More Syndication, Day 5 – Einen Jodler hor i gern by Franzl Lang

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 5 – Einen Jodler hor i gern by Franzl Lang

What do you think of yodeling?  Everyone’s heard it, but it’s probably one of those funny little things occupying the recesses of your brain that you don’t bring out very much to occupy your conscious thoughts.  You may find your immediate association with yodeling is one of ridicule, like it’s one of music’s laughing stocks.  And a few weeks ago that’s probably about how my mind would have reacted to the idea of yodeling.  But there’s a pretty serious art there, and in researching and learning more about it I’ve developed a much greater appreciation for yodeling and those who master it.

It’s one of those skills that has probably been around as long as people have been singing (a very long time).  If you research it yourself you will find that, while there are certain nations and cultures that we tend to associate with yodeling, related practices are spread wide across the world.  And it’s not as though yodeling originated in one place and spread to all the others, at least not that I’ve found.  It seems to be one of those human practices that, like speech, song, dance, architecture, religion and agriculture, springs up naturally wherever and whenever humans live in community, slipping into their vocal music.

In principle the skill is simple: a rapid, clear, and complete alternation between chest voice and head voice.  Both sexes can yodel convincingly, but it is more compelling when done by males due to the distinctive timbre of the falsetto register that pops out every time the break is crossed.  It is thought that the yodeling know best today, that originating from Switzerland and Austria, was originally a practical skill, used to communicate across vast expanses of the Alpine mountain range.  I’ve also read that it may have had an application for herding livetstock.  Singing styles akin to what we call yodeling can be found on all the inhabited continents among peoples who have discovered the beauty of navigating the vocal break with speed and clarity.

And yodeling has impacted many styles of folk and popular music.  Influences of yodeling can be found in blues, country music, vaudeville, and more.   There are a handful of popular singers working today who can yodel well, for instance the Alaskan singer Jewel:

And maybe you’ve seen this funny bit?

Chances are you have already seen that, since more than seven million people have watched that on YouTube, which is to say nothing of the live viewing audience which saw that back around the time of the premiere of World War Z.  I’m reasonably sure that those Jimmy Fallon and Brad Pitt’s actual yodeling voices.  But…the end is not quite accurate.  While yodeling is as old as human verbal communication, it developed into a much more elaborate art in Switzerland starting around the 1830s when yodelers began to entertain audiences in performance settings.  Soon yodeling groups, and even entire choirs, formed to present ensemble pieces based on yodeling, often majorly improvised.  So, double yodels and beyond are not exactly unheard of.

That’s quite haunting and beautiful, isn’t it?  It’s a Zauerli, just one of the choral genres based on yodeling models.  It feels a little like yodeling in slow motion with a bunch of other parts filling out the chords beneath it, all in a very atmospheric and ambient way.  Another one, usually for a smaller ensemble, is the Juuzli, which has a somewhat different feeling:

You can find out more about Switzerland’s history of yodeling here.  Switzerland’s noble and historic tradition of yodeling privileges it to be the location of the triennial National Yodeling Festival, held in Davos, which is in the Eastern knob, just south of the tiny nation of Liechtenstein.  The next one is in 2017, and if you want to go you should book your flight and hotel today since the event usually attracts more than 200,000 visitors.

http://www.carnifest.com/events/switzerland/davos/577/switzerland-s-national-yodeling-festival-2017.aspx

A master yodeler is a marvel, a most impressive spectacle to behold.  The best I’ve been able to find is the Bavarian Franzl Lang, known as the Jodelkonig or “Yodel King”.  Here he is singing one of his flagship hits, Einen Jodler hor i gern, “I like to hear a yodel”:

Isn’t that infectious?  I can’t help but to smile in delight whenever I see this clip; he’s obviously so completely at home in his persona as the Yodel King.  My German from high school is a little rusty, but in the very beginning the hostess in the pink dress asks the accordion player whom he considers to be the best yodeler in the world and he, without a hint of hesitation, strings together every German superlative he can think of in praise of Franzl Lang, who is then welcomed by the host.  And the accordion player is not alone: Franzl Lang is widely regarded as the best Alpine yodeler in the world, hence his uncontested title.

In addition to yodeling, Lang played the guitar and accordion, and also wrote his own songs.  He is clearly a darling of the German folk, happily spreading good cheer with his numerous performances at festivals and television variety shows.  These strike me as the German equivalent of Lawrence Welk and I notice tendencies that seem to common to all of Lang’s performances as I watch them on YouTube.  His yodels are always set to fast-paced polka-style music, mostly consisting of tonic and dominant harmonies (with perhaps the occasional subdominant at the end of major phrases).  He is constantly walking toward an ever-receding camera.   And he is always in the midst of an audience who is clapping along while sitting at tables, drinking beer.  It’s always Oktoberfest when Franzl Lang sings!  Blazing yodel technique aside, he is the very image of a good-natured German fellow who has had his share of lager and schnitzel.  He just seems so warm, inviting, and utterly without pretense.  And he’s a great showman, quite comfortable on stage and on camera.

Isn’t his yodeling breathtaking?  Always clear, always in tune, always placed exactly in the intended register, rhythmically accurate, and incredibly fast.  And there’s never any break for relaxation; just when you think the phrase is ending he tags on another little motive in a different register, which keeps his listeners captivated.  Lang’s technique is an art and a science.  Here’s one more, even more impressive than the last.  And in this one he sports a killer hat:

There’s plenty more on YouTube if you want it.  Franzl Lang is not always yodeling.  Sometimes he is just singing German ballads or drinking songs in his sweet and lively voice.  But more often than not, he is showcasing his stunning and world-renowned skill, the culmination of centuries of Alpine tradition.

 

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Syndication, Day 5 – Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat, Opus 81a by Ludwig van Beethoven

This week’s theme is…Syndication!  Enjoy some of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Syndication, Day 5 – Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat, Opus 81a by Ludwig van Beethoven

Have you ever played the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”?  It’s a modern American “parlour game”, that is a group game that can be played indoors to pass the time.  In the Kevin Bacon game the challenge is to link a given actor to Kevin Bacon through their co-stars in 6 movies or less.  

