoven’s Op.111, was a symphony of “iron and steel.” On the surface, this sounded like a subject that should appeal to the new Soviet aesthetic, keeping in mind something like Mosolov’s The Iron Foundry depicting in exact detail the noises of a busy factory, considered a masterpiece of the Revolution’s denouncement of bourgeois Romanticism of the 1920s but which would hardly pass muster with the attitudes of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

His 3rd Symphony, written in 1928, was basically a four-movement suite based on material from the opera, The Fiery Angel which he was having trouble getting produced. The 4th is also based on stage music rather than being something symphonically conceived (I mean, in the traditional sense of a symphony), taking music from the ballet, The Prodigal Son, which he premiered in 1930 but which he revised so completely in 1946, following the success of his new 5th Symphony, that he even gave it a new opus number.

So between 1924 (still in Paris) and 1944 (eight years after the prodigal Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union) he had not really risked writing anything so formalistically bourgeois as a formally conceived abstract Symphony.

Then, in the few short years between 1944 and 1947, he wrote three symphonies – the 5th, the large-scale revisions of the 4th, and the 6th.

Could this be why Prokofiev decided to make his comments about "singing the praises of the free and happy Man," to give his new symphonic symphony an acceptable socialist patina?

The next great shift in Soviet aesthetics occurred in 1948 and this time, Zhdanov and the bureaucrats came down hard on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, accusing them and several others of the crime of Formalism, essentially banning the performance of their music in Soviet concert halls.

His health issues aside, Prokofiev never really regained his creative spark, though he continued to compose – especially inspired by the young cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich – but even politically correct works we would consider the product of a Party Hack were not well received either popularly or critically.

In the end, even in death, Stalin had the last laugh.

Stalin’s death was announced on March 5th, 1953 – he may have died the night before – and Prokofiev, suffering the after-effects of a cerebral hemorrhage, died hours later. A music periodical reported the composer’s death on page 116 – the first 115 pages were about Stalin. Even the crowds gathering in Red Square mourning the death of their leader, not far from where Prokofiev had lived, made it impossible for his friends to even remove the body from his home to take him to the headquarters of the Composers’ Union for the funeral until three days later.

Hardly anyone in the great Soviet Masses knew that the composer whose 5th Symphony was so popular and appealing – and somehow lacking in formalism – had died.

Checkmate…?

Dr. Dick

Music & Politics: Shostakovich's 5th & 10th Symphonies

2011-09-16T16:56:00.001-04:00

Let me begin with a seemingly unrelated anecdote.

Several years ago, a friend took me to hear an open rehearsal with Riccardo Muti conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. I forget what major work was to be on the program but the moment I will always remember from that experience concerned the orchestra’s first read-through of a work they’d never performed before: Hindemith’s little-known Symphony in E-flat which I’d never even heard of before. They read through the scherzo (the lighter movement of a symphony which translates from the Italian as “joke”) and I thought “okay, cute, kind of scurrying and unsettled, but in a hushed kind of way, cute.” Then Muti said “Yes, but it’s supposed to be... spooky!”

With that, he flung out his arms, hunkered his head down between his shoulders – one could almost see the glare in his eyes from our balcony seats – and they began again.

This time, the music was riveting, spooky above all, and almost demonic, like some breathless nightmare. After they’d read through the notes, now the orchestra gave the music its soul. But they were the same notes: how could two run-throughs make it sound like an entirely different piece? I’ve never heard another recording of the piece match the fear and intensity of that rehearsal.

What is it about music that allows two interpretations to be so radically different? Hindemith wrote the piece in the summer of 1940, shortly after he’d arrived in America as a voluntary exile from Hitler’s Germany in the months following the start of the Second World War. Think about it.

While music can be considered on its own value – whatever that may be – the life of its composer and the times in which it was composed often have some bearing on an even more elusive aspect of art: its “meaning” (whatever that may be).

One of the great things about art, of course, is that it transcends all of that to speak to each individual on a unique basis. The biography of a piece of music is full of certain facts and tinged with interpretation, just like the biography of the person who wrote it. One supplements the other and yet the music can be appreciated without our needing to be aware of either.

An old Cold War complaint was that Shostakovich was just a "propaganda" composer. Yes, he wrote things like the “Song of the Forest,” a cantata glorifying Stalin’s reforestation program (imagine an American composer writing a large-scale choral work extolling the virtues of the Bush Administration’s argument for increased oil drilling in the Alaskan Wilderness) but we in the United States have not lived under the kind of threat artists in totalitarian regimes deal with on a daily basis: while we may argue about Freedom of Speech, we do not necessarily fear for our lives as a consequence. Under Stalin, someone speaking out against the government would simply ‘disappear’ in the middle of the night, when a late-night knock on the door could be from the dreaded KGB, the Soviet secret police, coming to arrest you and subsequently, as happened to various friends of Shostakovich’s, imprisoned or executed.

The 1936 denunciation appeared in the state-run newspaper Pravda (“Truth”) the day after a performance of his most recent success, the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had been attended by Stalin and his wife who then famously stormed out in the midst of it. The opera had already received rave reviews, had already been running for about 90 performances each in Moscow and Leningrad when it had even been hailed as the “prototypical Soviet music-drama,” and yet when the unsigned article, “Chaos instead of Music” appeared on page 3 – Shostakovich himself, six-months shy of his 30th birthday, discovered the article after buying a paper in a train station while on a concert tour – even his staunchest supporters dropped him for fear of any contamination.

It was not just a bad review: it was clear the article came not from some disgruntled critic but quite possibly from Stalin himself, whoever may actually have written it.

A week later another scathing attack appeared, this one about his ballet The Limpid Stream, and he was now labeled an “enemy of the people.” He'd seen others arrested for merely espousing non-Soviet principals or pro-Western “decadence” in their art – when would they come for him?

During this year, then, a former companion, a family friend, his mother-in-law and brother-in-law and an uncle were all arrested by the NKVD, the People’s Commisariat for Internal Affairs. In the midst of composing his 5th Symphony, he himself was called in to be interrogated by the NKVD about his association with a powerful military figure, Mikhail Tukachevsky, a fan of Shostakovich’s music who had recently been implicated in a plot to assassinate Stalin.

The story is told by a friend who recalls the composer telling him how he had been “interviewed” on a Friday but since he could not recall ever discussing politics with Tukachevsky, just music, he was told to return on Monday as if, perhaps, his memory might improve. That weekend, Shostakovich hardly slept. When he left for his second “interview,” his wife had prepared a little bag for him with traveling stuff (like warm underwear) because they feared he would not return but be sent off to a prison like many of his friends.

This time, his name was not on any list of “interviewees” and he was again sent home, only to discover later the officer interrogating him had himself been arrested!

Shortly after Tukachevsky was executed, Shostakovich’s close friend, the musicologist Nikolai Zhilayev, was arrested and executed. A short time before, the composer had shown him part of the new piece he was working on at the moment, his Fifth Symphony. A couple of years later, the poet who wrote the words Shostakovich had set in his film-music, The Counterplan, was executed as well as the poet who wrote the book for his ballet, The Limpid Stream. Even the great theatrical director Vsyevolod Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and executed, implying even an internationally recognized figure like Shostakovich was perhaps not immune from Stalin’s Terror.

Given that atmosphere, you might understand how a composer who wished to survive to write another day might decide to do the dictator’s bidding only to put his true soul into music that could be left, by the very nature of art, a secret.

Someone called Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony “a Soviet artist’s practical response to just criticism,” a comment that stuck (I think it’s even inscribed in the published score) and on the surface the music genuinely responds to the Pravda attack: instead of screaming dissonance and an acute lack of melody as his earlier music had often been described (or derided), this work veers away from the more aggressive harmonic direction his music had been taking in the previous decade, creating something simpler that could be called a “populist” tone.

Consider, however, the history of his 4th Symphony which he’d begun writing the year before this Pravda article, then completed four months afterwards. After ten rehearsals – wow! – and just days before its scheduled December premiere, he was talked into withdrawing the work, an hour-long extravaganza for a huge orchestra and two nearly half-hour long movements separated by a brief scherzo, music full of violence and violent contrasts that perhaps was even more deserving of Stalin’s complaint about “neurotic” music. Whether it was out of fear or dissatisfaction with the piece, he put it aside (it would not see the light of day for another 25 years).

In mid-April four months later, he began work on the 5th Symphony which he completed in three months: its premiere in November, then, would establish him as an artist rehabilitated. It went on to become perhaps his most popular piece, if not his greatest symphony.

Reports say that during the last movement, many in the audience stood as if royalty had entered the room, as one described it; the ovation at the end, depending on whom you read, lasted a half-hour, 40 minutes, almost an hour. Clearly, Shostakovich had proven he could write a symphony that would reach the Soviet masses.

In many respects, it is a symphony about the struggle with fate – like Beethoven’s 5th, Mahler’s 5th, Tchaikovsky’s 4th and 5th (perhaps it's a 5th Symphony Thing to struggle with fate).

In lectures about his father’s music, Maxim Shostakovich who later became famous for conducting his father’s music, called the 5th his father’s “Heroic” Symphony, quoting his father that “the hero is saying, ‘I am right. I will follow the way I choose.’”

At this point, it becomes impossible to avoid the book that has changed the West’s perception of the composer from a political doormat to a raging undercover dissident, Semyon Volkov’s Testimony which purports to be Shostakovich’s memoirs as told to the author in numerous meetings in the years before his death in 1975, then smuggled out of the country and published in 1979.

In it, we read many new and surprising comments made by the composer regarding many of his major works, including the 5th Symphony, one of the most famous quotes – so famous, it has become part of the Shostakovich Canon – pertaining to the last movement:“I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in [Mussorgsky’s] Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.”

This is certainly a viable comment since it's a famous moment from the very opening scene of what is considered the greatest Russian opera, Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky, an historical opera based on a tsar who usurped the throne, possibly murdering the only available heir, and who desires to be declared the new tsar by the acclamation of the people. Only the people are not willing to do so until forced by the police to beg Boris to become tsar. Did people in the 1870s see this scene as a comment on the Russian social system? Perhaps not at the moment, but I think many Russians would understand it as part of their heritage: certainly the poorer classes were constantly being coached and badgered against their own deeper feelings to acclaim the country’s rulers and their policies.

Part of this begins long before the finale: the struggle that has gone on with the first movement’s constantly shifting tempos always accelerating before breaking off into something almost static or perhaps only to start over again, as if one’s heartbeat is racing but then you catch your breath; the stark contrast of the brief scherzo; the agonizingly tragic lament of the slow movement; and then the rousing (or supposedly rousing) march of the final movement comes to a long drawn-out expansion of the march-tune which can be played in two ways. If you conduct it in 2 (two beats to the bar, conducting half-notes) , it is fast and triumphant sounding; if, however, you conduct it in 4 (four beats to the bar – quarter notes – but with each beat in the same tempo as the previous half-notes), it loses its drive and perhaps does sound mechanical and hollow. I have not seen the original manuscript in the composer’s handwriting to know if what some people have said is true, that there was a misprint in the published score and the composer “intended” it to be “in 4" or if the quartet-note got the beat, not the half-note, and my miniature score is so miniature, even a magnifying glass doesn’t clear it up.

