Musical America Blogs

By James Conlon

As readers of Musical America may know, I have long been an advocate for the works of composers whose lives and musical legacies were damaged through their suppression by the Third Reich.  Last month this mission experienced a moment of great promise with the announcement of a gift of $1 million from Los Angeles philanthropist Marilyn Ziering to establish The Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at The Colburn School.  I am as much honored by this gift as thrilled to collaborate with a first-rate conservatory. Marilyn Ziering’s generosity and commitment to this cause has made me even more determined to bring the music and personal histories of these composers into greater focus for an emerging generation of musicians.

The name “Recovered Voices” may be familiar to some.  This is the term we have used at LA Opera (and subsequently elsewhere) for the works I have programmed by Viktor Ullmann, Alexander Zemlinsky, Walter Braunfels, Franz Schreker and others.  At the Ravinia Festival, we have used the term “Breaking the Silence.”  Mrs. Ziering is particularly keen on the name “Recovered Voices” (having generously underwritten a large portion of LA Opera’s productions), hence its use in connection with L.A.’s Colburn School.

This Initiative reflects the commitment of one of America’s great conservatories to examine the so-called canon—or what we think of as the canon—with eyes and ears open to a different, more complete version of music from the first half of the twentieth century.  For the young artists of The Colburn Conservatory, many of these composers will not remain vague names; they will become fully fleshed-out individuals whose works will be heard, analyzed and evaluated in the same way we have previously heard, analyzed and evaluated the music of other, more fortunate, composers of the era.

The Colburn School has invited me to teach a course one semester each year. It will be offered as an elective to all students and opened to members of the public as well. Thus, both practicing musicians and music lovers can become familiar with an important body of works, which have remained in comparative obscurity since the Second World War.

The School will invite scholars from around the country and the world to convene on campus, starting in August 2014, to discuss the latest research into these composers and their era and to consider wider questions of their history, context and reception.  During the summer of 2015, the School will host a competition for young musicians from across the country to perform chamber music by “Recovered Voices” composers.

In the course of the semester, I hope to inspire students to include some of this music on their recital programs alongside, not separated from, more established works.  My belief is that the students will carry this music with them into the future. Through trial and error, we expect to develop a curriculum that can inspire other conservatories and universities.

Much of this music will find its place in the repertory, but not before the next generation of musicians becomes acquainted with it, and that is the purpose of the Ziering-Conlon Initiative at the ColburnSchool in Los Angeles.

By James Conlon

I had intended to submit this entry on December 15, the day after the terrible events in Newtown, CT. I found it impossible to think about anything else, and felt it was inappropriate, if not disrespectful, to publish it on that day. I have kept it for the New Year and offer it to the reader with my best wishes for 2013.

At the end of my previous entry, I was wandering around the streets of Leipzig and reveling in the cultural riches it has to offer. From Bach to Stockhausen, this city has played a historic role disproportionate to its size, and the Gewandhaus Orchestra can be credited with having kept much of that alive.

The orchestra derives its name from “garment house” and had its first home on the second floor of a commercial center used by merchants to exchange wool and cloth. Mozart performed there once, in 1789. Mendelssohn, who became the first “modern” conductor by insisting on standing in front of the now larger ensemble of musicians and taking the reins from the concertmaster and continuo player, transformed and led the way to the expanded nineteenth-century orchestra. That building saw the world premieres of Schubert’s “Great” C Major, Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” and Schumann’s “Spring” Symphonies. The premiere of the Meistersinger Prelude was shared with Franz Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto played by Hans von Bülow. Later, when the orchestra had long outgrown its home, a new, magnificent “Second” Gewandhaus was opened in 1884. Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss all conducted their own works there; Nikisch, Furtwängler and Walter were among its principal conductors.

In 1878, The Leipzig Opera became the first theater to produce Wagner’s Ring Cycle outside of Bayreuth. Earlier in the 19^th century it was a center for so-called German “Spieloper,” with premieres of Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon, and other important firsts by Marschner, Lortzing and Schumann. In the 20^th century, at times in the avant- garde, with Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel and Ernst Krenek’s groundbreaking “jazz” opera, Jonny spielt auf. Soon after the reunification, two parts of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht were premiered in 1993 and 1996.