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is something I have always take  for granted.  I don’t know when I first heard of it, but it’s one of those things that I’ve just always had in my construct of the world, and so I never really gave much thought to how old it is or how it originated, even though it must have had a beginning, and couldn’t be that old.  It’s actually newer than I thought, and has a very precise story of origin.  It was invented by a few bored and clever college students in Pennsylvania in 1994, and began to go viral just as I was going through high school, which explains why it has been a part of my consciousness throughout my entire adult life.  Notably, it was also invented just as another human invention based on the idea of unlimited connectivity was taking off: the internet.  Is it a coincidence?  Maybe, but the internet and the Kevin Bacon game share some notable parallels in the way they reflect the nature of our human network.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is, of course, based a theory called “six degrees of separation”, which postulates that we are connected by acquaintance no more than six degrees from any other person on the face of the Earth.  Have you ever thought about that?  On one hand it seems impossible given the abundance of essentially anonymous people which seem to populate the earth, at least to our subjective view, but intuitively I imagine that most of us suspect there is some truth to this, and we find our limited degrees of separation springing up in the most surprising of places.

And in addition to that, the degrees of separation get much smaller if you impose a limitation on the data set, like restricting the geographical area, interest, or profession.  I often suspect that, worldwide, professional musicians are separated by no more than 3 degrees, and…maybe…only 2.  I’m fairly certain I could link practically any other professional musician through one mutual acquaintance most of the time, and a maximum of two in other cases.  Of course, as you go back in time the chain grows, but I bet it still wouldn’t be all that much.

If you impose two or more limitations the connectedness skyrockets.  As an example of this, I am a professional musician in Central Wisconsin.  If I postulated about the degrees of separation within that community, my guess is it would be no more than one, and, as often as not, zero.  What this means is that I either know every other professional musician in Central Wisconsin or know them through no more than one other person.

What fascinates me about the Kevin Bacon game is that, in spite of the restrictions placed on that data set (Hollywood Actors), sometimes it is still not easy to link him to others without expanding to fourth and fifth degrees.  If you want to play with this a little bit, this website is fun:

https://oracleofbacon.org/help.php

Kevin Bacon used to be offended by the game, suspecting he was the butt of a malicious joke, but has since embraced it for the cultural enrichment it provides.  It also works only because he has been so prolific.  He has even leveraged its popularity to launch philanthropic organizations and speaks touchingly of his history with the game in this interesting and enjoyable TED Talk:

And, he eventually became comfortable enough with Six Degrees to make this amusing commercial, which I remember seeing on television:

Anyway, I bring up Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon because it reminds me of something I came across doing research for the featured music of this post, Beethoven’s Farewell Piano Sonata.  Bear with me here…

Have you ever watched the film JFK?  It’s Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theory about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Based largely on the controversial work of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who ended up making a considerable investigation into people and events which he suspected were related to a conspiracy centered in his jurisdiction, the movie is correspondingly controversial.

I was fascinated by the film when I first saw it in college, and it’s still a film I can watch with pleasure.  I don’t tend to sit around and think about conspiracy theories that much, but the film usually manages to convince me there may be something to the various theories about Kennedy’s death.  As a film it boasts many merits, however you feel about the implications of its content.  It’s the kind of movie that you sit down to start and end up glued to the couch for the entire 3-hour running time because it’s so absorbing and compelling.  Siskel and Ebert agreed at its time of release, and I still remember seeing the articles in the Newsweek magazines that were delivered to our house, analyzing its veracity:

Part of what makes the film fun to watch is that it is essentially an ensemble cast, packed from beginning to end with colorful cameos brought to life by notable Hollywood figures.  Kevin Costner plays Garrison, and he is certainly the protagonist who holds the film together, but as his investigation unfolds he meets one colorful lowlife after another, and Stone’s casting reflects the color of the characters.  You just don’t know who will fill the screen next.  I’m not going to spoil it if you haven’t seen it, because I recommend that you do.  But I will tell you that one of the cameos is played by none other than…Kevin Bacon.  It is for this reason that one of my friends, in discussing JFK, once called it “solid gold for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.  I might even go so far as to say that you could understandably disqualify it from the pool if you were playing a serious game.

In researching the history of classical music I have been struck by how small of a world it really was.  It seems that all the great composers and performers knew each other, and crossed paths often,with very few degrees of separation between them.  Everyone studied with someone, taught someone, met someone, encouraged someone, criticized someone, collaborated with someone, heard someone in performance, danced with someone, etc. etc. etc.  This is a truth I had not fully grasped before, even loving classical music as much as I have for so much of my life.  It was an incredibly small and tightly-knit world, and reading the stories of Western composers drives this point home.  And, ladies and gentlemen, I believe I have discerned classical music’s JFK.  It is the Diabelli Variations, published in the 1820s.  And here is the story behind that…

Anton Diabelli was a priest until Bavaria closed its monasteries in 1803, and then he went into music publishing.  He and his Italian business partner, Pietro Cappi, created a very successful music publishing company in Vienna.  Part of what made it work so well was Diabelli’s keen sense of promotion and providing music to the public that he knew would go over well.  It is this sensibility that motivated him to extend a commision to 50 of the most notable composers of the day, requesting variations composed on a little waltz that he wrote.  

The submitted variations were published together as a collection.  Well, actually two collections, since Beethoven went above and beyond the call of duty, generating more than 30 himself.  This collection is often performed and recorded all on its own under the title of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and considered one of the strongest masterpieces of variation technique.

Variations were submitted by these folks, among others: Beethoven, Czerny, Schubert, Hummel, Moscheles, Gelinek, Kalkbrenner.  If you’ve read at all about Beethoven’s time you probably recognize a bunch of those names.  Most have been lost to history, but you can see the complete list here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaterl%C3%A4ndischer_K%C3%BCnstlerverein

Three other composers are notable:

1. Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, son of Wolfgang Amadeus, submitted one.

