Dr. Bob Prescribes | Robert Greenberg | Speaker, Composer, Author, Professor, Historian: Recent Episodes
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Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) in 1904, by Valentin Alexandrovich SerovYesterday’s Music History Monday marked the death of the Russian impresario and polymath Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929).
Serge Diaghilev was a facilitator of genius. His special gift was for “creative administration.” He could spot talent from 100 miles away, then bring that talent together, all the while imposing his own taste, vision, artistic and aesthetic will on a project. He was a narcissist, an egomaniac, and a born leader, who created a way of doing things that had not existed before him. The medium of ballet was Diaghilev’s all-inclusive art form – his gesamtkunstwerke – and through ballet he managed to influence almost all the arts of his time, not just dance but music, theater, painting, literature, design, fashion, and early cinema as well.
Diaghilev and Stravinsky together circa 1920It was Serge Diaghilev who gave the young Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) the opportunity to become Stravinsky. Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have become an international sensation at the age of 28. Without Diaghilev, some of Stravinsky’s greatest masterworks – Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, and Pulcinella would never have been composed. Without Diaghilev, twentieth century music and dance would have evolved in a manner entirely different than it did, and not for the better.
But thanks to Diaghilev’s eye and ear for talent, young Igor did have the opportunity to compose Firebird in 1910, and then Petrushka in 1911, and then Rite of Spring in 1913, the latter being the consensus “most important and influential musical composition of the twentieth century.”
No hyperbole, that. The Rite changed the way composers thought about rhythm, melody, counterpoint, and orchestration, and it continues to exert a seminal influence on composers to this very day. The Rite of Spring appeared to be devoid of any reference to the long and glorious Western musical tradition as it existed at the time. Rather, it created what appeared to be an entirely new musical language and expressive world: a world devoid of such bourgeois niceties as elegance, prettiness, and grace; a primal, sexual, violent, thrumming, pre-moral musical world in which pure rhythmic energy for its own sake became the principal musical element and the work’s expressive reason-to-be.
Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) with Diaghilev, 1911The Rite of Spring opened at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, as a ballet performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and choreographed by Diaghilev’s lover, the phenomenal Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950).
It was, perhaps, the most famous premiere in the long history of Western music, though admittedly for all the wrong reasons. Stravinsky recalled that opening night this way:
“That the first performance of The Rite of Spring was attended by a scandal must be known to everybody. Strange as it may seem, I was unprepared for the explosion myself. The reactions of the musicians who came to the rehearsals were without intimation of it, and the stage spectacle did not “appear” likely to precipitate a riot. The dancers had been rehearsing for months and they knew what they were doing, even though what they were doing often had nothing to do with the music. ‘I will count to forty while you play,’ Nijinsky would say to me, ‘and we will see where we come out.’ He could not understand that though we might at some point come out together, this did not necessarily mean we had been together on the way.
Mild protests against the music could be heard from the very beginning of the performance. Then, when the curtain opened up on the group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke.”
The virgins – Stravinsky’s “knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas” – toeing inwards against all that was traditional to classical balletStravinsky continues:
“Cries of ‘shut up!’ came from behind me. The uproar continued, and a few minutes later I left the hall in a rage; I was sitting on the right near the orchestra, and I remember slamming the door. I have never again been that angry. The music was familiar to me; I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance. I arrived in a fury backstage, where I saw Diaghilev flicking the house lights in a last effort to quiet the hall. For the rest of the performance I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky, holding the tails of his frac [tailcoat] while he stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers, like a coxswain.”
Various eyewitness accounts described the scene in the theater that night.…
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Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612)Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612)By the last years of the sixteenth century, the multi-choral/multi-ensemble (or just “polychoral”) religious music being composed for performance at the Basilica of San Marco (St. Mark’s) in Venice had virtually nothing to do with the sober spirit and musical dictates of the Counter Reformation. Rather, it had everything to do with the exuberant, independent spirit of Venice. The great exponents of this magnificent, polychoral Venetian music were the Gabrieli boys – Andrea Gabrieli (ca. 1510-1586) and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612).
Giovanni Gabrieli was born in Venice around 1555. His uncle, Andrea Gabrieli, was an excellent and influential composer as well as the principal organist at San Marco, a musical position second only to maestro di cappella (who was, at the time, the theorist and sometime composer Gioseffo Zarlino, 1517-1590).
Andrea Gabrieli (ca. 1510-1585)Young Giovanni was Andrea Gabrieli’s star pupil, and Andrea was proud of his nephew. Giovanni Gabrieli recalled:
“If Signor Andrea Gabrieli (of blessed memory) had not been my uncle, I should dare to say (without fear of being accused of bias) that, as there are few illustrious painters and sculptors gathered together in the world, so are there few indeed composers and organists as excellent as he. But since by my blood-relation I am scarcely less than his son, it is not fitting for me to say freely that which affection, guided by truth, would seem appropriate to me.”
At around the age of 20 (circa 1575), Gabrieli ventured the 300 miles north to the Bavarian capital of Munich. It was there that he studied with the celebrated Belgian-born, Franco-Flemish composer Orlando de Lassus (circa 1532-1594) at the court of the Duke of Bavaria, Albert V. Along with his uncle Andrea Gabrieli, de Lassus was Giovanni Gabrieli’s principal compositional influence, and when Giovanni returned to Venice around 1579, he was prepared for the big time.…
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the 627th birthday of Guillaume (“William”) Du Fay (1397-1474). He was, by every measure, one of the greatest composers yet to have lived, and was considered – in his lifetime, by his contemporaries – to be the greatest among them.
Guillaume Du Fay (on the left) stands next to a portative (or “portable”) organ; Du Fay’s fellow oltremontani, Gilles Binchois (circa 1400-1460; on the right) holds a small harp; from a miniature made before 1451Why, then, is he not TODAY a household name? Why, then, do we not hear his music programmed alongside that of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Greenberg?
You know the answer. 627 years was, in terms of Western music history, a long time ago. The compositional language has changed profoundly since the fifteenth century, as has the very “nature” of what constitutes musical expression. Du Fay’s music mirrors a world long gone, a world – socially, politically, and spiritually – that most of us, today, simply cannot identify with.
And yet, his music – no small amount of which is based on complex compositional methods that had been formulated in the fourteenth century – is, to my ear, ineffably beautiful. This is the mark of any great art: art that transcends the mechanics of its construction and the time of its creation to communicate something intrinsically and aesthetically important over the centuries, to people otherwise unfamiliar with the circumstances of its creation.
Our job – okay, my job – here, today, is to bring Master Du Fay and his world a little closer to ours, and then to recommend two superb albums of his music.…
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Become a Patron!Robert Greenberg Best Sellers* Mozart In Vienna$80.00 – $150.00 Select options * Great Music of the 20th Century$199.95 – $319.95 Select options * Understanding the Fundamentals of Music$199.95 – $319.95 Select options * Music as a Mirror of History$219.95 – $334.95 Select options * How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition$349.95 – $599.95 Select options The post Dr. Bob Prescribes Guillaume Du Fay first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
As often happens, the topic of a previous day’s Music History Monday post has become, here, the inspiration for today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes. As a reminder: yesterday’s Music History Monday – entitled “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” – focused on a pair of Taylor Swift concerts in Seattle that shook the ground beneath the stadium with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.
OMG: does that mean that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will feature Taylor Swift?
No, it does not, for which we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Instead, we’re going to run with the music-and-earthquake connection. It’s a bit tangential, to be sure, but nevertheless, applicable.
CarmenGeorges Bizet (1838-1875) in 1875, not long before his deathWith music by Georges Bizet (1838-1875) and a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée, Carmen opened on March 3, 1875, at the Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris’ 2nd arrondissement.
Neither Carmen’s premiere nor the run that followed went well. Audiences at the “Opéra-Comique” were accustomed to, well, comic French operas. Instead, in Carmen, they witnessed an opera that the critics slammed as “Wagnerian” because – so they wrongly claimed – the voices were subordinated to the orchestra. Additionally, the audiences at the Opéra-Comique found both of Carmen’s principal characters to be distasteful, to say the least. Don José, having sniffed Carmen’s pheromones, goes from being a good, honest soldier to a murderous, testosterone-addled brigand. As for Carmen herself, well, there’s a piece of work! She is the female id personified: a glorious, beautiful, highly sexualized and unrepentant hedonist; an amoral conniver; a capricious, fearless, utterly free spirit; a veritable female Don Giovanni, in sexual heat 24/7/365. She is an opportunist and a feminist in a pre-feminist world, in many ways a shockingly modern woman who, in the words of The New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg:
“would rather die than be false to herself.”
The character of Carmen was as far as one could possibly get from the typical “woman-of-virtue” leading lady the audiences at the Opéra-Comique were accustomed to.
Of course, it’s Georges Bizet’s music that makes Carmen the ultra-sexualized woman that she is, and he composed some of the most seductive music in the operatic repertoire for her, as she goes about winning the heart, loins, and unquestioned devotion of a corporal in the Spanish Dragoons named Don José.
Carmen introduces herself to both the audience and Don José with her famous Habanera – a slow, Cuban dance in duple meter – during which her philosophy of life (and love) is made crystal clear!
Sensational, yes? But not for the opening night critics, who claimed that Carmen’s music was boring!…
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As I know I’ve already mentioned, since I turned 70 this past April, I’ve decided to stop worrying about repeating myself.
So here I go again.
Asking me to name my favorite music, or favorite composer, or favorite performer is something of a waste of time, as I tend to be most in love with whatever/whomever I’ve just been listening to. Besides, at this point of my life, I rarely listen to music just for pleasure. Rather, I’m typically listening to the music I’m writing about or preparing to lecture about.
However, there is an exception to this work-related listening – when I actually listen to music for the sheer pleasure of it – and that’s when I’m in my car. Consequently, if someone really wants to know what I’ve been listening to by choice – and by extension, what music is currently giving me the most pleasure – I merely need to be asked what’s in the CD player of my 2017 Toyota Highlander/Dadmobile.
Bill Evans (right) in 1968 with his impossibly great trio; at left, Eddie Gomez (bass; born 1944) and at center, Jack DeJohnette (drums; born 1942). I swear to you, listening to music gets no better than when these three are playing together!Answer: 99% of the time, it’s jazz piano. And for the last 18 months (or so), it’s been almost exclusively albums featuring Bill Evans (1929-1980) playing solo, or with the guitarist Jim Hall as a duo, or with various of his trios.
Bill Evans is no stranger to my Patreon posts. Music History Monday for August 16, 2021 – which appeared on the anniversary of his birth on August 16, 1929 – offered up a biographical sketch of his all-too-brief and all-too-troubled life. Dr. Bob Prescribes for March 2, 2021, offered up a rave recommendation for the Bill Evans Trio’s “Village Vanguard Sessions,” recorded live at New York City’s Village Vanguard on June 25, 1961. I said it then and I’ll say it now: that double album – featuring Bill Evans on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass, and Paul Motian on drums – must be considered among the greatest jazz recordings of all time. Dr. Bob Prescribes for June 22, 2021, fawned over the two albums Evans made with Tony Bennett: The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album (on Fantasy, recorded, June 10 – 15, 1975); and Tony Bennett & Bill Evans: Together Again (on Rhino Records, recordedSeptember 27-30, 1976).
So here we go again: more Bill Evans. How lucky we are.…
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the birth on July 8, 1935, of the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning pop singer, actor, and comedian Steve Lawrence. Maestro Lawrence’s birth name was Sidney Liebowitz, which I used as a point of departure for an extended riff on American Jewish musicians/entertainers who changed their named in order to “blend in” to what was, during the first half of the twentieth century, the predominantly white, Protestant, Anglo-American culture.
Steve Lawrence (1935-2024) and Eydie Gormé (1928-2013) circa 1960During the course of researching and writing yesterday’s blog, I watched a bunch of Steve Lawrence videos. In some, he appeared solo. In others, he appeared with his wife and performing partner, Eydie Gormé (1928-2013). In still others, he appeared with his best pal, Sammy Davis Jr. I watched Steve Lawrence perform and be interviewed on his friend Johnny Carson’s Show (on which he appeared many times) and the Ed Sullivan Show (ditto). In fact, I spent an entire afternoon watching Steve Lawrence videos. It was an altogether shocking pleasure, one that evoked from me applause (is there anything more stupid, really, than applauding a YouTube video?), laughter, a few tears, and the most acute nostalgia: I hadn’t realized – or at least I hadn’t remembered – how much these mid-century entertainers had shaped by musical consciousness and cultural awareness.
Well, I’ve been reminded. This post will share with you some of what I watched, because one, the older ones among us need – perhaps – to be reminded as well, and two, the younger ones among us should be aware of these good people because they were all quite fabulous.
What struck me the most about the folks in these videos, starting with Sidney Liebowitz/Steve Lawrence, is that they were – as the italicized word two paragraphs ago indicated – entertainers: a category of all-purpose popular performance artist largely forgotten today.
EntertainersBorn to entertain, born for Las Vegas! From left-to-right, Andy Williams (1927-2012), Tony Bennett (1926-1923), and Steve Lawrence at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas; August 5, 1966Entertainers are a special sort of performers, one sometimes referred to as “variety artists.” They are described/defined as follows:
“Entertainers perform live for audiences in a range of artistic and creative works, including theater, dance, comedy, and music. They write and rehearse routines, develop characters, performance styles or other talents, and even sometimes create costumes and props to accompany their acts, and perform their acts live and/or through electronic media.”
This description/definition fits Steve Lawrence like one of his perfectly tailored tuxedos. On stage, there was nothing he couldn’t do. He was a natural born crooner with a smooth, warm, honey-sweet, pitch-perfect baritone voice. He could dance. He could do comedy. He could act.
Steve Lawrence as the sleazy booking agent Maury Sline in The Blues Brothers (1980)He had charm, confidence, presence, and stage savvy virtually oozing from his every pore. He was nominated for a Tony Award in 1964 for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical for his performance as Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run? Along with his wife and performing partner Eydie Gormé, he won an Emmy Award in 1979 for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Program for Steve & Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin. He won a Grammy Award, a Film Advisory Board’s Award of Excellence, a New York Critic Circle Award, and a Television Critics Circle Award as well.
This sort of all-purpose, category-busting entertainer, the likes of which includes Jimmy Cagney (1899-1986), Bing Crosby (1903-1977), Frank Sinatra (1915-1998), Judy Garland (1922-1969), Sammy Davis Jr. (1925-1990), Elvis Presley (1935-1977), Barbra Streisand (born 1942), Bette Midler (born 1945), and Cher (born 1946) are a disappearing breed.…
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Last week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post dealt with the 1970s, the phenomenon that was disco, and the movie Saturday Night Fever of 1977. Likewise, yesterday’s Music History Monday post also dealt with the 1970s: the invention of the Walkman in 1979. As such, I’ve decided to stick with the 1970s in today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes as well, with music that – like disco – also reflects something of its time. However, rather than focus on the frivolous escapism that was disco culture, today’s post will feature music that mirrors some of the most profound issues of its time.
The 1970sI will be among the first to admit that attempts to generalize/characterize the events and spirit of a given decade – the 1950s; the 1960s; the 1970s; etc. – is a fool’s errand.
So color me a fool.
Like music history periodization (Renaissance; Baroque era, Classical era, Romantic era, and so forth), attempting to relate the events of a numerical decade as if they represent some sort of unified whole can be an exercise in random.
I mean, honestly, can we really draw a historical line between the years 1969 and 1970?
Of course not. But discussing events that occurred during a given decade – like periodization – has its use, in that it allows us to make comparative generalizations between one chunk of time and another.
You will forgive me the unspeakable conceit of quoting myself. In my book, How to Listen to Great Music (Plume/Penguin, 2011), I addressed the conundrum of periodization in terms bardic:
“To periodize or not to periodize? That is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged academes by periodizing (and thus to blaspheme through generalization), or to address large-scale stylistic trends without prevarication; ‘tis a fardel to bear, and bear it we shall. For such utile aids are not to be scorned but embraced lest even greater misunderstanding be our lot. O Baroque! O Classical! O Romantic! Though the thorns of spite be your reward, we will invoke you even as we curse you for, like our knees, though poorly made, we cannot walk without you.”
The preceding blather is, in fact, a lengthy apology for the historical generalizations I am about to make about the 1970s, the decade that gave us the shootings at Kent State, Watergate, the reelection of Richard Nixon and Nixon’s resignation, the oil embargo, the fall of Saigon, the caretaker presidency of Gerald Ford and Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the advent of disco, the Iran hostage crisis, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, and the invention in 1979 of the Walkman! (It occurs to me that today, in our presumably more enlightened times, shouldn’t we be referring to the device as a “Walkperson”? A “Walkindividual”? A “Walkthey”?)
President Jimmy Carter (born 1924) giving his “Crisis of Confidence” speech on July 15, 1979All of these events notwithstanding, the most challenging aspect of the 1970s for the average American was the economy. Writes the Gregory L. Schneider, a professor of history at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas:
“The American economy in the 1970s suffered from high inflation, high unemployment, an energy crisis, a declining dollar, high government spending, and jobs going overseas because of deindustrialization that had been accelerating since World War II. In 1972, Washington Post columnist Joseph Kraft labeled the phenomenon ‘stagflation.’”
It was during his nationally televised speech from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979, that President Jimmy Carter (born 1924 and, bless him, still hanging on as of this writing) identified the problems facing the nation as stemming from a “crisis of confidence.” Although he never used the term, the address was immediately dubbed as being the “malaise speech.”
“It is a crisis [of confidence] that strikes at the very heart and soul of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt of the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of unity and purpose as a Nation. The erosion of confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of the nation.”
It was as candid, as timely, and as honest a speech as any ever delivered by an American president, and as such, it was political suicide.
DisillusionmentIf the 1960s were “about” the struggle for change – as personified by the youth movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the environmental movement, and the women’s movement – then the 1970s were about disillusionment: a painful and ongoing reminder that real change is slow and is often marked by as many steps backwards as forwards.
The war in Vietnam continued unabated into the 1970s – violent protests notwithstanding – and was then lost in April 1975. The publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 further eroded many Americans’ faith in their government and the military. The criminal actions of Richard Nixon and his cohorts during the 1972 presidential elections led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 and damaged the institution of the presidency for decades to come.
Why is this man smiling? Richard Nixon leaving Washington D.C. after his resignation on August 8, 1974On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford (1913-2006), after having been in office for just 30 days, granted Richard Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes that he might have committed as president. As such, Nixon was never held accountable for his misdeeds.
Talk about disillusionment! I was a hot-headed 20 years old at the time of Nixon’s pardon and I still remember my outrage over the fact that he would not be held accountable. Instead, eleven of Nixon’s accomplices did time in his place, including the former Attorney General of the United States, John Mitchell; the White House Chief-of-Staff H. Robert Haldeman; advisors John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson; the former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy; and the CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. While these and others served their time, Nixon returned to California and cooled his heels in his home in San Clemente, his so-called “La Casa Pacifica.”
My outrage notwithstanding, I would suggest that no one was more disillusioned by all of these events than the American composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski…
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We began our examination of Tristan und Isolde in last week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. Our prescribed performance – as featured above – will continue to supply our video examples as we move through Acts II and III. As mentioned in last week’s post, our examination of Tristan und Isolde is focusing on Isolde, and three particular episodes – one from each of the three acts – that demonstrate her ongoing metamorphosis across the span of the drama: from viciously angry and depressed in Act I, to agitated and love struck in Act II, to transfigured in Act III.
Act II
Wagner’s stage instructions set the scene:
A garden with tall trees in front of Isolde’s apartment with steps at one side. A pleasant summer’s night. At the open door is placed a burning torch. Sounds of hunting. Brangäne, on the steps to the apartments, looks out after the hunting party as their sounds fade away into the distance. Isolde comes out of the apartment in wild agitation.”
Act II consists of three continuous scenes. Scene one is a dialogue between Isolde and her maid, Brangäne. Scene two is dominated by the conversation (which I’ve italicized because it’s some conversation!) between Tristan and Isolde. Scene three sees the discovery of the would-be lovers, King Marke’s long, heartbroken monologue over Tristan’s apparent betrayal, and finally, Tristan’s mortal wounding at the hands of a treacherous courtier named Melot.
We discover during scene one that a “night hunt” has been hastily organized by this “Melot,” who is presumably Tristan’s best bosom buddy. Brangäne – suddenly a fount of good advice (way too little, too late, we think) – warns the love-addled Isolde about Melot: “He’s up to no good” says Brangäne, and, for a change, she’s correct.
But Isolde’s hormone-addled brain is presently incapable of listening to her handmaid, and she remains indifferent to Brangäne’s concern.
As the hunting horns recede into the distance, Isolde extinguishes the torch, which is her signal to Tristan that the coast is clear.
Act II, Scene Two: The Conversation
The forty-five-plus-minute conversation between Tristan and Isolde that dominates this second act is – bar none – the most remarkable duet in the entire history of opera. It reveals two very different and very real people, isolated by dramatic circumstances from their respective communities, sheltered – and seemingly protected – by the darkness of night.
The opening minutes – during which Tristan and Isolde are seeing each for the first time since they were separated at the end of Act I – are crazed, inspired, exalted, frankly almost insane. The scene begins quietly, as the couple gropes for each other in the dark. But as they get closer – “you’re getting warmer!” – the orchestra builds to the first of a series of shattering “climaxes” (a-hem) as the lovers finally find each other and passionately embrace.…
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Tristan und Isolde, overture opening: principal composite leitmotivSooner Than Later
My Dr. Bob Prescribes post for May 14, 2024 (four weeks ago) was entitled “Fluids of Choice and Drinking Songs.” Among the featured “drinking songs” was the famous “quaff the presumed poison” scene from Act I of Tristan und Isolde.
That May 14 post offered a video link to the scene, from a performance recorded live at La Scala in Milan in 2007. Featuring Waltraud Meier as Isolde and Ian Story as Tristan, and conducted by Daniel Barenboim, it is hands down my favorite recording of the opera on DVD. I promised to feature the performance in a post of its own “sooner than later.”
I trust today is soon enough.
Today’s double-length Dr. Bob Prescribes post will deal with Act I of Tristan und Isolde. Next week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will pick up from there, with Acts II and III.
Write What You Know: Tristan und Isolde as Autobiography
The aspiring writer is advised to “write what you know.” What Richard Wagner (1813-1883) “knew” during the late 1850s was an unquenchable passion for the wife of his benefactor. That benefactor was a wealthy businessman named Otto von Wesendonck; his wife (and the object of Wagner’s desire) was beautiful young woman named Mathilde von Wesendonck (1828-1902). It is no coincidence that at exactly that time Wagner decided to write a music-drama about an unconsummated passion between a heroic knight named Tristan and a beautiful princess named Isolde, a princess that happens to be engaged to the Tristan’s benefactor, King Marke of Cornwall. While the original story of Tristan and Isolde goes back a thousand years, Wagner’s version has everything to do with his life in the late 1850s.
Tristan und Isolde: The backstory
All of the following occurs prior to the beginning of Wagner’s music drama.
Tristan is a knight and nephew of King Marke of Cornwall, on the coast of southern England. Isolde is an Irish princess. In battle, Tristan kills Isolde’s fiancé, Morold (believe it or not, a name that failed to make the top-ten male baby names for 2023). Badly wounded himself, Tristan is brought to Isolde who, like her mother, is famous for her skills with non-prescription pharmaceuticals. He does not reveal his identity to her, instead claiming that his name is “Tantris” (“Tristan” spelled backwards). Nobody’s fool, Isolde figures out who Tristan is pretty quickly. She picks up a sword to kill him, but she cannot, because she realizes that she is in love with him. Instead, she heals Tristan who swears to her his undying love. He then demonstrates his love by walking out on her. He returns some five (or ten) years later, having been tasked with hauling Isolde off to Cornwall, there to marry his elderly uncle, King Marke.…
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Johann Joseph Fux?
Yes, Johann Joseph Fux. And please, let us try to refrain from joking about Herr Fux’s fuxing name. There’s nothing we can say that hasn’t already been said by generations of young music composition students, including – to my enduring shame – yours truly.
Johann Joseph Fux (circa 1660-1741)Yes: for generations of undergraduate music composition students, a thorough study of Fuxian Counterpoint has been – and for all I know, continues to be – de regueur. When I was a university freshman, the required freshman-level music theory class taught by a composer named Peter Westergaard (1931-2019) was a thorough study of something called Fuxian species counterpoint.
Westergaard’s book was largely based on Johann Joseph Fux’s instructional treatise Gradus ad Parnassum which was first published in 1725.
Fux’s Gradus was, in turn, based on the compositional techniques of the great Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (circa 1525-1594). It is no small irony that Fux, who was considered among the greatest (and was certainly among the most honored) composers of his time is known today – to the degree that he is known at all – as a result of his instructional manual.
So: Why Fux, Here, Today?What, you might rightly ask, made me think of Herr Fux and his music for today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post?
Just this.
Yesterday’s Music History Monday celebrated Ludwig von Köchel, the German polymath whose ticket to what for now qualifies as immortality was his comprehensive, chronological catalog of Mozart’s music, which he completed in 1862 and which was first published in 1863.…
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Inappropriate RevisitedSubtitled as being a “divertimento for two horns and string quartet” and generally (if rather inaccurately) translated as “A Musical Joke,” Ein musikalischer Spaß is, in my humble opinion, the single strangest work ever written by a major composer, particularly a major composer in his absolute prime who had not a minute to waste. It is a PDQ Bach-type, four movement musical parody in which Mozart (1756-1791) imitates a bad composer composing badly. According to Stanley Sadie, writing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
Mozart in 1789, at the age of 33
“[its] harmonic and rhythmic gaffes serve to parody the work of incompetent composers.”
Given that the “joke” was composed by Wolfgang-freaking-Mozart, it is, of course, devastatingly clever and often laugh-out-loud funny; which was no doubt Mozart’s intention from the get-go.
Okay; fine: purposely artless music intended to be funny.
But why would Mozart choose to inappropriately waste his time and energies on such a parody (a parody that no one asked for or commissioned) at a time he was at the very top of his game, composing some of his most lucrative music? That is the $64.00 question.
Mozart in 1789, at the age of 33
The 31-year-old Mozart entered “A Musical Joke” in his Verzeichnis aller meiner Werke (“Catalogue of All My Works”) on June 14, 1787. Please, indulge me for a moment, because we’ve got to place this “musical joke” within the context of some – some – of the other music (and completion dates) he entered in his “works catalog” immediately before and after it.
- The Marriage of Figaro: May 1, 1786
- Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat: June 3, 1786
- Piano Sonata No. 15 in F: June 10, 1786
- Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-flat: June 26, 1786
- Piano Trio No. 2 in G: July 8, 1786
- Trio in E-flat for Piano, Clarinet, and Viola, “Kegelstatt”: August 5, 1786
- String Quartet No. 20 in D, “Hoffmeister”: August 19, 1786
- Piano Trio No. 3 in B-flat: November 18, 1786
- Piano Concerto No. 25 in C: December 4, 1786
- Symphony No. 38 in D, “Prague”: December 6, 1786
(Okay, yes, we’ll jump ahead a bit . . .)
- String Quintet No. 3 in C: April 19, 1787
- String Quintet No. 4 in G minor: May 16, 1787
- Sonata in C for Piano Four-Hands: May 29, 1787
- A Musical Joke: June 14, 1787
- Serenade No. 13 in G, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: August 10, 1787
- Violin Sonata No. 35 in A: August 24, 1787
- Don Giovanni: October 28, 1787
We’ll stop there. A pretty impressive 17-month compositional run, yes?
Yes.
So again: why would Mozart choose to inappropriately waste his time and energies composing such a purposely inappropriate piece of music at a time he was composing some of his very best and most important music?
The answer is fascinating, and it cuts to Mozart’s complex and deeply troubled relationship with his father, Leopold Mozart.…
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Friedrich Wieck could be a first-class creep. Nevertheless, we – meaning posterity, taken as widely as we please – owe him a debt of gratitude for the education he gave, the musical opportunities he afforded, and the professional contacts he made for his spectacularly gifted daughter, Clara (1819-1896).
Friedrich Wieck at the age of 45 in 1830, the year he first met Robert Schumann; Wieck’s daughter Clara was 11 years old at the timeIn 1815, the thirty-year-old Friedrich Wieck moved to the Saxon city of Leipzig. Ferociously ambitious, he set himself up as a piano teacher and proprietor of a piano shop. His timing could not have been better. Leipzig was rebuilding from the Napoleonic Wars, and as a commercial center the city was filled with cash and a growing number of middleclass families who wanted pianos for their parlors and lessons for their kids.
Within a year – his business prospering – Wieck decided it was time to reproduce. On June 23, 1816, he married Marianne Tromlitz (1797-1872) who, at 19, was 12 years Wieck’s junior.
Marianne was an extremely talented singer and piano player. She took on singing students and, because she was by far the better pianist in the Wieck household, she also took on the more advanced piano students. Friedrich and Marianne had a whole cottage industry going: sell the piano, tune the piano, sell the music, teach the kids how to play the piano, buy the piano back when the kids stop playing, sell the piano, etc.
Marianne Tromlitz (1797-1872)Together Marianne and Friedrich had five children, three of whom survived their infancy. The second and oldest surviving child was born on September 13, 1819. They named her Clara.
On May 12, 1824, Marianne Wieck gathered up her children and walked out. After nearly eight years of marriage, she had had enough of Friedrich Wieck. This sort of “take the children and run” is difficult enough to do today; in 1824 it was impossible, as under Saxon law the kids were the legal property of their father. On September 17, 1824 – four days after her fifth birthday – a sobbing Clara was forcibly removed from her hysterical mother and hauled back to her father in Leipzig.
The Young ClaraIn that long and ignoble line of tennis fathers, tiger mamas, Little League bullies, and “tough love” parents, Friedrich Wieck was up there at the top. Even before she was born (even before he knew Clara was a “she”), Wieck had decided that his child would grow up to be greatest pianist in the world, a testament to his pedagogic skill, a validation of his existence and a steady paycheck in his old age.
Clara’s formal piano lessons began at the age of five, at just the time she was taken from her mother. Friedrich Wieck was a hard man, and it goes without saying that he worked his daughter hard. Her formal schooling ended when she was just seven. Whatever friendships and social skills she might have garnered from being around other children were considered by Wieck to be “unimportant,” as such relationships were not part of his “method.” Wieck’s goal was to create a great piano player, and in order to achieve that goal, he wrote:
“The whole education from the earliest youth must be planned accordingly.”
Clara in 1832 at the age of 13Clara studied with private tutors under Wieck’s watchful eye – reading, writing, French, English, music theory and composition; violin lessons and score reading – subjects Wieck deemed useful for her “future career.” From the time she was six Clara saw almost every opera mounted not only in Leipzig, but in every city she and her father visited as well. At night, there was the musical circle that met at Wieck’s house in which Clara was a participating, contributing member.
WundermadchenThe miracle is that young Clara had the brains, talent , and disposition to absolutely flourish under her father’s regimen. Small, physically adorable, docile, anxious to please, in the almost total absence of her mother, Friedrich Wieck was Clara’s entire existence. He made her special; he told her that she was a genius, that she was blessed, different, that he would make her into a star. In return, she worshipped him.…
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We pick up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday.
May 13th – yesterday’s date – has been designated by those fine people who designate such things as “World Cocktail Day” (as well as the first day of “American Craft Beer Week”). I used the occasions to begin a discussion about the drinking habits of some of our favorite composers. As I pointed out yesterday and would point out again today, I am in no way promoting the consumption of alcohol, especially in excess. Rather, as is my usual schtick, I am seeking to render human composers who have been pedestalized and, as such, de-humanized.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)Franz Schubert always liked to hoist a glass (or two, or three). His favorite wine was a rosé called “Schilcher.” It was (and still is) produced in the Austrian region of Western Styria from Blauer Wildbacher grapes.
Schubert in 1827: when in his cups, he was no friend of glassware or crockerySadly, “self-medication” due to illness put his drinking well over the top.
It was sometime in the late summer of 1822 that the 25-year-old Schubert contracted syphilis, almost certainly from a male prostitute during a pleasure-jaunt with his friend and periodic roommate, the homosexual and sometime female impersonator Franz von Schober (1796-1882).
The first symptoms of the disease appeared in the late fall of 1822 and became pronounced by January of 1823. Let us make no mistake about it: in those days, syphilis was almost always a fatal diagnosis, something the 26-year-old Franz Schubert was well aware of.
Gratefully, from the fall of 1824 until mid-1827 (or so), Schubert’s syphilis entered its latency, during which he was both symptom free and noninfectious. Nevertheless, he still suffered from debilitating depression, exacerbated by his fear that the disease would return. Consequently, he self-medicated with vast amounts of alcohol, at which time the ordinarily mild-mannered Schubert became vulgar, abusive, and physically destructive.
While under the influence, the small (5’3”), roly-poly, Teddy bear-like Schubert liked nothing more than to smash glassware and crockery, making him – understandably – a less-than-welcome guest in homes and hostelries across his hometown of Vienna. Schubert’s friend Wilhelm von Chezy observed that when Schubert drank, he was subject to uncontrollable rage.
“As soon as the blood of the vine was glowing in him, he liked to withdraw into a corner and give in to anger, during which he would create some sort of havoc as quickly as possible, for example, with cups, glasses and plates, and as he did so, he would grin and screw up his eyes tight.”
Franz Liszt at the tender age of 23, showing the ravages of alcohol abuse (just messin’ with you; Liszt in 1886, not long before his death)In yesterday’s Music History Monday, we observed that in pre-twentieth century Europe the lack of clean/safe drinking water encouraged (and even necessitated) a routine degree of alcohol consumption that many people today would consider to be unhealthy.
However, the great Hungarian-born pianist and composer Franz Liszt’s drinking habits went rather beyond a substitute for water. Writes Liszt’s principal English-language biographer Alan Walker:
“[As Liszt became older] he became increasingly dependent of alcohol, the friend of his youth and the close companion of his manhood. Whether he was an alcoholic in the medical sense of that term we cannot be sure. But his consumption of wine and liquor in the course of a single day was considerable. For the last few years of his life Liszt regularly consumed one bottle of cognac daily and two (or three) bottles of wine as well. And in the early 1880s, he developed a strong liking for absinthe: a powerful distillation of grape-alcohol and wormwood. Nonetheless, he was never seen to be inebriated, and alcohol seemed to impair neither his piano playing nor his speech.”
The man could hold his liquor, and no broken crockery! Under these circumstances, Liszt would be a far more amiable drinking partner than Franz Schubert!…
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Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) and Duke Ellington (center; 1899-1974) at the Downbeat Club in New York City in 1948; Benny Goodman (1909-1986) sits directly behind Ellington’s left shoulderMy Music History Monday post back on June 15, 2020, marked the death on June 15, 1996, of the the “First Lady of Song,” the “Queen of Jazz,” “Lady Ella”: of Ella Jane Fitzgerald, at the age of 79.
Music History Monday for April 29, 2024 (just last week!), marked the birth of “The Duke”: Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, on April 29, 1899.
Ella and Duke. They knew each other, loved each other, and performed and recorded music together for half a century. They were, the cliché, be damned, a musical marriage made in heaven. And thus, in my self-proclaimed “Year of Popular American Song,” this album of songs associated with Duke Ellington – which, BTW, is one of the greatest recordings ever made (no hyperbole that; just fact) – just screams to be examined and prescribed.
And so we shall.
Left-to-right: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday (1915-1959), and Leonard Feather (1914-1994) in 1945Ella and Duke Up Close and Personal
I would introduce you all to Leonard Geoffrey Feather (1914-1994). He was a London-born jazz pianist, composer, and producer, who nevertheless is best known today for his books and essays about jazz and his jazz criticism (he was the chief jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times from the 1960s until his death in 1994).
Feather wrote an extended essay for the liner notes of the original 1957 release of Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook. That essay was written as a true insider, as someone who personally knew (and worshipped) Ellington and Fitzgerald, and who travelled in the same rarified jazz circles as did they. As such, Feather’s essay does not recount history from afar but rather, it reports contemporary events from first person observations. …
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Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) was an American jazz pianist and composer, someone who led his eponymous jazz band (or “orchestra,” as he preferred to call it), for what was a record-making 51 years: from 1923 until his death in 1974.
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974), in May 1943 at the Hurricane Club, Broadway & West 51st Street, New York CityHe was born and raised in Washington D.C. He moved permanently to New York City in 1923, and it was there that he became famous: as the leader of the house band at Harlem’s Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931.
A brilliant composer of songs – many of which are today standards of the Great American Songbook – Ellington began composing extended works (what he generally referred to as “suites”) in the mid-1930s. By the time of his death in 1974, he had written and collaborated on over one thousand musical works, by far the single largest body of written work in the jazz repertoire.
When we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday, Ellington had just become a household musical name thanks to his band’s weekly national broadcasts from the Cotton Club in New York City. Ellington remained at the very top of the American musical heap through the 1930s and mid-1940s. And then.
And then came the late-1940s and 1950s, and with those years, a new generation of post-World War Two music fans and consumers: young music fans and consumers who didn’t give a rat’s rump for big band swing music, which they perceived as their parents’ music. Big bands dropped like flies and disbanded, leaving only a very few to scratch out a living in what quickly became a “nostalgia” market.
Duke Ellington’s band was one of those few survivors, due primarily to Ellington’s categorical refusal to stop making music with his band:
Duke Ellington and his Orchestra at the Cotton Club, circa 1930
“It’s a matter of whether you want to play music or make money. I like to keep a band so I can write and hear the music next day. The only way you can do that is to pay the band and keep it on tap, 52 weeks a year. If you want to make a real profit, you go out for four months, lay off for four and come back for another four. Of course, you can’t hold a band together that way and I like the cats we’ve got. So, by various little twists and turns, we manage to stay in business and make a musical profit. And a musical profit can put you way ahead of financial loss.”
I’d point out the obvious: a big band is an expensive proposition, with its high payroll and costs of transportation. And sadly, a “musical profit” will not put food on the table or gasoline in the tour bus. Nevertheless, Duke Ellington managed to keep his band together through the advent of rock ‘n’ roll and what appeared to be the end for large jazz ensembles playing swing music. And then.
And then Ellington’s orchestra performed at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival and his career and his band were reborn!…
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Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) in 1976Monday’s Music History Monday post marked the birth – on April 22, 1916 – of the distinguished American-British violinist, conductor, and teacher Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999). During the course of that post, I wrote that Menuhin:
“was a man of unwavering moral integrity and courage: a soft-spoken, kind, gentle, and elegant man, a role model for everyone who knew him.”
In support of that statement, I would offer up two of the many examples of his integrity and courage. But first, an anecdote that sets the stage for those examples.
Menuhin was born in New York City to a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His given name – “Yehudi” – literally means “Jew” in Hebrew. In an interview published in the British magazine New Internationalist, Menuhin described how he got his name:
“Obliged to find an apartment [in New York City], my parents searched the neighborhood and chose one. Showing them out after they had viewed it, the landlady said: ‘And you’ll be glad to know I don’t take Jews.’ Her mistake made clear to her, the antisemitic landlady was renounced, and another apartment found. But her blunder left its mark. Back on the street my mother made a vow. Her unborn baby would have a label proclaiming his race to the world. He would be called ‘The Jew.’”
With that bit of background in mind, here are the two promised examples of Menuhin’s integrity and courage.
Menuhin and Benjamin Britten performing together some ten years later, circa 1955During World War Two, he tirelessly performed for Allied soldiers. Immediately after the war, in June and July of 1945, Menuhin toured and performed at camps for “displaced persons” – Holocaust survivors – including concerts given just outside of where the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had stood (it had been demolished in May 1945, soon after the end of the war). Menuhin’s piano accompanist on the trip was none-other-than the composer and pianist Benjamin Britten.
During the course of the tour, Menuhin saw (and heard and smelled) things that not a single one of us can imagine, things that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
And yet.
And yet, in 1947 he returned to Germany to perform violin concerti with the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954). There, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Yehudi Menuhin was the first Jewish musician to perform in Germany, saying that he did so in order to facilitate the rehabilitation of German music and to help heal the spirit of the German people.
Menuhin was criticized for performing in Germany by some, but in retrospect, it was a moral and courageous thing to do.…
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Beethoven (1770-1827) in 1820, painted by Joseph Karl StielerThe ProjectIn early 1819, the Vienna-based music publisher Anton Diabelli (1781-1858) had what was a great idea for a charity project. He sent a brief waltz of his own composition to 50 composers living in Austria and invited each of them to compose a single variation on the waltz. Diabelli’s plan was to publish the set as an anthology entitled “Patriotic Artist’s Club” (“Vaterländischer Künstlerverein”) and distribute the profits from its sale to widows and children left orphaned by the Napoleonic Wars.
Among the composers to receive the theme and Diabelli’s invitation to participate in his project was the 48-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven.
Typical to form, Beethoven was deeply irked at being included in such a “group grope,” on top of which he dismissed Diabelli’s theme as a “cobbler’s patch”: as being entirely beneath his musical dignity.
But then, for reasons discussed in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, Beethoven had a change of heart, and decided to accept Diabelli’s offer after all. But Beethoven was unwilling to join the mob of composers who had consented to contribute but a single variation each. Instead, he made it clear that his contribution would be a complete set of variations, the number of which he had yet to determine. Beethoven put aside his work on the Missa Solemnis and began work on the variations, and by the summer of 1819 he had completed 23 of them. But then he put the variations aside for nearly four years, during which he completed the Missa Solemnis and composedhis last three piano sonatas. He finally returned to the variations in February 1823, and finished the set in March or April of that year.
Why “33” Variations?
“33” might seem a strange number for Beethoven to fasten onto, but in fact, Beethoven had a number of reasons for composing 33 variations on Diabelli’s theme.
Back in 1806, Beethoven composed for piano a work entitled “32 Variations in C Minor on an Original Theme,” WoO 80. Though the piece was published, Beethoven was so unhappy with it that he refused to assign it an opus number. He went so far as to scoff at himself for having composed the thing, saying later in reference to it:
“Oh Beethoven, what an ass you were!”
Perhaps – so the thinking goes – Beethoven composed 33 variations on Diabelli’s theme in order to do himself “one better” than his earlier work, one he didn’t like at all!
There is also speculation that Beethoven’s decision to compose 33 variations on Diabelli’s theme was an oblique reference to his just-composed piano sonatas. Beethoven completed his final piano sonata – No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 – in 1822. The “valedictory character” of the final movement of Op. 111 made it pretty clear, even at the time, that Beethoven had little intention of composing another piano sonata. Consequently, having just completed this 32nd and final piano sonata, Beethoven returned to the Diabelli Variations intent, perhaps, on crowning his 32 sonatas with 33 variations.
It is also likely that Beethoven wanted to “one-up” Johann Sebastian Bach’s epochal Goldberg Variations, which consists of thirty-two sections of music: two statements of the theme (one at the beginning and one at the end of the piece) bookending thirty variations.…
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For the second week in a row, I’m offering up a different sort of Dr. Bob Prescribes (DBP) post. Yesterday’s Music History Mondaymarked the private ceremony, held on April 1, 2017, during which Bob Dylan received his Novel Prize for Literature. Typically, if I were to follow my usual modus operandi in today’s DBP, I would now be prescribing for you my favorite Bob Dylan album (or albums).
Bob Dylan in 1965: a taciturn, razor-thin super-hipsterBut circumstances force a confession: with the exception of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” (pictured above), I don’t own any of Dylan’s albums. In fact – and I trust his will not affect your good opinion of me – I’ve never been much of a Bob Dylan fan. And while I recognize and acknowledge his greatness, I personally have never thought much of his attitude, his voice, or even, with a few exceptions, his songs.
Okay, color me a barbarian; you wouldn’t be the first. I can handle it.
But as for the various “personas” Dylan has concocted/projected over the course of his 60-plus year career: those personas have always fascinated me. Cool to the point of detachment, Dylan is, in fact, a middle-class Jewish nebbish from Hibbing Minnesota crossed with a dustbowl Okie, Beat poet, Nashville ‘cat, Born Again evangelist, Delta Bluesman, with a little bit of Charlie Chaplin thrown in to round things out.
Despite all of his “mythologizing” (lying?) about himself and his life, from the beginning of his career, Dylan has consistently projected the image of a taciturn super-hipster who would claim that his songs do his talking for him.
(In in 1967, the 26-year-old Dylan told a reporter from Time magazine:
“I got nothing to say about these things I write. I don’t write them for any reason. There’s no great message. I mean, if, you know, you wanna tell other people that, go ahead and tell them, but I’m not going to have to answer to it.”)
Dylan circa 2016; well, at least he still has his teethAnd the evolving Dylan “looks”: from the razor-thin, frizzy haired, chain smoking, jeans-wearing counter-culture hippie of the 1960s to someone The New Yorker’s David Remnick compared to a miniature:
“Vincent Price wearing Hank Williams’s clothes, [a] pencil mustache, [and a] white Stetson.”
According to the playwright and author Sam Shepard:
“Dylan has made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things around him and inside him. Dylan is an invention of his own mind.”
That is indeed the truth. But given his outsider, anti-establishment, hipster iconoclasm, perhaps the very last reinvention anyone expected from Bob Dylan was as a corporate pitchman. (In fact, “huckster” would not be too strong a word!)…
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Today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post takes a different tack than usual. Rather than prescribing/recommending a particular CD (or DVD, or book), today’s post will feature a series of links to various video performances of Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony, interviews with people who knew him, and audio recordings of a very few of his legendary temper tantrums!
Toscanini, circa 1937Instant FameThe story of Toscanini’s rise to almost instant fame is the stuff of legend.
At the age of eighteen, he was living at home and contributing to his family’s finances by working as a freelance cellist. He looked younger than his years, so he grew a mustache in an attempt to look older.
During the 1885-’86 opera season, Toscanini played cello at the Teatro Regio in Parma (where, for our information, he had begun performing as a cellist cello at the tender age of thirteen).
Over his time in the pit, Toscanini had memorized all of his parts, which allowed him to watch the action on stage without ever having to look at the music on his stand. He later remembered:
“I never had to turn a page.”
Toscanini’s prodigious memory annoyed the conductor of the Teatro Regio – Nicola Bassi – no end. According to Toscanini:
Toscanini in 1885, at the age of 18
“When we got to [Ponchielli’s] Marion Delarme, which was a brand-new opera, Bassi came over to me and said, ‘Now we’ll see if you can play this by heart!’ And I said, ‘Why not? Isn’t it music, too?’”
Among Toscanini’s fellow musicians at the Regio that 1885-’86 season was a violinist named Carlo Superti. Superti was helping to put together a pickup opera company to tour Brazil and, if things went well, some other South American countries. Toscanini later recalled:
“One fine day, [Superti] comes up to me and says, ‘Wouldn’t you like go to South America with me?’ I said, ‘I can’t go to American because I’m only eighteen. I need my family’s permission.’ ‘Ask for permission; I’ll take you to America as principal cello.’”
Toscanini received that permission, and was hired by Superti not just as the principal cellist but as the assistant chorusmaster (choir coach and conductor) as well.
The Brazilian conductor (and composer) Leopoldo Miguez (1850-1902) was hired to conduct the company while it was on tour in Brazil.
Alas, Maestro Miguez and Carlo Superti’s Parma-based opera company were not a good fit.
By the time the company arrived in Rio de Janeiro – after a two-month engagement in São Paulo – the singers were entirely fed up with Miguez, and demanded that he make like a tree and leave. Miguez responded by blaming his problems on the singers, and was then a last-minute no-show for company’s first shoiw in Rio, a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida. (“That’ll show these Italian ingrates if they think they can do without me!” likely thought Maestro Miguez.) But the performance was saved when Toscanini’s friend, the violinist Carlo Superti, stepped in and managed to conduct the opera.
The second performance of Aida was scheduled for June 30, 1886, and it was on that day that Leopoldo Miguez formally resigned, claiming that it was for “reasons of health.” So, Carlo Superti got ready to conduct that evening as well, unaware that word had spread among the locals that the hometown conductor – Leopoldo Miguez – had been treated with disrespect by the Italians.…
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We begin where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, with what was the closing statement:
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) circa 1886
“It’s a fact: the very history of twentieth century Russian, Russian expatriate, and Soviet composers starts with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), whose own roots trace back through The Five to Glinka and the awakening of Russian musical nationalism in the 1830s, all of which was an outgrowth of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812!”
During his lifetime, Rimsky-Korsakov was best known for his thirteen operas. However, he is best known today for three spectacularly popular orchestral works, all of which were composed within a span of 18 months, between the winter of 1887 and August 1888: the Capriccio espagnole, The Russian Easter Overture, and Scheherazade.
Scheherazade – the StoryThe literary story behind Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade comes from a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales initially compiled during the 9th century, a compilation entitled One Thousand and One Nights. Among the best-known of the folk tales in this compilation are “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.”
Many different versions of One Thousand and One Nights have come down to us, from different times and places. What they all have in common is a literary device built around a Persian princess named Scheherazade, a devise that “frames” each of the stories as it is told in turn.
Here’s that device.
Scheherazade and the Sultan, by Ferdinand Keller, 1880[3. “Scheherazade and the Sultan, by Ferdinand Keller, 1880”]
The Persian Sultan Shahryar has developed some serious anger-management issues as a result of his frankly disastrous love life. Since being betrayed by his first wife, he’s been on a rampage: every night he marries a new virgin, and every day he has that previous night’s wife (presumably now no longer a virgin) beheaded. In just this way he has “divorced” some 3000 young ladies when the daughter of his “Grand Vizier” (the prime minister) – a virgin named Scheherazade – decides to put an end to the slaughter and volunteers to marry the sultan. A learned young lady and clearly a heck-of-a storyteller, she enthralls the sultan with a story that, because of the coming dawn, she cannot finish (a Persian cliff-hanger, if you will). He spares her life so that she might finish the story the next night, which she does, only to begin another story that remains unfinished at dawn. You get the picture. This goes on for 1000 nights, at which point Scheherazade finally runs out of stories. On the 1001st night, Sultan Shahryar – now a wiser and less angry man – realizes he loves Scheherazade, spares her life, and officially makes her his queen.…
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A Lurid, Depraved Tale!Put in contemporary terms, the plot of Rigoletto is, frankly, revolting: a sixteenth century version of the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell story. The opera tells the tale of a rich, slimy, powerful, utterly amoral man (the Duke of Mantua/Epstein) who, among his many carnal sins, rapes and traffics in teenaged girls, abetted by his court jester, Rigoletto (Maxwell). Rigoletto himself only begins to regret the duke’s penchant for youngsters when he discovers that his own teenaged daughter, Gilda, is on the duke’s “defile bucket list.” She is indeed abducted and delivered to the duke’s bed, where he has his way with her, and where – like a hostage suffering from Stockholm Syndrome – she “falls” for her captor, the duke! Beside himself with grief and rage, Rigoletto hires a hit man named Sparafucile to whack the duke, but Rigoletto has been cursed, and instead, it is Gilda whose adolescent bosom receives the business end of Sparafucile’s stiletto!
Luciano Pavarotti, the Duke of Mantua; Ingvar Wixell, Rigoletto and Monterone; Edita Gruberová, Gilda; Ferruccio Furlanetto, SparafucileThe Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo ChaillyGame PlanHere is the game plan for this double-length post.
We will occupy ourselves with the two, opening episodes of the opera.
The first of these episodes is the “prelude,” (or overture), the music of which anticipates the maledizione – the curse – that will drive the opera’s action and its denouement.
The second episode is the matchless party scene that follows the prelude, during which we meet the despicable but charismatic Duke of Mantua (played to perfection by Luciano Pavarotti); the duke’s equally reprehensible court jester, Rigoletto (played correspondingly well by the Swedish baritone Ingvar Wixell, 1931-2011); and Count Monterone (also played by Ingvar Wixell). Monterone is an old and dignified aristocrat, a foe of the duke whose curse drives the primary action of the story.
Episode One: PreludeIn Ponnelle’s film, the story is told in flashback, beginning in the prelude. The prelude features the music that will, soon enough, accompany Count Monterone while he delivers his curse of Rigoletto. Here in Ponnelle’s production, the prelude is used to accompany Rigoletto’s discovery of his daughter’s corpse, which is also how the opera ends.
Episode Two: The “Party”It’s party time at the Duke of Mantua’s pleasure-palace, and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle goes for the entire calzone. This is no evening soiree with wine and canapes; it’s not even the Playboy Mansion circa 1550; but rather, a grotesque, decadent, Caligula-like orgy, all of it a reflection of the Duke of Mantua’s profane tastes!
The ballroom is brightly lit as courtiers, ladies, servants, and homo-erotic musclemen in various states of dress and undress romp about. The mood is wild. A dance band plays in the background, its banal, circus-like music standing in abject contrast to the tragic music just heard in the prelude.
(For our information, during the course of this opening scene, various such “bands” will play a total of five different dance tunes. According to the British opera and Verdi scholar Julian Budden, the function of this dance music is:
“to depict the corruption and triviality of the Duke of Mantua’s court.”
From a compositional point of view, this dance band music is an ever-present “canvas” upon which the voices of this party scene are projected and layered.…
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Year of the SongAs I’ve mentioned in previous Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, I’ve unilaterally designated this campaign and election year “The Year of the Song,” so desperate am I for the distraction and solace only the best popular American songs can provide. We began with Barbara Cook’s wonderful Disney Album on February 6, and my intention is to do at least one such popular American song-oriented Dr. Bob Prescribes post every month until January 2025.
Joan Morris and William Bolcom at New York City’s Town Hall, 1985Today’s post is as much about introducing you to two very special performers as it is hawking their first album, After the Ball, of 1974. They are the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris (born 1943), and her husband, the composer and pianist William Bolcom (born 1938). I will be prescribing no small number of their albums over the course of this year, so I figure we should get to know them a bit before all of these prescriptions commence.
Smarter Than the Average BoorI have, if you’ll pardon me, always been a bit smarter than the average boor.
For example.
It was in either late 1978 or early 1979. I remember the date because I had just come to California for graduate school, and was living in an apartment in North Berkeley with an old undergraduate friend and fellow composition graduate student named Eric Moe.
The albumOn a recommendation, I had just bought what was then a newly issued LP of George Gershwin songs performed by the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris and her husband, the composer and pianist William Bolcom. I didn’t know who Morris and Bolcom were at the time, but once I heard their Gershwin album, my enthusiasm for them knew no bounds: the clarity of Morris’ voice and Bolcom’s wonderful and idiomatic pianism completely bowled me over. In my excitement over the album, I played it for my roommate Eric and his girlfriend, who was also a fellow composition grad student. (FYI: I’ve always been a disc jockey at heart, ready to play a recording at the drop of a needle.)
The name of Eric’s girlfriend (and, unfortunately, his future wife, though gratefully not for very long) will go unspoken, because she was – putting it most charitably – a boor. All-too-predictably, she sat there, drinking my coffee, chain-smoking her stinking cigarettes, finding fault after fault with Joan Morris’ voice. “Her tone is thin . . . her vibrato is too wide . . . her upper notes are strained . . .” blah, blah, blah.
Like I said, a freakin’ boor.…
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The original cast of Star Trek, the crew of the starship Enterprise, in 1966RerunsI don’t know about you, but personally, I have mixed feelings about reruns.
On one hand, I will never tire of seeing of watching the original Star Trek, which ran for 79 episodes spread over three seasons, from 1966 to 1969. I have seen every one of those 79 episodes so many times that I can – no exaggeration – speak the dialogue along with the actors. Why my infatuation with this show, and why am I willing to revisit – over and over again – these manyepisodes?
Perhaps it’s because I associate the show with my childhood and the “race to the moon” that so galvanized us all in the 1960s; perhaps it’s because the show was then so fabulously camp and today so magnificently retro; whatever: it was a vision of the future with actors and stories of which I never seemed to tire.
And yet, on the other hand, I often dislike and avoid reruns. I’m not talking about the life-preserving flight from reruns of such bottom-dwelling shows as The Beverly Hillbillies; Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Gilligan’s Island, but rather, reruns of stuff I loved the first time around. For example, Garry Trudeau’s editorial comic strip, Doonesbury. I have been an avid reader of Doonesburysince the fall of 1972. Sadly, even tragically, in February 2014, Doonesburyceased being a daily strip, and began appearing only on Sundays. (To this day, the first part of our Sunday paper I read is my precious Doonesbury.)
On March 3, 2014, our local newspaper – the San Francisco Chronicle – began running “flashbacks” – reruns – of earlier Doonesbury strips from Monday through Saturday (which it continues to do to this day). Much as I adore Gary Trudeau and his strip, I cannot bring myself to read these reruns. It’s not as if I actually remember the strips that are being rerun, which I don’t. Perhaps my unwillingness to read the “flashbacks” is that the originals were subtly but inextricably tied to current events and are therefore, today, no longer relevant. Perhaps it’s because I find earlier incarnations of Doonesbury’s characters, characters that have grown and evolved over the 40-plus years I’ve been following the strip, disquieting. Again, for whatever reason(s), I can’t bring myself read Doonesbury reruns.
I think that when it comes to reruns, what’s important to me is that they are still, in some way or another, relevant and appropriate to today.
Today’s PostAs I think you have already guessed, today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is a modified rerun. I am ordinarily loath to do such a thing lest I be considered lazy. But given yesterday’s Music History Monday post was about Charles Bizet’s brilliant Symphony in C (composed when he was just 17), and given that for the better part of a century Bizet (1838-1875) was (wrongly) considered a one-hit wonder, and given that that “one hit” was his opera Carmen, well, the relevant and appropriate post for today would be one dealing with Bizet’s Carmen. And since Carmen remains the most frequently produced and, presumably, the best-known and most “popular” opera in the repertoire, it occurs to me that you hardly need me to rehash the story of the opera itself. But Carlos Saura’s spectacular flamenco version of the opera? Ah: there’s a version that deserves our attention and even our love.
In the spirit of touching all my bases, I would quickly offer up two prescriptions for the traditional version the opera before we take our deep dive into Carlos Saura’s flamenco fantasy version of Carmen.…
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday focused on the crime of passion that was the murder of the be-bop trumpet player Lee Morgan (1938-1972), a crime committed on February 19, 1972, by his common-law wife, Helen Moore.
Morgan was an extraordinary player, someone who recorded prodigiously and who – being only 33 years old when he was killed – should have had a long and storied career in front of him.
