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“ENGLISH MUSIC IS WHITE, IT EVADES EVERYTHING” Elgar Part Three

Sunday, January 12th, 2014

Elgarshaw

 

by Albert Innaurato

Elgar (the quote above is his) chats with George Bernard Shaw. Sir Edward owed Shaw 1000 pounds! Lady Elgar died in 1921, Elgar was devastated. Whatever their amorous intimacy, Alice had been everything else to Elgar. Her passionate belief was more crucial after WW 1 than it had been since the early days. His reputation post war was at low ebb (ironically, both he and Alice had hated the war). He wrote elaborate chamber music, but a piece adored today, The Cello Concerto, was a disaster at its world premiere. After Alice’s death, Elgar slowed down, dining with his dogs and often running off to the races. He derided the “folk song” collectors in England and around the world, and was puzzled by Stravinsky, and the experimental and intellectual movements gaining force in Europe.

But there is OWLS: remarkable texture, arresting harmonic gestures and an overwhelming sorrow that seems very much of the 1920’s — except it was composed on New Year’s Eve, 1907. Elgar had something of the prophet in him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JnIjK1ML4

Vera Hockman, a “semi-professional” violinist was at one of the back desks at a performance of the Dream of Gerontius he was conducting in 1931, and he whisked her off for — Manhattans — a choice of drink considered impossibly daring. Vera was highly intelligent with an impressive circle of friends including “Uncle Ralph” (Vaughan Williams), and she was separated from her husband, a rabbi. Once again, Elgar wrote letters that leave little doubt that at least for a time this was a physical relationship — although he was 74 and she was 40. Ideas for big pieces flooded his brain. His source for composition had always been from his own emotion and experiences. Vera awakened irresistible impulses. It seems that the Third Symphony was Shaw’s idea; he wanted his money back and advised the composer to demand that the BBC commission it (they did). But Vera was passionate about his work. He called her “My mother, child, lover, friend”. In one of the sketches of the Third Symphony, he wrote “Vera’s own tune.” Elgar did not live to finish this work, it was completed by Alexander Payne to a mixed reception (usual with completions) but one can’t miss the energy in the work, and one tune, associated with Vera, is especially arresting.

In this period, Elgar also became one of the first serious composers to record a lot of his music. Possibly fees and royalties had something to do with it, he was no longer earning very much, but among others, he made a very famous recording of The Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin, then 16.

He died of cancer and was often in considerable pain (but 32 days before his death he supervised a recording of Caractacus over the telephone).

Elgar was attacked after his death for his conservatism. Young English musicians associated that as much with The Edwardian era as they did with the actual quality of his music. Inevitably, the “old days” seemed less bad after the Depression and Second World War, and rehabilitation came, helped by a flood of recordings on long playing records by conductors Elgar had cultivated when they were young and unknown, including Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli. Even Benjamin Britten came around somewhat after condemning Elgar (and many other composers) as amateurs — but he had written a masterpiece, the very radical, disastrously received Our Hunting Fathers only two years after Elgar’ s death. He never forgot the open mockery of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from which he had to be rescued by Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music he detested.

Any opinion offered of a creative artist has no value unless most of the work is considered, and even then, it is a product of personal experience, expectation and limitation. After listening to and reading a lot of Elgar I remain skeptical about many of the large works. It seems to me, he was primarily a remarkably gifted inventor of tunes, and also very good at setting them so that they “landed”. Oddly enough, that puts him in the same boat as many of those detested opera composers who could come up with strong melodic material but could only rely on convention and hope in organizing it. Music of this kind often acts as an intoxicant and for many that’s enough.

As a person, it’s interesting that many of the distinguished musicians interviewed in Elgar The Man behind the Music, a terrific film by John Bridcut, say they are sure they would have disliked or even detested him. But how can one know what is real about someone who is so self invented? The rigid class codes of the time made it essential for Elgar to control his public image and behavior. As is true of many artists he did not treat everyone well, but the letters show genuine “heart”. I don’t think that’s so bad,; but I do suspect he would have disliked me! 

Vaughan Williams had admitted the 16 year old Britten to the Royal Academy of Music with a scholarship, which did not redeem him in Ben’s eyes. But one person Ben could not consider an amateur was the phenomenon, Thomas Tallis. There is a piece a musician described during rehearsals as “A queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea”. It is the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughan Williams. It is a marriage between Elizabethan and Victorian composers that will surely last as long as anything by the great Benjamin Britten!

So before running out of steam, a threat: I’ll babble on about Tallis, Vaughan Williams and a bit about Ben, that will be our own version of 50 shades of grey!

 

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“GOSH MAN I’VE GOT A TUNE IN MY HEAD”. ELGAR PART TWO

Wednesday, January 8th, 2014

edward-elgar-deathbed-photograph

By Albert Innaurato

That is Sir Edward Elgar playing possum. He arranged this photograph of himself “dead”. The flowers are a nice touch, don’t you think?

The quote is from a note Elgar got up from composing the “trio” section of his first Pomp and Circumstance March to send to a friend. He was right, it remains one of the most famous tunes in all Western music. The entire march says much about Elgar’s curious duality. As usually played, the work sounds like an over scored piece of French ballet music with an organ. But in score It begins in a wild, threatening way; the trio is meant to contrast but the tune is colored by a typical Elgar gambit, a major sixth collapsing into a minor third. This ambiguity makes that melody wrenching, suggesting an element of doubt. Is the Pomp the reality or camouflage for carnage? Elgar’s answer sounds superficially affirmative but the substance doesn’t. None the less, the world premiere engendered a very unEnglish riot of acclaim.

The Enigma Variations (they include an organ too), premiered in 1899 when Elgar was 41. It was an international sensation; even Gustav Mahler conducted it in New York. What strikes me is that poor Mrs. Elgar, C.A. E., gets rather shrugged off, but, A. J. Jaegar, Elgar’s publisher and very close friend gets the grandiose Nimrod movement, another tune everybody knows. It is much extended in the score and milked by many conductors. What does that mean? Jaegar was a crucial ally; did Elgar love him more than Alice? Surely not sexually, but was there a passion he didn’t have for her?

Sir Edward, as he was by 1908, wrote his First Symphony, the clinching triumph of his career, played over 100 times in its first year. It opens with a memorable tune in A flat major, which functions as a kind of motto. There is a contrasting theme which appears surprisingly in D major (not the dominant of A flat) but while Elgar moves through a number of distant keys, some unpredictable, the movement, indeed, the symphony never loses a very diatonic feel, especially for 1908. The whole seems patterned on Brahms’ Third, one of only two symphonies Elgar lectured on, the other being Mozart’s g minor, no 40. The second theme in the last movement is a near quote of Brahms’ second theme at the same place, and the entire symphony, despite some surprising detours, ends predictably.The crushing logic and inevitability of Brahms let alone Mozart is not there. And although Mahler is criticized for the variability of individual movements in his long symphonies, there isn’t one measure not inevitably related to every other in each of the completed symphonies. And if you really want to upset an Elgarian, point out that the same is true of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, stripped of its story and some vocal grandstanding, it is an amazing achievement. Can one feel the same about Elgar’s First?

Elgar met another Alice, Mrs. Stuart-Wortley and fell in love with her. He had done some philandering but he and Windflower, as he nicknamed her, had an intense, probably erotic relationship, confirmed by a large cache of letters Elgar wrote her (the windflowers he pressed into many of them are still intact). Her daughter destroyed the responses and also cut Elgar’s more explicit pages. The couples stayed friends; it’s not clear if Mr. Stuart-Wortley understood or cared, but Mrs. Elgar did. She wrote a heart broken poem and left it for Elgar to find after she died. It plunged him into a deep depression. But in the short time they were closest, Windflower inspired the passionate Violin Concerto of 1910, Elgar’s last great public success. The gorgeous soaring melody that is a development of the second theme in the first movement is often referred to as the Windflower theme.

Sir Edward told Windflower she inspired the beautiful start of The Music Makers of 1912. But it’s also likely that she inspired one of his most gorgeous works, the short Sospiri, also of 1912, a work of naked longing and sorrow (the title means sighs). Perhaps it marks the end of their intimacy? If Lady Mary, of Downtown Abbey liked music, she might have owned this piece and after her husband’s sudden death, played it, weeping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzJ__a1e184

By then, Elgar’s star had dimmed; his second symphony, also inspired by Windflower, had failed and WW 1 made him seem suddenly old fashioned.

The Second  Symphony was vehemently dismissed. It’s less straight forward than the First, though claims of a “modernistic” manner are greatly exaggerated. Brahms once again looms large.  Elgar has some wonderful tunes and they are often spread through the orchestral in unusual ways, probably making them harder to hear at first. The epigraph is from Shelly, “rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight” and indeed, the symphony is full of longing for delight and lament for decay. At the end of the score there are the names “Venice -Tintagel” — he had been with Windflower in both places. Venice suggests rotting beauty, and Tintagel, associated with The Arthurian Legends, inevitable ruin.  “I have revealed myself”, Elgar wrote of this work. Perhaps, though not always interestingly, but the second movement, a funeral march of accumulating power, is very moving.

Well, we’ve had a few days without spankings and such, but soon the end of Elgar and then Tallis and Vaughan Williams.

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DOWNTON ABBEY AND ELGAR, 5O SHADES OF VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND YES, BENJAMIN BRITTEN!