Even before Volkov’s “Testimony” appeared, I’ve heard performances with the “expansive” ending: the recording Maxim Shostakovich conducted (recorded in 1977 and available on RCA) also takes the expansive ending.

Then too, there is the figure of Mahler who is one of the major influences on Shostakovich the symphonist, and in this case Mahler of the 3rd Symphony. Mahler’s finale is also not a “faster/louder” ending meant to get the audience to its feet. It is a grand, expansive slow movement lacking any sense of irony, but there are many similarities between Shostakovich’s and Mahler’s conclusions, that one in fact can end slow and loud and sound triumphant. To this, just add a touch of Soviet (or Russian) Socialist Realism – the police-persuaded peasants inherited from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Possible? [Hmmmm...]

A composer writes notes on a page, choosing pitches that create the right combination for what he wants to express in the melodies, harmonies, colors and rhythms of his creation. But it is the music “between the notes,” left to the performer, which the composer has no control over: once he is finished writing it and sends it off into the world, the music is at the mercy of first the performer and then the listener. The listener can only approach it after a performer interprets it and then walks away with something that could have little to do with what the composer had in mind.

Not to denigrate the musicianship of Eugene Ormandy or the Philadelphia Orchestra, but when the last series of Shostakovich symphonies were recorded in the West, it was their recordings that introduced us to these dark and often difficult pieces – not technically difficult, but difficult to comprehend their “meaning” because so many of us were listening for something beyond the clarity of formal structure and so on. This is obviously music “about” something - two of them are collections of poems set to music - and I found these recordings lacking in something. As a naive 20-something, I dismissed the Late Shostakovich Symphonies as “boring.”

Then I heard the next batch of recordings to come out, conducted by the composer’s son, Maxim: now, I discovered, these were wholly different works, exciting and deep, thought-provoking and sometimes even just plain scary. The notes were the same: why was the music different?

Did Ormandy not “understand” these pieces? Or was I just more receptive to Maxim Shostakovich’s approach?

It could be a little of both, plus how I felt on that particular day, who knows...Remember my opening anecdote about the performance of the Hindemith, hearing the orchestra read through it and then, after being told it was supposed to be “spooky,” how suddenly everything changed?

When I heard Stuart Malina conduct the Harrisburg Symphony in Shostakovich’s 5th several seasons ago, his approach to the accelerations in the first movement’s tempos left me so breathless I was almost imagining the "knock on the door" myself: how could these not be the thoughts of a composer who was fearing for his life – not Beethoven’s Fate that knocks at the door, but the KGB – and who was watching as friends and relatives around him were hauled into the net of Stalin’s Terror? If the slow movement is a lament, who is it a lament for? The reviled Soviet Artist being criticized for having written neurotic, dissonant music or the Russian people under the shadow of the tyrant? And so in the end, is it the Russian People who are hollowly rejoicing, mimicking the policeman’s call to rejoice, or is it the composer saying “I will do your bidding, but...”?

There is another tradition that we in the West do not understand, and it is what is usually called “The Holy Fool.”

We think of the Village Idiot as a figure of ridicule but to the Russians, this person was closer to God and given a certain amount of respect and “distance,” allowing him to say things and get away with them that an ordinary person would, perhaps, be arrested for. Returning to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, one of the minor figures (to us) is The Simpleton, as he’s called – in Russian, this yurodivy – who appears in a few scenes lamenting the tears shed by the poor Russian people.

There is a scene that has often been cut from performances, at least in the past. Boris is now faced with open rebellion among the people who support a renegade monk posing as the reborn prince, Dmitri, the legitimate heir Boris is rumored to have killed so he could ascend the throne himself. Coming out of the cathedral, the tsar, dressed in robes and crown, is confronted by the Simpleton in his rags who’s had his last penny stolen by a bunch of rowdy children: “why don’t you have them killed,” he asks the Tsar, “like you had Dmitri killed?” One of the noblemen orders the fool arrested but Boris stops them and instead asks the fool to pray for him. “How can you pray,” the simpleton asks the tsar, “for the murderer of a child?”

It is a chilling scene and even in the West with our claims for Freedom of Speech, such an affront might not go without some retribution. Depending on how the scenes and episodes of this opera may be staged (they are individual tableaux, not a continuous drama), one can conclude the opera with Boris’ death (which makes sense in the West because, after all, the tsar is the star) or with the scene in the forest where the people, in open revolt, have captured some of the tsar’s supporters and, led by the False Dmitri, now march off to Moscow to bring down Boris’s government, leaving only the Simpleton on stage with his sing-song lament – tears, no matter what happens, only tears for the poor starving Russian people.

Ending the opera with Boris’ death is a powerful operatic story about a man overcome by fate; ending the opera with the Simpleton’s lament is a powerful emotional ending to a story about the people who, despite their impending victory, will continue to suffer regardless who’s in control.

Which do you think might resonate more with the Russian people themselves?

And so we come to the 10th Symphony.

During World War II, Shostakovich composed a series known as the “War Symphonies,” especially the 7th, written during the dramatic siege of Leningrad and smuggled past the Nazi lines to become a rallying cry in the West in support of the Soviet Union against the Nazi aggression. Once the war was over, everybody was awaiting Shostakovich’s 9th and, thinking of Beethoven’s 9th, wondering what kind of victory celebration it would be, what heroic salute to the glorious Stalin it would conclude with. Instead, they heard a succinct, often humorous symphony with no apparent programmatic content, certainly no glorious portrait of Soviet Victory – I’d often described it as Haydn Lost on the Steppes – and even though it’s perhaps Shostakovich’s most “accessible” symphony just from its sound alone, it was met with confusion and derision. Shostakovich himself called it “a joyful little piece” -“musicians will like playing it and critics will delight in blasting it.”

Since the symphony was a German musical form, the Soviets felt it was too Western for good Soviet listeners who needed less formalism, less pro-Western influences in their art, and so once again, Shostakovich – along with several other leading composers – was denounced as being a “deviationist,” “occupied by private whims,” for being “pathologically discordant”... and for writing symphonies.

This time, he chose simply to retire from the symphonic stage and produced no new major works for the next six years. That didn’t mean he wasn’t composing: he wrote several works intended for more private performances, like the 5th String Quartet (“one of the toughest and most uncompromising of all his quartets”). He put his 1st Violin Concerto in the drawer and composed perhaps his most “western formalist” pieces inspired by the playing of a young pianist who could play all 48 Preludes & Fugues from Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier” from memory upon request (which is how she won a major competition where Shostakovich had been one of the judges).

Whether he fell in love with Tatiana Nikolaeva or her playing is immaterial, but she inspired him to write his own set of Preludes and Fugues (his Op. 87): in fact, she would die in the midst of a public performance of these in San Francisco in 1993.

She told the story that Shostakovich immersed himself in Bach and was writing one prelude or fugue almost every day: she would stop by every few days to play through the newest one. One day, she said, he told her “There will be no fugue today: today, I will start the 10th Symphony.”

This was in 1951.Stalin died in 1953.

The circumstances of his death can still be debated but the immediate impact on Shostakovich was one of release: Stalin was dead! He was still alive!

And so in quick succession, he produced a series of new works that would not have fared well under the old regime, some of them lying in his desk drawer for several years: perhaps the new regime would be more lenient with the arts? He reported that he had begun his 10th Symphony in the summer following Stalin’s death and that it was a direct response to that event.

And yet Nikolaeva said he’d begun it, apparently even completed it in 1951. According to her, during these “Fugue Visits,” he eventually played her the whole symphony as he was composing it: yet there are letters to friends and students saying how difficult the process was of composing it during the summer of 1953.

Regardless, the work was premiered that December.

There is a very long Mahler-like slow movement to open – Shostakovich always seemed uncomfortable with the traditional “Symphonic Allegro” to open his symphonies – followed by a brief but brutal “scherzo,” if one can call it that. The third movement is a nocturne, dark and mysterious, permeated by a horn call and a short motive that takes on more significance in the last movement. This finale, opening with a long slow introduction, contains a happy theme followed by a rough Georgian Hopak reminiscent of the violent “scherzo” before ending with a loud and decidedly triumphant ending.

That’s the surface.

One of the opening brooding themes is actually a quote from a setting of Pushkin which he apparently completed in 1952 – a poem beginning “What is in my name?” Few of us in the West might know this song (or this poem), but what significance might it have had for the composer?

Let’s look at the famous motive that concludes the symphony: it first appears in the middle of the nocturne but becomes triumphant at the final curtain, even blazing out on the timpani at the very end.

It consists of the notes D - E-flat - C - B-natural.

It was a ‘game’ that many composers played over the centuries, turning their names or their initials (or their secret girlfriends) into musical themes or motives: the most famous is Bach, spelling his name in the traditional German notation where H is B-natural and B is really B-flat – B-flat - A - C - B-natural. In German, E-flat is called Es and in German, Shostakovich’s name would be spelled with "Sch" instead of "Sh" (the initial letter, in Russian, transliterates to an "sh"). So these pitches he uses at the end of his 10th Symphony are actually his monogram – in German (how personal, pro-Western formalist is that?!) – D-S-C-H. He would later use this as a musical signature in other works, too: it also appears on his tombstone.

What no one knew before it was revealed in the early 1990s was that Shostakovich had met and fallen in love with a student of his, the pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.

Though they’d met years before, many of the 34 letters he wrote to her correspond exactly to the time he was writing the 10th Symphony, the first one in April. He says he began work on the symphony in July: Elmira received 18 letters from him between late June and the week following the symphony’s official completion. She was living in Baku, Azerbaijan, and he was in Moscow. They rarely met and it’s quite likely she was more muse than lover and the letters trail off to only 5 the year after the premiere and stop when he announces, after the death of his first wife, he has remarried.Her name, too, is part of this symphony: the horn call that permeates the Nocturne.

In a mixture of English and Italian syllables representing the pitches (as in do re mi fa so la), he could spell her name E - LA (for L) - MI - RE (for R) - A... or E-A-E-D-A, a fairly standard-sounding horn-call that brings to mind a famous theme from Mahler’s “Song of the Earth” (the opening movement, “The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Misery” [hmmm]). Throughout this movement, Shostakovich weaves his monogram with Elmira’s name.

Later, when asked what this symphony was “about,” since its inherent drama clearly had some programmatic intent to most listeners, he replied in his famously side-stepping way, “in this composition, I wanted to portray human emotions and passions” and most elusively of all, “let them listen and guess for themselves."

