Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 21

Why Did American Classical Music “Stay White”?

William Dawson

In 1893 Antonin Dvorak, teaching in New York City, predicted that a “great and noble school” of American classical music would arise from America’s “Negro melodies.” Dvorak’s prophecy was instantly controversial and influential.

But the black musical motherlode migrated to popular genres known throughout the world. American classical music stayed white. The reasons are both obvious and not.

This is the topic of my book-in-progress Dvorak’s Prophecy. In the current issue of The American Scholar, I encapsulate my findings. I identify two factors: institutional racism (obvious) and modernism (not so obvious). 

What’s the pertinence of Aaron Copland’s poor opinion of “Mr. Gershwin’s jazz”? Of Virgil Thomson’s view that American folk music was fundamentally white? Of Leopold Stokowski’s credible assertion that William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1934) marked “a wonderful development in American music”? And whatever happened to that formidable symphony, greeted by one eminent critic as “the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved”?

Here’s a taste of my article:

“The reigning paradigm for a modernist ‘American school’ had no more use for sorrow songs than for Gershwin or Ives, not to mention the ‘black’ symphonies of Still, Price, or Dawson. The same fate would have befallen the most popular, most iconic American concert work – Rhapsody in Blue– if Paul Rosenfeld had held sway. Writing in The New Republic, the high priest of American musical modernism detected in Gershwin the Russian Jew a ‘weakness of spirit, possibly as a consequence of the circumstance that the new world attracted the less stable types.’ Rosenfeld vastly preferred the ersatz Piano Concerto that Copland produced two years after Gershwin’s ‘hash derivative’ Rhapsody. Elevated by Copland, jazz had at last ‘borne music.’

I conclude:

“Does William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony signify an ephemeral  footnote or a crucial squandered opportunity? In the history of twentieth century American music, the black musical motherlode migrated to popular genres with magnificent results – in part through natural affinity; in part because it was pushed. Might American classical music have canonized, in parallel, an  ‘American school’ based in the black vernacular? I believe we may be about to find out.”

Read the entire article here. To hear a related podcast (with musical examples), click here.

What Happened Between Vladimir Horowitz and George Szell?

George Szell

“As admirers of Horowitz’s musicianship and resilience, we must face these realities remembering that, in the end, he loaded his baggage onto his back and jogged across the finish line, smiling from ear to ear. Today, the weight of Horowitz’s baggage serves mainly to accentuate the magnitude of his ultimate triumph.”

Thus Bernard Horowitz on Vladimir Horowitz. These two are unrelated. Bernard, however, happens to be my son Bernie – whose obsession with Vladimir has been the topic of numerous filings in this space.

It has been many years since Bernie began plying me with
rare Horowitz recordings in an attempt to bludgeon me toward a more favorable
opinion. As I have conceded, he’s met with some success.

The most recent Sony Classics Horowitz re-issue – “The Great Comeback: Horowitz at Carnegie Hall” – comprises 15 CDs and an eleganty illustrated 200-page booklet. In a formidable review the other day in Spain’s El Pais, Pablo Rodriguez cited Bernie’s Sony essay at length. Truly, as Rodriguez writes, it more clarifies Horowitz’s epic 12-year retirement (1953-65) than anything previously written. The details are remarkable.

For one thing, there was an incident with George Szell, whom Horowitz (Bernie writes)  resented for his “ingratitude and nastiness towards artists – including Toscanini and Rubinstein – who had helped him financially and professionally after he escaped Nazi Germany.” When Dmitri Mitropoulos suffered a heart attack, Szell was (inexplicably) chosen by the New York Philharmonic to partner Horowitz in Tchaikovsky’s B-flat minor Piano Concerto (which Szell loathed) for the Horowitz Silver Jubilee on January 12, 1953. The broadcast recording of that performance documents a singular feat of symphonic accompaniment: to my ears, a conductor caustically intent on driving every bit as fast as his hurtling soloist.

Afterward there was a party at Horowitz’s apartment. As
Bernie writes (quoting a private tape of Horowitz in bitter reminiscence): “Szell
and his wife . . . walked into the Horowitz’s living and room and beheld
Horowitz’s favorite painting: ‘The Acrobat in Repose’ by Pablo Picasso. Mr. and
Mrs. Szell exclaimed, ‘Aha! You see what painting they have here? You see what
painting they have here?! It’s just like the pianist!’”

This vituperative outburst coincided with self-doubts Bernie
also documents: opting for Prokofiev, Barber, Kabalevsky and other moderns,
Horowitz had shifted his attention away from Classical and Romantic repertoire;
he had opted for a more brilliant instrument; he was experiencing qualms about
“the trajectory of his career.” He retired from the stage six weeks later.

Some four years after that, Horowitz’s daughter Sonia attempted
suicide on a motor scooter in Italy. Horowitz’s apparently callous response has
never made any sense. But Bernie connects this to the tragedy of his brother,
Jacob, a hospitalized World War I veteran whom Vladimir had visited daily before
Jacob hung himself. Bernie has additionally uncovered poignant documents
showing that Horowitz, “an absentee father during Sonia’s adolescence,” bonded
with his daughter in New York shortly before she departed for Italy and her
near-fatal accident.

These revelations in Bernie’s Sony essay hint at a larger
portrait he has unearthed of a young artist unmoored by the Russian Revolution
(which decimated his family), then coping for decades with demons of every
description – and yet ultimately renewed upon returning to Russia, and to his
personal and artistic roots, at the age of 82.

Busoni, Kandinsky, Schoenberg — Instinct at the Cusp

It’s a truism that, as aesthetic movements go, the visual arts get there first. Think of Impressionism, which didn’t begin to inflect music until Debussy and Ravel – decades after Monet.

Expressionism is another matter: the synchrony is amazing. I am thinking of 1910: the year of Wassily Kandinsky’s first non-representational painting. Non-tonal music was simultaneously conceived by Arnold Schoenberg and with the same goal: capturing instinct at the cusp. What is more, Kandinsky and Schoenberg recognized their kinship. And they corresponded about it: an imperishable sequence of letters. (Schoenberg singled out Kandinsky’s “Romantic Landscape” [1911], reproduced above, as a personal favorite.)

There is also a third participant: Ferruccio Busoni, one of the most magical figures in the history of Western music. Busoni and Schoenberg also corresponded: an even more amazing written exchange. The moment I discovered it I knew it had to be animated in performance. The opportunity materialized two weeks ago in the form of a PostClassical Ensemble Concert at The Phillips Collection in DC: “The Re-Invention of Arnold Schoenberg.”

The Busoni/Schoenberg correspondence is not only acute; it
is hilarious – and at our concert William Sharp, enacting both parts, had the
audience in stitches. Schoenberg’s impassioned self-exhortations to “express
myself directly,” to renounce
acquired knowledge in favor of “that which is inborn, instinctive” can sound like a tangled Monty Python script:

“This is my vision which I am unable to force upon myself:
to wait until a piece comes out of its
own accord in the way I have
envisaged. My only intention is to have no intentions!”

Busoni is the adult in this exchange. But he is also a
serene provocateur. When Schoenberg sends him a pair of non-tonal piano pieces
(Op. 11 – composed in 1909), he is full of admiration. He then imperturbably
adds:

“My impression as a pianist,
which I cannot overlook, is otherwise. My first qualification of your music ‘as
a piano piece’ is the limited range of the textures. As I fear I might be
misunderstood, I am taking the liberty, in my own defense, of appending a small
illustration.”

