Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 31

On the Future of the Metropolitan Opera (continued)

Reviewing a new history of the Metropolitan Opera in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I write: “The Met has never enjoyed the services of a shrewd and practical visionary. There is no one in the company’s annals to set beside Henry Higginson, who created the Boston Symphony in 1881; or Oscar Hammerstein, whose Manhattan Opera combined integrated musical theater, new repertoire and stellar artists before being bought out by the Met in 1910; or George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, who invented the New York City Ballet in 1948; or Harvey Lichtenstein, who reinvented the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the 1980s.” #

To read the review, google: wall street journal affron metropolitan opera book review #

Also, if you were not able to access my recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on the Met, in which I opined that the 4,000-seat Metropolitan Opera House is “already a relic,” google: wall street journal joseph horowitz metropolitan opera union trouble #

Common to both pieces is the notion that “grand opera” as a defining variant of the operatic experience is increasingly a thing of the past. Like the “culture of performance” and the “performance specialist,” it will ultimately be viewed as a twentieth century anomaly. Opera in America will increasingly transpire in smaller spaces, prioritizing an intimate theatrical experience. #

The Elephant in the Room at the Met Opera Negotiations

#

According to my Op-Ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Metropolitan Opera House — physically and metaphorically — signifies a notion of “grand opera” that is increasingly unsustainable. #

To read the rest: http://online.wsj.com/articles/joseph... #

Dvorak’s America

The current Times Literary Supplement (UK) features my latest rant on Dvorak as an American composer, as follows: #

Earlier this summer, Ivan Fischer came to New York with his Budapest Festival Orchestra to offer two memorable concerts of music by Antonin Dvorak. The repertoire included Dvorak’s last two symphonies: no. 8 in G major, and no. 9 in E minor (“From the New World”). On the web, Fischer commented in a filmed English-language interview: “[Dvorak] came out of the nineteenth century patriotic emotional group of composers. And at that time, one has to stress, being in love with your country had nothing negative — it wasn’t like the nationalism of a later period. Dvorak the absolute lover of Bohemia gives us an insight into East European culture – the feeling people had at the time – like nobody else.” #

To a New Yorker, Fischer’s statement seemed chiefly notable for two omissions. The first, conveyed loudly but implicitly, was of something Hungarian: that Dvorak, the benign nationalist, rebukes the combative nationalism of Hungary’s governing Fidesz party, which Fischer opposes. The second omission was of something American. Fischer overlooks an understanding I take for granted: that Dvorak’s Ninth has more to say about New World than Old World identity – an understanding that bears on the nature of patriotic sentiment in music generally. #

When Fischer mentions “the nationalism of a later period,” he could of course equally have had in mind Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin: all music-lovers. Also relevant, from a much earlier period, is Plato’s anxiety about the capacity of music to stir mass sentiment. Certainly in Dvorak’s time – the late nineteenth century – musical nationalism was not invariably wholesome. #

In late nineteenth century America, the central authority on music and race was the New York music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel. Krehbiel wrote about American music, Czech music, Hungarian music, all kinds of music. And he admired it all – including Jewish music. He also wrote (in 1914) the first book-length treatment of African-American folk song, in which he chastised “one class of critics” for “their ungenerous and illiberal attitude” toward black Americans. Krehbiel’s allies in New York included a visionary music educator: Jeannette Thurber, who in 1892 lured Dvorak from Prague to head her National Conservatory of Music. Thurber’s conservatory admitted all black students on full scholarship. She wanted them around because she was convinced of the power of “plantation song” to stir constructive national feeling. When Thurber handed Dvorak a mandate to help found an “American school” of composition, Dvorak fixed on the African-American and Native-American as representative embodiments of “America.” Krehbiel supported and championed this endeavor. One result was the “New World” Symphony. #

From the moment of its premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893, Dvorak’s symphony was both influential and controversial in America. The question asked and re-asked was: “Is it American?” New York said yes. But the music critic Philips Hale, a central arbiter of Boston taste, denounced Dvorak as a “negrophile.” For Boston, “America” meant the Mayflower. New York, by comparison, was a melting pot. New York critics admired in the “New World” Symphony a plethora of “black” and “red” allusions. The third theme of the first movement and the Largo’s English horn tune seemed self-evidently inspired by African-American song. (The former practically quotes “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The latter was transformed after Dvorak’s death into “Goin’ Home” – an ersatz spiritual so pervasive that to this day many Americans assume it is a slave song quoted by Dvorak.) Dvorak’s absorption of Native American music and lore was also noted – not least because Dvorak himself told members of the New York press that the middle movements of his new symphony were inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), in 1893 still the best-known, most-read work of American literature. #

In a tour de force of musical journalism, the New York Times’ W. J. Henderson – a close colleague of Krehbiel – filed a 2,000-word review that remains one of the most eloquent descriptions of the “New World” Symphony ever written, one which clinches the twin pathos of the Indian and the slave as polyvalently conveyed by Dvorak. Henderson called the Largo “an idealized slave song made to fit the impressive quiet of night on the prairie. When the star of empire took its way over those mighty Western plains blood and sweat and agony and bleaching human bones marked its course. Something of this awful buried sorrow of the prairie must have forced itself upon Dr. Dvorak’s mind.” Of “the plantation songs of the negro” — songs which inspired Dvorak as they had “struck an answering note in the American heart” – Henderson had clarion words: “If those songs are not national, then there is no such thing as national music.” #

But in decades to follow, this first reception of the “New World” Symphony was forgotten. The symphony was canonized as a Slavic masterpiece whose sadness conveyed “Heimweh” – homesickness for Bohemia. In 1966, Leonard Bernstein (for whom an “American school” began only with Copland) preposterously claimed that Dvorak’s Largo “with Chinese words could sound Chinese.” A program note by Michael Beckerman for Ivan Fischer’s “New World” Symphony performance concluded differently: “Some have argued that there is nothing American about the work, that Dvorak could have just as easily written the work at home. They are wrong.” #