Morgan didn’t get his first trumpet until he was 13. Nevertheless, by the time he was 18, he was already making records and performing as a member of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. Given that he died at 33, I suppose we should be grateful that he wasn’t a late bloomer, as he likely would have left little by way of a recorded legacy behind him!
The subject of this post is another trumpet player who made his mark as a youngster: Sergei Nakariakov, who was born in 1977. Nakariakov was a crazy child prodigy, and he has grown nicely into his maturity: today he must be considered among a handful of greatest living trumpet players.
I first introduced you to Maestro Nakariakov back in 2020, and it is time to visit with him again. But first, a brief but spirited examination of the trumpet as a “glamor” instrument.
Buckingham Park (later called “Bookbinder”) Elementary School, Levittown/Willingboro, N.J., which I attended from 1959-1965, kindergarten through 5th gradeThe Instruments We Choose!We routinely decry the death (or near death) of music appreciation classes in public schools. However, if my experience is any indication, I would suggest we temper our outcry based on the harsh, white light of reality. Growing up in the South Jersey township of Willingboro and attending public schools there from kindergarten through high school (1959-1972), my experience was that classroom instruction in “music appreciation” was a total, unmitigated joke; no teachers (or subject matter) were treated with greater, more extravagant disrespect than were these unfortunate creatures.
However.
I do (and always will) rue the demise (or near demise) of band and chorus programs in public schools. In my experience, these were taught by no-nonsense professionals who by their teaching and personal example had a tremendous impact on their young charges. Every fourth grader in my school district (and I imagine in pretty much all public-school districts at the time, nation-wide), had to choose and play an instrument for a minimum of two academic years: through the fifth grade. Even the delinquents got into it, and for at least that (brief) period of time, every one of these kids had the opportunity to personally make some sort of music, which is among the greatest, most humanizing gifts we can give any child.…
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Wax sculpture of Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) by Franz Thaler, circa 1800Haydn’s six string quartets published in 1799 as Opus 76 are his supreme works of chamber music, works that show him at the very peak of his craft and imagination. The quartets were composed between 1796-1797, soon after Haydn’s return from his second residency in London. Haydn dedicated the set to his patron, the Hungarian nobleman Count Joseph Georg von Erdődy (1754-1824).
The famed English music historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814) first heard Haydn’s Opus 76 string quartets in 1799, and he could not contain himself when he wrote that:
“They are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well recently, but one of the highly cultivated talents, who has expended none of his fire before.”
(“Expended none of his fire before”? Okay; whatever.)
Haydn’s Op. 76 string quartets are, indeed, brilliant; works that were – as we will soon observe – powerfully inspired by the late quartets of Haydn’s beloved and recently departed friend, Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791).
Mozart’s own string quartets aside, it is Joseph Haydn who, through the example of his 68 string quartets, is rightly credited with establishing the genre as it has been understood since the 1780s (an “understanding” described below).
(For our information, once upon a time, it was believed that Haydn had composed 83 string quartets. However, modern scholarship has proven that 15 of those quartets are arrangements of other works or were not composed by Haydn at all.)
The String Quartet: A Brief (but spirited!) HistoryA “string quartet” is, in fact, two separate things: an instrumental ensemble and a compositional genre written for that ensemble.
Portrait of Haydn by Ludwig Guttenbrunn, painted in 1791, based on an earlier portrait depicting Haydn circa 1770The instrumental ensemble consists of two violins – referred to as the first violin and the second violin – a viola, and a cello. These four instruments represent, respectively, the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices of the ensemble.
The compositional genre of string quartet, as we understand it today, consists of four distinct instrumental voices, with each voice being a fully empowered musical individual. More than any other composer, it was Joseph Haydn who forged this modern notion of the string quartet as four individuals who collaborate to create a musical whole far greater than its parts.
The string quartet remains the most important genre of chamber music from the 1750s to the present day. No other specific grouping of instruments has shown such longevity. But even more important, no other ensemble of instruments has been lavished with such an astonishing repertoire.
The immediate ancestor of the Classical era string quartet was the Baroque era trio sonata. Despite the designation as being a “trio,” a “trio sonata” is in fact a composition for four instruments. (Yes, they could count during the Baroque era; it was, after all, the era of Leibniz, Galileo, and Newton. Just work with it.) A trio sonata is a chamber composition for two soprano instruments, one bass instrument, and the ubiquitous (during the Baroque era) harmony-playing instrument, usually a harpsichord. The most typical instrumentation for a trio sonata – your garden variety, a-dime-a-dozen, flip-over-a-rock-and-find-a-trio-sonata instrumentation – is two violins, ‘cello, and a harpsichord.
Attractive though this music is, it would not have been considered expressively or compositionally relevant by young Italian composers during 1730s and 1740s. Such pre-classical, so-called “Rococo” composers as Giovanni Sammartini (1701-1775), Niccolo Jomemelli (1714-1774), and Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785), sought to create a more lyric and less “complicated” sort of music, musical capable of pleasing almost any listener on its first hearing. To that end, these Italian composers – who were the de facto inventors of the string quartet – took the trio sonata and replaced its continuo (harpsichord) part with a viola, an instrument capable of providing a supple, entirely melodic inner voice while blending seamlessly with the other strings.
Such early Italian string quartets placed an overwhelming emphasis on the first violin part, while the second violin, viola, and cello parts are almost always strictly accompanimental. Lacking – as they do – any sort of interplay between the voices, we do not today consider these early Italian “quartets for strings” to be true “string quartets.”
What we do consider, today, to be the “true string quartet” developed in southern Germany and Austria during the 1750s and 1760s. It was there that the new, lyric, pre-Classical Italian style merged with the German predilection for formal organization and more independent part writing.
Joseph Haydn was at the very forefront of this development.…
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post acknowledged the strange and by any measure, stupid death of Charles-Valentin Alkan on March 29, 1888. (You needn’t flip back to yesterday’s Music History Monday; we’ll recount Alkan’s “death by umbrella rack” later in this post.) By the time Charles-Valentin Alkan died in Paris on March 29, 1888, at the age of 74, his decades-long self-imposed isolation had effectively removed him from public consciousness. According to his obituary in the influential Parisian music journal Le Ménestral: “Charles-Valentin Alkan just died. It was necessary for him to die in order to suspect his existence. [He was] an artist infinitely greater than thousands of his more celebrated and praised contemporaries.” Damn straight. Born on November 30, 1813, in Paris, Alkan (born Charles-Valentine Morhange) was a prodigiously gifted pianist and composer. Pianistically, both Chopin and Liszt considered him their equal. (According to the English music writer and critic Jeremy Nichols [born 1947], Alkan had: “a keyboard technique that even Liszt admitted was the greatest he had ever known.” As I’ve not been able to substantiate that statement from another source, I’ve put it here in parentheses.) The virtuoso pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow described Alkan as being: […]
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Bruckner, whose 199th birthday was celebrated in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, was born in the Austrian village of Ansfelden, near Linz. His father – Anton Senior – was the town schoolmaster and the church organist, and it was at the local Catholic Church that Bruckner heard his first music, sang as a choirboy, and learned to play the violin and organ from his father. Bruckner was educated in the churches and monasteries of his native Upper Austria, and for his entire life, the Catholic Church was Bruckner’s spiritual home, his refuge, and his inspiration. Bruckner was as devout as they come, and he seemed to have believed completely that everything he did should honor God. Bruckner’s faith in his god might have been exactly what it appeared to be: religious altruism. But knowing the guy as we do, it’s also difficult not to see that faith as a compensation for his pathological lack of faith in himself. As a young adult, despite his musical training and obvious talents as a musician, he apparently had little belief in his own abilities. The consensus today is that as a young man Bruckner lacked the confidence or the grit to brave the […]
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Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin received its premiere in the Thuringian (central German) city of Weimar on August 28, 1850: 173 years ago yesterday. Conducted by Weimar’s Kapellmeister – the extraordinary Franz Liszt (1811-1886) himself – the premiere was a smash and Lohengrinhas remained a pillar of the operatic repertoire since. As we observed in yesterday’s Music History Monday – which offered up a synopsis of Lohengrin’s action – the opera contains a thinly-veiled paean to German national virtue. But more than that, it is an Adam-and-Eve-like story of temptation and the power of evil to make an otherwise innocent person act on temptation, to disastrous consequences. The action of the opera revolves around two couples: one good, one bad, and an ugly situation. Couple Number One: The Good. Elsa is the Duchess of Brabant, living in what is today the Belgian city of Antwerp. “The Nameless Knight in Silver” (a.k.a. Lohengrin) is Elsa’s mysterious savior, who shows up in Antwerp in a little boat drawn by a swan, there to act as Elsa’s champion against the scoundrel who has accused her of killing her own brother. Couple Number Two: The Bad. That scoundrel is Telramund, a once-honorable nobleman. The puppet-master behind […]
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We pick back up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, with the techno-wizard and American maverick-styled inventor Robert Moog’s education. Robert Moog (1934-2005), Continued Having graduated from Columbia and Queen’s College in 1957, Moog headed north to Cornell University, where he eventually received a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics in 1965. His fascination with electronic musical instruments remained undimmed. At a time (the early 1960s) when synthesizers were still the room-sized, tube-driven, super-expensive behemoths running on punched paper (like Viktor, aka the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer), Moog’s ambition was to create a synthesizer that would be accessible to all musicians, and not just an elite, academic few. Three parameters drove Moog’s thinking: his synthesizer had to be compact enough to be reasonably portable; it had to have a practical interface, meaning that it would have to be operated by a piano-like keyboard; and it had to be affordable. As it turned out, Robert Moog was the right man living at the right time, because the technology he required to create a portable, practical, and affordable synthesizer came into being at exactly the time he needed it, a technology called the high-density integrated circuit. Bear with me […]
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In Six, Short Years! Yesterday’s Music History monday post concluded by observing that in the six short years between 1964 and 1970, the Beatles amassed a total of 20 number one songs on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, a number that here, 53 years later, remains a record. As a public service, here are the top 10 top ten performers with the most #1 hits: In addition to those songs that charted #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the Beatles had an additional seven (further) number one songs on the UK Singles Record Retailer Chart, giving them a total of 27 number one songs on the combined US and UK charts. When we consider that The Beatles, as a group, were together for not quite eight years – from August 18, 1962, to May 8, 1970, when the album Let it Be was released – that’s a level of popular and artistic success that’s just a bit insane. What makes that 27 number one hits so difficult to fathom – something that separates the Beatles entirely from the competition – is that they were all originals, songs written by three members of the band: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, […]
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post was all about auctions; specifically, auctions of Elvis Presley memorabilia. As we observed yesterday, the most expensive piece of Elvis memorabilia sold to date that isn’t a gold Rolex watch is Presley’s 1942 Martin D-18 guitar, Serial Number 80221, which was auctioned off for $1,320,000 August 1, 2020. As I suggested in yesterday’s post, given its historical importance and provenance – Elvis owned the guitar between 1954 and 1956, began his career and made his first recordings (for Sun Records) with the guitar – the $1.32 million paid for the thing was a steal, anyway you strum it. Anyway, that post about the prices paid for Elvis’ stuff got me to thinking about the prices paid for music manuscripts by the “great” composers, prices that dwarf the amount paid for Elvis’ Martin D-18 guitar. The high prices brought by such manuscripts are a function of rarity. Handwritten musical scores by household name composers are excessively rare, as the overwhelming majority of those that have survived are safely locked away in climate-controlled vaults in libraries and museums. There are a few such autograph manuscripts – or “holographs” – still in private hands, and on the exceedingly […]
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday was generally about nepo (as in “nepotism”) babies: “the children of celebrities who have succeeded in the same or adjacent career as their celebrity parents or other esteemed relatives. The implication is that, because their parents already had connections to an industry, the child was able to use those connections to build a career in that industry.” Specifically, yesterday’s Music History Monday marked the 77th birthday of Gary (Levitch) Lewis, the son of the comedian Jerry Lewis and a nepo baby par excellence. Gary Lewis’ mother – Patti Palmer – was a professional singer who gave her son a set of drums when he was 15. At the age of 18, he formed a band with four friends. Since his mother was underwriting the band’s equipment purchases, Lewis got top billing, and the band was called “Gary and the Playboys.” The band was taken on by the American record producer Snuff Garrett, not because they were particularly good but because Garrett saw the band as an opportunity to capitalize off of Gary’s father, the presumed “King of Comedy” himself, Jerry Lewis. In yesterday’s post, we observed that Gary Lewis was not much of a […]
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The composer, conductor, pianist, violinist, watercolorist, photographer, and teacher Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was born 143 years ago yesterday in Geneva, Switzerland. He grew up in a middle-class household; his father Maurice Bloch was a merchant and his mother Sophie (née Brunschwig) was a highly cultured, stay-at-home mother. The Bloch’s were Jewish, and both religious and cultural Judaism played a powerful role in Bloch’s childhood. (A brief explanation here. Many Jews, particularly Reform Jews like myself, differentiate between our cultural background and our religious background. Judaism is a very ancient way of life-slash-religion; the current Hebrew year is 5783. That’s a long time and it encompasses a lot of history, a lot of art and literature, a lot of human experience, a lot of food, and a lot of guilt. More than just a form of worship, then, Judaism is a cultural way of life and a moral code of conduct based on the Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or so believe secular Jews like myself. This is why people like me – who are nonbelievers [or nearly so] – can still identify powerfully as Jews, despite the fact that ultra-religious […]
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Today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is a bit different from any other I’ve done to date. Instead of offering up a recommended recording, or a video, or a book, I’m prescribing a person: the indomitable Elaine Stritch (1924-2014). Love her or not, she was like a gorilla in your boudoir: impossible to ignore. She was one-of-a-kind and deserves to be celebrated! Madame Stritch Nearing the End On February 17, 2014, just five months before she passed away on July 17, 2014, at the age of 89, a wheelchair-bound Elaine Stritch appeared onstage at the 92nd Street Y (in New York City) for an interview. Stritch’s age and infirmity meant nothing; seven particularly good one-liners from that interview are linked below: The Emmy Award-winning actress Holland Taylor (born 1943) said this about her long-time friend and mentor, Elaine Stritch: “There was always the element of danger with her, and the possibility of dying of embarrassment.” That there was. Stritch was, in turns, loud, domineering, irascible, volcanic, and funny as hell, a consummate entertainer who carried – and happily celebrated! – her many demons on her sleeve. A self-professed “gravel voiced broad,” her career – which began in the 1940s – […]
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The subject of today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is doubly appropriate. Yesterday’s Music History Monday dealt with Carl Orff (1895-1982), a composer who thrived under the Nazi regime only to later claim (as did so many others in the post-war period) to have been a “victim” of the Nazis. Well, today’s composer was a victim – a real victim – of the Nazi terror: the Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944), who was “selected,” gassed, and cremated at the concentration/death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 17, 1944. Haas was a student and disciple of Leoš Janáček, whose own life and string quartets were celebrated in last week’s Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts. “The Gathering Storm” It still boggles the mind. Seventy-eight years after the end of World War Two, it still amazes us that so very many Germans – citizens of a great and modern nation – could descend to such depths of criminal depravity and sheer wickedness as they did between 1933 and 1945. If it remains hard for us, here, today, to grasp the enormity of the Nazi evil, imagine how difficult it was to grasp for most Europeans in the early and mid-1930s. Most such […]
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I am well aware that today is July 4 and that, perhaps, the patriotic thing for me to do today would be to celebrate the national anthem of the United States – The Star-Spangled Banner – and, perhaps, a famous arrangement of that very anthem. Sadly, no-can-do, because it has already-been-done: just last year, in Music History Monday for July 4, 2022, and Dr. Bob Prescribes for July 5, 2022. Those posts – respectively entitled “As American as tarte aux pommes! Celebrating the Fourth with some Real American Music! or Tampering with National Property” and “Stravinsky in America” – together recount the story of The Star-Spangled Banner as well as Igor Stravinsky’s famous and most controversial arrangement of the anthem, made in 1944 and subsequently banned in Boston! I would humbly direct your attention to these two posts for appropriately “spangled” reading. As for today, we pick up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday, with the Czech composer Leoš Janáček and his two superb string quartets: No. 1, subtitled “The Kreutzer Sonata” and No. 2, subtitled “Intimate Letters.” Leoš Janáček(1854-1928) Our impressions of Leoš Janáček tend to be conditioned by photographs taken of him later in life. […]
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with the incredulity we should all feel when faced with the astounding magnitude of Wolfgang Mozart’s talent and the beauty and quality of his music. It is appropriate, then, that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post should celebrate at least some of Mozart’s astonishing music, and I have chosen his two Piano Quartets and what is a brilliant and relatively new recording, one released in 2018. Superlatives The title of this album of Mozart’s two piano quartets is “Apotheosis.” The program booklet packaged with the CD defines apotheosis as: “1. Elevation to divine status 2. The perfect form or example of something” With its references to “divine status” and “perfection,” that definition indulges in superlatives: “Something of the highest quality or degree.” Statements of superlatives are dangerous because they can ride roughshod over important details, details that would otherwise force us to qualify those superlative statements. For example. The consensus “greatest baseball player” of all time is Babe Ruth (1895-1948), whose statistics as a power hitter were so far ahead of his contemporaries as to put him in a league of his own. (His stats as a pitcher – had he continued to pitch regularly […]
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In my Dr. Bob Prescribes post of June 6, 2023, on Martha Argerich, I recommended an album containing two piano trios: Pyotr Tchaikovsky one-and-only piano trio of 1882, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s second piano trio, in E minor of 1944, as performed by Martha Argerich, piano; Gidon Kremer, violin; and Mischa Maisky, cello. In that post, I observed that Ms. Argerich (born 1941) has long been associated with the violinist Gidon Kremer (born 1947) and the cellist Mischa Maisky (born 1948). Their album containing live performances of Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 and Tchaikovsky’s Trio in A minor, Op. 50 is superb. I opined that as musical compositions go, Tchaikovsky’s trio is wonderful, but Shostakovich’s is a world-class masterpiece, a bristling gut-wrenching chef-d’oeuvre. I then promised that I would write about Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E minor as soon as possible, and here we are, two weeks later, ready to go. Who says I don’t keep my promises? Shostakovich’s trio, composed in 1944, was a product of the war years and, in many ways, a product of the war itself. As such, some necessary historical background is called for. So bear with me, as we address – by necessity – something of […]
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the birth of the American pianist and composer Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea (1941-2021), in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A good bit of that post was spent discussing Corea’s stunning versatility as a pianist and composer: he could play the piano and compose for the piano in almost any conceivable style. This versatility was a function of his talent, of his training, and of his omnivorous musical appetite: when it came to music in general and jazz in particular, Corea consumed and internalized it all. The result is a body of music so varied that many commentators appear to spend more time categorizing it than actually listening to it. (I say that because if they actually listened to and thought about Corea’s music, they’d realize that for all its stylistic variety Chick Corea’s music always sounds like Chick Corea’s music, its “stylistic category” notwithstanding.) Corea addressed this issue in an interview conducted in 2010: “I’m often asked about what others consider my diversity of tastes. Actually, the simple, most truthful and direct answer is, I never think about it. I follow my interests and find that it leads me to trying to understand other cultures and […]
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Yesterday – Monday, June 5 – marked Martha Argerich’s 82nd birthday. As promised in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, it is a birthday we will celebrate here, now, today, in Dr. Bob Prescribes! Over the course of her storied career, Martha Argerich has made people say the darndest things. I present for your reading pleasure a selection of frankly gushing statements by some otherwise jaded, hard-nosed music critics (as if there’s any other kind!): Writing in The New Yorker in 2001, Alex Ross asserts that: “[Argerich] reigns supreme over the feudalistic world of virtuoso pianists. Rivals become mere fans around her, lingering at the door of her dressing room and then skulking away. Argerich brings to bear qualities that are seldom contained in one person: she is a pianist of brain-teasing technical agility; she is a charismatic woman with an enigmatic reputation; she is an unaffected interpreter whose native language is music. This last may be the quality that sets her apart. A lot of pianists play huge double octaves; a lot of pianists photograph well. But few have the unerring naturalness of phrasing that allows them to embody the music rather than interpret it.” Critic Barney Zweitz, writing in […]
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I am doing something here in this post today that I have only done twice before in the storied history of Dr. Bob Prescribes: I am recommending a recording for the second time. The other two times I did so were a matter of expedience, as I reran two posts back in early March immediately after my heart bypass surgery. The issue today is not one of expedience but rather, of necessity. You see, Giuseppe Verdi’s String Quartet in E minor remains his least-known masterwork, and it deserves a much harder sell than it was given in what was a brief post back on March 10, 2020. Yesterday’s Music History Mondayfocused on Verdi’s Requiem and its premiere on May 22, 1874, 149 years ago yesterday. What went unmentioned in yesterday’s post is that following the premiere of his Requiem, Verdi shocked the operatic world by announcing his retirement. It was an announcement that appeared to have aggrieved pretty much everyone on the planet with the notable exception of Giuseppe Verdi himself, who believed that with the composition of Aida (1871) and his Requiem (1874) he had freaking written enough. Verdi and Retirement In 1875 Giuseppe was truly at the very […]
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In choosing a topic for last week’s (May 8) Music History Monday post, I had a difficult choice: to either mark the birthday of the short-lived American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) or the birthday of the even shorter-lived American blues songwriter, singer, and guitarist Robert Johnson (1911-1938). I chose to run with Gottschalk. Today, then, we are offering up a belated birthday greeting to Robert Johnson, who is among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived. Was that last bit an overstatement, “among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived”? No; it is not. But we would note that Johnson’s musical influence was primarily felt by rock ‘n’ roll musicians, living and working a full generation after his death in 1938. As we will soon discuss, we know next to nothing about Johnson himself: his life (and his death). He was an itinerant musician who performed on a small musical circuit up-and-down the Mississippi Delta, playing on street corners, saloons, Saturday night dances, and what were called juke joints. (“Juke joints” were pop-up establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, operated primarily by Black Americans in the deep south). Johnson’s recording career spanned […]
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My Dr. Bob Prescribes post for February 21 of this year feature Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s superb video of Gioachino Rossini’s Barber of Seville. During the course of that post, I wrote:
“Comedy requires deftness, speed, and timing, timing, and more timing. Ponnelle’s production has it all, and the opera crackles under his direction. I would like to say that I can hardly imagine an equally good opera film, but actually, I can: Ponnelle’s own version of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, filmed in 1976. With an all-star cast featuring Hermann Prey, Mirella Freni, Dieterich Fischer-Dieskau, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Maria Ewing; accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm; staged and directed by Ponnelle; and produced by DG, this version of Figaro remains among the very best opera films I’ve ever seen. I will find a reason to feature the performance in a post of its own sooner than later.”
