Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 32

My “Porgy and Bess” Playlist

I invite you to sample (in sequence): #

1.[Beginning of track 1:] From the Gershwin Memorial Concert at the Hollywood Bowl (Sept. 8, 1937), Otto Klemperer conducting his LA Phil in his own slow-motion transcription of Gershwin’s Second Prelude, ingeniously transforming it into a dirge for the deceased composer. Like so many European-born classical musicians in the US, Klemperer more surely recognized Gershwin’s genius than his American-born colleagues. #

2.[Track 1 at 12:03:] That the Met’s Lawrence Tibbett should have been the first singer to record Porgy’s songs (rather than Todd Duncan, the superb black baritone from the original case) was properly controversial in 1935. And yet Tibbett’s heartbreaking version of “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess” will never be surpassed. And the US has never produced a greater operatic baritone than Lawrence Tibbett. #

3.[Track 1 at 22:00:] Jascha Heifetz was another European-born Gershwin admirer; he wanted a violin concerto from Gershwin. He never got one – but Heifetz’s own suite of Porgy tunes comprises an impressive and original tribute. It also elicited some of Heifetz’s best recordings, in which Slavic pathos is mated with a quicksilver jazz sensibility. #

4.[Track 2 at 3:56:] The “cultural fluidity” of Porgy – of Gershwin generally – is such that Porgy’s songs can be sung any number of ways. Avon Long, who excelled as Sporting Life, applied his breathy high tenor to a terrific 1942 version of “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” with the Leo Reisman Orchestra. #

5.[Track 4 at 8:00:] My desert-island Porgy recording, also from that Hollywood Bowl Memorial concert: Ruby Elzy, the original Serena, singing “My Man’s Gone Now” for the departed composer. Elzy, who herself died young, was planning to tackle Aida. At the same time, her high-ranging soprano has some Billie Holiday in it. This amazing performance documents (among other things) the interpretive freedom enjoyed by the first performers of Gershwin’s opera. #

Leonard Bernstein’s Letters

Reviewing the new book The Leonard Bernstein Letters in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I write: #

In June 2011, the estate of Leonard Bernstein donated to the Library of Congress 1,800 letters that had been sealed at his death. As the library’s Bernstein Collection already included more than 15,000 letters, postcards and telegrams, the resulting amalgamation obviously called for a book—and here it is, 23 years after the composer-conductor’s death at the age of 72. #

As composers go, the champion letter writer was Ferruccio Busoni, whose correspondence serenely discloses an acute humanistic observer and hypnotic personality. If their letters are less splendidly literary, Wagner and Schönberg were composers whose galvanizing complexity of affect was copiously mirrored in words on paper. Tchaikovsky’s letters are remarkable acts of intimate self-revelation bearing on his sexuality. The Bernstein correspondence partakes somewhat of all these qualities but without attaining a comparable density of disclosure on any front. Mainly his letters, as selected and edited by Nigel Simeone, are less about music or ideas or the wide world than they are about Bernstein’s breathless aspirations and mercurial ups and downs: ecstasies of fulfillment in rapid alternation with disappointment, backaches and “big, soggy depressions.” #

The bulk of the letters predates his 1969 departure from the helm of the New York Philharmonic. That is, they include the period of his tutelage by the composer Aaron Copland and the conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Fritz Reiner; of his Broadway triumphs “On the Town” and “West Side Story”; of his Philharmonic music directorship (1958-69); and of his 1951 marriage to Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein’s sexuality is a dominant topic, frankly and seriously discussed. Young Lennie was gay, and so were many of his friends. In letters variously airy and anguished, he craves company and describes himself as chronically lonely. “You may remember my chief weakness—my love for people,” he confides to a Harvard classmate in 1939. “I need them all the time—every moment. It’s something that perhaps you cannot understand: but I cannot spend one day alone without becoming utterly depressed.” Nor can he figure out whether to compose symphonies or shows, or to conduct. Koussevitzky and the composer Roy Harris advise him that he needs a non-Jewish last name. “I suppose I haven’t approached [Koussevitzky’s] model for me sufficiently,” he tells Copland in 1942. “I haven’t changed my name, or learned to schmoos, or become a dignified continental. The hell with it.” #

