Shuffling Off, Day 4 – Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 4 – Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I fear the Mozart Requiem is a piece I will never really be able to hear with “fresh ears”.  What I mean is that it is so laden with emotional, conceptual and aesthetic baggage from my personal history that I am always hearing it through a bunch of overlapping lenses.  First of all, it was the centerpiece of one of the earliest classical concerts I remember attending.  This occurred just as I was developing an interest in classical music so it has something of a cherished place in my mind, saturated with the enthusiasm and majesty of the experience, even if it was a community orchestra and choir.  In preparation for that concert the piece was considerably talked up by music teachers as an immortal masterpiece and transcendent listening experience.  Similar baggage has been overlaid from performing the Requiem, and hearing similar enthusiasm from conductors and fellow performers.  This is of course not to deride a wonderful masterpiece, which it certainly is, but I do wonder if a listener, having been cleansed of his preconceived notions, and comparing the Requiem to a handful of Mozart’s other late works, say his last piano concerto, the Magic Flute, the Clemency of Titus, his Masonic Cantata, or his quintet with glass harmonica (see this post), would favor the Requiem in any particular way.  Perhaps he would, but I still have to wonder.

The other major culprit which is responsible for having layered considerable psychological baggage about the experience of the Mozart Requiem, baggage that is incredibly difficult to shed, is the movie Amadeus.  Now, if you are a faithful reader, you may remember earlier references to this film (like here and here) and if you do then you know I am a fan and typically recommend it.  This is still true.  But I would take care to warn prospective viewers of Amadeus of the resulting associations they will forever carry with the Requiem, no matter how hard they try to escape, and in spite of the more or less commonly understood fact that the central premise of the film, Antonio Salieri’s intense jealousy and intended murder of Mozart, is most certainly legendary and apocryphal.  Still, it is easy to be swept away by the crackling drama of the film, and the Requiem serves as a cohesive focal point around which to stage it.

(!Spoiler Alert!) In Amadeus Salieri, mad with envy for Mozart’s superior musical aptitude, eventually seeks every opportunity to sabotage him professionally and, eventually, to hurt him personally, even plotting his murder (it is reported that Salieri had confessed to this on his deathbed, possibly due to the senility of old age).  The final scenes, in which Mozart’s death appears imminent and Salieri manipulates his way into his inner circle, are bathed in the music of the Requiem, indeed they focus on its composition as Salieri takes dictation from the muse of Mozart.  In the film the narrating Salieri, years later, reveals that it was his plan to murder Mozart (or let him die – this is not quite clear) and then to pass off the Requiem as his own in honor of his deceased friend, finally recognized for the sublime art he has longed to create since beholding Mozart’s befuddling powers.  To facilitate the commission, Salieri dons an imposing cape and mask to hide his identity during all transactions surrounding the Requiem (in the film it is a reference to Wolfgang’s strict father, Leopold – see this post – the evocation of whom has dramatic psychological effect on the younger composer), claiming to represent a wealthy patron.  He comes so close to seeing his plan through that he can taste it, but Mozart dies too soon and Salieri later is shown at his funeral, supremely frustrated by what could have been…  In scenes leading up to the finale we see other depictions of Mozart and Salieri together, for example at the Magic Flute, where Salieri compliments the work.  That the terse dramatization is fiction is obvious, but fascinatingly there are a handful of truths, both explicit and thematic, present within the twists and turns of the plot.

Salieri and Mozart were acquainted, even familiar.  Generally it is thought that Salieri regarded Mozart well, although there are speculations that he attempted to frustrate the career of the younger composer, understandably if at all sensed his powerful position as director of the Habsburg opera was at all threatened by the young upstart.  These are difficult to substantiate, however.  Mozart would have served Salieri well as a creator, so long as he did not become a competitor.  There is evidence of their mutual admiration, and it is true that Salieri attended The Magic Flute, as well as other works by Mozart, and was complimentary.  Two other elements ring true, although their stories are at once more banal and simultaneously more fascinating (in my opinion) than those the high drama of Amadeus.  

That Mozart transacted exclusively with a mysterious veiled figure representing a wealthy patron is true.  An Austrian nobleman named Franz von Walsegg had an odd penchant for taking credit for various composers’ creations.  He would commission them anonymously, copy the parts into his own hand without the true composer’s name, and have his house musicians perform them.  He always made sure to get complete rights over the commissioned works in order to avoid the possibility of trained ears hearing them elsewhere; the composers probably didn’t care as long as they received their due, which was always generous.  Apparently his house musicians knew what was up, but didn’t let on, either out of affection or pity.  As a side note, I sometimes wonder if it is more fulfilling to be extremely secure financially, with little in the way of creative legacy, or to be impoverished and leave a substantial creative legacy.  The story of Walsegg gives clear indication of the longing one may experience with the former.  And in hindsight, few would switch places with him, whereas at present few may switch places with Mozart who was practically Walsegg’s inversion.  Anyway, Walsegg’s young wife had died in 1791, almost a year before Mozart, and the aristocrat sought a musical Requiem mass to claim as his own and present annually on the anniversary of her death, hence Mozart’s commission and dealings with the anonymous agent.  Incidentally, Mozart’s untimely death in the middle of his work on the Requiem put Walsegg in a tricky spot given Constanza’s legal and financial machinations.  You can read more about the details of that fascinating story here:

http://www.salieri-online.com/mozreq/pg1.php

That Mozart may have had something of a secretary during his work on the Requiem is also based in fact.  It was not his archenemy Salieri as Amadeus suggests (exaggerating both his intimacy and enmity with Salieri), but a composer named Franz Xaver Sussmayr.  With ambitions to write Italian opera, Sussmayr had studied with Salieri, and after this became something of a friend and apprentice to Mozart.  The two traveled together and Sussmayr, perhaps among other efforts, is recorded to have written much of the dry, extensive recitative of Mozart’s penultimate stage work, the Italian serious opera The Clemency of Titus.  This stands with Idomeneo (see this post) as Mozart’s finest contributions to the genre; his most famous operas are German or Italian comedies.

It is thought that, given Sussmayr’s intimacy with Mozart, he was privy to much of the process that yielded the Requiem.  Constanze, eager to collect the balance of Walsegg’s invoice, tapped him to complete the Requiem.  Exactly how much of the final work is Mozart and how much is Sussmayr is difficult to discern, but certain movements are clear enough.  The opening Requiem is the only movement completed in full by Mozart.  Others remained unfinished, or unorchestrated, while others were not composed at all, and so Sussmayr wrestled with a variety of tasks through his process of completion.  It seems certain to say that Sussmayr composed the Agnus Dei from scratch.  The following movements, which close the mass, use material from the beginning, certainly by Mozart.  Can you tell the difference between Sussmayr and Mozart?

 

It is difficult for me to listen past all of the lore, legend, and personal associations with Mozart’s requiem and hear the purity of the music underneath, but if I tried, I might say that it is illustrative of the near superhuman transparency and elegance which characterizes all of Mozart’s late works.  The opening bars of the Requiem are sublimely orchestrated, and the vocal entrances convey loss and awe given the eternal journey ahead which Mozart would have regarded through a very Catholic lens as he prepared to make it himself.  Sometimes I wish I could wipe all of the baggage from my mind, unsee Amadeus, and discover the Requiem as a more or less anonymous work of his late years in order to make a fresh evaluation free of influence.  Alas, that is not the world in which we live, and I simply have to be content to roll the legends and the drama which surround the story of a flawed man but great composer into my experience of the Requiem, his unfinished masterpiece.

