Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 25

“The Art and Alchemy of Conducting” — and Mahler’s Fourth

As all Mahlerites know, the opening of the Fourth Symphony is both magical and mutable. A preamble of chiming sleigh bells and flutes dissipates to a cheerful violin ditty that coyly retards as it ascends to the tonic G. Mahler writes “etwas zuruckhaltend” (“somewhat held back”). But really anything goes.

The champion retarder is Willem Mengelberg, in a famous 1939 recording with his Concertgebouw Orchestra. It sounds like this.

Since this passage is inherently playful, conductors can get away with that and we gratefully smile. Since Mengelberg was a Mahler disciple whose performances Mahler liked, since Mahler was well-known to change his mind about such details, since Mahler’s other disciples (e.g., Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer) take a much smaller retard, there is no official version.

Mahler himself last conducted the Fourth Symphony in New York – with his New York Philharmonic in 1911. We know two pertinent details about that performance, which came a decade after the symphony was composed. The first – barely believable — is from a member of the orchestra interviewed by William Malloch in 1964. He testified that Mahler had the violins swoop up to the G with a glissando starting perhaps an octave lower. The second detail is something I just learned from John Mauceri’s recent Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting.

Mauceri – a conductor teeming with ideas about how music should be performed – discovered that Mahler’s New York score bears a notation in the conductor’s hand that insists that the sleigh bells and flutes not retard along with the violins – a startling instruction, because if followed literally it demands that for one and half beats the sleigh bells and flutes are out of synch with the first violins (and also the clarinets, by the way).

Mauceri recounts sharing this discovery with his mentor Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein, it turned out, was aware of it already. Then why didn’t you do it? Mauceri asked. “Because I chickened out,” Bernstein said. And then Bernstein changed his mind. As Mauceri notes, it’s all documented in sound.

Here is Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic recording.

And here is Bernstein’s subsequent Vienna Philharmonic recording, in which the sleigh bells and flutes don’t slow down.

The difference is so subtle you might call it insignificant but it is not. What Mahler is suggesting, in 1911, is that he has composed a kind of musical mosaic in which the two components, rather than blending, are wholly distinct. (Mauceri likens the effect to “a musical cross-fade . . . the aural equivalance of what happens in a movie when one scene dissolves into another.”) And indeed this was a direction Mahler pursued in his later symphonic style. Personally, I now prefer the passage without the “traditional” retard in the sleigh bells and flutes. It would be interesting to hear it juxtaposed with a Mengelberg retard in the violins.

Mauceri’s book shares other such details. It remarkably succeeds, it seems to me, in combining a fluent narrative for neophytes – what does a conductor do? – with detailed examples felicitously described.

In Porgy and Bess, for instance, Mauceri observes that both “Summertime” and “A Woman is a Sometime Thing” bear the same metronome marking. And yet today we always hear the first sung slower than the second. Both, Mauceri points out, are lullabies – and Gershwin, he believes, is making a point of that. Mauceri follows suit in his own Porgy and Bess recording.

The composer whose intentions most interest me is Antonin Dvorak. I feel I know a few things others do not. There is no question in my mind, for instance, that the violin tremolos in the C-sharp minor section of the New World Symphony’s famous Largo were inspired by the chill of winter. We know from Michael Beckerman’s pathbreaking research that Dvorak was here inspired by the death of Minnehaha, in Longfellow’s famous Hiawatha poem of 1855. If you read that passage, it’s partly about the weather:

Oh the long and dreary Winter!

Ever thicker, thicker, thicker

Froze the ice on lake and river,

Ever deeper, deeper, deeper

Fell the snow o’er all the landscape,

The opening of the Scherzo of the New World Symphony was inspired by the Dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis at Hiawatha’s wedding. That, I am sure, is why Dvorak introduces a triangle – it’s inspired by the bells on his moccasins. The reason I am sure is that there is also an Indian dance in Dvorak’s American Suite – and it, too, uses a triangle.

And what difference does that make? Dvorak did not write a programmatic symphony. He did not expect us to hear the tremolos and think: “winter.” We are not intended to know that the triangle has anything to do with footwear. Rather, these are private associations that guided Dvorak toward delicious instrumental touches.

On the other hand, it seems to me that knowing that the G minor theme of the first movement of the New World Symphony is an elegiac “Indian” theme does tangibly bear on musical interpretation. As with the C-sharp minor “Indian” theme in the third movement of the American Suite, we have here a plaintive tune for unison oboes and flutes, a flatted seventh, a drone accompaniment, and a pianissimo reprise. I like the conceit that the hushed reprise (which in the case of the symphony is assigned to second violins, not firsts) evokes the fated extinction of the Native American. All of which suggests to me that this little theme deserves a slower tempo than the main Allegro molto. And everything I know about the symphony’s first conductor, Anton Seidl (the hero of my book Wagner Nights: An American History), tells me that he would have slowed down here.

Bernstein was a conductor who happened to insist that there was nothing “American” about the New World Symphony. When he recorded it with the New York Philharmonic, he would not have known about its close relationship with The Song of Hiawatha, because Beckerman hadn’t yet discovered all that. In his Philharmonic recording, he takes the G minor theme briskly – at 3:03 here. See if you think it conveys Dvorak’s empathy for the Native American.

How important are a composer’s intentions, whether implicit or explicit? My thinking is more lenient than Mauceri’s. I prefer “Summertime” at a slower tempo than “A Woman is a Sometime Thing.” We know that Gershwin told John Bubbles, the original Sportin’ Life, to pick his own tempos. Was he equally lenient with Abbie Mitchell and Edward Matthews? Based on other reports, I would say: very probably.

My favorite performance of any Porgy and Bess number is Ruby Elzy’s version of “My Man’s Gone Now” at the Gershwin Memorial Concert at the Hollywood Bowl. It combines the pathos of a Billie Holiday with the high notes of a Leontyne Price. It also is shaped by an un-notated range of tempo and nuance no singer would attempt today.

Stravinsky is the antipode who insisted that there was only one correct way to interpret his music. But Stravinsky’s own Stravinsky recordings don’t back that up. He also insisted that his music was only about itself. And yet there can be no doubt that the finale of his Symphony in Three Movements was inspired by specific newsreel images of World War II. This is a topic I have addressed at length in this space. Here is the evidence.

A lot of the music we hear – a lot more of it than we realize – was inspired by stories, characters, and pictures. The opening of Mahler’s Fourth is a likely example. The New World Symphony is an example. The Symphony in Three Movements is an example. For the most part, the evidence is unrecoverable. But the attempt can matter. Wagner, in one of his essays, said the highest goal of musical interpretation is to extrapolate such meanings (he offered as an example a story for Beethoven’s Op. 131 String Quartet).

Anyone conducting the New World Symphony needs a story for the idiosyncratic ending – why is there a dirge, and a final chord diminishing to silence? In this instance, we can plausibly infer that Dvorak is thinking of the ending of his source poem – Hiawatha departing into “the purple mists of evening.” And what about that funeral march in the slow movement of his G major Symphony? The entire movement is obviously story-based. But we have no clues at hand. So conductors have to invent a story and run with it. Many don’t bother.

I remember once asking this question of Gerhardt Zimmermann, a wonderful Dvorak interpreter who now teaches at the University of Texas, Austin. “What’s the slow movement of the Dvorak G major Symphony about?” His story tumbled right out. I no longer remember what it was, and it isn’t important. It doesn’t matter if it happens to conform with Dvorak’s story, whatever that might be. What matters is that the story works for Gerhardt.