Monday, January 6th, 2014

English Landscape 004

BY Albert Innaurato

In John Elliot Gardiner’s Bach — Music in the Castle of Heaven there are some penetrating remarks about Henry Purcell. Ralph Vaughan Williams is buried right next to Purcell in Westminster Abby. Vaughan Williams and Sir Edward Elgar had ended the idea that Purcell was the final great English composer. And then, Benjamin Britten had donned the armor and waded into the cliche that England was “the land without music”.

At Downton Abbey they would have had some Elgar 78’s, perhaps. And in 50 Shades of Gray, the BDSM fantasy, mention is made of Thomas Tallis, a name connected with RVW. And goodness knows what Benjamin Britten might be connected with — some version of Larry Kramer’s play called The Abnormal Heart? But away from soaps and saddles, I realized it had been a long time since I had thought about Teddie (as Elgar liked his few intimates to call him) and RVW, and that 2013 had been the fiftieth anniversary of Ben’s death. My far less tactful self had written about the biographies and documentaries “investigating” Ben at

Benjamin Britten: THE BITTER WITHY – mrs john claggart’s sad life

but that’s because I love Britten despite the inevitable re-evaluation going on. Although not free of degrees of homophobia and horror (Ben was a pederast, probably not sexually active), some of it makes sense. I too am sorry Ben wrote so many operas. Yes, it was brave that he and the tenor, Peter Pears, lived as a couple, fairly openly, when all homosexual acts between men were criminal in England. Those who lament Ben’s vocal works when early masterpieces such as Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge and the Berg besotted but powerful Sinfonia da Requiem, and the later, magnificent Cello Symphony and Third Quartet all demonstrate a heart stopping power might at least have a point worth arguing. However, the more radical assertion that the phenomenally productive Britten was “written out” after Peter Grimes in 1945 is ridiculous.

But I realized that I had never been interested in Elgar and knew only a little about him and Vaughan Williams. I read the compendious Edward Elgar: A creative Life by Jerrold Northrop Moore, the interesting Edward Elgar and his World by Byron Adams and Michael Kennedy’s responsible The Life of Elgar. I also looked at scores, thanks to the Great Central Library of Philadelphia and listened to what looked interesting.

There are many prominent worshipers of Elgar. but I must confess to thinking his life was more interesting than his music. I am unable to embrace the many religious choral works, though it’s true that Elgar is far more imaginative than his rivals,  with remarkable textures and some risk taking (a shofar is blown at the start of the Dawn section of The Apostles and his use of tam-tam and other percussion to support it has remarkable atmosphere.) He also had a significant melodic gift and considerable theatrical flair. Britten recorded a perceptive, decidedly unsentimental Dream of Gerontius, Elgar’s masterpiece in this line. I wanted to stop the music long before the (lovely) end. 

But surely The Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, and for many people the First Symphony are imposing? Elgar was primarily a melodist and a very gifted one; that’s not a problem in short pieces, but symphonic work needs an intellectual and harmonic construct that is clinching beyond whatever themes a composer spins.

Before going into more of Elgar’s music there is his life. Anyone who knows something about it has seen those formidable pictures of him that personify Empire.
 
 
275px-Edward_Elgar
 
 
But they are all posed, every single one. Elgar was one of the first composers to deliberately manufacture a look as a publicity ploy. He wanted to personify the aristocratic Edwardian. There are almost no candid pictures. He even arranged his deathbed photograph, “playing dead”, so he would look exactly as he wished when he actually died a few days later.
 
Yet, his background was poor and Catholic. He never had a composition lesson, learning what he could from books and from studying the scores he could borrow. Elgar, of course, had first imitated those composers he admired then tried to find his own voice. I’ll never forget Leonard Bernstein sitting at the piano and deconstructing The Enigma Variations. He’d just had a bad experience recording them with the BBC Symphony, and he showed how nearly every single notable turn was “borrowed” with small modifications from familiar Nineteenth century compositions. Luckily Teddie’s father was musical and taught him violin and piano.  One of Elgar’s early jobs was playing in a madhouse! Eventually, he took on other musical odd jobs, earning too little to have a future.
 
One day, the heiress, Alice Roberts came to him for piano lessons. She was a poet, plain, and eight years older. Eventually, they married; she was disinherited. But she had money of her own and took Elgar to London where she used her formidable will and family connections to set him up as a composer. She was rather like Richard Strauss’ wife: she made her husband work. He was lazy, had an eye for the ladies, but worse, was subject to paralyzing depressions and talked often of suicide. Though she was able to keep them afloat financially, they needed whatever royalties Teddie could earn and he needed her unshakable belief that he was a genius destined for acclaim.
 
But space has run out — clear out the dining room you nutty but personable downstairs staff — and get the unguents and bandages ye much bespanked of 50 Shades. We will continue…

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THE CALLAS CLICHE

Wednesday, December 4th, 2013

Furious Maria

By Albert Innaurato.