And what are the last lines of Pushkin's poem, "What is in my name"? In M. Kneller's translation:

But silently, in time of anguish
Pronounce it softly while grieving
Say that my memory won't vanish
That there's a heart in which I'm living...

Hmmmm...

Then there is Volkov’s Testimony, once again. In it, Shostakovich is quoted as having admitted the demonic second movement, this violent scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin “roughly speaking.” The fact the innocent-sounding theme that opens the main section of the finale is attacked by a Georgian Hopak might imply another appearance of Stalin who, after all, was born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. In the end, it is the D-S-C-H motive that is triumphant as if our “Holy Fool” were dancing on Stalin’s grave: Stalin is dead – but I’m still alive!Possible. Possible...

Toward the end of his life, when Shostakovich was feeling old and in constant pain, he was reading Chekhov’s story, “Ward 6,” about a doctor who halfheartedly performs his duties at a squalid provincial hospital:“Dr. Ragin was a great believer in intelligence and honesty, but he lacked the strength of character and the confidence in his own right to assert himself in order to see to it that the life around him should be honest and intelligent. He simply did not know how to give orders, to prohibit, or to insist. It was almost as though he had taken a vow never to raise his voice....When deceived or flattered or handed a quite obviously fraudulent account for signature, he turned as red as a lobster and felt guilty, but he signed the account all the same.”

In a letter to his student Boris Tishchenko, written around the same time he was meeting with Volkov, Shostakovich wrote, “when I read in that story about Andrey Yefimovich Ragin, it seems to me I am reading memoirs about myself.”

Whether Volkov’s testimony is even partly accurate or may be more conjecture than “straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth” accuracy – given the furor over James Frey’s memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” a few years ago – there are more arguments now that it is a forgery. Since many of its quotes and ideas have already permeated the Shostakovich Legacy, it will be hard to filter what is fact from what may only be fiction.

But the point remains, the music is there: however we choose to interpret it, pointing out this background fact or that possible afterthought, the music is capable of speaking in different ways to different individuals, with or without these references.

Spooky.

I only point them out.

-- Dr. Dick

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P.S. For more details concerning Prokofiev and his music on this same subject, see this post, Prokofiev and the Chess Match of soviet Politics & Music.

Music on September 11th

2011-09-11T09:13:00.000-04:00

It is challenging, choosing music for September 11th. The Mozart Requiem which the Harrisburg Symphony is performing today with the Susquehanna Chorale is probably as good a piece as any, free of direct associations with the event. It was performed at the "Rolling Requiem" on the first anniversary where choirs in each time zone around the world performed Mozart's Requiem at 9am local time in tribute to those who died and those who survived. It also, musically, reminds us of the composer's life - likewise cut short - dying at the age of 35 before he was able to complete the work.

In this previous post, I describe my own experiences answering the question "Where were you on September 11th?" And also my musical response, composing a string quartet inspired by the emotions experienced on that day which, when I attended rehearsals for the piece in New York City (the performance was here in Harrisburg, PA), I made my pilgrimage to Ground Zero, sat in the silent space behind Trinity Church, overlooking where the Trade Center once stood, and started reading through the score of my quartet before realizing this was not the place to be listening to this music.

At that time, I worked the evening shift for a local classical music radio station. Like most people, probably, I sat there numbly listening to the reports, the discussion of events, the endless repetition, the speculation, the rage, the fear, the paranoia and the unfolding tragedy - the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania that might have, except for the bravery of its passengers, ended up in the Capitol or the White House. I had heard news reports, I had been watching television when the towers collapsed and I heard a reporter for NPR suggest the death toll - which so far nobody else was talking about, as I recall - that could reach 50,000.

Knowing that eventually we would return to broadcasting classical music during the day and evening, I couldn't even begin to think about what might be suitable - certainly not "regular programming as scheduled." This was not the time to return to normal quite so soon even if it were days later.

The first piece of music I listened to at my desk that afternoon, sorting through the possibilities, was this:
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And then I realized, this was the first time I had cried all day, regardless of what I had seen or heard or thought about throughout the day. And I realized the intense power of music to cleanse the soul.

Today, ten years later, I do not need to be reminded of what that day was like. Even without the associations of lost friends, I can remember everything, watching it re-unfold in front of me like an unwanted film even when I try to shut my eyes against it.

What I want to remember this day, ten years later, are the people who died there and the heroism of the people who went there to help.

For me, silence - after hearing this short, simple musical prayer - is the best memorial.

As I write this, it is 9:11am on 9-11-2011. Let the bells and the reading of names ring out in tribute.

Elliott Carter and the Cello: Sonata, Concerto

2011-09-08T10:20:00.001-04:00

If you've followed this blog for any period of time, you're probably aware one of my favorite composers is Elliott Carter who will turn 103 in three months. His publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, had posted three short films from an interview recorded last year in which Carter discusses his life, his music and what motivated his creativity over the years.

Film No. 1 -- The Early Years
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Film No. 2 -- Symphony and Opera
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Film No. 3 -- Poets and Composers

Thanks to John Clare for pointing these out to me.

I've been wanting to post these two videos from YouTube for a long time and just haven't gotten around to it (as I've put off so many things: procrastinatus sum), so here are two works by Carter written for the cello during different periods of his career.

The Cello Sonata, written in 1948, was a breakthrough piece, leaving his populist style behind and establishing many of the ideas that would identify his future musical voice, especially the rhythmic complexities as well as the contrapuntal layering of textures. Here, the cello plays a rhapsodic, emotional line (very "right-brain") against the severely logical piano part with its almost metronomic regularity (very "left-brain").

The argument, whether in Bach's day or Brahms', concerned the role of the brain versus the role of the heart which were usually considered to be mutually exclusive. Carter combines the two in an on-going dialogue to create a unified work of disparate elements.

This video includes the score, but as often happens with YouTube postings, the performers are not credited.
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For some reason, this poster apparently did not get around to the 4th Movement, so here is a different (and likewise uncredited!) performance recorded by students at McGill University in 2009.
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Here is Elliott Carter writing for the cello 52 years later. The Cello Concerto, written for Yo-Yo Ma, was composed in 2000 and premiered September 27th, 2001. This video was filmed at the dress rehearsal for a performance by Juilliard student Dane Johansen with the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by James Levine. Mr. Johansen won the Juilliard's Concerto Competition that year and had since gone on to become a member of the Escher Quartet.

Recently, I posted about more recent works by Mr. Carter, one completed and premiered in November, 2010, and another premiered this past June.

- Dr. Dick
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Header photo credit: screen-capture from opening of Boosey&Hawkes documentary film directed by Tommy Pearson of Red Ted Films.

File This Under "Perception Is Everything"

2011-07-24T12:55:00.004-04:00

While it’s easy to make fun of bad reviews of music generally recognized as masterpieces today, the idea – as Nicholas Slonimsky did in his wonderful collection called The Lexicon of Musical Invective which should be required reading on every composer’s night-stand – bears consideration when we realize how our perceptions change.

At Friday night’s program of Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic Festival 2011, Fry Street Quartet first violinist Will Fedkenheuer prefaced their performance of Bartók’s 3rd Quartet by saying how a violist friend of his brought a boombox into his practice room and said “you’ve got to listen to this!” Will’s initial reaction to hearing this tape of Bartók’s 3rd implied a proficiency with profanity he was reluctant to share in mixed company, but over time he came to love the work and, after all, here he was, playing it tonight - and giving it, after all, a completely committed performance.

It reminded me of a story I’ve told often (and will continue to tell) how a student of mine at the University of Connecticut, taking a junior-level 20th Century music class, made a dismissive noise as I began introducing the music of Béla Bartók.

“I take it you don’t like Bartók,” I asked him.

“Can’t stand him…”

“And what is it about Bartók you don’t like?”

“Well, it’s all this motor rhythm and aggressive dissonance,” and I don’t remember what else he complained about, but it was a long list and enough to get started on.

So I asked him, “now, I understand you like Mahler’s music.”

“Oh, I love Mahler!” His expression changed to one of near ecstasy.

“So, what is it you like about Mahler?”

“The way he just expands everything beyond recognition, how he builds to his climaxes,” and so on.

I thought I’d go out on a limb. I remembered how it took me a while to warm up to Mahler. “Did you always like Mahler?”

“No, actually – I couldn’t stand it, at first.”

“What was it you didn’t like about it?”

“For one thing, it was just so long, I mean it took forever to get somewhere and I had no idea where he was or where he was going…” and so on.

“So, what changed your mind?”

Nodding his head, apparently recalling the challenge it had first presented and how, after all that work, he had found it to be more than rewarding, he said "Oh, I had to listen to it a lot."

Pause.

[insert light bulb here]

“Ah,” he said quietly. “I guess I should listen to Bartók more…”

Three years later, I was sitting in the recital hall at the Juilliard School of Music where this student, a gifted clarinetist, was giving his master’s recital. The last work on the program was “Contrasts” by Béla Bartók.

Given that, I want to mention this review I read and I want you to guess whose music it’s describing.

I’ll paraphrase it here, in case the literary style might give it away:

This piece “is a work built upon dry as dust elements,” something that slipped from the composer to prove what “an excellent mathematician he might have become.” He found this composer hopeless, unfeeling, unemotional and arid. To him it was like listening to quadratic equations and hyperbolic curves.

The review concludes with the reminder that “music is not only a science: it is also an art.” While the piece was played with precision, he remarked that’s really the only way you can “work out a problem in musical trigonometry.”

So, who was he talking about? Was it…

(a.) Iannis Xenakis
(b.) Johann Sebastian Bach
(c.) Elliott Carter
(d.) Johannes Brahms
(e.) Béla Bartók
(f.) Arnold Schoenberg

Click on this link to listen to a video of the work this critic was reviewing. And you can read more about the composer and this particular piece in this post.

Hot Time with Summer Music

2011-07-22T11:48:00.002-04:00

The past week or so has been busy – though I’d put the Piano Trio, for the moment, on a back burner.

For once, that metaphor sounds appropriate as it’s been in the 90s here since last Sunday, reaching 101° yesterday and shooting for 102° this afternoon. It’s supposed to cool off to 90° by the end of the weekend…

The scurrying scherzo of the Piano Trio reached a snag and I needed to put it aside for a while to sort things out and I think, in a way, I might have. So I’ll be ready to dig back into it in another day or two.

Meanwhile, other than reading and occasionally breaking a sweat just turning a page, I’ve been blogging a lot for Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic Festival 2011 and you can follow them with these links. Performances begin tonight at 8pm at Market Square Church and continues Sunday afternoon at 4pm at Messiah College’s Climenhaga Arts Center in Poorman Recital Hall, then concludes Tuesday evening with an earlier-than-usual start time of 6pm, back at Market Square Church.

As I joked on Facebook, “the music will be hot but it’s inside and it’s air-conditioned!” This is a good weekend not to be at the old Mill on the Yellow Breeches, as beautiful a spot and as quaint a building as that was. Last year, I was tempted to call the festival “Sweatin’ to the Oldies”…

Here’s a general post about the festival, the performers and the repertoire for each program.