(For much more on Dvorak’s extra-musical meanings, here is the pertinent “PostClassical” broadcast. And here is a pertinent article for the Times Literary Supplement.)

 

 

Can Orchestras Be Re-Invented?

David Skinner, in his article in the current Humanities Magazine about the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium that I direct, describes Delta David Gier, the exemplary music director of the South Dakota Symphony, addressing a room of university students and faculty:

“He starts by asking everyone to reimagine an orchestra as a humanities institution – one that brings together symphonic music and the immersive intellectual context you get from a museum. That, he says, is what is going on here, in this room, and tomorrow on stage in the program called ‘Music Unwound: Aaron Copland and Mexico.’“

Later in the piece — “Can Orchestras Be Reinvented as Humanities Institutions? Joseph Horowitz is Asking” – Skinner writes of me:

“Horowitz complains a lot, and one of his bigger, more enveloping criticisms is what brings him to the humanities. ‘Orchestras are not interested in their own history,’ he says. ‘They are not curators of the past.’ This is the moment when Horowitz is most likely to smile his brokenhearted, I-can’t-help-it, I-have-to-tell-the-truth smile. As smiles go it is remarkably sad.

“Theater companies, he points out, have dramaturges. Museums are staffed by scholars. But orchestras, despite their reverence for great music of the past, don’t even care about their own backstories, says Horowitz.”

I also read in Skinner’s piece that in front of a room of people I bring “a very different energy” than others might, “hangdog, brainy, and a little hard to predict.” In fact, he thinks “Horowitz should make a one-man show of his thoughts on classical music and life. He’s an inspired monologist – or, as he puts it, ‘I have a big mouth’ – and it would be very interesting and not a little bit shocking to have him airing his many opinions in a stand-up format.”

Any takers?

Related news: I went to the Metroplitan Museum of Art the other day to see “Thomas’ Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings,” which is up January 30 to May 13. Cole was the teacher of the most prominent, most influential American painter ca. 1860: Frederic Church. You can’t talk about Gilded Age America without referencing Church – but it’s done all the time. The same is true of The Song of Hiawatha and Dvorak’s New World Symphony: essential reference points for understanding how Americans viewed themselves before the turn of the twentieth century.

In a splendid video presentation that introduces the Met exhibit, Cole is called “a torchbearer who created a defining aesthetic” for the New World. Thanks to Cole and Church, landscape became the defining American genre for visual art.

Including major works by Turner and Constable, the exhibit dramatizes how the European landscape masters that Cole revered inspired epic canvases of mountains and plains inhabited not by peasants and farmers, but — a transformational ingredient – by ceremonial Native Americans. This achievement, clinched by Church, parallels the achievements of Mark Twain and Charles Ives, who likewise transformed hallowed Old World genres – the novel, the symphony — into something New.

Created by Elizabeth Kornhauser, the museum’s Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture,  the exhibit links to nine Exhibition Tours, two concerts, and various other presentations – in addition to a major publication: Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, which “breaks new ground by presenting British-born American painter Thomas Cole as an international figure in direct dialogue with the major landscape painters of the age.”

Personally, I would never call Cole a “great painter.” (Church is another matter; and he’s the painter who most evokes Dvorak’s majestic, elegiac renderings of the American open space.) But he is a great and necessary figure in the history of American painting.

Were an orchestra to do something similar, it might be a contextualized presentation of the symphonies of John Knowles Paine (1875, 1879) – crucial progenitors of the American-sounding Second and Third Symphonies of George Chadwick en route to Ives. Paine was the first American to compose superbly finished symphonies in the Germanic mold. I would not call him a “great composer.” But he is a great and necessary figure in the history of American classical music.

American orchestras do not even know him. (An excellent recording of Paine’s Second may be heard on Naxos – with JoAnn Falletta and the Ulster Orchestra. Avoid the Mehta/NY Phil recording.)

David Skinner’s article was originally published as “Roots Music: Joseph Horowitz Looks to Reinvent Orchestras” in the Spring 2018 issues of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities

 

 

Shostakovich and Film — Take Two

I spent the last two days repeatedly viewing – and (as the orchestra’s pianist) participating in – screenings of the 1929 Soviet silent film The New Babylon, with Dmitri Shostakovich’s score performed by PostClassical Ensemble led by Angel Gil-Ordóñez.

Every aspect of this astonishing movie has surged in my comprehension and estimation – to the point, for instance, that I have no doubt that Shostakovich’s score, however little known (there is no suite by the composer), is one of the most formidable ever composed for film.

Anton Fedyashin, who took part in an eventful hour-long post-screening conversation Friday night, began with a comment I found instantly revelatory – that The New Babylon differs from other Russian silent films, also products of the feverish experimentalism of the Soviet 1920s, for combining social context and ideology with individualized human drama. That is: this polemical celebration of the Paris Commune of 1871 is infiltrated by a gritty love story, mating a fiery Communard with a hapless, placeless soldier. This is no sentimental diversion (like, say, the gratuitous love story inflicted on James Cameron’s Titanic). Rather, its shattering hopelessness meshes brilliantly with the film’s fierce depiction of class warfare and political betrayal.

The New Babylon marks the first collaboration of Shostakovich and the master director Grigory Kozintsev – initiating a historic forty-year relationship ending with the greatest of all cinematic Shakespeare adaptations: their epic King Lear. The latter 1971 film is enriched by the same double aspect: added to Shakespeare’s human drama is a social dimension inspired, in part, by the oppressed multitudes inhabiting Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (cf my previous blog: Shostakovich and the Fool).

As with Mussorgsky, as with the Soviet King Lear, The New Babylon miraculously intermingles the personal and with the epic. In fact, the lead actors – Yelena Kuzmina as the shopgirl and Andrei Kostrichkin as the soldier – deliver two of the most riveting cinematic performances I have ever encountered. The seething discontent and confusion of Kostrichkin’s soldier contradict the stylized “eccentricity” of the film’s general aesthetic. I should also mention, as one of the film’s many seductions, the poetic homages to Daumier and Degas – which, however, co-exist with biting lampoons whenever “bourgeois” Paris is on display. How Kozintsev and Shostakovich get away with such a plethora of stylistic and thematic ingredients I do not know.

As I learned from Anna Lawton, who guided our post-screening discussion Saturday afternoon, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor created by Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (who co-directed The New Babylon)  promulgated a manic aesthetic predilection for the circus, Charlie Chaplin, and other antidotes to pompous high culture; Eccentric antipathy to linear narrative was compatible with the signature montage effects of Soviet silent film.

The young Shostakovich feasts on cinematic montage. In 1929, he was all of 23 years old. Five years previous, he completed a First Symphony more impressive than anything by the young Mozart; it already encapsulates the irony and (incredibly enough) the pathos of his mature voice. In The New Babylon, his debut film score, he flaunts his enfant terrible energies. But as the film moves from satire to tragedy, Shostakovich’s emotional range proves limitless. And he is already a master of shaping a cinematic trajectory. Check out, for instance, the crescendo of imagery and music – of dissolute revelry — in the sequence directly preceding the percussive tramp of the invading Prussian army that lays siege to Paris and precipitates the Commune: the pertinent musical coda begins at 15:50 of this youtube link. (The frisson of this passage last weekend, in the 400-seat AFI Silver Spring Theater with a 17-member pit orchestra including a hard-driving string quintet, was electrifying; the invaluable DVD version of this film, with a larger band, is not comparably impactful.)