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Shuffling Off, Day 3 – Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 3 – Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler

It seems that listeners love to discover musicians’ sources of inspiration, the events, objects and feelings in their lives that are responsible for the music sounding as it does.  Perhaps you can relate to this.  Have you ever listened to a piece of music and found yourself thinking “Gosh, this seems deeply felt or unusually evocative; I wonder what this is based on.”  As a composer I have been asked questions like these.  I remember a lady, upon hearing something I wrote, asking what had inspired it, as if some kind of extramusical impetus was necessary for something that struck her so beautiful and human.  It’s only natural given the human penchant for meaning, relatability and understanding.  And like anything this personal, it will vary widely from musician to musician, informed by a diverse array of factors ranging from personality and life experience to aesthetics and historical era.

Sometimes it’s patently obvious, like when a singer-songwriter tells you the precise story upon which a particular song is based.  We all know that most songwriters perpetually probe their lives and experiences for fertile lyrical material.  It is probably the exception to find a contemporary song that is not based in some way on an experience or feeling from the songwriter’s life in some way.  But in classical music it isn’t usually so clear.  Part of this stems from the tendency to simply refer to “classical music” as a monolith rather than parsing out the finer distinctions which constitute its body of work.  The fact is a European composer working in 1700 will have had a much different notion of “inspiration” than one working in 1890.

Students of music history, professional and amateur alike, are often astounded to learn about the production rates of Baroque and Classical composers.  The concertos of Vivaldi, the cantatas of Bach, the operas of Handel, the symphonies of Haydn (the marches of Sousa – see this post – not a Baroque or Classical composer, but animated by a similar creative impulse, I think).  Prolific to the point of boggling our modern minds.  But why?  Obviously these feats are possible within the human experience, and not even extraordinary since their less famous contemporaries produced at similar rates.  But it’s only possible because they weren’t sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike.  They had solid and reliable methods and techniques for inventing and polishing their musical works, even if their results seem inspiring to us.  But the notion of inspiration would probably have seemed foreign, and distastefully self-indulgent to them.  They saw their role in the social order as sonic decorators for hire, illuminating the great myths of their societies into affective form fit for human consumption which supported their social order and structures of power (see this post).  Certainly this can be argued as a form of inspiration, but not as we typically think of it.

The attitude which cultivated the modern idea of inspiration, which I would summarize as autobiographical, can be seen to have emerged, like so many of these significant aesthetic shifts, with Beethoven and his legacy.  Suddenly listeners and scholars were scrutinizing his strong, powerful music for influences from his life and the forces which shaped the world around him.  The music seemed so deeply personal that it must have had a different impetus than the dry, stodgy patronage system!  I have read about analyses of his Eroica Symphony (see this post) which border on extravagant, even zany, and reach far to account for every moment as owing to some kind of inspiration.  My feeling is that Beethoven was not as autobiographically motivated as his commentators and fans like to think, but perhaps more than his predecessors.  At any rate, the feelings of his music became deeper and seemingly more personal; his rate of production dropped below the previous common practice norm, and he either anticipated or motivated later trends in which composers used their music to tell personal stories and/or promote ideological agendas.  And certainly in Beethoven’s late music, so bizarre and wonderful (see this post) he seems to be working out his personal existential questions, reconciling his life, philosophy, eternity, and the world.  Later musicians most certainly looked to this as a model for their own similar processes.

Was this shift a benefit to Western art?  Rhetorical question of course.  It depends on your evaluations of the results and the needs they fill.  For some the earlier paradigm with its clear, principled and disciplined aesthetic is the very definition of artistic purity, a bonus to which is the the diversity of voices which managed to individuate within its framework (in other words, Bach, Vivaldi and Haydn have clear, distinctive, and distinctively clever voices even though their musical languages and cultures were shaped by similar societal forces and values), while the latter paradigm is messy, neurotic and uncomfortably self-indulgent.  For others the older model is sterile and impersonal while the newer, autobiographical model is passionate and intensely meaningful on an emotional level.  As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to lay teleology upon the flow of history and see a goal where none may in fact exist (see this post).

At any rate, after Beethoven musicians saw greater liberty to explore their personal places in art music, and we tend to call this sensibility Romanticism.  In my estimation the neuroticism and intimacy of this approach reaches its absolute zenith in Gustav Mahler, the great Austrian conductor and symphonist who expanded the symphony to its absolute peak breadth and personal significance.

Over the course of his career Mahler had worked to expand the symphonic form to unprecedented length (see this post) while also developing a very unique manner of orchestration and harmony.  Like Beethoven, he seemed to use his final utterances as a way to explore his inner landscape and work out the philosophical implications of his troubled life.  Many see his final symphonies, particularly his sprawling 9th (which Alban – see this post – Berg called the most extraordinary thing he had ever written) and what exists of the 10th as deeply autobiographical, grappling with his roller coaster of marriage, his often turbulent career, his impending death and the losses of his life.  There was perhaps no Western composer more neurotic or death-obsessed as Mahler, and his late music speaks this in abundant volume.  Mahler sought the advice of Sigmund Freud in 1909 to deal with his wife, Alma, and her affair with the architect Walter Gropius.  The advice of the great psychoanalyst seemed to provide a way forward, but the damage of the ill-advised marriage was done and ran deep.  During the next couple of years Mahler began to work on what would be his Tenth Symphony but succumbed to a bacterial infection of the blood in 1911, not even two decades prior to the discovery of penicillin.

Mahler completely orchestrated the first of five movements and left sketches for the others.  Some musicians and scholars have completed it in various versions, but many purists are content to confine their experience of Mahler’s Tenth to the aching and dissonant first movement, the only completed by him, an adagio that takes the listener on a deeply personal journey of neurosis and longing over the course of 30 minutes:

So go ahead and speculate about the inspiration for the music you hear.  Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes not.  Sometimes the societal and aesthetic framework of the musician’s experience supports the idea of inspiration and sometimes it doesn’t so much.  But if you hear late music by Mahler, you can be sure that the inspiration is never far below the surface.  In listening to movements like these you become like Freud in a sense, witnessing Gustav as he works through his life, reconciling pain and triumph.  In his late symphonies we hear it all, fighting to make sense.  Even though we would all love to have heard Mahler’s final version, many of us are content with the tears, pain and, ultimately, resignation that the surviving first movement speaks, a fitting epitaph to the most neurotic, but also one of the most pathetic, characters in the history of Western music.

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Yet More Syndication, Day 5 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication!  I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 5 – 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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More Syndication, Day 3 – Symphony No. 45 by Franz Joseph Haydn

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

More Syndication, Day 3 – Symphony No. 45 by Franz Joseph Haydn

You never quite know what you’re going to find going through Haydn’s symphonies.  He wrote many, 104 cataloged, and that’s to say nothing of those which have been lost to history, of which there are certainly at least a handful.  Any body of work that extensive will have a few items that fall through the historical cracks, especially with composers as prolific as Haydn continually churning out new music all the time.  The impulse to write for posterity is a Romantic innovation and Haydn and his contemporaries would not have been driven by this mindset, hence neither he nor his librarians felt the great need to preserve every jot and tittle from his pen.

Because he wrote them so often, it seems that Haydn was always on the lookout for clever and creative tricks and twists to enliven the four hundred-some movements of his symphonies.  Haydn was exceedingly intelligent, and not just intelligent, but also obviously concerned that his numerous symphonies transcending mere academic exercise.  If you are at all familiar with his symphonic output, particularly his middle symphonies, than you have probably come to expect the delightful games Haydn plays with his audience, and perhaps even enjoy imagining the reactions of their original listeners who would have been, for the most part, the educated and sophisticated members of the court of Esterhazy in what is today Hungary.  For a particularly clever game, seamlessly integrated into the fabric of one of his symphonies, see this post.

And sometimes the games go beyond mere academic tricks.  On at least one occasion, Haydn used a symphony to communicate, sending a subtle but unambiguous message to his patron.  