This post gets into the whole idea of how people listened to music back in Haydn’s day, how that changed in the 19th Century and how it affects how we might listen to something, familiar or unfamiliar, today. It also includes some video clips of the Bartók 3rd Quartet that’s on tonight’s program (one of my favorite pieces ever, I am soooo looking forward to this).

Since I’d interviewed Bartók’s son, Peter, back in April for the Gretna Music presentation of all six of the Bartók Quartets, I wrote a post about “Bartók, the Man Behind the Music.”

While the Dvořák Piano Quintet “needs no introduction,” here’s a post that includes video performances of it and the 2nd of the Brahms String Sextets, recorded at LaJolla’s SummerFest a few seasons ago.

Usually, Brahms’ music also “needs no introduction,” but I find many of the details of Brahms otherwise uneventful life to have significant impact if not on how he wrote the music but on how I might listen to it in light of realizing Brahms was more a man than the old bearded “marble bust” we usually take him for. So there are two posts, one for each of the sextets. The first post also includes video clips of each of the four movements of the B-flat Sextet.

Meanwhile, hope you’re staying cool out there, wherever you are.

Dick Strawser

Working on a Piano Trio...

2011-06-28T13:14:00.004-04:00

There are any number of ~~excuses~~ reasons I haven’t been blogging much, recently. I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been busy though that only accounts for part of the time. Mostly it’s because of a generally procrastinacious streak that has been getting worse – not that I was ever anticrastination, myself.

But recently, I’ve been reading a little of Henry-Louis de La Grange’s first volume (the 1973 edition) of his epic Mahler biography – managing some 200 pages and skimming another 100 or so before the book was due back to the library (being an interlibrary loan, the renewal policy is fairly limited).

In addition to that, I’ve been slowly working on the revisions for my music appreciation thriller, The Doomsday Symphony which I finished back in February but have been reluctant to follow through the process of slicing and dicing my way to the final product. I'm actually trying to avoid working on the complete rewrite of The Lost Chord because I know this will take more time than I have, now, but that doesn't keep ideas from bubbling up in the creative stew...

And since around May 1st, I’ve been busy sketching my new Piano Trio which I thought was going well till the other day when I finished the first two segments of the piece (less than a third of the work’s total length) I calculated that in 55 days I’ve spent over 240 hours producing some 101 pages of sketches (this does not include a few that pertain to the original idea for a piano sonata scribbled down in late-December last year) which have so far translated to 105 measures or 7 minutes of music…

The trio is basically a four-movement work in one movement, except in this case, the movements are cut up and spliced into the continuous fabric in various segments so that before one movement is finished, the next movement has begun and it may be a while till we get back to that point of departure. Consequently, this has involved a good deal of planning to balance the symmetries and proportions of the form this creates.

The major problem this past month has been working out the second movement which is a chaconne, similar to the one that formed the central arch of a five-movement violin sonata.

I’ve never been a big fan of the “sectional” variation form – thirty-two variations mostly in the same key and all, basically, the same form (say, “rounded binary”) one after the other, regardless of the amount of variety the composer can squeeze out of often very insipid material. While I love, say, Brahms’ “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel” (something I actually could play, once upon a time), there have been few performances or recordings of it that didn’t strike me as the equivalent of Chinese water torture on the macro-structural level.

And chaconnes are basically the same kind of thing – a chord progression that repeats over and over while something noodles around above it. (The passacaglia, close cousin to the chaconne, can have similar issues.) There are very few that can hold my interest after a while.

So my idea (which I’m sure is not original) was to come up with a chord progression that can modulate which means that, rather than having 32 variations (or 512 measures) all in the key of, say, D Minor, it can actually have a continuously varying tonal palette.

By the way, I should point out two exceptions to this problem (at least for me) and both are by Bach: the Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin from the Partita No. 2 (which I used to play in Brahms’ transcription for piano, left hand which I originally took on when my tendonitis was acting up) and the Goldberg Variations which are not only sectional variations but also based on a repeating harmonic progression. The difference is, you’re never hit over the head with the idea "this is the same thing, over and over again."

So you might call my response to this, “Chaconne Awe.”

Anyway, I set up a series of chords that have a logical harmonic direction but which can also evolve in different ways. By carefully crafting the tension between dissonant three-note chords and standard (but not standardly used) major and minor triads, I created a pattern of chords that point to certain resolutions, thereby moving from one “tonal level” to another as the piece unfolds.

And a lot of this can be varied simply by using different inversions of these chords: in certain instances, a three-note (non-major/minor) chord could go off in a different direction in a different inversion; a close-position chord could have more tension than the same one in an open-position. A second inversion major triad will have a different sense of resolution than a first inversion or root position triad. By using these chords in a consistent manner, you can create your own harmonic context of dissonance and resolution.

To avoid the monotony of sameness in the rhythmic structure – the often pedantic pounding out of 4+4+4+4 measure units – I based the length of each variation on the structural proportions by dividing the time-line according to the Golden Section, something I’ve been doing for years, anyway. This means some variations are shorter than others and that, as the harmonic motion drives you to a particular climactic point, the variations becomes shorter until the rhythmic motion is driving you to that climactic point just as the harmonic motion is as well. (That’s nothing new: Beethoven did it all the time, writing shorter and shorter phrases as he approached a significant cadence.)

Above this – as in a traditional chaconne – would be a melodic layer, something that rises out of the chord progression and changes continuously or may, in itself, become the source of variations.

Only in my case, this layer becomes more independent until it seems to have no relationship to the harmonic layer.

In fact, the sense of line cadences at different points from the harmonic layer, only merging at certain significant points.

This creates a kind of temporal counterpoint that still fits “logically” within the harmonic and melodic expectations. Whether a listener senses this “logic” is not the point but it helps underline a hopefully emotional response to the idea of what a cadence – whether it’s by Bach, Beethoven or Schoenberg – can be (or should be, if the performer is at all aware of the emotional nature of what’s happening in the music).

Getting these two lines to work together was not a matter of just slapping notes down on a page (usually too often the way “modern composers” in any era are accused of working). There was still a context that needed to work harmonically as well as linearly, just like it did in all those counterpoint exercises I should have done when I was a student but usually didn’t because counterpoint in general was something generally overlooked).

Now, in a piano trio, there are so many ways you can subdivide the instruments. If my harmony is based on three-note chords, two string instruments cannot always be playing three notes, so they must be carefully worked out in such a way that this is possible. Also, having the melody in the piano meant it was either doubled in both hands or I had to work out some kind of “accompanimental line” so the texture wasn’t so spare but then this became another layer of complexity to work (contrapuntally) with the harmony and the melody.

There were days I just stared at blank pieces of paper, scratching out potentialities, only to sit back and think, “ya know, this would be a lot easier if it were for orchestra” – as if having more instrumental options made the instrumental challenges less challenging. Or “maybe it would be easier if I just started over and did something else.” Or “perhaps tomorrow will be better,” and I’d put it aside.

Then one day, without so much as an “aha!,” a solution presented itself without needing any significant changes, no need to “start from scratch” or any reason to doubt my sanity. Go figure…

The thing is, in order to make the chaconne work for the segment I was composing now, I needed to know what the whole chaconne was doing. On the other hand, sketching out the entire chaconne means that, when I finally do get around to writing that part of the Trio, it’s already done. Voilà…

So now I’m ready to start the first segment of the third movement, a scherzo, and probably the same thing will happen – I need to sketch out the whole movement, not just the portion of I need at the moment. Besides, it overlaps with the other segments as if fading in and out of our perception, so all of that has to be worked out in advance.

It’s not whether these are first, second or third movements, because they will appear in various orders at various times. In fact, the Trio ends not with the fourth movement but with the final segment of the first movement which is, essentially, the recapitulation of the opening, however affected it becomes by everything that’s happened in between.

But each movement is definable (easily recognizable) by its mood or tempo – or, in the case of the chaconne, its “procedure” – not by its location in the time-line. The scherzo is fast, the last movement to be introduced (if not the finale) is actually a slow (by comparison almost suspended) nocturne-like movement. Yet the tempo throughout is the same – the metronome set at a consistent “quarter note = 60” (the silent common denominator of a ticking clock) while the perception of the tempo frequently shifts by the number of notes we hear in a given pulse.

This creates something not nearly as complicated looking as Elliott Carter's 7-against-13 passages or metronome markings like 163.3 or Leon Kirchner's Piano Trio II which has six metronome changes in the first ten measures.

Well, anyway, time to get back to work.

- Dick Strawser

The Latest from Elliott Carter

2011-06-28T10:43:00.005-04:00

Elliott Carter’s 103rd Birthday may be less than six months away – is it more cumbersome to refer to someone as 102½? – and even though he is writing less than he’s been in the past few years (there was a veritable flood of new works leading up to his 100th birthday), he is still composing even if they’re “short” works. But what Carter packs into a piece in ten minutes can still make a major statement.

There have been two recent premieres of works composed in 2010 and both with orchestra – which means there are a lot of details involved, more than writing short pieces for just a few instruments.

You can read Joe Barron’s account of the Concertino for Bass Clarinet & Orchestra, receiving its American premiere in New York City earlier this month (it received its world premiere in Toronto last November).

Composed for Virgil Blackwell, one of the best bass clarinet performers on the planet, who has long been Mr. Carter’s assistant, the work apparently came as a surprise: his first awareness of the piece was a fax from Carter with a few measures of music for bass clarinet and the typical composer’s query, “is this possible?”

Boosey & Hawkes, the publisher’s website, wrote:
- - - - - -
“One of the centenarian composer’s most recent works, the Concertino received its world premiere this past December in Toronto in an all-Carter concert celebrating the composer’s102nd birthday. The world premiere performance also featured Blackwell as soloist. In his review of the concert, Robert Everett-Green of Toronto’s Globe and Mail said ‘the Concertino...conjured a magical passage of deeply resonant sound that was much more than the sum of its parts.’”
- - - - -

There is also another work for soloists and chamber orchestra that was premiered on June 26th, just two days ago, at the Aldeburgh Festival in England, a work they commissioned and the third recent work they’ve premiered.

The review in the Guardian, posted yesterday, refers to the double concerto for piano, percussion and a chamber orchestra of 20 players as “Dialogues” which is confusing, since Carter called a 2003 work for piano and orchestra written for Daniel Barenboim “Dialogues” (and there is a “Dialogues II” in the works, for Barenboim, as well). The Boosey & Hawkes website refers to this new work as “Conversations” (close but no cigar).

This review, posted at the Telegraph (which contains a generic you-tube video interview with Carter), gets the name right.

[Updated 6-29: ...and this review, from London's Financial Times.]