And they are. America’ s leading Dvorak scholar, Beckerman has tirelessly excavated the intimate relationship binding the “New World” Symphony with “The Song of Hiawatha.” Dvorak testified that the beginning of his Scherzo – the symphony’s third movement – was inspired by the scene “in which the Indians dance” in Longfellow’s narrative poem. There is only one such scene: it is “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.” The wedding dancer, Pau-Puk-Keewis, begins by “treading softly like a panther,” then whirls, stomps, and spins “eddying round and round the wigwam,/till the leaves went whirling with him,/like great snowdrifts o’er the landscape.” This idealized, mythic mega-dance is the hurtling main theme of Dvorak’s scherzo, with its incessant tom tom and exotic drone, and the “primitive” five-note compass of its skittish tune. Never mind that real Indian dances don’t sound like this. Dvorak saw and heard dancing Indians in Manhattan and in Iowa. He knew Krehbiel’s specimens of Indian song. He was not attempting to retain the flavor of indigenous music – as Bartok would, and as would Arthur Farwell in the wake of Dvorak (about which more in a moment). The other main events of the Wedding Feast are the gentle song of Chibiabos and a legend told by Iagoo. As Beckerman as incontrovertibly demonstrated, Dvorak builds these episodes, too, into his Scherzo. It is a de facto Hiawatha tone poem. #

Beckerman has also tracked down evidence that Dvorak’s Largo – in addition to evoking prairie desolation, which Dvorak found “sad to despair”; in addition to evoking the sorrow songs of the plantation – drew inspiration from the death in winter of Hiawatha’s wife, Minnehaha. This is the funereal passage with pizzicato double basses and piercing violin tremolos, shuddering with the chill of Longfellow’s “long and dreary winter” – a threnody of the most exquisite poignancy. The very end of the symphony comprises another dirge (with timpani taps), then an apotheosis, then – a conductor’s nightmare – a dying final chord requiring the winds to diminish to triple-piano. Although Beckerman does not here propose a Hiawatha correlation, this coda is plainly extra-musical: it requires a story. The story at hand fits: it is Hiawatha’s leavetaking, sailing “into the fiery sunset,” into “the purple mists of evening.” #

Last spring, Beckerman and I completed a 35-minute “Hiawatha Melodrama” for narrator and orchestra (in musical parlance, a “melodrama” mates music with the spoken word). It can be heard on a new “Dvorak and America” Naxos CD. Combining passages from “The Song of Hiawatha” with excerpts from the “New World” Symphony, it maximizes the symphony’s programmatic content. It glimpses the unrealized “Hiawatha” opera or cantata that was Dvorak’s crowning ambition during his American sojourn. “From the New World” was a step in this direction. It is not itself a “Hiawatha” program symphony: the Hiawatha episodes are not in proper sequence. And “Hiawatha” is a sporadic presence, not ubiquitous. Rather, this last Dvorak symphony transitions to the folkloric tone poems he would compose upon returning to Prague: pieces in which every detail tells a story as well-known to his Bohemian audience as “The Song of Hiawatha” was known to Americans. #

Though listening to such late Dvorak tone poems as “The Wood Dove” or “The Golden Spinning Wheel” without reference to the Karel Erben ballads that they set (in some passages, word for word) would be a perverse experience, the knowledge that Dvorak’s Scherzo was inspired by the Dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis does not require that we hear it as an Indian dance. That said, the “Hiawatha” elements of Dvorak’s symphony remain an essential point of reference. They support the epic, elegiac splendor of the work, which begins with a sorrow song in the low strings and ends with an apotheosis of pain. Obviously, Dvorak’s sadness of the prairie and sadness of the Indian and sadness of the slave resonate with homeward longings (and with who knows that other personal sadnesses). My own experience of “From the New World” is of a reading of America drawn taut, emotionally, by the pull of the Czech fatherland.

And there are other reasons to attend to Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” references. They tell us something important about Dvorak the man, and about musical meaning. #

The most startling confession in Igor Stravinsky’s many conversations with Robert Craft is that his Symphony in Three Movements (1945) aligns with pictorial imagery. Although commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as a World War II victory opus, the Symphony is widely considered a prototypically abstract neo-classical exercise affirming Stravinsky’s notorious credo that music can only be about itself. “Certain specific events excited my musical imagination,” Stravinsky told Craft. “Each episode is linked in my mind with a concrete impression of the war, almost always cinematographic in origin. For instance, the beginning of the third movement is partly a musical reaction to newsreels I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The square march beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba – all these are related to those repellant pictures.” Stravinsky went on to furnish a scenario for the entire six-minute finale. But he concluded: “In spite of what I have admitted, the symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all.” #

Though his most recent biographer, Stephen Walsh, dismisses the pertinence of Stravinsky’s “supposed” testimony to Craft concerning the martial imagery informing the Symphony’s outer movements, Stravinsky’s pictorial narrative for the finale works splendidly – I happen to know, because (with the video artist Peter Bogdanoff, for California’s Pacific Symphony) I’ve tried it out, with actual World War II newsreel clips. And though Stravinsky’s distinction between “programmatic” music and music inspired by “specific events” may sound sophistic, it is not: he was sharing workshop secrets with Craft. #