Busoni here takes a measure of Schoenbeg’s piano writing,
and “enhances” it. He continues:

“But this is neither intended as judgment nor as criticism –
to neither of which I would presume, but simply a record of the impression made
and of my opinion as a pianist.”

Schoenberg:

“I have considered your reservations about my piano style at
length. It seems to me that particularly these two pieces, whose somber,
compressed colors are a constituent feature, would not stand a texture whose
effect on one’s tonal palate was all too flattering.”

Busoni:

“I have occupied myself further with your pieces, and the one in 12/8 time [No. 2] appealed to me more and more. I believe I have grasped it completely — although the form of expressing it on the piano has remained inadequate to me. To complete my confession, let me tell you that I have (with total lack of modesty) rescored your piece. Although this remains my own business, I should not fail to inform you, even at the risk of your being annoyed with me.”

Schoenberg was a connoisseur at taking offense. My favorite
Schoenberg sentence was written to the conductor Otto Klemperer. They were
colleagues in Los Angeles. Klemperer performed Schoenberg with his LA
Philharmonic – but would not broach his non-tonal works. Schoenberg wrote: “The
fact that you have become estranged from my music has not caused me to feel
insulted, though it has certainly estranged me.”

And here is Schoenberg’s response to Busoni in 1909:

“Above all, you are certainly doing me an injustice. But my
trust absolutely cannot be shaken by this divergence. On the contrary, it has
increased since I personally came in contact with you. The intuition I already
had about the nature of your personality has been confirmed. And now I have
formed a fairly clear picture. I can perceive a facet of your personality that
is infinitely valuable to me: the endeavor to be just! And I value this
endeavor higher than justice itself. Therefore, even if you are in fact doing
me an injustice, nothing in the world could give me greater pleasure than the
way in which you do so. But, as I said: I believe in actual fact that you are wrong.”

Busoni:

“Your last letter is an interesting document, which I value very highly. . . . Happily we have
struck an attitude of frankness to one another, and I would ask: to what extent
to you realize these intentions? And how much is instinctive, and how much is
deliberate?”

Busoni thereupon proposed that both versions of Op. 11, No.
2, be published in tandem.

Schoenberg:

“You must consider the following : it is impossible for me
to publish my piece together with a transcription which shows how I could have
done it better. Which thus indicates
that my piece is imperfect. And it is impossible to try to make the public
believe that my piece is good, if I
simultaneously indicate that it is not
good.”

Busoni closed the exchange:

“For various reasons, I am unable to give my formal assent
to play your pieces, but I shall always be on your side.”

At our concert, Alexander Shtarkman illustrated at the piano
how Busoni made Schoenberg’s keyboard writing more “pianistic.” And he
performed Op. 11, No. 2 (as Schoenberg composed it). We also sampled the
Schoenberg/Kandinsky exchange accompanied by paintings by both  Kandinsky and . . . Schoenberg (“Perhaps you
do not know that I also paint”). But the evening’s main events were a pair of
torrential musical compositions.

In 1907 – one year before Schoenberg’s first non-tonal compositions; two years before his Op. 11; three years before Kandinsky’s canvases turned wholly abstract – Busoni published a prophetic manifesto: Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. Schoenberg read it with admiration. He also recommended it to Kandinsky. A key passage explicates the notion of “Ur-Musik” – a primal “absolute music” or “infinite music” privileging spontaneity and instinct:

“Is it not singular, to demand of a composer originality in
all things, and to forbid it as regards form? No wonder that, once he becomes
original, he is accused of “formlessness.’ . . . Such lust for liberation
filled Beethoven that he ascended one
short step on the way leading music back to its loftier self – He did not quite
reach absolute music; but in certain moments he divined it, as in the
introduction to the fugue of the Hammerklavier
Sonata. Indeed all composers have drawn nearest the true nature of music in
preparatory and intermediary passages, where they felt at liberty to disregard
symmetrical proportions, and unconsciously drew free breath.

The famous notes-in-a-void Hammerklavier passage — which Shtarkman performed for us at our concert – says it all. Next to Beethoven, Busoni continues, Bach comes closest to “infinite music.” He also cites examples in Brahms and Schumann. In Busoni’s own solo piano output, a prime specimen of Ur-Musik is his Sonatina seconda from 1912. This ten-minute, one-movement musical tornado, in which motivic shards ride the storm or recede into ghostly clouds, is known (if at all) by reputation rather than experience. So I asked Alexander Shtarkman to learn it and play it for us. He magnificently obliged; here it is.

After the horrors of World War I, the moment for unrestrained Expressionism was over. Busoni opted for a “New Classicism.” Schoenberg opted for an insane 12-tone theory that would organize his non-tonal onslaughts. He also fled Hitler’s Germany for – an incongruous destination – Los Angeles (he liked the weather). There his output included a twentieth century patriotic masterpiece: the Ode to Napoleon – a work I have long presented and written about. It closed our concert in a blaze of exaltation.

In William Sharp’s electrifying performance, with Angel Gil-Ordonez conducting and Alexander Shtarkman at the piano, Schoenberg’s closing apostrophe to Franklin Delano Roosevelt (here symbolized by Lord Byron’s George Washington) sounded like this.

Kandinsky, Busoni, and Schoenberg followed a demanding muse.
Schoenberg even said: “I do not think about the pubic.” But the Ode to Napoleon invariably ignites an
ovation – and so it did at the Phillips Collection.

Harry Burleigh and Cultural Appropriation – Take Two

The annals of the Harlem Renaissance include heated debate over the practice of turning African-American spirituals into concert songs.

Zora Neale Hurston Hurston heard
concert spirituals “squeezing all of the rich black juice out of the songs,” a “flight
from blackness,” a “musical octoroon.” She listed Harry Burleigh among the
offenders.

But without Burleigh there
would be no “Deep River” as sung by Marian Anderson.

Angel Gil-Ordonez, the inspirational music director of PostClassical Ensemble, calls Burleigh one of our “lost causes,” along with Bernard Herrmann, Lou Harrison, and Silvestre Revueltas — with Arthur Farwell coming up in October.

What Angel means, really,
that these are delayed causes – that Burleigh
will ultimately become known as an American musical hero, that Herrmann will
remembered for more than his supreme film scores, that Harrison will be widely
performed east of California, that Revueltas (notwithstanding being Mexican) will
take his place as a twentieth century master  – and that Arthur Farwell’s “Indianist”
compositions, in parallel with Bartok abroad, will transcend their stigma of “appropriation.”

I am not sure what, exactly, “rich
black juice” might be, but there is a lot of it when Kevin Deas sings Burleigh’s
“Steal Away” – as he did last Thursday night in a PostClassical Ensemble
program we called “The Spiritual in White America.” It sounded like this.

That was at the Phillips Collection
– which in addition to its landmark collection of twentieth century American
paintings boasts a venerable music series situated in an intimate, wood-paneled
music room enhanced by a rotating selection of great visual art.

In such a space, the impact
of Burleigh’s settings – both solo and choral – was immense. On the same
program, we heard readings by Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonin Dvorak
(whose assistant Burleigh was in New York’s National Conservatory). That is: we
sampled a debate over appropriation. In the ensuing discussion, a member of the
audience called this the most memorable music-education experience he had
encountered since the days of Leonard Bernstein.