Of his amours, the Hollywood actor Farley Granger writes to him with a ¬special sweetness. Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896- 1960), Bernstein’s too little remembered predecessor on the Philharmonic podium, was a major conductor who did nothing to conceal his homosexuality. He writes to Bernstein in the late 1930s, when they became intimate: “Have I really failed to you, have I really left you a void after our last meeting? This thought makes me crazy, and so happy that I dare not believe it. . . . Dear boy, if you only could know how alone I am.” In a 1939 letter, Mitropoulos writes: “I am very happy to hear that you are working hard . . . I see you too come to the position now to have problems: musical, artistic, social and spiritual—and the worst of all, sexual. Unfortunately I am too far away to help—to give you good advice.” #

In this context of high-pitched conflict and confusion, Bernstein’s correspondence shows Copland as a lifelong pillar. “Dear A,” Bernstein writes in 1967, “I suppose if there’s one person on earth who is at the centre of my life, it’s you; and day after day I recognize in my living your presence, your laugh, your peculiar mixture of intensity and calm . . . I hope you live forever. A long strong hug.” Bernstein’s 1979 Kennedy Center tribute to Copland (included here) extols “the Copland grin, the Copland giggle, the Copland wit and warmth, and width of his embrace.” Bernstein also recorded that he had only once seen Copland weep—“at a Bette Davis movie that caused me to oo and ah and marvel and groan ‘NO, NO, NO’ at the unbearable climax.” Copland, Bernstein continues, turned to him, “his cheeks awash with tears, and sobbed ‘Can’t you shut up?’ ” #

The union with the actress Felicia Montealegre was an experiment. During the long and twisting courtship, his analyst, Marketa Morris, had written in 1947: “You are seeing Felicia and the day she leaves you have to see a boy. The same old pattern. You can’t give up.” One month after the wedding, writing to Copland, he finds marriage “fascinating . . . the most interesting thing I have ever done, though there are times when one’s interest must be that of a person in an audience, or one would go mad. It is full of compensations and rewards, and reveals more to me about myself than anything else ever has.” Around the same time, Felicia writes to him, acknowledging “you are a homosexual and may never change.” But, she continues: “Let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession, please! . . . Our marriage is not based on passion but on tenderness and mutual respect. Why not have them?” #

Three years later, Bernstein wrote to his sister, Shirley: “Now I feel such a certainty about [Felicia and myself]—I know there’s a real future involving a great comradeship, a house, children, travel, sharing, and such a tenderness as I have rarely felt.” The birth of their first child, Jamie, in 1952, deepened everything. Years later, in 1976, Bernstein left to live with a male lover; Felicia cursed him and predicted, “You’re going to die a bitter and lonely old man.” When she died of cancer in 1978, Bernstein blamed himself. In a 1987 letter to his business manager, Harry Kraut, Bernstein alludes to “those ever-decreasing moments when I like myself.” #

The letters here collected contain surprisingly few musical nuggets. There is new information about the gestation of “West Side Story” and about frustrations regarding the ways in which it was recorded and filmed; writing to Arthur Laurents in 1961, Bernstein decries the “line-by-shot destruction” of Laurents’s book “by the H’wood exegists,” making “painfully obvious” the “line, however fine, between whatever art is, and non-art.” Two heated 1955 letters to the composer Marc Blitzstein memorably record Bernstein’s failed attempts to get La Scala to mount Blitzstein’s formidable American grand opera “Regina”—which Victor de Sabata, La Scala’s artistic director, liked so much that he would perform the number “Watching my gal watch me” at the piano. But the most substantive “musical” letter is not by Bernstein but by a contemporary, the composer/performer/teacher Gunther Schuller, commenting on Bernstein’s presentation of “modern music” on a 1957 “Omnibus” TV show. In 10 closely reasoned paragraphs, Mr. Schuller gently chides Bernstein for fashioning a narrative slighting the contributions of Debussy and Webern. #

The reason this letter interests is that Bernstein, master educator that he was, favored schematized readings of musical history that could be perilously reductionist (as when his allegiance to Copland’s modernist moment led him to patronize Ives and Gershwin as gifted dilettantes). That in his correspondence Bernstein seems so hurried feels relevant. Among the most resonant phrases to be found in these letters are “the whole desperate race with time” (1947) and the “panic at time running out before all our works can be finished” (1981). #