It is the last movement that sends this message.  Listen to it now, and see if anything strikes you about it.  Go to 3:00:

What did you hear?  Did you find any of its characteristics unusual?  Well, here’s a few hints.  First of all, it was almost unheard of for symphonies of this time to end with a movement as slow and tranquil as this one.  You would expect to find it as a second movement, possibly a third.  But a finale?  Finales were always quick, bold, and filled with busy agile passages to end the symphony with a flourish.  So what’s the deal with this slow movement?  Also, did you notice that the orchestration became progressively thinner as the movement progressed?  The downbeat is richly scored with strings, winds and horns, but the movement ends with two violins playing a dainty duet.  The melodic material is consistent, unifying the movement, and the form is exquisitely balanced, easily satisfying all of our cognitive expectations with regard to form and development, which is why the movement works so well.  And Haydn really uses the orchestration brilliantly – it actually adds considerable variety to the movement as it thins out over its course.  But, again, this was unheard of at the time.  If you started the movement with a full orchestra, you ended it with a full orchestra.  If your movement ended with a violin duet, it probably began that way.  During the twentieth century, it became more acceptable for composers of art music to play with the orchestration in this way, but the conventions of the eighteenth century strongly discouraged it.  So, again, what’s the deal with these unusual features?

The story goes like this…  Prince Esterhazy, Haydn’s musically cultured patron, enjoyed spending time at his summer palace in the country.  Naturally, he brought along his favorite composer and orchestra to provide musical enrichment on his holiday because, well, you don’t find a composer as good as Haydn producing as he did in an environment which did not value and encourage his contributions.  So Nikolaus would have symphonies in the countryside.  The only problem was that the musicians were separated from their wives and children, who remained at the palace proper.  The excursion ended up being extended beyond the original projections, and the members of Haydn’s orchestra became inordinately homesick, longing for reunion with their loved ones.  And so they needed a plan.  Haydn acted on their behalf, adding this ingenious fifth movement to what is today known as his 45th symphony.  The symphony was all set to follow convention, ending with a quick and stormy fourth movement which would really put a cherry on things.  But Haydn must have burned the midnight oil, designing this pointed musical statement, which the musicians started up right as the final strokes of the original finale were clearing the air.  Can you imagine the Prince Nikolaus’ reaction to hear this surprisingly lyrical encore placed where the applause should be?  And it was presented with its own staging too.  As the musicians’ parts ended, one by one, they each blew out their desk candle and left the stage.  Some modern orchestras have fun with it and present it in a similar way.  This performance really helps you to see how it works:

If you were Prince Nikolaus, how would you have reacted to that stunt?  I wonder what he did after Haydn and Tomasini, the two remaining violinists, walked off stage.  I can imagine him with his fist against his pursed lips, amused by the cheekiness of his kapellmeister and amazed at the quality of the execution, which is exactly why Haydn was there, after all.  Well, according to legend, Nikolaus read his message loud and clear, and the court returned to the main palace the next day.
If you really consider this story, it illuminates the nature of what must have been a most unusual and wonderful relationship between Haydn and Nikolaus Esterhazy.  This was a patron who truly valued his music and those who created it for him.  Haydn may have been a servant, wearing livery and eating at the low table, but Nikolaus knew his worth and would undoubtedly have regarded him as an intellectual equal.  The fact that Haydn felt comfortable expressing this, and that the Prince responded so quickly, and with no hurt feelings, indicates a high level of mutual respect between the two.  Of course, I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the delivery of the message was so artful; simply approaching the powerful patron and asking would surely have met with an entirely different reaction.  The musicians in Haydn’s orchestra seemed to know that he would be able to find a way to persuade the prince using the fiercely intelligent and ever-resourceful tricks that he dispensed in abundance from up his compositional sleeve.  In a body of work already rich with clever and enchanting tricks, this one manages to stand out, yielding what is still one of Haydn’s greatest hits, even two and a half centuries after it was written.

 

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More Syndication, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

More Syndication, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you love Mozart (and probably even if you don’t), then I’ll wager you’ve seen the film Amadeus.  And if you haven’t, you should.  I’ve written about many of the merits of the film in this post, so go ahead and read that one if you require further persuasion 🙂  The film dramatizes the years of his professional life, that is, the time during which he held a professional post in Salzburg and then freelanced in Vienna, roughly the second half.  Naturally, a life like Mozart’s, even as brief as it was, would have been filled with considerable detail that a story like Amadeus must boil down.  The scope of Amadeus is Mozart’s final 15 years, starting with his rather dramatic resignation from the service of the Salzburg prince-archbishop, and dramatizing the political machinations and artistic productivity of his remaining years, spent mostly in Vienna.  Of course much of the fun of Amadeus is that central story which features the mad plotting of court composer Antonio Salieri to thwart and eventually murder (whether he actually does this, or accidentally inspires him to work to death, is unclear in the film) the young and threatening composer out of jealousy, but this is considered by most historians to be a contrivance, even though Salieri apparently went mad later in life and admitted to the crime in his delirious state.

It was during his employment under the prince-archbishop in Salzburg that Mozart began to take his first strides toward composing mature music and he soon became restless with the provincial character of his hometown, especially since its economy could not support a stable venue of opera, to which he was drawn.  If you have seen Amadeus, then you know this, as the operas provide significant set pieces in the film’s production and benchmarks by which the plot is paced.  His Viennese drama begins with the Abduction From the Seraglio, proceeds through The Marriage of Figaro, takes a personal turn with Don Giovanni, and ends with the bizarre and mysterious Magic Flute.  This quartet gives a fine sampling indeed of Mozart’s best operas, covering as it does two German singspielen and two Italian comedies (although from the scene chosen to represent Don Giovanni, you could be forgiven for missing that opera’s generally comedic nature).  

But there’s another type of opera which Amadeus leaves out completely.  It is one that occupied Mozart’s operatic mind for significant periods of time, all throughout his life, and allowed him to develop major skills as he crafted them: Italian serious opera, also known as opera seria.  While it is true that you will today find Mozart’s opera seria produced much less frequently than the four which appear in Amadeus, there are two particularly fine examples from his years of maturity, and a handful from his formative years as well (check out Mitridate, King of Pontus and Ascanio in Alba, composed when he was 14 and 15 years old, respectively – they both contain much fine music).  From the end of his life, composed at the same time as The Magic Flute, is The Clemency of Titus, a rather dry and lofty, serious drama, which essentially holds to what can seem like an endless succession of recitative and arias.  If you’re into that kind of stuff, as I am, you can find plenty to like there.  But, if you find the stodgy, stiff opera seria formula boring (which is many people, I’m sure), you will probably do better to explore a rich and colorful serious Italian opera from right around the middle of Mozart’s life, Idomeneo, King of Crete.

Idomeneo does score a brief, passing reference in Amadeus.  As Emperor Joseph’s cabinet discusses the possibility of commissioning an opera from Mozart, Baron von Swieten speaks admiringly of having recently seen a performance of Idomeneo:

…to which Count Orsini-Rosenberg shoots back:

Or, if you want to see the exchange old school…

And so the rest of the film is essentially set up in this exchange, with Mozart’s champions and antagonists playing a human tug-of-war which ultimately batters and bruises him.  Incidentally, that last comment by Orsini-Rosenberg has become a rather famous encapsulation of the criticism of Mozart’s detractors as summarized by the film.  Do you think there may be any truth to their observation, or were they merely defensive?  It’s become something of a trope, even beyond Amadeus and you see it pop up in some unexpected places…

Whatever opinions of Idomeneo may have been, it is a notable opera in Mozart’s history, considered by pretty much anyone who knows his music to be his first mature opera.  And it is a splendid opera, alive with variety, vivid music, and spectacle.  It will always take a back seat to The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, simply because of the stiff artifice of its conventions, but Mozart works within them so creatively that it really stands out of its genre.

