Virginia Chorale Fall Concert, Oct 2-4 (www.vachorale.org)
Sing in the Seasons: Five Centuries of Songs for the Four Seasons
Notes on the Program
If the famous set of concerti by Vivaldi are the first name in classical music as far as the Four Seasons are concerned, the months of the year and their many accompanying metaphors have inspired all kinds of artists. Our opening program will examine a mere handful of the possibilities falling under the colorful umbrella of songs for the seasons. From Elizabethan England to today, these works come from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, France, Norway and Finland.
Even if the foliage of Hampton Roads shows few signs of fall, Autumn Leaves is a perennial favorite. American audiences that associate the song with Johnny Mercer may be unaware its composer, Joseph Kozma, was a Hungarian Jew who studied in Budapest and Berlin before fleeing to France from the Nazis. Placed under house arrest and banned from composing, he still managed to be a successful songwriter and film composer.
Dominick Argento is one of our greatest living composers, and one who has enriched the body of American vocal music—operas, songs, and choral works alike—over the course of his prolific career. Sonnet LXIV is an elegy in response to the events of September 11, 2001. “When sometime lofty towers I see down razed” inspired an intensely felt and pungently harmonized chorale setting of Shakespeare’s verse.
Danny Boy is one of the most beloved elegiac ballads in the repertory. Joseph Flummerfelt’s arrangement seizes on the lyricism of the tune and its poetic sentiment.
While not explicitly concerned with autumn, the Witches’ chorus from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble exudes Halloween and is a perfect close to our opening section of songs for the fall. Jaakko Mäntyjärvi has been an increasingly visible presence on the international choral scene since winning acclaim at the 1997 European Choral Composition contest. His skills as a professional Finnish-English translator are in evidence in the deft setting of Shakespeare’s grotesque recipe. He exploits the voices’ range, incorporates parlando (speaking) effects, and closes by using the choir as a massed percussion instrument.
Our section devoted to winter is framed by two impressionist triptychs. Hildor Lundvik was an important 20th century Norwegian composer, and his indebtedness to the fluid textures of Debussy and Ravel is apparent. His three Nocturnes use textures that conjure mid-winter frozen rain; spare harmonies echo the cold, and the varied use of modes (whole-tone & pentatonic scales) evokes the constantly shifting weather between late winter and early spring.
In between the impressionist works are two madrigals. April is in My Mistress Face is one of the classics of the Renaissance genre by its central exponent, Thomas Morley. Morley’s words and music chart a familiar metaphorical journey that begins with love in spring and ends unrequited in winter. New York composer Matthew Harris has written several collections of songs by Morley’s colleague and contemporary, William Shakespeare. O Mistress Mine (from Twelth Night) sounds like a popular ballad closer to top 40 than the Renaissance, replete with a crooning tenor solo.
Claude Debussy is one of the most important composers in music history. After all, how many composers are THE epitome of a ground-breaking genre? Debussy is music's great Impressionist composer (even if he claimed to disdain the term). In the brief span of his truncated career (he died of cancer in his mid-fifties), his oeuvre, though modest, would define a style and influence many of the developments of the 20th century.
His Trois chansons de Charles d’Orleans are among the great miniatures for the a capella chorus. The first chanson (song) is a lilting & simple sounding folksong. The attractive sheen this impressionist music creates belies the extraordinary care and detail in Debussy’s craft, which is anything but simple for the performer of his music. The second song, Quant J’ai Ouy le Tabourin features an alto solo accompanied by the voices imitating instruments, like the tambourine of the title. The final song, Yver, vous n’etes qu’un villain (“Winter, you are a villain”) requires virtuosic precision in rhythm and diction, with icicle like accents punctuating the alternating textures between individual sections, a solo quartet and the entire ensemble.
Spring opens with a fluid setting from the Song of Songs by the Canadian church music composer, Healey Willan. Rise up, My Love, My Fair One is a prime example of this composer’s gifts for text setting, effective melody and affective harmony.
We feature next another pairing of Morley and Harris. Now is the Month of Maying is a paradigm of the Renaissance madrigal, ebullient and effervescent, rounded out with the trademark fa-la-la refrain. Harris has written another pop ballad-inflected chorus in It was a lover and his lass. Here the line “with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino” serves as the madrigal-esque refrain. The hummable tune is shared between the tenors and sopranos, with the lower voices providing accompaniment.
Another outgrowth of the Renaissance madrigal is the English part-song. Cousin to the French chanson and German Volkslied, the part-song is typically an a capella setting of a romantic or traditional poem. Finzi elevates the popular genre in his inspired setting of Seven Partsongs on poems of Robert Bridges. Nightingales is the fifth in the set, and uses the descriptive poem to create a sound world evocative of the natural one. The final stanza, narrated by the Nightingales themselves, depicts the “innumerable choir of day” building to an arresting & impressive finish.
Frederick Delius’ Two Unaccompanied Part Songs dispense with words entirely. To be sung of a summer night on the water (I & II) features jazz-like harmonies between the wordless voices, evoking the very image the composer identified in the descriptive title.
O My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose, is a contemporary American part-song. David Dickau’s setting of the popular Robert Burns ballad is a lovely serenade, and typical of the immediately appealing style of its composer. Nocturne was the first piece of Adolphus Hailstork’s with which I fell in love. Here, Hailstork uses effects to create the atmosphere of a summer night abuzz with the sounds and signs of life. The chant-like soprano solo leads to a rousing tutti where the poet invites the beloved to “come and watch these skies with me.” The atmospheric opening of humming lower voices accompanies the solo soprano, returning to frame and close this striking nocturne.
No season is complete without Shakespeare, and Harris’ When Daffodils Begin to Peer is a rowdy, romp of a choral hayride. With bluegrass-tinged twang, Harris sets Shakespeare’s verses about the good life with wit and flair. We close our opening program with the quintessential song of summer, Gershwin’s Summertime. We hope you enjoy listening to these songs as much as we enjoy singing them for you.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Nine Lives: Intro to the lives of nine 9th Symphonies
I have been mulling over a series of essays on 9th symphonies for some time. My recent post on Lawrence Kramer's engaging book, Why Classical Music Still Matters, has spurred me to at least take a stab at it. Kramer talks about one of classical music's singular and defining features via the personality a major work assumes. Separable from the performers who recreate the music, a great symphony, quartet or concerto takes on a metaphorical, allegorical, and--seemingly-- literal life of its own.
It is not difficult to ascertain why this anthropomorphic status should be assigned to the great symphonies. From Beethoven onward, the symphony evolved with its parallel form in literature, the novel. And the symphony in the 19th century would develop & change like its romantic & modern cousins, the roman a clef & Bildungsroman (simply put, the narrative novel--unfolding from or about the life of its protagonist--the French term applies more to satire &/or allegory, the German to the "coming-of-age" novel).
It is also with Beethoven the quasi-mythological status of the 9th symphony comes into being. Beethoven's magnum opus, the first symphony to employ vocal music (the famous "Ode to Joy" finale), is at once a starting place and endpoint of the work as "thing-unto-itself"--an alpha and omega of classical music's unequaled claim to transcendence. Its unique power is in evidence from its 19th century origins to monumental appearances at the end of the cold war to recent incarnations in the aftermath of September 11 and hurricane Katrina.
I became more fascinated with the idea of the 9th symphony as I grew more enamored with the life and music of Gustav Mahler. One of Mahler's teachers and mentors, Anton Bruckner, did not live to complete his own 9th symphony, and that shadow only strengthened the mythological spell cast by Beethoven. Some believe Mahler attempted to outwit Fate by calling his ninth entry in the symphonic genre Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). His last completed Symphony was numbered the 9th, but is the tenth symphony he wrote. His Tenth symphony remained unfinished at his death in 1911.
The opening adagio of Mahler's Tenth, interestingly, has taken on a life all its own. Schubert's so-called "Unfinished" symphony (his 8th) and Bruckner's 9th are multi-movement torsos of what would have been larger works. I can't think of a single movement that has the afterlife of Mahler's valedictory Adagio. Rilke's brilliant sonnet, "Archaic torso of Apollo," with its images of radiance and power still emanating from the incomplete, headless statue, will certainly be a source to which I return often in discussing the unfinished lives of these works. This is from the excellent edition of New Poems [1908], The Other Part (A Bilingual Edition, translated by Edward Snow. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,
holds fast and shines...
Rilke's sonnet crackles with the energy of a great work of art, able to transcend its history & location--its specificity--and speak across time and space. This is another defining feature of the "classical" work, one which rewards those engaged with it, charged and changed by the very act of participation. As the actor Jude Law recently said--on playing Shakespeare's Hamlet--these speeches still resonate today because we have not found a better way of saying things in 400 years!
The inextinguishable resonance of the 9th symphony is such that a handful of major essays in the genre are, if not ignored, overlooked (and though Alban Berg said "there is only one 9th"--Mahler's, Beethoven's is the one most refer to as THE 9th).
9 is the ultimate number for composers around whom less aura has accumulated. From Schubert to Dvorak to Vaughan Williams, the 9th symphony would be a crowning achievement. Even further removed from the smoke and mirrors of myth is the American modernist, Roger Sessions, whose 9th is an incisive, tightly argued work.
Though not their final essays in the genre, Dmitri Shostakovich and Hans Werner Henze both wrote 9ths that were products of their time and in very different ways, responses to the dilemma of the post-Beethovenian, post-Mahlerian "9th lives." Following the brooding, massive, post-war canvas of his 8th, Shostakovich was expected to compose a heroic, Beethoven-inspired 9th honoring Stalin and the Soviet Union. This 9th, however, is a bird of a different feather. It is one of its composers most compact & drolly ironic scores. Henze has lived in Italy in self-imposed exile from his native Germany since the 1950's. His 9th is a choral symphony throughout, based on the anti-fascist novel of Anna Seghers, Das Siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross). It was by hearing and studying this engaging, committed, and moving work (and considering it as my dissertation topic) I first hit upon the idea of a "nine lives" series of essays exploring these symphonies.
Whether living in the limelight or abiding in obscurity, these works are bursting with energy and personality all their own.
I look forward to spending more time with these works and musing on the fascinating life of each of them in the coming weeks & months.
It is not difficult to ascertain why this anthropomorphic status should be assigned to the great symphonies. From Beethoven onward, the symphony evolved with its parallel form in literature, the novel. And the symphony in the 19th century would develop & change like its romantic & modern cousins, the roman a clef & Bildungsroman (simply put, the narrative novel--unfolding from or about the life of its protagonist--the French term applies more to satire &/or allegory, the German to the "coming-of-age" novel).
It is also with Beethoven the quasi-mythological status of the 9th symphony comes into being. Beethoven's magnum opus, the first symphony to employ vocal music (the famous "Ode to Joy" finale), is at once a starting place and endpoint of the work as "thing-unto-itself"--an alpha and omega of classical music's unequaled claim to transcendence. Its unique power is in evidence from its 19th century origins to monumental appearances at the end of the cold war to recent incarnations in the aftermath of September 11 and hurricane Katrina.