Yesterday’s anniversary of the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro on May 1, 1786, is all the excuse we need to celebrate Ponnelle’s film!
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988)Jean-Pierre PonnelleThe opera director and designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle was born in Paris on February 19, 1932. He died, much too young, in Munich on August 11, 1988, at the age of 56.
(Ponnelle’s death was the result of a crazy, work-related accident. He was in Munich to direct a production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta. At some point during a rehearsal, distracted and not looking where he was going, he fell off the stage into the orchestra pit, injuring himself badly. Hospitalized, a blood clot travelled to his lungs, and he subsequently died from a pulmonary embolism [a blockage of an artery in the lungs].)
Ponnelle came from an artistic and artistically connected family. His father, Pierre Ponnelle, came from a long line of high-end vintners and was, as well, a music critic, an excellent combination of professions if you want to be paid to drink and listen to music. Pierre Ponnelle was also a friend of the great Richard Strauss (1864-1949), and it was his German connections that led him to move himself and his family to Baden-Baden in Germany after the war, where he directed the radio broadcasts in the French zone of occupation.
A sampling of Pierre Ponnelle winesWhen he turned 18 in 1950, Jean-Pierre left Germany and returned to Paris, where he studied philosophy and art history at the Sorbonne and took art lessons from the famed French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Fernand Léger (1881-1955).
In 1951, Ponnelle was contacted by a friend from his years in Germany, the composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012). Henze had just completed his first opera: a one-act drama entitled Boulevard Solitude, which was modern, post-World War Two retelling of Manon Lescaut. Henze asked Ponnelle to “design” the production, which meant designing the sets and costumes. Ponnelle didn’t have to be asked twice. Boulevard Solitude received its premiere on February 17, 1952, at the Landestheater in the German city of Hanover, and Ponnelle’s career was born. He designed opera, ballet, and theater productions across Europe during the 1950s, and made his American debut in 1958, when he created sets for a staged performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in San Francisco in 1958.…
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Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand, and the CriticsThe famed Pauline Kael spent much of her review of Funny Girl in The New Yorker identifying what she called the film’s “weaknesses.”
Roger Ebert (1942-2013) in 1969Roger Ebert, writing in Chicago Sun-Times on October 18, 1968, thought that:
“The film is perhaps the ultimate example of the roadshow musical gone overboard. It is over-produced, over-photographed and over-long. The second half drags badly. The supporting characters are generally wooden.”
According to Richard L. Coe, writing in The Washington Post, Funny Girl was:
“Overdone . . . a long, trippy bore.”
Renata Adler, writing in Barbra Streisand’s hometown newspaper The New York Times on September 28, 1968, found the movie “condescending and patronizing,” the critical meaning of which we can only guess.
Despite all of this critical negativity, Funny Girl was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture (which it did not win; the best picture Oscar that year went to the musical Oliver!, which had been nominated for an astounding nineteen Oscars). Of its eight nominations, Funny Girl garnered but one Oscar, for Barbra Streisand as Best Actress. In fact, it was Streisand’s performance that carried the movie, a fact impossible to ignore whatever was the critical opinion of the movie itself.
Pauline Kael (1919-2001)For example, in the same The New Yorker review in which Pauline Kael itemized the film’s weakness, she wrote this about Barbra Streisand’s performance in Funny Girl:
“A bravura performance. As Fanny Brice, she has the wittiest comic inflections since the comediennes of the 1930s; she makes written dialogue sound like inspired improvisation. Streisand’s triumphant talent rides right over the film’s weaknesses.”
For all of his negativity about Funny Girl as a “total package” in his review, Roger Ebert also wrote that:
“Barbra Streisand is magnificent. She has the best timing since Mae West, and is more fun to watch than anyone since the young Katharine Hepburn. She doesn’t actually sing a song at all; she acts it. She does things with her hands and face that are simply individual; that’s the only way to describe them. They haven’t been done before. She sings, and you’re really happy you’re there . . . That makes the movie itself kind of schizo. It is impossible to praise Miss Streisand too highly, [and] hard to find much to praise about the rest of the film.”
Jan Dawson, writing in the January 1969 edition of The Monthly Film Bulletin, observed:
“The story of the actress whose dramatic rise from rags to riches is accompanied by the discovery that suffering lies on the flip side of success has provided the basis of many an American musical. But [director and producer] William Wyler manages to transcend the clichés of the genre and create – largely through Barbra Streisand’s characterization of Fanny Brice – a dramatic comedy in which the musical numbers illustrate the public aspect of the star’s life without once interrupting the narrative.”
…
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The Easter Holiday has come and gone, but the melody lingers. The “melody” to which I specifically refer is Johann Sebastian Bach’s epic St Matthew Passion, which was first performed on Good Friday, April 11, 1727, at the St. Thomas Church (or Thomaskirche) in the Saxon city of Leipzig. Revised versions of the St Matthew were performed three more times in Bach’s lifetime, all under his direction in Leipzig: on April 15, 1729; March 30, 1736; and on March 23, 1742. Bach then further revised the passionbetween 1743 and 1746, and it is this final version that we will hear in performances and recordings today.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) in 1746, the year he completed the final version of the St Matthew PassionSebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion is a massive, roughly three-hour-long sacred oratorio that sets to music the story surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection as told in chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel of Matthew. Musically, it is a full-blown religious opera presented in concert form, with a narrator, a cast of characters, two adult choirs and a separate boys’ choir, eight vocal soloists and two orchestras. It is replete with arias, recitatives, choruses, and action music of every stripe. With a libretto by Bach’s long-time collaborator Christian Frederic Henrici (known as “Picander”, 1700-1764), the St Matthew Passion features 68 different musical numbers, divided into two acts, or “parts”: Part One featuring 29 numbers, and Part Two 39 numbers.
In terms of its scope, spiritual and expressive power, range of expression, and sheer (frankly inexplicable) beauty, Bach’s St Matthew Passion is, as a work of art unique, sui generis, one-of-a-kind: an artwork defined only by itself, comparable only to itself.
Bach biographer Karl Geiringer writes:
“The St Matthew Passion represents the climax of Bach’s music for the Protestant Church. His own conception of its importance is clearly revealed in the exquisite score he made of it, a score which is unique even among his many beautiful manuscripts. He worked on it with a ruler and compass, and he used red ink for the recitatives of the Evangelist [the Passion’s narrator] to distinguish the divine [Biblical] message from the rest of the text. The motto Beethoven placed in front of his Missa Solemnis – ‘It comes from the heart – may it go to the heart – can well be applied to this work as well.”
A page from Bach’s manuscript of the St Matthew Passion; as indicated in the quote above, he wrote texts taken directly from Scripture in red, in order to differentiate them from the words of his librettist, Christian Friedrich HenriciThe first version of the St Matthew Passion received its premiere on April 11, 1727, 295 years ago yesterday. As previously observed, Bach continued to rewrite and rework the Passion for 19 years, until 1746.
Passion Plays and the Evolution of the “Oratorio-Passion,” of Which Bach’s St Matthew Passion Is OneModern scholarship indicates that the Gospel (meaning “good tidings”) of Matthew, which like each of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke) tells the story of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection, was written by a Jewish male between 85 CE and 95 CE. This view is based on four factors. The first is that the writer deeply understood contemporary Jewish values, both traditional and non-traditional. Second, the Matthew gospel appears to have been written after the final separation between the new, Christian Church and the traditional Jewish Synagogue, an event that took place around 85 CE.…
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Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was born and raised in the cold, dank, north German city of Hamburg. (As an adult, he habitually vacationed in the warmer climes of Italy; it would seem that it took him half a lifetime to warm his frozen bones!)
Johannes Brahms at twentyPhysically, Brahms matured very slowly. By the age of 20 – fully grown – he was short, blonde, blue-eyed dude, almost girlish in his physical beauty, with a high, piping voice. This description might work for a 12-year-old guy, but not one that’s 20. In fact, the year Brahms turned 20, his friend Hedwig Salomon wrote in her diary:
“Brahms has a thin, boyish little voice that has not yet changed, and a child’s countenance that any girl might kiss without blushing.”
Brahms’ frequent (and eventually exclusive) indulgence in prostitutes dates from this time of his life, his early 20’s. Writing in 1933, Brahms’ biographer Robert Schauffler (The Unknown Brahms, Crown Pub.) delicately observed:
“Thus handicapped, he naturally found trouble in getting respectable girls to take his young virility seriously; whereas the daughters of joy, besides possessing a deep knowledge of masculine psychology and being blasé to sex appeal, would take any man as seriously as they could take his pocketbook.”
Of course, the real reason behind Brahms’ predilection for prostitutes has to with his catastrophic experiences as a brothel pianist between the ages of 12 and 14 (discussed in yesterday’s Music History Monday post) and his subsequent, life-long aversion towards intimacy with women.
Brahms’ late physical development drove him crazy. His voice did not change until he was 24, by which time he had already done permanent damage to it by forcing himself to speak in a low, gravelly manner, presumably to sound more “manly.” Brahms’ beard didn’t even start to grow in until his mid-thirties. Dr. Alfred Gruneberger, Brahms’ physician later in life, claimed:
“that the exaggeratedly hirsute and virile appearance of his long-bearded middle age was encouraged by Brahms as a psychic compensation for the humiliation he had suffered on account of the smooth cheeks of his early twenties.”
Brahms circa 1863Brahms moved permanently to Vienna in November of 1862 at the age of 29 (coincidentally, almost 70 years to the day after Beethoven arrived in the city from his hometown of Bonn). Youthful looking though he was, by the age of 29 Brahms’s compositional maturity was fully in place. He had turned away from the literary “Romanticism” of Robert Schumann and had turned his back entirely on the over-the-top, expression-at-all-costs Romanticism of the New German School of Liszt and Wagner. He preferred to craft his music objectively, by combining the contrapuntal clarity of Bach with the formal structures of Classicism, and informed by his admittedly modern melodic and harmonic language.
Soon enough, personal circumstances would provide Brahms’s expressive wherewithal to compose that single work that would establish him as a major composer.…
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It Happens Every SpringFive days ago, on March 30, 2023, something took place that hadn’t happened since 1968, 55 years ago: major league baseball’s Opening Day took place with all thirty teams starting their season on the same day.
I am aware that this year, spring technically began on March 20, 2023. But let’s be real: in the United States, the true end of winter and beginning of spring – and with it the sense that verdant life and hope spring eternal – is marked by the beginning of baseball season.
In the words of Terrence Mann (as played by James Earl Jones in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams):
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Ohhhhhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”
Terrance Mann’s is a sentiment that would have been shared entirely by the miraculous (not too strong a word) jazz pianist Dave McKenna (1930-2008). McKenna was a life-long Boston Red Sox fan, as the cover of the prescribed Dave “Fingers” McKenna album above attests. In fact, according to that album’s producer Hank O’Neal:
“The project [to record the album] was firmed up in May 1977 at a Yankees/Red Sox game (the Yankees won; sorry Dave).”
(On the album jacket of the original vinyl version of the recording, the producer Hank O’Neal explained the cover this way:
“A note on the cover. Dave McKenna likes the Boston Red Sox. In fact, he may very well like the Red Sox better than playing the piano. Anyway, to boost sales in the Boston area, John De Vries fashioned a cover modeled on the old 1940 Play Ball baseball card. We cheated, in that Dave’s name has been moved to the top of the ‘card’ since, I am told, that if the name of an album is not at the top, prospective customers might overlook it.”)
Dave McKenna in 1990, age 60When I Discovered JazzPardon me a bit of first-person pronoun-dominated background.
Along with untold millions of us, I took piano lessons as a little shaver. By the time I was thirteen I was a competent pianist; I could play an armload of Beethoven Sonatas, Bach’s Two and Three-Part Inventions, some Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, etc., etc. But at the age of thirteen, I became bored with my piano lessons, and while I spent a good bit of time writing my own, primitive, primarily rock ‘n’ roll flavored ditties, I stopped practicing and subsequently stopped taking lessons.
And then I was hit by a bolt of musical lightning: at the age of 14, I discovered jazz. Here was a music with all the rhythmic intensity of rock ‘n’ roll but magnified – to my ear, a gazillion fold – by the polyrhythmic magic that is swing. I was gob-smacked by its harmonic complexity, its melodic sophistication, its discipline, its conversational nature and, as a primarily improvised music, its freedom from the printed page. …
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Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1791, by John HoppnerHaydn’s MassesDuring the course of his career, Haydn composed a total of fourteen settings of the mass. This means he set the same words to music fourteen times. One might think that in doing so, Haydn could not possibly have avoided repeating himself, but one would be wrong to think so. Haydn was as devout a Catholic as ever genuflected; he loved and believed to the core of his cockles the words of the mass. As such, he lavished extraordinarily original music on each of his masses, the composition of which was – for Haydn – an act of faith.
Haydn as BelieverJoseph Haydn was born into a Roman Catholic family on March 31, 1732, in the Austrian village of Rohrau. He was raised Catholic and he stayed Catholic; unlike his buddy Mozart and his cantankerous student Beethoven, Haydn’s Catholicism never “lapsed.”
Georg August Griesinger (1769-1845) in 1799Haydn’s personal friend and biographer Georg August Griesinger (1769-1845) described his faith this way:
“Haydn was very religiously inclined, and was loyally devoted to the faith in which he was raised. He was strongly convinced in all his heart that all human destiny is under God’s guiding hand, that God rewards good and evil, that all talents come from above. All his larger scores begin with the words In nomine Domini [‘in the name of the Lord’] and end with Laus Deo or Soli Deo Gloria [‘Praise to God; to God alone the glory’].
I once heard him say, ‘If my composing is not proceeding so well, I walk up and down the room with my rosary in my hand, say several Aves, and then ideas come to me again.’ He accepted the what and the how of the teaching of the Catholic Church, and his soul found comfort therein.”
His faith aside, Haydn wrote music for a living, which means that his fourteen masses were written because someone hired him to write them. The economics behind the composition, in 1796, of a mass Haydn himself entitled Mass in the time of War will be told in a moment. But first, to paraphrase the great Ricky Ricardo, “We have some ‘splainin’ to do”, because the Mass in the time of War was composed in response to events that began in Revolutionary Paris. …
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“What Right Had He to Write This Thing?”Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) in 1911; Nijinsky is costumed as PetrushkaA happy vernal equinox to everyone and sundry!
Yes, technically the first day of spring in 2023 was yesterday, March 20. But I was taught that the first day of spring is usually March 21, and so we are honoring it today with its eponymous masterwork, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
The Rite – composed in 1912 and premiered in Paris on May 29, 1913 – was new and different, and it inspired people to say the darndest things. For example, the following poem appeared in the Boston Herald on February 9, 1924, following a performance of The Rite in that city:
“Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring?
What right had he to write this thing,
Against our helpless ears to fling
Its crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang, bing?
And then to call it Rite of Spring,
The season when on joyous wing
The birds’ harmonious carols sing
And harmony’s in everything?
He who could write The Rite of Spring,If I be right, by right should swing!”
Igor Stravinsky composed The Rite of Spring for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes when he was thirty years old. Even if he had never written another piece of music, Stravinsky would still be famous, because excepting perhaps Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I Got Love in My Tummy (by Arthur Resnick and Joey Levine, 1968), The Rite of Spring must be considered the single most influential piece of music composed during the twentieth century.
The Rite changed the way composers thought about rhythm, melody, counterpoint, and orchestration, and it continues to exert a seminal influence on composers to this day. For all of its debt to Stravinsky’s Russian roots and the music of Claude Debussy, the Rite appeared to be devoid of any reference to the long Western musical tradition as it existed to its time. Rather, it created what appeared to be an entirely new musical language and expressive world: a world devoid of such bourgeois niceties as elegance, prettiness, and grace. Rather, it created a primal, sexual, violent, thrumming, pre-moral musical expressive world in which pure rhythmic energy for its own sake became the principal musical element.
Stravinsky created this violent, “pre-moral musical world” because that was the gig, that’s what the scenario of the ballet of The Rite of Spring is about: fertility rites, contests, sun worship and human sacrifice in pagan, Bronze Age Russia. In order to evoke a world no one had ever seen, Stravinsky wrote music the likes of which no one had ever heard.
Pierre Monteux (1875-1964) in 1912Certainly, the conductor of the Ballets Russes, Pierre Monteux (1875-1964), had never imagined such music. He first heard The Rite in a tiny rehearsal room in Paris’ Théâtre du Casino when Stravinsky played it on the piano for both Monteux and the founder and CEO of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929). Stravinsky’s performance left Monteux gob smacked. He remembered:
“I decided then and there that the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms were the only music for me, not the music of this crazy Russian. My one desire was to flee that room and find a quiet corner in which to rest my aching head. Then [Diaghilev] turned to me and with a smile said, ‘This is a masterpiece, Monteux, which will completely revolutionize music and make you famous, because you are going to conduct it.’ And, of course, I did.”