Montage is omnipresent in The New Babylon, typically juxtaposing decadence with travail.  Shostakovich adds a third plane of expression. E.g.: here is “Preparations,” a sequence shifting between preparations for a musicale and for a bloody military encounter, at 33:00 of the film.

Such jolting contradictions in content and tone engender an active response. The film jostles feeling and thought. Notwithstanding its ideological message, it doesn’t spoon-feed the masses as would Steven Spielberg and John Williams decades later. Here are a couple of further examples:

The Commune has been toppled. The revolutionary shopgirl has been arrested. The soldier is trying to find her. Paris is now repopulated by the bourgeoisie. Shostakovich (for once) ignores this decadent spectacle and scores the Soldier: 1:18:00 of the film.

Earlier on, the bourgeoisie sing the Marseilles while French soldiers prepare to attack French citizens. Shostakovich responds with feigned relish, then decomposes their song via the intervention of an Offenbach can-can: 54:40 of the film. This compositional tour de force subverts a visceral response with a political critique. Our shifting perspective on the goings-on keeps us alert. Meanwhile, the soldier himself can’t decide which side he’s on.

The New Babylon is art, it is propaganda, it’s a political tract, it’s an aesthetic anthem. For the young Shostakovich, it was doubtless a heady learning experience. Its impact on his future development is more than ponderable.

Shostakovich and the Fool: Boris Godunov and King Lear

The most galvanizing Shakespeare experience I know is the 1971 Soviet film version of King Lear directed by Grigory Kozintsev with music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Its dimensions are such that it fails on a home screen; it demands a big theater and big sound.

The profound Russianness of the Kozintsev/Shostakovich Lear transcends language. Re-encountering this great film in the context of PostClassical Ensemble’s ongoing two-season Russian Revolution immersion experience, I realized its Russian lineage connects to the most famous of all Russian operas: Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. It would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that Shakespeare’s iconic seventheenth century play is here conflated with Mussorgsky’s iconic nineteenth century opera.

Obviously, both play and opera deal with a ruler who sins, and who dies consumed by crazed guilt. (Boris was complicit in the murder of the Tsarevich, and so ascended the throne.) But there is a more literal resemblance, a character common to Lear and Boris, and of special importance to Shostakovich. And that is the Fool.

The Fool can say what others cannot. In Boris Godunov, he alone can tell the Tsar to his face that he’s a murderer – and not be punished.

In Boris, the Fool comes last: one of the most original finales in opera. A conventional ending would have been the Tsar’s agonized death. He empties the throne room of all but the Tsarevich, sings “Farewell, my son, I am dying,” and expires. And that in fact is how the first version of Boris Godunov ends. But in Mussorgsky’s final version of 1872, Boris’s death, however affecting, is penultimate. Mussorgsky trumps it with a culminating vignette in the Kromy Forest. The People – a pervasive presence – acclaim a false pretender to the throne. They march with him on Moscow, emptying the stage. And – the culminating stroke – the Fool sings:

Cry, cry Russian land

Russian people

Cry

(Here is the peerless Ivan Kozlovsky, as Mussorgsky’s Fool, from a Soviet film version of the opera.)

In the Kozintsev/Shostakovich Lear, Lear’s death is witnessed by the People – an oppressed ubiquitous presence, as in Mussorgsky’s opera. The funeral cortege exits. And the Fool plays his plaintive song.  It is Mussorgsky’s ending, transplanted to King Lear.

(You won’t find the Soviet Lear on youtube, but there is a video of excerpts with live accompaniment conducted by Claudio Abbado; the pertinent ending begins at 1:08.)

Mussorgsky’s sad, suffering Fool embodies a mass of sad, suffering humanity. So, too, does the Kozintsev/Shostakovich Fool. His centrality is such that his song begins the movie, accompanying the credits. Then comes a trudging horde of placeless people. Shostakovich’s scoring of this procession practically mimics Mussorgsky. The beginning of Shakespeare’s play is delayed fully five minutes.

The People even turn up in Edgar’s hut – it becomes a homeless shelter. And they elicit some of Shostakovich’s most potent and characteristic music. Their effect is to explicitly amplify and ramify the tragedy. Doubtless, Shakespeare’s dysfunctional royal family implicitly embodies a larger malaise. In the Kozintsev/Shostakovich King Lear, this malaise is explicit. We see it. It is epic, as vast as Russia itself.

Kozintsev wrote of the ending of Shakespeare’s King Lear: “Lear has no end – at least there is no finale in the play: none of the usual solemn trumpets of tragedy, or magnificent burials. The bodies, even of kings, are carried out under conditions of war; nobody even says a few elevated words. The time for words is over.”

This dire view of the human condition was also Shostakovich’s view, numbed by decades of Stalinist fear and oppression.

Reinforcing these linkages of Lear with Boris is Shostakovich’s reverence for Mussorgsky. He undertook a new orchestration of Boris Godunov. He orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. For Shostakovich, as for Mussorgsky, art was never for art’s sake. It possessed an ethical dimension. It commented on human affairs. Shostakovich said of Mussorgsky:

“Mussorgsky’s concept is profoundly democratic. The people are the base of everything. The people are here and the rulers are there. The rule forced on the people is immoral and fundamentally anti-people. The best intentions of individuals don’t count. That’s Mussorgky’s position and I dare hope that it is also mine.

“Meaning in music – that must sound very strange for most people. Particularly in the West. It’s here in Russia that the question is usually posed: What was the composer trying to say, after all? The questions are naïve, of course, but despite their naivete and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. Can music make man stop and think? Can it cry out and thereby draw man’s attention to various vile acts? All these questions began for me with Mussorgsky.”

The official Soviet view of Mussorgsky, as propagated under Stalin, is not irrelevant: he was an “artist of the masses,” an enemy of art for art’s sake. He projected a social conscience.

Stalin of course would never have endorsed Shostakovich’s Mussorgsky encomium, with its repudiation of the “rule forced on the people.”  But as surely as Mussorgsky, as surely as Shostakovich, he rejected art for art’s sake. It was an instrument of patriotism, of propaganda, of Socialist Realist uplift.

A remarkable recent book — Stalin’s Music Prize by Marina Frolova-Walker – opens a window on Shostakovich the cultural bureaucrat. Culling Soviet archives previously shut, she documents the deliberations deciding the Stalin Prizes awarded to Soviet composers and musical performers. One discovers that Shostakovich took his role seriously. He embraced the criterion of popular appeal. His predilection that art “make man stop and think” resonates with Mussorgsky, with (an inescapable example) Tolstoy.

It bears mentioning, in this context, that Shostakovich evidently didn’t care for the United States. Also, that he said of his great expatriate contemporary Igor Stravinsky that he detected “a flaw in his personality, a loss of some important moral principles. . . . Maybe he was the most brilliant composer of the twentieth century. But he always spoke only for himself, while Mussorgsky spoke for himself and for his country.”

I am not suggesting that Shostakovich was an ideologue; there is no Socialist Realist uplift at the conclusion Kozintsev/Shostakovich King Lear. But it aligns with ideals of Russian art that endured into Soviet times. It insists upon a social context. It make us ponder people other than ourselves.

The Shostakovich quotes I cite above are from Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. This invaluable book is today widely reviled as fraudulent. But there is no “objective” reading of Shostakovich the man. I am certain that Testimony records a true picture of Shostakovich as experienced by Solomon Volkov. (The same could be said of my own Conversations with Arrau, which Claudio Arrau’s cousin – a Pinochet supporter — repudiated as a false portrait.) Today, no one can deny that Shostakovich’s scores are packed with encoded meanings subverting the Stalinist status quo.

