Music at last! What a relief. I hate opera! Sometimes.

Writing a few weeks ago about what was once “new music”; I realized, not for the first time, that opera is a mental illness. A few days ago I listened to one of my favorite pieces, Brahms’ A major piano quartet, something even I played (badly) way back when. I staged a war between the old Arthur Rubenstein and the Guarnieri (Arthur’s second go at the piece, very romantic with a lot of rubato and Arthur clearly dominating the proceedings with many the tempo change mid phrase), the fantastic Sviatoslav Richter live performance with the Borodin quartet, an utterly demented and very thrilling performance, with the Borodins keeping up with Richter with ferocity (just barely in the orgiastic account of the final movement), the Domus quartet with Susan Tomes interrupting tea with just a few slices of mince tart and the great Hollywood Quartet with Victor Aller.

(this is another great performance, with the phenomenal Russian pianist Maria Yudina)

I read along with my tattered score and what was my response? “Thank The Dear there was no singing!” Music at last! What a relief. I’m sorry about the description at the head of this blog, I hate opera!

Sometimes. On Saturday, poor Mrs. Claggart’s Facebook page exploded with encomiums of varying hysteria to an Italian tenor named Mario del Monaco. (Mrs. Claggart has only three friends on Facebook, one of them “Mr. Bianco, IRS”. But she has 300,000 enemies, a category Zuckerberg’s elf invented just for her.) I had to wonder how many people had ever heard of Mario del Monaco? I know not many people currently alive heard him. Mrs. Claggart, when she was a boy, now that she’s a girl, heard him three times in two seasons before a nearly fatal automobile accident reduced his immense, deafening, nothing like it since volume, and prompted him to be more careful both about high notes, and his manner on stage, which became less obviously certifiable (though by the mid 1960’s he did regain some of that Twilight Zone Form adopted by the older Italian tenors). But there is a lot of Mario out there.

                             
                                   (Mario sings "Ghost Riders in the Sky" in Italian)

He was a world star from the late forties and made a great many too closely miked records. Why, I knew a man who had perpetual ear ache. All in fear and atremble he went to his doctor. “Perhaps you’re having a stroke,” the doctor allowed reassuringly. Then the doctor settled back. “Have you been listening to Mario Del Monaco records?”

“Why yes, every night,” the patient replied. “For hours. My wife makes me use headphones” “Well, sir,” said the doctor, breaking out his old Calabash (this was when medical people smoked and died young), “there’s your answer. My wife dragged me to see this so called Del Monaco in Otello and though they all said he was sick and saving, I had a headache and hearing loss for a week. Switch to this young fella named Domingo. You can barely hear him, you’ll be good as new in a couple of days.”

Besides Mario’s commercial recordings (all on Decca except for an early EMI) there are tons of pirates. You can also see Mario. He journeyed to Japan with the Italian companies that ventured there every year starting around 1955. The cameras capture his exuberance. At the end of the Andrea Chenier with Renata Tebaldi, as they go off to the guillotine, he actually leaps toward the blade, loses his balance and falls off stage (and dances out to his deafening ovation like a champ). Audiences worshiped him (well, maybe not the English, they had Jimmy Johnston and Ken Clark for the big roles). The hysterical response given his Canio in Pagliacci there is amazing (but it’s a thrilling performance). He did a Carmen there with Giulietta Simionato, all the famous excerpts survive. In the final scene, failing to convince the obdurate Carmen to return to him, he beats his breast in heart break and frustration. I hadn’t seen that since my father did the same regarding me.

I played that excerpt for a couple of Manhattan litigators who said they were opera lovers. They roared with queenly hysteria. Luckily, I didn’t play the final scene from his Don Jose in Carmen at the Bolshoi, also a collection of excerpts with the great Russians, Irina Arkhipova and Pavel Lisitsian. There he screams, sobs, beats his chest, waves the knife and all but levitates when he finally runs to kill Carmen. What would those lawyers have made of that? And what would they have made of the Russian audience of dignitaries who riot after his Flower Song? (And yes, Don Jose sings it, not The Celestial Voice from Don Carlos, as James Oestreich seemed to think in his review of a recent Carmen in the Paper of Record the New York Times).

He was the most famous (though not the only important) singer of Verdi’s Otello in the 1950’s (bravo, Ramon Vinay!) and one can see him in Japan, reportedly with the flu but the abandon, ferocity and breast beating heart break are all there (as are the renowned Tito Gobbi as Iago and the adorable Gabriella Tucci).

But those litigators would have laughed; it’s a peek into a vanished era. They would have been indifferent to the (eloquent) gestural vocabulary that is part of the acting of the principals and inclined to giggle at “acting” techniques designed for the stage and those in the far balconies not for the camera, and perhaps embarrassed that a group of adults could take an opera as seriously as Del Monaco and Gobbi and Tucci do. Had those wealthy consigliori to the 1% been inclined to father children, their teenagers would have been completely bored within minutes and soon would have been texting, sexting, playing video games and surfing the ‘Net simultaneously.

The Japanese use a three camera technique, borrowed from American sit coms; it works, even in a big theater. The cameras can get close enough for detail but one never loses that this is a stage performance and distance is important. When the cameras pull back one can see three mikes hung from the ceiling, mid house. They are to get the sound clearly on the tape not to amplify or help the soloists. How different from the multi mike and camera fraudulence on the HD broadcasts from the Met, which deliver a very difference experience from the one those sitting in the theater had.

These Japan performances (and the highlights from The Bolshoi) are probably best experienced from VAI (www.vaimusic.com). They’ve put archival films on DVD and cleaned them up as much as possible. All the Japanese films have Kangi subtitles with English subtitles under them, which takes some getting used to. The picture quality of the earlier performances is often somewhat washed out. Besides Mario, there are marvelous demonstrations by Carlo Bergonzi (an amazing Un Ballo in Maschera), Renata Scotto, Alfredo Kraus (an incredible Faust) and Antonietta Stella (my high school pals and I used to call her Toni Starr. I met her some years later and explained this would have been her Motown Name. She squealed with joy). Her performance of Minnie in The Girl of the Golden West is stunning, the only completely idiomatic and the best sung on a video in an otherwise somewhat ramshackle performance.

Mario also appeared on the RAI films that began to be made for Italian TV in the early fifties. They are lip synched but they are carefully prepared and feature singers who are forgotten now like Mrs. John Claggart and her twin and we aren’t even dead (who would miss Clara Petrella in Manon Lescaut and Il Tabarro or Carla Gavazzi in Cavalleria Rusticana? There is even a great Pagliacci with the young, gorgeous Franco Corelli, who, freed of having to produce his tone live, proves to be a wonderful and moving actor. Mario’s accident cleared the way for him to become “the greatest Italian tenor” in the world, and although he couldn’t count, phrase, and sing at the same time, liked to squeeze his nose, wiggle his jaw and do tongue exercises while others sang in live performances, the sound was thrilling. Mario hated him. Naturally. I hate a lot of people too. I understand).

(The Chenier doesn't translate from You Tube, this is from the Otello with Carteri)

Not all the RAI films are so effective. These involve one massive camera stalking the singers. The great Rosanna Carteri sings a spectacular Violetta in La Traviata but has a hard time lip synching, becomes self conscious and then, when the huge camera machine comes swooping in for her close ups, she starts to run away from it. She had charisma, though; if not there, in a performance filmed live in Naples by RAI in 1958. This is of Puccini’s usually dismissed La Rondine, but it is a very moving performance, conducted by a Puccini pal, quite old obviously, Vincenzo Bellezza, who understands the heart breaking nostalgia for a time lost that throbs under nearly every bar, unashamed to use string portamenti and a well controlled but large scale rubato to make these melodies soar (how plain so many sound elsewhere! Even Brahms would have cried). Carteri was very beautiful and is so full of longing and tears that the entire experience is unforgettable. This is also in excellent quality from VAI, distributing the Italian Hardy Label.

Wait have I become an opera queen again? I’ve relapsed!!! As Anthony Wiener knows, the Brahms rehab center did not take!!!