If even Stravinsky, the modernist scourge of extra-musical meanings, privately resorted to extra-musical inspiration, what about the composers who came before? Their workshops were crammed with pictures – even for symphonies. Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s amanuensis, testified that Beethoven typically relied upon scenery and events to – we can use Stravinsky’s phrase – “excite his musical imagination.” Dvorak is an extreme case. His ten Legends – three of which Ivan Fischer conducted in New York with exemplary creative flair – are plainly miniature tone poems. The slow movement of the G major Symphony – which Fischer delivered with a revelatory precision of narrative detail – obviously tells a story. I have no idea what characters and plots Fischer may adduce in these pieces – because Dvorak, characteristically, left no clues That he conceded that “Hiawatha” impregnated the “From the New World” may well have been a begrudging response to New York’s importunate critics, who were at the same time – unlike their European brethren – proactive daily journalists. Krehbiel, in particular, was granted a “New World” Symphony audience in Dvorak’s study that he later recalled as one of the supreme satisfactions of his professional career. Dvorak was coy, and said different things to different New York interrogators. But the net confessional was substantial. We are not left in the dark, as with the Legends, the G major Symphony, and countless other Dvorak essays in musical description. We can actually identify the Hiawaha stories he used as a creative spur. Even the pay-off is extra-musical. #

Dvorak was a village butcher’s son. He drank beer. He loved birds and kept some, uncaged, in his Manhattan apartment. He wrote to the New York Herald: “It is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness. The poor work hard; they study seriously. . . . If in my own career I have achieved a measure of success and reward it is to some extent due to the fact I was the son of poor parents and was reared in any atmosphere of struggle and endeavour.” As a Bohemian, Dvorak proudly belonged to a Hapsburg minority experienced in the rigors of marginalization. He refused to move to Vienna or to change his first name to “Anton.” The resisted polishing his German. In America, Dvorak identified with the disenfranchised. The 1890s were not remote from the memory of slavery. The extinction of the red man was a living reality; turn-of-the-century Americans widely believed that he would vanish completely. Dvorak’s African-American assistant, Harry Burleigh, was the grandson of a slave who bought his freedom, who learned to read, who sent his daughter to college; Dvorak knew this saga intimately. Though not a gregarious type, Dvorak in Iowa daily conversed with the members of the Kickapoo Medicine Show. If the “New World” remains the most beloved symphony composed on American soil, it is partly because as listeners we sense, however subliminally, Dvorak’s compassionate experience of black and “red” Americans. He was not an easy or uncomplicated man. His National Conservatory students often found him daunting and irascible. But the artist in Dvorak was defined by personal humility, sympathetic understanding, and democratic instinct – qualities that set him apart from such contemporaneous symphonists as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Bruckner. What the “New World” Symphony ultimately imparts is that its composer was a great humanitarian. #

Dvorak’s American legacy remains ponderable. The twin sources for an “American school” that he proposed yielded twin prophecies. He told the New York Herald that “Negro melodies” would foster “a great and noble school of music.” He also espoused a future American music inspired by the Native American. If the second of these predictions proved false, Dvorak was nonetheless a central promulgator of a four-decade “Indianist” movement in American music. And if hundreds of Indianist songs, symphonies, and operas amassed a mountain of kitsch, there is as well some buried treasure. Arthur Farwell, who declared himself the first American composer to “take up Dvorak’s challenge,” was impelled by the “New World” Symphony to found a Wa-Wan Press for himself and fellow Indianists. At his best – in the Navajo War Dance No. 2 for solo piano (1904); in “Pawnee Horses” for eight-part a cappella chorus in Navajo (1937) — Farwell is the closest thing to an American Bartok, honoring the astringency of indigenous sources. This is a truncated Dvorak legacy that deserves to be remembered. #

The “Negro melodies” Dvorak championed of course more than endure: he correctly foresaw a black American musical future. Though it has taken many directions, one is specific to Dvorak and to Harry Burleigh. It was Burleigh, after Dvorak’s death, who transformed plantation song into a genre of art song. Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson sang Burleigh’s version of “Deep River.” It is sung even now. In Burleigh’s lifetime, “Deep River” (not “Swing Low”) was the iconic spiritual, a grave hymn of inspiration and hope. This was a compositional achievement: an earlier “Deep River,” sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, was relatively upbeat. #

What inspired Burleigh to recast “Deep River”? Could it have been Dvorak’s Largo, so similar in tone and tempo? Among the versions of “Deep River” that Burleigh crafted, there is one for a cappella male chorus. Its chordal preamble cites the brass chorale with which Dvorak prefaces his English horn tune. We can actually say that this great American folk-song, as known today, would not exist without the influence of a symphony composed by a visiting Bohemian. I cannot imagine a purer example of musical nationalism as a wholesome force. #

Remembering Artur Bodanzky

Sony’s 25-CD set “Wagner at the Met: Legendary Performances” reminds us that when the Metropolitan Opera was a great Wagner house — how times have changed! — it was also a permanent home to great conductors. My “Remembering Artur Bodanzky,” in the current issue of Barry Millington’s excellent Wagner Journal, expounds: #

An abundance of evidence – written and recorded – suggests that from 1885 to 1939 the world’s foremost Wagner house, judged solely by the caliber of musical performance, was the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. In Europe, there were companies that staged Wagner more painstakingly or progressively. But none could compete with the Met with regard to singing, conducting, and orchestral support. #

The caliber of Wagner singing in New York during the half century in question is a phenomenon well known and much described. Initially, the resident German ensemble included Marianne Brandt, Lilli Lehmann, and Albert Niemann – great singing actors stolen from German companies. Later, Jean de Rezske – who proved that Tristan could be beautifully vocalized — and Olive Fremstad – the closest equivalent to a Wagnerian Callas – reigned at the Met. After that came Friedrich Schorr, Lauritz Melchior, Kirsten Flagstad. This was before the advent of air travel; these artists stayed put in New York. #