Burleigh’s spiritual arrangements
(some of which deserve to be called “compositions”) were juxtaposed with remarkable
arrangements by composers black and white, including William Dawson and Michael
Tippett.

Hurston is correct: none of
these concert versions of plantation song evoke the wild grief and ecstasy of
enslaved human beings laboring under the lash of white America. She rightly misses
the “jagged harmony,” the dissonance and spontaneity of singing in the field,
where “each piece is a new creation.” Nor – as the African-American composer/impresario
Nolan Williams pointed out in an acute post-concert discussion – does the
spiritual in concert truly evoke the sheer devastation of stolen lives.

And yet, in live performance,
Burleigh’s relative simplicity and directness of expression impart a timeless
dimension. More than subsequent concert renditions, they manage to convey the immediacy
of the vernacular.

Take “Deep River.” It was first set down (in an 1877 Fisk Jubilee Songbook) as a “church militant” spiritual. So far as I am aware, the once famous black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the first to capture “Deep River” for the concert hall. He slowed it down and “dignified” it as a 1904 solo piano piece. To my ears, the eight-minute Coleridge-Taylor “Deep River” is diffuse. And its decorum registers what Hurston called “a flight from blackness.” Burleigh’s final setting for voice and piano (1915) is by comparison singularly concentrated: thirty-one measures lasting less than three minutes. But everything is there. Even the chromatic harmonies, even the keyboard counter-melodies are radically concentrated. It attains an elemental force.

Harry Burleigh’s “Deep River” (Kevin Deas with Joseph Horowitz), preceded by Maud Powell’s 1911 recording of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s arrangement

Here is
Kevin Deas singing Harry Burleigh’s “Deep River” three days ago at the Phillips
Collection. It has been my privilege to accompany him in concert for some dozen
years.  

“Heedlessly Controversial” — Remembering Oscar Levant

Reviewing Sony Classical’s invaluable new Oscar Levant tribute in the current “Los Angeles Review of Books,” I write: “That Levant was what he seemed was doubtless a key to his appeal. His authenticity has never appeared more exceptional: no present-day mainstream media personality – not even our President — is as heedlessly controversial as was Levant every time he opened his mouth.” 

I also remark that Levant – who as pianist, movie star, radio and TV personality embodied an American cultural moment one lifetime ago — inhabited “a public community of erudition that no longer exists.”

I begin:

Before “Here’s Johnny!”, late-night TV meant the Jack Paar Show. Paar was as emotionally unbuffered as Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Conan O’Brien were caustically remote; simply but knowingly, he wore his heart on his sleeve — and never more than when his guest was Oscar Levant. Paar variously called Levant “a man for whom living is a sideline,” “my favorite far-outpatient,” and “one of America’s true geniuses.” He also quipped: “He’s as nervous as he is clever – for every pearl that comes out of his mouth, a pill goes in.” He enjoined his audience to bear in mind that “appearing here is good for Oscar; he looks forward to it; he enjoys an audience’s warmth again. Just coming here is therapy for him.”        

The object of these observations would sit slumped in a chair, his legs carelessly crossed to disclose a swath of flesh above the sock. He smoked and grimaced helplessly and continuously. His discourse consisted entirely of impromptu one-liners, delivered off-handedly with occasional eye contact. His thick features were battered and sleep-deprived. That he was self-evidently a wreck of a man equally excited Paar’s interest and compassion.      

Levant said: “You know, the only reason I’m appearing here is that there are no more beds in the mental institution.” And: “You have the most responsive audience since Adolf Hitler in the good old days.” Asked what he did for exercise, he replied: “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.” Informed that “we have a bunch of pills here you know . . . ,” he interrupted impatiently: “I took them, they’re nothing.” 

TO READ THE WHOLE REVIEW: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/completely-unmasked-at-all-times-on-the-complete-piano-recordings-of-oscar-levant/

A Vital New Book about Music and Race

Dale Cockrell’s “Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in in New York 1840-1917” is a book that will bring to wider attention the scholarship of one of America’s most original music historians — someone whose work fearlessly challenges conventional wisdom. It was my pleasure to review this new Norton release in this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal”:

On his first trip to New York, in 1835, Davy Crockett discovered in the drinking cellars of the Five Points “such fiddling and dancing nobody ever saw before in this world. I thought they were the true ‘heaven-borns.’ Black and white, white and black all hug-em-snug together, happy as lords and ladies.” 

Subsequent reporters, including armies of undercover cops, documented not only further racial intermingling in New York’s brothels and backroom saloons but also nudity, cross-dressing and “tough dancing”—and did so with a deadpan acumen both thorough and hilarious. The high-kicking can-can, appropriated from Paris, was “extravagantly indecent”; one 1885 incarnation, in an Eighth Avenue dive, degenerated into a “drunken orgie.” While two women danced, their companions snatched at their clothes until they “literally danced in nothing except hats, shoes, and stockings.” A 1902 film shows “A Tough Dance at McGurk’s” in which Sailor Lil begins whirling while her partner Kid Foley’s hands slide down her backside, after which both dancers toss themselves on the floor and roll on top of each other. As the music historian Dale Cockrell summarizes: “Few, if any, decades in the history of American dance featured a wider array of wildly provocative dances than the 1910s.” In 1912 alone, investigators identified such species as the hoochie koochie, the grizzly bear, “skirt & muscle dancing” and an airborne “exhibition dance” in which a female was twirled clinging to her partner’s neck.

That this world of sex, dance and music was interracial is crucial to Mr. Cockrell’s book “Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917.” It makes the connection to his scholarly specialty and passion: American popular music and its black vernacular roots. In an earlier, essential study, “Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World” (1997), he brilliantly elaborates an unpopular truth—that, early on, blackface music-making was not necessarily racist. Rather, it could be about class: a means of empowering the little guy in a world of capitalist snobs and prudes. And Mr. Cockrell, accordingly, is an eloquent advocate for the most gifted, most popular pertinent composer: Stephen Foster, in whose songs of loneliness and hardship (though sung in exaggerated black make-up by white performers) he finds an empathetic voice arising from Foster’s own marginality. 

In “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” this theme returns newly embroidered and contextualized. Assessing the white minstrel singer whose signature blackface song was “Zip Coon,” Mr. Cockrell calls George Washington Dixon (1802-61) “surely one of the most complex, enigmatic, and colorful figures in American history.” He continues: “There is no question that the skeleton around which [the blackface minstrel show] was built was the denigration of black people. . . . And—too often forgotten—there is no question that its enormous, century-long appeal was because of the music and dance that gave it flesh. That music and dance . . . was an expression of urban, lower-class, dance-hall and brothel culture. To the throngs on the stage of the Bowery Theatre, ‘Jim Crow’ belonged to them. Who would have thought that lower-class music and dance deserved a place on the legitimate stage? . . . ‘Zip Coon’ belonged to them as well. The song was of them, and once Dixon sang their song . . . their point was made: our music; we made it; we belong here.” 

In Mr. Cockrell’s account, minstrel extravaganzas at the Bowery overlapped in audience and affect the battered pianos, cracked cornets and raucous tambourines of red-hot “concert saloon bands” down the street. And both inculcated an American popular music that after World War I would sweep the world. An offspring of plantation song, the blues “joined oppressed people together into a single mind.” “Born in despondency,” it sang “loudly of hope.”