I became more fascinated with the idea of the 9th symphony as I grew more enamored with the life and music of Gustav Mahler. One of Mahler's teachers and mentors, Anton Bruckner, did not live to complete his own 9th symphony, and that shadow only strengthened the mythological spell cast by Beethoven. Some believe Mahler attempted to outwit Fate by calling his ninth entry in the symphonic genre Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). His last completed Symphony was numbered the 9th, but is the tenth symphony he wrote. His Tenth symphony remained unfinished at his death in 1911.
The opening adagio of Mahler's Tenth, interestingly, has taken on a life all its own. Schubert's so-called "Unfinished" symphony (his 8th) and Bruckner's 9th are multi-movement torsos of what would have been larger works. I can't think of a single movement that has the afterlife of Mahler's valedictory Adagio. Rilke's brilliant sonnet, "Archaic torso of Apollo," with its images of radiance and power still emanating from the incomplete, headless statue, will certainly be a source to which I return often in discussing the unfinished lives of these works. This is from the excellent edition of New Poems [1908], The Other Part (A Bilingual Edition, translated by Edward Snow. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,
holds fast and shines...
Rilke's sonnet crackles with the energy of a great work of art, able to transcend its history & location--its specificity--and speak across time and space. This is another defining feature of the "classical" work, one which rewards those engaged with it, charged and changed by the very act of participation. As the actor Jude Law recently said--on playing Shakespeare's Hamlet--these speeches still resonate today because we have not found a better way of saying things in 400 years!
The inextinguishable resonance of the 9th symphony is such that a handful of major essays in the genre are, if not ignored, overlooked (and though Alban Berg said "there is only one 9th"--Mahler's, Beethoven's is the one most refer to as THE 9th).
9 is the ultimate number for composers around whom less aura has accumulated. From Schubert to Dvorak to Vaughan Williams, the 9th symphony would be a crowning achievement. Even further removed from the smoke and mirrors of myth is the American modernist, Roger Sessions, whose 9th is an incisive, tightly argued work.
Though not their final essays in the genre, Dmitri Shostakovich and Hans Werner Henze both wrote 9ths that were products of their time and in very different ways, responses to the dilemma of the post-Beethovenian, post-Mahlerian "9th lives." Following the brooding, massive, post-war canvas of his 8th, Shostakovich was expected to compose a heroic, Beethoven-inspired 9th honoring Stalin and the Soviet Union. This 9th, however, is a bird of a different feather. It is one of its composers most compact & drolly ironic scores. Henze has lived in Italy in self-imposed exile from his native Germany since the 1950's. His 9th is a choral symphony throughout, based on the anti-fascist novel of Anna Seghers, Das Siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross). It was by hearing and studying this engaging, committed, and moving work (and considering it as my dissertation topic) I first hit upon the idea of a "nine lives" series of essays exploring these symphonies.
Whether living in the limelight or abiding in obscurity, these works are bursting with energy and personality all their own.
I look forward to spending more time with these works and musing on the fascinating life of each of them in the coming weeks & months.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Bearing the music in the heart...
I'm not sure how many times I picked up and put down Lawrence Kramer's recent book, "Why Classical Music Still Matters" (University of California Press, Berkeley. 2007, 2008) before finally buying it earlier this month while at the Bard Music Festival. Perhaps it helped that the author was present for a panel discussion on Wagner and aesthetics. Regardless, once I picked it up this time I couldn't put it down.
Maybe it was the defensive-sounding title, or the notion I have of being one of the many (lesser) disciples of Robert Shaw in "preaching the gospel of the arts" which told me I didn't need to read this book. I was wrong. Kramer's engaging, thoughtfully presented book is one I'll be recommending to colleagues, board members, patrons, and anyone else who'll listen.
"Classical music has people worried. To many it seems on shaky ground in America." In the introductory chapter, Kramer spells out some of the reasons for this. And while written before the current recession's effects were fully felt, his provocative reasoning is still relevant as classical music ensembles and organizations struggle with how to not only remain relevant, but remain open. Many anxious performers & presenters have been clamoring about the "danger of extinction." If Kramer's dismissal of this seems untimely given the subsequent (& ongoing) financial meltdown, consider this:
"The problem is perhaps less economic or demographic than it is cultural, less a question of the music's survival than of its role...For what it's worth, my anecdotal impression is that people are generally less knowledgeable about it than they were even a generation ago...We know, some of us, how to enjoy it, but we don't know what to do with it."
I couldn't agree more, and if worried producers and planners dismiss Kramer's initial diagnosis--that the "crisis" is less economic than cultural-- he backs up his claim with the following:
"One reason why [classical music may be in trouble] is the loss of a credible way to maintain that people ought to listen to this music...Our growing reluctance to impose prescriptive or judgmental shoulds has obscured the power of the should that says, 'Don't deprive yourself of this pleasure, this astonishment, this conception.'...No wonder, then, that many culturally literate people who visit museum exhibits and keep up with the latest books, movies, and ideas think nothing of being classical-music illiterates. There is nothing, any more, that one just has to hear."
Before embarking on the body of the book which does answer the statement claimed by the title, Kramer warns against a couple lines of reasoning many of the above-mentioned "preachers of the gospel of the arts" revert to time and again. The first is the one famously dubbed by the acerbic critic, Virgil Thomson, as the "music-appreciation racket." If you've not heard the term, you've heard the argument. If you've read one of my letters to Virginia Chorale supporters you've heard the so-called "racket:" that classical music is good for you--body, mind, and soul. From "The Mozart Effect" on down, the notion that this music makes its particpants better human beings is a timeless argument. And the argument is no less valid than the more elitist one that seeks to shame the unwashed into submitting to the greatness of the (usually dead) masters. Kramer debunks both approaches. He says,
"This music provides as much insight as it invites...[it] is full of powerful feelings, but they're feelings that are always pushing beyond their own boundaries to open and refresh these questions. The music stimulates my imagination and my speculative energies while it sharpens my senses and quickens my sense of experience."
In not taking the music-appreesh or the elitist route, he is sensitive to the competing genres of musics like pop and jazz. Throughout the book he carefully balances arguments that don't elevate classical music at pop music's expense (even if many of us might want a more level playing field). He finds creative ways around this challenge by returning to classical music's "advantage in the rich vocabulary available to describe it." Language is one of--if not THE--primary means we have of not only articulating experience but ascribing meaning to the experiences that add up to make what we call life. And music--specifically classical music (in the broad sense from the 18th century baroque up through the present)--is one of the richest repositories for such linguistic performance. The other principal means of experience Kramer explores is the act of listening. This is music to not only be listened to, but "to be listened into."
In the span of a few pages--the book is imminently readable--Kramer traces the importance of the act of listening itself in the digital age to the shifting relationship between music and audience from the 19th century forward. One of his professed aims is "to refresh listening: to reconnect the listener with a community and culture of listening," and he cites a few poignant examples of this both in his introduction and near the book's conclusion.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, "classical music provided a perhaps unexpected, perhaps momentary, but nonetheless real resource, consoling in both an emotional and something like a metaphysical sense." He cites performances by the New York Philharmonic, the MET, and the Louisiana PO.
As a personal anecdote, I was scheduled to give the first of my doctoral recitals for the University of Maryland that very day. That recital was delayed one week, and the final lines of Lee Hoiby's setting of Dickinson's "There Came a Wind Like a Bugle"--"how much can come/and much can go/and yet abide the world!"--proved again the fact of music's rare gift of transcending time & space. If it is not the "universal language," it still is as close as we have come to one.
The body of the book is devoted to chapters on "The Fate of Melody" and how centrally important the "tune" is--what it says, how it changes, and how it affects and changes the listener in the process of participating in performance. He cites examples from three very different films in the third chapter, engaging evidence that this music really can transcend specificity to apply to a range of meanings. Or in the singleness of its expression, music can not only identify an emotion or state, but embody such feeling, so that the listener experiences it as real (even though it is "merely" simulated). Of Mahler's beloved "Resurrection" Symphony, he says "the effect of transcendence is less something the music expresses, as something it does, something it accomplishes."
This goes to the heart of why we continue to be moved by such works, and why, as Kramer says, the works seem to take on a personality and life of their own. When we talk about our favorite popular music, one of the only occasions where a song is separate from a performer is when a "cover" artist is involved. We might have a favorite Beatles song or album, but it's the band that's the thing. "Abbey Road" does not exist as an independent score or work, nor take on a life of its own apart from its status as one of the greatest albums ever recorded by a particular band. And while you may prefer Solti's Mahler 2 to my Mehta (or Bernstein, or Klemperer, or...), the fact is Mahler's 2nd Symphony has a life of its own. It exists in a discernable, transferable yet individual body in the specific score that bears its name.
The two middle chapters deal with the special worlds of art song and solo piano music, the intersection of music and society, performance and reception, and again, the difference between these forms as composed scores in the classical genres they inhabit. Even more important is the light Kramer sheds on the music's engagement with subjectivity and all the implications of the term--emotion, feeling, meaning, interpretation, reception, etc. I love the following:
"Our times may be telling us that subjectivity itself is old-fashioned, but perhaps that just makes us hunger for it more. The signs of the times suggest as much. Classical music can help fill our emotional needs; all we have to do is let it."
He cites both the 19th century art song and solo piano piece (exemplified by Schubert & Chopin) as paradigms of culture's first representations of modernity vis-a-vis the formation of the individuated self. Not only does such music help define the very idea of "the self" but it has the power to help that "self" understand & deal with the conflicts of modern life. No wonder we refer to such music as being "therapeutic."
The penultimate chapter returns to musical meaning in the wider community, tracing an arc from Beethoven's symphonies (appearing in the midst of early 19th century war and political upheaval) through one of the works written in response to 9/11, John Adams' arresting elegy, "On the Transmigration of Souls."
Along the way he cites the British novelist E.M. Forster's argument that art does not just lead to the ideal, "it is the ideal." In the essay "Art for Art's Sake" Forster argues the requisite order of art (ie: its form, and the technique required to create it) makes it the best model for social effectiveness we have.
The final chapter, "Persephone's Fiddle: The Value of Classical Music" is Kramer's impassioned finale. And like a great 19th century symphony, the author culls and gathers his work's themes and presents them with a forward moving, organic unity that not only makes a strong impression, but lingers and invites further consideration.
He quotes from a 1903 study by the sociologist Georg Simmel who's findings ring even more true today. Technological advances have increased the number of external stimuli, quickened the pace of everyday life, and have had deleterious effects on the attention spans of the beings inhabiting the modern world. To defend ourselves, we pretend indifference or build walls to distract from the outside. Thus, we find ourselves "the furthest removed from the depths of the personality." One antidote to the maddening pace and consequence of modern life was & is music. Kramer poetically summarizes Simmel by saying "listeners to a composition could compose themselves by their listening."
He concludes by relating an unlikely experience in the NY subway system that involved a small crowd gathering around a young violinist playing perhaps the least likely music to be heard--much less appreciated--in the loud, crowded, unpleasant environment underground between the local and express tracks at Times Square.
The passersby who stopped to listen to what they could hear of the Bach partita being played were offered "the chance to experience the depth of the inner life--by which I mean to enact it, to produce it."
He quotes T.S. Eliot's couplet about this active experience of listening:
"Music heard so deeply that you are the music/While the music lasts."
This music "offers an antidote to both the distractions of a complex world and the adaptations required to navigate them."