Despite the PTSD inflicted by Stravinsky’s pianistic performance, Monteux spent two months – from March to May of 1913 – with Stravinsky, helping him tweak the orchestration of The Rite so that Stravinsky would get precisely the orchestral effects he wanted. In the process, Monteux came to know the music of The Rite better than anyone on the planet except Stravinsky himself.…
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The Ultimate HobbyistYesterday’s Music History Monday post featured the non-musical hobbies of some of our favorite musicians, from Rod Stewart’s train set, to Courtney Love’s Liddle Kiddle dolls (made by Mattel in the late 1960s), to Arnold Schoenberg’s mania for tennis and ping pong, to Gioachino Rossini’s delight in all things food.
The subject of today’s post – a person I’m calling the ultimate hobbyist – flips things around: he was someone who earned his living in a non-musical job, whose hobby was composing music.
That person was Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954).
Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) circa 1947Something Different: An ExplanationThis post is different than most Dr. Bob Prescribes posts in that at nearly 5000 words in length, it is double the length of a typical post. I’d like to think that this is a good thing – more bang for your Patreon buck – but for some of you it will simply be irksomely long.
Whatever.
I’m running it because aside from being an appropriate subject, it represents something of a rarity: a lecture that was originally intended for a Teaching Company/Great Courses/Wondrium course (The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works, recorded in 2011) that was removed from the course a couple of months after the course came out. It was replaced with a lecture on Camille Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3.
The circumstances of that removal and replacement bear telling.
Ives was a brilliant, utterly singular composer. His music got a lot of play in and around the bicentennial in 1976, which is when I came to know and love it. But sadly, it has since fallen back into the obscurity it suffered before the bicentennial. I’ve tried to include Ives’ music in as many of my courses as possible (his Symphony No. 3 is featured in my The Symphony course, recorded in 2003), but one of Ives’ publishers has since made that almost impossible. That publisher is Theodore Presser, located today in suburban Philadelphia.
Since Ives had been dead for less than 75 years when we made the orchestral music course, we had to license not just a recording but Ives’ music as well. The people at Theodore Presser initially behaved honorably and contracted the piece to us. But a month after the course came out – after the Teaching Company/Great Courses/Wondrium had sunk a considerable chunk of change into its production – the pirates at Presser came back and demanded we renegotiate the contract, quintupling the initial licensing price. Of course, this was unethical and probably illegal – we had, after all, a contract – but the legal action we were threatened with simply made the whole thing untenable. So I flew back to The Great Courses in Chantilly, Virginia; we recorded a new lecture (on Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3); we removed the Ives and replaced it with the Saint-Saëns and that was that.
The stupidity of all of this was clear to everyone but those lovely folks at Theodore Presser. The music of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) does not need me to make a fuss over it; it’s quite well-known and beloved already. But the music of Ives needs all the huzzahs it can get (huzzahs that it deserves), and so the whole episode was a bit tragic.
So here is the bulk of that Ives lecture, unused and unheard since 2011, along with a recommendation for the superb recording we had licensed for lecture’s musical examples.
A “New England Symphony”Charles Ives House, Danbury, ConnecticutCharles Ives was born in 1874 and died in 1954. He was a composer of genius for whom music was a hobby: in Ives’ mind, “real” American men worked for a living. Ives himself was a highly respected insurance executive, who like thousands of others, commuted by train to his office in lower Manhattan from the ‘burbs in Redding Connecticut where he lived, where he lived for much of his adulthood.
The experimental nature of so much of his music, combined with his amateur status and pathological fear of self-promotion, condemned the great bulk of his music to obscurity for decades. A case in point is Three Places in New England – a work that Ives referred to as his “New England Symphony” – which had to wait 15 years for its premiere.…
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Italian Opera as an IndustryThe Teatro San Cassiano in 1637: a digital reconstructionFrom the moment the first public opera house – the Teatro San Cassiano – opened in Venice in 1637, opera has been a media industry in Italy. By the early nineteenth century, virtually every Italian city and many Italian towns as well had their own opera theaters; in the case of larger cities, multiple opera houses.
Like movie theaters in the first half of the twentieth century – before the advent of television – opera houses in nineteenth century Italy were not just entertainment venues but secular houses of worship, where people of virtually every class gathered to experience and cheer the musical/dramatic gospel and worship the great celebrities of their day: singers and opera composers.
For nineteenth century Italian opera houses and twentieth century movie theaters alike, turnover was the key. An opera (or a movie) would run for a week, by which time those who had wanted to see it had seen it. (When I was growing up in Willingboro, NJ, we had a single theater, part of the Fox chain; new movies opened every Wednesday.)
What “turnover” meant for nineteenth century Italian opera was a constant demand for new operas, which were composed and produced with assembly line-like speed to meet a demand that seemed never to flag.
It’s hard for us to imagine the heart-stopping deadline pressure the nineteenth century Italian opera industry put on its composers, producers, and performers. New operas had to be contracted, librettos written, music composed, casts assembled and rehearsed, sets designed and built and costumes sewn in just a few weeks’ time, over and over again. Typically, a composer would ride into town, compose an opera in roughly three weeks, supervise its production and conduct the first few performances before moving on to the next town and the next opera. The Italian public’s appetite for new operas was insatiable, so turnover was the name of the game. The most successful opera composers were those who were not just top-flight composers but those who could write fast, composers who additionally weren’t above the selective “reuse” of previously composed materials in order to meet their deadlines.
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) in 1820We are told that:
“Seldom were the operas published, and Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), for one, knowing that the next town would not have heard his last opera, would calmly appropriate sections from it and pass them off as new. Rossini’s most famous opera, The Barber of Seville, of 1816, uses arias and ensembles from La Cambiale de Matrimonio of 1810 and, in addition, material from four other of his operas. It was typical that The Barber took the composer no more than 13 days to finish. ‘I always knew Rossini was a lazy man,’ joked the composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) when told of this feat.”
Donizetti knew what he was talking about: it took him just eight days to compose the opera L’elisir d’amore, “The Elixir of Love.”…
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Advertising postcard picturing Wagner (with his father-in-law Franz Liszt directly behind him) greeting Kaiser Wilhelm I at the inaugural Bayreuth Festival in 1876The Giving of GiftsIt is appropriate that today, on St. Valentine’s Day, we celebrate a piece of music given as a gift of love from a husband to his wife: Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyl, which was given as a birthday gift to his wife Cosima in 1870.
Yesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the 140th anniversary of the death of Wagner (1813-1883) in Venice, at the age of 69. As we observed in that post, Venice was, for Wagner, a spiritual and artistic refuge, a place of uncanny physical beauty and – lacking any sort of wheeled transportation – uncanny quiet, a place where Wagner could presumably remove himself from the anxiety, hyperactivity, over-excitability, and depression that dogged his adult live.
Presumably.
On September 14, 1882, following the premiere run at the Bayreuth Festival (in southern Germany) of what turned out to be Wagner’s last work, Parsifal, Wagner, his family, and his entourage decamped for Venice. There they took over the entire mezzanine floor of one of Venice’s greatest palazzi: the late fifteenth-century Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi on the Grand Canal.
On arriving in Venice, Wagner expressed the wish that he would die in Venice, a classic instance of “be careful what you wish for.” He did indeed pass away there in Venice, some five months later, on February 13th, 1883. But before he died – of a heart attack – he participated in what had become a Wagner family tradition, the giving of a musical gift to his wife Cosima on the occasion of her birthday.
Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner was born late on Christmas eve of 1837, but she always celebrated her birthday on Christmas day. For those good people who celebrate the Christmas holiday and were additionally born on Christmas day, this can be – in terms of a birthday celebrations – a small disaster: instead of having separate celebrations and receiving separate birthday and Christmas gifts, it is my impression that for such people, everything gets rolled into a single celebration (and single gifts!).
(For our information, among other notable people who celebrate their birthdays on December 25 were/are Clara Barton, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Buffett, Conrad Hilton, Annie Lennox, Sissy Spacek, Kenny Stabler, and Justin Trudeau.)
Despite his ailing heart, Wagner continued his musical gift-giving tradition in December of 1882, when, in honor of Cosima’s 45th birthday, he conducted his early C Major Symphony at La Fenice (Venice’s principal opera house) to an invitation-only audience on Christmas eve.
(The symphony was composed in 1832 when was Wagner was 19 years old. A complete performance by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Heinz Rögner is linked below.)
The Siegfried Idyl and its Dedicatee: Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner (1837-1930)Cosima and Richard Wagner in 1872; she is seated in order to mask the fact that she was a full head taller than her husband. Wagner was around 5’5” in his shoes (lifts!), but closer to 5’2” barefoot. In terms of her height, Cosima was her father’s daughter: Franz Liszt stood 6’1” and Cosima about 5’11”.We read – here and there, over-and-under, around and about – that “Wagner wrote almost no instrumental music.” This is a mostmisleading statement, as Wagner was in fact a brilliant composer of instrumental music for orchestra, and he did indeed compose a significant body of orchestral music. However, it just so happens that the overwhelming bulk of that orchestral music was incorporated into his stage works as overtures, entr’actes, interludes, codas, etc. So let’s rephrase that just-quoted statement to read this way: “in his maturity, Wagner wrote very few self-standing, instrumental compositions, the most famous of which is his Siegfried Idyll.”
Siegfried Idyll is an exquisite work, with a fabulous back-story, and after all, how often do we get to hear and revel in a Wagnerian opus that runs but 20 minutes from beginning to end? Exactly. And it just so happens that the Siegfried Idyl was a gift from Wagner to his wife, Cosima, on the occasion of her 33rd birthday, on December 25, 1870.…
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The BandThe Band; left-to-right: Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, and Rick DankoThe group of five musicians that eventually became known as “The Band” began to gather in Toronto, Canada, in 1957. However, it wasn’t until 1968 – after working as the backup group for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan – that the band became “The Band.”
As “The Band,” the group recorded and released ten studio albums, becoming one of the most popular and influential rock ‘n’ roll ensembles of their time.
Bruce Eder (born 1955), journalist, film writer, and audio/video producer whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Newsday, Current Biography, Interview, the Oxford American, AllMusic, and AllMovie describes The Band as:
“one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics as seriously as the music of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.”
An exaggeration? No. The Band were the darlings of Rolling Stone magazine, which lavished more attention on them than any other group in the magazine’s history. On January 12, 1970, The Band appeared on the cover of Time magazine, only the second rock group – after the Beatles – to be so honored. Both George Harrison and Eric Clapton claimed that The Band had exerted a major influence on their own music, and Clapton later claimed that he actually wanted to join the band in the early 1970s. (He never did, though he performs with The Band in the prescribed video!)
Robbie RobertsonGoing Out with a Bang
Jaime Royal “Robbie” Robertson was the lead guitarist and principal songwriter for The Band. By the 1976, he had been touring for 16 years non-stop and he was through. It was Robertson who, in the fall of 1976, urged the rest of the group to retire from live performances and become – as The Beatles had done in 1966 – a strictly studio band, making recordings but not touring. Robertson remembered:
“I had become suspicious of the road. These people who got crazy when they got on the road. This was not a healthy thing. I was telling the guys in The Band, ‘I like the music we make together. But I don’t want to go out there with it anymore. We’re not learning from it. We’re not growing from it.’”
Bill Graham (1931-1991) in front of the Winterland Ballroom, San FranciscoRobertson wanted to mark The Band’s “road retirement” by staging a final, colossal farewell concert at the same venue in which they had played their first concert in 1969 as “The Band”: at Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. That farewell concert (and the film that documented it) was to be known as The Last Waltz.
The concert took place on November 25, 1976 – Thanksgiving Day – at the Winterland Ballroom. Produced and managed by Bill Graham, it was a lavish occasion. Attended by some 5000 people, the evening began with a turkey dinner and ballroom dancing, with music supplied by the Berkeley Promenade Orchestra (today simply the Berkeley Orchestra). The Band took the stage at 9pm and was joined by an all-star/A-list cast of musicians during the long concert that followed…
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Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)The New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg offers this appraisal of the music of Francis Poulenc in third edition of his book, The Lives of the Great Composers (W. W. Norton, 1997):
“It seems clear that Francis Poulenc has emerged as the strongest and most individual member of Les Six [that group of six Paris-based composers arbitrarily lumped together by a Parisian journalist in 1919: Georges Auric (1899–1983), Louis Durey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983)]. Nobody would have guessed it in the 1930s. The betting would have been on Milhaud or Honegger. Poulenc was considered a comic (he even had the marked facial and physical resemblance to the great French comic Fernandel).”
Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin, better known as Fernandel (1903-1971)Harold Schonberg facetiously continues:
“[Poulenc was] the court jester, the sophisticate. So charming and amusing! So lightweight! So chic! As a corollary, so unimportant, au fond [basically]. To the world, Poulenc was the musical soft-shoe man, dancing away at his music-hall routines with not a care in the world, a grin perpetually plastered on his face.”
Learning to ComposeLacking any formal training, in his early music Poulenc (1899-1963) fell back on what he did best, and that was write beautiful melodies.
(Alas, no amount of training can create a great melodist; either you have it, or you don’t, and Poulenc had it by the cartload. The British musicologist Roger Nichols, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians observes:
“For [Poulenc], the most important element of all was melody and he found his way to a vast treasury of undiscovered tunes within an area that had, according to the most up-to-date musical maps, been surveyed, worked and exhausted.”)
Like another gifted melodist and his exact contemporary – George Gershwin (1898-1937) – Poulenc learned to compose on the job. Like Gershwin, Poulenc was well aware of his compositional technical shortcomings, and like Gershwin, he sought out teachers and “advisors” even as his career was taking off. On the advice of Maurice Ravel, the increasingly well-known Poulenc decided to take composition lessons. On the advice of Darius Milhaud, he took those lessons (on and off) with the French composer, teacher, and musicologist Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) from 1921 to 1925.
When push came to shove, Poulenc also had his friends to fall back on for advice, most notable Georges Auric and Milhaud.
If anyone is wondering what the 20-something Francis Poulenc did for a living, and how he had so much free time to hobnob and take lessons and compose the scads of music he did, think no more. When his father died in 1918, he inherited a fortune. When he turned 21 in 1920, that fortune was his to spend as he chose. Poulenc was, very simply, that most enviable (and rarest!) of composers: from a young age, financially independent. (I twitch with jealousy.)
With his gorgeous melodic sensibility leading the way, Poulenc learned to compose over the course of the 1920s.…
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James Baldwin (1924-1987)In 1965, the American writer James Baldwin wrote:
“At a time when there seemed to be no hope at all, Paul Robeson [1898-1976] spoke out for all of us.”
By “all of us,” Baldwin is, of course, referring to Black America.
In 1998, the American scholar, historian, author, and social historian Lerone Bennett expanded on Baldwin’s comment, writing:
“Before King dreamed, before Thurgood Marshall petitioned and Sidney Poitier emoted, before the big breakthrough in Hollywood and Washington, before the Jim Crow signs came down, and before the civil rights banners went up, before Spike Lee, before Denzel, before Sam Jackson and Jesse Jackson, there was Paul Robeson. One of the most phenomenally gifted men ever born in America, he lived one of the most extraordinary stories of the century. When he died, even his critics and detractors conceded that he was one of the immortals.”
Clement Price (1945-2014)According to the American historian Dr. Clement Alexander Price, who was the Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at the Newark, NJ campus of Rutgers University:
“Called by some ‘The Great Forerunner’ and others the ‘Tallest Tree in Our Forest,’ Paul Robeson is without peer in the annals of modern American civilization. His was a life rich with intellectual and emotional complexity and poignancy, unfolding during the United States’ most eventful times, a long and troubled era to which he contributed his talent and his willingness to challenge the prevailing conventions of racism, imperialism, and social injustice.
His trailblazing career in film, during the 1920s and 1930s, was only one of the many facets of his extraordinary life, but it was pivotal to the emergence of a black film aesthetic and, by extension, an African-American cultural identity. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to understand the intersection of racism, colonialist influences on popular culture, and black artistic concerns without considering what Paul Robeson accomplished as a singer, stage and film star, and activist and, alas, what he left undone because of the tenor of his times.”
“Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist”Paul Robeson: Portraits of the ArtistThe prescribed set of discs – The Criterion Collection: Paul Robeson, Portrait of the Artist – includes a twenty minute documentary entitled “Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist.” Fairly brief, yes, but superbly done. It consists of footage from Robeson’s films and concerts and interviews with the actors James Earl Jones (born 1931) and Ruby Dee (1922-2014), and the filmmaker William Greaves (1926-2014). Narrated by Sidney Poitier (1927-2022), the documentary explores aspects of Robeson’s artistic life and political activism and is a must see. …
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Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in 1861, at the age of 48Had I not taken a necessary holiday respite from both Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes, my January 2 and 3, 2023, posts would have featured Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, which received its premiere on January 2, 1843, in Dresden. The story of the opera, and the DVD I was going to feature in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post of January 3 are simply too good to pass up, and so here is the Dutchman, better late than never!
In August of 1837, the 24-year-old Richard Wagner accepted the job of music director at the municipal theater in Riga, the present-day capital of Latvia. For Wagner, who’d been moving around from one low-end musical job to the next for the previous three years, Riga was the bottom of the barrel, nowheresville, the end of the line: a predominately German-speaking burg that was, nevertheless, part of the Russian Empire and a gazillion miles from the centers of German culture he so longed for. But Wagner, as he always did when he had to, persevered, and putting aside his despair, he made the Riga gig work, at least at first. To great local acclaim, he conducted fifteen different operas during his first season in Riga and twenty-four during his second. He even managed to do some composing himself; those first two seasons in Riga saw the composition of Act One and most of Act Two of what is considered his first real opera, Rienzi.
It was because of his popularity with the opera-going public in Riga that Wagner managed to hold down his job for two consecutive years, a Wagner world record. However, given his poor attitude towards the city itself, his insolence towards his boss (a theater director named Karl von Holtei), and his typically scornful attitude towards his fellow musicians, it was only a matter of time before he was fired. That inevitable but still humiliating event took place in March of 1839. Wagner didn’t handle the news of his firing well, and he publicly accused the theater director von Holtei of being:
“A homosexual and a pimp who made advances towards [my wife] Minna in order to deceive people as to his real nature.”
Wilhelmine “Minna” Planer (1809-1866) in 1835, a year before her marriage to Richard WagnerWhatever satisfaction Wagner’s parting shot at Karl von Holtei might have brought him, the fact remained that by the spring of 1839, he was unemployed, without prospects for employment, and deeply in debt to various lenders in Riga. Even worse, by having stayed put in Riga for almost two years, his many creditors from his previous places of employ – Magdeburg and Königsberg – had managed to track him down. In order to keep Wagner from once again skipping out on his debts, his creditors petitioned the Russian authorities to confiscate Wagner’s and Minna’s passports, which was done. It looked like debtor’s prison for sure unless the couple could escape. And that’s exactly what they managed to do.
Writing in 1978, Wagner biographer John Chancellor describes his escape:
“[On] 9 July 1839 Wagner fled from Riga to escape his creditors. This was the most sensational of his getaways.