Joe Barron’s blog, “Liberated Dissonance,” also mentions, in a response to a reader’s comment, there are other works in addition to “Conversations” in the Carter Pipeline: “Dialogues II, written for Barenboim; a sextet (for unspecified instruments) that is also rather reminiscent of the 70s; and a brief string trio that was described to me as a tiny viola concerto.”

Incidentally, Mr. Barron has also initiated a Facebook Campaign to get Elliott Carter to host Saturday Night Live.

- Dick Strawser

Gustav Mahler: The Earliest Years

2011-05-29T12:58:00.003-04:00

Henry-Louis de La Grange is a French-born music critic who has, as they say, “written the book” on Gustav Mahler. His four-volume biography – the last volume came out in 2008 – averaging about 1,000 pages per volume, is easily the most detailed if not the definitive biography on the composer. When the late, lamented Encore Books went out-of-business, I managed to pick up Vol. 2 (pictured, left) and Vol. 3 for about $20 each: these three volumes currently list for $140-$155.

Vol. 1, curiously, never came up in these searches.

Much of the material I used for my posts on Mahler’s 3rd for the Harrisburg Symphony’s recent performance came from Vol. 2 which covered the years he was preparing the work for its first performances. Even though it had tons of information about it, the time period it was composed in was covered in Vol. 1 which I didn’t have and couldn’t find. Curious about it, I began looking around to see what I could.

I knew that La Grange wrote a one-volume biography published in the early-70s in French which he then expanded into a three-volume work that was never translated from the French. This in turn was further expanded into the four-volume set which began appearing during the 1990s. Oddly enough, I was unable to track down any on-line sales for Vol. 1 of the four – and the original one-volume work was out-of-print. It turns out that Vol. 1-of-4 has not yet been released, despite the three later volumes’ availability. Somewhere, a commentator who referenced the initial 1973 volume advised anybody interested in a “complete” Mahler set by La Grange (who is now 87) to snap this one up “just in case.”

There were things about Mahler’s musical style – or his attitudes about his musical aesthetic – that I was curious about which would only have been discussed in those pages covering his student years. These are very rarely mentioned in what material I’ve read about Mahler where it seems his 1st Symphony (prefaced by the early ‘cantata / song-cycle’ “Das Klagende Lied”) appeared largely through some form of parthenogenesis.

I was also curious about his relationship with fellow-student Hans Rott whose career is easily summarized but tantalizingly lacking in explanation: a brilliant young composer who studied with Bruckner, his 1st (and only) Symphony failed to please, it sounds a lot like Mahler and yet it was composed in 1880, eight years before Mahler began his 1st Symphony. Rott was on the receiving end of some bitter scorn by no less than Johannes Brahms and this apparently proved too much for his delicate psyche: on a train out of Vienna, he threatened a fellow passenger with a revolver when he tried lighting a cigar because he was convinced Brahms had loaded the train with dynamite in order to destroy him. He was taken off the train, put in an asylum and diagnosed with “insanity, hallucinatory persecution mania” and where he died of typhoid before he was 25 years old.

Aside from a single reference to Rott and his Symphony in La Grange’s second volume, I wanted to see what more information there might be about Mahler’s association with Rott when they were students. This would presumably be covered in the first volume of La Grange’s work.

(I’ll write more about Mahler & Hans Rott in a subsequent post.)

Having located Peter Bartok’s memoir about his father through an InterLibrary Loan, I again contacted my local library, the East Shore Library of the Dauphin County Library System, to see if they could track down the elusive (and difficult to explain) one-volume first edition biography of Mahler by La Grange. Despite trying to distinguish between this and the later four-volume expansion (of which Vol. 1 is not yet available), the book that showed up was Vol. 2 (which I already owned). After more discussions and details in an incredible example of customer service – finally aided by my tracking down a publisher and an ISBN number (d'oh!) – they were able to locate it.

Ironically, it was in the Harrisburg Area Community College Library (not one I would’ve expected to own a copy of it) where it has been signed out twice: once in 1977 and another time in 1992. Apparently there’s not a lot of demand for this book – or anyone who would be interested in it would probably not think to check the HACC Library.

So I now have until June 18th to read through some 982 pages.

And it turns out not to be a complete biography of Mahler later expanded into four – it covers only up to January 1901. And Vol. 2 of the “complete” set begins in May 1897 to September, 1904.

Paging through the initial chapters dealing with the inevitable background on Mahler’s family and his earliest years, I found a few items of interest which I thought I would take time to point out.

(These may not be the only biography in which this material appears in print but, published in English in 1973, it still predates many of the more standard, readily available and often less detailed biographies which have been published since then.)

His first composition, written when he was 6 years old, was entitled Polka with Introductory Funeral March.

To anyone who knows Mahler’s more mature music which is full of references to funeral marches – think the third Movement of his 1st Symphony (with its minor key version of the tune we know as “Frere Jacques”), the huge “funeral games” of the 2nd Symphony’s first movement, passages in the opening of the 3rd Symphony, the opening of the 5th Symphony and even passages of the unfinished 10th Symphony which were inspired by hearing a passing funeral procession for a slain policeman in New York City – much less his frequent mixing of the deeply tragic with almost banal vulgarity (particularly in the first movements of the 3rd and 5th Symphonies), and the title of his first piece would surely sound like something Mahler would do.

But at 6 years old?

His musical awareness began quite early, in true prodigy fashion – though Mahler is never thought of as a “prodigy” in the sense Mozart and Mendelssohn were (or we might have been saddled with The Three M’s). As an infant, he would stop crying only when one of his parents would hold him and sing to him; he was able to hum tunes he had heard even before he could stand. There were the darkly sad Slavic cradle songs and gay peasant rounds of Bohemia – and stories like the one told him by a neighbor’s nursemaid called “Das Klagende Lied” which would form the basis of his first major pre-symphonic composition, completed after considerable revision, by the time he was 20 years old.

And he discovered military music. There were barracks down the street and the soldiers often paraded past the Mahler’s house. Once, he ran out of the house and followed behind the parade playing the toy accordion he’d been given for his 3rd birthday. It was only after they’d gone several blocks, into the busy Market Place, when he realized he was lost. Two neighbors recognized him and offered to take him home but “only after he had played to them, on his accordion, his entire repertoire of military music. Seated on a fruit-vendor’s counter, he enchanted a large audience of housewives and passers-by. After this, amidst applause and laughter, he was taken back to his parents…” You could consider this his first “public appearance,” not quite as grand as Mozart’s introduction to the world, but still…

Again, how many “military marches” appear in Mahler’s early symphonies? This is especially important in the 3rd where there is quite a dramatic contest between the March of Pan or Bacchus (as he initially conceived it) and the good burghers who prefer the more vulgar military-style march that forms the first movement’s climactic moments.

Signs of the future conductor and his imperious maestro-ness might be in evidence in another anecdote about one of his first visits to the synagogue, when he interrupted the hymn singing, howling “Be quiet! It’s horrible,” then offering, at the top of his lungs, his own favorite song, “Eits a binkel Kasi” (which unfortunately is not translated in the notes).

(Though other biographies include this anecdote, Norman Lebrecht's "Why Mahler?" mentions it is a bawdy Czech song about a swaying knapsack in a polka rhythm but then he concludes the reference by saying "There is an element of myth-making involved in his narration. He is leaving false trails for future biographers like me, playing us along a line of no return.")

Visiting his maternal grandfather, the 4-year-old Mahler disappeared into the attic where he found a strange box. Opening the lid, he discovered a keyboard that made sounds and on which he found he could play tunes that others in the family recognized. The grandfather gave the boy the old piano, sending it on an oxcart to the Mahler home. The boy then began to have regular piano lessons.

There are stories how he would borrow scores and sheet music from the local library and play them over and over at the piano, even refusing to stop for dinner, entreaties by his sisters and mother ignored until his father's cane proved more persuasive.

When Mahler was 7 or 8, he had his first piano student, a boy a year younger. La Grange writes how the teacher rested his arm on the pupil’s shoulder, palm close to the cheek, all the easier to slap the pupil when he made a mistake. If the pupil continued making the mistake, he was made to write “I must play C-sharp, not C” one hundred times.

Around this time, a neighbor girl asked him “how music is composed.” He told her she should “sit down at the piano and play whatever comes into her head. After noting the principal melodies, she should develop them, improve them, and finally write down the resultant piece of music.”

It may sound obvious to one who composes but not so obvious to one who still regards creativity as a mystery (I couldn’t help thinking, when I found this passage in La Grange, of Monty Python’s infamous “How to Make a Rat Tart” skit which enumerates in excruciating detail how you would kill the rat “and then bake it into a tart,” end of story). Still, the adult Mahler recalled this story and said “These instructions that I gave at the age of 8 are followed by most composers all their lives!”

Many of these anecdotes were told to his friend, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, whom I wrote about in my post on the 3rd Symphony. She was a frequent guest of his during his composing holidays and apparently kept voluminous notes in her journals about her conversations with him.

Another famous anecdote was something he told Sigmund Freud when he visited the psychiatrist in Vienna in 1910 when he was 50. Mahler’s father was an often violent man who could be very strict and abusive, especially toward his wife. During a particularly brutal quarrel, Mahler fled from the house when he ran into a street musician playing Ach, du lieber Augustin on a barrel organ.

Much has been made of this story and it is often dismissed by many writers, those who believe such experiences have nothing to do with an artist’s art. But Mahler himself considered it why, when “a moment of deep emotional creation carried him to the heights,” he would suddenly find one of these banal street songs stuck in his head.

This kind of juxtaposition, so shocking to his contemporaries, was one of the hallmarks of his style, perhaps heralding a more psychological approach to the creative mind. La Grange says, whether conscious or unconscious, “these ‘quotations’… opened a new chapter in musical history, and were the forerunners of neoclassicism in early-20th Century music,” though I’m tempted to think of it as more a precedent for the deeper psychological explorations of early-20th Century’s expressionism, more of an antithesis of 20th Century neoclassicism.

Remember Arnold Schoenberg’s 2nd String Quartet, famous for its use of the soprano voice added in the last two movements, a work that progresses from its loose hold on tonality into what is generally considered the first example of atonal music? Much of it was composed during a particularly emotional phase of Schoenberg’s private life, the discovery of his wife’s affair with the painter Richard Gerstl who would be their summer guest at the time he was completing the quartet. There’s a disturbing and usually inexplicable moment when, in the midst of all this harmonic turmoil as the familiar world is on the brink of being thrown over into the unfamiliar, Schoenberg suddenly quotes a banal nursery song which comes in quite unexpectedly and without apparent preparation – Ach, du lieber Augustin.

Was he familiar with Mahler’s anecdote? They were at times acquaintances, even friends – perhaps Schoenberg had heard him talk about this one time and it left an impression on him. After all, Mahler’s music is full of such contrasts, though not such explicit quotations. Was this Schoenberg’s way of expressing his own deeper personal conflict or applying a “third-person experience” to mitigate the trauma?