Classical music matters for many reasons, And many of those reasons are explored in this gem of a book. "Falling in love requires three things--being with the right person at the right time for long enough time." So Robert Shaw said in relationship to falling in love with Bach, Beethoven, and company. I think Kramer might agree with that. Regardless, we who spend time with classical music do it because it matters to us. And the "things that matter are things we bother with."
Kramer closes by quoting the great English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who's "Solitary Reaper" plays an important role:
I listened, motionless and still,
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.
Maybe it was the defensive-sounding title, or the notion I have of being one of the many (lesser) disciples of Robert Shaw in "preaching the gospel of the arts" which told me I didn't need to read this book. I was wrong. Kramer's engaging, thoughtfully presented book is one I'll be recommending to colleagues, board members, patrons, and anyone else who'll listen.
"Classical music has people worried. To many it seems on shaky ground in America." In the introductory chapter, Kramer spells out some of the reasons for this. And while written before the current recession's effects were fully felt, his provocative reasoning is still relevant as classical music ensembles and organizations struggle with how to not only remain relevant, but remain open. Many anxious performers & presenters have been clamoring about the "danger of extinction." If Kramer's dismissal of this seems untimely given the subsequent (& ongoing) financial meltdown, consider this:
"The problem is perhaps less economic or demographic than it is cultural, less a question of the music's survival than of its role...For what it's worth, my anecdotal impression is that people are generally less knowledgeable about it than they were even a generation ago...We know, some of us, how to enjoy it, but we don't know what to do with it."
I couldn't agree more, and if worried producers and planners dismiss Kramer's initial diagnosis--that the "crisis" is less economic than cultural-- he backs up his claim with the following:
"One reason why [classical music may be in trouble] is the loss of a credible way to maintain that people ought to listen to this music...Our growing reluctance to impose prescriptive or judgmental shoulds has obscured the power of the should that says, 'Don't deprive yourself of this pleasure, this astonishment, this conception.'...No wonder, then, that many culturally literate people who visit museum exhibits and keep up with the latest books, movies, and ideas think nothing of being classical-music illiterates. There is nothing, any more, that one just has to hear."
Before embarking on the body of the book which does answer the statement claimed by the title, Kramer warns against a couple lines of reasoning many of the above-mentioned "preachers of the gospel of the arts" revert to time and again. The first is the one famously dubbed by the acerbic critic, Virgil Thomson, as the "music-appreciation racket." If you've not heard the term, you've heard the argument. If you've read one of my letters to Virginia Chorale supporters you've heard the so-called "racket:" that classical music is good for you--body, mind, and soul. From "The Mozart Effect" on down, the notion that this music makes its particpants better human beings is a timeless argument. And the argument is no less valid than the more elitist one that seeks to shame the unwashed into submitting to the greatness of the (usually dead) masters. Kramer debunks both approaches. He says,
"This music provides as much insight as it invites...[it] is full of powerful feelings, but they're feelings that are always pushing beyond their own boundaries to open and refresh these questions. The music stimulates my imagination and my speculative energies while it sharpens my senses and quickens my sense of experience."
In not taking the music-appreesh or the elitist route, he is sensitive to the competing genres of musics like pop and jazz. Throughout the book he carefully balances arguments that don't elevate classical music at pop music's expense (even if many of us might want a more level playing field). He finds creative ways around this challenge by returning to classical music's "advantage in the rich vocabulary available to describe it." Language is one of--if not THE--primary means we have of not only articulating experience but ascribing meaning to the experiences that add up to make what we call life. And music--specifically classical music (in the broad sense from the 18th century baroque up through the present)--is one of the richest repositories for such linguistic performance. The other principal means of experience Kramer explores is the act of listening. This is music to not only be listened to, but "to be listened into."
In the span of a few pages--the book is imminently readable--Kramer traces the importance of the act of listening itself in the digital age to the shifting relationship between music and audience from the 19th century forward. One of his professed aims is "to refresh listening: to reconnect the listener with a community and culture of listening," and he cites a few poignant examples of this both in his introduction and near the book's conclusion.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, "classical music provided a perhaps unexpected, perhaps momentary, but nonetheless real resource, consoling in both an emotional and something like a metaphysical sense." He cites performances by the New York Philharmonic, the MET, and the Louisiana PO.
As a personal anecdote, I was scheduled to give the first of my doctoral recitals for the University of Maryland that very day. That recital was delayed one week, and the final lines of Lee Hoiby's setting of Dickinson's "There Came a Wind Like a Bugle"--"how much can come/and much can go/and yet abide the world!"--proved again the fact of music's rare gift of transcending time & space. If it is not the "universal language," it still is as close as we have come to one.
The body of the book is devoted to chapters on "The Fate of Melody" and how centrally important the "tune" is--what it says, how it changes, and how it affects and changes the listener in the process of participating in performance. He cites examples from three very different films in the third chapter, engaging evidence that this music really can transcend specificity to apply to a range of meanings. Or in the singleness of its expression, music can not only identify an emotion or state, but embody such feeling, so that the listener experiences it as real (even though it is "merely" simulated). Of Mahler's beloved "Resurrection" Symphony, he says "the effect of transcendence is less something the music expresses, as something it does, something it accomplishes."
This goes to the heart of why we continue to be moved by such works, and why, as Kramer says, the works seem to take on a personality and life of their own. When we talk about our favorite popular music, one of the only occasions where a song is separate from a performer is when a "cover" artist is involved. We might have a favorite Beatles song or album, but it's the band that's the thing. "Abbey Road" does not exist as an independent score or work, nor take on a life of its own apart from its status as one of the greatest albums ever recorded by a particular band. And while you may prefer Solti's Mahler 2 to my Mehta (or Bernstein, or Klemperer, or...), the fact is Mahler's 2nd Symphony has a life of its own. It exists in a discernable, transferable yet individual body in the specific score that bears its name.
The two middle chapters deal with the special worlds of art song and solo piano music, the intersection of music and society, performance and reception, and again, the difference between these forms as composed scores in the classical genres they inhabit. Even more important is the light Kramer sheds on the music's engagement with subjectivity and all the implications of the term--emotion, feeling, meaning, interpretation, reception, etc. I love the following:
"Our times may be telling us that subjectivity itself is old-fashioned, but perhaps that just makes us hunger for it more. The signs of the times suggest as much. Classical music can help fill our emotional needs; all we have to do is let it."
He cites both the 19th century art song and solo piano piece (exemplified by Schubert & Chopin) as paradigms of culture's first representations of modernity vis-a-vis the formation of the individuated self. Not only does such music help define the very idea of "the self" but it has the power to help that "self" understand & deal with the conflicts of modern life. No wonder we refer to such music as being "therapeutic."
The penultimate chapter returns to musical meaning in the wider community, tracing an arc from Beethoven's symphonies (appearing in the midst of early 19th century war and political upheaval) through one of the works written in response to 9/11, John Adams' arresting elegy, "On the Transmigration of Souls."
Along the way he cites the British novelist E.M. Forster's argument that art does not just lead to the ideal, "it is the ideal." In the essay "Art for Art's Sake" Forster argues the requisite order of art (ie: its form, and the technique required to create it) makes it the best model for social effectiveness we have.
The final chapter, "Persephone's Fiddle: The Value of Classical Music" is Kramer's impassioned finale. And like a great 19th century symphony, the author culls and gathers his work's themes and presents them with a forward moving, organic unity that not only makes a strong impression, but lingers and invites further consideration.
He quotes from a 1903 study by the sociologist Georg Simmel who's findings ring even more true today. Technological advances have increased the number of external stimuli, quickened the pace of everyday life, and have had deleterious effects on the attention spans of the beings inhabiting the modern world. To defend ourselves, we pretend indifference or build walls to distract from the outside. Thus, we find ourselves "the furthest removed from the depths of the personality." One antidote to the maddening pace and consequence of modern life was & is music. Kramer poetically summarizes Simmel by saying "listeners to a composition could compose themselves by their listening."
He concludes by relating an unlikely experience in the NY subway system that involved a small crowd gathering around a young violinist playing perhaps the least likely music to be heard--much less appreciated--in the loud, crowded, unpleasant environment underground between the local and express tracks at Times Square.
The passersby who stopped to listen to what they could hear of the Bach partita being played were offered "the chance to experience the depth of the inner life--by which I mean to enact it, to produce it."
He quotes T.S. Eliot's couplet about this active experience of listening:
"Music heard so deeply that you are the music/While the music lasts."
This music "offers an antidote to both the distractions of a complex world and the adaptations required to navigate them."
Classical music matters for many reasons, And many of those reasons are explored in this gem of a book. "Falling in love requires three things--being with the right person at the right time for long enough time." So Robert Shaw said in relationship to falling in love with Bach, Beethoven, and company. I think Kramer might agree with that. Regardless, we who spend time with classical music do it because it matters to us. And the "things that matter are things we bother with."
Kramer closes by quoting the great English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who's "Solitary Reaper" plays an important role:
I listened, motionless and still,
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
BMF: Music and German National Identity
Since I don't appear until the last act of the final program of the Bard Music Festival, "Wagner and His World," I thought I'd write about it. My first entry connected to this summer's festival was on Meyerbeer's grand opera "Les Huguenots." It was a huge success from its premiere in 1837 through the first decades of the 20th century. Wagner was one of its early admirers.
Meyerbeer was also the primary victim, along with Mendelssohn, of Wagner's anti-semitic diatribe that first surfaced anonymously in 1850. It was updated and appeared with his name a decade & 1/2 later. It should give us pause that the 2 composers whose reputations most suffered from Wagner's attacks were 2 of the composers to whom he owed the biggest debt of influence.
Telling then, that "Ein feste burg" ("A mighty fortress") the Lutheran chorale that is a unifying (ie: leitmotivic) motive in Les Huguenots appears in Wagner's paean to German nationalism and her victory in the Franco-Prussian war.
The Kaisermarch is the opening work on this program of "Music and German National Identity" and excerpts from Wagner's operatic pageant to German art, "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" is the closing act. In between are topical works by Bruckner and (perhaps the last composer we'd identify with nationalism), Brahms ("Triumphlied" is a work that should have found its way into Brahms file 13. It is a derivative work that sounds like Handel on a revved-up cocktail of steroids and red-bull).
Meistersinger is problematic in our post-WWII world for two main reasons. The arguably/allegedly/credibly anti-semitic portrayal of the clumsy, awkward & inept Beckmesser, and the philo-Germanic exhortations of the work's protagonist, Hans Sachs.
The program notes (again by co-artistic director, Christopher Gibbs) quote one infamous admonishment from Sachs:
"Beware! Evil blows threaten us if one day the German people and kingdom decay under a false foreign ruler...therefore I say to you: honor your German masters!"
I believe it is time to wrest Wagner from the stranglehold of our reverse-perspective view of history following the Holocaust. At the same time, it is impossible to overstate the horrors and atrocities committed against European Jewry in the death camps of the Third Reich.
We are right to employ a hyper-vigilant, scrutinizing sensitivity to not only the Shoah itself, but the near and far reaching effects of anti-semitism leading up to it.
Wagner died before Hitler and his henchmen were born. Without getting into territory I have neither the time nor qualifications to navigate, I am inclined towards the argument of the mastermind & maestro of this festival, Leon Botstein. Botstein, a non-practicing orthodox Jew of Russian descent, argues forceably against the Wagner ban in Israel and Wagner censorship in general. He has made the central contribution to the festival's book, "Wagner and His World" in his provocative and illuminating essay "German Jews and Wagner." First, he states that censoring Wagner, especially in Israel, poses the dangerous risk of misplacing blame and stealing focus from the real causes and effects that led to the Holocaust.