But even more crucial – and far less acknowledged – is that the Met was a conductor’s house with a Wagner lineage comprising Anton Seidl, Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, and Artur Bodanzky. That Bodanzky is not normally grouped in such company is the reason for this article. His Wagner broadcast recordings were once sidelined by commercial studio products. No longer: you can readily hear Bodanzky’s Wagner on youtube, on Naxos, and on a new 25-CD Sony box of “Wagner at the Met: Legendary Performances from The Metropolitan Opera” including New York Bodanzky performances of Siegfried (Jan. 30, 1937), Tristan und Isolde (April 16, 1938), and Götterdämmerung (Jan. 11, 1936). All you have to do is listen. #

But first, backing up: it must be remembered that, following an inaugural season of Italian and French opera that broke the bank, the Met began as a German-language house. The seven seasons from 1884 to 1891 were wholly German; it was the only language sung, and the vast majority of the singing was of Wagner. As of 1885, the presiding conductor, Anton Seidl, was a Wagner protégé of genius. That from 1872 to 1878 Seidl lived at Wahnfried – in his own room, as a virtual member of the family — has somehow escaped Wagner biographers. He was Wagner’s boy, and when Wagner sent him out into the world he testified that Seidl was a young man he wholly trusted to do justice to the Ring, Tristan, and Die Meistersinger. All accounts of Seidl conducting Wagner register his close allegiance to Wagner’s own precepts – and his overwhelming impact in the pit. #

When Mahler became the Met’s chief purveyer of Wagner in 1908, that he was found worthy of comparison with Seidl was the highest possible praise. Compared to Seidl, Mahler seemed more analytical, less prone to the weight and Innigkeit later associated with Furtwängler. Mahler and his wife were amazed by the lustrous voices at the Met, compared what Mahler had in Vienna. That Mahler did not complain about the Met orchestra (as he did about the New York Philharmonic and New York Symphony) speaks volumes. #

Toscanini’s Wagner at the Met, from 1908 to 1915, was at first less highly regarded – but his intense mastery and advocacy were never in doubt. Toscanini’s Wagner sound was found more Italianate than that of his predecessors, and his lyric predilection – for “singing” sonic surfaces – was experienced as something new in the Wagner repertoire. #

And so to Bodanzky. He was born in Vienna in 1877. He studied composition with Alexander von Zemlinsky. He was an assistant to Mahler at the Vienna Opera, and was also closely associated with Busoni (who recommended him to Toscanini when Toscanini left New York in 1915). He was head of the German wing at the Met from 1915 until his death in 1939. The Mahler and Busoni links are suggestive. Bodanzky’s Met broadcasts do not disclose a “Germanic” Wagner conductor in the Wagner-Seidl-Furtwängler mold. The massive elemental groundswell is not his interpretive medium. Rather, he favors the highest possible surface intensity. He likes brisk tempos, subito dynamics, and sharp attacks. More than responsive, his orchestra is indescribably hot. James Huneker – a legendary name among early twentieth century New York critics — wrote: “No living conductor has the fiery temperament of Bodanzky save Arturo Toscanini.” #

It bears stressing that Bodanzky’s Met orchestra was predominantly Italian – a Toscanini legacy. The house’s other principal conductor, presiding over the Italian wing, was Ettore Panizza – a name as forgotten as Bodanzky’s, and as important. Panizza was a conductor in the Toscanini mold, albeit predisposed to a more flexible pulse. To hear his Met broadcasts of Verdi is to hear both Panizza and the Met orchestra in their element. There is no greater recorded operatic performance than Panizza’s New York Otello of Feb. 12, 1938, with Giovanni Martinelli, Elisabeth Rethberg, and Lawrence Tibbett. Martinelli and Tibbett are iconic in their roles. And the orchestra is a powderkeg of inflammatory virtuosity, an instrument unlike any to be heard today. (Panizza, who had conducted in Milan and Vienna, called his Met orchestra “as fine a theater orchestra as I have seen in the world.”) The same orchestra, in the 1938 Tristan under Bodanzky’s baton, delivers the most gripping act one Prelude I have ever experienced (I am not alone in this opinion). The sound is Italian: keenly focused singing from the strings, laced with portamento; forward timpani and brass (bright trumpets). Bodanzky begins very slowly (the total timing is 11:38 – slow), with huge allargandos and agogics, but there is no languor in his reading. It begins burning hot, and in an iron grip grows hotter still. The gradual acceleration is masterfully gauged. The climax is titanic – even a good performance of the opera could only be anti-climactic after such a draining preamble. #

But the Bodanzky performance to hear first is Siegfried. This is not only the most fulfilling recorded performance of this opera that I know; it is the only musically fulfilling Siegfried I have ever encountered. To begin with, the scherzando métier of acts one and two suits Bodanzky to perfection. And, of course, there is Melchior – he can sing the title role, first to last. The young Flagstad makes her own the sunburst of Brünnhilde’s awakening. Schorr has always seemed to me a somewhat stolid singer – but where today can one find a Wanderer of comparable vocal heft and stability? The others – Mime (Karl Laufkötter), Alberich (Eduard Habich), Erda (Kerstin Thorborg), even the Forest Bird (Stella Andreva) – are uniformly potent. The diction throughout is exemplary; words are sung, not swallowed. #

Bodanzky’s act one is predominantly fleet. Mime and Siegfried scamper in time, prodded by hairtrigger accents and sforzatos in the pit. Where Siegfried assimilates his mother’s death, Bodanzky drops his reins and Melchior trims his big tenor to a whisper, shading the words with pangs of incredulous grief. When the last scene is attained, the pacing of the act acquires an unanticipated breadth. Buttressed by the incredible rasp and bite of Bodanzky’s low strings, Melchior just pours it on. I cannot imagine a more exultant rendition of the forging song. In act two, Bodanzky’s intermittent climaxes – the crest of the Wanderer/Alberich confrontation; the Wanderer’s apocalyptic exit – are so tremendous they risk pre-empting the act’s closing surge. But when this comes, Bodanzky’s velocity (the passage cannot be taken any faster or more brilliantly) and Melchior’s vocal refulgence clinch Siegfried’s delight and excitement. The surpassing moment of this performance, however, is unquestionably Brünnhilde’s Awakening. Here, the surging melos of Bodanzky’s strings drives a climax made uncanny by the knife-thrust of the epochal chords preceding “Heil dir, Sonne!” – chords typically delivered via “soft” attacks from the bottom up. Then Flagstad: a lava flow. And then Melchior. Bodanzky accelerates their duet toward a torrential cadence. #