One tidbit about Mozart’s life that Amadeus leaves out is his visit to Paris, shortly before he left Salzburg for Vienna.  While in Paris, he surely would have taken in some of the recent and fashionable operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck.  Gluck was a Bohemian who found success in Vienna and Paris as an opera composer.  He is one of those figures that musicians learn about for his innovative spirit, a spirit which influenced scores of subsequent composers, but whom most non-musicians have probably not heard of.  Gluck managed to successfully take the operatic models which existed during his lifetime, synthesize the best parts of each, and distill the whole mix into a dramatic form of unprecedented focus and power.  The singing is basically Italian arias, with considerably less ostentatious ornamentation than was typical, a vice for which Italian singers were notorious, and the spectacle is French, but it serves the drama in a way that it never did in Lully’s operas (see this post).  The divertissements in Gluck’s operatic shows developed and deepened the story with magnificent force.  In addition to all of this, Gluck anticipated the spare, homophonic textures which would dominate European music in the coming years, relieving listeners from the busy counterpoint of Bach and Handel.

Gluck made his mark on music history, even though he is largely unknown outside of music history circles.  Idomeneo is clearly Gluckian in its structure, clarity, and power; Italian arias, French spectacle, and forceful dramatic clarity, but all done at Mozart’s level, which was a step beyond Gluck.  Gluck tends to be brilliant, but scrappy; Mozart is grace personified.  But there is obviously a congruence of spirit between Gluck’s reform operas and Mozart’s Idomeneo.  I bet Mozart saw Gluck’s Armide, written in 1777, when he was in Paris.  Gluck includes this bold, sparkling, and sharp-edged chaconne in the fifth act, as Armide’s minions dance for her bespelled lover, Renaud:

If you want to compare that to the passacaille Lully wrote for his setting of the same libretto almost a century prior, listen to this.  It is quite a different animal:

While it’s just one echo of Gluck’s operatic art in Idomeneo, Mozart included a chaconne of his own, and that’s notable because as far as I can tell it’s the only chaconne he ever wrote.  And it doesn’t quite sound like one either; I wouldn’t have been able to tell you it was a chaconne if I didn’t know, but if you do, you can kind of hear it.  It has a triple meter propulsion and a succession of interesting gestures, woven together into a kind of variation form, all clothed in Mozart’s orchestral splendor:

By this time, the chaconne and passacaglia were losing favor.  Gluck probably represents the last generation of composers who would have used it without any irony or anachronism.  In Mozart it has the feeling of being almost a neo-chaconne, as if he was looking back and writing it with his own twist.  During the time of Mozart and his contemporaries, the chaconne would fall out of favor, making way for the theme and variations concept, which is found in so much of their instrumental music.  But it is intriguing that Mozart saw fit to leave his mark on the chaconne as only he could in the colorful and fascinating Idomeneo, which represents his summing up of all the different currents of serious opera in Europe, a fitting graduation piece to cap off his apprenticeship as he prepared to dive headlong into his maturity as a composer.

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 5 – Sonata in a minor for arpeggione and piano by Franz Schubert

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 5 – Sonata in a minor for arpeggione and piano by Franz Schubert

The official classification of any musical instrument which relies on one or more vibrating strings to produce its sound in organology, the scholarly study of musical instruments, is called a chordophone.  Organology at times seems built upon the premise of reduction to absurd levels, but it is always trying to get at the essence of what musical instruments ultimately are, which is surprisingly simple.  In the early twentieth century two musicologists, the Austrian Erich von Hornbostel and the German Curt Sachs boiled all of the musical instruments they could think of down to four broad categories of sonic mechanism.  The four categories are:

1. Idiophones, in which sound is created by a hard object struck or shaken
2. Aerophones, in which sound is created by moving air
3. Membranophones, in which sound is created by a vibrating surface
4. The aforementioned chordophones, in which sound is created by a vibrating string, fixed between two points

It’s fun to go through all the musical instruments you can think of and attempt to classify them.  Some take a little bit of thought, and seem to be counterintuitive.  And the presence of a piano-style keyboard can add to this ambiguity.  It’s really just an input system that can cause an instrument to work in any of the 4 categories.  An organ or accordion, for example, is an aerophone.  Whereas a piano is technically a chordophone, even though its manner of playing seems more idiophone-like and it is often classified as a percussion instrument.  Most instruments, however, are pretty straightforward, and their conventional families break down along even lines, percussion and keyboards aside.  Brass instruments are aerophones, as are woodwinds.

Within chordophones, there seem to be two large families within the canon of Western music, which developed respectively over the course of centuries in largely parallel lines, although there is at least one interesting incident of their convergence in nineteenth century Vienna.  The two families are the primarily plucked guitar family and the primarily bowed violin family.  They are all chordophones, relying as they do upon the vibration of strings to make their music, but they have developed distinctive idioms and contexts during their intervening years of development.

As long as humans have kept records, it seems, the families have remained separate.  There are ancient instruments which were plucked and others that were bowed.  Both of these lines flowered into the instruments we know and love around the same time in European cultures.  The violin’s cultural cradle was Italy, and the guitar’s Spain, although we would not have the modern 6-string guitar as it is without important advancements made by guitar makers in Italy and France.  The guitar is actually a much more continental phenomenon than you might expect given its stereotypes.  And don’t get the wrong idea – the guitar has always been a mainstay of Latin cultures, but it was much more popular in the cultural centers of European art music than you often hear.

Everyone knows that the violin was and is a major workhorse in the art music of Europe’s common practice.  But the guitar was there too, just working outside of the canonical tradition somewhat.  Everyone was aware of it, and many composers loved it, but there was a sense that it was somewhat different, and suitable only for composer-performers.  A revealing artifact to this effect is Hector Berlioz’ statement about the guitar from his great treatise on orchestration in which he writes that it is essentially impossible to write effectively for the guitar without knowing how to play it.  He continued on to say that when non-guitarists did attempt to write for the instrument, they ended up yielding music of trivial effect.  This may the reason that it did not serve the classical canon as its bowed cousins did.

But its was present to the European culture of classical music.  Virtuosi of the guitar performed in Paris, Vienna and major centers of Italy.  Luthiers built them and improved upon them.  Publishers released accessible music and method books about the instrument.  The Italian violin virtuoso and composer Niccolo Paganini (see this post) played the guitar as well and wrote prolifically for the instrument.  So Europe certainly loved the guitar, but due to its idiomatic nature it was never quite assimilated into the classical manner.  Interestingly, there is one story in which it almost did, albeit in a somewhat unexpected and unconventional way…

The finest guitar maker in Vienna during the nineteenth century was Johann Georg Stauffer.  He built guitars and improved their design.  He was actually commissioned by the empire to do this, and one of his major innovations is the invention of the “machine head” with which the strings of guitars and double basses are often tuned to this day:

 

 

This, along with a couple other modifications, went into the design of the distinctive headstock that still bears his name, both beautiful and functional, much imitated during his day:

 

Stauffer, like many luthiers, was also something of an inventor and experimenter.  He toyed with new musical instruments related to both the guitar and violin families throughout his career.  One of Stauffer’s best-known inventions, and one that had a considerable, if short-lived, run of success, is a synthesis of both families, the arpeggione.  The arpeggione has some features of the guitar and others of the violin family.  It has six strings tuned in the same manner as the guitar and a fretted fingerboard.  But it is shaped like a cello, held between the legs, and played with a bow.