He then maps out the complex web of Wagner reception--especially among Wagner's Jewish contemporaries--and how reexaming contemporary (ie: 19th century) criticism & reception is essential in avoiding the slippery slope of a retroactive misreading of history.
Gibbs makes a similar observation in his program notes, suggesting that Wagner's contemporaries--which would include many of his Jewish followers & supporters (yes, he had a number of Jewish patrons--another point to be noted)--would not have been uncomfortable with the nationalist elements of Meistersinger. Indeed, nationalism was widespread throughout 19th century Europe, and when paired with, say, American "exceptionalism" it is not necessarily the xenophobic, racist sickness it all too easily becomes in our post-modern world. Tellingly, Botstein claims there are 3 unassailable facts about Wagner at the height of his notoriety in the 1870's: he was an outspoken anti-semite, an adherent to a growing, philo-Germanic nationalist movement, and Jews numbered many of his most ardent supporters.
There is nothing remotely anti-semitic in the repeated choral exclamations of "Heil, Heil, Sachs!" (Sachs is the eponymous Master singer, and mentor to the romantic hero, Walther). Yet the anachronistic leap modern audiences cannot help but make should be put into its proper context and the retroactive "evil" of the libretto deflated and terrestrialized.
As much as anything, I am grateful to have been a participant in this engaging, provocative, and ultimately rewarding festival. By putting Wagner in context & presenting front-and-center the masterworks of the two Jewish composers who felt the harshest blunt of his racism, we are confronting Wagner the artist AND man. We also confront the paradox by taking his masterworks out of the holy grail of self-serving sacrosanctity (perpetuated by his family & heirs, to the detriment of his reputation) and meeting them where they are. No artist has been more contentious nor more influential in history. Wagner challenges us to consider questions of enormous value where politics & society, art & culture, and history intersect. There is no question of the enduring cultural debt to his art. But we owe ourselves better than the censorship that avoids the discomfort of confronting such contentiousness. For a man whose worldview and behavior appear beyond the pale of the acceptable, it is remarkable so much of his work concerns the redemptive power of love.
Censoring Wagner runs the risk of rewriting history by assigning too large a retrospective role to a megalomaniacal artist who's works were easily manipulated into propaganda. Auden was mistaken in his claim that "poetry makes nothing happen." The extent Wagner's anti-semitism affected (or infected) his works is cause for attention, investigation, and deliberation. If this process renders Die Meistersinger the problematic work it has been in the Wagner canon, then it is a judgment better served by considerate debate than ignorant censorship. If Wagner the man doesn't deserve redeeming, the victims of those who propogated his nationalist opera for their murderous ends deserve that and more--the truth.
Meyerbeer was also the primary victim, along with Mendelssohn, of Wagner's anti-semitic diatribe that first surfaced anonymously in 1850. It was updated and appeared with his name a decade & 1/2 later. It should give us pause that the 2 composers whose reputations most suffered from Wagner's attacks were 2 of the composers to whom he owed the biggest debt of influence.
Telling then, that "Ein feste burg" ("A mighty fortress") the Lutheran chorale that is a unifying (ie: leitmotivic) motive in Les Huguenots appears in Wagner's paean to German nationalism and her victory in the Franco-Prussian war.
The Kaisermarch is the opening work on this program of "Music and German National Identity" and excerpts from Wagner's operatic pageant to German art, "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" is the closing act. In between are topical works by Bruckner and (perhaps the last composer we'd identify with nationalism), Brahms ("Triumphlied" is a work that should have found its way into Brahms file 13. It is a derivative work that sounds like Handel on a revved-up cocktail of steroids and red-bull).
Meistersinger is problematic in our post-WWII world for two main reasons. The arguably/allegedly/credibly anti-semitic portrayal of the clumsy, awkward & inept Beckmesser, and the philo-Germanic exhortations of the work's protagonist, Hans Sachs.
The program notes (again by co-artistic director, Christopher Gibbs) quote one infamous admonishment from Sachs:
"Beware! Evil blows threaten us if one day the German people and kingdom decay under a false foreign ruler...therefore I say to you: honor your German masters!"
I believe it is time to wrest Wagner from the stranglehold of our reverse-perspective view of history following the Holocaust. At the same time, it is impossible to overstate the horrors and atrocities committed against European Jewry in the death camps of the Third Reich.
We are right to employ a hyper-vigilant, scrutinizing sensitivity to not only the Shoah itself, but the near and far reaching effects of anti-semitism leading up to it.
Wagner died before Hitler and his henchmen were born. Without getting into territory I have neither the time nor qualifications to navigate, I am inclined towards the argument of the mastermind & maestro of this festival, Leon Botstein. Botstein, a non-practicing orthodox Jew of Russian descent, argues forceably against the Wagner ban in Israel and Wagner censorship in general. He has made the central contribution to the festival's book, "Wagner and His World" in his provocative and illuminating essay "German Jews and Wagner." First, he states that censoring Wagner, especially in Israel, poses the dangerous risk of misplacing blame and stealing focus from the real causes and effects that led to the Holocaust.
He then maps out the complex web of Wagner reception--especially among Wagner's Jewish contemporaries--and how reexaming contemporary (ie: 19th century) criticism & reception is essential in avoiding the slippery slope of a retroactive misreading of history.
Gibbs makes a similar observation in his program notes, suggesting that Wagner's contemporaries--which would include many of his Jewish followers & supporters (yes, he had a number of Jewish patrons--another point to be noted)--would not have been uncomfortable with the nationalist elements of Meistersinger. Indeed, nationalism was widespread throughout 19th century Europe, and when paired with, say, American "exceptionalism" it is not necessarily the xenophobic, racist sickness it all too easily becomes in our post-modern world. Tellingly, Botstein claims there are 3 unassailable facts about Wagner at the height of his notoriety in the 1870's: he was an outspoken anti-semite, an adherent to a growing, philo-Germanic nationalist movement, and Jews numbered many of his most ardent supporters.
There is nothing remotely anti-semitic in the repeated choral exclamations of "Heil, Heil, Sachs!" (Sachs is the eponymous Master singer, and mentor to the romantic hero, Walther). Yet the anachronistic leap modern audiences cannot help but make should be put into its proper context and the retroactive "evil" of the libretto deflated and terrestrialized.
As much as anything, I am grateful to have been a participant in this engaging, provocative, and ultimately rewarding festival. By putting Wagner in context & presenting front-and-center the masterworks of the two Jewish composers who felt the harshest blunt of his racism, we are confronting Wagner the artist AND man. We also confront the paradox by taking his masterworks out of the holy grail of self-serving sacrosanctity (perpetuated by his family & heirs, to the detriment of his reputation) and meeting them where they are. No artist has been more contentious nor more influential in history. Wagner challenges us to consider questions of enormous value where politics & society, art & culture, and history intersect. There is no question of the enduring cultural debt to his art. But we owe ourselves better than the censorship that avoids the discomfort of confronting such contentiousness. For a man whose worldview and behavior appear beyond the pale of the acceptable, it is remarkable so much of his work concerns the redemptive power of love.
Censoring Wagner runs the risk of rewriting history by assigning too large a retrospective role to a megalomaniacal artist who's works were easily manipulated into propaganda. Auden was mistaken in his claim that "poetry makes nothing happen." The extent Wagner's anti-semitism affected (or infected) his works is cause for attention, investigation, and deliberation. If this process renders Die Meistersinger the problematic work it has been in the Wagner canon, then it is a judgment better served by considerate debate than ignorant censorship. If Wagner the man doesn't deserve redeeming, the victims of those who propogated his nationalist opera for their murderous ends deserve that and more--the truth.
BMF: Engineering the Triumph of Wagnerism
This month I've been writing about my time at Bard College for their annual Summerscape festival which culminates in the Bard Music Festival, "part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit" (New York Times).
We are in the middle of the final day of the second weekend of "Wagner and His World." I've already written about the first weekend, and the two major works that framed the festival the first week of August.
I left off with Wagner's apprenticeship in Paris, and so I'll pick up with a program that featured a good dose of (French, German, and English) operetta, some imitating and some spoofing Wagner. Amy was joined by Jennifer Rivera, Jon-Michael Ball and Jonathan Hays for an enjoyable recital entitled "Bearable Lightness: The Comic Alternative." My friend and colleague, James Bassi, directed the musical shape and pace of the program from the piano. The composer and professor Richard Wilson provided droll and insightful commentary between the sets of songs, arias, and enembles.
Arthur Sullivan (the musical half of Gilbert & Sullivan), famously dismissed Wagner's music as "intolerably dull and heavy, and so undramatic." Yet one of his most sophisticated scores, "Iolanthe," betrays a heavy debt to Wagner. Amy and Jon-Michael sang an energetic love-duet, Jennifer was an impassioned Iolanthe, and Jonathan stole the scene with one of the cleverest of the G&S patter songs, "Love Unrequited, Robs Me of My Rest."
This was preceded by a set of Chabrier songs that featured both sides of the "light" response to Wagner's music in Paris. "The ballad of the fat turkeys" and "Villanelle of the little ducks" were comic character songs (engagingly sung by Amy and Jennie, respectively). In between the caricatures, Amy offered a beautiful, Tristan-tinged "L'ile heureuse" (the happy island).
If Chabrier wavered in allegiance to Wagnerism, Jacques Offenbach was one of Wagner's most visible Parisian critics. He turned to operetta as a melodic and immediately appealing alternative to Wagner's "music of the future." I am indebted to the excellent program notes by Byron Adams for the quotes herein; here is one from Offenbach: "to be erudite and boring isn't art; it's better to be pungent and tuneful."
The beautifully simple & tuneful duet opera lovers know as the "barcarolle" from "The Tales of Hoffmann" first appeared in Offenbach's Rhine-inspired opera, "Die Rheinnixen." Despite the fact Offenbach could not have known Wagner's "Das Rheingold," the fortuitousness of the pairing is deliciously ironic.
The program also included piano music by Faure and his student, Andre Messager, as well as music from German operetta. Suppe's "Lohengelb" IS a deliberate spoof on Lohengrin, as Oscar Strauss' "The Merry Nibelungs" is on Wagner's Ring cycle.
The Ring Cycle was the theme of Saturday night's concert, "The Selling of the Ring." As I mentioned in a previous post, the festival is programming excerpts from the operas Wagner himself arranged and conducted. His practice was to select the most accessible and extractable passages (no mean feet in the "unending melody" of operas whose individual acts last 1 1/2 hours alone) and close with the overture.
Since the Ring tetralogy dispenses with the traditional overture, this program featured orchestral excerpts from within the operas themselves. (Das Rheingold does open with a 136 bar prelude that is a study itself in Wagnerian unfolding--the spinning out of a single idea over a length of time with accumulating motion & force. In this case, a single E-flat chord is repeated and varied, gathering momentum over nearly five minutes of scales and arpeggios until it spills seamlessly over into the opening scene of the Rhine Maidens swimming in the Rhine with their gold).