In his Introduction to Testimony, Volkov calls Shostakovich “the second great yurodivy composer,” Mussorgsky having been the first. “The yurodivy is a Russian religious phenomenon, which even the cautious Soviet scholars call a national trait. . . . The yurodivy has the gift to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he tells the world about his insight in an intentionally paradoxical sway, in code. The plays the fool, which actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice. The yurodivy is an anarchist and individualist, who in his public role breaks the commonly held ‘moral’ laws of behavior and flouts conventions. But he sets strict limitations, rules, and taboos for himself.”

I would say that the King Lear adaptation of Grigori Kozintsev and Dmitiri Shostakovich suggests that Shostakovich identified with Shakespeare’s Fool. And that is why the Fool, not Shakespeare’s Albany, has the last word.

A final observation: during the Cold War, Shostakovich was widely perceived in the West as a composer whose early genius had been snuffed out by ideology and politics: a Soviet stooge. The notion of Shostakovich the yurodivy was as yet unglimpsed.  The Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, extolled Stravinsky and other artists of the Free World. And JFK delivered eloquent speeches denying that art could flourish in totalitarian states. In retrospect,  many delicious paradoxes complicate these decades of cultural propaganda, during which the most enduring concert music was being composed in the Soviet Union, not Europe or the US. PostClassical Ensemble ends its two-year commemoration of the Russian Revolution on May 23 at Washington National Cathedral with “Secret Music Skirmishes of the Cold War: The Shostakovich Case” – an evening including former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle, former CIA Staff Historian Nicholas Dujmovic, and former Soviet refusenik Vladimir Feltsman.

And next weekend we present the first Kozintsev-Shostakovich collaboration – the classic avant-garde Soviet silent film The New Babylon (1929) – with Shostakovich’s enfant terrible score performed live by PostClassical Ensemble and Angel Gil-Ordonez. That’s at the American Film Institute (Silver Spring, Md.). Information: http://postclassical.com/performances...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mieczyslaw Weinberg on Film

Is Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) a third Soviet composer to set beside Shostakovich and Prokofiev? An increasing number of musicians seem to think so, including the peerless Latvian-born violinist Gidon Kremer, himself a product of Soviet training.

My own impressions of Weinberg’s music have been spotty and confused, the peak experience having been Ben Capps performing Weinberg’s 1968 cycle of 24 Preludes for solo cello at Washington National Cathedral earlier this season – a program presented by PostClassical Ensemble (of which Capps is principal cellist).

Weinberg’s output for cello was immense: the 24 solo Preludes, three solo sonatas, two sonatas for cello and piano, and a cello concerto. He was not a cellist – and his cello writing does not explore new possibilities for the instrument (as Benjamin Britten’s does). But the cello’s voice suits Weinberg’s dark turbulence of feeling and expression. I don’t hear a single happy note in this cycle. And certainly Weinberg’s musical embodiment of Stalinist Russia — however subliminal or explicit, conscious or incidental – is fundamental to his appeal.

Behrouz Jamali, who turns our PostClassical Ensemble concerts into films, has produced a remarkable 20-minute memento of Capps’ performance, interspersed with my own comments and observations. The result, I would say, makes a stirring case for the importance of this composer, and of this music. You will find it by clicking here.

Ben Capps will return to Washington National Cathedral (where PostClassical Ensemble is Ensemble-in-Residence) next Fall to repeat Weinberg’s 24 Preludes in honor of the Weinberg Centenary. He has also recorded the cycle – a studio performance now being edited.

Ben’s concert came at the tail end of a two-year PCE commemoration of the centenary of the Russian Revolution. He earlier participated in a program exploring Soviet experimental music of the 1920s, curated by Vladimir Feltsman. It yielded another Behrouz Jamali film.

The final events in this series are a screening of the classic 1929 Soviet silent film The New Babylon, with Shostakovich’s score performed live, on March 30-31 at the American Film Institute; and “Musical Skirmishes of the Cold War: The Shostakovich Case” at Washington National Cathedral May 23. For information: www.postclassical.com

It’s Not Over Yet: Babayan, Trifonov, Yuja Wang

 

 

 

 

 

At my age – I somehow just turned seventy – it’s considered normal to wax “sentimental” and yearn for better times. Nostalgia: a cliché.

But in the case of the world of classical music that I have long inhabited, there’s nothing sentimental about fond retrospection. It’s an art genre in decline. Orchestras are in decline, Singing is in decline. The piano is in decline. And – the most certain evidence of all – the repertoire is no longer being much replenished. (For some pertinent blogs in this space, click here for orchestras and here for singers; re: pianists, read on.)

And so last Thursday’s event at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall becomes a source of bewilderment. Two pianists took part. Sergei Babayan studied at the Moscow Conservatory – where, thanks in part to the Iron Curtain, traditions lingered longer. Danill Trifonov is a protégé of Sergei Babayan. At the age of 26, he has acquired a big international career without recourse to glamour or personal celebrity.

Babayan and Trifonov played three staples of the two-piano repertoire: the Mozart K. 448 Sonata, and the two suites of Rachmaninoff. The Mozart sonata was magical but in no way revelatory. The Rachmaninoff suites were something else – performances I would call not just fabulous, but important.

Rachmaninoff was a master of knitted keyboard texture; for him, two pianos created gloriously fresh opportunities to explore the coloristic potential of the Romantic keyboard. Babayan and Trifonov seized Rachmaninoff’s achievement with an alacrity and thoroughness that knew no bounds.

The two performers are complementary. Trifonov is a dreamer whose tonal signature is liquidity. Babayan leverages his compact body to achieve tonal depth. The resulting symbiosis yields a kaleidoscopic array of timbre and tone sealed by a calibrated clarity of texture sustained at every dynamic.

But what is newest about these interpretations (at least in my experience) is their plasticity of phrase and pulse: a fluctuating range of tempo far more characteristic of Rachmaninoff’s day than our own. I’m not suggesting that the Babyan/Trifonov performances are necessarily more “idiomatic” as a result – just that they are fresh and arresting at every point. What is idiomatic – what recalls Rachmaninoff’s own recordings – is that the virtuosity at play is wholly incidental. The Babyan/Trifonov tempo for the Valse movement of the Second Suite, for instance, is the fastest possible Presto. But that’s not the point.

I am grateful that Carnegie Hall booked this concert in its 600-seat undergroung hall, not the main 2,800-seat auditorium. The sound is a little dry, but the compensations were great both in terms of intimacy and of audience. The full house was rapt. Self-evidently, it was packed with Russians who knew these pieces – an osmosis of shared inheritance fortified performers and listeners alike. The standing ovation was not pro forma; rather, a storm of applause broke and continued unabated until the lights came up.

As it happened, I heard Yuja Wang perform Brahms’ First Piano Concerto two nights later with the New York Philharmonic and its new music director, Jaap van Zweden. It was the first time I heard her live. I felt the need after the drubbing I received on facebook six months ago in response to a series of piano blogs in which I compared one of her recordings unfavorably to Benno Moiseiwitsch. I was told I am a sexist, a racist, and an elitist.

Undoubtedly Yuja Wang is a conscientious artist with fleet and accurate fingers. Her playing is not impersonal. Her repertoire is reasonably adventurous. But the Brahms D minor Concerto is not her piece. My impression is that she lacks a gift for sustained interior intensity. And there is a matter of piano sound. In this concerto, she oscillates between watercolor washes and stretches of piercing articulation. There is no consolidated sonic conception.