 

 

For novelty alone, the arpeggione was successful after its creation, but perhaps it was novelty only as they are not made in great quantities anymore.  Still, the instrument managed to capture the attention and adoration of European audiences just long enough to inspire the composition of one masterpiece, a sonata by Franz Schubert.  It is thought to have been commissioned by his friend Vincenz Schuster, a virtuoso of the arpeggione, quite possibly the only one in history.  The work is still performed today, but usually transcribed for cello or viola.  Still, you can catch a performance on its intended instrument here and there and it is fascinating.  You’ve never seen an instrument that looks or sounds quite like this before:

 

Musical instrument makers can be crafty folks.  They are often looking to improve what they have inherited, and sometimes their imaginations dream up interesting things.  Sometimes they just want to have I little fun, I suspect.  Stauffer had his fun, marrying the disparate clans of bowed and plucked.  While the fruit of their union has not stayed with us, life is just a little more colorful for forays of fancy such as these.  Oh, and if you are playing 7 Degrees of Anton Diabelli at home (see this post), here’s another first degree: Diabelli published what is probably the only tutorial on the arpeggione in history, its author, Vincenz Schuster.

 

 

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 3 – Adagio and Rondo K617 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 3 – Adagio and Rondo K617 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

While it is not the most controversial or significant debate raging within the circles of musical academia, there is some question as to who authored this 5-movement string quartet:

 

It’s an odd, quirky, spirited little piece, and full of bizarre features.  While it has been arranged for more typical performance practice, the original concept of this quartet is to be played entirely upon open strings in scordatura tuning, which means that the string instruments have been tuned unconventionally.  Some notable essays in scordatura exist from composers like Saint-Saens (see this post), J.S. Bach, and Gustav Mahler.  Usually, it is applied in order to add some kind of novel and evocative color to a composition.  But in this quartet the application of scordatura seems to have a different aim – it is essentially a gimmick in order to facilitate a clever performance challenge.  The open strings of the instruments are tuned to cover all of the notes of the F major scale, some in multiple octaves, so that all of the content of the score may be played on only open strings, no left hand fingering necessary.  Performing this quartet then must feel akin to playing in a handbell choir in which players work carefully with their neighbors to construct melodic lines, pieced together between all of them  Given this understanding, the stilted, quirky nature of the piece becomes more understandable.

So, who wrote this piece, and why the debate?  The primary confusion arises due to the many scores in existence throughout Europe.  Most of them don’t agree on the authorship.  Some attribute the work to Haydn, some to Pleyel, still others to Ferrandini (of whom I had not heard before learning of this).  And then there is the oldest extant copy which attributes its composition to someone we’ve all heard of, but probably wouldn’t expect to hear of in this context, Benjamin Franklin.  Some speculate that during Franklin’s travels to Paris, where this copy of the score was discovered, he might have come up with this clever novelty to shake things up in the salons there.  The problem is that it is not written in his hand.  Not a deal breaker by any means, but a copy in Franklin’s hand would be much more of a smoking gun.

Still, based on what I know (so take it for what it’s worth) I find the hypothesis that Franklin is the composer to be convincing.  First, the quartet is written for the rather unconventional ensemble of 3 violins and cello, as opposed to the much more typical ensemble of 2 violins, viola and cello which serve as the configuration for all of Haydn’s quartets.  The only other piece I know of for this ensemble is the Canon and Gigue by Johann Pachelbel (see this post).  While Haydn was known for his clever tricks (see this post), his execution tended to be more artful and less self conscious.  And the quartet breathes with a rough, earthy quality that I often associate with the hymn singing and professional composers of early America.  The quartet has an odd quality to its intonation, familiar to anyone who has spent time listening to certain a capella styles.  All of these signs, in my estimation, point to Franklin who had printed several collections of hymns during his career as a printer.  I also suspect that a quartet like this would have been Franklin’s ideal solution in order to engage in the sophisticated musical culture of Europe’s Age of Enlightenment.  An enthusiastic dilettante, he knew he could not compete in purely musical terms, and so he set out to create a puzzle and solve it, thereby gaining credibility within the European salons.  That’s my best guess anyway.

Benjamin Franklin is the kind of polymath about whose resume it is possible to learn more and more and never exhaust its resources.  The quirky string quartet is not the only way in which he engaged with the art of music.  The other one, and his primary claim to fame among musicians, is as the designer and builder of a musical instrument.  During a visit to London in the early 1760s, Franklin had heard a virtuoso playing crystal wine glasses, filled with different amounts of water to create a spectrum of musical pitches.  Fascinated, Franklin decided to apply his genius for invention to the creation of a sturdier and more efficient system for musical glass players to use.  The result, known variously as the glass harmonica or armonica, arranges glass bowls on an axle, ordered from lowest to highest somewhat like a piano keyboard, spun by a foot pedal like that of a sewing machine, so that the player’s fingers may remain stationary and stimulate multiple simultaneous notes more easily than they can with a set of wine glasses.  Later models featured a water trough which kept the glasses moist.

The first virtuoso of the glass harmonica was Franklin’s English friend Marianne Davies, a multi-instrumentalist.  She and her sister, soprano Cecilia, toured Europe and helped Franklin’s instrument to gain notoriety, with composers everywhere contributing scores.  There exist works for the glass harmonica from Beethoven, Donizetti, Saint-Saens and Richard Strauss, among others.  As the Davies sisters performed in Vienna they introduced the glass harmonica to another musical family, the Mozarts, and the most famous of them would become the first notable composer to leave a notable work for the instrument.  It’s actually one of his last, a slow, sublime, haunting movement and companion rondo for an unconventional chamber ensemble of glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello.  Composed during his last year of life, the writing demonstrates Mozart’s breathtaking command of orchestral color.  The instrumentation is revealed to be far from accidental, with the timbres of the carefully-chosen soloists complementing the eerie aura of the glass harmonica with astounding precision and imagination:

 

 

The glass harmonica had something of a heyday, and then faded into obscurity.  I think the reason for this is its lack of versatility.  The composers of Europe, while fascinated by its strengths, seemed to understand that it could only ever achieve status as an impressive novelty, and that it is poorly suited for the demands placed upon a first-class soloistic instrument.  The glass harmonica is really only capable of producing one kind of sound, and there is little possibility of varying attacks, which severely limits its expressive variety.  Still, the glass harmonica lives on as an impressive testament to Benjamin Franklin’s polymath accomplishments, revealing the heart and soul of one of America’s most important founding fathers.

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MORE Music About Animals, Day 5 – Saint Anthony Preaches to the Fishes by Gustav Mahler

This week’s theme is…MORE Music About Animals!  There’s just too much animal fun to contain within a single week…

MORE Music About Animals, Day 5 – Saint Anthony Preaches to the Fishes by Gustav Mahler

A few years ago I was having a deep philosophical discussion with a friend of mine, a fellow composer.  We were debating the respective merits of prospering during one’s lifetime versus leaving an artistic legacy to ensure immortality with future generations.  Naval gazing?  Maybe, but it is a question that hangs around in the minds of many artists and musicians I have known, and one that will probably never really be satisfied or reconciled in any real way.  I think it is helpful in exposing two, often competing (at least it seems that way), drives that artists of all stripes must reckon with – it’s nice to make a living, but it’s also nice to create things that seem meaningful, and it doesn’t always seem possible to find their intersection in one’s life.

There have been enough composers in the Western canon to demonstrate that these desires are not always mutually exclusive; financial security is often so fickle and fleeting anyway, so why not just stick to principle and have all of one’s productivity go into leaving a lasting legacy?  It’s not so simple – a life is made of so many little decisions, and not all of them are worthy of a biography after 100 years.  But on the other hand, perhaps all of those little decisions figure into a legacy at some point, the butterfly effect and all.  It will always be hard to nail down a coherent and consistent philosophy of artistic legacy, and everyone has to deal with the day-to-day demands of life sometimes, although I suppose those things can figure into a legacy also.