I also went to see the house in which the young Erwin Schulhoff lived when he came to study in Leipzig at thirteen years of age. My interest in him and the subject of composers who were suppressed by the Nazis is not unknown, and so I was appreciative in a very personal way that the importance of one of these composers was recognized in a standard tourist guidebook. I cannot remember ever seeing a comparable reference to any other “suppressed” composer anywhere in the world. An entire page was devoted to him, including the address of the building in which he lived. I went to find it, a bit off the beaten path in what now seems to me to be a Russian-speaking neighborhood.

The building is currently being renovated. I took pictures of the construction site (which looks like any other), struggling to master my new iPhone. In its present condition the structure is without poetry, as perhaps befits Schulhoff’s fate in a Bavarian internment camp. But in an illuminating irony, a sign still hangs on a window. It reads: LIVE Guitar-Night, Jazz Session, Rock and Blues Session, Psychedelic Session. EINTRITT FREI (free admission). Almost exactly one hundred years ago, Schulhoff, with his classical education, passionately embraced and promoted jazz as the future of Western Music. He was in the Post World War I avant-garde and spent many a night, often until the crack of dawn, in such tiny establishments.

One might think that Leipzig has enjoyed all of this in a seamless and untroubled atmosphere, but it was not at all so easy. It maintained itself throughout the twentieth century’s turbulent political history. What is perhaps most admirable of all, is that music has remained deeply and firmly ingrained in the culture of this city. We all are aware of the hard economic times we are currently experiencing in our country, and worrying about the future of classical music, and rightly so. But it is nothing compared to what the Leipzigers have experienced in their history. I think we can draw inspiration from their example.

By: James Conlon

The Gewandhaus Orchester was the first to play the Prelude to Die Meistersinger, conducted by the composer, on November 1, 1862. The orchestra traditionally observes important anniversaries of works that were premiered there. The honor (and pleasure) fell to me last week to open the program with the Prelude before moving on to works less familiar to the orchestra and to the public in Leipzig. But even the ten minutes spent in front of one of the oldest and most distinguished “Traditionsorchestern” (as the Germans, with well-deserved pride, refer to them) is enough to drive home the immense value of tradition in the best sense of the word. (More on this subject to come.)

The city’s metamorphosis since the re-unification of Germany is astounding (I had not seen Leipzig since 1985). My afternoons were all free, as German orchestras, who often have two services in a day, usually respect the afternoon as private time. I took advantage of that, and had a week of tourism, which will remain unforgettable.

Leipzig is designated a “Musikstadt,” and it is richly deserving of the name. Of the many famous composers who lived, worked or passed through Leipzig, only Richard Wagner was born there. As was (and still is) characteristic, his relationship to the city, and its relationship to him, was testy and contentious. But standing on the street where he was born, walking upstairs to the second floor of the Nicolaischule, where he was a rebellious student, or to see the “Königshaus,” where his uncle, who had inspired Wagner’s lifelong love of literature, lived and worked, is impressive.

The old center of Leipzig is quite small but boasts an extraordinary wealth of musical history; almost all of it is within walking distance. Within its borders flourished one of the world’s greatest concentrations of compositional genius from the time of the arrival of the young Johann Sebastian Bach up until the 1930s. It is to German Classical Music what Florence is to the Italian Renaissance, a tiny square mile or two that has enriched the Western World as a zenith in cultural history. Between museums, monuments, residences and plaques, you can retrace a trail of composers and musicians equaled perhaps in a few European large capitals, but unsurpassed in a city of these compact dimensions.

Most moving for me was seeing the Thomas and Nicolai Churches, where Johann Sebastian Bach created the bulk of his life’s work. In addition, one can visit the beautiful new Bach Museum (in the house where Bach lived across the street from Thomas Church) with its interactive exhibits. Bach’s presumed remains are marked by a simple bronze plaque in the church. An organist was practicing an impressive piece of Messiaen while I was visiting, a reminder that Leipzig’s rich past was always based on being at the forefront of the “contemporary” music of the time.

Bach (and sons), Edvard Grieg, Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, Clara and Robert Schumann, Georg Philipp Telemann and Richard Wagner, for starters, all lived and worked there for some period of their lives. Composers less familiar to us in America but significant in the history of German music left their mark as well: Hanns Eisler, Albert Lortzing, Heinrich Marschner, and Max Reger. Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz, as well as Wagner and Mendelssohn, visited the Schumanns in a house that is open to the public and is home to a beautiful collection of memorabilia.