The concert did not feature the prelude but rather the other bookend to Das Rheingold, "The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla." The unfolding technique is used in this scene as well, which begins with Donner using his hammer to evoke the thunder and lightning and literally clear the air. He urges his brother, Froh (the part I sang) to build a bridge to lead into their new fortress (Valhalla). 12 bars of shimmering G-flat, accompanied by the harps and strings, feature a rising Valhalla-inspired motive that is introduced by the lower strings, winds and horns. Though I only sang one page of Froh's music, it was a glorious page to sing. Wotan and Loge finish the scene, though they are interrupted by the complaining Rhinemaidens (who's stolen gold Wotan promised to return--the god of contracts is notorious for breaking them in Wanger's cycle).
Das Rheingold was the first of the tetralogy to be composed, but the last "poem" to be written. Wagner thought of his libretti as independent poetic dramas and published them separately, ahead of the operas, for commercial, promotional & aesthetic reasons. He started with "Siegfrieds Death" which became "The Twilight of the Gods." Then he wrote a prelude to it describing the life of his hero, "Siegfried." Then he decided he needed a prelude to explain Siegfried's background and wrote the story of "The Valkyries." Finally, he decided to append a prelude to contextualize the trilogy, and wrote "The Rhine-gold." Oy.
After finishing the scores of the first two operas, and realizing his epic efforts would yield scant compensation in their gestating state, he paused. "Tristan und Isolde" and "Die Meistersinger" (originally intended to be short operas on tragic and comic subjects, respectively) were composed in the late 1850's in the hopes of immediate success and multiple productions that would bring the struggling composer some much-needed funding. The final two operas of the tetralogy were completed in the 1870's. The decade-wide gap between "Die Walküre" and "Siegfried" & "Götterdämmerung" is an especially wide one, even more so considering the intricate motivic integration of "Der Ring des Nibelungen."
Much ink has been spilled on the gap in Wagner's style as a result of both the long lapse, and the stylistic evolutions of Tristan and Meistersinger. I think this point is exaggerated. Already in Act 1 of "Die Walküre" we hear the musical evocation of love & desire that would perfume the 4+ hours of "Tristan und Isolde." Once Wagner hit his stride with the Ring, his style was achieved. And though the inflection of his voice may evolve from opera to opera, it remains the same expressive voice.
I had the extraordinary opportunity to apprentice at the Young Artists Festival in Bayreuth in 1996, and return in 1997 as an assistant professor. Within a span of 8 days in August of 1996, I saw the Ring Cycle, Heiner Müller's stunning, instant-classic-upon-its-conception production of "Tristan & Isolde" (and now available on DVD), and "Die Meistersinger." The following year I repeated the experience of seeing my two favorite Ring operas, "Die Walküre" and "Götterdämmerung," "Tristan" & "Meistersinger" and added Wagner's sublime final opera, "Parsifal" to the docket. These were--and remain--overwhelming and unforgettable experiences. I was unprepared for Wagner's impact. Having long been an admirer of the generation of composers he influenced (namely Mahler and Richard Strauss), I never really "got" Wagner. And what I read about his life, and the infamous association of his works with Nazism, only reinforced that predisposition.
This brings to mind one of the best lessons my undergraduate mentor, "Daddy" Dave Watkins taught his students: you can not judge a work until you really know it. This is true in the music of Wagner, even more so for the retroactive guilt to which modern history has subjected him, given the coincidence of his racist views with Nazism. I'll write more about that later. For now, I will repeat what I've said before, that one judge the work on its merits, and the life on its terms. When the two intersect, collide and/or explode, then the makings of contentious symposia (like "Wagner and the Jewish Question") is engaging and worthy grist.
Amy, who has had little experience with Wagner live, was completely overwhelmed by last night's concert, as I expected she woud be. She also agreed with me with her two favorite operas. "Die Walküre" includes some very appealing excerpts. Siegmund's "Love Song" and the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" and Wotan's powerful "Farewell" to Brünnhilde make the second opera in the Ring cycle the most popular, and among the most beloved. Gary Lehman and James Johnson were both outstanding as Siegmund & Wotan. What a thrill to share the stage with such distinguished Wagnerian singers!
"Götterdämmerung" has a pair of great orchestral excerpts--Siegfried's "Rhine journey" and his death and "Funeral music." The closing "Immolation" scene with Brünnhilde features a crash-course of intermingled Leitmotiven (leading motives) that encapsulate the entire cycle. "Wagner thus recreates a musical ring" (the annotator Christopher Gibbs noted), as the epic 18-hour tetralogy comes full circle to close.
We are in the middle of the final day of the second weekend of "Wagner and His World." I've already written about the first weekend, and the two major works that framed the festival the first week of August.
I left off with Wagner's apprenticeship in Paris, and so I'll pick up with a program that featured a good dose of (French, German, and English) operetta, some imitating and some spoofing Wagner. Amy was joined by Jennifer Rivera, Jon-Michael Ball and Jonathan Hays for an enjoyable recital entitled "Bearable Lightness: The Comic Alternative." My friend and colleague, James Bassi, directed the musical shape and pace of the program from the piano. The composer and professor Richard Wilson provided droll and insightful commentary between the sets of songs, arias, and enembles.
Arthur Sullivan (the musical half of Gilbert & Sullivan), famously dismissed Wagner's music as "intolerably dull and heavy, and so undramatic." Yet one of his most sophisticated scores, "Iolanthe," betrays a heavy debt to Wagner. Amy and Jon-Michael sang an energetic love-duet, Jennifer was an impassioned Iolanthe, and Jonathan stole the scene with one of the cleverest of the G&S patter songs, "Love Unrequited, Robs Me of My Rest."
This was preceded by a set of Chabrier songs that featured both sides of the "light" response to Wagner's music in Paris. "The ballad of the fat turkeys" and "Villanelle of the little ducks" were comic character songs (engagingly sung by Amy and Jennie, respectively). In between the caricatures, Amy offered a beautiful, Tristan-tinged "L'ile heureuse" (the happy island).
If Chabrier wavered in allegiance to Wagnerism, Jacques Offenbach was one of Wagner's most visible Parisian critics. He turned to operetta as a melodic and immediately appealing alternative to Wagner's "music of the future." I am indebted to the excellent program notes by Byron Adams for the quotes herein; here is one from Offenbach: "to be erudite and boring isn't art; it's better to be pungent and tuneful."
The beautifully simple & tuneful duet opera lovers know as the "barcarolle" from "The Tales of Hoffmann" first appeared in Offenbach's Rhine-inspired opera, "Die Rheinnixen." Despite the fact Offenbach could not have known Wagner's "Das Rheingold," the fortuitousness of the pairing is deliciously ironic.
The program also included piano music by Faure and his student, Andre Messager, as well as music from German operetta. Suppe's "Lohengelb" IS a deliberate spoof on Lohengrin, as Oscar Strauss' "The Merry Nibelungs" is on Wagner's Ring cycle.
The Ring Cycle was the theme of Saturday night's concert, "The Selling of the Ring." As I mentioned in a previous post, the festival is programming excerpts from the operas Wagner himself arranged and conducted. His practice was to select the most accessible and extractable passages (no mean feet in the "unending melody" of operas whose individual acts last 1 1/2 hours alone) and close with the overture.
Since the Ring tetralogy dispenses with the traditional overture, this program featured orchestral excerpts from within the operas themselves. (Das Rheingold does open with a 136 bar prelude that is a study itself in Wagnerian unfolding--the spinning out of a single idea over a length of time with accumulating motion & force. In this case, a single E-flat chord is repeated and varied, gathering momentum over nearly five minutes of scales and arpeggios until it spills seamlessly over into the opening scene of the Rhine Maidens swimming in the Rhine with their gold).
The concert did not feature the prelude but rather the other bookend to Das Rheingold, "The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla." The unfolding technique is used in this scene as well, which begins with Donner using his hammer to evoke the thunder and lightning and literally clear the air. He urges his brother, Froh (the part I sang) to build a bridge to lead into their new fortress (Valhalla). 12 bars of shimmering G-flat, accompanied by the harps and strings, feature a rising Valhalla-inspired motive that is introduced by the lower strings, winds and horns. Though I only sang one page of Froh's music, it was a glorious page to sing. Wotan and Loge finish the scene, though they are interrupted by the complaining Rhinemaidens (who's stolen gold Wotan promised to return--the god of contracts is notorious for breaking them in Wanger's cycle).
Das Rheingold was the first of the tetralogy to be composed, but the last "poem" to be written. Wagner thought of his libretti as independent poetic dramas and published them separately, ahead of the operas, for commercial, promotional & aesthetic reasons. He started with "Siegfrieds Death" which became "The Twilight of the Gods." Then he wrote a prelude to it describing the life of his hero, "Siegfried." Then he decided he needed a prelude to explain Siegfried's background and wrote the story of "The Valkyries." Finally, he decided to append a prelude to contextualize the trilogy, and wrote "The Rhine-gold." Oy.
After finishing the scores of the first two operas, and realizing his epic efforts would yield scant compensation in their gestating state, he paused. "Tristan und Isolde" and "Die Meistersinger" (originally intended to be short operas on tragic and comic subjects, respectively) were composed in the late 1850's in the hopes of immediate success and multiple productions that would bring the struggling composer some much-needed funding. The final two operas of the tetralogy were completed in the 1870's. The decade-wide gap between "Die Walküre" and "Siegfried" & "Götterdämmerung" is an especially wide one, even more so considering the intricate motivic integration of "Der Ring des Nibelungen."
Much ink has been spilled on the gap in Wagner's style as a result of both the long lapse, and the stylistic evolutions of Tristan and Meistersinger. I think this point is exaggerated. Already in Act 1 of "Die Walküre" we hear the musical evocation of love & desire that would perfume the 4+ hours of "Tristan und Isolde." Once Wagner hit his stride with the Ring, his style was achieved. And though the inflection of his voice may evolve from opera to opera, it remains the same expressive voice.
I had the extraordinary opportunity to apprentice at the Young Artists Festival in Bayreuth in 1996, and return in 1997 as an assistant professor. Within a span of 8 days in August of 1996, I saw the Ring Cycle, Heiner Müller's stunning, instant-classic-upon-its-conception production of "Tristan & Isolde" (and now available on DVD), and "Die Meistersinger." The following year I repeated the experience of seeing my two favorite Ring operas, "Die Walküre" and "Götterdämmerung," "Tristan" & "Meistersinger" and added Wagner's sublime final opera, "Parsifal" to the docket. These were--and remain--overwhelming and unforgettable experiences. I was unprepared for Wagner's impact. Having long been an admirer of the generation of composers he influenced (namely Mahler and Richard Strauss), I never really "got" Wagner. And what I read about his life, and the infamous association of his works with Nazism, only reinforced that predisposition.
This brings to mind one of the best lessons my undergraduate mentor, "Daddy" Dave Watkins taught his students: you can not judge a work until you really know it. This is true in the music of Wagner, even more so for the retroactive guilt to which modern history has subjected him, given the coincidence of his racist views with Nazism. I'll write more about that later. For now, I will repeat what I've said before, that one judge the work on its merits, and the life on its terms. When the two intersect, collide and/or explode, then the makings of contentious symposia (like "Wagner and the Jewish Question") is engaging and worthy grist.