December the second was the 90th birthday of poor Maria Callas. The encomiums of hysterics appeared on the opera lists; there was even a doodle on Google. Isn’t that a thrill?

Like Placido Domingo, who lately cracked on a high note while trying to sing the Verdi baritone role of The Count di Luna in Il Trovatore, Callas has become a commodity. Domingo played “Let’s help the hype” by telling Anna Netrebko that she was “like Callas”. So Callas has become a decorative robe and essentially meaningless.  Netrebko had the savvy to demur. Whatever she has or doesn’t have to offer she knows she’s not Callas. And since Callas had a very tough and finally, a very sad life, who would want to be?

In all the Internet commentary that followed the crack and the comparison, only a few mentioned that Domingo is not a baritone, he’s an older tenor, period. Not everyone thinks he was great or even very good. People have made up their own minds about that, since he still sells tickets. But if one judges by resonance and sonority he remains a tenor.  On Netrebko’s recent  CD devoted to Verdi arias, a score follower would have to notice musical compromises that Callas could hardly have conceived of, let alone have been willing to put on something as durable as a CD. But again, let those who love Madame Netrebko buy their tickets and scream themselves hoarse for what she can actually do. It should not be that the only real world use of Callas is to promote someone else, from a very different background and of a very different generation, with their own hurdles to clear. Callas deserves more than to be used as a bandwagon. I know many are happy to see her exploited that way. I doubt the ghost of Maria Callas is.

That poor woman when asked in her last years how things were, would reply, “one day less!” She ended up miserable and alone. She was 54; her voice had collapsed ten years earlier and she had sung with reduced volume, range and control for four years before that. She had, a few years before her death, made money touring the world, sort of Sunset Boulevard meets The Marx Brothers with the then broke tenor, her once famous colleague, Giuseppe Di Stefano. One hopes she knew it was a joke but perhaps she didn’t. She needed an infusion of cash, too.  Her widely reported affair with Aristotle Onassis gave people the wrong impression of her finances.  Onassis’ sudden marriage to The Widow Kennedy hoping for her in- laws’ influence in his American businesses and the ensuing stresses, kept Callas before the public as the cast off of a billionaire. Only Mrs. Kennedy won in this strange interlude. But Callas became a tabloid floozy instead of the great artist she had aspired to be, and for a time, was.

Sadly, she had bought into her myth. Privately, she continued to work on her voice; a few late fragments on tape even sound like her. Could she perhaps have mastered part of the huge song repertory as the great Victoria de los Angeles did when her opera career ended early? But as Callas thought of herself as a diva, that was beneath her. She did try two sets of master classes and found the students poorly prepared and not stimulating. Her reward was an internationally successful play by Terrance McNally. Many thought it was true to Callas, though the complete tapes of her Julliard master classes, some of which I saw, show a very different person: shy, correct and helpful. The brassy, bitchy, sex obsessed fictional character raises at least the question of misogyny. We live however in a society where pretty much everything has been defined down, and the notion of il sacro fuoco — the sacred fire — that Callas embraced, is now a joke. Maybe she is too.

How could she have come to that? We all die, some of us are young when the heart stops; all artists know that a career is a tight rope walk over an abyss likelier at the end to hold poverty and obscurity than worshipful remembrance. Callas escaped the obscurity but it would be better were she remembered for a kind of genius in some roles, Norma, Anna Bolena, oddly enough the despised La gioconda — her second recording, made when her voice was failing is an amazing, perhaps unique, example of spinning pathos out of dross — than as a tired name snatched at by every opportunist to glorify qualities she conspicuously lacked: laziness, coarseness, musical ineptitude.

Yes, opera as Callas dreamed it and as it sometimes really was, is dying out. But don’t worry. Despite common belief, the dinosaurs lasted at least tens of thousands of  years gasping and roaring after what is thought to have been a comet wiped most of them out.

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CLONE CHRISTINE GOERKE!

Sunday, November 24th, 2013

Goeke Nilsson

by Albert Innaurato

(Christine Goerke congratulated by Birgit Nilsson after winning her competition)

Buttons that should be made from the Met’s Die Frau ohne Schatten: CLONE Christine Goerke. ANNE SCHWANEWILMS FOR ACT THREE. FIRE VLADIMIR JUROWSKI. I thought he rushed through in a business like if technically able way, missing the high romanticism, the “nuss”, which is the only way the very long opera really becomes completely and continually involving.