2. An 11 year-old Franz Liszt submitted one.  Liszt almost singlehandedly formed a hub around which all the Romantic composers of Europe orbited.  If you played Six Degrees of Franz Liszt, you could probably do everything at zero or one degree.  He was a true connector – read more about that here.

3. “S.R.D.”, a mysterious composer who has been identified as the cardinal archduke Rudolf of Austria.  Here’s his variation:

Well done isn’t it?  It reminds me of a cross between Bach and Beethoven.  And that makes sense, because Beethoven taught him piano and composition for many years.  They became close friends and remained so for decades, which I imagine was somewhat rare for Beethoven.  In Archduke Rudolf Beethoven found a companion and champion who used his power and influence to stand up for and help the composer in spite of his unorthodox disregard for decorum, helping to arrange important opportunities and financial support for the brilliant and often socially misfit musical genius.  In return, Beethoven dedicated 14 of his compositions to the Archduke, including the great Missa Solemnis.

One such dedication goes beyond the conventional framework of the dedication process, bordering on the territory of a personal letter.  It is the Piano Sonata in E flat major, opus 81a (for more on the opus numbering system, especially as it relates to Beethoven, see this post).  Cast in three movements, the sonata is thought to summarize Beethoven’s feelings regarding the Archduke leaving Vienna in response to Napoleon’s attack.  In an uncharacteristically transparent expression of inner landscape, Beethoven actually wrote “Le-be-wohl” over the first three chords of the sonata.  

Beethoven must have sympathized with the misfortunes of his patron, adding to his already conflicted feelings about Napoleon Bonaparte (for more on that story, see this post).
In a fascinating little corner of music history, Beethoven and his patron, Archduke Rudolf, share a connection in the pages of Diabelli’s clever commission, and connections with so many other musical luminaries as well, making their colorful cameos in the pages of the publication.  If you wanted to play six degrees of separation with classical composers, you would never be all that far away from anyone else.  But the Diabelli Variations would be solid gold for anyone seeking to reduce the magnitude of degrees.  Like JFK in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, savvy players may find it fair to disqualify it from their game.

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Syndication, Day 4 – “Olim lacus colueram” from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff

This week’s theme is…Syndication!  Enjoy some of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Syndication, Day 4 – “Olim lacus colueram” from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff

Have you ever eaten swan?  What would it mean to do that?

So, apparently people used to eat swans?  http://modernfarmer.com/2014/05/come/  Not for a while though.  But they were once a real delicacy, only considered suitable for aristocratic mouths.  I have to figure this accounts for the thinly veiled symbolism of a certain poem written almost a millennium ago and set to music by one of the most morally enigmatic composers of the twentieth century.  

The collection of poetry known as Carmina Burana was unearthed in 1803 at a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria.  It was quickly recognized as a window into the soul of the Golliards, a sort of displaced and, as a result, disillusioned, second class of medieval clergy.  Trained in theology and monastic disciplines at a time of overabundant applicants for a limited number of ecclesiastical positions, a large number of these seminarians found themselves adrift and questioning their place in the social order.  These were the Golliards.  Educated, lacking apparent purpose, world-weary, and observing around them a deep and prevalent moral corruption in the Church, they themselves gravitated toward a carnal lifestyle and expressed their frustrations over the moral degradation they witnessed in Latin verse.  The Protestant Reformation was still a few centuries off, and the biting satire of their poetry was the only way the Golliards had to express their discontent.  These morally charged forces would continue to build pressure under the dome and eventually explode in revolt and revolution once Martin Luther broke the camel’s back in 1517.  The Golliardic poetry that survives from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries exposes many of the currents that would eventually place Luther at the door of All Saint’s Church in Wittenberg with a hammer in one hand, 95 Theses in the other, and a few nails held between his lips.

I imagine that the Golliardic poetry contained in the Carmina Burana was fascinating to many artists, historians, philosophers, and other sensitive souls in Europe during the era of the World Wars.  It must have been disorienting in the extreme to experience the long reliable and effective structures of societal order and authority disintegrate around them over a matter of just a few decades.  If the Dadaist art and music of the 1920s is any indication, many could relate to what the Golliards had endured almost a millennium earlier, that had resulted in their disillusionment and moral laziness.  Add to that a sense of underlying dread, even approaching nihilism, and you can easily arrive at the Dadaist sensibility with its absurd and disturbing imagery.  Germans in the 1920s were disheartened, depressed, uncertain, and in need of something new to believe in.  Their music and art expresses this all too clearly.  In addition to the age of Dada, it was also the age of the cabaret with its gleeful and exhibitionistic disregard for conservative morality, and also the bracing, cerebral music of composers like Hindemith and Schoenberg which commented on the feeling of the time in its own way, with equal measures of academic rigor and angst.  As we know Nazism all too easily slipped into social void and began to develop a new and powerful style of authority that quickly began to rebuild the shattered nation, which most of its citizens were all to happy to go along with, even without fully realizing what was in the movement’s heart and how it would be tragically expressed over the decades to come.

Carl Orff occupies a place in all of that that I find frankly difficult to judge definitively.  He lived through that most disorienting time, and seemed to support the aims of the Nazi regime, which ran its entire course during his adult years.  While Nazism had its detractors, both societal and artistic (those who refused to create art in line within the regime’s accepted guidelines) Orff was not one of them.  But how harshly can we judge him for this?  How harshly can we judge anyone for not speaking out, especially when it is so hard to say how clearly people saw the appalling fruits of Nazism on a day-to-day basis?  People need to live, after all, and it is so easy to become wrapped up in the pursuit of getting along.  And who isn’t suspicious or distrustful of their governing authorities from time to time?

There are those stories that make one wonder if he should have taken notice and committed to greater self-sacrifice in the name of social justice.  When the Third Reich banned Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (because he was born Jewish, even though he later converted to Luther’s sect) and called for German composers to create new, comparable works, Orff answered their call.  And then there was the time that Kurt Huber’s wife asked Orff to defend him.  Professor Huber was one of the founders of The White Rose, a college-based organization that secretly resisted Nazism, and he was eventually caught and captured.  Shortly after that Huber’s wife pleaded with Orff to use his influence and favor with the Reich to advocate for him, but he refused and Huber was executed.  Should he have complied?  Would he have made a difference?  Would he have been hurt by the scandal himself?  Hard to say.  And hard to ultimately judge him definitely on this matter, although people keep looking deeper in an attempt to do so.  He was deeply remorseful over this later on.