But by the time jazz invaded Paris and Berlin, New York’s brothels were in steep decline, their biracial music and dance squelched and sanitized. A series of clean-up exercises culminated with a Committee of Fourteen formed in 1905. Its founding members included leaders of the city’s major religions. Its financial bulwarks included John D. Rockefeller Jr., J.P. Morgan, George Foster Peabody and George H. Putnam. Its undercover detectives would chat and imbibe, even sing and stroke a barroom piano before heading upstairs. A representative report: “I sat on the edge of the bed and was talking to her and she kept saying hurry up. . . . There is others that want to be f— as well as you. I told her that I was not in a hurry and that I did not want to f— in a hurry.” 

Some 1,200 establishments were thus inspected. Many were successfully shut. As incriminating evidence of corruption and vice explicitly included racial intermingling, a “de facto color line” was enforced. Marshall’s Hotel on West 53rd Street was among the most popular nightspots in town, “a vibrant black and tan that was the epicenter of New York’s black bourgeois life”; the clientele included James Weldon Johnson, James Reese Europe, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois. Investigators reported how white women met their “colored lovers” there. Marshall capitulated, newly separating his patrons by color—a Jim Crow sea change. The tide of social activism, Mr. Cockrell writes, changed the city’s “approach to morality.” Concurrently, its music changed. Ragtime made way for jazz, purveyed by an army of displaced black and white musicians who had lost access to a secure demimonde economy. “Music as a public, big-space, segregated experience” resulted. 

A memorable epilogue to “Demons of Disorder” reveals how Mr. Cockrell came to chronicle all this in two linked books. He grew up in rural Kentucky, where—stereotypes notwithstanding—he acquired black friends and a notion of racial equality enforced by his parents. Later, in the north, he encountered less comfortable racial attitudes among whites more entitled than he had been. In his 20s, he taught in Africa before joining the music faculty of Middlebury College. His personal odyssey turned him into a populist on the left—in today’s America, an honorable endangered species. Mr. Cockrell’s identification with his interracial childhood peers fires his scholarship to this day. “Everybody’s Doin’ It” is a book to read and ponder.

MORE ABOUT “EVERYBODY’S DOIN’ IT” (NOT FROM MY “WALL STREET JOURNAL” REVIEW):

Everybody’s Doin’ It documents three findings. The first is about the musical legacy of blackface minstrelsy. The second is about racial intermingling in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. The third is about the culture of brothels. All three challenge conventional wisdom.

Cockrell writes: “Prostitution was a large, highly developed urban industry throughout the United States from the Jacksonian Era up to World War I.” What he means by “large” is that as of 1858 commercialized sex was New York City’s  second largest industry, right after textiles, with one prostitute for every fifty-two males. The numbers went up after that.

The topic is complex. For some women, prostitution was their last best hope. It was, Cockrell generalizes, seldom “unalloyed exploitation” or “a way for women to be empowered.” And the world of brothels was about other things as well. It is in these other things – bristling with  social and creative energies – that Cockrell surprisingly discovers a defining American milieu.

Remarkably, he has documented that in Manhattan musicians charged with keeping customers dancing comprised something like thirty per cent of the total male musician population. The police reports he has exhaustively culled further disclose the kind of American dancing that this American music impelled.

To call it “erotic,” in shorthand, would be both accurate and evasively incomplete.

Re-Thinking Aaron Copland

How did Aaron Copland’s film music attempt to counteract the Hollywood influence of Erich Korngold? To what degree did he draw inspiration from the master Mexican populist Silvestre Revueltas? How did the Red Scare change Copland’s style in the 1950s?

These were some of the questions tackled by “Copland’s America,” this summer’s festival-within-a-festival at North Carolina’s impressive Brevard Music Festival.

So far as I can tell, Brevard is unique. It manages to combine the focused intellectual exploration that Leon Botstein has long pursued at Bard with the ambitious training activities for gifted young musicians that we associate with places like Aspen and Tanglewood.

The Copland festival – in which I was fortunate to participate as a teacher, producer, and speaker — engaged all three Brevard orchestras (including high school, conservatory, and professional musicians) plus a range of chamber music, film, and lectures. Copland’s turn to populism in the 1930s was an inescapable central topic. When Roger Sessions quipped that Copland “was more talented than he realized,” he of course meant that for him Copland the high modernist trumped Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring. I myself have long been similarly disposed; my favorite Copland is the 1930 Piano Variations, which once emptied rooms with its scathing dissonances and skittish urban energies.

Formidably performed by Douglas Weeks, the Piano Variations kicked off “Copland and the Cold War,” a Brevard program tracking Copland’s compositional odyssey as well as his political lurch to the left. Copland’s prize-winning 1934 workers’ song “Into the Streets May First” preceded a 25-minute re-enactment of his 1953 grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his aide Roy Cohn. In this context, encountering the 1950 Piano Quartet – a non-tonal work eschewing Copland’s accustomed ebullience – was a chilling experience. For the first time, it occurred to me that the example of Shostakovich – whom Copland more esteemed for his mission than his music – might be pertinent to the stark textures and black humor of this little-known example of Copland’s “late style.” I would call it music by a composer to whom something bad has happened.

Brevard’s music director,
Keith Lockhart, is a true believer in Copland’s capacity to reach a “new
audience” – to (like Shostakovich) compose for both “us and them.” And
Lockhart’s reading of the heroic Third Symphony – a symphony unthinkable
without Shostakovich’s example – was the most persuasive I have ever
encountered. This 1945 patriotic paean can easily sound overwrought. Lockhart tracked
a long line and ascended to high ground.

It was my pleasure to work with more than 100 high school musicians, exploring Copland the film composer in juxtaposition with Korngold, Revueltas, and Bernard Herrmann. Six of them hosted their own orchestral concert, conducted by Kenneth Lam (who every summer achieves stellar results with pre-college players). Copland’s music for The City (1939) was compared with Korngold’s for Kings Row (1942). The former is Copland’s highest achievement as a film composer – the most important Copland score we don’t know. The latter is one of Korngold’s admired Hollywood soundtracks, for a film featuring a signature Ronald Reagan performance.

Copland’s loud critiques of Korngold’s plushly upholstered style, smothering Hollywood with Vienna, were pondered by the student hosts. The swagger of the Kings Row score made a great effect in concert. But I emerged with a fresh appreciation of its redundancy – Kings Row would be a better film shot “silent,” sans dialogue; Korngold repeats everything the actors have to say. The title music (played at the first Reagan inauguration) is risibly irrelevant to the film’s subject matter – Korngold composed it thinking the movie would be about kings, not smalltown America. Even so, I’m glad he kept it. 

Another symphonic program explored in detail Copland’s Mexican epiphany. This is a scripted, bi-lingual presentation I have produced many times in all parts of the US — including El Paso, where its impact was unique. Part two is the film Redes (1935), which I have often extolled. At peak moments in the story, its combination of Paul Strand’s majestic cinematography and Revueltas’s explosive score (which impetuously charts its own course) is simply unbeatable. Brevard’s conductor was my DC colleague Angel Gil-Ordonez, who memorably commands this music and has recorded it with our PostClassical Ensemble.