He forced Goerke (who had a triumph as the Dyer’s Wife) through every soaring phrase — she could have spun them out thrillingly (many can’t), he RUSHED the D major interlude in scene two, act one, (marked “molto sostenuto e cantabile” — VERY MUCH SUNG AND SUSTAINED) — and after that RUSHED Goerke on the low d’s and the phrase starting “und mich dich gemacht”, which includes two low A’s delivered with a contralto’s color and size — and RUSHED the beautiful chorale at the end of that scene. He drowned everyone but Goerke out. In act three, Schwanewilms had the sense to come all the way downstage and do it her way (she had some issues earlier).

He RUSHED the most soaring music in the opera, “Schweigt doch ihr Stimmen”, that opens act three, and did not relish a DYER’S WIFE who could really soar when she joins in the duet with her husband Barak, “Mir anvertraut…”, and ignored one who could actually DO that impossible line all the way up to B natural (in fact tied B flat to HALF NOTE B natural) and then, after the alto says they are free, he RUSHED her through that insane cry of jubilation (and yes I realize it’s marked “LEBHAFT” — “lively”) but you had someone who at the very least DESERVED the opportunity to spin out that final phrase that starts on the high A natural (half note tied to quarter soars up to the B flat tied to quarter and yes I know they become triplets but the music needs grandeur.)

Many of the markings in the score are fast, but fast and flexible, inward and expansive are the way for me and it’s how Wolfgang Sawallisch did it in Munich (I saw him do it 11 times there and saw him rehearse) and how Christian Thielemann does it (complete!). Scuttlebutt from backstage (unconfirmed, of course) was that the Met wanted the usual cuts, Jurowski insisted on the work being given complete but was told he better get a move on.

Audibility issues with others (I was sitting orchestra row M on 11/12), and I thought Barak, Johan Reuter, though he had a pretty tone, was slight and bland, and the Nurse — whose part is impossible to sing, let’s face it, and really cruel if the work is done complete — barely made it.

And, as with Sondra Radvanovsky’s often phenomenally sung Norma, I felt that there was no one to teach the singers how these scenes work best (the brilliant original director, Herbert Wernicke died in 2002). I remember Birgit Nilsson and Dietrich Fischer Dieskau in that D major interlude simply standing still and staring at one another with everything they had in them — the longing the couple feels, the intense attraction, yet the impossibility for them at that moment to express it — was overwhelming (Nilsson and Theo Adam did the same) — it is the magic of filled, focused and felt stillness. Or Fischer Dieskau, terrifying, moving from confusion to homicidal rage at the end of act two, as Nilsson (and the great Inge Borkh on other occasions) abandoned herself to his knife, almost as a kind of sexual/sacrificial offering — stunning and shocking.

A friend, my age, said — “bury the ghosts and seize what’s here”; so CLONE CHRISTINE GOERKE and yes, ANNE SCHWANEWILMS — while she got the better of Jurowski in act three, he did prevent her from really taking that devastating pause before “Du taugst nicht zu mir” to the nurse — I’m not going to mention Leonie Rysanek, Eva Marton, Cheryl Studer, but will mention Ingrid Bjoner who I saw six times in Munich — ALL got to make the MOST of that pause, a HUGE moment of decision.

Jurowski is a tall, young, nice looking Russian with very long hair, doesn’t that mean he’s great? But Thielemann, conducting the entire work live both at the Met, and in Berlin and on a Decca DVD with a good cast, including Schwanewilms found so much more. Sawallisch also does wonderfully on a note complete EMI recording, and old timers may remember the compelling old Zillig recording. I heard it first in high school on reel to reel tape, now, with luck, it’s to be found on Ponto CDs. On that recording, Christa Ludwig, some years later to emerge as a great exponent of The Dyer’s Wife, sings the soprano role of the Falcon!!!

How much Die Frau ohne Schatten is worth as a work of art is a different matter.

Perhaps on my other blog I will consider that. But soon, more on Goerke, announced as the next Brunnhilde in a complete Ring at the Met.

Albert at length:

http://mrsjohnclaggartssadlife.blogspot.com/

 

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ON UNSELFCONSCIOUS STUPIDITY, LOVING MUSIC BY HATING IT

Tuesday, November 5th, 2013

by Albert Innaurato

On Saturday evening, YannickNezet-Seguin conducted The Philadelphia Orchestra in a stunning, almost unbelievably thrilling account of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, written for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1941. It seemed the most modern and challenging work on a program containing two world premieres.  Yannick (as he introduces himself to audiences) had an amazing grasp of this piece — surprising phrases, agogic mastery, finding the sting in no longer familiar modulations, all floating along on a magic carpet of inevitability.  It was feverish, reckless, and the orchestra responded with astounding virtuosity.

I was not raised to value composer Rachmaninoff; at a master class, my heart bleeding into  Busoni, the “master” hit me on the back of the head and screamed, “raus, du… du… Rachmaninoff spieler!”, words to wound a young man’s soul. But I was astounded by the piece, thanks to Yannick’s insight and fire.

After this concert there was a round table with Yannick and the two composers the orchestra had commissioned to write virtuoso concerti for principles. These were Behzad Ranjbaran, whose Flute Concerto, spectacularly played by Jeffrey Khaner; and David Ludwig, whose Bassoon Concerto was gorgeously sung by Daniel Matsukawa (Ludwig described himself as a “lover of Italian opera”). This concerto has a title, Pictures From the Floating World, and many quotes from Debussy piano pieces.

An older man put up his hand and effusively congratulated both composers for not being “navel gazers” but for “communicating with the audience”. “None of this atonal stuff“, he said. 

Yannick,  with great charm, said “but atonal music, you know, can communicate, and can be quite beautiful”, and quickly changed the subject.

I thought the questioner was a bigoted idiot and I see the same mentality on the ‘Net all the time. Mr. Ranjbaran’s work alternated lush orchestration with “Persian” effects for harp (imitating running water), the flute circling ’round (I’d have been more impressed had I not heard these effects and others he used in Ethnomusicology 101 45 years ago). Built on the alteration of augmented seconds and perfect fifths, the harmonic language as opposed to cultural allusion seemed thin for a thirty minute piece, and for once the complaint that it sounded like movie music seemed justified (did our questioner day dream or even nod off during, thrilled not to be rudely awakened by a surprise?). Mr. Ludwig’s work was shorter and modestly tuneful (thank you, Claude) but there was a lovely movement that for all the world sounded like Sam Barber’s quietly melancholy meditations leading to a long scale that was a recurring motive in the piece but in that section provided an effective punctuation. Mr. Ludwig is the grandson of Rudolf Serkin and teaches at Curtis. I suspect he knows his Barber.

Having heard these sort of discussions in Europe, the man’s question struck me as profoundly yet proudly ignorant. Does he know what “atonal” means? What works exactly did he have in mind? If one removed the name Schoenberg or Carter or Boulez or Berg from a piece would he actually enjoy it? Would he hear surprising tunes, interesting harmonies, arresting sounds and a distinctiveness these new pieces seemed to lack, and want to listen again immediately? Now, I don’t want to be unfair to the commissions, they should be heard again, with different conductors and soloists; secrets may open up. They got big applause, but was that relief that they weren’t “worse”, or enthusiasm for local soloists and not that the pieces themselves had got the audience thinking, their minds racing, their emotions fully involved?

American “serious music” culture is very stupid. It’s all TV now; we look to be palliated and reassured not stimulated, profoundly moved, disturbed. There’s nothing wrong with being enraged or puzzled by an art work. But I think there’s a great deal wrong with wanting it to be essentially a warm bath to which one plans tomorrow’s brunch.

Well, I’m a snob and hadn’t paid for my ticket; these good people should be allowed their soul deafness. But I’m glad I’ve seen works that were hated, that inspired heated discussion, that were booed, that divided an audience. I disliked some of them too, but I left the hall feeling I had had a unique experience, an evening different from all other evenings, an escape from Law and Order reruns or yet another proficient but standard go through of a war horse. One should go to art to have one’s life changed, if only a bit, to be forced to see the dark streets and one fellow human beings a little differently afterwards, to have one’s brain buzzing. I am afraid we’ve lost that desire in “fecund America today”, and with it, the determination to fight for the survival of those endangered arts we think we love.

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TO DIE FOR: THE MUSIC ONE CHOOSES AS THE LIGHT GOES OUT

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

by Albert Innaurato

I visited my doctor yesterday. He looks like Santa Claus. He eyed me and said, “Yo!” (he’s from South Philly), “No trick or treats. You’re a fatty.” I thought of Luke 4:23, where The Nazarene is mocked, “Physician, heal thyself” (Cura te ipsum as the nuns used to scream at us after they had thrashed us without mercy.) Doctor Santa then gave me a flu shot, and I had visions of dying from it. I thought, “what music would one chose for one’s last moments alive?”

A number of people have mentioned the second movement of the Schubert Quintet. It is one of the most celestially beautiful pieces of music ever written in the West. It was written two months before he died, and shrugged off.

Schubert Quintet in C, Stern, Casals

But there is a lot of music one loves in a lifetime. Bela Bartok for example. He saved me from Johann Sebastian Bach. I was a hapless six year old fighting the Inventions, too stupid to count them. A new teacher suggested Bartok. And though rhythm was never my strong suit, in life or music, I fell in love. As the flu shot worked its way toward my throat to close it, I thought of this memorial to Bartok by Gyorgy Ligeti. This is early Ligeti, but throughout his career he composed beautiful and moving music. It is played here by the great pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Musica Ricercata number 9. Bela Bartok In memorium

But of course, if one wasn’t too out of it, one would want real Bartok. I’d ask to hear at least a movement from one of the six quartets. As I felt flu vaccine flood my lungs, I thought of Number Five. It uses elaborate Bulgarian rhythmic patterns (one might want a taste of the authentic as, with one’s dying eyes, one made out the white light — either The Eternal or the impatient orderly who wants to dispose of one’s body). The Adagio is strictly structured to have three subjects, one following another, ABC, then those subjects return. Not only does Bela invert the order in which they return but the subjects themselves. It’s sublime music to hear but also to count off as these small miracles of invention occur up to one’s final shut eye.