Ultimately reading “The Leonard Bernstein Letters” is a discomfiting experience; one feels like a voyeur peeking at Bernstein’s own discomfiture. Bernstein’s versatility and ambition were such that he spent a lot of time trying to figure out who he was—which also meant searching for American music and for the future of music generally. This book doesn’t resolve Bernstein’s quest. But it’s an invaluable resource, and the quest itself continues to fascinate and to matter. #

“I’m a Didactic Writer”

Last Fall, I was interviewed for a full hour by Chris Johnson of Houston Public Radio and invited to comment not only on my book Moral Fire, but more broadly on the state of culture in today’s America. #

Chris suggested that my book, though situated in the late Gilded Age, was “chockfull of lessons – but that might not be the word you would use.” #

Oh yes it is, I replied — I’m a didactic writer who writes books “partly out of disgruntlement with the 21st century.” #

So I wound up talking about Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, about the cooptation of moral outrage (a potential dimension of art) by cynical and opportunistic politicians, about the marginalization of books, all kinds of things. #

The Bulletin of the Society of American Music has now printed an edited transcript of the interview and you can read it here. #

How Did “Porgy and Bess” Originate?

“Where did the big set pieces of Porgy and Bess originate? With Rouben Mamoulian, it seems,” writes Steven Suskin in his copious Playbill.com review of my new book “On My Way” – The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess.” #

Well, thank you, Mr. Suskin. As a book has no fixed meaning, it’s often informative (and sometimes not) to discover how others read what you yourself thought and wrote. My book is about many things. It’s a Mamoulian book (arguing for his rediscovery as a forgotten hero of Broadway and Hollywood). It’s a Gershwin book (arguing that we must stop patronizing him as a dilettante of genius). And it’s a Porgy and Bess book (revealing that the opera’s most famous line – “Bring my goat!” – and the entirety of its redemptive ending were fashioned by Mamoulian eight years before the premiere in 1935). #

Yes, the opera’s big set pieces – Robbins’ funeral, the hurricane, “O Lawd I’m on My Way” — actually originate with Porgy the play as directed and refashioned by Mamoulian in 1927. The reason we didn’t know that before is that all published versions of the play omit Mamoulian’s crucial revisions – which have only now come to light with the opening of the Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress. #

As an author, I’m grateful for any attention I get, and the reviews of “On My Way” have been uniformly gratifying. But the core of my book, as I myself read it, happens to be those set pieces, and the revelation that it was Mamoulian who transformed what had been a snapshot of a regional black subculture (DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, with its languorous depressed ending) into an epic human saga (with a redemptive finale utterly at odds with Heyward’s sentimentality and anthropological verisimilitude). #

Porgy and Bess as we know it could never have happened without Rouben Mamoulian. #

“Bring My Boat!” — Who Wrote the Ending of Porgy and Bess?

“Bring my goat!” Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Bess has left for New York City and he’s determined to find her. When his request is met with astonishment — New York is a great distance from Catfish Row — Porgy remains undaunted. He mounts his goat-cart and leads the community in an ecstatic finale, “Oh Lawd, I’m on my way.” #

Stephen Sondheim has called “Bring my goat!” “one of the most moving moments in musical theater history.” For years it was assumed that DuBose Heyward — the author of the seminal 1925 novella Porgy and subsequent 1927 play of the same name, and later the librettist for the opera Porgy and Bess — penned this historic line. In fact, both it and “Oh Lawd, I’m on my way” were added to the play eight years earlier by that production’s unheralded architect: Rouben Mamoulian. Porgy and Bess as we know it would not exist without the contributions of this master director. #

Hence my new book: “On My Way” – The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess. Culling new information from the recently opened Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, I show that, more than anyone else, Mamoulian took Heyward’s vignette of a regional African-American subculture and transformed it into an epic theater work, a universal parable of suffering and redemption. #

The book comes with festooned with blurbs attesting that it “restores Mamoulian to the pantheon of essential figures in the development of American theater and cinema” (Larry Starr), “reveals Mamoulian as a brilliant co-auteur of Gershwin’s masterpiece” (Mark. N. Grant), and “completes our understanding of Porgy and Bess” (John Mauceri). #