We could have similar discussions about other figures like Richard Strauss.  These artists, working within the Nazi Party’s accepted practices, survived because they toed the cultural line, and their reputations survive because they kept their compliance and support for the regime ambiguous enough to escape definitive judgement.  Still, it is not without certain irony I realize that I spent so much time in my elementary school music classes playing Orff instruments under teachers devoted to Orff Shulwerk while, just a handful of decades before, many of my ancestors had suffered and died in Nazi camps.  I’ve even composed music for Orff ensemble, which I enjoyed very much, but in thinking through the way these things interrelate it is easy to become conflicted.

However we judge figures like Orff and Strauss, their music is still with us and delights its listeners.  I wonder, though, what it was exactly about the texts of the Carmina Burana that attracted Orff’s attention and caused him to deem them suitable for a musical setting in Germany during the late 1930s.  Was there some part of him that was suspicious of the rising regime?  Did he sense a similar hypocrisy to that observed by the Golliards centuries earlier?  Was he reacting to the moral degradation of the Dadaist age?  It’s hard to say, but in listening to Orff’s setting of Carmina Burana, in addition to the powerful Germanic force that so clearly pervades certain movements, and would have resonated with the Nazis (like the immediately recognizable opening chorus, although it is clear the Nazi party was not receptive to the intended lesson of the text), I hear an almost grotesquely ironic, and even cabaret quality in others.  Like this one:

Once I lived on lakes,
once I looked beautiful
when I was a swan.

(Male chorus)
Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely!

(Tenor)
The servant is turning me on the spit;
I am burning fiercely on the pyre:
the steward now serves me up.

(Male Chorus)
Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely!

(Tenor)
Now I lie on a plate,
and cannot fly anymore,
I see bared teeth:

(Male Chorus)
Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely!

Do you hear that chiding chorus, sympathizing with the Swan’s demise?  The swan was once a thing of sublime beauty, gracing the lakes upon which it swam.  But was it too prideful?  It is now in misery, roasted black on a spit.  And the chorus echoes the tenor swan “Misery me!”, but in the most ironic and parodistic way.  The Golliard’s message is clear: pride goeth before a fall; beauty and honor inevitably end up in ruins, a pattern that plays out again and again in our fallen world.  Of course the Third Reich thought itself immune, quite mistakenly.  Could Orff see into the future, even in 1936 before any of that would have been clear?

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Syndication, Day 3 – BONUS Double Post! “Morning Mood” from Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg and William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini

This week’s theme is…Syndication!  Enjoy some of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Syndication, Day 3 – BONUS Double Post!  “Morning Mood” from Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg and William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini

Do you know this character?

Do you know who gave Rocky his voice?  Her name is June Foray, and she is one of the most prolific voice actresses in twentieth century America.

How about this character?

His voice was first given by an actor and impressionist named Daws Butler, another highly prolific comic voice actor.  Butler was also a notable mentor to vocal talent of the next generation, including Nancy Cartwright, the famous voice of Bart Simpson.

If you do a brief scan through the Wikipedia pages of June Foray and Daws Butler you will begin to develop a sense of just how prolific they were and how much of the voice acting they were responsible for during America’s golden age of comic animation.  You could write volumes about their work and the characters they brought to life.  But for me and my family, one of their most delightful projects was in their collaboration with an increasingly obscure American radio comedian, Stan Freberg.

If you’ve seen Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, you have heard Stan Freberg voice the beaver who is manipulated into freeing Lady from her muzzle.  That’s probably his most famous role today.  Incidentally, he was also invited by George Lucas to audition for the voice of C-3PO before the voice role was granted to Anthony Daniels, who also physically embodied the droid onscreen.  Oh, if that audition process had followed an alternate path, Freberg’s life after that would probably have looked considerably different (it’s amusing to imagine him on a panel at a Comic Con!).  Freberg may have been a bit ahead of his time in many of his endeavors.  In addition to his abundant voice acting, Freberg contributed to various animation and puppetry, and his very clever and satirical radio comedy, which has never achieved the renown that it probably deserves, has developed a most devoted cult following.

One of my favorite short sketches by Freberg, which incorporates the voice comedy of both Daws Butler and June Foray, is LIttle Blue Riding Hood, a hilarious sendup of TV’s Dragnet set in the fairy tale woods.

While Freberg is known for numerous shorts like Little Blue Riding Hood, which can fit onto one side of a 45 RPM record single, he was also adept at creating longer programs, like Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, the classic first volume of which was released in 1961.  The album is a series of comic audio vignettes which make fun of various episodes of early American history.  In addition to a large cast of voice actors, this album is enriched by another significant Freberg collaborator, the bandleader Billy May, who arranged the musical score.  Listen to this scene from the album, which presents Freberg’s sideways take on the British surrender at the Battle of Yorktown:

Funny stuff, right?  I love Freberg’s fun with the character of George Washington and lovably exaggerated British good manners, among other things.  The suggestion that the Revolutionary war was won by an act of sleight-of-hand trickery is almost sacrilegious to the American myth, but this is Freberg’s world.  Here’s something you may have missed: Billy May, a most facile arranger, embeds a clever touch into the music.  Let’s listen more closely; watch again and go to 1:58.