My three weeks at Brevard were capped by Dean Anthony’s production of Johann Strauss’s sublime Die Fledermaus. As I have previously written in this space, he achieves miracles with his young singers — I have never seen a Brevard production that failed to ignite.  In Fledermaus, Anthony waltzed a fine line between humor and sentiment. The score’s crucial number – Falke’s “Bruderlein und Schwesterlein,” here rendered as “Sing to Love” in the Ruth and Thomas Martin translation – was given full emotional weight. Unlike so many opera directors nowadays, Anthony is musically literate — he was a comprimario tenor of wide experience. He paces his productions flawlessly, precisely gauging the cadences and the silences, seizing the big trajectory. Of necessity, he works intimately and organically with his conductors. (I am reminded of the difference between Copland scoring The City, as a core member of the creative team, and Copland scoring the Hollywood films he was handed by their creators. He abandoned Hollywood in 1949.)  

A cavil: Is the Viennese waltz a lost musical art? The original performance style of a Mozart or Verdi or Wagner opera is informative but not imperative; fresh perspectives are fine. But I don’t see any alternative to kicking the second beat in The Blue Danube. There are different ways to do it – the beat needs a rhythmic accent (play it early) and/or a dynamic accent. But it has to be done. And it isn’t – cf. Jonas Kaufman at Carnegie last fall with the Orchestra of St Luke’s (not youngsters) and a German conductor; every Lehar waltz was flat as a table and tables don’t dance. You can hear Lehar conducting the Merry Widow Waltz – he recorded it. You can hear Clemens Krauss conducting Strauss, or Carlos or Eric Kleiber, or (my favorite) Josef Krips. They’re all hiding in plain site on the web.

Ferruccio Busoni: “A Fresh Gust of Air”

Preparing an August 15 Busoni/Schoenberg/Kandinsky program for The Phillips Collection in DC, I discovered myself newly entranced by one of the most magical figures in the history of Western music. Around the same time, Kirill Gerstein’s revelatory new CD of the Busoni Piano Concerto turned up — and I felt impelled to take stock. I wound up writing 4,500 words:

On the first anniversary of the death of Ferruccio Busoni, in 1925, his former pupil Kurt Weill wrote: “I will never forget the feeling of relief which we experienced when, in 1920, after an absence of six years, Busoni returned to Berlin. . . . He came like a fresh gust of air. He was able to transcend the distortions in which we had sought escape.”

The moment was crucial for twentieth century composers. In the wake of Wagner, in the wake of the Great War, in the wake of spent Romanticism and tarnished ideals, something radically new was needed. 

For Arnold Schoenberg, the new idea was an esoteric theory of non-tonal music propelling Romantic chromaticism a step further into the unknown. In comparison, Igor Stravinsky attacked Romanticism from the rear, reversing the trajectory toward harmonic complexity in favor of a stripped down “neo-classicism.” These antithetical strategies long dominated a heated discourse over music’s proper modernist future.

Today, looking back, modernism no longer seems as dominant. Composers irrelevant to Schoenberg and Stravinsky – including such unrepentant Romantics as Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, and Richard Strauss – are no longer footnotes. And neither should be Busoni. If his genius remains too rarified to secure wide appeal, his “fresh gust of air” is enjoying a fresh gust of advocacy.  

In two respects, Busoni surpasses Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and the others: the charismatic appeal of Busoni the man and the stature of Busoni the performer.

Weill’s encomium reads in part: “It is strange enough that such a phenomenon appeared in our time. Even in the past we find few figures in whom the man and the work are thus unified . . . We are bound to think of Leonardo. In him also we find that comprehensive spirituality which strives to open up all attainable spheres, that sublimity above life’s trivialities.” Many another testified to the spell cast by Busoni’s idealism and intellect. His letters document a hypnotic personality, aloof yet prone to acute humanistic observation. He was born in Empoli in 1866 – and so straddled two centuries. His father was a nomadic Italian clarinet virtuoso out of Fellini. His mother’s lineage was German and Jewish. No less than Mahler (who esteemed him), he embodies qualities of paradox and irony both implicit and manifest. His Faustian striving is oddly leavened by espousals of Mediterranean clarity and proportion. 

Busoni the pianist was famously regarded as a successor to Franz Liszt – whom he both resembles and contradicts. His core keyboard affinities were for Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt. His eight acoustic recordings of 1922 illuminate a singular perspective. His Bach is in equal portions analytical and subjective; he pedals the ending of the C major fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, to discover an aura of mystery. In Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13, he reproduces Liszt’s zithers and gypsies in a Mephisto mirror of his own idiosyncratic devising. His 1933 biographer Edward Dent, who knew Busoni well, wrote: “Those who never heard Busoni play during those last years (1919-1922) can have no conception of the prophetic inspiration and grandeur of his performance. His technical achievements in mere speed and strength must have far surpassed anything accomplished by Liszt and [Anton] Rubinstein.” Of Busoni’s late Beethoven, Dent wrote: “To hear him play these sonatas was an almost terrifying experience; dynamic and rhythmic relations were treated with such vast breadth and freedom that one seemed taken up to heights of perilous dizziness and made, as it were, to gaze steadily into the depths until one’s vision became serene.” Of Busoni the man, Dent summarized: “He was . . . of warmly affectionate temperament and irrepressible humour; his married life with Gerda Sjostrand brought them both thirty-four years of unclouded happiness, and his kindness and thoughtfulness for his pupils were inexhaustible.” 

Busoni’s legacy will inevitably hinge on his compositions, in which every Busoni paradox is somehow in play. He cherishes vivacity, elegance, simplicity, and grace. And yet he is a fervent thinker and other-worldly seeker. The resulting music has always hovered on the fringes of the repertoire. And yet three of the most interesting pianists prominent on today’s stages are Busoni advocates. And there are reasons to believe that this is not coincidental.

Busoni’s compositional output falls into two periods; call them “early” and “late.“ A lot of late Busoni tacks toward a pair of concepts from his aphoristic writings: “Ur-Musik” and “Young Classicism.” That the concepts seem contradictory is a typical Busoni ambiguity. The first connects, at times precisely, to the contemporaneous efforts of Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky to capture instinctual creativity at the cusp. The latter overlaps but does not describe neo-classical restraint.

In his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music(1907), Busoni writes of Ur-Musik (“absolute music”):

Is it not singular to demand of a composer originality in all things, and to forbid it as regards form? No wonder that, once he becomes original, he is accused of “formlessness.” Mozart! The seer and the finder, the great man with the childlike heart – it is he we marvel at, to whom we are devoted; but not his Tonic and Dominant, his Developments and Codas. . . .

[Beethoven] did not quite reach absolute music, but in certain moments he divined it, as in the introduction to the fugue of the Sonata for Hammerklavier [Op. 106]. Indeed, all composers have drawn nearest the true nature of music in preparatory and intermediary passages . . . , where they felt at liberty to disregard symmetrical portions, and unconsciously drew free breath.

Busoni also pertinently observes: “The rest and the pause are the elements which reveal most clearly the origins of music. . . . The spellbinding silence between two movements becomes, in this context, music itself. It leaves more room for mystery . . . “ 

The same “free breath,” drawn “unconsciously,” animates Kandinsky’s first excursions in non-representational art and Schoenberg’s first attempts at non-tonal music. In fact, Schoenberg and Busoni corresponded on this and other topics – a span of letters (1903-1914) beginning with the characteristic Busoni sally: “Maybe I, some later Siegfried, shall succeed in penetrating the fiery barrier which makes your work inaccessible, and in awakening it from its slumber of unperformedness.” The common ground they evince, in Busoni’s words, compasses “pure, unspecified, refined ideas for the piano, sound without technique.” Schoenberg calls it “unshackled flexibility of form uninhibited by ‘logic.’’’ In the same letter he disavows “harmony as cement or bricks of a building,” “protracted ten-ton scores,” and “pathos.” Not the least fascinating aspect of this dialogue is its self-portraiture, juxtaposing Busoni’s complex urbanity with Schoenberg’s extremism of sentiment and opinion, as when he insists upon envisioning a subconscious music captured on the fly before his mind corrupts it: “This is my vision: this is how I imagine music before I notate=transcribe it. And I am unable to force this upon myself; I must wait until a piece comes out of its own accord in the way I have envisaged. . . . My only intention is to have no intentions!”