The paradigmatic approach to Brahms at the piano emphasizes breadth and depth – of tone, of phrase, of texture. In the D minor Concerto, a signature passage is the first movement’s chordal second theme. The thick contrapuntal threads become three widely dispersed melodies gathering intensity and momentum while moving at different speeds. A great exponent of this passage – say, Claudio Arrau or Emil Gilels – can sustain a refulgent multiplicity of voices. (Here is Arrau with Rafael Kubelik in 1964 – go to 6:45.)

Yuja Wang foregoes the pianistic and expressive challenges posed by such heroic Brahmsian writing. She is happier where the piece is smaller — more mobile, less layered.

Her audience was as restless as the Zankel house was silent – coughing,  program-page-turning, random departures up the aisle. As I remained seated, I was able to study the standing ovation. It was sluggish – many stood because others had. I also noted that most upstairs listeners did not stand.

This report would be gratuitous were Yuja Wang not a classical music icon. She is also a point of entry for many neophytes. She matters.

The Gershwin Moment

Some months ago I received an email from an exemplar of inquisitive musicianship: the pianist Kirill Gerstein, whom I had never met. (We mutually know a peerless Hungarian musical pedagogue: Ferenc Rados.)

Gerstein had recorded a Gershwin album and wanted to know if I were interested in writing a note for it.

I was more than interested. Not only do I believe in George Gershwin; I believe we are embarking on a Gershwin Moment.

That is: modernism has departed, and so (sooner or later) will the Standard Narrative for American classical music that we learned from Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein. The Standard Narrative penalized both Gershwin and Charles Ives as gifted dilettantes. Roy Harris was the “great white hope.” No one today would put Harris ahead of Gershwin or Ives.

Commensurate with the Gershwin Moment is the demise of the high/low bifurcation of American music, which after World War I insured that American classical music would stay white. Gerstein is a classical pianist with a jazz degree (from the Berklee College of Music). Like Gershwin, he doesn’t bifurcate. In fact, his new recorded performances of Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F abound with flourishes of clairvoyant improvisation.

Here’s a teaser. And here (below) is my album note:

KIRILL GERSTEIN and the GERSHWIN MOMENT

Historically, the concert music of George Gershwin has more impressed foreign-born than American-born classical musicians. And outsiders to the American experience, generally, have appreciated aspects of American music more taken for granted at home. The classic instance is Antonin Dvořák, who resided in New York City and Iowa between 1892 to 1895. The most famous and controversial of all his recorded utterances, reported in the New York Herald, prophesied that “the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies.” The spirituals of the American South had struck Dvořák as an epiphany, “music that suits itself to any mood or purpose.” If Brahms had quoted Hungarian dance tunes, if Dvořák himself drew instruction from Bohemian song and dance, American composers could fashion “a great and noble school of music” by mining the African-American motherlode.

So steeped in plantation song is the plaintive Largo of Dvořák’s New World Symphony that it was turned into a beloved synthetic spiritual: “Goin’ Home.” Much less famous is the American Suite Dvořák composed a year later, in 1894; comprising a series of New World snapshots, it marks a further, ingenious appropriation of minstrel and plantation song. This was also the year of the G-flat Humoresque – music so “American” most Americans assume an American wrote it. Another Dvořák Humoresque, in F major, begins with a bluesy tune Gershwin might have composed three decades later. Serendipitously, it was the G-flat Humoresque, wafting down from Maxie Rosenzweig’s Brooklyn flat, that first inspired Gershwin to become a composer.

The immediate influence of Dvořák’s prophecy was great. It was a former Dvořák student, William Arms Fisher, who turned the Largo into “Goin’ Home.” Dvořák’s New York amanuensis, Harry Burleigh, transformed “Deep River” into a grave concert song sung the world over by Marian Anderson and Paul Robe son. Via the machinations of Burleigh and Fisher, the once celebrated black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor also signed onto Dvořák’s project.

But Dvořák’s New World aspirations did not resonate with the American modernists who came next. They favored a shiny new aesthetic purged of the past. Dvořák had written of “Negro melodies”: “they are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will.” Aaron Copland disagreed; “From the composer’s viewpoint,” he wrote, jazz had “only two expressions: the well-known ‘blues’ mood, and the wild, abandoned, almost hysterical and grotesque mood so dear to the youth of all ages.” “Any serious composer,” he added, would quickly become aware of these “severe limitations.” Of “Mr. Gershwin’s jazz,” Copland said: “Gershwin is serious up to a point. My idea was to intensify [jazz] . . . to use it cubistically – to make it more exciting than ordinary jazz.”

And so, during his short lifetime, George Gershwin — heir to Dvořák’s prophecy — was a shunned outsider to American classical music. The influential American music narratives written by Copland and Virgil Thomson simply omitted him. America’s leading journalistic apostle of musical modernism, Paul Rosenfeld, rebuked him as a dilettante. Who today would endorse Rosenfeld’s insistence that Copland’s jazz-influenced Piano Concerto of 1927 was an improvement on Gershwin’s “hash derivative,” that Gershwin disclosed “a weakness of spirit, possibly as a consequence that the new world attracted the less stable types”?

The Gershwin threat, and the jazz threat of which it was a part, were symptoms of a youthful musical high culture borrowed from Europe – and hence obsessed with pedigree. With the singular exception of the New York Philharmonic, American orchestras for decades segregated the Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F, and An American in Paris as “pops” fare. The Boston Symphony first gave these works on subscription in 1997, 2005, and 2005, respectively. The Chicago Symphony waited until 2000 for all three. The Metropolitan Opera first gave Porgy and Bess in 1985.

It was of course in the realm of popular music that Dvořák’s prophecy came true. More than in Europe, American music after World War I was bifurcated between classical and popular – a bifurcation that was also, to a degree remarkable and disturbing, a split between white and black. The Oklahoma-born Roy Harris was even called a “white hope” in the unfulfilled interwar quest for the Great American Symphony. In retrospect, what American music needed was not another Copland or Harris, but a mighty interloper to rescue American classical music from itself. But George Gershwin died at the age of 38 in 1937.

Olin Downes summarized in The New York Times: “His value may have been exaggerated… He never passed a certain point as a ‘serious’ composer.” As ever, America’s European-born conductors, composers, and instrumentalists thought differently. Otto Klemperer led his own, dirge-like transcription of Gershwin’s Second Prelude at the Hollywood Bowl Gershwin Memorial Concert. Arnold Schönberg eulogized Gershwin as “a great composer.” Jascha Heifetz, who had hoped for a Gershwin Violin Concerto, said: “We should be ashamed that we did not appreciate this man more when he was in our midst.” Other Europeans speaking up for Gershwin included Maurice Ravel and Dmitri Shostakovich – composers of great reputation with nothing to lose.

As a student at the Special Music School for gifted children in Voronezh, Russia, Kirill Gerstein was from a very early age infatuated with jazz, which he knew from his parents’ extensive record collection. At fourteen, he met Gary Burton in St. Petersburg, leading to a scholarship to study jazz piano at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. “A famous American piano pedagogue said to me, ‘Berklee??? And what would you be studying there?’ When I meekly answered ‘Jazz,’ he looked away and said, ‘I have no further questions.’” Gerstein adds: “At that time, Berklee was mainly non-classical. But in fact, some of the best classical analysis courses I’ve ever had were at Berklee. And now they’ve merged with the Boston Conservatory. They offer a comprehensive unified curriculum – from classical to jazz, Baroque to bluegrass, film music to hip-hop. Which bodes well for music education that’s stylistically fluid and unconstrained by artificial barriers.”