Well, I am a writer with the runs in any case. And we were talking about Mario. He did an outstanding Otello for RAI. But his best performance is in a stunning film of Andrea Chenier. The hokey storey is enacted with life or death intensity, and that extends to all the roles, even the smallest, played with almost Dickensian detail by those wonderful Italian supporting singers of that era (they’ve vanished, as have the stars – none have had successors). Understanding that there is no audience present and that the camera will come very close, Mario who was a good looking man, is utterly human, believable. He relaxes into a completely natural impersonation of the doomed poet. And he is matched by those great singers, Toni Starr and Giuseppe Taddei.

Let’s face it, there was nothing wrong with the composer, Umberto Giordano, that five more years in a tough American conservatory wouldn’t have fixed. Well, he wasn’t as great a tune smith as Cole Porter (who did time in a tough French conservatory, the Schola Cantorum) but in this opera he knows how to set up his tunes very effectively and the recitative beginnings to the many sections that will eventually almost flower into being memorable are wonderfully done. James Levine told me that Chenier was one of the hardest operas to do; Giordano does not use key signatures not because he couldn’t read music as the naughty have had it, but because he belonged to a political movement that disliked hierarchies of all kinds. But Mo. Levine averred getting winds and brass to deal accurately with music full of accidentals (signs that the note should be played up or down) was murder.

The RAI films can be found in good quality from Premiere Opera, and they have good prices, too! (www.premiereopera.com/)‎

Well, Sunday cleared the air for Mario. But opera? There is this gene (or is it a mixture of nature and nurture?) that makes some of us deeply sensitive to voices, so much so, that a timbre and manner we respond to, even on record, seems three dimensional to us. We can become obsessed with some of those magicians, to the exclusion of other factors that matter in opera. Mrs. John Claggart adores music. The sad thing about opera is that it is, I believe, very dependent on vocal capacity. This is not to say that a great conductor, a persuasive production, the music itself can't compensate for a merely adequate cast. I think sadly, that even adequate casts are rarer than they were in a time when singers were generally less well prepared musically and far less inclined to "act" whatever that may mean in opera. I see on the “Opera ‘Net” people claiming that Konzept style productions will bring youths into the opera house. I like some of those productions too. But if those youths have no response to the music, what is there to enjoy in a Konzept production? I have met many the intellectual (and great) musician who thought opera was worthless. Perhaps it is my weakness but I love it, not exclusively, but passionately. And that is why I am sad that there is such confusion, pretentiousness and fakery in the form today. I recently had occasion to listen to music by Carter and Feldman, what a relief that was! But would I want to be without opera? It is a dilemma and maybe I should shut up.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

(Rauschenberg Retroactivo l, 1964

I was thrilled to listen to Sony’s recent release of five CDs, called as a group, Prophets of the New. I found myself weeping hearing these, many of them never available on CD. Oh, by the way, I’m letting my twin, Albert, write this week. As a widder, I know the sorrow of loss. But he knows it better.

Prophets of the New may not be the most crystal clear title for this release. This is music that was new from the nineteen fifties to the seventies, by composers who were then in their primes. It’s sad to think that gifted creators such as Luciano Berio (1925-2003) are forgotten, that Elliot Carter became something of a joke among the ignorant, He died in 2012 at the age of 103. Between the ages of 90 and 100 he composed forty works (!!!) But the CD devoted to him is from the height of his creative energy and contains two of his greatest works, two of the greatest works in “serious” music. Morton Feldman (1926 –1987), eccentric and a proud New Yorker of a very specific sort, has only recently become a subject of great interest. He was an American original; his music has a profound beauty that no description can convey. One CD, alas too short, is conducted by Bruno Maderna, one of the great musicians to emerge after World War Two and a tremendous composer. Here he presides over some of the central pieces of this era, including Krzystof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Karlheinz Srockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte, its piano solo played by another remarkable American composer-performer, Frederic Rzewski. Also there is an outstanding piece by the forgotten but important Earle Brown (1926-2002), one of the inventors of “Downtown”, and a piece by another immensely influential creator in the field of electronic music (musique concrete), Henri Pousseur. Finally, there is one of the great Columbia records (as it would have been known in the old days), superbly transferred, The Rite of Spring conducted by yet another great composer/performer, Pierre Boulez, with the Cleveland orchestra, and his stunning account of Jeux by Claude Debussy with the New York Philharmonic.

I guess I am old now. I owned all these records. Then, some were released by RCA, and I wore them out. I bought the Berio and Carter three times on vinyl. They were released in the mid and late sixties when I, a fool, thought I might be able to live somehow in music, making music. For some of that time I was at The California Institute of the Arts where I studied with the formidable Schoenberg pupils, Leonard Stein and Dika Newlin, more doctrinaire than the Master himself, and frightening.

But in memory, I adore them, and Dika was an incredible person, an amazing woman, a genius, who like too many of us (including we who are less gifted) lived too long and died struggling to keep that spirit, that energy, which gets buried under the detritus of having to live among the pigs, vital, ageless, alive. Before then I had studied in Philadelphia and even, in 1965, met the amazing Stockhausen, when he was in residence at the University of Pennsylvania (where I don’t think he was much liked). I listened to him lecture and shook his hand, a fat boy still, with no evident promise but I felt – dimly – the electricity. Of course in that Philadelphia orbit were three composers that I know were great, largely forgotten now. One is George Crumb still alive and living around the corner from me. He’s 83. There was the complex and influential George Rochberg (1918-2005) and the profoundly kind Vincent Persichetti, 1915-1987 (sadly, none included in this package but copyright probably creates problems for republishing their music on sound documents, and who would buy it?) It’s rather brave of Sony to release these CDs. I don’t know if they will sell, but anyone who doesn’t listen to them is the poorer for it.

(Jackson Pollock, The Flame)

Unfortunately, Art in America first of all, had become a minority preoccupation by the time most of this music was written. “New Music” was a phrase that for those modest numbers hugging their Dvorak LPs, kissing their Haydn busts, automatically condemned what these men were doing. They were among the first generation in the history of art to be blamed for their genius, shrugged off, often without even a listen. Those who had certainly had to listen to the Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony quite a few times before “getting it” and feeling comfortable with it, hated that Carter or Feldman or Berio required – and rewarded – the same kind of concentration. Though there were Newspapers still and people actually read them, and all had arts pages, sadly, then as now in the few starving survivors, mostly manned by fools, their only hope was to become trendy, which didn’t always last. Opera lovers, notoriously the most unmusical and certifiably philistine group (“All I want to know is did she sing and hold that unwritten E flat.”) had no interest at all.

American concert audiences, probably the most conservative in the world, would talk through newer music or walk out on it. It was at a New York Philharmonic concert that Morton Feldman met John Cage. They were both so disturbed at the audible hatred of a Webern piece the orchestra had dared play, they had walked out and encountered one another, both upset, in the lobby. As happened in that vanished, magical New York, Cage took Feldman into his circle of friends, all artists, and helped Feldman move more easily on the path he was exploring already. Cage did Feldman that greatest service one New Yorker can do another; he found him an affordable apartment (next door to Cage, in fact). But he also articulated what Feldman was feeling. One of Cage’s dicta was "getting rid of the glue so that the sounds would be themselves”.

It’s the sort of thing that happened in New York into the early 1980’s. Not impossibly expensive to live in and so full of gifted people one was apt to trip over them and start a conversation. For someone who aspired to be an artist it was the most stimulating, the craziest, the most intense laboratory in the world. I had that experience myself when I moved there, dead broke, after graduate school at Yale, in 1974. Within months it seemed I had met everybody. Some people I already knew, but I literally collided with Wystan Auden in the street on East Fourth, I met Leonard Bernstein in an elevator. I bumped into Alan Ginsberg at an airless, seedy party in the West Village, given by a crazy neighbor of mine on Waverly and Bank Street who he only knew vaguely and when it seemed all was lost, rather than make excuses and flee (as some had already done) he started to “jam” his poetry, an incredible experience.

I was hefty and clumsy and ethnic looking as Feldman was, gay, as he was not, my close acquaintanceships and friendships led not to bed (though for the beauties of both sexes and all proclivities that did indeed happen) but to other meetings and other friends, endless conversations, five a.m. cups of coffee and a run to one’s makeshift job (I was a messenger for a time!!!!), quiet visits to crazy galleries where one could study the work, groups congregating at Village spaces where strange music in sort of but not quite a pop style  (my era was the height of “Downtown”) was played and one always got to know the artists. I met Patty Smith and her insane but remarkable circle at a gathering of that kind. Her intimate, Robert Mapplethorpe lived across from me when I moved to Chelsea, then rather a dangerous neighborhood.

(Morton Feldman and John Cage)

Perhaps I find Feldman so hypnotic because while he transcended all of this to create mysterious works that were instantly unforgettable. I also think I understand the clash between a strong ethnicity, inescapable for him (his parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, my father’s family were Southern Italian immigrants and we both grew up in almost entirely ethnic communities).

The Sony CD has three works, two of his greatest shorter pieces (he went on to become notorious for the length of his later compositions). At Cal Arts he was put down. Like most of these composers he rejected serialism and “undue” intellection. "The point is to erase in one's memory what happened before,” He said often. (Later, the theorists at Cal Arts developed a respect for him). He went on an interior journey to search out the sounds somehow ricocheting through his brain, through his being. That meant rejecting or trying to, most that was standard practice. "I don't know what a composer is," he once said. "I never knew as a young man, I don't know now and I'm gonna be fifty next month." 

His lectures (I went to some in New York) were very eccentric affairs and sometimes, I think, he was teasing an earnest audience that wanted “meaning” or safety. Art, he knew, isn’t about safety, it’s about danger. It’s not about knowing in advance but discovering during and perhaps understanding later. And music is the most powerful and dangerous of the arts. “I'm not creating music,” he said in a lecture, “it's already there, and I have this conversation with my material, you see” The music used in Rothko Chapel, which is the first piece on the CD devoted to him, is "already there”. He felt a kinship with Mark Rothko, both from Eastern European Jewish stock, both, though especially Rothko, concerned about what exactly art tells us, how we perceive it, whether meaning can ever be pinned down.

(Rothko, Underground fantasy (subway)

(Rothko Chapel)

Feldman “eases” into Rothko Chapel, meditating for ten measures. The five note chord in measure 11, played by the viola, celesta and vibraphone, is repeated eight times in various contexts in the course of the piece. That gives the ear a frame of reference, a map of sorts. Many of these composers repeat a great deal, changing sonority or the configurations of the chords. Feldman’s reiterations don’t seem to be building, there is no pressure, but with the inevitability of an object not at first perceived but always there and suddenly understood, in measure 314 a “quasi Hebraic melody” is sung by the small chorus. It is simple, beautiful and seems “new”, but it is actually very similar to the chords played throughout the piece. Feldman creates a small miracle of a work in which there is a quality of freedom from time in the chords that are repeated, and a piece that ends with a “line” that has a set shape. It’s astounding and moving at first hearing and more remarkable in repetition. 

(Frank O'Hara at MOMA looking at the camera with Sol Lewitt and Jeff Koons)

For Frank O’Hara, is a piece of very quiet meditation, repetition and silence; it’s as though Feldman were summoning an evanescent presence. “I prefer to think of my work as between categories,” Feldman said. “Between time and space. Between painting and music. Between the music’s construction and its surface.”  O’Hara wrote that he tried to keep "lies and evasions" out of his poetry. Feldman remarked on O’Hara’s "all-pervasive presence that seems to grow larger and larger as he moves away in time". O’Hara died at forty. Walking on the beach at Fire Island, he was hit by a dune buggy.  

After these pieces that haunt the memory, which are very moving, there is a wonderful study in sonority, rhythm, repetition and variation for percussion called, ironically, The King of Denmark. The playing of Max Neuhaus is stunning.  

Luckily, I heard Elliot Carter’s Variations for orchestra (1956) and Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with two chamber orchestras (1961) live, fairly often. The first time I heard the Variations for orchestra I was stunned and overwhelmed; every time thereafter the thrill was renewed. This is an incredible eruption of musical energy, phenomenally organized and controlled, but not to the point that its wild fires are doused. It’s not a typical theme and variations piece but rather an explosion of creative energy that after study one realizes is carefully organized. There is indeed a theme, though it doesn’t appear at first, and there are two contained musical gestures that Carter called ritornelli. They reappear, varied, but give the work a shape and certainty, while the theme when it is finally stated in full is changed in a dazzling variety of ways. Depending on how one “sets” one’s brain one can hear this work as a coruscating display of harmonic and instrumental variety, from chords that haunt the memory for days to instrumental combinations that are sheer magic. Or one can experience a gorgeous outpouring of tunes, parts of tunes, melodies that expand and contract, making it seem one of the most beautiful works for full orchestra ever written. It is all that and more, and is stunning as performed and recorded here by the New York Philharmonic under Frederik Prausnitz.

The Double Concerto seems to have begun in Carter’s mind as a serious work but in his notes he quotes the great satirist, Alexander Pope, as an actual inspiration. Musically, it is an amazing achievement, antic, odd, haunting, edgy and very beautiful indeed. Carter’s balancing of the two solo instruments and his handling of the orchestras is astounding, and live, the range of color, the wit, the emotion is overwhelming. This is also a great recording. Paul Jacobs, harpsichord, was the keyboardist of the New York Philharmonic. He was both a great musician and a great player. He would be an AIDS death; his many recordings, most on the Nonesuch label when it was run by Theresa Stern, are phenomenal but most have vanished. The pianist is the phenomenon, Charles Rosen, a wonderful player, but the greatest American music critic ever to have existed (he died in 2012 at 85). Ironically, his roommate at Princeton was another great music critic, Michael Steinberg! Neither saw precisely the lives they would have at that time.

The third work here, The Piano Concerto (1964-65) is somewhat thornier, yet those opening chords always thrill me, and the way thematic material develops through this virtuoso piece (spectacularly played by Jacob Lateiner, who commissioned it, with the Boston Symphony conducted by Erich Leisndorf) is finally thrilling – and moving -- as the piano, solo, simply fades away.

Carter was kissed by the muse: Charles Ives encouraged the boy to be a composer (Ives sold insurance to Carter’s family!). He studied with the great and ignored American symphonist Walter Piston at Harvard (as did that third important music critic, Peter G. Davis, still writing brilliantly, and for a long time the only knowledgeable voice at the New York Times, then, increasingly, the only knowledgeable voice about music in New York, magazine and city), then, of course, like so many Americans, with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (searchers after little known but very beautiful music should seek out the small body of work left by her sister, Lily, who died young). Aaron Copland was a passionate admirer of Carter’s and Igor Stravinsky thought he was the great American composer of his generation (The Piano Concerto is dedicated to Stravinsky on his 85^th birthday). 

Just a few words about the Berio CD. Of course, it contains the four movement Sinfonia with the Swingle Singers and the New York Philharmonic under the composer. This is a work very much of its time but it’s also irresistible. The singers mostly speak both carefully chosen and randomly heard lines accompanied ingeniously by the orchestra. It’s most famous movement is the third, where the accompaniment is Berio’s version of the Third Movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, where with sudden side slips, quotes from other composers leap out, the most instantly recognizable is a bit of Ochs’ waltz from Der Rosenkavalier, but Bach and Debussy and Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Posseur and Berio himself put in appearances as well. Berio was close friends with Umberto Eco (author, among much else, of The Name of the Rose) and read Joyce (quoted in the third movement, along with Samuel Beckett and Frank O’Hara, along with sentences and catch phrases from the Harvard students Berio spied on). Berio describes the whole work as a river in his notes. It’s an early postmodern collage of music, verbal images and odd displacements that deliberately overloads the senses, and like any substance that does that, it’s delectable. Also on this CD is the marvelous Allelujah ll – best heard live because five instrumental groups are distributed around the hall. But the CD is wonderfully recorded and Berio’s co-conductor is Pierre Boulez.