Bartok: Fifth Quartet, Adagio; Julliard Quartet

However, I was torn. The flu shot had entered my abdomen and pumpkin pie looked good. The Third Piano Concerto was written by a dying Bartok. Not Jewish, he’d fled to America to escape Fascism (funny that, today). The Piano Concerto was a birthday present for his wife; it’s a work of great beauty and the second movement is the last Bartok finished. (Tibor Serly completed the concerto). Dying, Bartok evokes the night sounds of his native Hungry, the universal spirit of late Beethoven, the famous Tristan chord. a homage to love in death perhaps as he thought of his wife, but unlike Wagner, Bartok resolves the chord on an affirmative C.

Bartok: 3rd Piano Concerto, Schiff, Rattle

I am not religious but Olivier Messiaen was devout. Perhaps, dying, one might want to bargain a bit just in case…? My belly was shaking — flu shot or pie? One piece in memory of Messiaen by Tristan Murail, one of his students (born 1947), might do. And, after all, Murail is part of a movement, which has an element of ghostliness in it, the “spectral” style. This is his beautiful homage to his master: Cloches d’adieu et un sourire (Bells of Farewell and a Smile), played by Marilyn Nonken

Murail: Cloches d’adieu et un sourire 

But I would try to hear all of Visions de l’amen. In college, my only friend and I would play this two piano piece at parties, and then wonder why no one liked us.  Wretched playing, maybe. It’s a wonderful piece, all about The Nazarene’s misfortunes and promises but wildly theatrical. That’s especially evident in this sweaty performance by Messiaen and another devout Catholic, the great Yvonne Loriod, with whom he was having an adulterous affair.  This is No. 5, The Amen of the Angels, the Saints and the Songs of the birds — hey, there are worse things to think about when dying!

Messiaen – Visions de l’Amen no. V (Messiaen/Loriod)

If my dying moments stretched a bit, I would want to hear something by John Adams. Several composer pals agreed we were less fond of Nixon in China than the works he composed around the same time. My favorite is Harmonielehre. Arnold Schoenberg used the title for his book on music theory (lots of fun to read). I’d choose the second movement, The Amfortas Wound, a reference to Wagner’s Parsifal but a summation of music that Adams had loved. Especially striking is the way he works in the amazing 12 note chord Gustav Mahler uses in the Adagio of the Tenth Symphony he died writing. There is a combination of sorrow and mind-energy, which just perhaps survives cessation in this deficient dimension.

John Adams, Harmonielehre, Part 2, Barnett Newman

But the shoulder wound made by Dr. Santa’s needle had healed, and seeing if there were a Family Guy episode on, I realized that I might want to laugh at death. Maybe the dread secret is that it’s funny at the final second. This is something chirped by Nellie Melba in 1910 from a useless work by Massenet that always makes me laugh. Trick or Treat!

nellie melba massenet-Don cesra de Bazan “Sevillana”

 

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NORMA ABNORMAL

Monday, October 21st, 2013

by Albert Innaurato

I went to Bellini’s Norma at the Met on Friday. I was late to the party, Sondra Radvanovsky’s Norma has been praised as a throwback to greatness by many of the easily enraged hard core  — and some of these people have been seeing international performers of this huge role for 60 and more years! But just that morning, there had been the dress rehearsal for Nico Muhly’s new opera, Two Boys. For a moment it had looked as though I might go to this but I’ll have to wait and see how Muhly’s opera is received, and most importantly, whether it can be one of the baby steps crucial to whether opera can walk again.

The arts we inherited from the 19th century are dying in America. A large group of successful new works would be one prong of a survival strategy, saving opera, for example, from seeming merely bizarre. Funding is another prong. Arts are subsidized in Europe and don’t appear to be in such trouble, but the Not for Profit system in America has failed badly. All the arts are charities, all artists, beggars, and as our society gets poorer, losing its middle class, the demands on that 1 or 2 % with money to spare are enormous. Does one give to cancer research or the Metropolitan Opera, to feeding Americans or to the ballet, to desperately backward schools or the symphony? And how does anyone persuade those two or three multinational, profit besotted hydras determined to control what everyone thinks and knows to add any of the arts to multi-channel cable systems on a regular, easily accessible basis, knowing that at first, few people will watch?