Another of Mahler’s childhood recollections regards his day-dreaming whether it was to escape his family’s quarrels or find a haven for his creative mind. His father had taken him on a walk in the woods and ordered him to sit on a bench until he was called. Apparently his father forgot about him but as Mahler later told Bauer-Lechner, “ but I did not get tired waiting and remained in my place, without moving and very happy. To everyone’s great amazement I was found in just that way several hours later.”

Immediately, certain sections of his early symphonies come to my mind – the long scenes of unfolding nature in the bird calls of both the 1st and 2nd Symphonies (which an impatient friend of mine referred to as “Sleepers, Sleep” as opposed to “Sleepers, Awake”) and the long post-horn solos in the third movement of the 3rd Symphony, incredible moments of suspended animation in the midst of the dance that Mahler himself described as being like “nature looking at us and sticking out its tongue.”

Perhaps such awareness of nature and its depiction in music would only have been possible to the mind of a child enraptured by spending hours sitting on a bench in the woods, oblivious to the reality around him, the bustle of the market and the military barracks of the town and of the family life with its quarrels and constant grief over the deaths of his little brothers and sisters (eight of the Mahlers’ fourteen children did not survive childhood).

There is one photograph that survives from Mahler’s childhood, a fairly famous one. He was five or six years old and looks terrified, standing beside a chair and holding a musical score. Now, any child, especially one placed before the contraptions of a photographer in 1866 or so, given the pan with its chemical flash, might be excused for looking terrified. But Natalie Bauer-Lechner writes how young Gustav was convinced he would be subjected to some form of enchantment where he would be transformed, stuck to a piece of paper forever. He would only allow it after he saw his father being photographed first and how “he walked away unharmed from the terrifying machine that [Mahler then] allowed himself to be photographed as well.”

And so far, that covers just twelve pages of La Grange’s text – only 933 more to go…

- Dick Strawser

The Difficult: Thinking about Roger Sessions & Johannes Brahms

2011-05-18T19:20:00.008-04:00

Last week, I snatched up a copy of Frederik Prausnitz’s biography of Roger Sessions, subtitled “How a ‘Difficult’ Composer Got That Way.” It was published in 2002, so it’s not like it’s an old book and hard to find – it hadn’t crossed my radar yet, not likely to show up in your typical American bookstore or public library shelf. I found it at an independent book-seller in uptown Harrisburg called “The Mid-Town Scholar” which has a pretty decent music collection among its used books.

(One of the things I like about the store is that, 56 years ago, my dad was getting this converted movie theater ready as a new clothing store called “The Boston Store,” helping to turn the area around the Broad Street Market into the Uptown Business District. Today would be my dad’s 93rd birthday, as it happens.)

Now, Roger Sessions is a composer I’ve always been fond of but, like many American classical music lovers, I was never really familiar with his music. Much of that is because of this “difficulty,” though that hasn’t stopped me with other composers. I own several CDs of Sessions’ music – symphonies, some piano pieces, the piano concerto – and when I was teaching at the University of Connecticut, I took a caravan of students up to Boston to see the American premiere of his opera Montezuma with Sarah Caldwell and her Boston Opera. But for some reason, he's never been high on my listening list.

So finding something that was a biography that might shed some technical light on the details of his style, especially the evolution of that style, was a must-purchase no-brainer for me (and fortunately at a price that fit within my limited budget). I look forward to getting into it in the next few weeks.

How a composer composes is something I find fascinating. I’m not even sure I know how I compose, but reading the thoughts about other composers, about how their creativity works, is something both informative and comforting: usually, when I try to analyze my own process, I can only presume this is how it works for others, so it is reassuring to find other composers who appear to think the same way or present a different process – which in turn might shed some light on how the great composers of the past dealt with their creativity. One can only assume so much, looking at or listening to their music: unless they’ve specifically written something somewhere, there is nothing to prove your assumption.

This was something on my mind a lot, the past few weeks, listening to Brahms’ 1st Symphony as the Harrisburg Symphony was getting it ready for their last concert of the season last week. I have heard this work many times – even listened to it several of those times – and I am constantly amazed by at least one thing: not that it took him so long to complete it (he spent 24 years working on his first attempt at a first symphony, 14 of which were spent actually working on what would become his 1st Symphony), but that it sounds like such a unified work from beginning to end, you would have no idea he was 29 years old when he started the first movement and 43 when he completed the last movement.

In his preconcert talk, conductor Stuart Malina mentioned how much of the thematic material throughout the symphony is based on certain note-patterns – mostly thirds (either as specific intervals or as melodic outlines) and half-step lower- or upper-neighboring tones – often used beneath the surface level of the melodic material. Whether this was something conscious in Brahms’ composing the piece – even on the installment plan – one can only guess: not only did Brahms notoriously destroy his sketches and rough drafts, he never really said much about how he composed and certainly never wrote articles for music periodicals or gave interviews to people asking questions like “So, tell us, Johannes, how did you come up with that theme in the first movement?” Unlike Olivier Messiaen, he never wrote something called “My Musical Language.”

(That’s why his talking about such general aspects of his creative process with a student, George Henschel, who wrote them down for posterity, is so important. You can read a post about those comments he'd made the summer he was completing the 1st Symphony, here.)

That the interval of the third was structurally important to Brahms is obvious – look at the opening of the 4th Symphony for perhaps his most famous example, and how chains of thirds ‘inform’ the late piano Intermezzo, Op. 119, No. 1 or the third of the Four Serious Songs – but is it coincidental the key scheme of his 1st Symphony is also based on thirds?

The first movement is in C Minor, the second is in E Major, the third is in A-flat Major and the finale ultimately in C Major. That’s a series of rising 3rds (considering A-flat the same as G-sharp) – I also think of the symmetry of E being a major third above C and A-flat being a major third below C – same difference.

Is that significant?

Well, Brahms did it elsewhere. The Third Piano Quartet in C Minor – which, along with the C Minor String quartet, was another work that was slowly gestating along with the C Minor Symphony – begins with two movements in C Minor, followed by a gorgeous Andante in E Major – and, not surprisingly, with a melodic chain of descending thirds: G-sharp – E – C-natural – A resolving to G-sharp , a melodic sequence that also gives the movement its peculiarly haunting harmonic sound.

But he also does this in two works completed shortly after finishing the 1st Symphony. In his 2nd Symphony, the 1st Movement in D Major is followed by an Adagio in B Major (a minor third down) which is in turn followed by an intermezzo in G Major (a major third down), before returning to D Major. The Violin Concerto’s luminous Adagio – his calling it a “wretched little adagio” is more self-deprecating humor than his actual assessment of the piece – is in F Major, a minor third above the home key of D Major.

Standard Procedure in the late-18th Century was for contrasting movements to be in “closely related” keys. The second movement of a work in the white rat, garden variety key of C Major, for instance, could be in the dominant or subdominant major or relative minor – in other words, G or F Major or A Minor. A work in C Minor would normally have a contrasting second movement in the relative major, or E-flat Major (same key signature, but different pitch as the tonic). The third movement would usually be in the home tonic.

Only later did composers try to find more variety in their options. Beethoven, in his 3rd Piano Concerto which is in C Minor, writes his slow movement not in E-flat Major as you’d expect, but in E Major. It’s a much brighter sounding key and while the switch from the pitch E-flat of the ‘darker’ minor key to an E-natural implying a ‘brighter’ major key is one thing, but the switch from the dominant pitch G to the G-sharp of an E Major chord is one of those emotional frissons when listeners probably sat up and went, “what? ”

And Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto is a work that Brahms performed and especially liked. It served as a model for his 1st Piano Concerto – a work that began as his first attempt at a first symphony, by the way.

That this scheme of thirds – either in the melodic writing or in the overall key scheme of the complete work – is not original doesn’t make it any less interesting. It’s what helps make the work sound a little different from the ordinary. A lesser composer would have written the 2nd movement in the expected E-flat Major, the 3rd movement most likely in G, a key scheme spelling out, after all, a C Minor triad. And while it also helps make it sound more like Brahms than that theoretical lesser composer (who could never have written a 1st movement like that in the first place), it also helps make the symphony more of a whole, whether we realize it consciously or not.

It is one of those moments where the brain, seriously engaged or not, is still given something to savor as the heart enjoys the overall surface of the work.

This underlying logic is one of the reasons Brahms was considered, in his day, a “difficult” composer. In an age when Wagner and Liszt were writing more dissonant or more harmonically adventuresome music “for the future,” Brahms’ music sounds more academic, not just because he wrote in old-fashioned forms like variations and fugues. Even if he isn’t using outright fugues in his 1st Symphony, its heavy reliance on counterpoint and the frequent use of contrary motion between melody and bass was usually dismissed as “academic,” things one learns in school to help your craft but which you jettison as soon as you arrive in the real world.

Because he wasn’t writing operas or using the symphony to tell involved dramatic stories like Liszt’s “Faust” Symphony or even implied stories like Tchaikovsky in his 4th, 5th and 6th Symphonies, Brahms was considered an abstract “classicist” in an emotional, “romantic” age, despite the passion in his music – is anything more passionate-sounding than the first movement of this 1st Symphony?

Curiously, it is Brahms’ reliance on technical control – the fine structural, often imperceptible details exhibited even in the short piano pieces written at the end of his career – that proved more important to a composer like Arnold Schoenberg who, after following the harmonic evolution from Wagner’s chromaticism to its inevitable dissolution of tonality altogether, decided he needed more of a “system” to wrap his musical ideas around, curiously finding inspiration in “Brahms the Progressive” as he invented something called “serialism” (more correctly a “system of composing with twelve tones”) which is only a neo-classical way of looking for something different from but comparable to the systematic rules we learn in theory classes that comprise what we call “tonality.”

And I can’t think of a composer more maligned for being “difficult” than Arnold Schoenberg.

Prausnitz uses a quotation of Sessions’ as an epigram for his biography’s preface:

“Every composer whose music seems difficult to grasp is, as long as the difficulty persists, suspected or accused of composing with his brain rather than his heart – as if one could function without the other.”

The same is true of Elliott Carter and Arnold Schoenberg, composers whose music is usually dismissed as requiring too much work to listen to and is too different from what we’re familiar with to warrant serious attention.

But the same was true of Brahms, a composer who you’d think had gained a certain amount of self-reliance after coming to terms with writing a symphony after Beethoven, yet following the reaction to his 4th Symphony was still insecure enough to destroy at least two more symphonic works, one far enough along to have played it for a test-drive with his friends!

The key to Sessions’ comment, written (I suspect) in the 1950s, is that “as long as the difficulty persists.”

Perhaps there will come a time when Schoenberg and Carter’s music – as well as Sessions’ – will be accepted on its own terms, and the negativity, like that which pursued Brahms as well as Beethoven and, most certainly, Bach, will have been forgotten.