What did you hear?  There’s actually quite a bit going on there, but if you lend a careful ear I bet you can pick out a couple familiar tunes.  There’s one in the celestra, the kind of chime like instrument, and another one in the flute.  The two tunes are ingeniously played together polyphonically in one of those mystifying feats of arranging that manages to reconcile and synthesize two pieces of music with completely different harmonic and rhythmic structures, but in Billy May’s hands they sound as if they have always existed together, even as they are derived from two completely different musical works from completely different cultures.  I’ve been listening to Freberg’s history of American for decades and once I started to gain a greater appreciation for music literature I began to notice touches like that.  It tells me a lot about Billy May’s comic timing and problem solving abilities.  Both of those tunes are frequently employed to evoke the sense of dawn and sunrise, particularly in heavy-handed comedic storytelling.  May was perhaps trying to decide which tune to choose between the two, and then realized that blending both would enhance the comedy while, at the same time, giving a wink to the musical connoisseurs of the audience, of which I suspect there are many.  It was a brilliant little move and it goes by so quickly.  Can you hear the two different tunes?  Do you know what they are?  Let’s take them one at a time.

First, the chime part.  Here is the original version:

The music composed by the Edvard Grieg, Norway’s greatest composer, for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt, has become one of those odd, and even frustrating, ironies of classical music.  It is a little-known irony.  Ibsen, if you don’t know him, is one of the greatest playwrights in the history of Western letters, today performed less often only than Shakespeare.  Growing up with Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites, I had formed an image of the play as a quaint, enchanting folk tale rich with Norwegian lore.  And while Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is largely based on Norwegian folk tales and characters, its drama is intensely philosophical, probing deeply and acutely the nature of human morality and identity, all the while couched in an unsettlingmix of myth, surreal imagery and unflinchingly dark adventure.  Why, just reading a synopsis of the play is practically enough to inaugurate an existential crisis concerning a life well-lived.  The Norwegian Ibsen asked his fellow countryman, Grieg, to compose incidental music for his play, both of which premiered in what is now Oslo in 1876.  The irony of Grieg’s Peer Gynt music is that it now populates primarily the programs of orchestral pops concerts in the form of two four-movement suites extracted by the composer, presented primarily for the purpose of light-hearted diversion, and divorced from their original, highly challenging, contexts.

Morning Mood, which opens the first suite, is a fitting illustration.  In the context of the original Peer Gynt the sun evoked by the music rose above a desolate Moroccan desert in which the title character, having been looted during the night by his unethical business associates, is left to defend himself, penniless and naked, against a horde of aggressive apes!  Would you have ever formed that image from listening to Grieg’s Morning Mood out of context?  I would love to catch a production of Peer Gynt with Grieg’s original score and see how that works.  It is so easy to imagine a benign Norwegian sun casting its warm glow across snow-capped conifers…

In Billy May’s musical mashup which greets the day of the British surrender, there is also a flute part, presenting another familiar morning-associated tune amidst the celesta of Grieg.  It is the Ranz de Vaches, a short section of the overture from the opera William Tell, about the great Swiss hero, by Gioachino Rossini.  I suspect most people know that the galloping march of the Swiss Guard, the rousing finale of the overture, which has come to be associated with the Lone Ranger, hails from this overture, but I bet many of the same listeners, all of whom have heard this tune in various places as well, do not know its source.  They are companions in the same composition, which was as symphonically ambitious as Rossini ever became in an opera overture, and written at the very end of his short but productive career, on the cusp of a long and cushy retirement.  Read more about the fruits of Rossini’s retirement in this post.

William Tell pushes harder against the formulas that governed Rossini’s prior operatic output than any of his prior works, and this begins with the sprawling overture.  Most of Rossini’s overtures are interchangeable; you could easily cut and paste the majority of these perfunctory curtain raising pieces from one opera to another and notice little effect on the overall feeling of the presentation.  But William Tell’s overture is made for William Tell, and William Tell alone.  Each of its 4 short movements relate to the drama in some way, achieving a level of integration that was rather ahead of its time.  It would be fascinating to see where Rossini would have gone after that, but he saw fit to excuse himself from the scene after William Tell and let other ambitious and pioneering creative spirits have their say.

At this point, listen to the overture.  Here is a helpful video which labels each of the four sections as they begin:

You can see that the melody quoted by Billy May in Stan Freberg’s production is from the third section.  It’s funny, though, because while that melody is often associated with dawn, it is actually the first section of the overture, scored for five solo cellos, that is intended by Rossini to illustrate daybreak.  It is a bleak and unsettling sunrise, though, portending strife and sorrow.  The melody of the third section has been  deemed suitable to depict morning in lighter settings considerably more often.

The english horn melody is a Ranz de vaches, literally “call of the cows”  a brand of Swiss melody traditionally played on the alp horn while herding cows from one field to another.  It has a mysterious and rich tradition.  The Ranz de vaches possessed an odd and uncanny power to make Swiss folks extremely homesick, which is why it was sometimes banned from being played to Swiss troops in foreign lands, so intense was their respondent sadness and desire to desert.  Rossini was not the only classical composer to imitate the Ranz de vaches.  The despondent slow movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is pervaded by double reed lines meant to evoke the melodic style of the Ranz de vaches:

Incidentally Berlioz, usually quite critical of the shallow nature of the Italian operas by Rossini and his contemporaries, seemed to be more impressed with William Tell and its ambitious overture.  Some listeners hear a bit of the Ranz de vaches in the idyllic opening of the final movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony:

The Ranz de vaches clearly left deep resonance in the ears and hearts of Europe’s classical music.
Billy May was a smart musician, a fitting sonic companion for a smart comedian like Stan Freberg.  I wonder if May knew of the rich heritage he was channeling when he so effortlessly paired Grieg and Rossini for a few seconds to greet the day on which the absurdly mild-mannered British surrendered to a cocky American general, as voiced by Freberg.  The roots of both tunes run much deeper than we tend to realize as we hear them in their often unassuming contemporary contexts, heralding the dawns of so many new days as they break upon the comic stage.  The suns of Grieg and Rossini rose to oversee dramatic struggles, both outward and internal.  Even if you enjoy these melodies as they accompany light-hearted daybreaks in animation and pops concerts, you can keep in the back of your mind the depths of human experience concealed within the history of these well-known but little-understood classical hit tunes.