That Busoni shared comparable goals is evident in such music as the mercurial Sonatina No. 2 for piano (1912). Among his purest essays in Ur-Musik, it shuns tonal centers and interposes irregular bar lengths.It also uses the piano more resourcefully than the Op. 11 Piano Pieces (1909) that Schoenberg mailed to Busoni for his consideration. (Busoni attempted in vain to share with soothing irony his reservations about Schoenberg’s piano writing.)

“Young Classicism” is a somewhat later Busoni credo, dated 1920. He writes:

By ”Young Classicism” I mean the mastery, the sifting and the turning to account of all the gains of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms.

This art will be old and new at the same time at first. We are steering in that direction, luckily, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly. . . 

With “Young Classicism” I include the . . . return to melody again as the ruler of all voices and all emotions and as the bearer of the idea and the beggeter of harmony . . . 

A third point not less important is the casting off of what is “sensuous” and the renunciation of subjectivity . . . and re-conquest of serenity.

Busoni’s Concertino for clarinet and chamber orchestra (1918), for instance, sublimates the virtuosic operatic paraphrases his eccentric father would perform. The music levitates. Its effect is ruined if the soloist’s cascading acrobatics betray effort or ego.

“Late Busoni” also includes the musical legacy of some 49 months in the United States (1891-94), where he taught and also toured widely. His letters home document both estrangement and fascination. The Native American proved a magnet for Busoni’s mystic bent and wide curiosity. In his Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra (1914) – a work American pianists and orchestras should perform – the “formless” stretches of Ur-Musik attempt to capture elemental Western landscapes wedded to elemental ceremony and song. His opera Doktor Faust, to his own German libretto, is Busoni’s summa. He did not live to complete it. Its pivotal Sarabande – a vaporous symphonic interlude – is a Busoni litmus test: if you succumb to the peculiar serenity (the music critic Paul Bekker’s 1924 term for the Busoni affect) of this valedictory ascension, you succumb to Busoni. Not everyone does. (The recording to hear is German-Italian: the Cologne Radio Symphony conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.)

* * *

Busoni’s first period, preceding all this, defies generalization: he is finding his way. The sound of his riper music is here more than nascent, but the scale and weight remain Romantic. (Brahms is a sometime influence.) Best-known are the Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano (1898) and the five-movement, 70-minute Piano Concerto with chorus (1904). Joseph Szigeti, Adolph Busch (partnering Rudolf Serkin), and Gidon Kremer were inspired exponents of the Sonata. Leonidas Kavakos and Frank Peter Zimmermann – consequential names in the violin world – play it today. The Concerto, which in Busoni’s own view concluded his initial quest for his real musical self, was long championed by his piano protégé Egon Petri. A 1967 recording by Petri’s onetime student John Ogden first generated wide awareness of its sui generis properties (at a time when Busoni the composer remained virtually unknown in the US). Recently it has been more frequently performed, most prominently by Garrick Ohlsson and Marc Andre Hamelin. A new recording on myrios classics by Kirill Gerstein in live performance with Sakari Oramo and the Boston Symphony is to my ears the most compelling yet – and argues that, peculiarities notwithstanding, the Busoni Piano Concerto deserves as much favorable attention as Liszt’s FaustSymphony or Mahler’s Eighth (setting Goethe), both mega-compositions it somewhat resembles. 

The concerto’s German and Italian elements are not so much fused as juxtaposed. Movements two and four – “Pezzo giocoso” and “All’ italiana” – are festive/demonic Italian set pieces. Movements one, three, and five are exercises in gravitas. The entirety is knitted by recurrent themes, the most prominent of which generates the closing male chorus, setting (in German) reverent verses from Adam Oehlenschlaeger’s Aladdin; Busoni comments: “It resembles some original inborn quality of a person which in the course of years comes out again in him purified and matured as he reaches the last phase of his transformations.” 

Plainly, the Busoni concerto maps a journey of the spirit. As in Faust, the journey visits German and Italian realms, higher and lower climes, with Oelenschlaeger evoking Goethe’s closing chorusmysticus. The traveler is the pianist: the composer himself. Nothing could be more characteristic of Busoni than his paradoxical diffidence in this role: less a soloist than a partner. He called the concerto template of his forebears a “caricature of a symphony,” “ a bravura piece for a single instrument, for the greater glory of which the orchestra, the most perfect and powerful musical medium, is subordinated. . . . For the sake of respectability these morceauxd’occasion were given the outward shape of a symphony: its first movement put on the mask of a certain dignity, but in the following movements the mask was gradually dropped, until the finale brazenly displayed the grimace of the acrobat.”

And so the soloist in Busoni’s concerto never flaunts his wares: though the piano writing is supremely dense and difficult, it supports and comments upon a symphonic tapestry. Perhaps posturing is not wholly avoided. Perhaps a faux religious mode interposes at times. But the same could be said of the Romantic religiosity of Liszt and Mahler when Goethe is in play. Busoni’s soloist projects heroism and temperament, but not display. This defining paradox of the Piano Concerto is unique and unprecedented.

 There exists an incandescent 1932 broadcast recording of Egon Petri performing the concerto’s fourth movement with Hans Rosbaud and Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. The movement itself is a tour de force, a mega-tarantella escalating to a pulverizing coda. Petri and Rosbaud drive the whirling dance rhythms at the fastest possible clip (Busoni asks for “Vivace”); the festivity acquires a phantasmagoric dimension. If nothing like this transpires in the new Gerstein/Oramo recording, it remains a marvel of creative advocacy. Beyond praise is the pianist’s intellectual grip, the clarity of passagework and texture, the misterioso sonic undulations. And it matters that Oramo – a Finn who currently presides over the BBC Symphony and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic – is not new to this piece. From the opening moments, he commands the long, smooth phrases with which Busoni evokes a pregnant ebb and flow of thought and feeling, sometimes acqueous, sometimes airborne, swelling to plateaus of grandeur.

*  *  *

Gerstein also plays late Busoni, but has not recorded any. Two prominent pianists who have are Igor Levit and Marc-Andre Hamelin. Most of the pieces in question have long been accessible on LP and CD, but readings of quality are few and far between. Busoni’s ripest piano works are permanently elusive. Playing the notes will get you nowhere. The oddity of the harmonies, the idiosyncrasies of scoring invite clairvoyant voicings and pedallings: a fresh conception.  

Last season, Levit toured with a program of Bach, Liszt, Busoni, and Frederic Rzewski conceived in remembrance of a close friend, and recorded it all for Sony Classical. The Busoni pieces, both from 1909, are the Fantasia after J.S. Bach, composed by Busoni in memory of his father, and the Berceuse, remembering his mother. The latter, signature late Busoni, limns a hovering melancholic barcarolle, a Venice of the mind. On the page, it’s simple and spare; no Busoni piano work is easier to finger. Levit’s performance is weighted with grief. A Hamelin version of the Berceusemay be found as the last of seven Elegies(1907-09) included on his landmark three-CD set on Hyperion: “Busoni: Late Piano Music.” Compared to Levit, Hamelin cultivates a cooler Busoni sound. Gerstein’s Busoni is colorful, aerated, more individual.