Anyway, the conflict between these two priorities plays itself out in all of the choices that artists make.  Is it better to choose a potentially less-meaningful activity that promises a higher degree of material comfort, or better to forgo that kind of opportunity in favor of spending one’s mental and spiritual energy on grand visions and great art akin to those of the past which we revere?  Is it ever all-or-nothing?  Of course it isn’t – composers whom we regard as great spent plenty of time teaching pupils who lacked ability and ambition, and engaged in tasks merely to pay the bills.  Maybe history is a poor judge of such things anyway.

It is also important to note that Western artists’ views on immortality of legacy have changed over the years.  In the days of Bach and Vivaldi, few musicians considered the possibility that their music would be studied or heard even as far as a week past its creation.  Over the course of the next couple centuries that changed, and the Romantic sensibility is much more thoroughly based on the idea of creating for immortality, with at least one eye gazing squarely into the future, trying to discern which choices in the present will result in the greatest adulation on the part of future listeners and historians.  Certainly Bach and Vivaldi achieved a certain measure of this, but it was not their goal as it was more decisively for, say, Beethoven and Wagner.

Another wild card in this equation is the fact that technological innovation has allowed certain skills to leave a legacy that can be experienced much more presently to consumers of the future that they simply could not before.  Follow along with me here…  Imagine that you are a musician before the age of paper, and you come up with a really great tune.  How is it preserved for future generations?  Well, someone has to learn it from you, and then teach it to someone else.  It’s an oral tradition.  But as soon as paper comes along, we can commit our music to notation; granted the notation must be taught, but the legacy is considerably clearer and more solid.  For hundreds of years, musicians have been able to leave their notated music for future generations to discover, learn and perform.  Of course the performance practices change, but I would submit that generally, if the music is good enough, its quality will be evident no matter what kind of practice is used to perform it.

Paper allowed composers to leave their legacy, but performers and conductors weren’t able to do that it until the advent of the next great technological innovation, sound recording.  I’ve heard Arcangelo Corelli (see this post) was an unbelievably engaging violinist.

“I never met with any Man that suffer’d his Passions to hurry him away so much, whilst he was playing on the Violin, as the famous Arcangelo Corelli; whose Eyes will sometimes turn as red as Fire; his Countenance will be distorted, his Eye-Balls roll as in Agony, and he gives in so much to what he is doing that he doth not look like the same Man.”

But we have to take the journalist’s word for it and imagine what it was like; Corelli’s legacy of performance is relegated to verbal description, simply because he lived before the age of audio recording.  But what if you wanted to hear Rachmaninoff play?  Fortunately, you can, because his life coincided with the development of that technology:

 

Audio recording technology is the only reason that we are able to hear the sound of the castrati; the first audio recordings were produced just as the last representatives of this archaic practice were dying out (see this post).

But what about conductors?  How is their legacy best expressed?  I would argue that the legacy of the conductor is most fully expressed by yet another advancement beyond audio recording, video.  It is almost cliche to say that “the conductor is the only musician onstage who doesn’t make a sound”, but it’s true, and extraordinary considering how deeply he can shape performances of those who do make sounds.  Because of this, audio recordings will never entirely capture the complete art of a conductor.  Sure, we can hear how the music is shaped by his command, and at times particularly emphatic conductors will even break their silence and urge on their ensembles, as Thomas Beecham did when he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in this electrifying performance of Sibelius’ Second Symphony in 1954.  Listen to the beginning of finale to hear that:

 

Beecham did survive long enough to be recorded on video.  But many conductors didn’t.  Fortunately for us, we are able to enjoy the legacies of conductors like Bernstein, Karajan, Reiner, Stokowski, and even Richard Strauss almost as though we are watching them in person since so many of their performances were able to be committed to video during their lifetimes.  But so many other conductors legacies’ are based only on reputation.  Some very great conductors enjoyed careers during their lifetimes which equaled, and in some cases surpassed, their careers as composers, but because of the state of technology their impact is lost to us, their legacy impaired.  One of the most notable examples of this is Gustav Mahler.

Today Mahler is known to most of us a great composer, but had he lived a few decades later, or had the state of the technological art run just a little faster, we may have a much more vivid experience of his primary vocation, conducting.  That was Mahler’s full time job, and he became one of Europe’s best.

But there was no technology to capture this for posterity, only paper, and so our primary, really our only experience of Mahler today, is through his compositions, also some of Europe’s best.  But that is why there are so few them, especially in comparison with other composers who practiced on a full time basis.  As a composer Mahler’s scope was rather limited on account of his limited composition time; he really only left work in two genres, symphonies and songs with orchestral accompaniment.  With very few exceptions, hardly any other composer of his stature (besides composers who primarily wrote operas) left work in such limited genres.  And it is his symphonies that get most of the press, representing as they do the post-Romantic culmination of Beethoven’s vision (see this post).

But his songs are full of transparent beauty, and most rewarding to those who discover them.  His first masterpiece was not a symphony, but a song cycle, Songs of a Wayfarer.  Composed during the late 1880s, just before his First Symphony, the two works share much material, as do later symphonies and song cycles.  Aside from the other notable song cycles, which include Songs for the Death of Children and the monumental Songs of the Earth, there is a collection based on German folk poems published in a volume called The Youth’s Magical Horn.  The wide variety of texts found within this collection emanates the earthy wisdom of the Volk.  One of the most entertaining is the bitingly satirical Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fishes, based on a legendary incident from the life of St. Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth century Portuguese saint.  In the original story, St. Anthony is fed up with preaching to hypocrites who won’t listen, and in frustration turns to a stream and preaches to the fishes there.  As they gather to listen, onlookers are struck by the numbers he has attracted, and are thus convinced to listen to him.  The poem from The Youth’s Magical Horn puts a different spin on it – each species of fish represents a hypocrite of some kind; they all love the sermon, but leave set in their sinful ways.  Hardly a more pointed exploration of nature versus nurture can be imagined.  Mahler’s music captures the satirical bite:

 

Antonius zur Predigt Die Kirche findt ledig. Er geht zu den Flüssen und predigt den Fischen; Sie schlagen mit den Schwänzen, Im Sonnenschein glänzen. Die Karpfen mit Rogen Sind [allhier gezogen]1, Haben d’Mäuler aufrissen, Sich Zuhörens beflissen; Kein Predigt niemalen Den Karpfen so g’fallen. Spitzgoschete Hechte, Die immerzu fechten, Sind eilend herschwommen, Zu hören den Frommen; [ Kein Predigt niemalen Den Hechten so g’fallen.]2 Auch jene Phantasten, Die immerzu fasten; Die Stockfisch ich meine, Zur Predigt erscheinen; Kein Predigt niemalen Den Stockfisch so g’fallen. Gut Aale und Hausen, Die vornehme schmausen, Die selbst sich bequemen, Die Predigt vernehmen: [Kein Predigt niemalen den Aalen so g’fallen.]2 Auch Krebse, Schildkroten, Sonst langsame Boten, Steigen eilig vom Grund, Zu hören diesen Mund: Kein Predigt niemalen den Krebsen so g’fallen. Fisch große, Fisch kleine, Vornehm und gemeine, Erheben die Köpfe Wie verständge Geschöpfe: Auf Gottes Begehren Die Predigt anhören. Die Predigt geendet, Ein jeder sich wendet, Die Hechte bleiben Diebe, Die Aale viel lieben. Die Predigt hat g’fallen. Sie bleiben wie alle. Die Krebs gehn zurücke, Die Stockfisch bleiben dicke, Die Karpfen viel fressen, die Predigt vergessen. Die Predigt hat g’fallen. Sie bleiben wie alle.