Allelujah ll has a lot in common with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen but it is a sweeter work of great charm. Berio and Stockhausen also had a influence on various rockers in common. One of Berio’s students was Phil Lesh, the Gateful Dead's famous bass player, who almost followed Berio to study further in Europe but accidentally met somebody named Jerry Garcia. But Stockhausen triumphed in this regard: Frank Zappa praises him in his liner notes for Freak Out! His debut with the Mothers of Invention in 1966. Pete Townshend of The Who remarked on an interest Stockhausen, and Rick Wright and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd followed his lead. LSD was no detriment in appreciating the slightly mad German, Jefferson Airplane admired him. And greatest accolade of all, his face appears on the cover of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band! However, Stravinsky, after a brief period of being influenced by Stockhausen (as he was influenced by nearly everybody over close to a century), put Stockhausen down as a bore. It didn’t matter to Karlheinz who famously said: “I was educated at Sirius and want to return to there, although I am still living in Kürten near Cologne.” On hearing this, the great conductor, Michael Gielen snarled: "When he said he knew what was happening at Sirius, I turned away from him in horror. I haven't listened to a note since", he accused the composer of "hubris" and "nonsense", though Gielen (a Moon Child) himself believed in astrology!

Sony has released two other CDs that are must haves for we insane collectors. One is Leonard Bernstein’s famous account of The Rite of Spring (in its original 1913 form) from 1958. This was a Bernstein specialty, as a young man he even prepared a score for his mentor Serge Koussevitsky of the Boston Symphony so the latter, baffled by the constant changes in meter could manage to lead it. Bernstein himself needed no such thing. His complete immersion in the piece not only yields a very accurate account but an orgiastic, mad ceremony of dementia, which puts a tremendous strain on orchestra and on recording team, luckily all are equal to it. Stravinsky said he loved what Bernstein did and maybe he meant it. Bernstein rides two horses in triumph: the modern aspects of the work’s harmonies and rhythms and its debt to high romanticism in sheer crazy abandon. In a sense, he catches and highlights Stravinsky’s debt to all those wild late romantics who could hardly contain their emotions, their madness, but at the same time exercises a razor sharp control. The wildness of this performance, its risk taking, its exaltation, its noise, its sudden sweetness and insinuation, these together are not to be encountered elsewhere. Sony has created an engaging package..

The other wonderful CD called Journeys is the Emerson String Quartet (assisted wonderfully by Paul Neubauer and Colin Carr) playing two sextets. One journey is outwards, Tchaikovsky’s popular Souvenir de Florence, (1890) played with rich tone and virtuosity, a sense of humor and the unabashed singing sense the second movement demands. The other journey is inward, Schoenberg’s gorgeous Verklärte Nacht – Transfigured Night from 1899, long before he had become the monster many still regard him as being (without knowing any of his music). This is the first time the quartet has played this piece.


Actually both works have something in common: they are about sex. Italy was where hordes of gay men from repressive countries went in search of young men and boys who were always accommodating and often on sale. There is an underlying seriousness in the work, also sweetness and longing. As it happens it is in D minor and that was Schoenberg’s favorite key. It is the key that opens Transfigured Night, which by the end of the work, where the problems of a passionate sexual relationship between a man and a woman are resolved has become D major. It is based on a poem by Richard Dehmel printed in the score (and in the Sony booklet).  Dehmel was the poet of the Strauss’ lied, Befreit. He was also tried for obscenity! Well, after all, the poem ends with the man placing his arms around the woman’s hips and…!

SONG

(by Frank O'Hara; there is a reference to Beethoven's Quartet no. 15, where the composer writes "muss es sein?" Then later insists, "muss es sein!" Frank isn't so sure it "must be so.")

I am stuck in

traffic in a taxicab

which is typical

and not just of modern life

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves

must lovers of Eros end up with Venus

muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you

how I hate disease, it's like worrying

that comes true

and it simply must not be able to happen

in a world where you are possible

my love

nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

(Frank O'Hara)

Parsifal: Wagner's Secret Gospel

In Parsifal Richard Wagner was massaging his hemorrhoids, whilst resting one cheek on a Cosima embroidered pillow and applying Schopenhauer’s lotion to the throbbing wound within, when he cried, “Cosima, Crikey! I will use the suffering of the sex obsessed wounded king on the one hand and a pretty boy on the other, and have my devil woman laugh at Jesus then die! It’s not about racial purity and how impure races have infiltrated us, the idea is the World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) -- it is Schopenhauer!!!!” “Master!” Cried Cosima as she slipped to her knees….

Actually, I’m joking. But how many idiots write in that style and can tell you just what Parsifal means? I see perfervid defenses of what, taken literally is indefensible, all the time, written by morons such as Stephen Jay Taylor (among the biggest idiots to hold forth) who uses his Dictaphone whilst playing ‘hide the gopher’ with the preposterously stupid Richard Garmise (also from Opera Brittania.)

So many people feel they must share their thoughts of Wagner the Man or No he really didn’t mean it as though they know anything, as though there really were such a thing as table turning and they could talk to “the Master”. Meanwhile, their thoughts on what we can actually know about his music and it’s execution in a particular piece are banal, unperceptive and so moronic they are probably deaf – presumably the reason other idiots from up the food chain hired them.

I’m no longer amused by the Wagner industry; he was writing entertainments and Parsifal has all the sex and religion one would expect in Thais, for example. If Massenet perforce must forego all of Anatole France’s wit about Christianity, the pretentious worship of the Greek masters, even the twisted psychologies of his leading characters (a pagan whore converted to The Christ by a Christian nut job named Paphnuce in the original – Massenet had enough sense to change the name to Atanael!), the result is at least not a pretentious farrago. Parsifal is not a work of philosophy – Nietzsche saw through that with priceless wit. Its libretto is a libretto, period. Did Wagner mean it, do you think? Actually the writing is less pompous and self regarding than most of “the Master’s” work, he uses free verse, easy rhymes, many exclamations, old fashioned recitative now and then, and only some of that ringy dingy nonsense known as Stabreim (pardon, ringy dingy is an old person’s reference to Laugh-In, though a good many recent productions of Parsifal, not an opera but a Bühnenweihfestspiel, are rather like Laugh-In). 

That long word means a “Sacred Stage Festival Play” and there is a pun contained in the word “weihen”, which means a “consecration”. How does the word sacred relate to Schopenhauer, an atheist, who was part of the first intellectual group to actually discover how contradictory, illogical and obviously much edited after the fact the Gospels were? How does the notion of “consecration” relate to The Buddha, supposedly another influence on the story? How could The Christ have been Aryan when even in Wagner’s time scholars such as Ludwig Feuerbach understood that if there really was a Joshua (Jesus is the Greek version of the name, a language a poor Jew would not have spoken, but since Aramaic was the language spoken most widely at the time, The Savior was probably called Yeshu) he would have been a small, dark, Palestinian who very likely never saw a blond person in His life!!! He might have thought one was the devil!!!

(Jesus as he very likely looked)

One may feel inclined as a perfect Wagnerian to screen these things out as we do in entertainments that we are legislated to enjoy and settle back and enjoy the music. But still the pretentious posturing out there, the automatic assumption that mere operas are “profound”, “searching” or even particularly revealing of what their creators really thought about complex issues irritates the Widder.

Certainly as a dramatic text, Parsifal is preposterous. It relies on endless exposition; its symbols are embarrassing, its point confused on the surface but stemming from the bigotry for which Wagner was famous. Its view of women is ludicrous; the odd sex scene that forms most of act two has -- like the entire work – to be hedged when described by the Wagner Industry, explained in contradictory ways that reflect nothing that would actually ever occur in life. But there’s no question that in Wagner’s plan Kundry the eternal whore must die – redeemed by the beautiful Aryan boy who has declined her favors but baptized her into – what? Schopenhauer? Buddhism? Is it to be taken at face value, do you think?