- Dick Strawser

Notes from the Hypocracy

2011-05-13T14:43:00.006-04:00

I don’t often bother getting into political issues, either on Facebook or on my blog, but I was checking out a friend’s blog and saw this story:

“Author Chris Rodda reported today (03/30/2011) that potential presidential contender Mike Huckabee, in a speech at the Rediscover God in America conference held in Iowa last week, stated his wish that all Americans should be forced, at gunpoint if necessary, to listen to the lectures delivered by pseudo-historian David Barton.”

My first reaction to this kind of statement was wondering, “Aren’t these the same people who oppose Obama's Health Care Reform" (which several Republican states’ attorneys general have filed suit against) "because it requires everyone in the country to have health insurance” which they feel is unconstitutional?

Was there any outrage among Huckabee's audience of fellow Republicans and pastors about the unconstitutionality of such an idea in the mouth of a past and likely future Presidential candidate?

So it’s okay to think – and should Huckabee be elected, perhaps likely initiating the proceedings – that everyone in the country should be required to listen to one person’s opinion at gunpoint, no less!

[UPDATE 5/16/2011: according to the New York Times, Huckabee has decided not to run for President, after all! And La Donald won't have to hear those dreaded words You're fired on election day. Two down...]

Another post today also got me thinking, in a slightly different direction. I haven’t been following the news – mostly because so much of it has been about the killing of bin Laden or the civil war in Libya, even displacing reports of the once ubiquitous Japanese nuclear nightmare that everyone seems to have forgotten.

But a friend on Facebook posted this link about the recently resigned Senator John Ensign, the “respected gentleman from Nevada” (or whatever formulas United States Senators use in recognizing their colleagues on the floor during debate) proving that, alas, not everything that happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

This, of course, from one of the supporters of the Defense of Marriage amendment…

And isn’t this the guy who once called on President Clinton to resign after admitting an affair with Monica Lewinsky because “he has no credibility left”?

Yet Ensign didn’t resign until May 2011, despite interventions by his “spiritual adviser” and various colleagues for an affair that was raging (so to speak) between 2007 and 2008 and which he publicly acknowledged in a press conference in June, 2009? This past March, he announced he would not seek reelection in 2012, fearing an ugly campaign.

"’At this point in my life, I have to put my family first,’ Ensign told reporters at a news conference in Las Vegas.”

This may have been something he should’ve thought about in 2007 when he started pursuing his friend and staffer’s wife.

(I don’t think the Ten Commandments says anything about coveting staffers’ wives, but I’m pretty sure it says something about coveting your “neighbor’s wife” whether they were next door neighbors or not (they did, however, live in the same gated community which proves that even elite neighborhoods like that don’t always protect you against everything). It also seems there was enough reason to include the "neighbor's wife" one along with a whole separate commandment regarding adultery in general.)

And he resigns now, only because he is being investigated in the Senate for “ethics violations.”

It’s not the affair that bothers me – except the woman with whom he was having the affair claims that she gave in only because his persistence wore her down – but the hypocrisy: not just his calling for Clinton’s resignation or his support of the “Defense of Marriage” Bill (which I think, if you're trying to protect the institution of marriage, ought to at least make adultery a punishable offense) but for his sheer stupidity, that he was unable to control himself against the advice and awareness of his cuckolded staffer, his “spiritual adviser” and various, presumably respected friends and colleagues, all advising him to stop the affair.

Yet he would not, perhaps even could not.

Perhaps, in the 2012 election for the Senate seat he just resigned from, John Ensign’s penis (whom the former Senator appears to be describing in the photo at right) can run in his place?

After all, if the Supreme Court decided last year that corporations have the right, like individuals, to make campaign contributions and that campaign reform was violating their right to free speech, couldn’t a man’s penis – especially one which has so clearly demonstrated having a mind of its own – run for elected office?

And he's certainly produced sufficient evidence he can be quite persuasive, if not outright charming, no doubt reasonable qualities in an elected official.

(Update: And this, about how the blood spatter from Ensign's unfolding scandal - particularly the cover-up and arranging of hush-money payments - might affect Republicans Senator Tom Coburn and former Pennsylvania Senator and Presidential ever-hopeful Rick Santorum. so there's a silver lining, after all!)

Well, enough senseless meditations for today – I’m now going to get back to work on my parody-update of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose.”

- Dick [sic] Strawser

A Trio, a "Lost Chord" and Lots of Brahms

2011-05-10T18:13:00.001-04:00

It’s been busy, here, at Dr. Dick Central – while I’m still finishing up editing a complete novel, “The Doomsday Symphony” (all 130,000 words of it), I’ve already begun working out some details to begin a new one. Well, not exactly “new” – it’s going to be a complete rewriting of one I completed last year, “The Lost Chord” (all 188,000+ words of it), a parody of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol.”

I’ll get into why and how I’m going to revise it – no, ‘revise’ is too polite a word for what will be a complete overhaul, starting over, basically, from scratch – at a later time, but basically, since I wasn’t as satisfied with Brown’s novel as I was with “The Da Vinci Code” (and I’m still very pleased with my parody, “The Schoenberg Code”), I found myself less than satisfied with my take-off on it, to the point I want to salvage what I can from the characters and many of the scenes, then implant them into a whole new plot which, rather than being a parody of Brown, becomes a parody of the genre, instead.

In addition to that, I’ve started composing again, much to my surprise. It’d been bothering me that it’s been a year since I completed (but not yet finished copying) the seven songs of the cycle, “The Other Side of Air” with no new work anywhere near a back burner.

True, writing a novel might constitute as an excuse for that, but still…

At some point around last Christmas, I jotted down a few ideas for what might become a piano sonata. At the end of April, I got those out to see what I might be able to do with them. It had also occurred to me, if for nothing more than an exercise in keeping the creative muscles moving – a form of exercise – I might transcribe one or two of the songs into... I don't know - a piano trio?

In a few minutes, I was jotting down some new ideas – not for a piano sonata or a song transcription, but for a piano trio. Fifteen minutes earlier, I hadn't even thought of writing a 'real' piano trio...

On May 2nd, I began actual composition on it and in a few days had written most of the first minute of it (it took over 27 hours, by the way, to get that much composed). But then I woke up one morning thinking “ya know, the main motive of this trio sounds awfully familiar,” like I’d written it before. In fact, I had – it was the generating force behind the String Quartet completed in 2003 which also was significant in the Symphony composed subsequently which was based on the same framework (if not the same material). While that wasn’t an “arrangement” of the quartet, I didn’t want this new piece to become “The Piano Trio Version of the String Quartet .” I mean, really…

So I decided to scratch the sketches and start over.

By the next day, I had fashioned a different six-note motive which, though not as dramatic an opening, actually turned out to be more “pregnant,” more filled with potential and found, since the structure I had planned originally was still usable, I could basically plug new notes into the old rhythms and phrases, though it hasn’t turned out to be quite that easy. Plus I found a few spots – even in only the first 17 measures – that could be tweaked a little better.

After all, better now than realizing all this 170 measures into the piece and having to start over again, right?

Curiously, I find the piece is now much better. Funny how things work like that.

I’ve also been blogging about Brahms for the Harrisburg Symphony Blog. Their concert this weekend is called “Brahms Brahms Brahms” and while I joke about calling it “Brahms Cubed” (“Brahms in Triplicate” sounds too bureaucratic), it offers me – as a writer about music – an opportunity to spill the cyber-equivalent of much ink about it.

The First Symphony post is a transcription of my pre-concert talk from several seasons ago, examining what was going on in Brahms' life as he tried to write that first symphony. Curiously, I'd also posted about some comments Brahms had made to a friend of his, the closest thing we've come to Brahms talking about his "creative process" which this friend was kind enough to write down.

This morning, Stuart and I got together to record a podcast, chatting about the program. You can hear that on this post at the Symphony Blog, one of a series of podcasts or video-chats we’d tried to do for each concert (pending the reality of schedules).

This afternoon, I added a post about the Violin Concerto, too, which Odin Rathnam will play with the orchestra, celebrating his 20th season as concertmaster of the orchestra. The post includes three different performances, videos embedded with legendary performers Henryk Szeryng, Jascha Heifetz and David Oistrakh, each playing one movement of the concerto. That in itself was a lot of fun.

There’s also the realization that – jeez – even a composer like Brahms has his moments with self-reliance: it took him over 20 years to complete his first symphony (and 14 of those years on the work that became his 1st Symphony and then in a burst of creative energy, he completed a second symphony and this violin concerto in the same of two more years.

But the Violin Concerto – regardless how we think of it today – did not go over well (yes, Vienna loved it, but it only received due recognition after Brahms died) and Brahms scrapped his plans for a second violin concerto. When some of his friends, a kind of creative advisory board and support group, were unable to find any enthusiasm for his 4th Symphony and the Double Concerto, he also scrapped sketches he’d had for a second “double concerto” and a 5th Symphony – apparently far enough along he could play it as a piano duet for his friends – as well as another symphony (a new one or a revisiting of the ill-fated 5th?). It makes you wonder what happened to the self-reliance he’d discovered after having finally finishing that 1st Symphony – after the Double Concerto, Brahms clearly went into a creative slide (I’d hesitate to call anything that could produce those last chamber music pieces a “slump”) but he decided to write no more orchestral works. And the Double Concerto was written only 11 years after he completed the 1st Symphony – that’s not a long time, when you consider Brahms’ stature in the world!

It’s made me think about the delicate balance that is creativity and how, even with Brahms’ obvious craft and genius, he could still fall prey to self-doubts.

Part of the reworking of “The Lost Chord” is to set it at a combination writer’s colony and clinic where the hero of “The Doomsday Symphony,” Dr. T.R. Cranleigh, runs into three composers on a mission.

One is a very systematic composer (perhaps a serialist) who is trying to discover how to bring more emotion into his music.

A more emotionally-oriented composer who relies on inspiration rather than craft is trying to find something intellectual he can use to build a stronger framework for his music, so it has more to offer than just "sound-appeal."

And the third composer is searching for the courage of his own convictions to continue being a composer, almost afraid to commit to putting anything down on paper. He hopes to overcome his doubts and fears, the negativity of critics and well-meaning friends and teachers, to write the kind of music he wants to write.

So, yes, one is looking for a heart, the other is looking for a brain and the third is looking for some courage.

And not only do I have to come up with names for them, I have to find a name for the little dog, too…

- Dick Strawser

Brahms' First: Years in the Making

2011-04-28T21:45:00.004-04:00

This post about Brahms' 1st Symphony is a transcript of a pre-concert talk of mine from several seasons ago. For more about the composer talking about his creative process at the time he completed the symphony, check out this post at the Harrisburg Symphony Blog.

The Harrisburg Symphony, conducted by Stuart Malina, performs Brahms 1st at their next Masterworks Concerts – May 14th & 15th at the Forum. Also on the program, Brahms' Violin Concerto with concertmaster Odin Rathnam celebrating his 20th season as the orchestra's concertmaster and a little something called “Brahms Fan-Fare” by Stuart Malina who always considers himself a Brahms Fan.
- - - - -

On a bright February day, Robert Schumann jumped into the Rhine, a suicide attempt that became his last public act before being taken away to an asylum. A few days later, Johannes Brahms jotted down a musical idea in his notebook, the opening of a new symphony.

In an article called “New Paths,” Schumann, a composer and writer about music, declared Johannes Brahms the heir to Beethoven, anointing him the Musical Messiah for the future of Classical Music.

Brahms, a short man with long blondish hair, boyish looks and a voice barely changed, long before he grew that famous beard, was 20.

He’d appeared on Schumann’s doorstep the previous September to play some of his piano music for him but after he’d started to play, Schumann tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Wait a moment, my wife must hear you.” And that was how Brahms met one of the greatest pianists of the day.

That month, Clara Schumann turned 34.

And so the long association with the Schumann family began, though unfortunately it was too late for Robert to teach him how to become the Musical Messiah: five months later, Schumann would be taken to the asylum where he would remain the last two years of his life. Clara, a few months away from giving birth to her eighth child, needed to increase her concert schedule to bring in much needed money, so their new friend Brahms stayed home to help raise the children, including their 9-year-old daughter Julie.

Meanwhile, that first sketch of a symphony just wouldn’t turn itself into one: he even had a dream where he was playing it as a piano concerto. The ideas for a second movement scherzo, dropped from the concerto, were later used in the German Requiem and he wrote a whole new finale in the Hungarian style. The whole process of conversion to completion into the Piano Concerto in D Minor took three years. It was not long after Schumann’s death that Brahms realized he was in love with Clara and decided this relationship had to end. Clara wrote a letter after seeing Brahms off to the train station, feeling as if she’d been to two funerals in three months.

Brahms then worked briefly with a women’s chorus in his hometown of Hamburg. When he fell in love with one of the women in the choir, he wrote a happy chorus called “Bride’s Song” but when he broke off that relationship, he wrote a companion “Grave Song” full of dire thoughts about Fate. The symphony sketch that became his 1st Piano Concerto started off with a dramatic roll on the kettledrums, but in the new “Grave Song,” it became relentlessly pounding kettledrums.

Not long after this, Brahms asked his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, to send him some large-sized manuscript paper because he was starting to work on a symphony again: this time, what had started out as chamber music for winds and strings was going to be turned into a symphony, but shortly afterward he changed his mind: “If in these days after Beethoven you presume to write a symphony, they’d better look entirely different!” The original manuscript called it a Symphony-Serenade before he crossed out the word “Symphony.” It became his 1st Serenade in D Major, a chance to practice his skills at writing for orchestra on something less substantial than a full-blown symphony.

Brahms was 25.

Meanwhile, Wagner and Liszt were championing the “New Music” which Brahms thought would send music into the “manure pit.” This didn’t earn him any points with contemporary composers who were still waiting to see what Schumann’s Anointed was going to produce. And so he began a third attempt at a symphony under this cloud. Meanwhile, a Viennese critic, examining the few pieces Brahms had produced so far, wrote that rather than looking back to Beethoven and Schubert (whose Unfinished Symphony hadn’t surfaced yet) – composers who’d been dead only thirty years – he was looking back to earlier centuries for inspiration from Bach (only recently rediscovered) and the Renaissance (virtually unknown to the general public). He would create something new by learning from the old. Followers of the New Music thought this silly.

Now friends again with Clara Schumann, Brahms sketched a number of chamber works one summer, continuing to work on the opening movement of a symphony “from previous sketches,” sending her a copy of the rough draft by July 1st. This is essentially the first movement of the 1st Symphony as we know it, but without the famous introduction. It was finale that was the real thorn. When Joachim heard about it, he hoped to be able to give the premiere that October. Little did he know it wouldn’t be 14 weeks but 14 years before it would be finished. There was also an F Minor String Quintet that didn’t seem just right, so he put it back in the oven.

Brahms was now 29.

He hoped to get the conductorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic. He’d just gone to Vienna when a letter reached him that in he fact he did not get the job. If he had, he might have had a use for that symphony, but still, why did it take so long to actually finish it? But in Vienna, he could walk the places were, only 35 years earlier, Beethoven had walked. When his G Minor Piano Quartet was played at the home where Mozart had composed “The Marriage of Figaro,” one of the musicians said “Here is the heir of Beethoven.”

Brahms was now 30.

Meanwhile, many things were happening: his parents separated and then his mother died, he wrote “A German Requiem” and he was turned down a second time for the conducting post in Hamburg. The String Quintet became a sonata for two pianos. Clara found him insufferable and often dis-invited him to dinners, and she’d wonder why he wrote all these dark, depressing pieces. Perhaps at 34, he felt he was too old to have his career ahead of him (at that age, Beethoven had composed his “Eroica” and Schubert was already dead 3 years). She suggested maybe he should get married: little did she know he was already in love – with her daughter, Julie.

Brahms suggested Clara should move to Vienna and perhaps spend less time concertizing – like she was doing this for fun? She needed the money and now two of her children were ill. Their friendship cooled once again. The 2-Piano Sonata which Clara said begged to be orchestrated was turned into the F Minor Piano Quintet. Then came the premiere of the German Requiem which left Clara in tears: here, she felt, was the realization of the promise her husband had seen 14 years earlier! After the performance, they quarreled and parted with more tears.

There was an old piano quartet in C-sharp Minor he’d never finished, the first one he’d started back when he was first in love with Clara; he started work on it again, changing it to that dramatic key of C Minor. And he wrote two melodies – a song better known as Brahms’ Lullaby composed for an old-girlfriend-now-married-with-her-first-child (in the accompaniment, he quotes a Viennese waltz she’d sung to him back in the days they were friends, so while she’s singing a love-song to her baby, another love-song is being sung to her). The other was scribbled down on a postcard from Switzerland, supposedly an old alp-horn tune he’d heard to which he added these words: “High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you a thousand times!” This became the melody that would soar out in the horn over shimmering strings once the last movement of the C Minor Symphony succeeded in struggling through its opening turmoil, allowing the finale to unfold its great hymn.

And the melody worked its magic on Clara – they were friends again, he visited the family, began the Love-Song Waltzes for four voices and piano duet, all about young love, shy to build: Clara wondered who the young girl was that inspired these delightful tunes? Then, a few days after his 36th birthday, she told Brahms some great news – Julie was engaged to marry an Italian count! She had no idea why Brahms, struck speechless, just ran out of the house. Then it hit her who the young girl was behind the “Liebeslieder Waltzes.” No one had any idea. Brahms was devastated and the rest of the waltz-songs changed mood, now focusing on jilted love and broken vows. He wrote his bitterest piece, the “Alto Rhapsody” which he dubbed his “Bridal Song,” a grueling battle with grief and despair. He vowed he would never marry.

Settling into a new apartment where he ended up spending the remaining 24 years of his life (eventually, he would die there), his routine was now fixed: up early, strong coffee, walking, then working or loafing. The piano was the focus of this small apartment, with its huge bust of Beethoven in the corner. He worked things out in his head rather than through laborious drafts like Beethoven. He was a great believer in walking and his carpet was well-worn with his constant pacing. Friends who listened at the door to hear if he were busy would not hear much when he was – a few notes at the piano, some humming, footsteps. Brahms had said a composer’s most valuable piece of furniture was a wastebasket: when he was done with a piece, he burned all the sketches.

He toyed with the idea of writing an opera – on the fairy tale that became “The Love for Three Oranges” which Prokofiev would later use; another was about gold prospectors in California! – but he decided, like marriage, opera was something he would never try, either. In 1873, he wrote a set of variations for two pianos based on a theme Haydn had used and before he’d finished them two months later he realized they needed to be re-worked for orchestra. His next work was not a symphony but a string quartet, one he’d started working on 20 years earlier – also in the dramatic key of C Minor. He said he had written enough music for twenty quartets before he’d finished one.

Brahms was now 40.

Then the stock market crashed and Vienna was hit hard. He had success, though, with three new works – the Haydn Variations and two string quartets. Now he decided it was time to pick up the symphony... but the C Minor Piano Quartet intervened, the third time around. In it, he’d used a theme based on what Schumann called his “Clara Theme,” a musical depiction of the letters of her name. Clara never liked this first movement, finding it too dark and depressing. Brahms wrote to friends hinting it was inspired by Goethe’s “Werther,” about a man, in love with another man’s wife, who commits suicide by shooting himself with a pistol borrowed from her husband. He told a friend he was working on “highly useless pieces in order not to have to look into the stern face of a symphony.” That summer he took a vacation by the Baltic Sea and by the end of August had completed the last movement of the symphony that had first come to him 22 years earlier and whose first movement he’d completed 14 years before. Once he’d figured out what to do with that finale, it took him a few summer months to complete it.

Rather than starting with the dramatic rolling of the kettledrums as it had first started, the symphony now began with relentless fate-like treading of the drums, later incorporating into its first theme one of the rhythmic motives from Beethoven’s 5th with its “Fate-Knocks-at-the-Door” motive as it appeared in the scherzo (the triplet figure, dee-duh-duh DAAH). The final movement began out of the mists like Beethoven’s 9th, searching for a theme before landing on the hymn tune that someone told him sounded just like The Ode to Joy (“any ass can see that,” Brahms responded). What most people didn’t see was where the opening idea of that theme may have came from.

Remember Schumann’s “Clara Theme”? C - B - A - G# - A (in the key of A Minor) with the G# standing in for the R, and the B – or as the Germans called it, “H” (since “Chiara” was Italian for Clara, meaning “bright”) for the L. Schumann often crafted themes like this through a “secret alphabet.” When Brahms was in love with a girl named Agathe, he buried his love for her in his G Major String Sextet by spelling out her name in the melody (minus the T) which he answered with A-D-E, German for “farewell.” It was just a personal association, not that the listener should hear it, necessarily.

Back to the C Minor Symphony’s finale. In the searching violin not-yet-a-theme peering over the mists, he writes C - B - C - A-flat which in C Minor resolves to the G (A-flat on the piano is the same note as G-sharp which should resolve into A Minor). Now look at the “Clara Theme” above. He wouldn’t quote it outright, necessarily, but it’s characteristic of the way Brahms might alter a theme, switching notes around as it evolves. This is then followed by that great alp-horn tune he’d sent to Clara on a postcard seven years before, greeting her a thousand times. A conscious personal association? When it finally resolves to that great Beethoven-like hymn, the tune, now firmly in C Major, is C - B - C - A - G.

Perhaps in addition to having to deal with the ghost of Beethoven in his first symphony, he also needed to deal with the ghost of Clara?

Brahms was now 43. And two years later, after finishing his 2nd Symphony and the Violin Concerto, he grew his beard.

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- Dick Strawser