Alex Ross's Blog, page 10

Villa Aurora in the fires

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If there is one site in Los Angeles that enshrines the spirit of the great German-speaking emigration of the 1930s and 1940s, it is the house of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, now known as the Villa Aurora. After Marta's death, the home was purchased by the German government as a residency site for writers and artists. Thousands upon thousands of Lion's books remained in place, together with his and Marta's furniture and a host of other artifacts, including Franz Werfel's desk and a couch that had belonged to Hanns Eisler. (The Feuchtwangers' papers and their most valuable books are at the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at USC.) I went to the villa twice last season to attend observances of the 150th anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg. When the Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, the Villa Aurora initially seemed doomed; reports from the neighborhood association suggested that every house on the high-climbing Paseo Miramar road was burning down. Then, on Wednesday, an intrepid neighbor on an e-bike sent in a video showing the structure astonishingly intact. Other observers confirmed as much; the photo above was taken yesterday. The house remains in danger, with Santa Ana winds returning early next week, but, for now, it has made a miraculous escape — as it did in 1961, when Marta defended her home against the Bel-Air Fire. With so much devastation all around — see the post below — there's no reason to celebrate. Yet the provisional survival of the Villa Aurora is, as the Feuchtwangers' neighbor Thomas Mann would say, a light in the night. The Mann House, for which I serve on the advisory board, is also safe for the moment.

In memoriam

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Crushingly long lists of architectural sites destroyed in this week's Los Angeles fires are circulating. One I have not seen mentioned is Richard Neutra's Freedman House, on the Palisades bluffs. Several other Neutra structures may well be lost, both in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Dozens of classics of residential modernism are gone. Gregory Ain's entire Park Planned development, with its colorful, variegated façades (second photo), is no more. Add to this libraries, museums, archives, schools, churches, synagogues, art collections, artists' studios, writers' studies, and thousands of individual life stories. Lawrence Schoenberg, son of Arnold Schoenberg, lost his home in Pacific Palisades, out of which he ran Belmont Music Publishers, devoted to his father's music. There is no way to calculate the totality of the loss.

Midnight

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The Zemlinsky-Messiaen connection

Witnessing an excellent concert performance of Zemlinsky's A Florentine Tragedy in Prague in the spring, I was struck by a curious resemblance, which I mentioned in my subsequent column: the opera's closing gesture is more or less the same as the one that ends Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur, written twenty years later. Listening to "Dieu parmi nous" on Christmas Day, as one does, I pondered the putative link again. In both pieces, a sustained major chord — augmented by a sixth in Messiaen's case — is at once underpinned and undermined by a bass line that begins a major third above the tonic and descends by way of a semitone, a whole tone, and a semitone again. In Zemlinsky, the key is A-flat major, and the bass line is C, B-natural, A-natural, A-flat:

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In Messiaen, the key is E major and the pedal line is G-sharp, G-natural, F-natural, E:

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Notice a further resemblance: in each case, the bass line begins on the second beat of the bar and is doubled at the octave. Zemlinsky has octaves in the trombones and bass tuba and also on the harp. What creates goosebumps in both cases is the dissonant grinding of the second and third notes against the general blaze of major.

The associative contexts of the two works are almost comically disparate.  A Florentine Tragedy, based on a dramatic fragment by Oscar Wilde, tells of a Florentine merchant who discovers that a prince has seduced his wife. When he kills the prince in a duel, the wife is impressed by his fortitude, and passion returns to the marriage. That four-note motif runs all through the opera and is heard in many different harmonic guises. You glimpse it already at the end of the prelude (B-flat, A, G, G-flat):

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But it really comes to the fore in a central sequence in which the merchant Simone, having overheard his wife hoping for his death, sings: "Who spake of Death? . . . What should death do in such a merry house?" In ironically refulgent B-flat-major, Simone has a descending line of B-flat / A-natural / G / G-flat, so that the final note is heard as a flattened sixth. Immediately after, it recurs in a B-flat-minor setting, ending on the leading tone. This happens again in the scene of the duel, amid orchestral mayhem. (Frantic repetitions of the figure make me think of Shostakovich's D-S-C-H.) But the four-note descending pattern can also expand to fill a wider intervallic space: it may traverse a fourth, in the familiar Lamento formula, or even a tritone, as at the beginning of the excerpt at the top of this post. Or it can be compressed to a chromatic line. Such extraordinarily subtle motivic variations are typical of Zemlinsky's method. When husband and wife are reconciled, the opulent major-key version returns, first in D major and then in the concluding A-flat — key areas a tritone apart but somehow in perfect harmony. The notorious music for the kiss in Salome plainly provides inspiration for this spasm of grisly lust. But the final appearance of the motto is almost stealthy, with a marking of diminuendo. It's more of a shudder amid ecstasy.