If Bodanzky is mainly remembered for anything these days, it is for inflicting cuts on Wagner. It must be recalled that Wagner was abridged in New York even by Seidl – or, rather, especially by Seidl, because he was a sensitive, sensible man: the works were new and most in the audience knew no German. (Mahler, by comparison, aspired to give Wagner uncut in New York – thinking of himself and the composer, but not of his audience.) Bodanzky trimmed Wagner not because he was lazy or obtuse; he was being considerate to others. That said, the Bodanzky’s cuts are far less extensive than Seidl’s had been. His Siegfried is uncut through acts one and two. The third act is missing part of the Siegfried-Wanderer scene, and part of the final duet – cuts that truncate the psychological trajectory of the latter scene especially. #

With regard to cuts, the Bodanzky Tristan is another case; the score is jettisoned by 13 per cent. Act one is complete. But the second act duet is snipped twice – so that it builds too soon. Marke’s speech is abridged – so that it becomes more eruptive, less depressive. Act three, with four cuts, feels compressed – and so does the opera as a whole. And yet this broadcast recording is an essential point of reference in the history of Wagner in performance. Others will disagree, but to my ears Flagstad is not a complete Isolde. The richness, evenness, and stamina of her Ur-soprano are unsurpassable; and the part has been assiduously studied. But she cannot really inhabit Isolde’s act one rage, scorn, and hopelessness. It falls to Bodanzky to supply the music’s whipping fury; the temper and virtuosity of his big orchestra, its agility at the swiftest speeds, are beyond praise. #

The performance congeals in act two, with Flagstad partnered by Melchior. Here the sheer amplitude of the two voices, the rapturous range and acute control of phrasing and dynamics (impressively captured on Sony’s transfer) beggar description. The singing portamentos of the orchestra’s strings seamlessly bind the vocal episodes. Bondanzky finds the long line of the love duet and makes it wondrously supple and strong. For Brangäne’s warning, he furnishes a sonic carpet whose slow-motion tension-and-release trajectory grips Karin Branzell as surely as it does the afternoon’s enthralled auditors. The duet’s climax takes possession of every participant; I have never heard a more desperate delivery of Kurwenal’s “Rette dich, Tristan!” than that of Julius Huehn on this charged occasion. In short: this Tristan act two documents an ideal toward which present-day performances cannot plausibly aspire. If I were to cite a single, peak passage, it would be Tristan’s “O König.” Melchior’s uncanny rendering of this great address – first to Marke, then Isolde – persuades that he has glimpsed what we cannot. It would take a Fremstad or Lilli Lehmann to craft a suitably visionary rejoinder; Flagstad isn’t up to it. But, miraculously, the Met has supplied a Melot – Arnold Gabor – who can stand his ground with Melchior, and also, in Emanuel List, a superior Marke. Bodanzky’s band drops the curtain with a staccato fury that knows no answer. #

Wagner once instructed Albert Niemann – the supreme Tristan of another era – to sound more fatigued singing Tannhäuser’s Rome Narrative. As the comatose Tristan in act three of our 1938 broadcast, Melchior evinces an elemental weariness. Equally convincing are the shouted, curdled tones with which he curses the lovers’ fatal drink; or the heartbreak of his hallucinatory yearning; or the manic ecstasy yielding the manic dissolution with which Tristan expires. In the Liebestod, Flagstad’s super-human instrument, piloted by Bodanzky’s heaving orchestra, impacts with primordial force. #

Bodanzky’ 1936 Götterdämmerung is chiefly notable for Melchior’s piercing interpretation of Siegfried’s Death and for his prodigious high C earlier in the third act; the performance as a whole feels hyper-active (but then so is this opera). More remarkable – but not in Sony’s box – are Bodanzky Met broadcasts of Das Rheingold and Die Meistersinger. Sadly, there exists no readily available Bodanzky broadcast of Die Walküre. Sony here supplies a performance (with Flagstad and Melchior) led by Erich Leinsdorf, whose emergence as Bodanzky’s successor at the head of the Met’s German wing marked the collapse of the Seidl-Mahler-Toscanini-Bodanzky lineage. Leindorf’s Wagner, of which this Feb. 17, 1940, Die Walküre is a fair example, was ever frigid and meticulous; it possessed nothing like the originality and passion of Bodanzky’s readings. Leinsdorf remained on and off the Met’s conducting roster for more than four decades. After Bodanzsky’s death in 1939, and Panizza’s 1942 departure, the company enjoyed no sustained musical leadership, whether German or Italian, until the 1970s advent of James Levin as principal conductor and then music direcor. Though Levine has his fervent admirers, to my ears he is no Bodanzky and no Panizza. And his orchestra, while much better than what he inherited, is a less special instrument than the virtuoso Italian ensemble Bodanzky and Panizza once commanded and maintained. #

My own first in-person experience of Wagner at the Met was a 1962 Die Meistersinger led by Joseph Rosenstock. I was 13 and knew the Prelude from my stirring Toscanini recording. To my surprise, a lumpy sonic pastiche emanated from the pit. This was during the reign of Rudolph Bing (1950-1972), who frankly disliked Wagner. Except for a few Rheingold and Die Walküre performances led by Herbert von Karajan, the Met orchestra in these years could not be expected to produce the Wagner sounds I knew from LPs. It more than bears mentioning that it was Rosenstock who was slated to replace Bodanzky in 1929, when the latter decided to leave the Met after 13 busy seasons. Rosenstock conducted six times, after which Bodanzky was reinstated. It is tempting to speculate what new turn his career might otherwise have taken. He was for instance a known Mahlerite whose New York concert performances included Das Lied von der Erde. But Rosenstock’s ascent had to await another, less momentous era of Wagner at the Met. #