A forgotten hero of American musical theater, Mamoulian subsequently directed Oklahoma! and Carousel – Broadway landmarks fired by Mamoulian’s early exposure to Russian experimental theater. The play Porgy made Mamoulian famous overnight. Three decades later, Samuel Goldwyn fired Mamoulian from the film version of Porgy and Bess, effectively ending his career. Once Broadway’s boy-wonder director, later the Hollywood director of Maurice Chevalier and Greta Garbo, he died in sordid obscurity. #

The Mamoulian Archives, which supplied the smoking gun that ignited my findings, remain largely unexplored. A proper understanding of Mamoulian’s no doubt crucial role as meddlesome director of Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Lost in the Stars awaits future researchers. #

The Great American Symphony

Tom Huizenga, who presides over Classical Music for National Public Radio, recently initiated a discussion thread on “The Great American Symphony” – and invited me to contribute something about early lineage. Keying on a superb new Naxos recording of John Knowles Paine’s Symphony No. 1, on my idiosyncratic enthusiasm for Dvorak and Chadwick as quintessential “American” composers, on my passion for George Templeton Strong’s Sintram Symphony (with the most beautiful slow movement of any American symphony), and on my conviction that Charles Ives composed the (only) two Great American Symphonies, I contributed a little essay. #

After 1920, Serge Koussevitzky predicted that “the next Beethoven vill from Colorado come” – and embarked on a fruitless interwar quest for the Great American Symphony. No one realized the magnitude of Ives’s symphonic achievements. Finally, in 1951, Leonard Bernstein premiered Ives’s Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic. Leopold Stokowski premiered Ives’s Fourth 14 years later. In retrospect, the Americans championed by Koussevitzky were more in thrall to Europe than they realized. If Ives remains the great American symphonist, it’s partly because – like Melville, like Whitman, like Mark Twain, like Gershwin – he disdained attending “finishing school” in Germany or France. #

Humanizing Stravinsky

To my ears, the most sublime music Igor Stravinsky ever composed is “The Land of Eternal Dwelling” — the Epilogue to The Fairy’s Kiss. #

The 1928 ballet itself, possibly Stravinsky’s most emotionally naked music, is a confessional love letter to the homeland he excoriated in his Norton lectures and elsewhere as “anarchic” and inimical to artistic fulfillment. That he protested too much is self-evident; as I argue in my book Artists in Exile, Stravinsky’s ostensible estrangement from Mother Russia manifested a “psychology of exile.” #

The Fairy’s Kiss is a loving homage to Tchaikovsky, whose songs and piano pieces furnish the exquisite musical materials. The two Tchaikovsky works most tellingly cited say it all: “Lullaby in a Storm” and “None but the Lonely Heart.” The Fairy’s Kiss is Stravinsky revisiting his own childhood, confiding his emotional roots. And the six-minute Epilogue – in which the first of these plaintive songs is distilled to a timeless echo, frozen in time — is a remembrance of Stravinsky’s own childhood innocence. #

The Pacific Symphony, an orchestra that does things differently, celebrated the centenary of The Rite of Spring last week by exploring two Russias: the rural Russia of primal ceremony, where Stravinsky and Nicolas Roerich observed the ritual sacrifice of a straw effigy; and the St. Petersburg of the elegant Mariinsky Theatre, where Stravinsky’s father sang in the operas of Tchaikovsky. #

The concert included two film clips: an excerpt from Tony Palmer’s classic 1982 Stravinsky documentary, in which Stravinsky recalled introducing The Rite of Spring to Diaghilev, and a film I created with Jeff Sells, of the Pacific Symphony staff, that combined “The Land of Eternal Dwelling” with a biographical sequence (clips culled from Palmer’s film) reviewing in retrograde the events of Stravinsky’s long life – so that music and film ended in tandem with the bliss of infancy. It looked like this. #

As the concert had begun with danced excerpts from The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, the Fairy’s Kiss Epilogue (prefaced by “Lullaby in a Storm”) was the linchpin of the evening, setting the stage for a terrific Rite of Spring performance conducted by Carl St. Clair. The program as a whole aspired to humanize Stravinsky in surprising and extraordinary ways. #

A Status Report on City Opera

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement (UK) includes my review of the City Opera season just past, as follows: #

Now is a tough time for American orchestras and opera companies. Many are cutting back. Some – including opera companies in Baltimore, Hartford, Orlando, and Orange County, California – have shut down. Others – including the Minnesota Orchestra, which is among the nation’s best – are in abeyance. In New York, New York City Opera is navigating a drastic and controversial downsizing. The company began in 1944 at the City Center, a converted Shriners’ Auditorium on West 55th Street that in 1948 also became home to George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. City Opera’s signatures were young American singers, adventurous repertoire, and low prices. In 1966, seduced by the glamour of Lincoln Center, it moved to the City Ballet’s New York State Theatre on the Lincoln Center campus – a move for which no one subsequently cared to take credit. The State Theatre proved inordinately expensive. Its architectural aspirations toward sleekness and refinement were a fit for Balanchine’s company, which (unlike City Opera) urgently needed a bigger stage than the City Center afforded. The acoustics of the new house were amazingly bungled – neither the singers nor the orchestra registered with impact or warmth. (Christopher Keene, during his tenure as City Opera’s general manager, privately likened the sound of opera at the State Theatre to that of a “car radio.”) The company could sustain neither its finances nor its identity. In 2011, the current general manager and artistic director, George Steel, decided to decamp. The City Opera is now itinerant. The present season, just ended, comprised 16 performances of four operas. The annual budget is now only $13.6 million. The City Opera season once totaled as many as 145 performances of 21 productions. #

Two ironies compound this saga. The first is that Steel, just before departing Lincoln Center, played a key role in rescuing the acoustics of the State Theatre. The second is that the company’s eight Spring performances – of Rossini’s “Moses in Egypt” and Offenbach’s “La Perichole” – took place at the home the company abandoned nearly half a century ago: the City Center. A final twist: two years ago the City Center underwent a $56.6 million renovation. Its faux Moorish décor has been lovingly restored. The seats (there are 2,250) are new. So are the sprung stage floor, the dressing rooms, and the lighting. The result is beautiful and distinctive but not glamorous or elegant: a fit for a spunky opera company dedicated to novelty. #

“Moses in Egypt” was a terrific show. This was the original 1818 “Mosè in Egitto,” sung in the original Italian – not the revised and augmented “Moȉse et Pharaon” Rossini fashioned in 1827. Rather like that of “Aida” six decades later, the plot of intertwines a tragic love story – the Pharoah’s son loves an Israeli maiden – with epic pageantry. Michael Counts, the production designer, eschewed sets in favor of projections created by the video designer Ada Whitney: a bewitching “cinematic environment” that simulated camera pans and kindred special effects. At one point, the singers entered a care and the “cameras” swiveled 180 degrees so we were looking out, not in. When in act one Moses lifted a plague of darkness, Whitney’s projection was not realistic but galactic. Other projected images were wholly abstract. Some poetically showed shifting sands and animated camels. The parting of the Red Sea for the Israelis, and the drowning of the pursuing Egyptians, were beautifully and dramatically rendered. The production as a whole achieved a stylized visual and gestural aesthetic that aligned with hieratic Egypt, and with the score’s “opera seria” formalities. Unlike Robert Lepage’s projections for the Metropolitan Opera’s now notorious “Ring” cycle ten blocks uptown, the imagery never seemed gratuitous. Rossini was at no point upstaged; a Gesamtkunstwerk was memorably achieved. If he did not find the long line of the ensembles, the conductor – Jayce Ogren, the company’s newly appointed music director – led the performance smartly. If not paragons of bel canto, the singers were uniformly young, credible, and robust. There was no coughing whatsoever in the sold-out house. “Moses in Egypt” had apparently never been staged in New York in its original version. This was an important occasion. #

Offenbach’s operetta, with its fabulous score, directly followed. Expectations ran high: Christopher Alden, Steel’s de facto house director, was in charge. Alden’s work is invariably witty and ingenious; his 2010 staging of Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” for Santa Fe Opera, was an intellectual tour de force. In “La Perichole,” Alden’s version of Offenbach’s synthetic “Peru” was properly tacky: all vinyl and linoleum, with pinatas suspended from on high. He began by turning the piece on its head: the ebullient opening chorus was indolent; the fetching streets singers Perichole (Marie Lenormand) and Piquillo (Philippe Talbot) were nervous and inept. The Viceroy (Kevin Burdette) – the operetta’s third principal, who steals Perichole – was a sex-crazed escapee from a Monty Python skit. (With his long rubbery body, manic exertions, and droll features, Burdette uncannily resembled John Cleese). #

The production, conducted by Emmanuel Plasson, was saturated with cunning detail and in-your-face excess. If it failed to levitate, the main problem was the cast’s two French imports. Talbot, a winning artist, revealed a light tenor too small for the house. Lenormand could not sing Perichole’s beautiful music beautifully. The resulting show was over the top but under-sung. It failed to make a winning case for doing “Perichole” – with its acres of dialogue – in French for an American audience. Beginning in the 1950s, the Met gave “La Perichole” in a clever translation by Maurice Valency. Cyril Richard (who also directed) and Theodore Uppman were unforgettable as the Viceroy and Piquillo. Offenbach’s opera comique was made silly, charming, and touching. The City Opera “La Perichole,” while entertaining, was neither charming nor touching. #

The prior Fall component of the company’s 2012-2013 season comprised two chamber operas – Thomas Ades’s “Powder Her Face” and Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” – at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2,000-seat Opera House. The Ades work should not have been attempted in so large a space. (I could not attend the Britten.) “Powder Her Face,” “Moses in Egypt” and “La Perichole” all disclosed economies imposed on a cash-strapped operation. That there were practically no sets was not problematic. But Steel fielded too small an orchestra and chorus for Offenbach at the City Center. The program books (if they can be called that) were unworthy of the company’s intellectual ambitions. The oversized house for “Powder Her Face” seemed self-evidently calculated to maximize revenues. #

Next season City Opera returns to City Center only once – for a new Christopher Alden version of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” At BAM it presents the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole.” Michael Counts directs the first American performances of Johann Christian Bach’s “Endimione” at the Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. In collaboration with English National Opera, City Opera gives Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, which also co-produces. There are 23 performances in all. #

What’s the status of New York City Opera? Plainly, it is not a company wandering in the wilderness, like Moses’s Israelis. Nor, however, has it found the Promised Land – a home conferring identity, such as City Center could potentially re-provide. Its ongoing reinvention retains interest and fascination both with regard to the fluctuating fate of opera in New York City, and in the nation at large. #

Ives the Sophisticate

Leonard Bernstein did Charles Ives an incomparable service when in the 1950s he premiered and recorded Ives’s Second Symphony. But Bernstein did Ives a disservice when in a program note for that work – a compromised encomium not unlike the back-handed compliments Bernstein would dole out to George Gershwin – he called Ives an inspired “primitive” and compared him to the painter Grandma Moses. #

A recent Ives festival at the University of Washington – a week packed with concerts, lectures, panels, classes, a lecture/recital, a master class, all under the aegis of Larry Starr of the School of Music — feasted upon Ives’s largesse of scope and spirit. The absurdity of Bernstein’s words haunted me throughout. #

An orchestral program, kicking off the UW festival, offered three Ives works. But the main offering was a European masterwork: Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The Sibelius (strongly conducted by a graduate student), whatever else one makes of it, is a symphony saturated with cliché, clinched by a tub-thumping finale. It occurred to me, experiencing this movement’s banal trumpet fanfares, that Ives is a composer who never succumbs to the banal. His endings, in particular, are immune to the predictable or formulaic. A case in point: “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” (sung UW by the baritone William Sharp, a peerless Ives interpreter), with an ending so surprising, original, and right that it never fails to stun the awaiting listener. #

In fact, a signature Ives trait is his way of recontextualizing cliché with irony; his music of course abounds in clichés, but every one of them is enclosed by quotation marks. How he acquired this habit – so precisely in parallel with Gustav Mahler an ocean away – I cannot say. The cranky example of his father, tweaking the Connecticut bourgeoisie, must have something to do with it. Or perhaps this is an instance of Ives’s fear of sentimentality and the genteel, a strategy for dealing with his own susceptibility to high but conventional feeling. #