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Syndication, Day 2 – Coffee Cantata by J.S. Bach

This week’s theme is…Syndication!  Enjoy some of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Syndication, Day 2 – Coffee Cantata by J.S. Bach

While it is certainly well documented that many European composers and creative figures were crazy about their coffee, there is only one example of a musician composing a work about coffee, at least as far as I’ve found.  It is the famous Coffee Cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach.  I remember when I was just getting into classical music, during my high school career.  One of the ways that I grew my collection of recorded music was through the BMG Record Club, and the glossy magazine-like catalogues made entertaining reading in addition to serving their practical purpose.  The concept of the record club fell by the wayside right as Napster was on the rise and file sharing loomed large on the horizon.  The writing was on the wall, and tech visionaries began to see that within a decade most recorded music purchased by consumers would be purely digital, no optical storage medium necessary.  Of course CDs are still around, but it is so easy now to listen to almost anything on YouTube, or to spend a mere dollar or two in the moment and buy that one track you want from iTunes or Amazon.  But in my teens, record clubs like BMG and Columbia House presented an economical way to grow a music collection, and their slick glossy catalogues were the marketing medium of choice, bolstered by all those crazy offers (“Buy 2 at regular price, get 5 for $3.99 plus 1 FREE, plus shipping and handling!!!”).  I spent many hours browsing through those catalogues, developing my sense of the scope of European art music, and at the same time continually adding to shopping lists that were always far beyond my budget, with regard to both money and listening time.  The BMG catalogues gave short little blurbs about each album and a brief, italicized list of some of the works contained therein.  One album that caught my eye was German Bach-enthusiast and conductor Helmuth Rilling’s 2-disc set of Bach’s secular cantatas, which included the Hunt Cantata and the…Coffee Cantata.  That gave me pause.  A piece of classical music about coffee?  Really?  There’s got to be a story there.  And there certainly is 🙂

The story actually begins, as far as Western history is concerned, with Pope Clement VIII, who reigned from 1592 to 1605.  While his pontificate  was occupied by all the typical ecclesiastical and foreign relations you may expect during this era, his papacy stands out in that he ought to have the thanks of coffee lovers everywhere for permitting its consumption to Catholics, which was certainly instrumental in the spread of the beverage to all parts of Europe and beyond.

Pope Clement VIII, who approved coffee consumption for his flock

Originating in Arab lands, coffee was regarded with a high level of suspicion as it made its way to Europe at the end of the sixteenth century.  Closely associated by European Christians with Islam and its blasphemous doctrines – coffee was actually used during certain Islamic rituals at the time – many of them came to regard the drink as satanic and sought to ban its consumption.  His Holiness, upon delightedly tasting coffee for the first time in 1600, however, is reported to have said  “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”  That story may very well be apocryphal, but it is fun to think that is how it happened.  At any rate, it was around this time that coffee began its triumphant occupation of Europe, which it enjoys to this day, proceeding to make its way to all the great urban centers, caffeinating people of all stripes, and steadily building its reputation for getting the lead out and stimulating productivity throughout the day.

Coffee houses began to open all around the continent, beginning with London in the 1650s.  Leipzig got its first one in 1694, although the most famous such establishment in Bach’s city came to be Café Zimmerman, erected in 1715.  In addition to supplying the citizens of Leipzig with the black tonic they so craved, it also served as a meeting place for members of the city’s cultured middle class, and a concert venue for performances by the Collegium Musicum, a sort of amateur musical ensemble founded by Telemann and later directed by Bach.  Amateur they may have been, but they had some terrific music composed just for them, including Bach’s Coffee Cantata.

Bach never composed an opera, although many would say this delightful little work for 3 singers and orchestra comes close.  With a libretto by Picander, who supplied the texts of many of Bach’s sacred cantatas and passions, the Coffee Cantata is a tongue-in-cheek dialogue between a father (whose German name, Schlendrian, literally translates to “stick-in-the-mud”) and his daughter, Lieschen, who looooooooooooooves coffee, and excessively enough to cause her father concern.  The drama is a series of pleas and threats from father to daughter intended to curtail her intake, but to no avail, and the three characters finish the cantata by singing a chorus that extols the joys of drinking coffee.

Bach was not known for his light-hearted music (or light-hearted personality, for that matter), but in the Coffee Cantata it seems he was able to let loose a bit and paint Schlendrian as a comic buffoon.  His first aria is rollicking and self-important.  But my favorite movement of the cantata is the aria that follows, which is Lieschen’s love song to coffee.  A plaintive tune accompanied by solo flute that trips along like a brisk minuet, Lieschen’s aria could easily be mistaken for a wistfully pious love song to Jesus Christ from any of Bach’s sacred works.  The opening flute solo is a terrific example of Bach’s fortspinnung manner of meandering through different keys along its soulful and introspective journey towards a cadence.  Oh, and the preceding recitative contains one of the best lines from any of Bach’s vocal works, “If I couldn’t, three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat.”

The absurd satire in Bach’s Coffee Cantata indicates that, in spite of Europeans’ ravenous and passionate consumption of the commodity, they were still not entirely at peace with the associations of its origin, even with the Pope’s blessing.  Or perhaps they were uncomfortable with its powerful psychotropic effects, even if it was able to stimulate greater productivity by its consumers.  Whatever it was, Bach’s Coffee Cantata seems to represent the struggle and, ultimately, acceptance, that many devoutly Christian Europeans may have experienced in assimilating coffee consumption into their lives.  Clearly Bach was a fan himself, and perhaps penning this odd little cantata helped him to reconcile his taste for his beloved drug of choice with his steadfastly moral character.  Listen to the whole cantata here:

More info about Bach’s Coffee Cantata:

http://www.playbuzz.com/wfmtrx10/10-facts-abouts-bachs-coffee-opera-you-need-to-know

 

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Syndication, Day 1 – Hunter’s Mass by Orlando di Lasso

This week’s theme is…Syndication!  Enjoy some of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Syndication, Day 1 – Hunter’s Mass by Orlando di Lasso

 

Okay, I’m going to be honest here.  Maybe a little too honest, so apologies for any offense, because I love you all!  But here goes…

I often feel like I live in a land of 2 dominant faiths.  And I don’t mean that 50% of people I meet practice religion A and the other 50% practice religion B.  These two faiths are often practiced simultaneously by the same people.  It’s either a Midwest phenomenon or an American one, but I bet you can also find different variations of the same thing in other countries and cultures.  Have you figured it out yet?  The two faiths are Christianity and Football.