But it’s easier to focus on this instant, knowing as one who is terminally ill knows, that things end, that America is a nation jammed with the uncaring, the indifferent and the stupid (sorry, I mean those with “low information”). We old timers cry: “let us sit in a circle and download the old days and if that fails, let’s hold hands and remember!”

Miss Radvanovsky is that currently rare thing, a professional singer of the highest standard for whom no excuses need be made. She has a strong technique, excellent coloratura, a very wide range with rafter shaking high notes when she wills, a glistening, easily controlled pianissimo — a very soft tone that still fills the huge opera house. She is a musician, she is tasteful. She was boring.

But can Norma, a great opera, no doubt, a high water mark of early romanticism, adored by nearly every important musician of the time, an influence on Richard Wagner (“without Bellini there would be no Wagner” he said) as well as Verdi, and Chopin and Mendelssohn and Schumann and on and on, rip our hearts out today as Bellini intended? Well, not in the sort of performance the Met gave, proficiently but unimaginatively conducted by Riccardo Frizza who evidently didn’t coach the singers in the style, or as the only native speaker in the production, get them to pay attention to their words (Bellini certainly did). Not with an Adalgisa who forced a small voice and lacked command in her difficult moments, and not with a clueless, bullish Pollione, and not with an ancient Oroveso who just stood around while his world fell apart, as indeed it does in the last scene.

Years ago (and yes, I was there years ago), Norma would have known that in the crucial moment where she decides not to sacrifice her innocent rival, Adalgisa, but to reveal herself as the villain in the eyes of her people and says simply, “son io” (“it is I” — who have betrayed you), that this was a moment to be seized for us to see the agony in this heroic woman as she fights within herself; and painfully, slowly, with profound sorrow and even fear condemns herself to death. The pain, self revelation, shame and grandeur should stop one’s heart. But Radvanovsky didn’t know how to do that, and in the whole great opera house, there was no one to tell her.

She is too accomplished and intelligent a singer to be damned with faint praise; the last twenty minutes, a massive challenge, were sung with remarkable command. But where does the instinct to perform these roles with the essential emotional commitment come from? Is a technically expert but generalized performance another symptom of how opera is dying?

Let’s hope the gifted Muhly, writing about how we live now, with singers who understand their characters implicitly, has managed a work and gets a performance that shocks and thrills and moves real people through music. And let’s hope that the remarkable Radvanovsky finds someone to stimulate her into the intense personal connection to those grand old roles that she did not have.

Alberto rages rather than babbles at http://mrsjohnclaggartssadlife.blogspot.com/

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Who Am I? Is This the Asylum?

Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

by Albert Innaurato

Well, Alberto (that’s me) does babble on a lot. And that reminded me of a little known Rossini Opera, Ciro in Babilonia. Poor Ciro does have his problems, though talking too much isn’t one of them (on the other hand, in my case, …). It’s one of the happy/sad realities of a troubled time for the arts, that we can fairly easily encounter Ciro on DVD and CD; a score has been prepared that is fair to Rossini. And we can find out by reading that score, or experiencing one of the DVDs that Ciro is fascinating, phenomenally orchestrated, and full of great tunes. Ciro’s enemy even gets one of the great tenor mad scenes in opera.

That’s happy because it’s a fine opera. That’s sad because it’s not new, just unfamiliar. It’s a very old opera, in a very old style with a very old story. Art is about us, now. One shouldn’t have to be like a soldier fighting battles, to believe that arts that can’t renew themselves die.

I always wanted new sounds. When I was studying music (for eighteen years) I always wanted to know what was being created right then. And then I took a wrong turn (probably) and began to write plays. I got to Broadway and Europe and even to Asia and everything was new; my life was about my creating, and about my measuring myself against what others were creating.

It’s not that I didn’t love older plays. And I was never indifferent to the stratagems of Beethoven and Debussy and crotchety old Johann Bach. It’s just that discovery was always just as thrilling. Even if technology has given us a way of reconstructing virtually the entire past of Western music, and great masters are always being uncovered, someway has to be invented to persuade those under thirty, said to be watching three screens at once, to pay attention. And in some sense it has to be, however subtly or indirectly, about the new kind of lives they are living now.

And as for opera, well, let’s be frank, it’s a mental illness. I have it. Electroshock won’t help. But the most thrilling evenings in my life were seeing Lulu for the first time, or Nixon in China or L’amour de loin. It’s not a contest; great operas have been written from the beginning, but the remarkable new is always more thrilling than one’s fiftieth exposure to a MASTERPIECE from a fast receding past.

I have the voice sickness too… I’ll be chattering about those things. But who even knows about  much of this, really? I know I’ll be babbling to many. One thing’s for sure, I’m a tenor!! Bring on the mad scene!

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