There are many bookshops, and in one of them I found something of very special interest. It was a standard tourist guidebook, one devoted exclusively to Leipzig’s musical landmarks. There was one very surprising entry and there will be more to come on that subject next time.

For people who don’t happen to read the Los Angeles Times, I would suggest clicking here for an excellent article posted on October 21 by Neal Gabler. It is headlined, “Hollywood’s perception of value versus real value [my italics]: America emulates Movieland’s way of measuring the worth of things, which teaches us to place the perception of value over value itself.”

Once again Mr. Gabler, with his customary lucidity, has identified an aspect of contemporary American society that needs to be recognized for what it is, questioned and, in my opinion, resisted. The term “valuation” refers to identifying some measurable worth of a film, a director, actor or actress, and accepting that measure as intrinsic value. He writes, “Movie grosses, TV ratings, salaries, lists of the most powerful are all ways that a society sets a valuation on things.” His point is that, through the ubiquitous translation of art and artists’ worth into monetary and commercial terms, we turn the perception and economic rewards of success into our own notion of success.

Hollywood created the film “industry,” which in turn has given us stars and the star system. It has had, and continues to have, a profound influence on our way of thinking. The article’s concluding sentence sums it up: “And so here we are, many of us subscribing to the same measures of worth to which Hollywood has subscribed for years, focusing on creating the perception [again, my emphasis] of worth and leading to a society that may know the valuation of everything and the value of nothing.”

It is not an enormous leap from the collateral damage of Hollywood’s influence on a large portion of our society’s perception (or lack thereof) of “value,” to our comparatively rarified and smaller subculture of classical music. It would be hard for any of us to claim that the phenomenon described above has not significantly impacted the way “our” music, its musicians and its institutions are perceived and promoted. Just as the concentrated listening that classical music requires has been neither nurtured by the media environment nor by education, so have the visual and marketable aspects of music-making claimed increased prominence.

“Value” and “valuation” have many definitions in various disciplines; most of them primarily have to do with identifying an object’s (or a person’s) place in a monetary or commercial hierarchy. However, it seems to me that contemporary humanity commonly uses (and misuses) the words “value” and “values” for various ethical and moral concepts. In the three definitions of “valuation” in my copy of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language: College Edition, only the last one mentions the word “merit;” and one has to get to the seventh of thirteen entries under “value” before any non materialistic dimension is to be found. And here it is:

“That which is desirable or worthy of esteem for its own sake; thing or quality having intrinsic worth.”

Isn’t that characterization fundamental to Western Civilization’s conception of art? And isn’t that why musicians devote their lives to playing the works of Bach and Mozart–because their music has “intrinsic worth”? Don’t the nation’s symphony orchestras exist to keep alive a wealth of music (in the non-monetary sense of the word) that has attained universal recognition, while also providing a forum for new works that will hopefully survive into the future? Are opera houses not there to preserve several discrete traditions of vocalism and theater, some of which were once as popular a form of entertainment as our cinema is today?

Assuming the answer is yes to any or all of these questions, I think it is important to keep our eyes off the bouncing ball of image and attune our ears to the music in music-making. We should take heed of the insidious effects of “valuation” within, and of, the classical arts. We should be capable of recognizing the difference between art and artifice, performance and its promotion, essence and the extraneous. The central distinction between “value” and “valuation” has been keenly scrutinized in Neal Gabler’s article. For anyone interested in the health of our classical music life, it is well worth the five minutes it will take to read and the hours required to digest.

by James Conlon

About a week ago I witnessed a heart-warming spectacle in Rome.

Imagine 750 kids between the ages of five and twelve, screaming, giggling, squealing with delight, singing, dancing while running on and off the stage of a theater. It lasted about an hour and ten minutes in all.  They were grouped together by age and filled almost the entire orchestra level of a theater. The adults are allowed to sit in the back and in the balcony, where the teachers could watch their students from a distance and their parents could videotape freely and take as many photos with their iPhones as their hearts desired.

Sound like a nightmare or a scene from Dante’s Inferno? Not at all.  It was the end of the year performance of a Mozart opera designed for school children. Not just to attend, but, more importantly, to learn and to participate.

Why do I say a Mozart opera? Because I actually attended, on consecutive days, two completely independent projects to introduce and cultivate a love for opera through direct participation that are thriving in Rome. One of them is produced with private and corporate sponsorship, and the other a consortium of government and private sponsors.