P.S. – After writing this piece, I shared with my wife the 1938 Bodanzky Tristan, act two. When the music ended, her first comment was to ask: “What orchestra was that?” When I told her, she was properly incredulous. #

Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony — Part Two

My last posting introduced the Hiawatha Melodrama, proposing a radical re-interpretation of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. As a postscript, here is a visual rendering of the Melodrama’s fifth movement by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff. #

As concocted by myself and the Dvorak scholar Mike Beckerman, the Melodrama aligns text from Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” with music by Dvorak. The world premiere recording is part of a new themed “Dvorak and America” Naxos CD (Naxos 8.559777) featuring PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. #

The starting point of the Melodrama is Dvorak’s testimony that the middle movements of his symphony were inspired by Longfellow’s poem. In effect, the Melodrama suggests what a Dvorak “Hiawatha” cantata or tone poem might have sounded like (and Dvorak aspired to compose such a work). It also establishes some of the extra-musical imagery that fired Dvorak’s musical imagination. The New World Symphony, being quasi-programmatic, marks a transition toward the tone poems and operas Dvorak would compose upon returning to Prague; he never composed another symphony. #

“The Hunting of Pau-Puk-Keewis,” the fifth of the Melodrama’s six movements, includes sung as well as spoken text (at 3:30). Beckerman comments: “While this at first may seem far-fetched, one must remember that as soon as he returned to Bohemia in 1895, Dvorak composed a series of tone poems based on the ballads of K. J. Erben. In at least one of these, he set down the poem, line by line, beneath the music – so this process was not alien to him.” #

Here is a related visual presentation for the Largo and the Scherzo of the New World Symphony. #

I next explore “Dvorak and America” as an Aspen Institute seminar (July 9-10, as a DePauw University festival (Oct. 27 to Nov. 2), and as a Columbus Symphony festival (Feb. 20-21). #

Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony

Is Dvorak’s New World Symphony a programmatic Hiawatha symphony? With the Dvorak scholar Mike Beckerman, I’ve composed a 35-minute Hiawatha Melodrama for narrator and orchestra that combines Dvorak with verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. A new Naxos CD, “Dvorak and America,” includes the world premiere recording, with PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. Here’s movement five, in which “The Hunting of Pau-Puk-Keewis” aligns with the finale of Dvorak’s symphony:
http://www.artsjournal.com/uq/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Hiawathalongest.mp3 #

Dvorak himself cited The Song of Hiawatha as a source of inspiration for his American symphony of 1893. Beckerman has closely studied points of correspondence between episodes of the symphony and episodes of Longfellow’s poem. He’s also demonstrated that the Larghetto from Dvorak’s Violin Sonatina is a portrait of Minnehaha, Hiawatha’s wife. #

Our Melodrama is in five movements:

1.A spoken Prologue

2.Hiawatha’s Wooing (the music of which mainly draws on the Larghetto)

3.Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (which presents the Scherzo from Dvorak’s symphony as a tone poem)

4.The Dearth of Minnehaha (using Dvorak’s Largo)

5.The Hunting of Pau-Puk –Keewis (Dvorak’s finale)

6.Epilogue: Hiawatha’s Departure (applying the coda of Dvorak’s symphony, which with its dirge and apotheosis can only be programmatic) #

Our first goal in creating the Hiawatha Melodrama is to create a viable concert work. As a work of scholarship, the Melodrama suggests what a Hiawatha opera or cantata by Dvorak might have sounded like (and Dvorak wanted to compose a Hiawatha opera or cantata). Finally, the Melodrama apprises us what images and stories were in Dvorak’s head when he composed his symphony. Certainly Dvorak powerfully empathized with the fate of the Indian, and of the African-American – and, however subliminally, this element of compassion is at the root of the symphony’s enduring appeal. #

By way of exploring Dvorak’s American style, the same Naxos CD includes Dvorak’s American Suite, the Larghetto from the Violin Sonatina, and a couple of Humoresques – as well as three terrific Indianist cameos by Arthur Farwell, who called himself the first composer “to take up Dvorak’s challenge.” #

That Dvorak became an American composer during his astounding New World sojourn of 1892 to 1895 can no longer be doubted or denied. #

A Mexican Composer Whose Time Will Come

Gustav Mahler predicted, “My time will come” – and he was right. Anton Bruckner is another composer whose posthumous fame, decades after his death, far eclipsed scattered acclaim during his lifetime. #

The relative paucity of post-1930 canonized symphonic repertoire impels the question: who else is awaiting such discovery? The surest candidate I know is Silvestre Revueltas, whose dates are 1899 to 1940. #

Revueltas is sui generis, impossible to place, an unfathomably original talent. His birthplace – rural Mexico – is the surest point of orientation: the shrieking clarinets, shrill trumpets, and booming tubas of the village bandas of his childhood generated a galvanizing, instantly recognizable Revueltas sound. He partakes of nationalism, modernism, populism, and the cultural politics of the far left. His music is both “accessible” and challenging, surprising, provocative. #

The most obvious reason Revueltas is not famous is painful to concede: it’s that we don’t expect Mexico to produce great international figures in classical music. And Mexican composers of Revueltas’s generation did not enjoy the publishing, performance, and recording resources of composers in other lands. Another reason Revueltas is not famous is that he was eclipsed in his lifetime by his compatriot Carlos Chavez, a card-carrying modernist who enjoyed the allegiance of Aaron Copland and other Americans, and was a compelling organizational factor in Mexican culture. Revueltas had nothing like Chavez’s practical acumen. #