St. Anthony arrives for his Sermon and finds the church empty. He goes to the rivers to preach to the fishes; They flick their tails, which glisten in the sunshine. The carp with roe have all come here, their mouths wide open, listening attentively. No sermon ever pleased the carp so. Sharp-mouthed pike that are always fighting, have come here, swimming hurriedly to hear this pious one; No sermon ever pleased the pike so. Also, those fantastic creatures that are always fasting – the stockfish, I mean – they also appeared for the sermon; No sermon ever pleased the stockfish so. Good eels and sturgens, that banquet so elegantly – even they took the trouble to hear the sermon: No sermon ever pleased the eels so. Crabs too, and turtles, usually such slowpokes, rise quickly from the bottom, to hear this voice. No sermon ever pleased the crabs so. Big fish, little fish, noble fish, common fish, all lift their heads like sentient creatures: At God’s behest they listen to the sermon. The sermon having ended, each turns himself around; the pikes remain thieves, the eels, great lovers. The sermon has pleased them, but they remain the same as before. The crabs still walk backwards, the stockfish stay rotund, the carps still stuff themselves, the sermon is forgotten! The sermon has pleased them, but they remain the same as before.

Like Songs of a Wayfarer, many of which appear in the First Symphony, Saint Anthony appears as a scherzo in Mahler’s mighty Second Symphony, nicknamed the “Resurrection”.
It is Mahler’s lot that the vehicle of his primary occupation was unable to be recorded for posterity due to an accident of timing.  I’m sure it would be wonderfully illuminating and inspiring to behold him as a conductor.  However, he was able to leave a legacy given his compositional prowess.  How many conductors are simply lost to our knowledge of history because they left no other legacy?  And who knows which future technological innovations will present themselves to give us the opportunity to preserve our legacies in ways that are not currently possible?  We are all making choices every day about what to leave behind for future generations.  Some of us, like the conductors of the past, leave little in the way of artifacts which can be rediscovered,.  Some of us leave remnants that are more tangible.  Due to technology, conductors no longer need to rely on their reputations for their legacies, but it might not hurt to diversify one’s portfolio of influence, just to be a little safer.

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Music About Animals, Day 1 – Theme and Variations from the Trout Quintet by Franz Schubert

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 1 – Theme and Variations from the Trout Quintet by Franz Schubert

In the years following the death of Mozart and Haydn, roughly the late 1790s and 1810s and 20s, there exists a corridor of largely unsung and forgotten music from largely unsung and forgotten composers.  Musicians like Gelinek, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Spohr – all virtuoso pianists (except Spohr – he was a violinist), respected composers, in some cases entrepreneurs (Kalkbrenner, among other enterprises, was a partner in a piano manufacturer and also owned successful music schools; he attempted to woo Chopin into studying at one of them which the younger composer almost did – he would have committed to a long, expensive contract – before coming to his senses), populated this corridor, filling it with the sparks of their pianism and flashy music.  This music has a delicate transparency derived from the Classical models, but also a rising robustness of spirit which anticipated the upcoming Romanticism, and a flashy virtuoso quality that would feed the flamboyance of Liszt.  Here’s an example of Kalkbrenner’s brilliant piano virtuosity:

 

Europe was still discovering Mozart’s legacy, and Beethoven was stormily thrusting his dramatic and powerful music upon audiences and other musicians who were not quite ready to assimilate his energy and vision.  While these virtuoso pianists/composers took their sweet, pleasant time with the transition between the Classical and Romantic periods, Beethoven was ready to make his home there almost immediately, arriving with his bold Eroica Symphony (see this post) shortly after beginning his professional career, and inhabiting the land of the Romantics decades before its time.  Not until the 1830s, with the likes of Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Schumann would more of European culture catch up to the direct, powerful, and forceful Romanticism which had animated Beethoven from the beginning of the nineteenth century.  The music of the transitional figures, as dramatic as it can be, simply does not achieve the purposeful Romantic style as Beethoven and his later followers did and would.  In the midst of these forgotten names is a much greater one, although it is easily overlooked, as is the music written by its bearer.  But he and his music belong with Kalkbrenner, et al – he is not quite Mozart, and not quite Beethoven.  The greatest transitional figure, coexisting with Beethoven but never quite reaching his level of intensity, is Franz Schubert.

Schubert is beloved by singers, probably more so than other musicians, on account of the kind of music of which he left the most, the art song.  A genre that had begun to sprout during the Classical era, with some notable but immature essays from Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, the German art song, or lied, is a short, secular song written for solo singer (99% of the time) accompanied only by piano.  An exploration of the German poets, the art song, largely thanks to Schubert’s work in the genre, gained prominence as a vehicle of music excellence, both for composers and performers, in which the meaning of the poem is exposed through deceptively simple and expressive vocal writing, and a most nuanced accompaniment part written to exploit the nearly limitless possibilities of the piano, a relatively new invention at the time (see this post).  Schubert was instrumental in elevating the German art song to a true art form; his songs are still frequently programmed on vocal recitals and his examples of the genre served as models for art songs by many notable composers who would grace the Germanic musical pantheon after him, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, and Richard Strauss.

Had Schubert not been such a prolific composer of art songs, would we still speak of him as we do?  It’s hard to say, as his reputation would then rest largely on his instrumental music which, after the songs, is his most successful body of work.  In hearing his symphonies, piano sonatas, string quartets, and other chamber works, we catch a fascinating glimpse of a supremely refined musical mind trying to fill in the stylistic cracks between Mozart and Beethoven, and generally doing so with assured grace and charm.  Schubert’s style is often called “poetic”, which is to say it emanates lyricism, warmth, and a detailed nuance that is easy to miss if you are not paying attention.  I’ve always felt that Schubert is a real musician’s musician.  Never overtly impressive like the music of his virtuoso contemporaries (Hummel, Kalkbrenner, etc.), Schubert’s instrumental music is charming, tuneful, transparent, harmonically imaginative, and unconditionally well-crafted, but you often need to listen closely in order to appreciate it.  One might say that where other composers’ music comes to the listener, the listener must go to the music of Schubert, approaching it with patience and understanding, in order to derive maximum benefit from listening.  In Schubert’s instrumental music we can hear the grace and lyricism of Classical music combined with a subdued emotion and harmonic adventurousness that feels more Romantic.  Later in his life, acutely influenced by the titanic music of Beethoven, he pursued the stronger qualities of his elder’s voice more explicitly, largely modeling his Great Symphony in C major after Beethoven’s mighty Ninth Symphony, but up until that point Schubert is tender and gentle (and maybe even then, actually).

A massive chamber work that illustrates these qualities effectively is the famous Trout Quintet.  Composed when he was just 22 years old (Schubert did not live very long – his almost 1000 surviving works were written over the course of just 32 years!), it can be seen as coming from his middle period – the music of his late period assumed an incredible depth and gravity – characterized by great tunefulness and vivacity.  It is written for a somewhat unconventional ensemble, a string quartet plus piano.  That in and of itself is not unconventional; there are many piano quintets like that, but they usually combine the piano with a quartet consisting of two violins, viola, and cello, common since Haydn’s day.  Schubert’s Trout, however, puts the piano amidst one of each different instrument in the violin consort, violin, viola, cello, and double bass!  The resulting transparency and invention of timbre reveals Schubert’s endless resourcefulness as an orchestrator.  This would not be the last time Schubert made that sort of move: late in his short life he produced another masterpiece of chamber writing, his final chamber work in fact, a glowing String Quintet in C major, scored for the unusual forces of traditional string quartet plus an additional cello.  There is hardly a more sublime work in the chamber repertoire; again, one must listen closely for the detail and nuance, and it is considerably rewarding to do so.