Amy, who has had little experience with Wagner live, was completely overwhelmed by last night's concert, as I expected she woud be. She also agreed with me with her two favorite operas. "Die Walküre" includes some very appealing excerpts. Siegmund's "Love Song" and the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" and Wotan's powerful "Farewell" to Brünnhilde make the second opera in the Ring cycle the most popular, and among the most beloved. Gary Lehman and James Johnson were both outstanding as Siegmund & Wotan. What a thrill to share the stage with such distinguished Wagnerian singers!
"Götterdämmerung" has a pair of great orchestral excerpts--Siegfried's "Rhine journey" and his death and "Funeral music." The closing "Immolation" scene with Brünnhilde features a crash-course of intermingled Leitmotiven (leading motives) that encapsulate the entire cycle. "Wagner thus recreates a musical ring" (the annotator Christopher Gibbs noted), as the epic 18-hour tetralogy comes full circle to close.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Wagner: The Triumphant Revolutionary
In my last post I wrote about the Bard Music Festival in general and this year's specific programs devoted to "Wagner and His World." If the opening concert exposed how far the journey was from derivative apprentice composer to "Master of Bayreuth" some 50 years later, Saturday night's concert traced a more logical line in this development.
"The Triumphant Revolutionary" was the fourth concert of the festival's opening weekend, and it opened with music Wagner wrote to be inserted into other composers' works. I wrote about 19th century Italian opera in the context of Verdi's world last month. A comparison of the lives of these two exact contemporaries is not necessary here. Verdi deplored the practice of these "substitution" pieces (at least in his operas). It is interesting how later in life Wagner (and his heirs) would exert such control over the sacrosanctity of his scores. It did not prevent him as a young composer, however, from literally inserting himself into the works of others.
The curtain rose, figuratively speaking, on what sounded like a circus chorus from a French operetta. Indeed, "Descendons gaiement la Courtille" (1841) was written to be inserted into a vaudeville show, while the struggling young composer was down and out in Paris. Those struggles, moreover, would be repressed, only to resurface as bile when Wagner dismissed his earlier admiration for Paris in diatribes about Meyerbeer and the "effects without causes" of French grand opera (more on "Wagner in Paris" below...)
Following the festive opening, I sang what was one of the most exhilarating arias I've ever attempted. Heinrich Marschner was the most famous German opera composer of his day, a highly successful early romantic composer following Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber. His opera, Der Vampyr (yes, The Vampire) is based on a Byron sketch. Wagner wrote a new allegro to be performed following a bucolic andante in Act II of the opera. The lead tenor is Sir Aubry, who has sworn to protect his friend Ruthven's identity for 24 hours. Ruthven is, you guessed it, the title character. Unbeknownst to Aubry, the Vamp needs to find 3 more victims in this time, and of course chooses Aubry's love, Malvina, as one of them. Aubry will turn into a Vampire himself if he breaks his promise, so he is somewhat distraught at the thought of his beloved becoming his friend's next victim. He sings a beautiful, Mozart inspired andante about Malvina's beauty and their (soon to be lost) love. When he confronts the literal horror of the situation, Wagner interrupts with a crazy sturm und drang (storm and stress) allegro with an original text and 28 high a-flats. They would not be so difficult were they not so close together and in the middle of cascading coloratura runs that span an octave & 1/2 range! So, when Mo. Botstein took a faster tempo in the concert, it was a wild ride, and like Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods, I was excited, "well, excited AND scared." The audience appreciated the accomplishment, and it was the first time in my career I've been encored back to the stage during the first half of a program. In fact, at dinner the next night, as I was excusing myself before settling the bill, the couple at the table next to ours said (within earshot of Amy, who responded) "I think that's Scott Williamson." It was surreal. They had attended the concert and we ended up having an enjoyable conversation about it and the festival in general. If my proverbial 15 minutes of fame don't surpass the 6 minute Marschner-Wagner Vampire aria, so be it. I'll keep enjoying the ride.
The ride of this particular concert continued with a great bass aria Wagner wrote to be inserted into Bellini's masterpiece, Norma. The bass for whom it was written declined to perform it, but it is worth hearing, especially by a singer of Daniel Mobbs' calibre, and it offers another window into Wagner's assimilation of the styles of his day. As the festival's co-artistic director Christopher Gibbs points out (in his illuminative program notes), this aria "must be regarded as an attempt to 'out-compose' the Italian with his own musical language."
Wagner finally found his own style with his fourth opera (the first "staple" of his in the repertory) The Flying Dutchman (1841). Many of the seeds that would germinate over the next two decades to appear in glorious blossom in Tristan and the Ring cycle are here. The searching chromaticism, the recurring use of motives to identify both character and emotion, and the large-scale canvas of the score's sound-world first emerge from the mist of Dutchman. Verdi conjured storms in his operas, from the "mad scene" in his first operatic hit, Nabucco, to the famous trio near the tragic end of Rigoletto, to the marvelous opening of his final tragedy, Otello. The Flying Dutchman's storm music--so "Wagnerian" from the opening of the fiery overture--would reappear with volcanic force in Die Walkure. Although the Ring cycle contains very little for chorus--a medium the composer professed to disdain--Wagner learned his lessons from Meyerbeer and the Italian bel canto composers and wrote rousing choruses. The sailors' chorus from Dutchman was described by one of my friends and colleagues (who shall remain anonymous) as an "anti-semitic show choir." It is actually the final solo and chorus from Die Meistersinger that make most post-WWII listeners uncomfortable, but I am a few programs ahead of myself. "Wagner and German Nationalism" is the 12th and final program Sunday afternoon, following a symposium on "Wagner and the Jewish question." Back to "the triumphant revolutionary."
If I had a great time singing my little insert aria, I was only part of the opening act for the queen of the evening, Christine Goerke. Christine outdid herself Saturday night, in excerpts from not only Dutchman, but the second half of the program's selections from the next two operas, Tannhauser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). We bantered backstage about whether my Vampyr aria was more awkward than hers from Die Feen. No matter, from his first great dramatic soprano roles--Senta, Elisabeth and Elsa--Wagner displayed his hard-won gifts for writing engaging & inspired vocal music.
(for the NY Times review of weekend one, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/arts/music/18wagner.html?emc=eta1)
Excerpts from Tannhauser offer an ideal entry into the Wagnerian world. From the overture to Elisabeth's "entrance" aria "Dich teure Halle" and (among others), the beautifully lyric baritone soliloquy, "O du mein holder Abendstern" this triptych of excerpts are immediate in their appeal. I have the privilege of playing John Hancock's brother (Froh to his Donner) in a brief Rheingold excerpt this weekend (the 10th program, "The Selling of the Ring" to be discussed later). John was wonderful as Wolfram in the "Song to the Evening Star" (which was how the famous baritone aria was listed in the program book).
All of the "suites" of excerpts from the ten mature operas are being presented in concert formats Wagner himself programmed, with the titles he assigned. Thus, without mounting a single Wagner opera (or even an entire single act) this festival is offering a unique view of the composer's world. Wagner was perhaps the most shameless--and ultimately successful--self-promoter in music history. For these concerts, he lifted the best-suited arias, often wrote new endings or arrangements to tailor them to the concert setting, and ended the excerpts by placing the overture last. Not so far off from the movie trailor format--just extended from 20 seconds to 20 minutes, with the theme music the closing punctuation of the image. Adorno (see previous post) would surely approve of the analogy, since he viewed Wagner's pervasive influence on film music so dismissively. Perhaps such disdain arises from the deflating sensation of having the suspension of one's disbelief itself suspended. Like a child who resents the magician after he figures out the tricks aren't magic but simply technique, craft, and talent.
There was certainly a lot of craft and talent in Paris in the early 19th century, making it one of THE cultural centers of the world. Home to a leading conservatory and arguably the best opera house of the day, Paris was a center for all of the arts. No wonder composers from Chopin and Liszt to Rossini and Verdi had extended residencies there (even if they made the complaint, still heard today, that "the only problem with France is the French!"). Wagner hoped for an apprenticeship with Meyerbeer, and lived in Paris from 1839 to 1842. I wrote about the latter's grand opera Les Huguenots in an earlier post. Sunday's concert, "Wagner in Paris" featured works written by Wagner, but more importantly by Parisian composers and transplants whose music thrived in the French capital while the young German composer struggled for a foothold that did not materialize. The brilliant young coloratura soprano, Erin Morley (the outstanding Queen Margeurite in the Meyerbeer opera) sang some of Wagner's early french songs and a Bellini aria. Chamber music by Cherubini, and Meyerbeer's grand opera colleagues, Auber and Halevy offset the solo vocal selections. My contribution was in a Meyerbeer chamber trio for voice, clarinet and piano. Modeled on Schubert's "Shepherd on the Rock," Meyerbeer's "Hirtenlied" (Shepherd Song) is a beautiful scena-like setting of the German romantic poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab. Most famous for the poems Schubert set in his posthumous song-cycle, Schwanengesang, Rellstab's poem is an idyllic landscape where the sounds of nature and the shepherd's pipe coexist in imperturbable harmony. The composer writes lyrical and playful duets for the voice and clarinet, and I thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing and peforming the charming piece with the ASO's principal clarinettist, Laura Flax, and the excellent British pianist, Danny Driver. Speaking of excellent pianists, the headliner on the program was Jeremy Denk (equally well known as Joshua Bell's collaborative pianist) who rocked on a Chopin Polonaise-Fantasy and tore up the stage with Liszt arrangements of Berlioz and Meyerbeer.
Wagner didn't achieve the success in Paris Meyerbeer did. But his older German-born colleague did help the struggling young artist procure a conducting post in Dresden, where Wagner was able to successfully mount, among others, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser. He was forced out of that position and into exile for his participation in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848. "The triumphant revolutionary?" Indeed.
"The Triumphant Revolutionary" was the fourth concert of the festival's opening weekend, and it opened with music Wagner wrote to be inserted into other composers' works. I wrote about 19th century Italian opera in the context of Verdi's world last month. A comparison of the lives of these two exact contemporaries is not necessary here. Verdi deplored the practice of these "substitution" pieces (at least in his operas). It is interesting how later in life Wagner (and his heirs) would exert such control over the sacrosanctity of his scores. It did not prevent him as a young composer, however, from literally inserting himself into the works of others.
The curtain rose, figuratively speaking, on what sounded like a circus chorus from a French operetta. Indeed, "Descendons gaiement la Courtille" (1841) was written to be inserted into a vaudeville show, while the struggling young composer was down and out in Paris. Those struggles, moreover, would be repressed, only to resurface as bile when Wagner dismissed his earlier admiration for Paris in diatribes about Meyerbeer and the "effects without causes" of French grand opera (more on "Wagner in Paris" below...)