And there is a third obstacle to absorbing Revueltas’s importance – he did not compose in the “normal” forms. Of his big symphonic works, the only one of substantial length – La noche de los Mayas – is an ersatz symphony concocted after Revueltas’s death by the conductor José Ives Limantour; it vulgarizes and misrepresents Revueltas. #

There is, however, a great Revueltas film score some thirty minutes long: Redes (1935). The film itself is a flawed masterpiece, an iconic product of the Mexican Revolution. Like that Revolution, Redes is unfinished. Its collaborators – including Revueltas, the master photographer Paul Strand, and the Austrian director Fred Zinnemann (in Mexico en route to Hollywood) — lacked a final, consummating vision. The script – about a fishermen’s uprising — is ordinary. The actors are amateurs (many are actual fishermen). But where score, cinematography, and story align, Redes is one of the peak achievements in wedding music and the moving image. #

Thanks to Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, we now have a beautiful restored print of Redes. What is not restored is the crude 1930s soundtrack. And yet, because in Redes music rarely overlaps dialogue, it’s possible to screen the film with a live orchestra performing Revueltas’s score. The new WCF print has so far been thus employed by the Louisville Orchestra, the Austin Symphony, and most recently by PostClassical Ensemble of Washington, D.C. (which I co-founded a decade ago). There will surely be more such performances to come – because they are revelatory. #

The film’s epic sequences are three. All eschew dialogue and all other sound except music. The first is the funeral of a child. The second is when the fish come in. The third is the film’s finale – the fishermen mount their boats and surge towards the village where they’ll demand their rights. You can see the funeral (with the original soundtrack) here. You can sample the very ending of the film (begin at 5:10) here. But the sequence that trumps every other is the big catch, with the fishermen – iconic Mexican faces, captured by Strand against an iconic Mexican sky – hauling their nets. The nets (“Redes” means nets) are deployed by Strand as a metaphor for ensnared lives. Strand makes a visual connection from the rope of the nets to the veins articulating toiling human arms. Revueltas’s score seizes on both these metaphors, and transcends them with a stately brass chorale. The resulting montage is suddenly heroic, a universal statement of human resilience. #

The autonomy of Revueltas’s musical set-pieces is such that they more discourse upon than accompany Strand’s poetic visual imagery. Accordingly, Angel Gil-Ordonez disdained a click-track conducting PostClassical Ensemble at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (College Park) May 10 – an event supported by DC’s enterprising Mexican Cultural Institute, Alonso Ancira (CEO of Altos Hornos de México), the Chevron Corporation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Angel wanted to conduct the music as music. In the finale, where a panting figure in the orchestra alludes to heaving oar-strokes, he succeeded in pacing the film’s cumulative crescendo more successfully than Revueltas himself, conducting the soundtrack in a Mexican studio. It is a cinematic ending like no other. #

What I Thought I Wrote about “Porgy and Bess”

Anyone who writes books learns sooner or later that a book has no fixed meaning. #

In my case, the discovery came in 1987, with Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music. The book was reviled and proscribed, extolled and prescribed. This was nothing less than I had expected, having assaulted a high icon. What I had not expected was that so many would read a book different from the one I thought I had written. I recall only one review – among many dozens – that felicitously encapsulated my notion of a social and institutional cultural history using the Toscanini cult as a metaphor for 20th century decline. And that appeared in a scholarly journal far from the mainstream. I also liked the alte Edward Said summarizing, in the New York Times Book Review, that I had composed a “Jeremiad.” But Said proceeded to deplore my failure to consider the cultural critiques of Theodor Adorno. I had written a long book and Said had doubtless read a bound galley with no index – and so (as I pointed out in a letter published by the Book Review) had overlooked my long section on Adorno. (Some years later Said shared with me his puzzlement that he had never again been invited to review for the New York Times.) #

My most recent opus — “On My Way”: The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess (W.W. Norton) – has received sympathetic notices in publications like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement. I do not complain. Those reviewers enjoyed what they carefully read. They committed no errors of fact or omission. And the meaning of my book to them as is valid as its meaning to me. More than that: I learned things about my book reading how they had read it. #

But only this week did I discover a review that more or less precisely coincided with my own reading of On My Way. It appeared in the Bulletin of my alma mater, Swarthmore College, and was written by a faculty member: Andrew Hauze. Hauze’s review concluded: #

“While Mamoulian’s direction often took liberties with the text, his changes to the ending of Porgy are downright authorial. By ‘recasting the novella’s dour ending as a redemptive mass finale, Mamoulian nudged Porgy toward a “miracle play” paradigm,’ writes Horowitz. Vital changes were made to the original script in Mamoulian’s hand, including many of the final scene’s most powerful lines (particularly memorable once George Gershwin set them to music). Beyond the brilliant direction of the original production, Mamoulian is, in the end, responsible for the redemptive tone of both play and opera.” #

That, I would say, is the spine of my book as I conceived it, more succinctly expressed than I expressed it. What may get lost in the detail of my account is that Mamoulian in later years regarded as his highest achievement his 1926 Rochester staging of Maeterlinck’s miracle play Sister Beatrice – and that (as Hauze’s review stresses) in style, tone, and content this production links directly to Porgy as refashioned by Mamoulian a year later. #

Musical theater is typically a collaborative enterprise with many authors. That Rouben Mamoulian, directing Porgy and Bess in 1935, contributed something to the constitution of the most important American opera is itself unsurprising. What I discovered is that Mamoulian’s contribution, stemming from his late revisions to the Dubose and Dorothy Heyward play Porgy, was fundamental – and far from typical. He must in the future be considered an indispensable contributor to the creative vision of Gershwin’s opera, not merely its first director. #

