Alex Ross's Blog, page 196

With Messiaen on Holy Saturday*

I heard no music playing today at La Trinité, the Paris church where Messiaen held the title of organist for more than sixty years, but I silently paid my respects. La Trinité will hold a Messiaen festival from April 27 to April 29, on the perhaps tautological theme "Messiaen et l'Éternité."

* Non-Orthodox date.

With Messiaen on Holy Saturday

I heard no music playing today at La Trinité, the Paris church where Messiaen held the title of organist for more than sixty years, but I silently paid my respects.

Contradictions of contemporary culture 2

An Apple Store at the intersection of rue Halévy and rue Meyerbeer. The "W" stands for Wagner, I believe.

At the grave of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

I was looking for Maria Callas and then I saw Paul Dukas:

Contradictions of contemporary culture

On the left side of this Paris kiosk, a poster for Nixon in China at the Châtelet; on the right, a poster for Battleship, a Hollywood film based on a game I enjoyed when I was ten.

At the graves of Nadia and Lili Boulanger

DVD of the week (perhaps of the year)

Bach, St. Matthew Passion; Mark Padmore, Christian Gerhaher, Magdalena Kožená, Topi Lehtipuu, Thomas Quasthoff, Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, the Rundfunkchor Berlin, and the Staats- und Domchors Berlin, Peter Sellars directing (Berlin Philharmonic DVD).

Robert Simpson in brief

The Simpson. The New Yorker, April 9, 2012.

CD of the day

In the mailbox today arrived a press release from EMI Classics: "If there's one thing that we here at the EMI Classics US offices have struggled with over the last year, it's been the wrenching tragedy of having our mice die after complicated heart transplant procedures. Fortunately, all that will change with the latest release from our beloved catalog reissue series Music for Recently Operated-Upon Pets..." The release is linked, of course, to that pathbreaking study linking Mozart and Verdi to successful heart operations on mice.

Related: Yo-Yo Ma's hip-hop album, the Glenn Gould android, the songs of Nick Hathaway.

Inside Schoenberg's wallet (updated)

The awe-inspiring website of the Schoenberg Center in Vienna continues to digitize its holdings and place images online; every time I visit, I find new treasures. Various of the master's identity cards and school reports can be viewed, and one can also page through his address books; one page lists Heinrich Schenker, Richard Strauss, Franz Schmidt, and Franz Schreker, among others. There are also cards for Orson Welles and Harpo Marx. The photograph file has been considerably expanded: I don't recall having seen this lovely picture of Schoenberg with Poulenc, for example, or a bathing shot of Schoenberg with a husky Winfried Zillig. Two photo-booth snaps are strangely reminiscent of Robert De Niro; another has him wearing a delightfully rascally smile. (The Photomaton, the world's first fully automatic photo booth, arrived in Berlin in 1929, the Schoenberg Center newsletter advises.) A couple of the pictures suggest a man attempting to figure out his new camera.

Update: Lawrence Schoenberg, the composer's youngest son, sends along news that Schoenberg Center is offering educational workshops for those interested in incorporating Schoenberg into teaching curricula. Details are here.

Update 2: Robert Holzer notes that the Poulenc-Schoenberg photo had previously appeared in Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt's Schoenberg biography, accompanied by some delightful anecdotes of Poulenc and Milhaud's visit to Schoenberg in Mödling in 1922. Evidently, Schoenberg's son Georg was playing football outside while Mathilde Schoenberg, the composer's first wife, was serving soup to the guests, and the ball somehow landed in the tureen, becoming, in Poulenc's recollection, an "edible melon." On this same trip Poulenc met Anton Webern, describing him, improbably and memorably, as "un garçon exquis."

Update 3: The composer Ken Ueno has used integer notation to convert Schoenberg's Social Security number to an interestingly whole-tone-ish nine-note motif: