Rivers, Day 5 – Fugue No. 4 in C# minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 5 – Fugue No. 4 in C# minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach

The great French music teacher Nadia Boulanger once said something to the effect of “What musician does not know Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier?  I would be surprised to hear that someone hadn’t read the Bible.”  In case you don’t know of her, Nadia Boulanger was an unusually influential musical scholar, performer, and pedagogue living and working in Paris through most of the twentieth century.  She had begun her musical career with her aim set on composing, encouraged to do so by no less than Gabriel Faure; her mastery of musical technique is apparent given the recognition of her level of skill in solfege and harmony that is evident from the awards she gained at her conservatory.  But she soon realized her best service could be offered as a scholar and mentor to other musicians.  This is largely thought to be a result of her acknowledging the even stronger creative gifts of her younger sister, Lili, which she sought to cultivate.  Lili Boulanger died tragically young, at age 25, just as the First World War was ending.  Nadia took her death very hard, particularly for the lost potential that went to the grave with Lili, and I imagine it was that which gave her the push to support other composers in their work.  Her connections in the musical life of Paris gave her a secure position by which to absorb the music of the past and observe the music of the present, digesting all of it and assimilating it within her peerless intellect in order to offer just the right teaching at just the right moment.

By all accounts from her best students, study with Nadia Boulanger was intense, yet playful.  The students who worked with her in Paris could expect coaching in private sessions and weekly group sessions which could include lectures and challenging group activities designed to push everyone to their technical limits.  As a technician, she demanded perfection.  And, from what I’ve gathered, all students in whom she had any confidence were expected to essentially memorize everything about Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  I’ve heard that Nadia Boulanger made it one of her missions to memorize all of Western music.  Yes, you read that right.  One of her students, with whom I have had a bit of experience, explained that she made a discipline of obtaining every score within the Western tradition she could find, copying it by hand, and memorizing it in the process.  This student told me that you could ask her to sing, say, the viola line of the most anonymous symphony by Stamitz and Nadia would do so with poise and in perfect French solfege.  Can you imagine?  Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Franck, Chopin, everyone.  Every single note memorized.  After she had exhausted the music of the past, she turned to her contemporaries and began the same process with Xenakis, Stravinsky, Poulenc, and more.  Can you imagine studying with the possessor of that mind?

What strikes me is that given all of that knowledge, I read more quotes from Boulanger about Bach than any other composer.  “Once you can write a cantata every week like Bach, then you may call yourself a composer, but not until then.”   “Bach doesn’t submit to convention, he creates it.”  For her there was something essential and prime about Bach’s art (for more about why Bach is special to so many musicians, see this post) and it is summed up largely in the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Bach’s music exists in several dimensions, expanding every plane upon which it works into near infinite space.  He was an improviser per excellence and created the most colorful and virtuosic body of solo organ music in existence.  He elevated the art of composing upon the body of Lutheran chorales into a consummate art with his cantatas and passions (For more about Bach’s cantatas, see this post, probing the depths of theology in weekly musical sermons filled with some of the most challenging and beautiful music imaginable.  And in his instrumental works he sought to create encyclopedic volumes of all the polyphonic techniques and approaches with which he was familiar.  Polyphony refers to the art of composing or improvising with multiple voices working simultaneously – it is one of the many challenges of the Western musician’s art.  Toward the end of his life Bach left two incredible catalogs of polyphonic technique, The Art of Fugue and A Musical Offering, the latter composed on an awkward theme provided by Frederick the Great of Prussia as a challenge to Bach’s craft (for more about that, see this post).  Splendid as both of those collections are, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend either of them for beginners.  If you are unfamiliar with Bach’s counterpoint, the very best place to start is his Well-Tempered Clavier, so high in Boulanger’s estimation.

The title of the collection refers to a manner of tuning keyboard instruments so that every single key sounds pleasing.

There are many tuning systems, all with their respective pros and cons.  The system prevalent in Bach’s day, called meantone tuning, made some keys sound very good and others less so.  Apparently Bach was an early champion of the style of tuning popular today, called equal temperament, which assures that all keys will sound pleasing.  Tuning is a complex topic and some musicians study it in great detail.

While Bach sold the collection as a demonstration of temperament, with a prelude and fugue written in every different major and minor key to confirm the benefits, it has become a de facto demonstration of a range of polyphonic techniques that appeals to laymen and connoisseurs alike.  To continue with Boulanger’s comparison, Martin Luther once compared the Bible, I’ve heard, to “A pool in which an elephant can swim and a baby can wade.”  And so it is with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  The first prelude, in C major, has a timeless appeal to the masses, and is also simple enough to be placed in countless intermediate piano method books.  I’m sure you’ve heard it:

 

But the Well-Tempered Clavier also features movements which are dense, challenging, and worthy of years of study in order to unravel their complete mystery (not that the C major prelude isn’t).  The c# minor fugue, a richly symbolic mass of severe polyphonic splendor for 5 equal voices, is a splendid example of this.

 

It combines three different motives, the opening of which serves double duty as a musical representation of a cross (a religious symbol) and Bach’s musical signature, almost spelling Bach’s surname in German pitch classifications.  Later, against this stern figure, Bach introduces a graceful, flowing countersubject in constant eighth notes which is passed around the ensemble serving as a kind of fluid varnish washing over the slow-moving skeletal structure based on the opening motive.  This fluid eighth-note motive is sometimes compared to a stream, Bach in German.

http://bach.nau.edu/clavier/nature/fugues/Fugue04.html
Boulanger returned to the stream of Bach continually, both for herself and her students.  Bach’s legacy is so strong and multi-faceted that it is practically beyond explanation and must be experienced, preferably with a senior musician as one’s guide.  It is Bach’s richness, his vision, his uncompromising approach to musical artistry, the depth of his feeling and knowledge which seems to reach us from the very ideal, that led no less than Ludwig van Beethoven to exclaim “Not Bach but Meer should be his name!”

 

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Rivers, Day 4 – The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 4 – The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana

Have you ever been to Disneyland?  For as long as I can remember I have had relatives living in Southern California, and so I have had a handful of opportunities.  I even have step grandparents who live in Anaheim, the same city as Disneyland.  I must confess that I have enjoyed my time at Disneyland – I know some people don’t like it.  I also went to Disney World once, although it was a bit more overwhelming.  Disneyland has sort of a small-town charm about it in comparison with its behemoth cousin in Orlando.  One fun story about Disney World though…

We went for a week and stayed in one of the resorts there.  Since we had a few days to kill, we ended up going to the Magic Kingdom a couple times.  One of the times we went must have been a weeknight or some other low-traffic time because there was barely any line for Thunder Mountain, that terrific train roller coaster with all the campy mining town scenery.

It’s a really fun ride and, to our delight, there was hardly any line for it that evening.  Every other experience I’ve ever had with a Disney park saw us waiting at least a half hour to board the high-demand rides, but that night we must have ridden Thunder Mountain at least 5 times.  With a wait time of barely 10 minutes, we delightedly passed a considerable amount of that evening riding Thunder Mountain again and again.

One of the things that I find so enchanting about Disneyland is the creative and ingenious mix of mechanical rides there.  If you exclude the simulators (Star Tours, Body Wars) and the child-oriented rides (teacups, carousel, flying elephants), I would say the remaining rides fall into two categories: roller coasters and dark rides.  Thunder Mountain is a roller coaster.  So are Space Mountain and the Matterhorn.  Roller coasters use a buildup of potential energy to unleash a thrilling and intense ride which affects you viscerally, at the core level.  On all roller coasters you strap yourself in and surrender to the unrelenting physical forces which you feel in your gut.  Some parks, like Great America, form their image based on roller coasters of extreme speed, height, and special features like inverting.  Disney’s roller coasters are fun, but for different reasons.  They are less intense physically (they are still very effective) and more immersive.  But they are roller coasters, and achieve their effects mostly through physical forces.

Opposed to roller coasters are dark rides.  The effect of the dark ride is achieved through carefully crafted ambiance and the development of a story line or succession of scenes.  The ride itself is tame and slow, but the enclosed scenery through which it winds is captivating.  Some of Disneyland’s most famous attractions are dark rides, including Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and It’s a Small World.  

The Magic Kingdom features other enjoyable dark rides like Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.  Universal Studios has a dark ride based on E.T. in which passengers board cars that resemble bicycles and experience E.T.’s flight across the sky.  Part of the beauty of the Disneyland experience is the very even mix of roller coasters and dark rides; in my opinion no visit to a Disney theme park is complete without plenty of both – the roller coasters for the physical thrills and the dark rides for the enchanting scenery and animatronic storytelling.

After Franz Liszt (for more about Liszt, see this post) invented the Symphonic Tone Poem, writing a dozen of them in the 1850s, many other European composers adopted the form for their own use.  In my experience, some of these composers of tone poems treated them more like roller coasters, and others treated them more like dark rides.  Those of Liszt himself are indisputably the roller coaster variety.  If you listen to Les Preludes or Mazeppa, you will find yourself reacting, almost physically, at a visceral level as the music finds its way to your core.  Liszt’s symphonic poem roller coasters rise and fall to great heights and profound depths, just like a roller coaster.  Another composer who wrote tone poems, the Frenchman Camille Saint-Saens, wrote roller coasters too.  Listen to this tone poem based on the tragic story of Phaeton and see if you don’t agree:

 

The first time I heard Saint-Saens’ Phaeton I found the climax to be simply overpowering and undeniably thrilling.

But the tone poems of the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana feel much more like dark rides.  In a dark ride the passenger is able to relax, sit passively and observe the different images that come his way.  This is essentially how Smetana’s tone poems work.  The 6 symphonic poems of his epic cycle My Homeland, each of them based on some story or image from Bohemia, are gentle, and do their work largely without penetrating the listener’s viscera.  Listening to Smetana’s tone poems is much more like watching a succession of rich, beautiful, immersive images pass before and around you than being inside a thrilling adventure.  His most famous tone poem, The Moldau, about Bohemia’s greatest river (called “Vlatava” in Czech) treats the listener to a beautiful and placid ride through a series of images from the river’s story:

We start at its springs and then take in the river’s fluid shape in the flowing main theme.  We then pass through a festive peasant wedding with merry polka dancing, then nymphs playing gracefully in the moonlight, imposing fortresses which echo with the sounds of ancient battles, and finally the widening of the river into the noble metropolis of Prague.  All of these images are quite clear from the music and they do not thrill us so much as act like a series of immersive paintings, much like being inside one of Disney’s dark rides.  You could easily make a similar ride out Smetana’s Moldau.  For another of Smetana’s tone poems which works in a similar way, see this post.

Disney also has at least one ride which exhibits features of both kinds of rides, Splash Mountain.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

It is quite immersive at times, moving slowly for the most part through rich and enjoyable scenery, and then there’s that thrilling drop at the end.  If anyone wrote tone poems that were sort of a mix, I think it was Richard Strauss – his are thrilling at times, and also passive and picturesque at times.  You can read more about his tone poems here.
Walt Disney understood that roller coasters and dark rides each worked their own special kind of magic, and that a day of leisure would benefit from both kinds of experiences.  Similarly, we have both kinds of symphonic poems to enjoy, depending on our mood.  Perhaps we would like Liszt or Saint-Saens to tug on our guts, or perhaps we would like Smetana to immerse us in an ever shifting diorama of rich imagery.  Fortunately, we have the choice as all of these composers gravitated to their preferred approaches.

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Rivers, Day 3 – The Rhine Gold by Richard Wagner

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 3 – The Rhine Gold by Richard Wagner

From what I’ve heard, the piece which holds the record for the longest number of annual performances since its composition is Handel’s oratorio Messiah which premiered in 1742.  There has never been a year since then which did not feature a performance of Handel’s beloved Messiah somewhere at some season.  And today, there must be thousands of performances in whole or part each year all over the world.  You never have to travel very far to catch Messiah around the Christmas or Easter seasons.  Classical music is full of traditions such as these.  It seems Messiah did not have to work very hard to become the tradition that it did; while he was a skilled entrepreneur and promoter, I can’t imagine that Handel would have taken the time to dwell on a project like Messiah in order to help it take hold like that.  He was incredibly prolific, composing 40 operas (for more about them see this post and this one) and more than 20 oratorios (for more about one of them see this post) over the course of his career.  Messiah is an oratorio – while he must have promoted it in some way at some point, he would have been moving on to the next project quickly.  So that indicates to me that something about Messiah warmed the heart of the Christian and music-loving world and managed to slip into regular performance quite naturally.  Not all traditions have managed to take hold quite this easily.  There is one particular tradition which its primary promoter strove mightily to entrench during his lifetime, a task which his descendants and champions assumed upon his death.  Even today, this particular tradition is complex, ever-shifting, and in need of constant attention to maintain its primacy.  The tradition to which I refer is the Wagnerian Festival at Bayreuth, Germany.

Richard Wagner was that special kind of visionary who always managed to find within him the drive to keep pursuing his goals, no matter how discouraging the obstacles in his path.  A man of lesser convictions would have quit long before the first Bayreuth Festival was held in 1876, when he was 63 – the fruition of his life’s work, and a long struggle full of criticism and rejection.  But as the saying goes, if it was easy, everyone would do it!  Wagner had harbored ambitions to compose operas for as long as he could remember.  He had completed his first opera at the age of 20, a full four decades before the first Bayreuth Festival, and his early operas all bore strong resemblance to styles already in existence, such as those by Weber (for more about Weber, see this post) and the French grand operas by composers like Meyerbeer.  Wagner had scored hits and misses with his early, derivative operas, riding out the waves which rack the career of any creative figure, but he constantly had the sense he was destined for bigger and better things.  We had visions of a new kind of opera, which he called total art work, and began composing his magnum opus, a (long-winded, depending on who is evaluating it) 15-hour telling of ancient Germanic myths called The Ring of the Nibelungen in 1848 at age 35.  He would complete it at age 61 in 1874, 26 years later.  You can read more about Wagner’s approach to the creative process of The Ring here and here.

The Ring cycle, as it is commonly called, is not exactly 15 hours at one sitting, but is split into 4 different operas, each with its own beginning, middle and end, The Rhingold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods.  They are sometimes performed individually, and they all have their own highlights that are worth hearing, but Wagner’s vision was to present them all on consecutive nights, a vision he ultimately realized in 1876 at the first Bayreuth Festival.  Wagner had worked toward structuring his life so that it was free of uninvited stress and influence from forces he did not desire.  In the early 1870s he worked in earnest to inaugurate his vision of holding a festival devoted only to the performance of his operas in a secluded place that he could essentially take over, and so he found Bayreuth in Bavaria, just 30 miles from the Czech border.  While Bayreuth boasted a beautiful opera house already…

…Wagner’s new operatic vision required acoustical and spatial resources that it did not offer, and so he set out to build his own theater, known as the Festspielhaus.  Again, he endured rejection on the way to building it.  His fundraising efforts began with meeting the with German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who denied his requests (if only Bismarck could have seen the future…?).  He then tried offering a paid subscription, but the results were unsatisfactory, even with with the foundation of Wagner Societies to concentrate interest in maximize donations.  Finally, he fell back on a former patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a great admirer of Wagner’s who had settled earlier debts.  The King acquiesced and provided the necessary sum to build the theater.  This was in 1874, and the theater was finally completed by 1876.

For the first time, Wagner’s complete Ring tetralogy was able to be presented on four consecutive nights, August 13 – 17, just as he had envisioned.  In attendance were Edward Grieg, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a handful of political dignitaries.   Both Tchaikovsky and Grieg were complimentary of the event, and thus began the tradition of prominent composers in the Western tradition making their pilgrimage to the Bayreuth festival to drink from the font of Wagner.  For more on another composer who did this, see this post.  But in spite of its positive reception, Wagner found that establishing a tradition such as this presented perpetual financial challenges.  The logistics of a Bayreuth Festival are complex and expensive, and they always will be.  Wagner found himself in considerable debt after the first Bayreuth Festival and so was not entirely free of unwanted projects, for example this march composed for the American Centennial of the same year which compensated him $5000, worth more than $100,000 today!

 

The first Bayreuth Festival was held less than a decade prior to Richard Wagner’s death, and so artistic directorship became a dynastic affair, with his wife Cosima assuming the office and then passing it to their descendants.  To this day, descendants of the Wagner clan are still favored for this position.  The current co-directors are half sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier.  They are both great-granddaughters of Richard Wagner and great-great-granddaughters of Franz Liszt:

The Bayreuth Festival is very much a tradition, but a complicated one.  Due to the logistics and expense, the Ring Cycle has not been performed annually, and in certain years the festival has not been held at all.  It still runs on a combination of ticket sales and state subsidies from the German government.  It is also complex in that it was a major cog in the Nazi propaganda machine, an image the administration of the festival has worked very hard to shed in the years since the Second World War.  If you would like to see the contemporary marketing of a distinguished tradition almost 150 years old, look at the website:

http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/english/english_156.html

Wagnerian websites, podcasts, credit card sales, promotional videos.  Even though the promotion, people, and governments have changed, the music is still the same.  A production of the Ring cycle begins and ends in the Rhine River.  The glorious opening of the first opera, The Rhine Gold, finds three Rhine Maidens frolicking beneath its waves as a sinister dwarf, Alberich, steals the magical gold in their charge, thus setting off the events of the ensuing evenings.  If you ever catch a production of The Rhinegold, at Beyreuth or anywhere else, this is the music that you will hear at the beginning of it all, Wagner’s noble evocation of the motion of the Rhine River and the very act of creation itself:

Handel’s Messiah may hold the record for uninterrupted performance since composition, but Wagner’s complex operation has arguably had a greater impact on the course of humanity, artistically, politically and socially, even if his Bayreuth Festival cannot match Handel for consistency.  With ambitious goals come messy execution; it was true in the 1870s and is true now.  Wagner’s story still serves as a supreme example for all visionaries in training.

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Rivers, Day 2 – By the River from the Florida Suite by Frederick Delius

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 2 – By the River from the Florida Suite by Frederick Delius

In college I was a music major.  Well, the story is actually not quite that simple.  I actually started life as a double major, music AND biology.  In high school I did very well in biology and enjoyed the subject (I wasn’t CRAZY about the dissections, but it was neat to see all the inner workings of those animals; who knew earthworms were so complicated inside?!) and my family thought that a degree in that field would provide a more marketable option in case music didn’t pan out so well – certainly a valid concern.  The question of whether to allow one’s children to pursue a career in the arts is of course complicated and you can find articles to support whatever decision toward which you are inclined, complete with evidence concerning factors of salary, happiness, freedom, and the like.

My family decided to let me risk it.  I eventually dropped my biology major altogether.  And it was never really a major beyond a designation on paper.  I remember receiving very intimidating formal letters in my dorm mailbox toward the end of freshman year that read something to the effect of:

“All declared biology majors must complete Biology and Zoology 100 within their first 3 semesters in order to remain in good standing…”

Eventually my mother saw what was up and gave her blessing to shed the pretense in order to focus entirely on musical studies.  And I’m not alone among musicians in history.  While some musicians were born into families that allowed and encouraged them to continue it as a family business, like Bach (see this post) for example (would he have chosen it had it not been for his lineage?!), his contemporaries Handel (see this post) and Telemann (see this post) , in spite of their demonstrative musical gifts, were first encouraged to study law.  Martin Luther, the founder of the faith shared by all three of them, did too, incidentally.  The English composer Frederick Delius is another such example, but not for law.  His prosperous German family (Dutch before that) had gained its fortune through wool sales and recently settled in Britain to expand its trade.

The Delius family obviously valued music.  Brahms’ favorite violinist Joseph Joachim was a guest in their house (can you imagine that?!) – for more about Brahms and Joachim see this post.  The young Delius studied violin with a member of the esteemed Halle Orchestra (for more about a conductor of the Halle Orchestra, see this post) and also improvised on the piano, drawn to the music of Grieg and Chopin (see this post).  

When he grew up and it was time to consider his means of living, his father, Julius, assumed he would simply walk into a post of the family wool business and easily assimilate into the prevailing culture.  But after repeated attempts to place him in various locations throughout Europe to push their interests, from England to Germany to France, with Frederick neglecting his commercial duties in favor of leisure and musical pursuits in each, Julius finally acknowledged that a future in the wool business was not in Frederick’s cards.  But, he still wasn’t content to permit full time musical study.  And so, in 1884, Frederick Delius was sent to Florida to manage an orange plantation.  It is not known whether the idea was Frederick’s or Julius’ (if it was dad’s, you could easily make an Orange Julius joke), but Frederick exhibited a similar pattern there, shirking his citric duties in order to compose, study with a local musician (Thomas Ward, considered by Delius to be the most important teacher of his entire career) and eventually moving to Virginia after having delegated the duties of the plantation to an employee in order buy the freedom to give lessons himself in the areas of violin, piano, music theory and composition.

After observing all of this, Julius finally gave in, somewhat at least, and allowed Frederick to enroll in the prestigious conservatory at Leipzig during which time he had the opportunity to rub shoulders with such luminaries as Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Grieg.  Grieg became a particularly significant mentor and champion; the two shared a close rapport.  Here is a famous picture of them playing cards together:

This picture indicates that Delius had penetrated deep within the Norwegian musical circle.  Grieg and his wife, Nina, are on the left, then Johan Halvorsen, then Delius, and then Christian Sinding on the very right.  All were prominent Norwegian musicians except for Delius.  It was Grieg who was at long last able to complete the process of persuading Julius that Frederick Delius’ life would be best spent in the pursuit of musical arts, which the steadfast father had still not entirely acknowledged even by this point.

During his time at Leipzig Delius composed an orchestral suite based on his experiences and impressions of Florida, the Florida Suite.  The orange plantation was located in a suburb of Jacksonville called Solano Grove, just a few miles from the delta of the Saint John’s River.  The second movement, lyrical, dreamy, relaxed, meandering, is a musical essay on the river:

 

The whole suite speaks in a warm, hushed lyricism, but the second movement in particular features superb melodic writing that is simultaneously soothing and unpredictable.  The warm glow of this music was to remain a hallmark of Delius’ voice for his entire career.  From listening to this is it clear why Grieg felt such an affinity for the young British composer.
In Leipzig, Grieg was ultimately convinced of Delius’ musical endowments from hearing a private performance of the Florida Suite.  Frederick was fortunate to gain such an accomplished and persuasive champion (for more about Grieg, see this post), just the right person to finish the job of convincing Julius to let his son continue on the path for which he was best-suited.  It’s never an easy decision for a parent, and perhaps Julius held on longer than he should have.  But for Frederick it was the right decision and, once permitted, he went on to make a lasting and lyrical mark on the face of the music of a proud nation during a time when it needed all the distinguished and original musical voices it could find (see this post).  Delius still stands out as a distinctive voice in British music, a well-kept secret that many musicians and listeners are happy to discover.

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Rivers, Day 1 – Water Music by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 1 – Water Music by George Frideric Handel

George Frideric Handel is often compared to his exact contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach.  Both of them were born in 1685 (along with Domenico Scarlatti, the Italian composer of hundreds of short sonatas for keyboard) and Handel survived Bach by 9 years, passing away in 1759.  Together they are considered to be the very best composers of the Baroque era of European musical history, which lasted from roughly 1650 to 1750.  During this time the grammar of the tonal system, the harmonic practice to which we are all accustomed in the Western world, codified and many of the musical genres familiar to us, opera, concerto, sonata, suite, cantata, reached their initial maturity.  Bach and Handel made significant contributions to this process, were born in provincial German towns, and remained lifelong Lutherans, but beyond those superficial similarities could not be more different.

While Handel was eclectic, contributing to all musical genres of the day, Bach left no operas.  While Handel was an ambitious impresario, welcoming the challenges of commerce and marketing in order to gain prestige and build his fortune, Bach composed his daily works and tended to the responsibilities of running a boarding school.  While Handel was attracted to music as entertainment Bach preferred to probe the depths of intellectual and spiritual introspection in his music.  While Bach was content to stay in Germany his entire life (there is no record of him ever traveling beyond its borders), Handel was cosmopolitan, instinctively seeking out the most happenin’ places and jumping into the fray.  I get the sense that Bach was introverted and structured whereas Handel was extroverted, ambitious and a bit carefree, kind of ISTJ vs. ENFP if you’re into the Myers Briggs thing (I’m not exactly what either would have been – that’s my best guess). Here is a map of Bach’s travels, entirely within Germany:

But Handel traveled from his hometown of Halle to Hamburg, Germany’s major center of opera.  From there, still in his early twenties, he set out to drink the art of opera from its very source, Italy, and visited all the major cultural centers there, meeting famous musicians, composing church music and cantatas for Catholic cardinals, and premiering his first Italian operas.  Then, he returned to Germany, and briefly settled in a little city called Hanover, which was ruled by an elector from the dynastic house of the same name, the House of Hanover.  In 1710 he became the Elector’s director of music.  It would have been a good steady job, akin to the kinds that Bach held for all of his life.  But Handel wasn’t satisfied.  He must have caught wind that the London aristocracy was crazy for Italian opera, and he knew he could supply their demand.  So he went on a few scouting trips over the next few years and produced some operas there, which were very successful.  So successful, in fact, that he decided to stay there, without seeking the approval of the Elector.

During his first few years in London Handel oversaw productions of his first operas for the city and also began to experience favor by the royal court under Queen Anne of the House of Stuart receiving a pension and supplying her with anthems.  But in 1714 something unexpected happened: Queen Anne died.  While there were numerous home-grown Roman Catholic aristocrats who could have ascended to the throne, 1701’s Act of Settlement prohibited them from doing so, much to the consternation of the Jacobites (for more about Jacobitism, see this post), and so the closest Protestant relative, the Elector of Hanover, was the inevitable choice.  The Elector became King George I.  Wasn’t Handel’s face red?!

King George I, previously the Elector of Hanover, Handel’s double-capacity patron

As a side note, it is often surprising to learn about such facts as a German aristocrat assuming the throne of Great Britain.  That the royal families of Europe were tightly inbred is a widely-known fact; some historians assert that the Russian Revolution was ultimately catalyzed by the hemophilia in the Tsar’s family, probably due to inbreeding, which drove a desperate Tsarina to confide in a mysterious and possibly sinister monk named Rasputin.

Was Handel phased by this?  Did it lead to awkward encounters at court?  Did Handel keep his distance?  Accounts vary, and it’s hard to know how serious this was, if it was indeed an issue.  Some sources indicate this was merely a legend and that even during Handel’s tenure as the Elector’s kapellmeister it was known that he would ascend the British throne within a few years.  But according to the legend, the Elector, now King George, and the composer were reconciled in the summer of 1717 through a magnificent event on the Thames River, a concert of orchestral music played upon a barge for the pleasure of King George and numerous spectators as he took a cruise from the main palace at Whitehall to Chelsea.

The music Handel composed for the occasion has come to be known as his Water Music and it’s one of his greatest hits, probably rivaled only by Messiah in the popular consciousness.  The music is suitably festive, lively and varied, scored for a large and colorful orchestra so that the sound would carry through the open air.  Water Music consists of three orchestral suites.  The orchestral suite was a genre especially popular with German Baroque composers.  Notable examples exist from Bach (see this post) and Telemann (see this post) as well as Handel, and the genre was an ideal arena for a composer to demonstrate his knowledge of different national styles; the orchestral suites of the late Baroque combined dances of all different nations, French, German, Italian and British.  Handel’s Water Music is one such eclectic collection.  The grand opening movement is a French overture, drawn from Lully’s noble operatic style which glorified King Louis XIV, the Sun King, (for more about Lully’s operatic legacy, see this post, this one, and this one), ideal for the opening of an event as grand as this.  Can you imagine the Thames River, thick with splendorous pleasure barges, as the expedition began on that beautiful July day?

 

The story of King George I, formerly the Elector of Hanover, and George Frideric Handel’s cosmopolitan leanings may very well be an urban legend.  Other sources indicate that the King was merely trying to outdo the Prince of Wales who had been making a point to show off his own wealth through lavish events and parties around this time.  But it is fun to think of Handel squirming, his constant ambition for a better lot getting the best of him.  Bach’s problems were different – he only had to worry about not landing the modest daily labor he sought (see this post), but Handel was a natural risk taker, prone to this kind of mess.  Shortly after the Water Music event, Handel would ride the roller coaster of fortune, investing in companies to present Italian opera to London more systematically than he had before, and eventually pivoting to English language oratorio when that threatened to go out of fashion (see this post and this one).

Bach and Handel were very different – we can be thankful for Bach’s approach, profoundly routine, and Handel’s, boldly entertaining, two sides of the same brilliant coin that was the German High Baroque.

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Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 5 – Diversions by Benjamin Britten

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 5 – Diversions by Benjamin Britten

Have you ever played the “What if?” Game with historical events?  You speculate about how the world would be if an event or events had just gone a little differently, turned out just a bit different.  Here’s a book of them:

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Eminent-Historians-Imagine-Might/dp/0399152385/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459731807&sr=1-2&keywords=what+if+history

What if Socrates had died in an Athenian war?  What if the southern states of the Confederacy had been allowed to peacefully secede?  What if Jesus had not been crucified?  So many ways that history could have been different.

In reading about the life of the English composer Benjamin Britten another “what if?’ question comes to my mind.  Britten had enjoyed a very formative experience studying music composition with a notable English composer, Frank Bridge, during his adolescence.  From Bridge Britten learned the supremacy of rigorous technique above all, and also took the permission to follow his intuition and tastes wherever they may lead, so long as the technique was good.  After that, Britten was enrolled at the Royal College of Music (RCM).  His experience was alright, but nothing to write home about; much of what he encountered dissatisfied him although he was largely successful in his education there, winning numerous awards for his works.  He continued to study with Bridge privately even though his official composition teacher was John Ireland.  During his time at RCM he took the opportunity to attend concerts in London which included performances of music by Mahler, Stravinsky and Shostakovich.  Perhaps impressed with this modern music, he strongly considered travelling to Vienna after completing his studies at RCM to study with the great disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg.  For music from another disciple of Schoenberg, see this post.  For more about both Webern and Berg see this post.  Britten had heard a performance of Berg’s opera Wozzeck and met Arnold Schoenberg in the early 1930s.

I wonder how music history would have unfolded differently had Britten not been dissuaded of this ambition.  It brings to my mind many thoughts, somewhat interrelated.  The first is that it is a historical rarity for one significant composer to teach another.  Certainly there are exceptions, but they are few.  And mentoring, championing, supporting, etc. is another matter.  But teaching?  I can think of a couple examples: Haydn taught Beethoven; Saint-Saens taught Faure who in turn taught Ravel.  But who taught Bach and Mozart, or Haydn for that matter?  Most people don’t know their names, nor do they know the names of those whom they taught, with the exception of Beethoven.  Great artists do not tend to be taught by great artists themselves, or vice versa.  So what would have been the result had Berg taken Britten under his wing?  Would we be oblivious to Britten’s name simply due to that trend?  And that is not to say that Berg is a stellar, fabulous composer in the Western pantheon, but he is more luminous a name than those who taught Bach or Brahms, for example.  Would the trend have automatically relegated Britten to a second or third tier?

Also, I have never found any record of Berg’s students.  I don’t know whom he taught, nor how he taught.  I don’t know if Berg would have been flexible enough to allow Britten to develop along to very natural and intuitive lines that he did, or would have enforced upon him a stylistic homogeneity reflecting his own interests.  I like to think someone like Berg, or Schoenberg for that matter, would be, but I just don’t know.  (For more about one of Schoenberg’s other notable pupils, see this post).  I think it is fairly certain to say though that had he spent time at the feet of Alban Berg, Britten would have devoted considerably more energy to studying and composing abstruse music written with serial techniques than he ended up doing.  Perhaps that would simply have been stirred into his already eclectic fantasy of styles yielding a colorful, spontaneous English musical voice edged with the dolor of dodecaphony, but that could also have ruined him.  Again, I tend to defer to the aforementioned trend which indicates that Britten would not have the name he does had he decided to study with Berg in Vienna; his teachers, Bridge and Ireland, refined, sophisticated, competent, unknown, influenced a figure a tier above.  Would Berg have?

And would Paul Wittgenstein have approached a second rate English serialist to compose a work for his left hand and orchestra as he approached the first rate Britten in the 1940s?  Again, I tend to doubt it.  Wittgenstein would have had the opportunity to commission plenty of fellow Germans and Austrians who were trained in serialism had he wished.  But Britten was a different kind of fish.  Something about the British maverick’s musical voice must have appealed to the iconoclastic Wittgenstein, something that spoke differently from the stern German and suave French with which he had already had experience.  Did Wittgenstein simply want a change of pace?

Interestingly, Wittgentstein seems to have deferred to Britten’s judgement in a way that he did not with Hindemith or Prokofiev.  Both Hindemith and Prokofiev created works for Wittgenstein that he did not see fit to play.  It leads me to wonder how he felt about their music in general.  With Britten’s Diversions, Wittgenstein saw fit to premiere it even in spite of some minor quibbles about orchestration which Britten refused to bow to.  I guess Wittgenstein had met his match in Britten, a fellow iconoclast who had to write the music he did.

Diversions, I would speculate, moves and breathes quite differently from most of the other commissions with which Wittgenstein was involved.  Perhaps he liked it that way.  He must have known what he was getting into with Britten.  Britten’s music always manages to combine a British propriety with a naive freshness, somehow yielding a whole greater than the sum of these parts.  I feel like only Britten is able to speak in the voice that he does.  In the hands of other composers his idioms would sound hopelessly naive, but Britten manages to make them speak to the human condition, simultaneously filled with wonder and regret.  Maybe Diversions was Wittgenstein’s opportunity to unleash his inner child:

 

Everything I have read about Wittgenstein indicates quite that he was quite a serious fellow.  Maybe Britten’s Diversions was his chance to loosen up and have a little fun with the music he had commissioned.  I hardly expect this would have been the case with a pupil of Alban Berg.

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Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 4 – Piano Concerto No. 4 by Sergei Prokofiev

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 4 – Piano Concerto No. 4 by Sergei Prokofiev

It can hardly be a coincidence that all of the very best composers were also keyboard players, and in many cases virtuosi.  This is true of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Saint-Saens, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Shostakovich and Prokofiev.  All of these significant composers were well versed in keyboard technique and, in many cases, world-class virtuosos on their chosen keyboard instruments.  And I am sure there are a handful I am forgetting.  Exceptions to this apparent rule also exist, rare though they are; great composers who did not reach those heights of keyboard performance include: Vivaldi (primarily a violinist, also debatable as to which composer tier to place him), Gluck, Berlioz, and Wagner.  But the first list is longer.  And this isn’t surprising – working at the keyboard forces one’s musical mind to keep track of numerous independent events and parts – keyboard music almost always features multiple simultaneous musical lines, the medium of harmony.  Keyboard instruments are still the best laboratory for understanding the theory of intervals, scales, chords and voice-leading, so naturally composers who spend significant time honing their keyboard skills are able to leverage the resulting harmonic sense in order to deepen their improvisations and composed music.

During the seventeenth century a particular invention increased the appeal of keyboard instruments to composers and their audiences considerably: Bartolomeo Cristofori, an Italian inventor and maker of musical instruments, introduced the first pianos around the year 1700.  The date is difficult to pin down for several reasons: musical instrument development does not occur in a vacuum, and is actually a rather fluid process; the first pianos would have resembled previous instruments like the harpsichord in many ways that would probably surprise modern listeners.  Cristofori’s early prototypes looked little like today’s massive and powerful models, but they are generally regarded as the first step in that direction.

Before Cristofori’s pianos, musicians had two primary options for the creation and performance of keyboard music: the harpsichord and the organ.  Both had their idiomatic and stylistic tendencies – the harpsichord for intimate, salon performances of miniature movements, and the organ for thick, grand, awe-inspiring sacred music in church.  But the piano’s attractive singing quality and powerful projection (which developed over time) opened up new avenues to musicians for creativity and performance.  The gentle and lyrical sound of the piano proved suitable for near endless ensemble configurations and musical roles: the piano can be convincing as a soloist, as an accompanist for a singer or solo instrument, as an equal player in a variety of chamber ensembles, as a percussive color in a symphony orchestra, as a soloist with orchestra, as accompaniment for a choir, and the list (or Liszt?!) goes on.  The piano can croon with intimacy, roar across a concert hall like an aggressive lion, and cover every level in between.  Neither the harpsichord nor the organ, as good as they are for their specific aims, achieve even a fraction of the versatility of the piano.  And for this reason, many composers after Bach (who did not like the first pianos, the old fuddy-duddy!) without hesitation adopted the piano as their expressive performing voice, and it has remained a reliable mainstay for performing composers to this day.

And the piano’s tone, sweet and lyrical, yet powerful, gave rise to what was essentially a new musical genre championed by Mozart, his contemporaries, and his successors: the piano concerto.  Solo concertos had risen to great prominence in the hands of composers like Vivaldi whose numerous and masterful examples for violin and orchestra (for more about that, see this post) inaugurated a stylish vogue throughout Europe.  Modeled on opera arias, concertos allowed the penetrating, focused sound of a melodic instrument like the violin to sing through a thick ensemble.  During the Baroque era concertos tended to feature single line instruments.  There were keyboard concertos, but they tended to be a bit awkward due to the harpsichord’s inability to cut through the ensemble as other solo instruments could.  The harpsichord sounds very clear and present up close, but its powers of projection fade quickly as one moves away.  Handel composed some notable organ concertos as entr’acte entertainment for his later operas and oratorios (see this post and this one) meant to be played upon small chamber organs (not a massive church organ), but this practice did not really catch on among other composers.

But once virtuoso performers and composers like Mozart embraced the piano and began to explore its possibilities, it emerged as an ideal instrument upon which to solo in front of an orchestra.  And so Mozart essentially invented the piano concerto and brought it to its initial maturity with his 27 examples, composed over the course of his lifetime.  These piano concertos allowed him to showcase his orchestral writing, his command of large scale musical forms, and his elegant and imaginative virtuosity, all in one impressive venue.  Later composers used piano concertos for the same function, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it remained a very personal vehicle with which to expose their own virtuosity and artistic interpretations to their audiences.  This is largely confirmed by Beethoven’s production of piano concertos – his 5 wonderful examples all come from the beginning and middle of his career (for more about the different episodes of Beethoven’s career, see this post).  Once he lost his hearing he saw no further need to create piano concertos for himself to perform, so there exist no piano concertos composed during Beethoven’s later years of introspection.

And during the twentieth century, too, virtuoso pianist composers used the piano concerto for the same purposes.  Sergei Prokofiev is a brilliant example.  For him the piano concerto became a very important and effective method for him to introduce his forceful, Bolshevik musical language and razor sharp virtuosity to audiences throughout Russia, Europe and the United States.  Of his five completed piano concertos, composed over the course of two decades, Prokofiev premiered all of them himself, with one exception, and I wonder if that exception remained a sore spot for him, blemishing an otherwise stellar record.

The exception, the one piano concerto he did not premiere himself, and the only one that was never even played during his lifetime, is Concerto Number 4, written for Paul Wittgenstein in 1931.  Shortly after the Great War which cost Wittgenstein his right arm, he became most active in approaching notable composers about writing works for him to perform.  And he performed most of them.  But upon seeing the fruits of at least two of these projects he was reluctant to premiere them out of artistic differences with the musical material.  The first of these incidents was Paul Hindemith’s Klaviermusik of 1924.  You can hear the beginning of that here:

Given Hindemith’s style, certainly not a well-kept secret, I’m not sure what Wittgenstein was expecting, but he claimed inability to ascertain the internal logic of the piece and so never performed it.  In fact, he actually stashed the score away in his study and was content to let the world think it was lost until it was uncovered in his affairs after his widow’s death in 2002.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 4, composed for Wittgenstein’s Left Hand, suffered a similar fate – Wittgenstein claimed to be unable to discern the internal logic and did not wish to perform it until he did.  That day never came, and so it is the one only of Prokofiev’s piano concertos which did not premiere in his lifetime.  Why don’t you take a shot at it..  How do you find the internal logic?

In spite of this misunderstanding Prokofiev and Wittgenstein remained on good terms, but I wonder if this led to any kind of awkwardness between them.  Prokofiev, perhaps frustrated by this incident, composed his next piano concerto, Number 5, for both of his own hands and premiered it himself, thus stepping back into a long line of virtuoso pianist composers who used the ideal medium of the piano concerto for highly personal expressive aims in presenting their compositional prowess and musical personalities to their audiences.

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Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 3 – Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged by Johannes Brahms

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 3 – Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged by Johannes Brahms

 

While Paul Wittgenstein is the most famous example of a dedicated pianist requiring a special repertoire to suit his peculiar physical condition, he is not the only example of this through history.  Nor are the works written especially for him the only examples of composers and arrangers doing the same, and for various reasons.  Here’s a rather comprehensive list of piano music composed or arranged to be played with just the left hand:

http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_Piano_works_for_the_left_hand

Camille Saint-Saens, a most intriguing figure to me (for more about him see this post), found himself at various points on the cycle of connoisseurial favor at different times in his life.  Significant to French musical history for his performing, teaching, editing, criticism and advocacy, as a composer he was extraordinarily gifted but unable, I fear, to convince many fellow musicians that his music was truly substantial and enduring.  He was at times subject to criticisms like “Bad music composed well” (ouch!), and toward the end of his life found himself unable to shake his association with light and trivial works like the famously ephemeral Wedding Cake Waltz, composed in 1886 as a gift to his near contemporary and piano duet partner Caroline de Serres née Montigny-Rémaury on the occasion of her second marriage.

Toward the end of her life she underwent a surgical operation which severely limited the functionality of her right hand and so approached Saint-Saens for a set of entertaining and challenging works which she could play with just her left.  Over the course of the resulting 6 Etudes, Opus 135, composed just before the outbreak of the First World War in which Wittgenstein suffered his own comparable personal tragedy, Saint-Saens explores every possible mood, texture and harmonic language, yielding a work of beauty and challenge for any pianist’s digital dexterity.  The fingers almost become their own singers, speaking and acting with utmost independence toward the aim of weaving intricate and convincing polyphonic textures that belie the single hand from which they are woven.  This set would provide important inspiration and education for Maurice Ravel as he set out to create a similarly convincing work for Paul Wittgenstein a mere decade and a half later (see this post).

But physical necessity is not the only reason that musicians have made arrangements at the piano for just one hand.  Another work that Wittgenstein championed came from the brilliant mind and artistry of Johannes Brahms arranging for the left hand not out of physical necessity, but in order to capture the spirit and astounding economy of means of a work from a previous century that fascinated and compelled him.

While the majority of Bach’s creative efforts were focused on the creation of a noble and varied collection of vocal works based on Lutheran Chorales (see this post), there was one short episode of his professional life which encouraged him to focus more extensively on instrumental music.  The Calvinist religious philosophy held by Prince Leopold, for whom Bach served as director of music during his tenure in Cothen from 1717 to 1723, considered elaborate music to be too sensual and distracting for worship, and so the Lutheran musical sensibilities Bach had been steadily developing lay largely dormant during this time, giving him the opportunity to create some of his best-loved instrumental music.  The orchestral suites, solo cello suites, first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier and Brandenburg Concertos all come from his time at Cothen, as do the six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin.

Ever since their genesis, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin have stood out as supreme examples in the art of condensing thick, complex, harmonically complete, and spiritually profound music into as few strokes as possible for a single staff instrument.  The sonatas and partitas are challenging to listen to (I remember being a bit repulsed by their angular, sometimes harsh sound upon first hearing them as a high schooler), and even more so to play, with their dense polyphony, both implied and explicit, which demands such precision of bowing and fingering and superlative musicianship.  Violinists have used them to refine their technique and powers of interpretation for the last couple centuries.  Most of the movements are brief dances or instrumental genres lasting no more than a few minutes, but of the 30-odd movements of the set one in particular stands out for its length and depth, the Chaconne of the second partita.

Many musicians and listeners have seen fit to relate to the Chaconne as a standalone piece, a world unto itself even without the four other movements of the accompanying partita, such is its scale and gravitas.  Here it is performed on solo violin; you may want to listen to a few minutes of it just to get a taste of its original setting:

Interestingly, Bach may very well have been exercising his latent Lutheran chorale muscles in crafting the Chaconne.  A compelling theory has been asserted that he was in fact, and perhaps subconsciously, embedding numerous chorales from the Lutheran tradition into the monumental texture of the Chaconne as an epitaph to his recently deceased wife.  This performance makes a convincing case for this theory which, even if untrue (although that would be surprising given how well the chorales seem to fit), serves to amplify the haunting and sacred qualities of a musical work which already exhibits both qualities in abundance:

Bach’s great Chaconne has had countless admirers over its couple centuries of existence, all of whom are drawn to its stunning level of integration and economy, including some of the greatest musicians in history.  Johannes Brahms was one such devotee, and it is most probable that it inspired the significant use of variation forms in his own music – see this post.

“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

Of course today, the very moment any of us would like to hear Bach’s Chaconne (or any other music), it is as easy as cuing up a video on YouTube over the speedy 4G network (by the way, John Philip Sousa was virulently opposed to the talking machines which began to pervade Western culture during his lifetime for just this reason – he saw the ease of consuming recordings as detrimental to society’s general musicianship and intellectual ambition and testified before congress to this end – for more about Sousa see this post), but Brahms did not have this luxury.  In order to experience the work it was necessary for him to be in the company of one of his favorite violinists, like Joseph Joachim for example.  Since this was a relative rarity (not only to be in his presence, but to be so as he was performing one of the most demanding works in the whole violin repertoire), Brahms did what was, in his mind, the best thing by transcribing it for the piano in a way that preserved much of the performing challenge of the original: he transcribed it for piano left hand, but an octave lower to take advantage of the piano’s deep and resonant bass range.

As a violinist myself, I have never developed sufficient technique to tackle the Chaconne (particularly the triple stop-heavy outer sections –  I have played that mellow, glowing middle section in certain contexts), but I have spent time with it at the piano and I can attest that playing it with two hands is quite a challenge, so I admire Brahms’ impulse to preserve the work’s original spirit.

Paul Wittgenstein had similar admiration for Brahms’ concept, and certainly appreciation for the precedent given his condition, but he also noted a perhaps excessive obsession on Brahms’ part to stay true to Bach’s “text” and therefore not to take certain liberties with the transcription that might have helped the work to speak better in its transplanted medium while still managing to stay true to the original vision.  Thus Wittgenstein deployed clever techniques to fill out the bass even more, providing yet greater sonorous depth to Brahms’ transcription:

While Wittgenstein is certainly the most famous pianist to commission and arrange piano music for one-handed performance, he was also able to draw from precedence in a considerable body of such examples left by some notable Western musicians of previous generations.  Wittgenstein’s ambition and drive to make a career for himself in spite of the injury which threatened him at such a young age motivated him to serve as inspiration for and collaborate in the creation of a notable and concentrated collection of works with which to fill his concert and recital programs.  But he was the culmination and summation of a prior tradition in which other important musicians had been working for reasons bearing varying similarity to his aims.

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Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 2 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 2 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

 

Here’s something you may find a little stilted…

 

Prince John: “Have your men close in.”

Sir Guy has his men close in.

Little John: “They’re closing in!  I hope Robin sees them…”

Cut to a very alert-looking Robin Hood, who obviously sees them.

Bishop of the Black Canons: “I must commend your highness for the subtlety of your scheme!”

Well, I like to think that since that production script writers, and filmmakers in general, have honed their subtlety just a touch.  But it’s fun to watch, isn’t it?  This is from a very colorful 1938 film by Warner Brothers based on a story that everyone knows, Robin of Loxley.  What’s your favorite Robin Hood film?  Is it Disney’s?  Or Kevin Costner’s gritty “Prince of Thieves”?  How about Mel Brooks’ bawdy and hilarious “Men in Tights”?  Fortunately for us we can choose whichever style fits our mood, and I have met some people who prefer the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckling classic to all the rest.  Its official title is “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.

The film is gorgeous – a feast for the eyes.  It was created just as the Technicolor process was finding its legs and Warner Brothers’ costume and set designers were clearly only too happy to take advantage of the bold new medium, just as the designers of Oz were also keen to do for similar reasons (for more about the Wizard of Oz, see this post).  Another point of interest in this version of Robin Hood, one that fascinates me and many of my music-loving friends, is the score.  Listen to it again and see if you can follow the underscoring.  Do you notice how rich and, yet, nuanced it is?  Whatever the dialogue and acting may lack in understatement the music more than compensates for.

If you had played me the score and told me it was taken from a Wagner opera, I may very well have believed it (for more about Wagner see this post and this one).  The composer of this score, Eric Wolfgang Korngold, is one of a number of Austrian musicians who eventually settled in the United States and contributed their considerable talents to entertaining Americans.  Other musicians who follow that pattern include Max Steiner, who arranged music for Broadway shows and then contributed music for hundreds of Hollywood films (most notably Gone With the Wind), and Frederick Loewe who, in collaboration with librettist Alan Jay Lerner, created Broadway shows like My Fair Lady that endure in popularity to this day.  Incidentally, all three of these musicians with Viennese roots were child prodigies of some degree or another and all three came from Jewish backgrounds.

Steiner and Korngold have both gone down in history as incredibly formative to the art of film music scoring, inspiring countless film composers and setting a very strong precedent for lush, late-Romantic orchestral music in American films.  But in spite of these similarities, their professional aims were rather different.  Steiner seemed content to be a “work-a-day” composer for major studios, churning out hundreds of well-wrought scores.  Korngold on the other hand was able to be quite selective about the projects he accepted, scoring only 13 over the course of his career.  But, they are fantastic and distinctive scores, written at such a level of quality that their influence transcends their relatively scant quantity.  Korngold was not content to settle into a long, steady career as a film composer as Steiner was.  It seems that Korngold accepted film scoring as a unique and formidable challenge, but was still mostly focused on creating music for the concert hall in a way that Steiner was not.

Film scoring may have been a detour for Korngold too, encouraged simply by serendipity, or lack thereof.  Shortly after Korngold travelled to the United States at the invitation Warner Brothers to score The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which he won an Oscar (the first film composer ever to do so), the Anschluss imperiled the Jews of his native Austria and he remained in Los Angeles, becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1943.  He would never return to his native Austria.  He sought to resume his writing for the concert hall and stage in America with several notable concert works written after he left film scoring.

Before his travels to America to become involved with Hollywood, Korngold was having a ball (so to speak – see this post) working the scenes of musical Vienna, crafting operas, ballets and concert works.  He scored major early critical successes with a ballet composed at age 11, and two operas composed shortly after that.  Early admirers of Korngold included Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Giacomo Puccini.  In addition to these stage works he was also at the same time creating chamber music and short orchestral works.  And he seems to have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Paul Wittgenstein, having written three pieces for his masterful left hand: a concerto, a piano quintet, and a concert suite for piano and strings.  The young and flourishing Korngold was in fact one of the first composers Wittgenstein approached about creating works tailored especially for him.

The suite for piano, two violins and cello, opus 23 (for more about the opus system, see this post) was the latest of the three works Korngold composed for Wittgenstein.  It is for the fewest forces and arguably the most elegant and direct in its communicative power.  Its collection of five movements could only have been assembled by an ambitious German or Austrian composer writing between the World Wars, so peculiar is its selection of movements to the sensibility of the musicians inhabiting that time and place.  In opus 23 Korngold creates a pastiche of musical procedures which seem to pay homage to the finest and most prominent figures of the German and Viennese persuasion.  But if I had to compare it the work of one composer, I would probably describe it as a Mahler symphony cast for a crisp and transparent chamber group.  There is a significant scale and sweep to many of the movements, five in number as was often the case with Mahler’s symphonies, exploring incredibly varied areas of the human experience, sometimes sincere (as in the beautiful Song fourth movement), sometimes biting and cynical (as in the sarcastic Groteske third movement), and always with an inspired and engaging melodic invention.  The opening Prelude and Fugue is a nod to pure German rigor.  The Waltz appeals to the Viennese, however Second Viennese (see this post) the disjointed and angular melody may be, and the Rondo Finale once again evokes the influence of Mahler who crafted similar finales himself (see this post).  That Mahler pervades Korngold’s Suite is unsurprising – Mahler served as an important champion for Korngold, having pronounced him a genius early in the prodigy’s career.  The Song is the shortest movement, the most direct, and the easiest to digest.  It is also sublimely moving and beautiful:

While Korngold is known to many music lovers as one of the greatest film composers in history, a reputation that is richly deserved, his heart never left the concert hall.  After his string of remarkable film scores Korngold returned to writing concert works even as he remained in the United States, sharing the invention and craftsmanship that shaped this early work, designed to showcase Wittgenstein’s ambitions, with American concertgoers.

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Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 1 – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand by Maurice Ravel

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 1 – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand by Maurice Ravel

I sometimes see Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy grouped together under the stylistic category of musical Impressionism.  I’m sure you are aware of the stunning work of the impressionist painters, Monet in particular, who achieved astonishing and unprecedented visual effects in their paintings, depicting the behavior of light with uncanny accuracy and arresting beauty through their pointillistic painting techniques.

One of the miraculous features of impressionistic painting is the way that the countless points of color, which seem random and unintelligible when viewed close to the canvas, coalesce into an image that is remarkably clear, yet nuanced, when viewed from a proper distance.  It’s like the ultimate expression of losing the forest for the trees.

 

In my opinion, this style of painting fits Debussy’s manner the best.  While he himself did not appreciate that label (see this post for more about that), feeling a greater connection with the Symbolist poets than the Impressionist painters, I think Debussy’s music provides a brilliant analogue to those paintings, glowing, soft and warm, with auras instead of edges and an impeccably imaginative control of pastel color and light.  And it is for this reason that I don’t particularly see Ravel as an impressionist.  None of the qualities of light and softness really apply to him.  His edges are sharp and crisp.  His colors are bold and primary.  His flavors are cool and astringent.  His music in no way exhibits the glow of Monet.  So I don’t know why Ravel is so often grouped with the Impressionist musicians.  Even Erik Satie feels more Impressionist (for more about Satie, see this post).

Ravel seems to much more completely evoke the clear, crystalline strokes of Neo-Classicism as exemplified by Stravinsky.  And the two shared an affinity for one another.  Once, Diaghilev wanted to stage Mussorgsky’s rough, unfinished opera Khovanshchina (for more about Mussorgsky’s roughness, see this post) and commissioned his frequent collaborator Igor Stravinsky (for more about Stravinsky and Diaghilev, see this post) to touch up the orchestration, for which he phoned a friend, Ravel, to help him complete the job.  Later, Ravel would orchestrate Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, yielding the popular concert version played by so many orchestras today (for more about Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, see this post).

Ravel and Stravinsky shared not only an affinity for similar patterns of orchestration and musical clarity, but also for the jazzy harmonies to which the Americans were dancing in the 1920s and 1930s.  Both Ravel and Stravinsky, at various points in their output, infused their pointed, astringent orchestral colors with the rhythms and harmonies of the jazz that poured out of American dance bands.  Here are a couple examples of Stravinsky’s forays into American jazz music:

 

Ravel had visited the United States in the late 1920s, touring around to major symphony orchestras and drinking in the American culture as he did so.  Among the many elements of American life that impressed him was the jazz music, and the two piano concertos he composed in the early 1930s, shortly after his return from the States, seem to reflect this.

Just a few years before Ravel’s trip to America, a remarkable pianist named George Gershwin, in fulfillment of a commission from bandleader Paul Whiteman, had written a seminal and monumental rhapsody for piano and orchestral that is to this day probably still the most authentic and convincing synthesis of jazz idioms and classical scope.  It came to be known as Rhapsody in Blue and is still beloved by modern listeners for its epic orchestral sweep, bluesy piano part, and alternation of moods, by turns meandering, opulent, relaxed, frenetic and euphoric.  In 2000 Disney animators showed just how well Gershwin had captured the flavor and spirit of interwar America, creating a brilliant piece of animation which managed to hit on numerous of the distinctive cultural notes and tropes to accompany Gershwin’s score in the sequel to Fantasia (for more about the original Fantasia of the 1940s, see this post).

 

Incidentally, the orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue is not Gershwin’s (he was not actually skilled enough at its time of composition to orchestrate it successfully), but went through several versions at the hand of Whiteman’s favorite arranger, Ferde Grofe.  For more about Grofe, see this post.

Given Ravel’s high level of involvement with the American musical scene during his visit, and also given the popularity of Rhapsody in Blue within that scene, it seems inevitable to me that the French watchmaker would have heard Gershwin’s jazzy essay himself.  It also seems likely given the extent to which Ravel seems to have been working under its influence in the two piano concertos written upon his return to France.  Interestingly, he worked on both of them simultaneously.  The Concerto in G, written for two-handed pianists, is the more famous of the two.  If you wish to note the similarities to Gershwin’s Rhapsody, simply listen to the 8-minute first movement and hear the sighing clarinet licks as they pop out of a succession of moods and colors very similar to Gershwin’s:

 

The Concerto in G is justifiably famous, but my preference is actually for Ravel’s other piano concerto, commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein for orchestra and piano left hand alone.  While the two-handed Concerto in G is cast in the conventional fast-slow-fast three movement format popular since Vivaldi (for more about Vivaldi’s concerto format, see this post), the Concerto for the Left Hand, at about two thirds the length, is one through-composed movement with no double bar until the end.  While there are rather obvious sections within the movement, this structure, which also features a similar scheme of opulent intensification and meandering relaxation, colored by often bluesy piano figuration and a ticking modal march that is pure Ravel, gives a clear nod to the parallel feature of Gershwin’s great Rhapsody.  Ravel’s Left Hand concerto could as easily be called a rhapsody as could Gershwin’s rhapsody be called a piano concerto.

There are several instances of the Germanic and conservative Wittgenstein, who was most active in seeking out and commissioning the most prominent composers of his day, reacting to the fruits of his commissions with displeasure and even vexation.  There are some commissions which he unfortunately did not see fit to premiere, for example those by Hindemith and Prokofiev (see this post).  While he initially did not know what to make of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand with its mixture of French mist and jazzy clouds, happily he came to embrace it after getting to know it, eventually considering it to be a significant and notable work, and seeing fit to premiere and record it.  And so, we are able to hear Wittgenstein’s own realization of Ravel’s synthesis of French gentility and American extravagance:

 

P.S.  Here’s a nifty video of Wittgenstein’s surviving left hand playing excerpts from Ravel’s Left Hand Concerto.  It’s worth seeing:

 

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