Berklee could only have fortified Gerstein’s mission to pursue a classical music career that would integrate his passion for spontaneous musical expression. When he performs the Schumann Piano Concerto, he does not improvise. But his reading bristles with spur-of-the-moment inspiration: a piquant voicing, a rhythmic eruption. Sonically, he works in shifting watercolors versus solidified oils. It is Gershwin’s Concerto in F, however, that becomes a full-scale playground for Gerstein’s dual schooling.

In fact, Gershwin’s legacy seems more protean than ever. No one any longer questions his pedigree. And he remains a singularly malleable and promiscuous stylist. With the exception of J. S. Bach, no other concert composer produced music susceptible to such a bewildering range of readings. Gershwin himself, overseeing the premiere of Porgy and Bess, made it very clear that John Bubbles could sing “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in his way; there was no “Gershwin way.”

The music on the present Gerstein disc is a further case in point. There does not even exist a remotely definitive edition of the Rhapsody in Blue – its instrumentation, its duration remain variable. There are two orchestrations, both by Ferde Grofé – one for the Paul Whiteman Band, the other for symphony orchestra (Gershwin afterward did his own orchestrating). Gershwin’s own two recordings, with different musical contents, are lean and driving. Oscar Levant, the pianist most closely associated with Gershwin, adopted meatier sonorities. Leonard Bernstein’s well-known reading proposed a Slavic expansiveness. It bears mentioning that Rhapsody in Blue was a 1930s sensation in Soviet Russia, and that its big tune strikingly resembles the “love theme” from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. The Concerto in F, historically, has been a specialty of French pianists.

All these artists, Gershwin included, played Gershwin by the book. Gerstein does not. He adds embellishments of many kinds. For the Concerto’s slow movement, he interpolates a cadenza. I asked him about all this. He said:

“The performances on the CD are culled from four consecutive concerts in St. Louis – and what I played was different every time. My intention is to strike a delicate balance – not too classical, not too jazzy. The jazzing up of Gershwin can easily be overdone. I think there is a fine proportion that’s implicit. As for the pieces themselves, I think they’re more masterly than is often perceived. In the Concerto in F, the orchestration is Stravinsky-like in its precision and transparency. This is often overlooked. And it’s even more the case for Rhapsody in Blue in the Whiteman band version that we’ve used – it’s chamber music. The more time you invest in rehearsal and refinement, the more impressive these masterpieces appear. I’ve played Rhapsody in Blue since maybe 2006. It took me some time to find my way – it’s such a volatile stylistic blend, second by second.

“There are moments where he’s alluding to jazz and interrupts to say: ’I know Rachmaninoff, I can do that. I can do Tchaikovsky, no problem.’ It’s a piece that’s naturally playful. The Concerto in F I first played in 2012. Since then, the improvised interpolations have expanded a bit. I’m not trying for ‘historical accuracy’ in interpretation. Here I’m simply responding to the stylistic threads.”

In sum: Gershwin was a premature harbinger of musical synergies we now take for granted. And American music is today verging on a Gershwin Moment long overdue. In thr world of American musicology, music historians are suddenly flocking to Gershwin in droves; a Gershwin critical edition was initiated in 2013 at the University of Michigan. In the world of American orchestras and opera companies, Gershwin is at long last a ubiquitous mainstream participant. A mere decade before Kirill Gerstein arrived in Boston, fledgling virtuosos were typically counselled not to acquire the Gershwin concerto lest it tarnish their image. No young pianist would today be so advised.

If the old Gershwin was an inspired dilettante, the new Gershwin is versatile, protean, universal. The old Gershwin was impure, in limbo, betwixt and between. The new Gershwin is wholesome, ecumenical. For Kirill Gerstein – a voracious learner — Gershwin is both a fulfillment and a beginning. What about those Dvořák Humoresques? Stay tuned.

 

Yannick’s Hollow Parsifal

Photo by Marco Borggreve

The highwater mark for Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera in recent decades was the 2013 Parsifal, handsomely directed and strongly cast. The crucial ingredient, however, was Daniele Gatti’s leadership in the pit.

The Francois Girard’s production has now returned, led by Yannick Nezet-Seguin. As he is the company’s new music director, comparisons to Gatti are inescapable.

The Nezet-Seguin Parsifal, alas, is slack and shapeless during the opera’s long outer acts. All the virtues of Gatti’s reading – the tensile line, the depth of tone, the moment-to-moment creative investment in the drama – are missing.

Amfortas’s first act monologue, heretofore a revelation, fails to build though the singer is the same. His elevation of the grail – invested by the composer with miracles of shimmering color and texture – is inadequately prepared or supported. The brisk tempo for the ensuing chorus comes out of nowhere. The act’s closing measures, in which the orchestra must move swiftly from aching pathos to consternation to beatitude, sounds like a first try, not a finished product.

With the sound of Gatti’s act three prelude fresh in the ear – he just performed it at Carnegie Hall with his Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra – Nezet-Seguin’s rendition sounded glibly dramatic; Wagner’s intended malaise of body and spirit, conveyed by Gatti with heaving oceanic accents, was wholly absent. The Good Friday music lacked an arc. The sustained sub-current of high feeling that wonderfully anchors this particular opera, governing its mood and trajectory, remained undetectable. The long evening felt rudderless. Hollow.

Act two was much better. “This fellow needs action,” said my wife – a plausible inference. Here a wide play of tempo – including a daringly prolonged silence after Kundry’s expostulation “lachte!” – aligned with the events at hand. Evelyn Herlitzius, possessor of a monochromatic soprano of good size, vividly projected the vicissitudes of Kundry’s attempted seduction.

I wish I could be more positive about the conscientiously crafted Parsifal of Klaus Florian Vogt.  He nowadays also sings Tannhauser, Lohengrin, and Walther von Stolzing in the world’s major houses – but with an instrument unlike any Wagner tenor I have previousy encountered: clear and piercing, with a vinegar timbre. Its tight focus insures audibility. The words are distinctly conveyed. But absent heft and tonal beauty, every big moment, lyric or dramatic, is squandered. My first Met Parsifal, in 1966, was Sandor Konya – today not even a name. In act two, he fell to his knees, opened his arms, and poured it on: “Erloser! Rette mich!” Thirteen years after that we had Jon Vickers: prodigious. Never since, to my knowledge, has this role been cast in New York with a voice of sufficient size.

Rene Pape and Peter Mattei repeat their assignments of five seasons ago. Pape has long and deservedly owned Gurnemanz – but the luster and stamina of his bass are now fading. Mattei’s big set pieces suffer from insufficient shaping in the pit. And, sitting in the Family Circle, I missed the revelatory facial and gestural detail he presumably still brings to Amfortas.

As it happens, for the first time in over forty years I was denied tickets by the Met press office. Whether this had anything to do with my recent posting about James Levine I have no idea. Certainly I have written more about Wagner at the Met than any other living human being. No matter, my $37 seat in row H was a bargain: the sound upstairs is superb, better than downstairs up front.

Girard’s production looks handsome from afar – but I find that I no longer tolerate his dramatization of the act one and three Preludes, or the superfluity of so many women onstage during act one. What he’s driving at is sufficiently conveyed when Kundry, rather than Parsifal, first lifts the cup at the close. I still find this interpolation exceptionally moving.