Schubert’s Trout Quintet derives its odd name from its synthesis of two of Schubert’s great abilities, chamber music and art song.  The charming fourth movement of the quintet is a theme and variations, a form that was very popular among composers of instrumental music during the Classical era, on one of his songs, called The Trout.  The two-minute song features an imaginative accompaniment that seems to simulate the gently lapping waves of a stream as the baritone soloists sings about a country trout’s very bad day:

 

Schubert was not finished with this melody, as it serves as the theme for the variations the Trout Quintet, constantly shot through by his gifts for melody and transparent orchestration.  As it is stated by the strings, it breathes and moves with the pure charm and lyricism of the Austrian folk:

 

I often feel that Schubert deserves more recognition than he generally receives.  Of course everyone knows he is a great composer, but it is more common to hear Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, even Schumann so much of the time.  But he has emerged as the clear superior among a group of transitional figures whose music, while brilliant and appealing, is  also acknowledged by most historians and critics to be vapid and superficial.  Schubert is to be commended, I think, for turning inward and discovering the transcendent qualities of enduring art within, even if it was not immediately successful as the work of the flashy virtuosi.  Schubert is a musician’s musician – his music often takes considerable patience and, perhaps a little effort, to engage with, but there is such treasure to be found upon putting it forth.  The Trout Quintet is still one of the most popular ways to access his wonderful musical voice, full of Classical tunefulness, Romantic harmonic adventure, and a lyrical charm, attention to detail, and, sometimes, even a pathos that is all Schubert’s own.

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Them’s fightin’ words!, Day 5 – Agnus dei from Mass in Time of War by Franz Joseph Haydn

This week’s theme is…Them’s fightin’ words!  Since time immemorial humans have found reasons to fight one another.  The images of combat and war fill our stories, our art, and yes, our music.  This week we listen to music colored by the din of combat.

Them’s fightin’ words!, Day 5 – Agnus dei from Mass in Time of War by Franz Joseph Haydn

It can be difficult to reconcile all the different linear presentations of history into the holistic web that is reality, harder still to realize our connection to it as members of the current world, separated from the past only by time.  (Every now and then I will have a rare moment, fleeting like deja vu, during which I realize that the flow of time envelops us all, even those who lived long ago – they did so in real time, never sure of the choices that seem so crystalline in our history books – and they come at the strangest times, but in those moments I feel like I realize the true nature of historical reality and authentically recognize my link with the heritage of our past).  The history of politics, war, architecture, music, art – they are often presented as separate strands.  Or, if you consume a biography of any kind, you are looking at a historical narrative through the vantage point of one perspective, more or less, and again a wider view is lost.  Some historical articles come close, like this kind of thing…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1796

…and it takes a great mental feat to keep it all straight in one’s head.  If you look at the sidebar of that article you will notice subtopics regarding different arts – those are fun to read.

One of the neat things about music history is that you get something of a different perspective, almost a nonlinear view of the official historical record that you would discover in a more straightforward class or textbook on the subject.  In learning about much European art music you discover commentaries on political events of the time, which helps both to place the music in history, and also to humanize the often dry political events, allowing us to understand them from a more empathetic perspective.  The Napoleonic wars, for example, were incredibly impactful on practically every element of life in Central and Western Europe during the first decade of the nineteenth century.  In many ways they were an outgrowth of what are known as the Revolutionary Wars, which saw the various coalitions of post-revolutionary France fighting surrounding monarchies who struggled to contain the specter of democracy which threatened to dissolve the old world order like a strong acid.  The entire nineteenth century was racked with conflicts surrounding this clash of political philosophies (see this post) and the old world order did finally dissolve more than a century later in the cataclysm of the First World War.

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars filled the air of Europe’s central monarchies with a sense of dread and uncertainty that their subjects and rulers must have sensed on a daily basis, or nearly.  Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, the three composers who have come to be known as the “First Viennese School” were all affected by it in some way (to find out about what is now known as the “Second Viennese School”, see this post).  Beethoven’s ambivalence regarding Napoleon is well-known (see this post).  Both he and Haydn lived to see Napoleon crown himself emperor of France in 1804, confirming what many of the French had feared about his ambitions – Europe’s trouble with Napoleon was just beginning and Beethoven’s music would later reflect the effect of his aggression (see this post).  On a side note, it staggers me to realize that Haydn in fact lived a few years past the premiere of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony – he is reported to have said that it was “Much too long, much too loud, and would never become popular” – he was many things, but apparently not a prophet, at least not in this case.  Mozart, passing in 1791, was just catching wind of the forces that would bring about the French Revolution, as alluded to right at the beginning of this scene from Amadeus (for more about Amadeus, see this post and this one):

 

But Haydn experienced the full scope of the French Revolution, from the early gathering storm, to the destructive wake of his coronation which brought with it the revelation that he was just another in a long line of megalomaniacs who had European conquest in their sights and few scruples about using the full force of imperial armed forces to set about achieving it, of whom there would still be more.

The early inklings of what would become the Napoleonic Wars touched and shaped Haydn’s music in a very explicit way in 1796.  At this point, late in his life, Haydn was able to spend most of his time at his residence in Vienna, visiting his old stamping grounds at Esterhazy annually to present a sumptuous setting of the Catholic mass for orchestra, choir, and vocal soloists in honor of his patron, Nikolaus Esterhazy II’s wife, Princess Maria Hermenegild.  Haydn composed six masses for this series, and they are often called his “Late Masses”.  They are not the only masses he wrote, but they are without question the most splendid.  Known to most musicians as the “Father of the Symphony”, a well-deserved title in light of the 100-odd he composed over the greater part of his working life, his symphonic composition had culminated in the 12 he had written for London audiences in the early 1790s.  These, to this day his most famous symphonies (for more about them, see this post), were the last symphonies from his pen, and in a sense he continued the line of stylistic development which ran through them in his 6 Late Masses.  I personally prefer the Late Masses to the London Symphonies.  The forces with which he worked add the colors and textures of choir and vocal soloist to the already colorful orchestra of the late symphonies for a nearly endless variety of textures and moods, limited only by Haydn’s unquenchable powers of invention – hardly a limit at all.

The second of these Late Masses was composed as Napoleon’s forces, having routed the Austrian Army in Italy, turned its sights to Vienna itself (Napoleon would invade Vienna in 1809 – see this post).  Haydn, like so many others loyal to the Austrian monarchy, sensed the tension with their enemy at the gates, and he worked his nation’s collective anxiety into the most agitated Agnus Dei you could imagine within the stylistic boundaries of the common practice.  

 

After a placid initial statement, the choir builds the Agnus Dei to a tense climax, at which point the timpani becomes the centerpiece, seeming to represent the foreboding advancement of a distant army.  Many historians suspect this to be an explicit evocation of the impending French forces and it is this device that is the source of both of the mass’ nicknames, “Mass in time of war” and “Timpani mass”.  After the Agnus Dei is always found the Dona nobis pacem, “grant us peace”, which here becomes an explicit prayer for the needs of the Austrian empire.  After the imploring supplication of the Agnus dei Haydn opens the floodgates of joy and the Dona nobis pacem swings the pendulum as far in the other direction as possible.  Haydn remained devoutly and happily religious his entire life; his message is clear: even amid times of unbearable strife, God is good.
Haydn’s Mass in time of war is a fascinating and explicit example of Europe’s politics intimately shaping its art.  It is easy to lose the big picture of how all disciplines and streams of human endeavor and function interrelate, but it is stories like this, more abundant than we often realize, which show us the deeper connections and help to keep our understanding of history firmly in touch with those who lived before us, not that different from ourselves, even if they can seem distant and irrelevant.

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