It was almost as dangerous then to leave Russia without a passport as it is to leave [the Soviet Union] today. The frontier was very carefully guarded; every few yards a Cossack kept watch at a sentry-box. Wagner, Minna and his large Newfoundland dog, Robber, were taken by friends first to a smuggler’s den near the frontier where they spent the evening with [what Wagner later called] some ‘hideous, evil-smelling Polish Jews’; then, as night fell, they took refuge in an unoccupied sentry-box; at a certain moment they made a dash for the frontier and scrambled into Prussian territory. Had they been seen by any of the patrolling sentries they would have been shot. The details of their flight had been planned and executed by a certain Abraham Möller, a wealthy patron of the arts. Möller, who had been waiting for the fugitives in Prussia, now accompanied them to Pillau; on the way, the rude cart in which they were travelling overturned and Minna was so shaken that she had to spend the night in a peasant’s hovel.”
Once at the port at Pillau, Richard, Minna and their dog boarded the “Thetis,” a small merchant boat with a crew of seven. Lacking passports, the Wagners were traveling illegally, and the captain of the Thetis was almost certainly bribed in order to take them aboard.
The Thetis was bound for London, a voyage that should have taken a week. Instead, it took three and a half weeks. Three separate storms battered the ship during its journey. During the first one, the ship’s wooden figurehead was torn away and Minna’s trunk – containing her silver and clothing – was washed out to sea. The skipper sought refuge in a fjord on the Norwegian coast, where Wagner – weak-kneed and pea green from sea sickness – had an epiphany. …
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the birth of the opera impresario Sir Rudolf Bing in 1902 and, using excerpts from his memoir 5000 Nights at the Opera, sketched his life and career up to 1950: the year he took over as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Bing was not the first, nor – sadly – the last senior manager to take on a job only to find out that the institution he was hired to run was in much worse condition than he ever thought possible. For Bing, the Met was a Mess, and to his eternal credit and everlasting fame, it was a mess he cleaned up.
He didn’t do it alone, though, and one of the things I admire about Bing’s memoir is the extent to which he credits others – his staff, board members, volunteers, etc. – with helping to turn the Met around. But then, Bing was clever enough to hire and then lead the right people, and so his modesty aside, we must give credit where credit is due.
Dealing With ArtistsRudolf Bings observes:
“Dealing with artists is not like dealing with people in any other profession. Bank officials and law clerks no doubt have their ambitions, but they do not have to put their lives on the line, to fight for their existence every night at eight o’clock. And these are nervous, irritable, sensitive, talented people!”
Richard Tucker (1913-1975)Richard Tucker (1913-1975)
“One of the first artists I hired [on coming to the Met] – for fear someone in Europe would hear this remarkably beautiful voice and steal the man away – was [the American tenor] Richard Tucker. We had a minor disagreement about fee, winding up our negotiations with $50 per performance still separating us. I foolishly suggested that we toss a coin. We did, and I won, and he never forgot it; he would remind me of this episode in all subsequent negotiations over a period of twenty-odd years and accuse me of using his coin and pocketing it at the end.”
At the end of every Metropolitan season, Bing would fly to Europe for a hectic few weeks of auditioning singers.
“Travelling as general manager of the Metropolitan was a strange experience. I would arrive in a city and be surrounded from the moment I left the plane – reporters, photographers, singers, and agents. I would hold auditions all day, and go to performances all night, and meet with the agents somehow in between, trying to remember what we needed now, what we needed later, and what we could afford. All these trips were frantic, much too crowded and busy. To save my life, I cannot remember in which year I first heard which artists, or under what circumstances. One of the few auditions I remember vividly is that of [the Italian baritone] Tito Gobbi, who was already too eminent an artist to participate in the day-long series of auditions held for me at [Rome’s] Teatro Argentina. But he graciously agreed that I should hear him before offering him an engagement, and he told me he had a large enough room at home. I went to his house and settled down on a couch to listen, and just as his pianist struck the first chord his pet lion came in through a swinging door and started straight for me. I am extremely fond of animals, and this was only a baby lion, but I must admit it was a distracting experience. Gobbi kept singing, and before the lion reached me across the big room his little daughter came dashing through the same door, grabbed the lion by the tail, and dragged him back to where he came from. Eventually we did engage Gobbi, but that audition did not speed the process.”
Early in his tenure at the Met, securing conductors was a challenge for Bing, not because there weren’t enough of them but because they had become way too lax about things in the years before Bing took over. Fritz Reiner conducted for Bing at the Met for three years before leaving in a huff and moving on to the Chicago Symphony. George Szell conducted for Bing but could not get along with anyone before he simply walked off the job. Erich Kleiber was willing to conduct at the Met, but his European commitments were too numerous and precluded him from doing so. For his part, Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) desperately wanted to conduct at the Met, but his perceived association with the Nazis was still too fresh in the early 1950s.…
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My copy of The Quincunx, which I have kept for reasons unknownSome 30 years ago, I was given a novel by the English author Charles Palliser called The Quincunx. The good friend who gave me the book claimed that it was, hands down, her favorite novel of all time. Back then, when someone gave me a book – especially with such a glowing endorsement – I generally read it. And I did indeed read The Quincunx.
Mistake.
Alas, for this insensitive lout, The Quincunx was a dreary, irksome, endless book written in the style of an early Victorian novel, in which an exceptionally unlucky protagonist lurches from one catastrophe to the next across its near 800-page length. In search of a codicil to a will that would presumably reverse his misfortunes, the dude takes more hard shots to the chin than Chuck Wepner (born 1939) did in his fight with Sonny Liston. (Wepner was not nicknamed “the Bayonne Bleeder” for nothing; after his fight with Liston, 72 stitches were required to put his face back together.)
But, believe it or not, The Quincunx was not the most harrowing tale of seemingly nonstop calamities with which I was familiar, because even back then, I knew something of the life of Édith Piaf. The cliché applies: no one could have made up the story of Piaf’s life, not Charles Palliser and not even the great master of the Victorian disaster novel, Charles Dickens himself.
A disclaimer up front: there’s no way a 2860-word blog nor a two-hour and twenty-minute movie can possibly cover even the notable points – high and low – of Piaf’s singular life.
Here’s how I have structured this post. We begin with a few words about the prescribed Piaf bio-pic, La Vie en Rose. I then list, in chronological order and with a minimum of narrative fuss, the principal events of her life. Finally, we will explore the beginnings of Piaf’s singing career using clips from the La Vie en Rose.
La Vie en RoseMarion Cotillard (born 1975)The New York Times critic Stephen Holden nailed it on the head when he wrote that Marion Cotillard’s performance as Édith Piaf is:
“The most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another ever encountered in a film.”
No disagreement from me; Cotillard’s performance is one for the ages. As is her physical transformation: from the 5’7” beauty that is Cotillard in real life into the nervous, twitchy, 4’10” “sparrow” that was Piaf. (Born Édith Giovanna Gassion, Piaf was given the stage name La Môme Piaf – Parisian slang for “The Little Sparrow” – in 1935 by the man who “discovered” her, the nightclub owner Louis Leplée.)
Édith Piaf in 1962, a year before her death, with her second (and last) husband, a singer, actor, and former hairdresser named Theo Sarapo (born Theophanis Lamboukas, 1936-1970). He was more than twenty years her junior. By the end of her life at the age of 47, Piaf – bent and broken, weighing some 66 pounds – hardly looked a day under 80. In playing Piaf at the end, Cotillard’s physical transformation is astonishing.
The movie is not chronological, but dances back and forth through Piaf’s life. A little knowledge of the actual chronology of Édith Piaf’s life goes a long way towards helping to follow the movie so, as promised, here is just such a chronology.…
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Live and LearnAn Emenee Chord OrganI have been known to make snide comments about the electric organ. This is an unfortunate artifact of my childhood in the 1950s and 60s, when toy organs made by “Emenee Industries Inc.” (of New York, N.Y.) were everywhere. They came in different sizes, though the ones I remember were the chord organs (see the illustration above): the buttons on the left side of the thing played simple harmonies to accompany whatever pathetic, wheezing tune was being played on the keys to the right. It was an instrument so simple and crude as to make its cousin – the accordion – look and sound like a Steinway Concert Grand by comparison.
When I became a jazz freak as a teenager and first listened to the great Jimmy Smith (1925-2005) play jazz organ, I was unimpressed. I still related the sound of Smith’s organ (a Hammond B3, as I later learned) to those Emenee beasties of my childhood, and because the organ is incapable of the sort of punchy, unexpected accentuation (syncopations) that give jazz its polyrhythmic character (its swing), I found Smith’s playing to be rather flaccid.
Alas, the arrogance of youth.
My attitude towards jazz organ remained one of epic disinterest (flavored with a pinch of disdain) for the next fifty years.
Live and learn.
Joey DeFrancesco (1971-2022) playing a Hammond B3 organOn Saturday, August 26 of this year, I received an email from my old friend (and patron) Karen Fiske, who wrote:
“Hi, Bob! Any chance you can write about Joey DeFrancesco, who just left us too soon? My spouse often rhapsodizes about the Hammond B3.”
The “spouse” to whom Karen referred is my equally old friend Chuck Fiske who, not incidentally, cut his musical teeth on the accordion (for which his wife and children have forgiven him, though, perhaps, he has not yet forgiven himself).
“Joey DeFrancesco” I mused. Who the heck is Joey DeFrancesco?
Live and learn.
I did my due diligence and I fell in love. I discovered that Joey DeFrancesco was an American jazz organist (and occasional trumpet player, saxophonist, and singer). Born in Springfield Pennsylvania in 1971, he died in Phoenix, Arizona, the day before Karen Fiske had sent me the email referenced above, on August 25, 2022 at the age of 51. I discovered that he had released more than 30 albums under his own name (a not-insignificant number of which I now own) and had recorded extensively as a side-person with such music world elites as Miles Davis, John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell, Ray Charles, Bette Midler, Diana Krall, and Van Morrison. He signed his first record contract (with Columbia) at the tender age of 16. He was a student and disciple of the famed jazz organist Jimmy Smith, though to my ear DeFrancesco far outpaced the master. And using techniques that I will describe in a bit, DeFrancesco managed to overcome entirely the dynamic/percussive shortcomings of the organ; shortcoming that, until I heard him play, had always made jazz performed on an organ sound to me like day-old oatmeal: congealed mush.
Finally, I learned that for the great bulk of his career, DeFrancesco performed on a Hammond B3 organ. I’ll explain the significance of that in a moment. But first: the late, great Joey DeFrancesco performs his own Better Than Yesterday on a Hammond B3, recorded in 2020:
…
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The CommissionDuring the summer of 1791 – some five months before his death – Mozart was anonymously commissioned to compose a Requiem Mass: a mass for the dead. More than any other single element, it was this anonymous commission that helped to later fuel the myth that Mozart had, in fact, been murdered.
Constanze Weber Mozart (1762-1842) in 1802, painted by Hans HansenIn 1829, 38 years after his death, Mozart’s widow Constanze was interviewed by an English music publisher named Vincent Novello and his wife, Mary. Constanze purportedly told the Novellos that:
“Some six months before his death he was possessed with the idea of his being poisoned – ‘I know I must die’, he exclaimed, ‘someone has given me aqua toffana and has calculated the precise time of my death – for which they have ordered a Requiem. It is for myself that I am writing this.’”
(For our information, “aqua toffana” is a colorless and tasteless mixture containing arsenic, antimony, and lead that was invented in Naples in the seventeenth century as a cosmetic. However, we are told that young women used it quite successfully as a poison, young women “who wished to hasten the arrival of widowhood.”)
Back to Constanze Mozart’s assertion, made 38 years after her husband’s death, that Mozart – feverishly obsessed with premonitions of death – “knew” he was being poisoned and that the Requiem was intended to mark his own death.
The story is complete hokum and utter bunk.
Did Constanze Mozart simply lie when she told this story to Vincent and Mary Novello in 1829? Or did Constanze, having told and retold and embellished the story for nearly 40 years, simply come to believe it was true? Or perhaps the Novellos just made it up (though this is the least likely explanation given their well-earned reputation for accuracy).
Whatever the source of this story, it was a smoking gun that supported the myth that the poor, innocent Mozart had been whacked.
Back to the anonymous commission for Mozart’s Requiem.
In fact, the Requiem was not commissioned by a divine or diabolical messenger but rather, by a clerk who worked for a wealthy musical amateur named Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach (1763-1827). The Count had recently lost his twenty-year-old wife Anna (the grief-stricken count, only 28 himself at the time, would never remarry), and he wanted Mozart to compose a Requiem in her honor. In offering the commission, Count Walsegg remained anonymous because it was his “hobby” to commission works from professional composers and then pass them off as being his own. (I, for one, find it unfathomable that anyone would have believed that Count Walsegg could have composed any part of what was in fact Mozart’s Requiem. I would further suggest that as hobbies go, the Count would have been better off collecting stamps or Beanie Babies.) In any case, Mozart’s Requiem – left unfinished at his death – was not intended as his own funeral music. It was a gig, a composer-for-hire gig, and an extremely lucrative one at that.
The TorsoMozart scholar Hermann Abert describes the Requiem as Mozart left it at his death:
“The first two movement [of 16] – the Introit and Kyrie – were both complete in Mozart’s score. Of the Dies irae, only the vocal parts and meticulously figured basso continuo [the bassline and shorthand indication of the harmonies] were written out in full, in keeping with Mozart’s usual practice. As for the instrumentation, only a handful of motifs were indicated in the preludes and interludes and at other characteristic points. All were intended to show how these passages should later be developed. The Lacrimosa breaks off at the words ‘qua resurget ex favilla judicandus homo reus.’ Of the Offertory, the Dominae Jesu and the Hostias were complete in draft score, while the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei are missing in their entirety.”
The CompletionMozart’s widow Constanze, who would appear to have been a ditz-supreme during their marriage, turned out to be a hard-nosed businessperson who parlayed her dead husband’s music into a major fortune after his passing.
Following Mozart’s death (on December 5, 1791) and burial (on December 7, 1791), Constanze’s first concern was what to do with Wolfgang’s unfinished Requiem. She was rightly worried that its anonymous commissioner might not be willing to accept an unfinished work and, worse, might not pay the balance owed on the commission and might even demand a refund for payments already made! So she and the people advising her hatched a plan: to secretly complete the Requiem and pass it off to its anonymous commissioner as Mozart’s final, complete work.
Easier said than done, right? I mean, who in their right noggin would want to – secretly or not – complete a work begun by Mozart, for heaven’s sake!…
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Aaron Copland in France, 1921-1924Aaron Copland in Paris, circa 1923Aaron Copland (1900-1990) never went to college. It was a decision that he later claimed to regret, although it’s hard to imagine how he could have gotten a better education than the one he actually received. He had begun to study music composition with the well-know and highly respected composer and teacher Rubin Goldmark (1872-1936) in the fall of 1917, during his senior year of high school in Brooklyn, New York. Copland graduated from high school in the spring of 1918 and continued his lessons with Goldmark while living at home. At the same time, he had the vibrant New York music and theater scene at his disposal and the full support of his family to pursue his musical studies (as an indication of that support, his father bought him a Steinway grand in 1919).
Goldmark was an alum of the Vienna Conservatory and at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, and he gave Copland exactly the sort of rigorous and vigorous grounding in harmony, counterpoint, and musical form that the young dude required. But even as Copland thrived under Goldmark’s regimen, he did what your people have always done and hopefully will always continue to do: he rebelled. Goldmark was a musical conservative, grounded in eighteenth and nineteenth century German music. However, Copland’s tastes ran towards Italian opera, Russian romantic music and, even worse, those new-fangled modernists Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and, most of all, that crazy Gallic impressionista, Claude Debussy (1862-1918).
Copland’s growing infatuation with musical things French was intensified a gazillion (give-or-take) fold by his friend Aaron Schaffer (1894-1957). The 16-year-old Copland met first met Schaffer in 1916 when he – Schaffer – was a 22-year-old graduate student in literature at John Hopkins University. Schaffer taught at Hopkins until 1919, studied in France between 1919 and 1920, and then joined the faculty at the University of Texas, where he taught the French language and French literature for the remainder of his life.
Despite their age difference, Copland and Schaeffer shared a passion for music and literature and corresponded regularly. Schaffer’s letters to Copland from Paris in 1919 and 1920 described what was the thrilling, post-war Parisian new music scene. In one of his letters, Schaffer commented:
“I am sure you would be in your glory here.”
Statements like that one sealed the deal for Aaron Copland, who acknowledged Schaffer’s description of music in France as being:
“the source of inspiration in my desire to go to Paris.”
Copland sailed for France in June 1921; he intended to stay and study there for one year. Instead, he stayed (and studied and networked and attended concerts and travelled and performed) for three years: it was what amounted to his college/university education.
And what an education it was!…
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Henry Purcell (1659-1695), portrait attributed to Godfrey KnellerWhen we think of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), if we think of him at all, what comes to mind are two of his operas – The Fairy’s Kiss and Dido and Aeneas – and perhaps a few well-worn songs. You’ll pardon me the comparison, but this is like knowing Beethoven only through his first and second symphonies and few of his folksong arrangements.
The comparison to Beethoven is apt. Purcell was not just the greatest English composer of his time but arguably the most important and innovative composer living and working during the second half of the seventeenth century.
Thomas Tudway (circa 1650-1726)Purcell’s contemporary, the English musician and Professor of Music at Cambridge University Thomas Tudway (circa 1650-1726), spoke for pretty much his entire musical community when he called Purcell:
“The greatest genius we ever had.”
That appraisal stood for well over two hundred years; the next English-born composer of (perhaps) equal stature to Purcell was Benjamin Britten, who was born in 1913 and died in 1976.
In his time, Purcell was referred to by his contemporaries as being as “our musical Shakespeare.”
(Observes our contemporary, the English harpsichordist and music director Trevor Pinnock:
“Wherever Shakespeare went, pulling the whole English cultural bandwagon behind him, Purcell was bound to follow.”)
Pinnock’s rather snotty comment aside, comparing Purcell to Shakespeare is also apt. That’s because what William Shakespeare (1564-1616) did for the English language – elevating it to high literary art – so too did Purcell for English-language vocal music, elevating it to high musical art.
Until Purcell’s time, English was considered an “unmusical” language, particularly when compared to the vowel-dominated languages of Latin, Italian, and French. But in his ground-breaking music, Purcell created a style of melody and declamation that arose directly from the character of the English language. …
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Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel (1805-1847) in 1829As a child and then as an adolescent, Fanny Mendelssohn’s all-encompassing commitment to music as a pianist and as composer never wavered. Fanny was not quite 15-years-old when her father Abraham dropped the bomb and forbade her to pursue music as a career. She was, instead, to learn how to run a household and raise a family, both of which she did – joyfully and competently – until her terribly premature death from a stroke on May 14, 1847, at the age of 41. She was “allowed” to choose her own husband, and she chose well: the Prussian Royal Court Painter and professor of painting Wilhelm Hensel (1794-1861). Together they had one child, a son named Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel (1830-1898).
Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel (1830-1898)(“Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel.” I think we can all agree that it was Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel who named her son. “Sebastian”, as in Bach; “Ludwig”, as in Beethoven; and “Felix” as in her brother, Felix Mendelssohn!
Sebastian Mendelssohn was such a good boy. Early on, he began compiling a history of the Mendelssohn family, based on Fanny’s diaries and the voluminous correspondence between his parents, Fanny and Felix. Sebastian’s family history remains the bedrock on which rests all Mendelssohn scholarship to this day.)
Wilhelm Hensel (1794-1861), self-portraitFanny chose her husband well, because aside from theirs being a genuine love match, William Hensel – as a sympathetic, high-end artist himself – encouraged her to practice, to compose, and to have her music published.
So, we must ask the question: with her spectacular talent and the unwavering support of her husband and her friends, why didn’t Fanny break free and go pro, particularly after the death of her father in 1835?
(We would observe that it’s not as if women never became professional musicians at the time; in 1835, the 16-year-old Clara Schumann was taking the Euro piano world by storm!)