Hamelin has recorded Busoni in bulk. In addition to the complete Elegies, his “late Busoni” box contains all six sonatinas, the Toccata, excerpts from the Klavierubung, the Indian DiaryBook I, and assorted shorter piece, all postdating the Piano Concerto. As a consolidated act of advocacy, it is invaluable. I would also call it timely.

A striking feature of this or any Busoni collection is its “oneness.” In Busoni’s lexicon, this term references a unity of the whole of musical experience. In practice, what it means is that Busoni’s music abounds in cross-reference and self-reference. He appropriates Bach and Mozart, Christmas carols and Italian tunes, Lutheran chorales and “Greensleeves” (a spectacular transformation, in the Elegy No. 4). And he borrows incessantly from himself. The Piano Concerto, for instance, echoes dreamily through the barcarolle elegy “All’ Italia!” There is even a name – “Nachdichtung” – for the Busoni genre in which borrowed and fresh materials interfuse.

For many decades, Busoni was best-known for his piano transcriptions of Bach. These range from organ works rendered pianistic to what is probably the most esteemed, most performed Bach-Busoni: an epic, irridescent version of the Chaconne from the D minor Partita for solo violin. The deserved popularity of these reincarnations was aborted sometime after 1950 by purists intent upon “authenticity” (at the Curtis Institute, Rudolf Serkin forbade his students to play any music in transcription). In other words: Busoni’s piano corpus spans a vast continuum from Bach-Busoni to unadulterated Busoni, with every gradation of appropriation in between. Because today the bias against transcription has evaporated, issues of ownership should matter less. So much the better for Busoni. (In 1981 Claudio Arrau told me that he had stopped performing Busoni’s Carmen Fantasy – a mainstay of his repertoire in Germany in the twenties and thirties — because of “idiotic prejudices” that had since abated.) 

Busoni’s “oneness” of music treats all music as common property. It also – Busoni being Busoni – intimates a kind of celestial intermingling, connoted by such typical Busoni instructions as “mistico,” “transfigurato,” and “visionario.” The late Busoni pieces Hamelin has recorded are authentically strange. As a listening challenge, they are not nearly as esoteric as Schoenberg’s non-tonal keyboard works. But, no less than Schoenberg, Busoni insists on his vision; he makes no effort to cajole or impress. He enacts a withdrawal.  

With the evidence at hand, one can plausibly predict that the Busoni Piano Concerto and Second Violin Sonata will be more performed in years to come. The same could be said of at least two specimens of late Busoni: Doktor Faust, which shows increasing signs of resilience, and two solo keyboard works: the Toccata and the aforementioned Kammer-Fantasie uber Carmen, both for now far better known to pianists than to the musical public. Subtitled “Preludio-Fantasia-Ciaccona,” the 10-minute Toccata (1920) bears an inscription from Frescobaldi, yet does not remotely evoke the early Baroque. The sostenuto melody of the Fantasia is the Countess’s hallucinatory aria from Doktor Faust. The velocity and intensity of the faster sections insure that, however incidentally, any competent player will make a galvanizing impression. (A riveting 1965 Rudolf Serkin performance is now on youtube.)

The Carmen Fantasy (1920), which Busoni calls his Sonatina No. 6, does and does not recall the operatic paraphrases of Liszt. Liszt is Romantically flamboyant and expansive; Busoni is curt and chilling. To close, he dissolves Bizet’s “fate” motto (“Andante visionario”). The composer Kaikhosru Sorabji, who in 1920 heard Busoni in London, remembered Bizet’s tunes “’controlled’ by Busoni in a way that recalls the control of a psychic sensitive by some powerful discarnate entity . . . It was amazing to feel the audience at the Wigmore a little horrified and frightened by something the likes of which they had certainly never known before.” There exist a couple of terrific early recordings by pianists who heard and revered Busoni in Berlin: Petri (1936) and the 25-year-old Arrau (1928). Both are very quick: Arrau’s takes 7:04, Petri’s an incredible 6:34 – at which speed the affect is not superhuman (as in Liszt), but inhuman. 

*  *  *

Busoni’s influence is a protean topic – and characteristically elusive. It is odd that in the copious scholarship on Kurt Weill, his mentoring within the Berlin Busoni circle is so little stressed. Weill himself judged his teacher’s Doktor Faust“in every respect” a model for future “musical stage works.” And Busoni’s writings on opera are a virtual primer for Weill’s historic collaborations with Bertolt Brecht; Busoni prophesizes the “alienation effect” Brecht would make his own. Weill’s pre-eminent concert work, the Second Symphony of 1933, is a dark essay in distantiation in which many pages actually sound like Busoni.

Of Busoni’s other Berlin composition students the most notable was Edgard Varese, for whom Busoni’s Sketch for a New Aestheticwas a veritable bible for its treatment of musical form and espousal of quarter-tones played by electronic instruments. A new study, Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy,by Erinn E. Knyt, adduces a third important composer upon whom Busoni impacted: Jean Sibelius, who in 1921 wrote to Busoni: “I thank you from the bottom of my heart . . . Without you, the [fifth] symphony would have remained paper and I an apparition from the forest.” In Helsingfors in 1888, Sibelius and Busoni met almost daily, commencing a relationship that lasted until 1921. When one reads that Sibelius admired Busoni’s Berceuse elegiacque( 1909), a picture snaps into place. Both as pianist and composer, Busoni was obsessed with sound per se. So when he transformed his four-minute piano Berceuse into a nine-minute symphonic vignette, he did not merely orchestrate it; he re-composed it. The result is a musical chiaroscuro in which timbre and color are, as Knyt observes, as important as pitch or harmony. A kindred work is Sibelius’s valedictory tone poem Tapiola (1926), a species of Ur-Musik in which the sight and sound of “Northland’s dusky forests” matter less than a presiding essence. Busoni also promoted Sibelius via the indispensable concerts of new music he conducted, engaging the Berlin Philharmonic at his own expense (1902-09); his programs also included Debussy, Delius, Schoenberg, and Bartok.

Beyond Weill, Varese, and Sibelius, a short list of the composers mentored or otherwise instructed by Busoni would include Percy Grainger, Louis Gruenberg, Ernst Krenek, Otto Luening, and Stefan Wolpe. The pianists who studied with him, in addition to Petri, included Eduard Steuermann, later an essential member of Schoenberg’s circle. And Busoni in Berlin cast a spell on Arrau, Mitropoulos, Serkin, Szigeti, Serkin and Busch. That said, there is no “Busoni school” of composition or performance. 

The generation that heard or knew Busoni is long past. A hiatus ensued. But now – another Busoni twist – globalization may entice Ferruccio Busoni back to us. It is pertinent that Kirill Gerstein, Igor Levit, and Marc-Andre Hamelin are twenty-first century artists not circumscribed by place. Born and raised in Russia, Gerstein studied classical piano in the Soviet Union and jazz piano in Boston, then with teachers in New York City, Madrid, and Budapest.  He is today an American citizen living in Berlin. His wife is Israeli. Levitt, also born in Russia, moved to Germany an early age. Like Gerstein, he is Jewish and lives in Berlin. Hamelin, born in Montreal, is French-Canadian – i.e., his country of origin lacks a legacy of classical composers. He lives in Boston. And it occurs to me to add that Dimitri Mitropoulos, who more than any other conductor tirelessly championed Busoni in the United States, was a Greek musician seasoned in Busoni’s Berlin before settling in Minneapolis, then Manhattan; Mitropoulos was also a peerless Mahler interpreter, ultimately as placeless as Busoni and Mahler both.

Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who once seemingly embodied the future of music, were immigrants to America – and yet permanent exiles of fixed national identity. Schoenberg famously quipped that his twelve-tone method would insure the supremacy of German music. Even his most patriotic American work – the searing Ode to Napoleon, composed in grateful response to Pearl Harbor – remains incorrigibly Germanic in style and lineage. Stravinsky, like Schoenberg a longtime resident of California, was admired for his magpie facility, musically adapting to Paris, even in some ways to Los Angeles. And yet upon his one return to Russia, in 1962, he was heard to declare that “a man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country – he canhave only one country – and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life,” even to express regret that “circumstances separated me from my fatherland, that I did not give birth to my works there and, above all, that I was not there to help the new Soviet Union create its new music.” To Aaron Copland, Stravinsky in America (as of 1943) embodied a “psychology of exile” characterized by “a lack of immediacy of contact with the world around him.” More recently Richard Taruskin has influentially called Stravinsky the “most Russian” of all Russian composers.

Born in Italy, Busoni mainly lived in Germany. He resided in the United States longer than any other country except Switzerland, where he spent the war years. He also lived in Russia. His wife was Finnish. His pupils and disciples were utterly diverse in origin. He was for decades victimized by nationalist prejudice – an interloper in Germany, a deserter of Italy, a evader in Switzerland. Stefan Zweig observed him in Zurich “shadowed by sadness,” haunted that his scattered students might be “shooting at each other right now.”

A blurring of boundaries enriches or problematizes Busoni’s life and work: Italy and Germany, Bach and Busoni, Ur-Musik and Young Classicism, artist and man. The notion of Schoenberg or Stravinsky gravitating toward Native Americans, as Busoni did in the West, is actually risible. He was, for his time, unfashionably cosmopolitan, controversially tolerant.

Kurt Weill, in his Busoni encomium, wrote: “He let us breathe of his being . . . It was an exchange of thoughts in the highest sense, without imposing opinions, without self-righteousness, without the slightest trace of envy or malice, and the acknowledgement of each creation which revealed talent and capability was unrestrained and enthusiastic. . . . Such individuals are immortal not only though their work but through the radiation of their personality, through the gradual influence of their humanity.”

Perhaps.

A Fidelio for Yesterday

Faced with a twelve-hour drive, with wife and dog, from Manhattan to the idyllic Brevard (North Carolina) Music Festival, I threw some CDs in the car.

I chose Fidelio
because I had been eager to re-experience Beethoven’s opera since encountering
David Lang’s Fidelio-for-today, A Prisoner of State, premiered by the
New York Philharmonic as a season finale concert opera. This minimalist
distillation ignited a standing ovation. But I wanted to go back to the real
thing.

The Fidelio
I own is the famous 1962 EMI
recording, conducted by Otto Klemperer, with Jon Vickers as Florestan and
Christa Ludwig as Leonore. I hadn’t heard it in decades.

I skipped act one because act two is better. Agnes
silenced her cell phone. Teddy was asleep in the back seat.

Florestan was one of Vickers’ signature roles. His specialty was the outsider. I knew that re-visiting his aching rendition of Florestan’s dungeon aria, beginning act two, would grip the car.

But I was unprepared for the rest. Beethoven tinkered for years with Fidelio, struggling to get it right. But, as I now discovered, act two proceeds with an inexorable logic, rising from blackness to refulgent light. Wondrously, Beethoven ascends by degrees. Then, when the arc is at its peak, he peaks some more: “O Gott! o welch ein Augenblick!”

The sudden linchpin in this progression is when
Leonora exclaims “Tödte erst sein Weib!” (“First
kill his wife!”). The moment – the lad Fidelio is revealed to be the heroine
Leonora — is transformational. Agnes began passing me paper towels to dab my
cheeks as we rode into West Virginia.

In general, I mistrust studio recordings of
opera. But this Fidelio is alive at
every moment. And it isn’t just Vickers and Ludwig, as the unconquerable
husband and wife. Gottlob Frick, as Rocco, bears unforgettably humane witness,
deploying his sepulchral bass (an increasingly rare species) at half voice.

When it ended, I struggled to speak. All I managed
to say was: “It’s over.” Agnes understood that I was referring not to the disk
in the CD player. I meant Klemperer, Vickers, Ludwig, Frick, Beethoven – an
aesthetic experience overpowered by empathy. There will never again be a Fidelio like this.

In 1927, Klemperer was asked how best to
celebrate the Beethoven Centenary. “Don’t play any Beethoven for a year,” he
answered.

We have another Beethoven anniversary coming up – 2020 marks 250 years since his year of birth. I think I know how PostClassical Ensemble will celebrate. We’ll invite our patrons to communally experience that 1962 Klemperer recording.

That I cannot imagine a more compelling
Beethoven experience in the year 2020 says it all.     

Who Was the American Bartok?

Who was the American Bartok?

The most plausible candidate,
I would say, is Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), who led the “Indianists” movement
in American music beginning around 1900.

Here is a sampling – his “Pawnee Horses” for 16-part a cappella chorus, sung in Navajo.

Farwell’s Pawnee Horses

Farwell is one of the most
fascinating figures in the history of American classical music. His life-long
quest was for the “unGerman” – a musical idiom as capacious and indigenous as
Walt Whitman’s free verse was to American literature. He lived with Native
Americans and studied their music and rituals. He reported out-of-body-experiences.
He was inspired by Dvorak’s notion that the American Indian could supply rooted
ingredients for a distinctive New World concert trope.

We don’t know Farwell, I would
say, mainly because American music predating World War I remains largely unexplored.
And of course Farwell bears a stigma: cultural appropriation. Yet he cannot be
written off as a naif. The late David
McAllester, an eminence gris of
American ethnomusicology, held Farwell in high esteem. McAllester distinguished
between “imitating” Native American music, and discovering “inspiration” in
Native American music. The inspiration forging Farwell’s “The Hako” string
quartet, in McAllester’s opinion, was formidably authentic.

PostClassical Ensemble will be celebrating Arthur Farwell at the Washington National Cathedral next October as part of festival we’re calling “Native American Inspirations.” The same series of concerts will sample the work of the eminent contemporary Native American concert composer Jerod Tate. And we’ll host the South Dakota Symphony’s visionary Lakota Music Project. That means we’ll bring to DC distinguished musicians from the Pine Ridge Reservation, as well as members of the South Dakota Symphony who have long been interacting with Lakota drummers and singers.

The festival pursues our mandate as Ensemble-in-Residence at the National Cathedral – to explore music as an instrument for mutual understanding. In seasons past, that’s fostered programs celebrating Whitman, Indonesian gamelan, and Harry Burleigh.

This coming season, PCE will also produce “An Armenian Odyssey,” for which the Cathedral’s Great Nave will dramatically frame the singular live animations of Kevork Mourad. And we close with a Haydn Festival featuring Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whose Haydn CDs for Chandos argue for fresh understanding of a composer/inventor harder to place than Mozart or Beethoven.