Following the festive opening, I sang what was one of the most exhilarating arias I've ever attempted. Heinrich Marschner was the most famous German opera composer of his day, a highly successful early romantic composer following Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber. His opera, Der Vampyr (yes, The Vampire) is based on a Byron sketch. Wagner wrote a new allegro to be performed following a bucolic andante in Act II of the opera. The lead tenor is Sir Aubry, who has sworn to protect his friend Ruthven's identity for 24 hours. Ruthven is, you guessed it, the title character. Unbeknownst to Aubry, the Vamp needs to find 3 more victims in this time, and of course chooses Aubry's love, Malvina, as one of them. Aubry will turn into a Vampire himself if he breaks his promise, so he is somewhat distraught at the thought of his beloved becoming his friend's next victim. He sings a beautiful, Mozart inspired andante about Malvina's beauty and their (soon to be lost) love. When he confronts the literal horror of the situation, Wagner interrupts with a crazy sturm und drang (storm and stress) allegro with an original text and 28 high a-flats. They would not be so difficult were they not so close together and in the middle of cascading coloratura runs that span an octave & 1/2 range! So, when Mo. Botstein took a faster tempo in the concert, it was a wild ride, and like Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods, I was excited, "well, excited AND scared." The audience appreciated the accomplishment, and it was the first time in my career I've been encored back to the stage during the first half of a program. In fact, at dinner the next night, as I was excusing myself before settling the bill, the couple at the table next to ours said (within earshot of Amy, who responded) "I think that's Scott Williamson." It was surreal. They had attended the concert and we ended up having an enjoyable conversation about it and the festival in general. If my proverbial 15 minutes of fame don't surpass the 6 minute Marschner-Wagner Vampire aria, so be it. I'll keep enjoying the ride.
The ride of this particular concert continued with a great bass aria Wagner wrote to be inserted into Bellini's masterpiece, Norma. The bass for whom it was written declined to perform it, but it is worth hearing, especially by a singer of Daniel Mobbs' calibre, and it offers another window into Wagner's assimilation of the styles of his day. As the festival's co-artistic director Christopher Gibbs points out (in his illuminative program notes), this aria "must be regarded as an attempt to 'out-compose' the Italian with his own musical language."
Wagner finally found his own style with his fourth opera (the first "staple" of his in the repertory) The Flying Dutchman (1841). Many of the seeds that would germinate over the next two decades to appear in glorious blossom in Tristan and the Ring cycle are here. The searching chromaticism, the recurring use of motives to identify both character and emotion, and the large-scale canvas of the score's sound-world first emerge from the mist of Dutchman. Verdi conjured storms in his operas, from the "mad scene" in his first operatic hit, Nabucco, to the famous trio near the tragic end of Rigoletto, to the marvelous opening of his final tragedy, Otello. The Flying Dutchman's storm music--so "Wagnerian" from the opening of the fiery overture--would reappear with volcanic force in Die Walkure. Although the Ring cycle contains very little for chorus--a medium the composer professed to disdain--Wagner learned his lessons from Meyerbeer and the Italian bel canto composers and wrote rousing choruses. The sailors' chorus from Dutchman was described by one of my friends and colleagues (who shall remain anonymous) as an "anti-semitic show choir." It is actually the final solo and chorus from Die Meistersinger that make most post-WWII listeners uncomfortable, but I am a few programs ahead of myself. "Wagner and German Nationalism" is the 12th and final program Sunday afternoon, following a symposium on "Wagner and the Jewish question." Back to "the triumphant revolutionary."
If I had a great time singing my little insert aria, I was only part of the opening act for the queen of the evening, Christine Goerke. Christine outdid herself Saturday night, in excerpts from not only Dutchman, but the second half of the program's selections from the next two operas, Tannhauser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). We bantered backstage about whether my Vampyr aria was more awkward than hers from Die Feen. No matter, from his first great dramatic soprano roles--Senta, Elisabeth and Elsa--Wagner displayed his hard-won gifts for writing engaging & inspired vocal music.
(for the NY Times review of weekend one, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/arts/music/18wagner.html?emc=eta1)
Excerpts from Tannhauser offer an ideal entry into the Wagnerian world. From the overture to Elisabeth's "entrance" aria "Dich teure Halle" and (among others), the beautifully lyric baritone soliloquy, "O du mein holder Abendstern" this triptych of excerpts are immediate in their appeal. I have the privilege of playing John Hancock's brother (Froh to his Donner) in a brief Rheingold excerpt this weekend (the 10th program, "The Selling of the Ring" to be discussed later). John was wonderful as Wolfram in the "Song to the Evening Star" (which was how the famous baritone aria was listed in the program book).
All of the "suites" of excerpts from the ten mature operas are being presented in concert formats Wagner himself programmed, with the titles he assigned. Thus, without mounting a single Wagner opera (or even an entire single act) this festival is offering a unique view of the composer's world. Wagner was perhaps the most shameless--and ultimately successful--self-promoter in music history. For these concerts, he lifted the best-suited arias, often wrote new endings or arrangements to tailor them to the concert setting, and ended the excerpts by placing the overture last. Not so far off from the movie trailor format--just extended from 20 seconds to 20 minutes, with the theme music the closing punctuation of the image. Adorno (see previous post) would surely approve of the analogy, since he viewed Wagner's pervasive influence on film music so dismissively. Perhaps such disdain arises from the deflating sensation of having the suspension of one's disbelief itself suspended. Like a child who resents the magician after he figures out the tricks aren't magic but simply technique, craft, and talent.
There was certainly a lot of craft and talent in Paris in the early 19th century, making it one of THE cultural centers of the world. Home to a leading conservatory and arguably the best opera house of the day, Paris was a center for all of the arts. No wonder composers from Chopin and Liszt to Rossini and Verdi had extended residencies there (even if they made the complaint, still heard today, that "the only problem with France is the French!"). Wagner hoped for an apprenticeship with Meyerbeer, and lived in Paris from 1839 to 1842. I wrote about the latter's grand opera Les Huguenots in an earlier post. Sunday's concert, "Wagner in Paris" featured works written by Wagner, but more importantly by Parisian composers and transplants whose music thrived in the French capital while the young German composer struggled for a foothold that did not materialize. The brilliant young coloratura soprano, Erin Morley (the outstanding Queen Margeurite in the Meyerbeer opera) sang some of Wagner's early french songs and a Bellini aria. Chamber music by Cherubini, and Meyerbeer's grand opera colleagues, Auber and Halevy offset the solo vocal selections. My contribution was in a Meyerbeer chamber trio for voice, clarinet and piano. Modeled on Schubert's "Shepherd on the Rock," Meyerbeer's "Hirtenlied" (Shepherd Song) is a beautiful scena-like setting of the German romantic poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab. Most famous for the poems Schubert set in his posthumous song-cycle, Schwanengesang, Rellstab's poem is an idyllic landscape where the sounds of nature and the shepherd's pipe coexist in imperturbable harmony. The composer writes lyrical and playful duets for the voice and clarinet, and I thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing and peforming the charming piece with the ASO's principal clarinettist, Laura Flax, and the excellent British pianist, Danny Driver. Speaking of excellent pianists, the headliner on the program was Jeremy Denk (equally well known as Joshua Bell's collaborative pianist) who rocked on a Chopin Polonaise-Fantasy and tore up the stage with Liszt arrangements of Berlioz and Meyerbeer.
Wagner didn't achieve the success in Paris Meyerbeer did. But his older German-born colleague did help the struggling young artist procure a conducting post in Dresden, where Wagner was able to successfully mount, among others, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser. He was forced out of that position and into exile for his participation in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848. "The triumphant revolutionary?" Indeed.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Wagner and His World: The Fruits of Ambition
I am in the middle of the Bard Music Festival's annual "Rediscoveries" series. "Wagner and His World" is the 20th annual festival devoted to a composer and his milieu. The festival "has established a unique identity in the classical concert field by presenting programs that, through performance and discussion, place a selected work in the cultural and social context of the composer's world." In addition to the centerpiece orchestral concerts (many featuring soloists and chorus), chamber concerts, recitals, lectures and symposia frame two weekends of programs that are also commemorated in an annual companion publication by Princeton University Press. These books of essays, commentary, and historical documents have become standards in the field of music research and in the wider culture of music criticism and appreciation. The festival takes place on the beautiful Bard College campus, in the Catskills/Hudson River valley region of NY state. The Frank Gehry designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts is a magnificent concert hall and one of THE destinations for classical music in the country. (For more info see: http://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/)
I have already written about my experience performing in Mendelssohn's Paulus (St. Paul) and attending Meyerbeer's grand opera, Les Huguenots. These were two works Wagner singled out for initial praise in the late 1830's and early 1840's, before finding his voice--both musical and polemical--and turning against these two composers in his anti-semitic writings first published in 1850.
The festival is programmed around two weekends of events. We are in the middle of weekend one, "The Fruits of Ambition" and I am preparing to sing on tonight's orchestral program of early Wagner, provocatively titled "The Triumphant Revolutionary." On Sunday I will sing a Meyerbeer chamber work for voice, clarinet, and piano (a cousin of Schubert's "Shepherd on the Rock") on a program of "Wagner in Paris." I'll write about those concerts later. For now I want to share some thoughts and quotes about the opening program, "Genius Unanticipated."
If there is a composer with a wider quality gap between his juvenalia and mature works, I am at a loss to name one. Unlike Mozart, Mendelssohn, or closer to our day, Britten, Wagner was no prodigy. Composers like Beethoven, Verdi, and Debussy (an unlikely trio) all took time to find their distinctive voices. Leon Botstein (co-artistic director of the festival, president of Bard college, and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra) joked in rehearsal this week that the distance between Wagner's early and mature works is so great we could rightly suspect him of having used a ghost-writer!
This opening concert offered several angles from which to view such a prospect. The concert opened with the first of Wagner's operas whose excerpts have entered the repertory. The overture of Rienzi (1840) offers a few glimpses of the Wagner to come, while displaying his debt to the French grand opera of Meyerbeer and the German romanticism of Weber. The bel-canto modeled scenas from his first two operas, Die Feen (1833) and Das Liebesverbot (1834-35), however, are curiosities only. It has been a privilege for me this week to sing in rehearsals with one of the finest young dramatic sopranos around, Christine Goerke. In a piano rehearsal at Mo. Botstein's house earlier this week, I had the unenviable task of following Christine's ravishing "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde! Christine was valiant in the awkwardly written dramatic coloratura of Wagner first opera, and Daniel Mobbs was in outstanding voice in Wagner's 2nd opera, an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure." In both excerpts, I know I was not alone in admiring the artists and their artistry over the art itself.
The next work was a fragment from a larger, unfinished symphonic work. Wagner's Faust Overture (1839-40) again shows seeds of his original voice. It also betrays the gap between his imitating Beethoven and assimilating the dramatic narrative style of this greatest of 19th century composers. Indeed, it is that gap between Beethoven's knack for development--for modulation & variation that propels the movements of his symphonies inexorably forward--and Wagner's lack of this compositional skill that was so glaringly obvious in this music. No wonder Wagner was so hostile to Brahms--the real heir to Beethoven's symphonic style. The Faust Overture--indebted to Berlioz and the romantic penchant for colorful dramatic effects in the orchestra--was interesting, but sounded like a series of moments and episodes rather than an integrated and cohesive piece of orchestral music.
That overture was rendered even more hollow by its juxtaposition with music from Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1882). The program certainly lived up to its title of "Genius Unanticipated" in this instance. Parsifal contains some of the most sublime music Wagner penned, and raises unanswerable questions concerning the relationship of the work and life of the artist. How could so despicable a human being compose such beautiful music? Is the through-line of the power of redemptive love--more explicitly present in Parsifal than in any other opera--the expression of the composer's sub- or unconscious wish/need for salvation/redemption?