On a Friday evening, I attended an abridged version of Don Giovanni, and the following morning, a similar arrangement of The Magic Flute.  The Don Giovanni was produced by the Associazione Musicale Tito Gobbi. Spearheaded by the dynamic personality of the renowned baritone’s daughter Cecilia, it collaborates with schools not just in Rome, but from Umbria and all the way south to Sicily. I serve on its honorary board (mostly from a distance) so I was particularly eager to see the product.  Entitled “Magia dell’Opera” (The Magic of Opera) it defines its mission as that of planting the seeds in the new generation for the creation of future audiences. It is in its eighth season and estimates that more thirty thousand children have experienced this over the years (six to seven thousand this year).

The following morning the Rome Opera, offered its similarly conceived Magic Flute, translated into Italian. Supported by the government, this program has greater means at its disposal. It is now in its seventh year.  In its first year, four hundred students attended.  It gave thirty-four performances over the past several weeks this year and estimates that about seventeen thousand children participated.  That is forty-two times the number of students than at its starting point only a few years ago.

Children’s symphonic concerts are very important, and certainly nothing new in the U.S.  I am also aware that there are outstanding programs offered for young people by many American orchestras and opera companies. But I have never seen anything like this before, and certainly not on the scale of what is going on in Rome.

It operates on the pedagogical principle of “active” education in which the students participate. The performance is the culmination of preparation over the course of several months. A team of instructors first meets with teachers in the schools, providing an instruction book and a recording with excerpts from the opera that the children will actually sing at the performances. They commit these all to memory, just as millions of young people do with popular music. The instruction books, marvelous examples of imagination, provide background, not just about Mozart and the particular opera in question, but the history of the art form from Monteverdi to Shostakovich. There are illustrations of the classical Italian opera theater, pictures with explanation of all the instruments of the orchestra. All of this is interspersed with games, quizzes and puzzles. The characters of the opera, the texts to be sung are all included.  The students and teachers receive these months in advance. This is how they learn the subject.

The culmination is the performance. It is abridged and adapted, accompanied at the piano. A secondary benefit of the system is the opportunity afforded to young professional singers. Some are still in (or just finishing) conservatory. There is a narrator (in one case it is Mozart; in both cases dressed in period costumes) who interacts with the children, asking them questions, prompting them to call out to the characters on stage at specific moments. The children are encouraged to make their own costumes, choosing the characters they prefer.

The best moment is when they all stand up and sing together from memory–everything from Leporello’s opening lines, the enumeration of Don Giovanni’s conquests in the catalog aria to (pointing their fingers) the final chorus condemning the protagonist to his eternal punishment.  All of the choruses and music of the three children were memorized at the Magic Flute performance, with highlights being Monostatos’ little ditty, and … the Queen of the Night’s famous second act aria (!!!!). Can you imagine seven hundred children doing all of that at once!?

Between the two organizations, approximately twenty-four thousand children have seen, “sung” and “acted” in an abridged Mozart opera in the past six weeks. Both organizations said that many of the older students have been coming back for years. That means that some now have a “repertory” of seven or eighth operas.  Operas done in past years include The Barber of Seville, The Elixir of Love, Carman and La Traviata. I am sure many of these children will carry this experience through their lives. Many will return over the course of their adulthood and bring their own children. Not only is a future opera audience being built in Rome, but these children are also learning about, and ingraining, a knowledge and recognition of their cultural patrimony.

And before one says those are their roots, but not ours, let’s check our history: All of the roots of what we call Classical Music come from Italy: opera was created in Renaissance Florence, and the art of singing, church music, the first (and sometimes still best) instruments, musical notation and terminology.  Need I go on? These are our roots also.

All of this is possible in America. Perhaps programs like this already exist. If so, whoever is responsible for them deserve our gratitude and praise. We are certainly reading all about the financial troubles in Europe (parallel to our own) and Italy in particular. Yet with all of that, this is one country where they still know how to take care of their children, educating them in an imaginative and fun way.

It is very fine to scratch our heads and ask how we can build audiences, as if there is a quick fix solution to the challenge. There is not, but there is a beautiful, long-term solution–and it starts with five-year-olds. Europe’s oldest city can serve as a great model and light the way for all who want to take up this mission.