Bernstein’s characterization of Ives as a primitive also masks Ives’s compositional sophistication. Proof of that, if proof were needed, is a German song Ives set at Yale: “Feldeinsamkeit,” composed alongside Brahms’s famous setting of the same Hermann Allmers poem. Sharp, at UW, sang (sublimely) the two Feldeinsamkeits in tandem. And he reminded us that George Chadwick told Horatio Parker, Ives’s Yale teacher, “That’s as good a song as you could write.” It’s more than that: as several audience members felt impelled to remark at UW, it’s as good a song as the Brahms. #

Sibelius of course went on to far greater things than his Second Symphony. He composed it in 1902 when he was 37. #

Ives composed “Feldeinsamkeit” in 1897 at the age of 23. #

The Greatest Film Score You’ve Never Heard

Silvestre Revueltas’s Redes is one of the greatest of all film scores. That it remains virtually unknown is a function of Revueltas’s own neglect and the neglect of the 1935 film itself, an iconic product of the Mexican Revolution. Unlike such renowned film scores of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and Virgil Thomson’s The Plow that Broke the Plains, the music of Redes is so organic to the film that it does not register as a concert suite. You have to see the movie. #

And the movie is a mixed bag. Its cinematography, by Paul Strand, is unforgettable: visually, Redes is a poem of stark light and shadow, of clouds and sea, palm fronds and thatched huts, with Strand’s camera often tipped toward the abstract sky. Metaphor abounds: a rope is likened to a fisherman’s muscled arm. Pregnant, polyvalent, the imagery invites interpretation equally poetic: music. For a child’s funeral, Revueltas furnishes more than a dirge: his throbbing elegy combines with Strand’s poised, hypersensitive camera to fashion a transcendent tableau. The recurrent visual motif of nets (“redes”) that catch fish subliminally suggests the confinement of rural fishermen: a metaphor underlined by the musical motif of massive tolling brass. At every turn, Strand and Revueltas elevate the film’s simple tale to an epic human drama. But the script is weak and so are the actors – with few exceptions, actual fishermen filmed onsite in Alvarado (near Veracruz). #

While the ultimate significance of Redes may be considered political (both Revueltas and Strand were activists on the far left) or photographic, for me it is first of all an essay in marrying sound to the moving image. The film completes the music. #

That is: Revueltas’s astonishing score partly comprises a series of set pieces applied to silent footage: the weary processional of the child’s funeral; the surging exhilaration of the season’s first catch; the epic thrust of a final act of proletarian rebellion. The last of these, in particular, is as powerful a swath of musical cinema as was ever conceived. Revueltas’s score is here shaped by the pulsing oar-strokes of the fishermen, storming the hacienda where they’re underpaid and undervalued. #

Because music rarely overlaps dialogue, it becomes possible to screen Redes with live orchestral accompaniment – a revelatory opportunity. It’s been done by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, by the Santa Barbara Symphony, by my own PostClassical Ensemble – and most recently (last week) by the Louisville Orchestra, conducted by Jorge Mester, as part of the NEH’s “Music Unwound” consortium. #

In Louisville, Redes ignited a standing ovation. Next season, the Austin Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and PostClassical Ensemble (again) present Redes with live symphonic accompaniment. PostClassical Ensemble will also record Redes for a Naxos DVD that will once and for all make the film widely available with a proper soundtrack (the 1935 Mexican sound recording is execrable). #

Sooner or later, Revueltas will be widely revealed as a major twentieth century composer. He far eclipses his compatriot Carlos Chavez. He bears comparison with his precise contemporary Aaron Copland (who drew inspiration from Mexico, and from Redes). Meanwhile, we will have to suffer the increasingly popular Noche de los Mayas, passed off as a four-movement Revueltas symphony by Gustavo Dudamel and other enthusiasts. This vulgar film score, for a vulgar film, was in fact never turned into a symphonic composition by the composer; what we hear in the concert hall is a concoction by another hand, created long after Revueltas’s death in 1940. It does Revueltas a disservice – and so (alas) does the Redes Suite created by Erich Kleiber, and increasingly performed in the concert hall. #

Would that for every half dozen presentations of Alexander Nevsky or Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights with live music we could see and hear at least one Redes performance. Assuredly, Revueltas is a composer whose time will come. #