A little too close to home?  Sorry, but I’m not going to take it back because I stand by that observation.  And I know in Wisconsin, with Green Bay Packer pride, that may be especially sensitive.  I want to tread gently here because I think the Packers are doing, and have always done, a benevolent thing with the whole collective ownership thing and all.  It feels more like a social good than the hugely profitable franchises owned by insanely rich people and I certainly don’t begrudge Wisconsinites the community spirit that comes with that manner of doing business, even if it’s never exactly been my thing.

And it might not stand out as much if the two practices didn’t share a sabbath as often as they do.  So often there is church on Sunday morning and football on Sunday afternoon.  And for this reason they can easily bump up against one another, forcing difficult choices.  Many are the church services I can recall in which Packers attire mixed evenly (or not) with Sunday best, often on the same worshiper, and I would speculate that given the choice between church and a football game if the times overlap, football would win more often than not.

Okay, end of commentary.  You can stop squirming now.  I was trying really hard to be gentle there, but I also suspect that many of you would agree with that assessment.  And we’re not so special in this day and age.  Cue Morpheus:

“Nothing new under the sun” as the saying goes.  And human nature, being what it is, often  struggles between the duty of obligation and the pleasure of indulging worldly pursuits.  The modern contest between football and church attendance is merely a recent manifestation in a long history of variations on that basic theme.  And a similar contest is suggested by a curious work from one of the greatest masters of Renaissance polyphony.

If you’ve studied western music history at all and I ask you to name a great composer of Renaissance my guess is that you would come up with Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina (usually called “Palestrina” for short) and you would certainly be right to do so.  Palestrina is awesome; one of my favorites.  While it’s not exactly the kind of music I would listen to every day (although I’m sure there are some who would), I am always a little awestruck by his success at consistently creating a sense of the utter sanctity in every single work of his I’ve ever heard (and there are lots.  Lots).  Palestrina’s characteristic textures are paradoxically busy with polyphony, yet serene with holiness; you could say they are a fitting musical companion to religious iconography that is both dense with colorful imagery, but somehow peacefully reverent.  The towering composer of the Counter-Reformation quickly emerged as the uniform creator of the most perfect works of Renaissance polyphony, hence his continued influence on the study of harmony and counterpoint to this day.

But if you’re acquainted with a few more great Renaissance masters you might offer up names like Dufay, Obrecht, Ockeghem and Willaert, figures extracted from a long succession of Franco-Flemish musicians whose work advanced the art of polyphonic vocal music little by little over the course of 2 centuries, bridging the gap between the stark kaleidoscope of Notre Dame Organum and the crystalline perfection of Palestrina’s radiant aura.  And one name that I have left out until now is that of Orlando di Lasso, a near exact contemporary of Palestrina’s.  Lasso’s style is close in many ways to Palestrina’s; glorious and moving, technically exacting if not quite as flawless.  His writing exudes a tender serenity that is all its own.

A key difference one senses between the two great polyphonists is varying levels of comfort in integrating secular influences into their sacred works.  The impression I get is that in his music Palestrina strove to maintain the image of aesthetic and, some might say, doctrinal and moral perfection, which keeps in line with his status as musical figurehead of the Counter Reformation.  The vast majority of his works are liturgical.  While he did produce a significant body of Italian madrigals (secular vocal works), their style is conservative compared to the daring harmonies and text painting of his contemporary madrigal composers, and the output simply pales in comparison to the volume of his sacred music.  Many of his madrigals are also sacred in nature, which is to say they were composed on religious and devotional themes but not suitable for performance during a liturgy; still, a secular output heavily colored by religious devotion.

Lasso, on the other hand, was much more comfortable with and practiced in all secular genres of the day.  A quick glance through his catalog reveals a healthy sampling of all the prominent secular vocal forms in their native languages: the Italian madrigal, the French chanson, the German lied.  Lasso was quite cosmopolitan and at home in all three languages.  These secular forms occupy a much greater proportion of Lasso’s body of work than of Palestrina’s, and Lasso was also more comfortable letting those secular forms mix with and influence his sacred works.  One illustration of this is Lasso’s affinity for the “parody mass”, a kind of setting of the Catholic mass which takes a secular song as the thematic foundation for some or all of the movements.  The most extreme example of this in Lasso’s catalog is probably the mass based on a French chanson called “O, you fifteen year old girls” written by a composer half a generation his senior, Jacob Clemens non Papa.  Palestrina, with his close ties to the papacy, would not have dreamed of applying a ribald secular text so scandalously to a liturgy.  That’s probably a special case, and there are also numerous, tamer examples among Lasso’s parody masses, but it is an obvious and important difference between Palestrina and Lasso.

Lasso’s more profane sensibility also comes through in his willingness to assist his patrons in balancing their religious duties with more worldly interests into a sort of compromising, everyday kind of faith that I suspect is rather common across the millennia.  An example of this can be found in a work written at the behest of the Bavarian Duke Albrecht V.  

Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria

If football is a competing religion during our time, in Duke Albrecht’s it was hunting, the perennially popular aristocratic pastime and bonding activity.  But Lassus crafted an ingenious solution to balance the rigors of the court’s religious devotion with their more worldly affection in the Missa Venatorum, or “Hunter’s Mass”.