Wagner at Coney Island

In the 1890s, when Wagnerism was at its height, Wagner’s American disciple Anton Seidl (1850-1898) would lead concerts fourteen times a week at Coney Island. He mainly conducted Wagner. The concerts, at the seaside Brighton Beach Music Pavilion (capacity 3,000), included children’s programs and the Seidl Society children’s chorus. Seidl himself composed a work for the children, “Good Night,” the manuscript of which resides at the Seidl Archives at Columbia University. #

“Good Night” received its first performance since 1898 a few weeks ago as part of “Scenes from Childhood,” a concert presented by PostClassical Ensemble (I’m the Executive Director) at DC’s Dumbarton Church. The chorus was Washington National Cathedral Choir of Boys and Girls (Michael McCarthy, conductor), conducted on this occasion by PCE Music Director Angel Gil-Ordonez. It sounded like
http://www.artsjournal.com/uq/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/PCE-Seidl_2.mp3 #

The story of the Seidl Society is one of the strangest and most stirring in the history of classical music in America. It was a singular Brooklyn women’s club, founded by Laura Langford. In summer, the Society presented Seidl and his orchestra at Brighton Beach. In winter, the Society’s Seidl concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music were more numerous than those of the New York Philharmonic, also conducted by Seidl, across the river. Propagating Wagner as a spiritual therapy, the Society hosted working women and African-American orphans, presented lectures on social and spiritual betterment, reserved special railroad cars so unescorted women could attend the Brighton Beach concerts; its goal — aborted by Seidl’s death — was a Brooklyn Bayreuth. #

Seidl had aspirations to compose, and was working on a Hiawatha opera when he died. Though he produced numerous transcriptions for orchestra, he left only a single composition of note: “Good Night,” composed and premiered in 1895. I discovered the score when researching my book Wagner Nights: An American History at Columbia University’s Seidl Archive. (I’ve also written about Seidl and Langford in Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle). The text, a poem by Edna Dean Proctor, reads: #

Good-night! Good-night! The morn will light

The east before the dawn,

And stars arise to gem the skies

When these have westward gone.

Good-night! And sweet be thy repose

Through all their shining way,

Till darkness goes, and bird and rose,

With rapture greet the day, –

Good-night! #

“Good Night” was last performed on May 2, 1898 — the Seidl Society’s memorial concert for Anton Seidl. Emil Fischer, a much-loved bass in his final American performance, sang Wotan’s Farwell. The program also included the Dream Music from Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel, Liszt’s Les preludes and Concerto pathetique (arranged for piano and orchestra), and, to close, Siegfried’s Funeral Music, for which the audience was asked to stand. Langford rose to explain that, as Fischer was sailing for Europe that very day, Wotan’s Farewell would be repositioned near the beginning of the evening. This short speech effectively ended Laura Langford’s public career. A Seidl monument at Brighton Beach was advocated by the Eagle; none was erected. The Seidl Society ceased to exist. #

For the PostClassical Ensemble performance, the piano accompaniment for “Good Night” was transcribed (and performed) for solo harp by Jacqueline Pollauf. #

Shostakovich Decoded

The Pacific Symphony, an orchestra that does things differently, mounted a “Shostakovich Decoded” festival over the past two weeks in collaboration with Chapman University. There were more than a dozen events, including a conference on Stalin and culture, an exhibit of Stalinist kitsch, master classes and lectures, and a potent variety of concerts. The central participants included Solomon Volkov, the author of Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the actor David Prather, whose re-enactments of Shostakovich remembering were a tour de force. #

Writing the script for the core symphonic program, I hit upon the idea of juxtaposing Shostakovich’s dissident memoirs, from the 1970s, with a couple of official pronouncements from the 1940s. So in addition to assigning Prather various readings from Testimony, we filmed him, in scarred black and white, reading Party Line statements about the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies he later contradicted; it looked like this and this. #

Dissidence of another kind was furnished by Alexander Toradze, whose performance of the Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto unforgettably re-imagined the slow movement, marked “Andante” by the composer, as a painstricken Largo. #

But the main event, on the same concert (with Toradze and Prager and Volkov), was Carl St. Clair’s profoundly felt reading of Shostakovich’s cathartic response to Stalin’s death in 1953: the Tenth Symphony, with its avalanche of lamentation and purgative self-assertion. Prather prepared the orchestra’s eclectic Orange County audience to engage with this intense act of personal and communal symphonic therapy; St. Clair drove the symphony home. #

As eyewitnesses to history, Volkov and Toradze furnished gripping reminiscences of Soviet cultural vagaries. Volkov and Shostakovich, we learned, had assumed that Testimony – with its contemptuous disparagements of Stalin — could be published in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. But Stalin’s reputation remained sufficiently unsettled that the manuscript had to be smuggled to the West. Toradze shared with us the circumstances of his impromptu defection in 1983 – when on tour with a Moscow orchestra in Spain he was neither permitted to perform (the Spanish presenters had not been apprised that a piano soloist would be furnished) nor to return home. #

Not the least important component of the festival was the orchestra’s collaboration with Chapman University. The notion of collaborating with colleges, universities, or conservatories remains novel within the American symphonic community. And yet, as orchestras rethink their institutional mission, and absorb the advantages of thematic programming (as practiced by museums, for instance), alliances of this kind can vitally expand their reach and impact. On this occasion, Chapman – galvanized by its dynamic Chancellor, Daniele Struppa — seized “Shostakovich Decoded” as a cross-disciplinary pedagogical opportunity, using public programming to explore culture and totalitarianism with a full week of campus activities binding music and liberal arts. #

“Shostakovich Decoded” was the latest installment in the Pacific Symphony’s “Music Unwound” series, underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities. No other American orchestra strives so tirelessly to discover new concert formats aligned with new audience needs. It deserves to be a model for the nation. #