It’s really all nonsense, modern directors try very hard to minimize the composer’s own explicit directions. Kundry lives nowadays, sometimes she takes over in contemporary Konzept productions. They must ignore The Master’s contemporaneous hate filled writings, and even worse, the snippets of colloquial bigotry to be found in Cosima’s million word diary around the time of his composing Parsifal where The Jews are likened to a swarm of flies in the wound of a horse. Or, Cosima records a “capital” joke of Richard’s, “All the Jews should be burned….”. God help anyone who is not white and doesn’t join an all male society that believes the myth called Christianity, “a human being who is born black, urged upwards to the heights becomes white, and at the same time a different creature”. (these edifying quotes and more of the same can be found in Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, February 9, 1882 and December 18, 1881)

But most of the people hired to write or talk about music can’t. So they refer constantly back to the prolix, pretentious, bizarre texts, which can only be tolerated not because Wagner was a great thinker, psychologist, or good heavens, a dramatist. He was, more often than not, able to write music of remarkable power. Unless there is something else going on in Parsifal, as some Theologians of the seventies thought there was a secret Gospel to be pieced together from hints and oddities in the familiar canonical writings.

I was able to get a video of The Salzburg Parsifal this spring, telecast on March 28. Led by Christian Thielemann, the cast includes Johan Botha, Stephen Milling, Wolfgang Koch and Michaela Schuster. The production is by Michael Schulz.

(Thielemann as a Karajan assistant)

There was some controversy because the Berlin Philharmonic had gotten a better offer from Baden-Baden and decamped with their leader, Simon Rattle. Very late in the game, Thielemann jumped in and brought “his” orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle.

But he also made a decision to do the work with an attention to details of orchestration and harmony that is often lost in standard performances, no matter how well played and rehearsed. To achieve this lighter weight; and to support rather than war on the singers, he raised the pit and urged the orchestra to listen to the singers, and the singers to “locate” themselves within the orchestral fabric. He emphasized the vocal lines and how they were set and how musical details colored and enriched them.

The result is amazing. He achieves an astonishing range of colors effortlessly, without needing all the tricks of slowing down, sudden speeding up, inserting pauses or italicizing phrases. Rhythms have a wonderful spring and immediacy but are varied subtly to increase both the songfulness of the writing and also, when needed, to add intensity without the heavy-handed rhetoric one is used to. Above all, he has ignored the lexicon of mannerisms Parsifal has attracted at least since the fifties; there isn’t any of the faux “spiritual” stretching of phrases, there is no forcing of climaxes. Nothing is dragged for effect, there are no oddities of balance or showy sudden shifts in sonority in the orchestra, and there is no playing with phrases, extending or contracting them, deliberately creating instability of movement in search of mystical hypnotism.

Instead, the score sounds – well -- new. The colors are Wagner’s, the balances are honest. I have my own suspicions about why Thielemann made these choices; the emphasis here is on what matters most, the composer’s extraordinary musical invention, seductive, challenging and above all, in its time, original. His singers all are exact, prompt, musicianly. Though this cast in general is not a parade of vocal marvels, it is rewarding to follow with the score because the singers have been coached so carefully to operate within the musical framework.

If this was much or part of Thielemann’s strategy, it is entirely understandable here. No one in their right mind would want to see what is transpiring on stage in this production. Though Wagner’s psychological “insights” and philosophical pretension are worthless, this particular attempt to make them palatable is grotesque first to last – not amusingly grotesque just fun house nutty.

Whether I am right, Thielemann has actually followed the composer not the story teller. In Parsifal the motives flow up from the orchestra, rather than from the vocal line or (with a few exceptions) by being generated by dramatic events. There are fewer “obvious” leitmotifs; instead, there is a remarkable free flowing musical invention where the composer uses, with evident spontaneity, musical material from the first act effortlessly changed, reharmonized, differently colored to create remarkable effects, imitations of which will be heard well into the 1920’s. For my taste it is the most astounding and stimulating of Wagner’s works musically, a work of infinite musical resource and originality. By avoiding the usual inflation and pomposity, the all too familiar stasis, Thielemann and his virtuoso orchestra allow the results of the composer’s imagination to flower. Whatever one thinks of the work’s text or dramatic concerns, the odd beauty, the shock of the music is evident in every bar. Sad that there are words too, or at least, these words.

Anyone who looks at a score notices that Wagner has quietly created a new kind of modulation that carried further would weaken and undermine the importance of tonality. The beginning of act two, “the sorcerer’s lair” is a version of the serene beginning of act one – but in act two the stability of the chord underlying the start of the opera is destroyed by the introduction of a tritone (“the devil in music”). Throughout much of the opera, diatonic harmony is always on the brink of extinction. Wagner continually bases his key relationships not on the expected tonic/dominant mode of modulation in tonal music, but on thirds, constantly shifting one’s sense of a firm tonal center. Even the more obviously diatonic stretches have unexpected resolutions or shifts that call established keys into question. Everything in Parsifal evolves, shifts, twists. This is most obvious in the highly chromatic, for its time very daring and for us, fascinating, act two. But even in the first and third act “classical” progressions harmonically can never be taken for granted.

Is it possible that the harmonic instability of the work, its experimentation, its oddities (often smoothed out by the standard performances) contain a secret? Does the music suggest that Wagner himself doesn’t really believe this story either? Is it possible that the old man, writing what was certain to be his last work, decided to make Christological textual references(after all both his terrifying wife and crucially his patron, King Ludwig, had to be convinced of the probity of Wagner the man, something he was conspicuously lacking in his real life), while calling all meaning into question? It is nice to believe in redemption, but is it real? Can we be sure? Perhaps this is why in the Good Friday Spell of act three the typical emphasis on suffering quickly gives way to the beauty of nature renewed every spring, perhaps the only life after death we humans can be sure of. And maybe that is the secret underlying what seems forced, hypocritical, weird or pompous on the surface.

Just a few words about the production: The enormous Johann Botha is dressed all in green throughout the entire opera, with a big and tall style bargain store jacket that once seen will haunt one’s dreams for life. The equerries and helpers of Gurnemanz are dressed in white uniforms. When the music tells us Kundry is riding up ferociously, they form a circle around Gurnemanz and jump up and down. They look like Woody Allen’s version of anxious sperm in his version of All you Wanted to Know about Sex. Amfortas looks very hearty to be in agony from a wound that won’t heal, and during the Grail ceremony (whatever the Grail is, it is in a box picked out of a back alley) two Asian women who appear to be topless entwine themselves around him. And oh, yes, we’ve already met Jesus crucified. He appears shortly after Kundry does, “shadowed” by what appears to be a ninja. This Christ is very taken with Kundry, and walking like a crippled mime he follows her around. But then Parsifal has appeared with a troop of boys wearing green t-shirts and white jackets (I thought he was wandering alone fighting his way through the world? Guess not).

In act two, the setting is a museum with white statues that suggest cheap antiquities though I thought one giant head looked rather like Wagner retching. The real villain is a little person (let’s be un-PC and call him a dwarf). This dwarf is a virtuoso mugger, twisting his face into astonishing shapes – even at his curtain call! Klingsor is sung by Amfortas (actually the music of both is chromatic and to a degree related, maybe the director reads music). But it’s the dwarf who “conducts” the action, sitting atop a big head. Kundry has doffed her trench coat, dragging it behind her, revealing a tattoo sleeve and she has put on shoes. Her dress looks like it was gotten from a dumpster but that trench coat will come in handy.

In scene two, the girls wear cute burlesque style uniforms that come off to reveal filmy dresses, but some of their number wears white 70’s disco attire with big boots, the Jane Fonda Barbarella look. Parsifal enters with his troop, this time a bunch of – twinks – I think is the colloquial word in some circles. Twinks and girls whirl around each other and make out while Parsifal watches – a bi-curious pure fool? This goes on through the seduction scene. Parsifal and Kundry stay as far apart as possible. He sits through most of the scene. She lolls on a statue of what might be the Buddha, making out with it, since Parsifal doesn’t seem interested. The Crucified shows up here too and naturally, Kundry and he are mighty attracted to one another (the “Tristan” chord appears right after Kundry says, “sein Blick” in her narrative of laughing at The Christ, maybe she was turned on, too – that’s certainly Wagner implication. Again, maybe this director actually read the score. Although whether The Master wanted us to see The Christ and the whore of Babylon ogling one another is a question).