It was not uncommon for complete polyphonic masses of the Renaissance to last 20 minutes, often more.  Much of the art was in extending the briefer texts into long-breathed movements which formed a sublime and expansive space for religious introspection.  The 6-word kyrie, for example, while easily spoken in less than 10 seconds, was commonly broadened into a 5 minute musical cathedral with soaring melismas and endlessly repeated words.  Wordier movements like the gloria and credo could reach the 8 minute mark.  All that time adds up.  For the Hunter’s Mass Lasso dispensed with all that fancy melisma and repetition, opting instead for a largely syllabic setting that hardly repeats any text at all.  None of the movements last more than three minutes, the longest being the wordy gloria, which clocks in at just over two and a half minutes.  The whole Missa Venatorum takes barely 10 minutes to perform from beginning to end, which would have allowed the Duke and his court to be on their merry way and get to tracking the day’s prey.  What is really extraordinary about the work, I think, is how lovely and balanced it is in spite of its directness.  It may be brief, but is so well-proportioned that it never feels abrupt or lacking.  Lasso clothed the single statements of text in some fine garments, on par with the best in Renaissance polyphony.  Indeed a craftsman of his caliber would settle for nothing less.

So, should modern church composers write more Missa Pedifollium? 😉

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Music About Animals, Day 2 – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “Frogs” by Georg Philipp Telemann

This week’s theme is…Music About Animals!  Our animated companions on Earth, animals have been our friends, food, foes, and fascination.  They constantly populate the art of humans, from literature to sculpture, poetry to music.  This week we listen to music inspired in some way by animals.

Music About Animals, Day 2 – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “Frogs” by Georg Philipp Telemann

To me, Telemann stands out a bit from the other luminous figures of the high Baroque.  He’s not quite as well known as the the others, although most would acknowledge that he deserves to be uttered in the same breath as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi.  His music just feels a little…different.  Where Bach and Handel are stocky and solid, Telemann’s light, airy music floats on the breeze, all the time.  Where Vivaldi is vigorous and busy, Telemann seems relaxed and carefree.  And he essentially spoke the same language as the others.  He could write Germanic polyphony with utmost facility – Handel once said that Telemann could sit down and write a composition in 8 voices as quickly and easily as others could write letters.  But his counterpoint is creamy, soothing, fragile and delicate in contrast to Bach and Handel’s well-hewn brickwork.  He wrote figuration a la Vivaldi, but whereas that of Vivaldi is propulsive, driven and incessantly goal-oriented, Telemann’s good-natured figuration meanders sunnily and takes its time to smell the flowers.  And don’t take these comparisons as criticism – Telemann’s music is delightfully transparent and uplifting; he was extraordinarily well-respected in his day (see this post).  Handel, upon hearing rumors of Telemann’s death, expressed to him in a letter his delight at his discovery that they were in error, and sent him some fine flowers for his garden on the next available ship.

But Telemann’s music seems to be crafted according to somewhat different principles than his great contemporaries.  Where Bach, Handel and Vivaldi left finely-tuned contraptions, Telemann wrote like perfume in the air (cue Debussy…)

 

As such, Telemann anticipated many trends of the upcoming Rococo and Classical styles which prized orchestral transparency, melodic breadth, slower harmonic rhythm, and an often sweet and dainty character.  Bach had nothing to do with Rococo textures, but his sons ate it up, making a deliberate stylistic break from their stodgy old man.  Handel and Vivaldi, too, did not quite dip their toes into the light, clear, Rococo waters (although some of their later works almost touch the surface), but Telemann was ahead of his time, anticipating these stylistic hallmarks.  Perhaps that is why he was so feted in his day, enjoying success in so many places, and winning priority over Bach in the estimation of the German folk.  As such, Telemann wrote musical statements that would seem strange in the hands of the others, but which work surprisingly well in his.

While Telemann was prolific, his total number owing a great deal to the unbelievable production of German church cantatas (more than 1,000!) and his impressive production of orchestral overtures (600), his solo concerto production ain’t got nothing on Vivaldi (see this post).  Vivaldi, the father of the concerto, wrote more than 500 for all different kinds of soloists and concertino groups – discovering their variety is truly a delight – but Telemann barely wrote 100.  Still, his concertos touch on an impressive array of instruments, ensembles and orchestral colors, and there is something in there for everyone.  His concertos breathe differently than Vivaldi’s, wandering with slow, nuanced footwork where Vivaldi’s enthusiastically run.  But that’s part of the fun.  Like Vivaldi, Telemann sometimes evoked extra musical associations in his pieces, although the overtures provide a much more comprehensive sampling of this tendency.  But there is this quirky concerto:

 

Do the sounds of that concerto remind you of anything?  Telemann is the only one who could have written this, so odd and cheeky are its features.  I get the sense he didn’t take himself quite so seriously as the rest, even Handel who was known so often to have roared with laughter.  The concerto is about frogs, and the solo part with its raspy croak, created by playing the open A string along with a fingered A on the D string for a strong blast of A, is jolly good fun.  The solo part practically twangs like a fiddle, evoking the joys of the country, perhaps the location of the frogs.  Do you hear how long the solo episodes go on, ringing out the same notes?  You would never hear that in Bach, Handel or Vivaldi – everything in their music is so ever-active, propelling from one harmony to the next.  Only Telemann would sit so long on the notes as his frogs croaked away.  The solo parts of concertos by Bach and Vivaldi are so densely packed with complex and florid figuration, designed for the fulfillment of the virtuoso ego (mostly), but Telemann’s solo part in the Frog Concerto sounds almost minimalistic, like Philip Glass centuries before his time (see this post).  What ambitious violinist would seek out a bizarre and static solo part like this to flex his virtuoso muscles?  You would have to be pretty comfortable telling the music’s story and renounce the personal glory of showing off.  Not that Bach’s concertos afford abundant opportunities of this, but the solo parts are certainly more soloistic.

Telemann, something of a prophet, predicted the sound of Europe’s music several decades before it arrived.  He soon fell out of favor as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi overtook his prominent place in the public’s ear.  In fact, they still overshadow him, but for many musicians, Telemann is a reliable source of pleasing, accessible music that is fun to play, easy to put together, and worthy of study for its detailed craftsmanship.  He spoke something of a different language than his prominent contemporaries, and thankfully so, for there is no one else quite like him, possessing all those qualities.  Telemann’s music runs alongside that of the mainstays of the high Baroque, dancing on the air as the others tramp firmly upon the ground out of their solid construction.  He makes us look up, even if our bodies are firmly rooted on the ground, broadening our perspective, and reminding us that there is more to life than where our feet make contact.

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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 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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