The answer is dishearteningly obvious. As an assimilated (and converted) upper middle-class Jew, living in the extremely conservative and class-conscious capital of Prussia – Berlin – Fanny’s family and indeed, Fanny herself believed that she had to maintain an “appropriate” lifestyle, and that she could not and would not rock the social boat. Her principal biographer, Françoise Tillard (Fanny Mendelssohn, Amadeus Press) writes:
“Why would such a talented woman agree to stay home? Obedience to social pressure. Civilized beings must play a role that allows them to identify with those around them, and women did not live alone in the nineteenth century, any more than they travelled alone – unless they absolutely had to. Despite her talent, Fanny – a model wife and mother, zealous in fulfilling all her family duties – conformed.”
(At the conclusion of this post we will observe that having turned 40 in 1845, Fanny finally screwed up the courage and began to publish some her music. But for reasons to be explained, her professional “breakout” was far too late to have any impact on her creative life.)
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Joan SutherlandJoan Sutherland (1926-2010) had a preternaturally big voice, one that spanned three octaves and had the size and punching power of Sonny Listen. Yet she had the vocal “hand speed” of Sugar Ray Leonard and was consequently able to specialize in repertoire ordinarily sung by women with voices lighter, smaller, and presumably more flexible than hers. That repertoire was the so-called “bel canto”, or “beautiful song/beautiful singing” style characteristic of much late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century Italian opera.
Here is the textbook definition of “bel canto” from Nicolas Slonimsky, writing in Baker’s Dictionary of Music:
“The art of lyrical and virtuosic performance as exemplified by the finest Italian singers of the 18th and 19th centuries, in contrast to the declamatory singing style brought into such prominence by Wagner. The term represents the once glorious tradition of vocal performance for beauty’s sake. The secret of bel canto was exclusively the property of Italian singing teachers. It was, above all, applied to lyric singing, particularly in opera. The operatic repertoire composed to highlight bel canto singers, notably early Romantic Italian opera, fell into disuse until after World War Two, when singers such as Callas, Sutherland, and Sills brought new life to the works of Bellini, Donizetti, [Rossini], and others.”
A Big Voice and Bel Canto in Action!Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), Dinah Shore (1916-1994), and Joan Sutherland together on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show in 1963The following link demonstrates what happens when the mammoth, highly trained, bel canto opera voice of Joan Sutherland is heard side-by-side with two otherwise outstanding jazz/pop singers, Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) and Dinah Shore (1916-1994). We all love Ella; she was celebrated in Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes on, respectively, June 15 and June 16, 2020. Her light, lyric soprano voice and perfect diction made her one of the greatest singers of popular American song ever. But like every singer of her generation and every generation since, Fitzgerald was dependent upon a technology introduced in 1923: that of the “ribbon microphone” (or “ribbon velocity microphone”).
The RCA 44-BX ribbon microphone, introduced in 1932These microphones were bi-directional, meaning you could sing into them from the front or from either side, and extremely sensitive, with a frequency range of 50-15,000 Hz (Hertz). (People with normal hearing can hear from about 20-20,000 Hz.) The ribbon microphone quickly became standard equipment on musical stages and in radio and recording studios. Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Shore’s careers were as dependent on the ribbon microphone as race drivers are dependent on their cars. As for Joan Sutherland, well, she had as much use for microphones as men do their nipples. Sutherland was an opera singer, and she was trained and was capable of projecting her mighty voice across a 4000-seat theater for hours at a time, without amplification of any kind.
Follow the link below to an episode of the Dinah Shore Chevy Show, recorded in 1963. Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Shore, and Joan Sutherland together perform “Three Little Maids” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885) and the popular song Lover Come Back to Me (Sigmund Romberg, music and Oscar Hammerstein II, words; 1928). Thank heavens all three of these ladies had a sense of humor, because vocally, Ella and Dinah are roadkill in the face of Sutherland’s voice, and they know it!
To understand the development of bel canto singing, and therefore Joan Sutherland’s artistry and career, a brief (if vigorous!) foray into Italian opera is called for.…
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Classics for Pleasure and Music for Pleasure The British record label Classics for Pleasure (see Ashokan Farewell,above)was introduced in 1970 as a budget, “classical music” label. The majority of its releases are reissues from the EMI/His Master’s Voice (HMV) catalog. Classics for Pleasure is a subsidiary of the London-based Music for Pleasure Limited, a holding company for a number of record labels and music publishing companies. The whole shebang is a subsidiary of Parlophone Records (founded in 1896 and today headquartered in London), which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, which is a subsidiary of the multinational natural resources, chemical, media, telecommunication, venture capital, and real estate giant Access Industries. Whew. Let’s get back to Classics for Pleasure and its parent company, Music for Pleasure. Some good people might find these names an irksome, implying as they do a sort of vanilla, easy-listening musical content (commute-time, wallpaper music: Vivaldi mandolin concerti and Pachelbel’s Canon-like fare, the sonic equivalents of Velveeta on Wonder Bread with a dash of mayo). At the same time, the names/phrases Classics for Pleasure and Music for Pleasure implies that “classics” and “music” not so described are, somehow, unpleasurable. There is a […]
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The backstory: in 1970, the 26-year-old Tilson-Thomas conducted Ruggles’ masterwork – Sun-Treader – in concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (That performance was followed by Tilson-Thomas’ recording of Sun-Treader with the BSO recommended above.) At the time, Carl Ruggles was 94 years old and living in a nursing home in Bennington, Vermont (he died the following year, in 1971). We’ll let MTT tell the story from here: “Ruggles, enigmatic and granitic man – how his music and spirit have haunted me. I first heard his music at age thirteen. The piece was Men and Mountains and I remember how stunning it was. Years later I began to perform Mr. Ruggles’ music and to discover more of his remarkable testimony in each new performance. The fascination continued over the years and turned to awe and appreciation as through repeated performances I began to understand the depth of the music and power of its testimony. It was in this mood that following a performance of Sun-Treader with the Boston Symphony, I set out to meet Mr. Ruggles. Syrl Silberman of WGBH-TV in Boston had worked on a film about him and had become friendly with the old man, who even then […]
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Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) was, in his lifetime, considered Beethoven’s equal as a pianist and, if not his equal as a compositional innovator, then a rather more listenable alternative. The former head music critic for The New York Times, Harold Schonberg, put it this way: “He [Hummel] was a highly regarded composer in his day – overrated then, underrated now.” A snooty but not inaccurate appraisal. And it is true that as a composer – particularly as a composer of piano music – Hummel remains far underrated today. When his music is discussed, on those fairly rare occasions when it is discussed at all, it is assigned to that strange, in-betweeny netherworld as being “transitional.” In the case of Hummel’s music, it is blithely classified as being “proto-Romantic” or “post-Classical,” as if it were a lesser hybrid (half-breed?) between two otherwise “pure” musical styles, a cross between old music and new music; between the Classical era ideal of the composer as craftsperson and the Romantic era vision of artist-as-hero. Well, pooh on all of that, and double-pooh on these useless categories so casually bandied about by program annotators and presumed music historians. As both a pianist and composer, Hummel […]
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Compositional Bipolarity Alec Wilder, in his classic study, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1972), writes: “Vernon Duke was only one half of his musical self; the other half was Vladimir Dukelsky, a composer of concert works. Unfortunately for all of us, the concert, so-called ‘serious’ side of the man’s talent never, so far as I know, attempted to employ his popular side in a ‘third stream’ fashion [meaning a free mix of popular music and concert music content]. For although he was born in another culture, his absorption of American popular music writing was phenomenal. One never was aware in his songs of his not being rooted in this culture, as I was, for example, when I listened to the theater songs of Kurt Weill.” Duke/Dukelsky addressed his musical “duality” this way: “I always feel the duality in myself. My light music [meaning popular music] is decidedly extrovert, my serious music is introvert. There’s my Carnegie Hall self and my Lindy’s self [‘Lindy’s Restaurant’ was a famed Jewish deli in New York City’s Theater District on Broadway between 49th and 50th streets, named for its owner, Leo “Lindy” Lindermann], my Russian heritage and my American […]
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Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) composed six symphonies which are, outside of Denmark, his best-known works. His first symphony was completed 1892, when he was 27 years of age. As we would expect from a first symphony by a young composer, Nielsen’s influences are clearly in evidence: the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) and the German-born, Viennese composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), both of whom were still alive and kicking when Nielsen completed the symphony. (We’d observe that Nielsen chose his principal influences wisely.) In his Symphony No. 2, Op. 16 (of 1902) and Symphony No. 3, Op. 27 (the “Sinfonia Expansiva”, of 1911), Nielsen’s compositional voice is very much more his own. His Symphony No. 4 (composed in 1916, during World War One) and Symphony No. 5 (composed in 1920, not long after the conclusion of the war) stand apart from the other four. They are both exceedingly dramatic, at moments even brutal works, each representing a “battle between the forces of order and chaos.” No doubt due to their viscerally powerful expressive impact, Nielsen’s 4th and 5th Symphonies are his best-known and most popular works outside of Denmark. Finally, Nielsen’s Symphony No. 6, subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (“Simple Symphony”, of 1925), reverts to […]
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the 77th anniversary of Bartók’s death in New York City, and the circumstances leading to what he himself called his “comfortable exile” in the United States between January 1940 and his death in September 1945. Among the works he composed while living in New York was his Concerto for Orchestra of 1943 which is, by any and every measure, among the very greatest orchestral works composed during the twentieth century. A monumental achievement in and of itself, the fact that the Concerto for Orchestra was written by a composer suffering from leukemia makes it something of a miracle as well. The story of its composition will be told soon enough. But first, indulge me some first-person reflection. Harlotry in Music Among my most frequently-asked-questions is: “who is your (my) favorite composer?” Who indeed! My typical response – flippant but true – is that I am a musical harlot, a strumpet, a slut: I love whomever/whatever I’m listening to at the moment. I mean, really: when listening to Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or the Goldberg Variations, how in heaven’s name would it be possible not to convinced that the sun, moon, and stars revolve […]
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A Nice Hike In early September of 1940, Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma (1879-1964) – now married to the Jewish author Franz Werfel (1890-1945) – walked from France to Spain in order to escape the Nazi occupation of Europe. (Time out. We read constantly about those intrepid individuals who, in order to escape the Nazis, “walked across the Pyrenees from occupied France to neutral Spain.” The image so conjured is one of daring and desperate people braving an alpine climb and descent – after all, the Pyrenees rise to a height of 11,168 feet – all the while avoiding border patrols, searchlights, and barking dogs. In fact, the crossing from the French town of Cerbère to the Spanish town of Portbou involves walking a roughly two-mile-long path up and over a hill along the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a stroll, for heaven’s sake, one that hardly constitutes a hike!) Alma had been told to bring only what she could carry, but she showed up in Marseilles (the point of departure for escapees) with twelve trunks worth of luggage. The man who arranged her escape from France was the American journalist and first order hero Varian Fry (1907-1967). (For our information: working for […]
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Romanticism The nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new sort of European literature. The cutting-edge writers of the time were consumed by a number of particular themes: the glorification of extreme emotion, particularly love; nostalgia for a distant, mystical, legendary past; and a passionate enthusiasm for nature wild and free, unspoiled by humanity and its bourgeois values! Soon enough, visual artists and composers embraced these themes as well. For many such nineteenth century writers, poets, visual artists, and composers, over-the-top expressive content, nostalgia for the past, personal confession and the depiction of nature wild and free were the vehicles for achieving what their art – at its essence – was all about: spontaneous and magnified emotional expression. The adjective “Romantic” came to be used to describe such emotionally charged and self-expressive art. And no nineteenth century, “Romantic era” composer believed more fervently in music as personal, emotional, and spiritual confessional than did Robert Schumann (1810-1856). Robert Schumann: Early Life He was born in the central German town of Zwickau on June 8, 1810, the fifth and last child of August Schumann and Joanna Christiana Schumann (née Schnabel). We are told that if we do what we love, we’ll […]
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Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was a prodigiously gifted pianist and composer. All in all, he composed 5½ piano concerti. (That was not a typo; an explanation will follow in a bit.) The first two of his piano concerti were composed while Prokofiev was still a student at the Petrograd/Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which he attended from 1904 until 1914; from the ages of 13 to 23. On May 11, 1914, Prokofiev performed his Piano Concerto No. 1 (composed in 1912) at his Conservatory graduation ceremony. The ceremony was nothing less than a Prokofiev lovefest, as he graduated with high honors and was awarded the prestigious Anton Rubinstein Prize in piano, a prize that included a brand new Shreder grand piano. (“Shreder” was a Russian-made piano that was “based” on American Steinway pianos, a not unfamiliar example of Russian appropriation of American technology.) Prokofiev chose to play his Piano Concerto No. 1 at his graduation ceremony rather than his Piano Concerto No. 2 (of 1913) because the premiere of that second piano concerto – 8 months prior, on September 5, 1913 – had created a scandal. Prokofiev, ordinarily as sensitive to such things as a lump of basalt, decided that the Second: “would […]
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The Way He Lived and Played In the parlance of the sports world, Charlie Parker “left it all on the field.” The unstoppable, overwhelming intensity with which he played the saxophone was mirrored in the way he lived his life as well. When he died in the New York City apartment of Baroness Panonnica de Koenigswarter at the Hotel Apartments Stanhope (at Fifth Avenue and 81st Street) on March 12, 1955, he was just 34 years old. Based on Parker’s appearance at the time of his death, the attending physician, Dr. Robert Freymann, estimated his age as being between 55 and 60; the coroner who conducted his autopsy put an age of 53 on his death certificate. Parker’s immediate cause of death was unclear, because after a lifetime (albeit a short lifetime) of living at the very edge, his body had simply given out. His stomach wall was perforated by a peptic ulcer; he was suffering from lobar pneumonia; his cirrhotic liver had stopped functioning; and he suffered a massive heart attack, pretty much all at once. It has been said that Charlie Parker wasn’t so much as dead as he was used up. According to the founder of Dial […]
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Picking Up from Where We Left Off from Monday’s Music History Monday . . . Claude Debussy (1862-1918), preternaturally talented little cocker that he was, entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1872 at the age of ten. He remained there for twelve years, until 1884, when at the age of 22 he won the vaunted Prix de Rome (“Rome Prize”) for his cantata, The Prodigal Son. Having won the Prix de Rome, Debussy was expected to reside and compose at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the Villa Medici in Rome for two years. Poor Debussy: having won a prize that everyone else coveted he complained bitterly about having to leave his beloved Paris for what he considered a “foreign exile”, something for which not a single one of us feels sorry for him. Debussy recalled his pique at having won the prize this way: “’You’ve won the prize’, someone said, tapping me on the shoulder. Whether you believe it or not, I can nonetheless assert that all my joy collapsed! I saw clearly the boredoms, the irritations that [such a prize] brings.” Debussy did indeed reside in the Villa Medici in Rome between 1885 and 1887, and he claimed to have […]
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Indulge me, please, the musings of a 68-year-old baby boomer. Aging sucks. Like you needed me to tell you, right? I’m not just talking about our knees, shoulders, fingers, hairlines and waistlines; sagging, spotted skin; sore hips, fatty livers, and forgetfulness; and the terrible knowledge that our physical discomfort notwithstanding, our time on this earth is dwindling. Neither am I just talking about the psychic damage of getting older, in particular loss: of seeing friends, family, and spouses pass, or heaven forbid, children and grandchildren predecease us. There are times when I do wonder how we “elderly” (legally defined as someone 65 years and older) manage to simply cope with accumulated grief. Now, we tell ourselves – rightly, I think – that in exchange for our losses and increasingly irksome bodies and memories, our life experience gifts us with wisdom. We come to realize that nothing is simple; that nothing is black and white; that good and evil are relative concepts; that nothing is forever and all we can really count on is change. Unfortunately, it is my experience that this “wisdom” often verges into pessimism because with wisdom – with knowledge and experience – comes a certain and unavoidable […]
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We must contemplate the weighty. Jazz is, by its very nature, a conversational and dynamic art form, in which performers improvise on a chord progression or on a series of scales (the latter called “modal jazz”). In theory then, as in a spontaneous oration, there is no “right” or “wrong” in a jazz performance, just better or less better choices. Consequently, a given jazz performance is just one of a virtually infinite number of possible jazz performances. The fluidity, spontaneity, and variability of the art constitute the very core of its nature. Which brings us, then, to the potentially problematic issue of a “studio jazz recording.” We backtrack, momentarily. There are two sorts of jazz recordings: live recordings and studio recordings. A live jazz recording captures a particular moment in time, a “slice of musical life”: a “slice of musical life” aided, abetted, inspired, and magnified by the presence of an audience. But a studio recording is another thing altogether. A studio recording is an object: an edited, multi-take, often over-dubbed document that seeks to create as perfect a performance of a piece of music as possible. In the concert world, in which compositions are entirely notated (scripted!), this means […]
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Weimar On July 14, 1708, the newly appointed court organist Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and his wife Maria Barbara Bach (1684-1720) arrived in the Thuringian (central German) city of Weimar from Bach’s previous post in the Thuringian city of Mühlhausen. The young couple moved into an apartment in a house owned by another employee of the court, Adam Immanuel Weldig, who was master of the pages and a falsettist (a non-surgical male soprano) in the chorus of the court chapel. (Coincidentally, this same Adam Weldig was an alum of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, where Bach would be the master of music for the last 27 years of his life, from 1723 to 1750). Whatever else its amenities, Weldig’s house had location in spades. It was located at number 5 Markt, on Weimar’s Markplatz (market square), which had been the city’s most important public space since around 1300. From there, it was just a five-minute walk to the Ducal palace (the Wilhelmsburg), where both Bach and Weldig worked. It was at the Weldig house that Bach’s first child, Catharina Dorothea, was born on December 29, 1708, and where his second child – Wilhelm Friedemann – was born on November […]
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Back on June 21, in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post entitled “The Joys of Bassi”, I asserted that, in my experience, baritones, bass-baritones, and bass singers – like the people that play their instrumental equivalents, the string bass and low brass – are the salts of the earth of the vocal world. I observed that, in my experience: “They show up early and stay late; they help set up chairs before a rehearsal and stack them up afterwards. They don’t cut to the front of the line (remind me to tell you my Thomas Hampson story; what a wonderful guy he is!) or exercise ‘artistic prerogative.’ Their collegiality, sense of humor, and general lack of bad attitude will, as my experience has played out over and over again, keep a rehearsal on an even keel.” I would observe with some pique that no one took me up on what are actually my Thomas Hampson stories. Well, if you’re not going to ask, I’ll just going to have to tell you. Story one. Sometime around 1992/1993, Hampson (born 1955) came to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) to do a master class. Here’s how a musical master class works. A […]
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the premiere (on July 18, 2003) of a newly discovered piano work by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Composed in late February/early March of 1917, Les Soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon (“the evenings lighted by the glow of the coals”) was, in fact, Debussy’s final piano work; he died of colorectal cancer a year later, on March 25, 1918. (Yesterday’s post also discussed the initial Dead Sea Scroll discovery, in November 1946, just because. Because it was the grandmother of all manuscript discoveries! Because any other manuscript discovery made during the twentieth century shrinks to near insignificance by comparison and because, for me, the discovery of those scrolls will always boggle my bean!) For our information, Debussy’s Les Soirs illumines. . . is not the only significant musical manuscript discovered in recent memory. For example. Where’s That Cello Concerto Been Haydn? (apologies) For nearly 200 years, the musical community knew that Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) had composed his first cello concerto around the year 1765 for his great friend, the cellist Joseph Weigl. We “knew” this because Haydn himself kept meticulous records of the music he composed. Unfortunately, that’s all anyone knew about the concerto, because […]
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