Messiaen, in a completely different universe, is depicting the glory of "God among us," the Lord made flesh. Here, the four-note figure stems from the octatonic scale, as does the sustained chord. (Whether one can analyze Zemlinsky along octatonic lines is not something I'm going to hazard off the top of my head, but similar interstitial slitherings can be found in his Second Quartet, among other scores.) Notably, Messiaen marks his bass line quadruple-forte: he obviously wants us to feel those passing dissonances in our gut. In his own performance, he holds down the pedals for a good long while, and other organists draw them out even more. This is dissonance as a maxing-out of joy. I tried playing the sequence on the Disney Hall organ once, and I've never had so much fun in my life.

So, is there a conscious or unconscious echo here? I assume not. It's possible that Messiaen knew Zemlinsky's music: Paul Dukas, his teacher, was well versed in the Mahler-Strauss orbit, and Zemlinsky had conducted Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue at the Vienna Volksoper. More likely, though, it's a spooky coincidence of a kind that so often occurs in musical history. What it does show is a likeness between worlds that might seem far separated. I've commented before on Messiaen's seemingly improbable kinship with Richard Strauss; composers like Zemlinsky and Schreker sometimes come even closer. What it also shows is the fertility of Zemlinsky's invention. He has yet to receive anything like his due.

A Hans Jürgen von der Wense moment

Apex 2024

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At the New Yorker website may be found my overview of the past year, with emphasis on Peter Gelb's strange campaign against Elliott Carter, György Ligeti, and Zachary Woolfe. Attached is a list of notable recordings.

Mahler's wallet, glasses

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From the digital archive of the Alban Berg Stiftung. Berg's library has been scanned, and one can also see photographs of various personal items, including these Mahler trophies.

Nightafternight playlist

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New and recent releases of interest, in Smiths Manier.

Saariaho, Adriana Mater; Fleur Barron, Axelle Fanyo, Nicholas Phan, Christopher Purves, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Symphony Chorus (DG)

Kali Malone, All Life Long; Macadam Ensemble, Anima Brass, Malone, Stephen O’Malley (Ideologic Organ)

Fauré, Complete Works; various artists (Erato)

Obrecht, Missa Scaramella (reconstructed by Fabrice Fitch) and other works; Andrew Kirkman leading the Binchois Consort (Hyperion)

Mahler, Symphony No. 6; Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony (BR)

Americascapes 2: George Walker, Address for Orchestra, George Crumb, A Haunted Landscape, Revueltas, Coronela; Robert Treviño conducting the Basque National Orchestra (Ondine)

Bookshelf

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New and recent publications of interest.

Jesse Rodin, The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin (Cambridge UP)

Yuval Sharon, A New Philosophy of Opera (Limelight)

Ann Powers, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (HarperCollins)

Gwynne Kuhner Brown, William L. Dawson (University of Illinois Press)

Elizabeth Eva Leach, Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders (Cornell UP)

Jeffrey Arlo Brown, The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey: Delirium and Form (Eastman Studies in Music / University of Rochester Press)

Liam Cagney, Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music: Composition in the Information Age (Cambridge UP)

Geoffrey Norris, ed., Sergei Rachmaninoff in His Own Words (Wolke)

Tom Morris, Always the Music: How a Lifelong Passion Framed a Future for Orchestras (Rubato)

Orin O'Brien

The Only Girl in the Orchestra, Molly O'Brien's delightful and musically rich documentary about her aunt, the legendary double-bassist Orin O'Brien, is now playing on Netflix. I recommend it very strongly. A little while ago I spoke to Orin for a future book project — not, as it happens, about her remarkable fifty-five-year career with the New York Philharmonic but about her father, the film actor George O'Brien, who starred in F. W. Murnau's Sunrise. Her cultural memory spans much of the twentieth century, and she brings it to life magnificently.