Act three is bare planks, dead bodies, Parsifal in green suit but holding some kind of home made mask made from a wire clothes hanger in front of his face to start. Soon enough boys and girls in green show up to demonstrate nature’s renewal. And here’s Christ again but this time he falls dead. The Ninja strips off his black shinobi shozoko and – it’s another Christ. Only he’s handsome, young, and aroused by Kundry. But he has bad luck, at the very end of the opera, though Parsifal has redeemed everybody (even Amfortas still strong enough to drag those two Asian dancers on with him, and to hurl his dead father, a plaster of Paris mummy, far behind the stage), this new Christ is crucified again just as he and Kundry appear about to conjoin. She is forced to her knees at the foot of the cross. Black out.

This is a wonderful performance to listen to. Thielemann’s balancing of chords and pointing of details and the instantaneous response of the orchestra is magical throughout. His ear is a keen as Boulez’ on his recording, but Boulez’ orchestra is not on this level and he has no feeling for the romantic gestures in the music, often rushing through. His great scene is the Klingsor scene, fantastically realized, but Thielemann with a somewhat riper sonority matches that. When the music should expand or have a highly colored quality Thielemann provides it without ever making a meal of anything. Boulez does not or will not expand. Armin Jordan who conducts the sound track for the once crazy but in comparison to this production interesting Syberberg film has a similar feeling for the flow and inevitability of the music and for its frequent changes and odd modulations. But again his orchestra is not as good or as responsive, and his male chorus, though they make an impressive general sound, doesn’t really sound prompt and idiomatic.

Koch, Amfortas and Klingsor is a virtuoso; he sings the magician’s very hard line with it shifts in key and easy to miss notes precisely, and his rhythm is superb, as is his elocution. As Amfortas he is hamstring by the production, but his phrasing and specificity musically are very rewarding. He has a fine voice, but not the glamour of tone Peter Mattei demonstrated this spring at the Met, the gorgeous ease of the younger Jose Van Dam on the Karajan performance, or the impact of George London on the first Knappertsbusch (1951). And for a real experience of agony and grandeur one can find Hans Hotter’s stunning early account of the third act monolog live from Vienna.

Milling is a good Gurnemanz, not wobbly or hoarse, always in tune, with clear words and an eloquent feeling for his phrases. It’s a good, dark, somewhat high set voice without the gorgeousness of Kurt Moll (first Karajan), or the immense abandon of Ludwig Weber (Kna, ’51) or the verbal magic of Hotter in the 1960 Kna, where his singing is variable and he wobbles but the impact of his performance is magnificent.

I adore Michaela Schuster, I loved her as the Nurse in Frau from last year’s Salzburg Festival (that is another great musical performance accompanying an odd, distracting production, available on a Decca DVD) and I’ve seen her be a thrilling Ortrud. She holds back here, concerned with staying in tune, and also keeping her tone focused as the line gets higher in act two. It’s a very intelligent reading of the role, but her singing is modest in impact. Physically she is not well cast, and thanks to the TV close ups, often looks uncomfortable (since she has to stare with lust at a hunky young Christ one can’t blame her).

Opera ‘Net scum, like the stupid fool, Stephen Jay Taylor, make fun of Botha. Of course, he’s badly cast physically. At the same time the role was being sung at the Met by the handsome Jonas Kaufmann and in Berlin by the very Aryan looking Klaus Florian Vogt. Both are good actors, Kaufmann particularly, and both were in more supportive productions. In a different time Botha would have shown up in front of the designer and cut that suit to pieces. Even in a different time though, Botha would probably have been thought better cast in concert. But especially on TV there is no winning for him. Close ups show emotion in his face but he really can’t move, and doesn’t. To hear him, though, is another experience entirely. Far more than Kaufmann or Vogt he is really a heldentenor. He has abundant, effortlessly produced tone that is both commanding and when he wishes, lovely. In act three where his singing is splendid throughout, he has a wonderful piano which is fully attached to his voice, not a croon, not separated from how he produces his tone, he can vary dynamics with skill and to fine effect and his grand “Nur eine Waffe taugt” is really thrilling.

Even though one can find a better performer of this or that role, I hope this is released as a recording. It’s a phenomenal Parsifal and a curative one and maybe a subtle demonstration of Wagner’s secret.

I should note that I don’t care about regie or off beat productions. Some work really well; I’m something of a fan of Peter Konwitschny and Hans Neuenfels. Both have profound, disturbing, powerful ideas about the operas they direct. Of course some productions in this school misfire and others are amazingly bad like the Salzburg Parsifal. But exactly the same can be said of “conventional” approaches, which often settle for the most obvious and tired images and sometimes miss the point of the opera in question just as much as a demented regie production. Loren Maazel, last week, was hostile to these “new” sorts of productions (not so new, in fact) and bragged that he got a huge positive response. He is a man of great general culture and intellect who also ran The Vienna State Opera; all the same, one has to go by the particular production and the kind of sense it makes of that senseless form, opera. Generalizations, even by someone as experienced as he, rarely have value in any large sense.   

THE OBESE, THE GIFTED, THE AUTHENTIC

(Ruggero Leoncavallo)

I got to thinking about fat people who create music. That may or may not be because the widder and her poor twin, whose name is around, wanted to compose and are persons of size. Alack! Neither had any talent so life went on and music was the better for it -- if you call what they do living and think life is better in these times --“auguri” as the Italians say. In fact, there aren’t many fat composers. Handel loved to eat. The sums budgeted specifically for his meals when he would be the guest of one or another cardinal in Rome are enormous. Known as Il sassone – The Saxon – his gigantic size was much remarked. It’s a pun, since “ona/o/e” is applied to the chubby in a familiar context. He was both "The Saxon" and the BIG Saxon. (We are assuming the reference is to Handel's overall size and not a particular organ, but given his suspected proclivities and the known ones of several of those cardinals, it's best to keep an open mind). Violetta might be called Violettina after a night of love by Alfredo, but were the sex act fattening for her he might pinch her pudgy cheeks and croon, Violettona, or since, many Italians leave off the final vowel if they are being familiar, she might be Violetton’ – perhaps more in the South than the North. When old Germont arrives to break the couple up, he might remark instead of “pur tanto lusso!” (what luxury),  “eppur si mangia!!!” (You eat a lot).

Handel was tall, though, and while he looks hearty in some portraits he doesn’t appear to have been fat. Schubert was teased by his friends for being chubby. Rossini was plump. Wagner had hemorrhoids and needed plush pillows upon which to sit. That suggests he liked to eat starchy foods but he wasn’t fat. Though judging from his choice for the first Tristan he didn’t mind fat people:

(Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld)

Brahms and Puccini, judging from portraits, look as though they gained weight in age, though not so much as to be remarked on. Toscanini hated fat people, being tiny himself. He used to make nasty fun of the gifted and on a few records, remarkable, Albert Coates:

Sadly, Maestro Coates greatly admired "Tosca" (as the 8000 or so women the erotomaniac bedded called him), But the widder and her twin aren't so naive. There are many, many millions of hideous thin people, and guess what? They die too.

But we were thinking about fleshy composers. About the only one who comes to mind is Ruggero Leoncavallo. He wrote Pagliacci. He was a genuine fatty. In fact, Toscanini called him, Mangia-cavallo, meaning horse eater. One can't pretend our Leoncavallo was a great, or even by the highest standards, a good composer. But the widder has a weakness for the quite awful verismo movement in Italy. Puccini, the only Italian genius of the time, was a member merely to a degree -- although like the others he was influenced by Massenet and Wagner and by Catalani who was from the same town and loved by Toscanini (in that rumbustious, emotional way of Italian men for one another, all tears and embraces, dances and lady chasing but no sex).

Toscanini told Puccini that he could never match up to Catalani, a composer of considerable gifts who never completely found a distinctive voice and died of TB at the age of 42 in the sobbing Toscanini's arms. But his most famous opera, La Wally, is a lot of fun as well as the inspiration for the name of Beaver's brother, Wally, the sex idol of The Widder's childhood in the American masterpiece, Leave it to Beaver -- our sad twin preferred Johnny Crawford in The Rifleman, sort of American verismo! (yes, yes, the widder is aware that Wally is short for some American name -- goodness! could it be Wallingford? No, more likely, Wallace. But the widder always thought, wouldn't it be wonderful for a suburban American couple to name their older son after the wild Valkyrie of the Alps who is crushed contemplating sin in an avalanche? Actually, the theme for The Rifleman with its opening rather Wagnerian horn call is by Herschel Burke Gilbert who died at 85 just ten years ago. He matriculated at Julliard, studied with Aaron Copland and became rich enough to form Laurel records which featured a remarkable range of works. In The Rifleman he wrote both leit motifs and longer themes for particular characters, and in fact his work in that overlooked medium is very distinguished -- he was at least as good as most of the Verismo composers. But perhaps this is all one needs to know).

But all that going on last week about authenticity got my twin and me to thinking about famous composers who have left behind some concrete indication of how their music should be performed, before the long playing record or even the "electrical" recording process (starting about 1927) where in good sound and without worry, a composer/conductor, or a performance supervised by the composer could make his/her intentions (at least of that moment) clear. There was a vinyl explosion of sorts starting in the early 1950's of new and very recent music performed or supervised by the composers but too often these were small labels with uncertain distribution and short lives.

It's true that a fair number of recent composers have had the opportunity of complete performances in good sound, often with famous performers, to make a case for their music. For the still living but lesser known, Naxos has released reasonable to excellent performances of some of their music, as have other smaller labels -- although performances can vary considerably in security, assurance and excellence of execution. One misses the Louisville label and its vast catalog of American music. It's sad that a great company such as Nonesuch could not stay in business as it was first envisioned by Teresa Sterne, and too many of their authoritative releases have not found their way on to CD.

But I'm thinking of an older generation of composers, those who died before recording technology reached any heights. In many cases one must look to piano rolls. And our mind jumped immediately to Leoncavallo playing his Intermezzo from Pagliacci. It is a very soulful performance. These rolls come from various places and were made in various ways, and there has always been controversy over how reliable tempos were, since speeds could vary; also attribution is sometimes a problem, since documentation can be lacking. But there is no question in this case; this is Ruggero Leoncavallo in 1905. It’s a piece I’m very fond of, based as you know, on the lyric section of the Prolog, sung by the baritone (usually the one who plays Tonio, but for the first night it was sung by the Silvio, Mario Ancona, scarcely less famous than the first Tonio, Victor Maurel, creator of Iago and Falstaff in the Verdi operas, whose idea the prolog had been, he also came up with the opera's title. “Un nido di memorie” – a nest of memories -- sings the soloist -- meditating on the creative process. This is developed into a lovely short piece.)

Leoncavallo plays in an old fashioned way, rolling the right hand chords, getting the left in slightly before the right and taking a free view of the tempo. No one will know how Toscanini conducted the first night since he hated the opera. Leoncavallo may have lifted the idea at least as far as putting the crime of a jealous husband killing his wife in a theatrical milieu from the French writer, Catulle Mendès, who certainly thought so. But then, in counter suit, Leoncavallo accused Mendès of lifting his play from an earlier Spanish play, and insisted his plot was based on a case his father, a prosecutor, investigated in his childhood in Calabria. The musicologist, Matteo Sansone, in investigating all this, suspects that Leoncavallo at least got the idea from Mendès and other French writers and then scrubbed the more obvious evidence of influence (the composer spent most of the 1880’s living poor in Paris.). Leoncavallo was very clever theatrically. He was one of seven librettists to work on Manon Lescaut; he had the idea to make an opera that would be called La Boheme and foolishly told Puccini who took the idea and literally ran with it, getting it on a year earlier than Leoncavallo’s interesting, more cynical version, truer to the source material but not the masterpiece the Puccini work is. And then he came up with a soap opera, that when performed with commitment in the right style is pretty effective, called Zaza (also in a theatrical setting, and to be barely heard in a pirate starring Mafalda Favero from 1950 – but there it is overwhelming.)

However, since Leoncavallo is thought a lousy composer there is no definitive version of Zaza. A recording with the queen and sadly the undertaker of verismo in its last true decade, the fifties, Clara Petrella, uses the German edition, cuts, variations in melodic lines and all, translated back into Italian. There was an MRF LP with a version from the publisher's archives and some corrections, starring the American, Lynn Strow Piccolo, now a proud member of the Tea Party. But while that is the most accurate version (and Madame Strow-Piccolo is very good) there still are questions about cuts, simplifications and some odd harmonic readings. Even the doyenne of 21^st century Opera chic work ethic, Renee Fleming, uses an odd variant for her quite sincere recording of one of Zaza’s tear jerking scenes; probably most clearly heard from Claudia Muzio on one of her Edison records, transferred superbly by Ward Marston. That is young Claudia at her heart breaking bitter sad best.

Pardon me, but I must play that. Zaza, a music hall performer, has discovered that her lover is married. She goes to his home and his little daughter plays the piano for her as she waits for his wife. She says, "how could I hurt this little person?" and yet -- and listen to her say "ho sognato, ho sognato" -- I've dreamed, I'VE DREAMED...!!!" As though life's victims should even dare dream of -- something, anything, love...

Perhaps that is a case of a magnetic interpreter of great imagination ennobling an obvious piece (we write as we wipe our eyes). But back to the question: can a conductor capture the sweetness of Leoncavallo's playing with a marvelous modern symphony orchestra simply by looking at the score? The charismatic leader here is another short, thin man, Herbert Von Karajan.

I think I’m with Ruggero on this one.

But how about a real composer? Gustav Mahler made four piano rolls including the finale of his Fourth Symphony, truly demented but not on You Tube. So, with some hesitation we can skip over the Funeral March from the Fifth Symphony (not quite as demented), and settle for a song, “Ich ging mit Lust.” This is a delectable, slightly naughty tune, to which our Gustav does surprising things. The composer starts with very simple material in D major with just little notes but soon has conjured up the woods (in the bass), the tree tops (a rising triad and a bit of bird song), a quick shift to the minor lets us in on an amorous early morning tryst, and a reassuring return lets us know that’s something the couple will enjoy again. This is also from 1905.

But since this is a song, we need a singer to make his or her own decisions as well as a pianist to help out. This is Christa Ludwig with Gerald Moore from 1957.

(lyrics are at the end of this blog)

If the question here is does a composer’s actual performance suggest a style, which interpreters can learn from, I think the answer in this case is yes. Mahler’s performance is surprisingly edgy and hard. The bird song has something aggressive about it. The bass is inflected to sound almost threatening. Nature in Mahler isn’t always friendly or safe. The text suggests a mild dalliance but they can turn dangerous (see Pagliacci). In Mahler’s performance there is something unstable, a sense of surprise. In Ludwig’s attractive singing there is allure and musical sophistication, from her pianist too. Perhaps given singers and songs that’s all one can really hope for and it’s fine. Yet two conductors who were mature musicians were champions and friends of Mahler, Oscar Fried and William Mengelberg. Alma, Mrs. Mahler, rather liked Mengelberg but thought Fried, almost as eccentric as her husband, “too Jewish”, something she thought of her husband too.

(Those still inclined to doubt that Alma Mahler was the most audacious and flamboyant liar ever to publish "non-fiction" should read Jonathan Carr’s carefully documented and entirely unsentimental – about both husband and wife -- biography. If they are inclined to say Mahler’s younger associates, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer were “calmer”, “more tasteful” or "truer" interpreters than Fried and Mengelberg they should keep in mind that both had to fight to get performances of the works, and that neither wanted to be thought “too Jewish” – translation: too emotional, eccentric, abandoned).

Fried and Mengelberg left complete recordings of two symphonies. Fried made a remarkable account of the huge Second Symphony in 1924 by the acoustical process. Mengelberg’s broadcast of the Fourth was recorded in 1939. Both offer performances very much in the spirit of Mahler’s piano rolls. Both are careful to observe all of the composer’s many expressive markings, but they are free about tempo, rhythmic articulation, phrasing and dynamic level. They take big risks, Fried more so since he is obviously working with a reduced orchestra (and when the time comes, chorus) and there are substitutions of instruments. It doesn’t matter; the performance is dangerous. It is ferocious, ironic, uproarious, mysterious, Jewish and Christian, It is a study in contradiction, in tempestuous moods that change quickly, in crazy outbursts, and intimate whispers.

No other conductor, though all get “better” sound, comes anywhere near this emotional abandon. Just as no other conductor makes a point of observing all of Mahler’s indications as broadly and forcefully as Mengelberg does. They both make full use of the rhetorical devices we know that Mahler used, portamento, rubato, sudden extreme dynamic shifts, yet in both cases what they do seems to proceed from whatever produced the music, not merely from their willfulness (or more typical in our time, timidity). I think even in the tiny song as played on the piano roll these qualities are present, they are present in the longer pieces Mahler banged out. Mahler was a contradictory personality, ruthless, unpleasant, manipulative and nasty, needy, vulnerable, lonely, angry, social, witty, worldly, a success who was a failure, a failure who succeeded beyond what would be anyone’s wildest dreams, a Jew who became an odd, sentimental Christian, and the victim of a vicious horror who won their brief battle. Walter (“drat that I was born a Brit, had I been a Jerry I’d have saved Our Adolf") Legge -- like Hitler he loved Lehar above serious music -- always said Mahler was a phony; that it was all superficial effect, and even that is true sometimes. You shouldn’t be able to predict a Mahler symphony, you shouldn’t feel comforted after one. It doesn’t matter if Mahler would have made very different choices. He probably did, in the same work in the same period as “the spirit” moved him. Fried (best heard on the Naxos pressing) and Mengelberg (Phillips) and Mahler himself suggest as much. And that is present on what he left behind. But I think it will be a long time before renewed study of his autographs and other documents (including in this instance sound documents) will lead to what might well be crazier yet truer Mahler. 

Another source of "authenticity" is teacher/disciple pupil communication. This in fact has been a mainstay of trying to figure out just how those 19th century composers who taught or had circles of followers who taught meant their music to sound. Many composers needed the income from teaching, and famous musicians, when they could no longer perform, taught (when it comes to singers, it's true they often taught what they never knew to begin with).

On the one hand the nature of music means that much can be transmitted by a good teacher, on the other hand, though, great performers have big egos and their own ideas, and if they are instrumentalists, live long enough frequently to develop styles of their own. "Romantics" (one could probably describe most performers with that word -- flexibly used -- into the nineteen twenties at least) often valued, some would say, over valued, the impulse of the moment, their own moods, a trust in psychic connections over literally following the score. So, whatever their teacher who had studied with famous composer X had said fifty years before, might go up in smoke, as they indulged themselves. Yet the score is both a crucial indicator of what should happen, and a series of hints. A computer can play the notes, but only a human can make sense of them. Composer-performers themselves often took liberties with their pieces as the spirit moved them, sometimes they forgot them altogether -- as Richard Strauss in New York, forgot the accompaniments to his songs when playing for Elizabeth Schumann and improvised as she sang what he had written! Still, if old music is going to dominate our repertory, shouldn't we want clues as to what the creator really wanted in performance? Perhaps we are talking of a precarious balance between "accuracy" and impulse. But if the impulses come from an "accurate" and complete sense of what the composer intended, then the impulses are likelier to be "true" in their own way. The corruption of the familiar by mindless repetition and habit that we've seen in so much of the "standard repertory" might be avoided, less by slavish and mechanical devotion to written notes then by a constant immersion in them, so that a talented interpreter is never merely taking the over familiar for granted but also never ascending into weird spaces just for novelty's sake.

Our minds (my twin's and mine) went to a favorite piece: Chopin's Nocturne in F sharp major, Opus 15. There is a piano roll by the great (though controversial) Raoul Pugno made in 1903 and there are two important historical records, one by Edouard Risler and a second by Alfred Cortot (from 1948). All three had close connections to Chopin himself. Pugno studied with his student, George Mathias; Risler and Cortot studied with Emile Descombes, a close disciple of Chopin. According to Pugno, Mathias quoted Chopin complaining that the piece was always played too fast. But in the Henle edition of Chopin, which publishes the urtexts (and certain alternates), the metronome marking is faster than Pugno uses and Risler plays the urtext exactly. Cortot is closer to Risler but by 1948 had stopped practicing and works his own magic (or according to the opinion of some, doesn't). 

The nocturne is composed in the key of F sharp major. According to Schumann that would be a distant, chilly or frightening key, or one of longing (it is the key of Schumann's wonderful  Romance from his opus 28, also of the second Scriabin etude from Opus 8.) It is A-B-A form, in 2/4. The first section is marked Larghetto, a little largo, slow but not so slow, it's metronome is 40. The opening melody is one of those endless breaths spun over an even bass (Bellini seems to be around, the Nocturne was written a year after Norma).  The bass is marked sostenuto, certainly steady but maintained, even sung, as the melody, somewhat unstable with its trills flies overhead. There is also an arresting counter theme in f sharp minor, which has an unforgettable series of dolcissimo falling phrases.

Among its features is a fascinating long ornamentation in measure 12, marked leggiero -- lightly and very soft -- to be followed by the marking con forza -- with force -- three bars later. This is so typical of the feverishness, the abandon of The Romantics that it should be in the performance, understood to "mean" something by the player.

The middle is marked doppio movimento (twice as quickly) and sotto voce -- whispering, perhaps. The haunting beauty of the start is interrupted by something haunting or odd and this builds with force and in agitation. But there is a return to the first theme, shortened by ten bars, gorgeously ornamented and using the extremes of the keyboard until dying away on an F sharp major arpeggio.

I think Pugno is the most spellbinding of these, also the freest, with some very distinctive readings of note values. Again, while no one would say this is the “spirit of Chopin” or that Pugno’s strong personality didn’t take a hand, his feel for the melodies and rhetoric of the piece really convince me that Chopin would have recognized the spirit behind the playing. He would have recognized the piece certainly from Risler. As for Cortot there is a surprising, haunting spirit, maybe he would have valued that most (or not).

I was going to go on to Lilli Lehmann this week but even I sometimes have had enough of me; why, my poor twin is huddled on the floor whimpering. So it is time to stop. But just remember next time you see a morbidly obese has been, as both my twin and poor Mr. Leoncavallo were described, and want to cry out in derision as fools do -- that crumpet addict may just have written once upon a time a lovely, haunting piece like Leoncavallo’s little intermezzo, and cut him some slack.

Translation of Ich ging mit Lust

(I walked with joy through a green wood;

 I heard the birds singing.

 they sang so youthfully, they sang so maturely,

 those small birds in the green wood!

 How gladly I listened to their singing!

 Now sing, now sing, Lady Nightingale!

 sing by my sweetheart's house:

 just come when it's dark,

 when no one is on the street -

 then come to me!

 I will let you in.

 The day was gone, night fell;

 he went to his sweetheart.

 He knocks so softly on the ring:

 "Eh, are you sleeping or are you awake, my dear?

 I have been standing here so long!"

 "Even if you've been standing there so long,

 I haven't been sleeping;

 I let my thoughts wander:

 where is my beloved,

 where has he been for such a long time?"

 "Where have I been for such a long time?

 That I should like to tell you:

 with beer and also red wine,

 with a brown-haired maiden,

 quickly forgetting you."

 The moon gazes through the little window,

 at this tender, sweet love;

 the nightingale sang the whole night.

 You sleeply maiden, stay alert!

 Where is your beloved staying?)