The second half of the program openend with Wagner's nearly forgotten (and forgettable) Symphony in C (1832). I have to disagree with scholar Thomas S. Grey's assessment that this is "a highly creditable amalgam of middle-period Beethoven with touches of Schubert." An amalgam, yes; highly creditable, no way. Nowhere is Wagner's lack of Beethovenian development more apparent than in the four movements of this symphony of dead-ends & unvaried repetition. It was if this self-forming composer listened and culled and imitated, workshopping his way through a series of derivative apprentice works, until he found a way around his limitations and forged an individual voice unlike any other.
That voice is most famously present in the opening, tonally ambiguous strains of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde (1857-1859). While Wagner's debt to Berlioz (especially the love-themed adagio from Romeo et Juliette) is clear, the style Wagner fashioned was entirely his own: "unending melody" via long, chromatically winding phrases, the integration of the different sections of the orchestra into a unified canvas of sound, and the elevation of the "leitmotiv" from signifier to the substance of both the individual characters and the character of the works themselves.
Tristan ranks as one of the greatest works of classical music from any period, and remains one of my favorites. Listening to the fluid and sweeping strains of the Prelude last night, on the heels of the derivative and formally vacuous symphony, I was struck by how effective Wagner was at manipulation. The music of Tristan doesn't "go" anywhere: it's repeated and varied through color & dynamics, not (harmonic) modulation or (symphonic) development. Maybe it is to music what the stream-of-conscious style is to narrative fiction. Interesting and engaging, but best appreciated on its own terms. Regardless, it can be mesmerizing & intoxicating, which are at least a couple of the effects the composer wanted.
If my take on Wagner's development vis-a-vis his early style seems harsh and polemical itself, perhaps some quotes from the modernist scion of criticism, Theodor Adorno, are in order. I have been reading his engaging set of essays "In Search of Wagner" written amidst the rise of Nazism. This work was a major factor in the reevaluation and criticism of Wagner that reached a fevered pitch in the wake of WWII, and from which it has not since waned.
Adorno's polemic shoots holes in the "Revolutionary" Wagner's "Music of the Future" claims by dissecting the very features that distinguish his art. He attacks the leitmotiv as "commodity-function" likening the identifying motives as an "advertisement" it is "music intended for the forgetful." In the context of examing the leitmotiv or musical "gesture" he hits upon the difference between Wagner and Beethoven, say, argued less forcefully above by yours truly (the quotations are from the Verso paperback (c. 2005, reprinted 2009) translated by Rodney Livingstone).
"Faults of compositional technique in his music always stem from the fact that the musical logic...is softened up and replaced by a sort of gesticulation, rather in the way that agitators substitute linguistic gestures for the discursive exposition of their thoughts. It is no doubt true that all music has its roots in gesture of this kind and harbours it within itself. In the West, however, it has been sublimated and interiorized into expression, while at the same time the principle of construction subjects the overall flow of the music to a process of logical synthesis; great music strives for a balance of the two elements. Wagner's position lies athwart this tradition."
Put another way, "his aim is to reconcile the lack of development in the gesture with the unrepeatable finality of the expression...the eternity of Wagnerian music...is one which proclaims nothing has happened."
The leitmotiv "leads directly to cinema music where the sole function is to announce heroes or situations so as to help the audience orientate itself more easily." He's on to something here. Even if he treats one of the defining features of Wagner's genius dismissively. Lesser composers would demean the leitmotiv of the "Gesamptkunstwerk" (total-work-of-art) into the derivative and merely descriptive function of much film music.
Adorno goes on, and it is an entertaining and intellectually stimulating screed. Keep in mind this is from the critic who famously claimed that "after Auschwitz, there can be no poetry." His post-modern, Marxist criticism paved the ground for the anti-Wagnerian, anti-Romantic avant-garde that embraced the serialism of Webern and led to the gulf between the composer and the public that still haunts contemporary classical music. It is supreme irony and/or poetic justice that Adorno tempered his view towards an appreciation of Wagner later in life. The Master of Bayreuth could certainly cast a spell.
I have already written about my experience performing in Mendelssohn's Paulus (St. Paul) and attending Meyerbeer's grand opera, Les Huguenots. These were two works Wagner singled out for initial praise in the late 1830's and early 1840's, before finding his voice--both musical and polemical--and turning against these two composers in his anti-semitic writings first published in 1850.
The festival is programmed around two weekends of events. We are in the middle of weekend one, "The Fruits of Ambition" and I am preparing to sing on tonight's orchestral program of early Wagner, provocatively titled "The Triumphant Revolutionary." On Sunday I will sing a Meyerbeer chamber work for voice, clarinet, and piano (a cousin of Schubert's "Shepherd on the Rock") on a program of "Wagner in Paris." I'll write about those concerts later. For now I want to share some thoughts and quotes about the opening program, "Genius Unanticipated."
If there is a composer with a wider quality gap between his juvenalia and mature works, I am at a loss to name one. Unlike Mozart, Mendelssohn, or closer to our day, Britten, Wagner was no prodigy. Composers like Beethoven, Verdi, and Debussy (an unlikely trio) all took time to find their distinctive voices. Leon Botstein (co-artistic director of the festival, president of Bard college, and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra) joked in rehearsal this week that the distance between Wagner's early and mature works is so great we could rightly suspect him of having used a ghost-writer!
This opening concert offered several angles from which to view such a prospect. The concert opened with the first of Wagner's operas whose excerpts have entered the repertory. The overture of Rienzi (1840) offers a few glimpses of the Wagner to come, while displaying his debt to the French grand opera of Meyerbeer and the German romanticism of Weber. The bel-canto modeled scenas from his first two operas, Die Feen (1833) and Das Liebesverbot (1834-35), however, are curiosities only. It has been a privilege for me this week to sing in rehearsals with one of the finest young dramatic sopranos around, Christine Goerke. In a piano rehearsal at Mo. Botstein's house earlier this week, I had the unenviable task of following Christine's ravishing "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde! Christine was valiant in the awkwardly written dramatic coloratura of Wagner first opera, and Daniel Mobbs was in outstanding voice in Wagner's 2nd opera, an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure." In both excerpts, I know I was not alone in admiring the artists and their artistry over the art itself.
The next work was a fragment from a larger, unfinished symphonic work. Wagner's Faust Overture (1839-40) again shows seeds of his original voice. It also betrays the gap between his imitating Beethoven and assimilating the dramatic narrative style of this greatest of 19th century composers. Indeed, it is that gap between Beethoven's knack for development--for modulation & variation that propels the movements of his symphonies inexorably forward--and Wagner's lack of this compositional skill that was so glaringly obvious in this music. No wonder Wagner was so hostile to Brahms--the real heir to Beethoven's symphonic style. The Faust Overture--indebted to Berlioz and the romantic penchant for colorful dramatic effects in the orchestra--was interesting, but sounded like a series of moments and episodes rather than an integrated and cohesive piece of orchestral music.
That overture was rendered even more hollow by its juxtaposition with music from Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1882). The program certainly lived up to its title of "Genius Unanticipated" in this instance. Parsifal contains some of the most sublime music Wagner penned, and raises unanswerable questions concerning the relationship of the work and life of the artist. How could so despicable a human being compose such beautiful music? Is the through-line of the power of redemptive love--more explicitly present in Parsifal than in any other opera--the expression of the composer's sub- or unconscious wish/need for salvation/redemption?
The second half of the program openend with Wagner's nearly forgotten (and forgettable) Symphony in C (1832). I have to disagree with scholar Thomas S. Grey's assessment that this is "a highly creditable amalgam of middle-period Beethoven with touches of Schubert." An amalgam, yes; highly creditable, no way. Nowhere is Wagner's lack of Beethovenian development more apparent than in the four movements of this symphony of dead-ends & unvaried repetition. It was if this self-forming composer listened and culled and imitated, workshopping his way through a series of derivative apprentice works, until he found a way around his limitations and forged an individual voice unlike any other.
That voice is most famously present in the opening, tonally ambiguous strains of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde (1857-1859). While Wagner's debt to Berlioz (especially the love-themed adagio from Romeo et Juliette) is clear, the style Wagner fashioned was entirely his own: "unending melody" via long, chromatically winding phrases, the integration of the different sections of the orchestra into a unified canvas of sound, and the elevation of the "leitmotiv" from signifier to the substance of both the individual characters and the character of the works themselves.
Tristan ranks as one of the greatest works of classical music from any period, and remains one of my favorites. Listening to the fluid and sweeping strains of the Prelude last night, on the heels of the derivative and formally vacuous symphony, I was struck by how effective Wagner was at manipulation. The music of Tristan doesn't "go" anywhere: it's repeated and varied through color & dynamics, not (harmonic) modulation or (symphonic) development. Maybe it is to music what the stream-of-conscious style is to narrative fiction. Interesting and engaging, but best appreciated on its own terms. Regardless, it can be mesmerizing & intoxicating, which are at least a couple of the effects the composer wanted.
If my take on Wagner's development vis-a-vis his early style seems harsh and polemical itself, perhaps some quotes from the modernist scion of criticism, Theodor Adorno, are in order. I have been reading his engaging set of essays "In Search of Wagner" written amidst the rise of Nazism. This work was a major factor in the reevaluation and criticism of Wagner that reached a fevered pitch in the wake of WWII, and from which it has not since waned.
Adorno's polemic shoots holes in the "Revolutionary" Wagner's "Music of the Future" claims by dissecting the very features that distinguish his art. He attacks the leitmotiv as "commodity-function" likening the identifying motives as an "advertisement" it is "music intended for the forgetful." In the context of examing the leitmotiv or musical "gesture" he hits upon the difference between Wagner and Beethoven, say, argued less forcefully above by yours truly (the quotations are from the Verso paperback (c. 2005, reprinted 2009) translated by Rodney Livingstone).
"Faults of compositional technique in his music always stem from the fact that the musical logic...is softened up and replaced by a sort of gesticulation, rather in the way that agitators substitute linguistic gestures for the discursive exposition of their thoughts. It is no doubt true that all music has its roots in gesture of this kind and harbours it within itself. In the West, however, it has been sublimated and interiorized into expression, while at the same time the principle of construction subjects the overall flow of the music to a process of logical synthesis; great music strives for a balance of the two elements. Wagner's position lies athwart this tradition."
Put another way, "his aim is to reconcile the lack of development in the gesture with the unrepeatable finality of the expression...the eternity of Wagnerian music...is one which proclaims nothing has happened."
The leitmotiv "leads directly to cinema music where the sole function is to announce heroes or situations so as to help the audience orientate itself more easily." He's on to something here. Even if he treats one of the defining features of Wagner's genius dismissively. Lesser composers would demean the leitmotiv of the "Gesamptkunstwerk" (total-work-of-art) into the derivative and merely descriptive function of much film music.
Adorno goes on, and it is an entertaining and intellectually stimulating screed. Keep in mind this is from the critic who famously claimed that "after Auschwitz, there can be no poetry." His post-modern, Marxist criticism paved the ground for the anti-Wagnerian, anti-Romantic avant-garde that embraced the serialism of Webern and led to the gulf between the composer and the public that still haunts contemporary classical music. It is supreme irony and/or poetic justice that Adorno tempered his view towards an appreciation of Wagner later in life. The Master of Bayreuth could certainly cast a spell.
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