The performance (I attended Saturday night) ignited a lusty ovation that peaked when Nezet-Seguin took the stage – and suddenly ended. A response to received opinion.

Our new music director is not yet 45 year old. Whether he grows into the big Wagner works remains to be seen. But I fear that, with the disappearance of Levine, a new cult may already be upon us. Please, Tony Tommasini – not so fast.

Rethinking “Classical Radio” — Part Two

Photo by Tom Wolff

Sudip Bose, the superb music critic for The American Scholar (he is also Managing Editor), writes about PostClassical Ensemble’s radio showcase “PostClassical”:

“When I find time to listen to the radio these days, I rarely encounter a program that gives me the same sense of excitement and discovery that I felt as a child. But a few weeks ago I did, while listening to . . . PostClassical . . . Not in my wildest imaginings could I have envisioned such a revelatory and shocking interpretations.”

As mentioned previously in this space, in crafting “PostClassical,” we consciously set out to “re-invent” classical–music radio – or at least to do something uncompromising: shocking and revelatory.

Here (below) is Sudip’s whole piece, posted Feb 1.

And here’s the broadcast he heard: “Schubert Uncorked,” with bass trombonist David Taylor (pictured above in performance with PostClassical Ensemble): http://wwfm.org/post/schubert-uncorked

Doppelgangers: What does Schubert sound like on a jazzy bass trombone?

I do not listen to the radio nearly as much as I used to, but when I was growing up, programs such as Saint Paul Sunday Morning and Karl Haas’s Adventures in Good Music were household staples, forming an important part of my musical education. I began listening to Haas’s program from a very early age, and I will never forget the opening of each episode, with Haas playing a passage from Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata before uttering those famous words—“Hello, everyone”—in his genial, warm, and sonorous voice. I must have been seven or eight, home sick from school one day, when I first heard one of Haas’s “mystery composer” programs, in which the host would play several excerpts from a composer’s work, progressing from the obscure to the more familiar, challenging the audience to guess the author’s identity. I remember that sick day well, unable, as I was, to come up with the answer. It was the first time I heard the name Camille Saint-Saëns.

Even when I do find time to listen to the radio these days, I rarely encounter a program that gives me the same sense of excitement and discovery that I felt as a child. But a few weeks ago I did, while listening to an Internet show called PostClassical, which features concert performances by PostClassical Ensemble, an innovative group of musicians now in residence at Washington’s National Cathedral. Led by the historian and writer Joseph Horowitz and the conductor Angel Gil-Ordoñez, the ensemble puts on concerts that are far from typical and often experimental, with the aim of contextualizing a composer or a piece of music with verse, theater, film, or dance. Every two months, Horowitz and Gil-Ordoñez join radio host Bill McGlaughlin (the former host of the aforementioned Saint Paul Sunday Morning) in the studio, to discuss their concerts in depth.

The show I happened to hear was devoted mainly to Franz Schubert, in particular four late songs: “Der Doppelgänger” and “Die Stadt,” from the posthumous cycle Schwanengesang, and “Nebensonnen” and “Der Leiermann,” from Die Winterreise. Yes, there were traditional renditions of these lieder, performed with feeling and great taste by the baritone William Sharp and Seth Knopp on the piano, but the versions that were juxtaposed with these—jazz-inflected variants of the pieces performed by the bass trombonist David Taylor and the instrumentalists of PostClassical Ensemble—were what captured my imagination. Not in my wildest imaginings could I have envisioned such revelatory and shocking interpretations.

These late songs of Schubert are dark, mysterious, brooding, full of despair. “Der Doppelgänger,” for example, depicts a man who has ventured to the former home of his beloved and is stunned and terrified to find his double standing there, revealed in the moonlight, staring up at the house and the sky. It’s an eerie enough work in its original setting, yet when Taylor seemingly improvised the solo line on the bass trombone, he transformed the familiar into something strange, still plangent and bewitching, but now uttered by a voice from another world—guttural, stuttering, flutter-tongued. With the orchestral accompaniment playing a steady, mesmeric dirge, the pathos was unrelenting, almost too much to bear. How had Taylor done it? I wondered. How had he conjured up a hazy, ghostly double of this moody Schubert lied? Later in the show, Taylor played “Der Doppelgänger” again, this time in a more extroverted, virtuosic manner. The same notes, but a completely different effect—the idiom more indebted to bebop and jazz, the orchestra sounding almost Brucknerian by contrast.

The title of the episode was “Schubert Uncorked,” yet this was not so much Schubert let loose as reinvented. I had never heard anything like Taylor’s version of “Nebensonnen” (about the phantom-like appearance of three suns in the sky), in which he put his trombone aside and sang the solo line instead, floating the notes in the upper register as if he were some bardic gypsy from Eastern Europe, albeit one singing in English. In “Die Stadt,” he and the ensemble managed yet another transformation, turning the fog-bound city of Schubert’s song into some dystopian landscape, the sound of the brass trombone emerging from the murky depths like some antediluvian sea creature.

“Der Leiermann” (or, “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man,” the concluding song of the cycle Die Winterreise) might seem to be an obvious candidate for this sort of imaginative metamorphosis. It’s an odd song, to say the least: at the end of his melancholy winter journey, the disconsolate wanderer-singer encounters a barefoot beggar on a street corner, shunned and reviled, playing a monotonous tune on his hurdy-gurdy. “Der Leiermann” has reminded the tenor Ian Bostridge of Bob Dylan. It’s a song, according to Bostridge, “that doesn’t conform to classical norms in singing,” one in which “it is hard to achieve the requisite vibe.” Indeed, when Bostridge was performing Die Winterreise once in Russia, “Der Leiermann” “emerged as a song that was hardly sung, rasping and guttural by the standards of bel canto.” His fear was that it would sound “like a ridiculous intrusion of pop singing into the classical world.” How appropriate, then, given this context, was Taylor’s version, both played and sung (the vocal line at times approximating the half-spoken half-sung technique known as Sprechstimme), with Zoltan Racz accompanying him on the accordion. It was a polystylistic marvel—reminiscent of jazz, folk music, Indian ragas—and almost symphonic in the density and conflation of textures, styles, and timbres. The two-hour episode held other delights: a hair-raising rescoring of Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, a moving version of the Adagio from Bruckner’s String Quintet, and two movements of the Bass Trombone Concerto by the Swiss composer and saxophonist Daniel Schnyder—kinetic, driven, seductive in its use of Middle Eastern idioms—yet it’s Taylor’s Schubert performances that have been haunting me ever since. I cannot get them out of my mind.

To listen to “Schubert Uncorked” and other episodes of PostClassical, visit http://wwfm.org/programs/postclassical#stream/0. To learn more about PostClassical Ensemble, go to http://postclassical.com/.

 

 

 

Another Cheap Shot at Wagner

Was Richard Wagner a “monster”? No so far as I can tell. Here’s my book review of Simon Callow’s opportunistic “Being Wagner” in this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal”:

In 1866, a Munich newspaper reported that Minna Wagner, the recently deceased wife of the composer Richard Wagner, had lived in “direst penury.” She was reduced to accepting poor relief notwithstanding “momentary” support “on the part of her [estranged] husband.” Never mind that a letter signed by Minna herself had stated that the voluntary annual allowance she received from her husband had permanently freed her from financial cares. The newspaper claimed— falsely—that the letter had been written for her in order to conceal the facts.

This instance of fake news was not a novel occurrence in Wagner’s harried life. And 135 years after his death he is harried still by the mandatory cartoon that makes him a “monster.”

There are three basic sources for depicting Wagner the man. First there are his operas, which remain as vital to the Western cultural canon as ever. Second there is his personal behavior, copiously recorded in letters and other written accounts. Third there are his essays, notoriously including the egregiously anti-Semitic “Judaism in Music” of 1850. Though any portrait of Wagner that begins with the essays will necessarily be prejudiced against him, this is a typical route. There are even influential writers on Wagner who disdain considering the operas altogether.

As it happens, the operas are saturated with complex self-portraiture, and a governing motif is Mitleid—compassion. Like it or not, Wagner’s characters specialize in empathetic comprehension. And any perusal of Wagner’s more than 12,000 letters will confirm that this humane aptitude was not foreign to Wagner the man. His many heart-breaking letters to Minna document astute, guilt-ridden understanding of their failed marriage, an understanding that impelled him to generously support an unhappy and unpleasant woman even when his own financial resources were nearly barren.

And Wagner was uncommonly rich in friendships. According to the monster cartoon, these friendships were all fundamentally exploitative. But consider the impresario Angelo Neumann, who left a book-length account of his eventful personal and professional relationship with the composer. Why was Neumann so dedicated to Wagner? Because he recognized his genius. Because Wagner’s prickly company was galvanizing. And because Wagner’s torrent of human feeling was endearing. Neumann, by the way, was Jewish.

The Wagner literature disposes of Neumann, Hermann Levi and other Jews in the Wagner orbit as studies in self-hatred. Such an approach is patronizing and obtuse. A fairer question is why Wagner wrote and spoke such intolerable nonsense about Jews. Reasons of a sort may be adduced. But the simple fact is that his evil anti-Semitism does not align with his actual behavior. That behavior is often elusive because Wagner was a consummate actor. He wore many faces. Was he a master imposter, or was he (as his letters suggest) helplessly inhabited by a repertoire of demonic personae?

That the actor and author Simon Callow should be enticed by such a figure is only natural. His own distinguished career includes one-man shows aimed at illuminating Jesus, Shakespeare, Dickens, Oscar Wilde—and Wagner. He has now turned his Wagner performance into a reckless little book that stylishly recycles the standard monster caricature.

In “Being Wagner,” Mr. Callow writes early on that his main source was the composer’s “own words, in his copious published writings. . . . Above all, I found that my most sustained sense of the man came from a book I had somewhat dreaded reading—his two-volume autobiography, My Life.” Mr. Callow’s surprise that the book “turned out to be as vivacious and candid as the greatest artists’ autobiographies” says it all. Everything endearing about Wagner—including the “surprisingly punctilious” pension he paid to Minna—strikes Mr. Callow as uncharacteristic. He is himself a victim of the monster myth, which he inserts as a corrective whenever his Wagner portrait turns too pleasant.

In particular, Mr. Callow is seduced by the ironic panache of Wagner’s self-descriptions, the most memorable of which are nearly Dostoyevskian exercises in hilarious self-humiliation. Mr. Callow’s compression of these stories—their merciless expansiveness is itself comedic—does not do them justice. A greater injustice is that the derisive tone Wagner applies to himself turns patronizing when applied to Wagner by another, lesser writer.

That Mr. Callow’s breezy portrait of Wagner is disrespectful will not be noticed by readers brainwashed by the monster cartoon. A small minority will think twice and recognize that Mr. Callow is glibly passing judgment on a supreme psychologist whose distressing and self-distressing gift was to peer more profoundly into the human psyche than any of his contemporaries—a predicament that left him lonely, restless and insatiable.

The first singer to portray Tristan was Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a prodigious artist whom Wagner regarded as a rare friend. He died suddenly, age 29, days after the premiere. Wagner confided to his diary: “I drove you to the abyss! I was used to standing there: my head does not swim. But I cannot see anyone else standing on the brink: that fills me with frantic sympathy.” Anyone who thinks those words are hyperbolic does not know the existential void into which Tristan plunges.

Central to Wagner’s identity was his unwavering recognition of the magnitude of his genius and the conditions for its proper cultivation. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. If he were to pursue conducting, or some other gainful employment, he could not compose. As a result, he was frequently impoverished and ill, vilified and derided. His enemies were real, powerful and numerous. Mr. Callow here discovers “a beady instinct for protecting his gift, his genius, and what fed it.” He argues that when Wagner “sued for favours, he had two modes: one, grovelling, the other haughty.” Wagner was himself the keenest analyst of his extreme instability. “What makes you see or wish to see a wise man in me? How can I be a wise man, I who am myself only when in a state of raving frenzy?” Mr. Callow cites this frank testimony to an intimate correspondent only to discover evidence of “the unrelenting soap opera” of Wagner’s “emotional life.”

Even in a book eschewing musical analysis, Mr. Callow is betrayed by his ignorance of music. Did Wagner retouch Beethoven’s orchestration because “Beethoven had, in Wagner’s view, got it wrong”? No, like many conductors afterward, he felt the need to accommodate changes in instruments since Beethoven’s day. Did he create “the notion of the conductor as puppet master”? No, as he explained in his pamphlet “On Conducting,” Wagner realized that a new kind of music—marshaling larger forces and pervasively flexing tempo and dynamics—required a new kind of proactive conductor. Did the tenor Albert Niemann trim the role of Tannhäuser because he figured “the sooner the inevitable catastrophe was over, the better”? No, Niemann (a supreme singing actor) felt that he could not sustain the opera’s last act without abridging the second-act finale.

As for “Tannhäuser” itself, did it arise from “the compost heap” of Wagner’s imagination? Is “Die Meistersinger” “everything Wagner said an opera shouldn’t be”? Does the “Ring of the Nibelung” amount to “self-celebrating Teutonic tub-thumping”? Come on. Summarizing the affect of it all, Mr. Callow says that Wagner’s audiences are impelled toward mass submission, not the state of active critical engagement provoked by Bertolt Brecht. Is he actually not aware that the “Ring” and “Tristan” have excited more intense critical commentary than the fading Brechtian corpus ever will?

The closest Mr. Callow comes to plausibly evoking Wagner the man is when he quotes those who admired him. Here, for instance, is the dramatist Édouard Schuré: “To look at him was to see turn by turn in the same visage the front face of Faust and the profile of Mephistopheles . . . one stood dazzled before that exuberant and protean nature, ardent, personal, excessive in everything, yet marvellously equilibrated by the predominance of a devouring intellect.” And here, balancing the books, is Mr. Callow’s follow-up: “Wagner had, it seemed, no inhibitions whatever, his qualities and defects on open display, to the delight of some and the deep repugnance of others.”

Predictably, Mr. Callow more extensively considers “Judaism in Music” than any of the operas. He blithely clinches the Wagner-equals-the-Third Reich equation: “Hitler-like,” Wagner spewed poison—“the notion of the Jews as a rotten part of the body politic which needed to be excised”—that was “enthusiastically taken up by the Nazis.” In fact, whether a straight line runs from Wagner’s brand of odious anti-Semitism to Hitler’s murderous Judenpolitik is a necessary question long debated by historians, with no consensus in sight.

It is wholly understandable that the shadow of the Holocaust has for more than half a century blackened our view of Wagner the man. Someday a revisionist wave will surface. But not yet.

Mr. Horowitz’s books include “Wagner Nights: An American History.” His book-in-progress is “Understanding Wagner.”