Holde Kunst Review: Robin Holloway's Essays And Diversions II

After thumbing through this (as originally published) expensive book at Borders, and choosing not to pay $50 for it, Essays and Diversions II has remained on my must-read-when-cheaper list. As Klingsor would say, die Zeit is da. 

Essays and Diversions (v. 2)
by Robin Holloway

A student of mine gave me a copy of The Girl with the Golden Tatto, describing it as “a can’t-putter-downer.” Well, I put it down (after reading it quickly in a day, and that book needs to be read quickly). Holloway’s book is also a can’t-putter-downer but one which doesn’t necessarily need to be read quickly. But classical music lovers are likely to read it quickly indeed. Most of this review is likely to be strikingly positive about Holloway’s intelligence, perception, and wonderful writing style. So, for convenience’s sake, I’d like to get the few caveats out of the way at once. 

Whenever describing his own music, Holloway is generous to the point of hubris. That’s OK! Some musicians, who are, perhaps, less enamored of his neo-tonal style, might sniffily find this a tad unseemly. Also, Holloway is obsessed with evaluating works in terms of their debts to other works. In terms of their lineage, so to speak. Well, that’s a neo-romantic’s occupational hazard.

In comparison with another very fine collection of essays I recently read (Boulez’s Orientations), Holloway commits himself to no perceptible credo or vision of musical progress. Not everyone is a Boulez, obviously. But leaving Holloway aside, to this reader it is symptomatic of a malaise in contemporary composition wherein everthing is about the past — just like Hollywood makes new versions of The A Team, seemingly every comic book hero and, sadly, Gilligan’s Island.

The best thing about Holloway’s writing is its pithiness coupled with its wildly opinionated slant on things. He prefers Percy Grainger to Shostakovitch. I can’t imagine that four out of five dentists agree with this, but more power to him. He also endorses the canard that Viennese expressionism is wholly about angst and morbidity. It’s not, and I regret (for his sake) that he can’t find his way to this repertoire. But he has a refreshingly open mind, and recognizes its greatness although it’s not for him.

An amusing episode from the book concerns his judging a composition competition and regretting the poor quality of the neo-tonal compositions while endorsing neo-tonality as a mainstream style. “The long-forseen, nay, longed-for counterrevolution shouldn’t be like this!” he laments. 

The book has five parts. The first part, “Places,” is descriptions of cities and experiences mostly connected with premieres of Holloway’s works. Oddly (or perhaps to be expected) the weakest section is about his home turf in England. Generally, “Places” is the weakest part of the book.

Delightful is part two, “Composers in Brief.” Holloway wildly asserts that Glinka is not merely the fountainhead of Russian music, but is the fountainhead of a Franco-Russo style that, in his view, ultimately eclipses Teutonic hegemony. His enthusiam for little-known French operas gratifies my own heart, as I’ve often felt that French opera of the second half of the 19th century is a repository of some of the greatest and most underrated works of the romantic era. Bizet and Chausson are discussed, but had he known I was reading, he may have thrown Massenet in too!

Holloway’s association of Reger’s repugnant physiognomy with his turgid style is priceless:

For a start, he is surely the physically ugliest of all composers, surpassing even Prokofiev, or Zemlinsky, whose repulsiveness actually inspiired an opera libretto. Reger’s slobish face, plus pince-nez and thick, sulky lips, already anticipates the music’s mix of short-sighted with greedy grossness…

His lusty, love/hate relationship with the Entartete Musik composers, Korngold, Krenek, Schulhoff and especially Schreker among others, is a delight to read, although being quite familiar with this repertoire I disagree with almost everything he says. Or at least, with Holloway’s idea that the excessiveness and voluptuousness of much of this music is a kind of Chinese dinner that tastes great at the time only to leave you hungry afterwords. 

Part 3, “Composers at Length,” is more substantial but less interesting because these are articles for sober publications or liner notes and thus don’t have the off-the-cuff opinionating that the rest of the book has. The best of these is the article on Debussy’s Etudes.

The best and most remarkable part of the book is Part 4, “Charting the Twentieth Century.” What a delight to read such a musician, completely trashing the notion of historical progress and inevitable teleology. Holloway humanely understands that the value of a composer such as Rachmaninoff isn’t to change the world but to give us more musical pleasure. Amen to that! Holloway comments that Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances is contemporaneous with the early works of Boulez. And he knows that this situation isn’t wacky — it’s only the blinkered historians who perceive it as such. Holloway has the knack for exulting in (or at least, acknowledging) the validity of disparate styles without needing any given style to be accorded pre-eminance.

I myself has been frustrated with people who unimaginatively are puzzled by the fact that four of my favorite composers are Rachmaninoff and Puccini, Schoenberg and Boulez. But that’s a fact, Jack! I promise you. 

Delightful and, I think, necessary, is Holloway’s brutal put-down of the Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music. Firstly, he outlines a vastly better way it could be done (concentrating on individual masterpieces, and especially unfamiliar ones) and then proceeds to excoriate that worst kind of academic writing: pseudo objective, pseudo-neutral listings of names dates, places, and isms. 

The final section is apologetically call “Odds and Sods.” Holloway needn’t apologize! His 20 best orchestral recordings list, attack on boring music (including classical and romantic concertos by Haydn and Tchaikovsky and a baroque opera by Scarlatti) are wonderful. How many readers of this blog haven’t sat through works by the Masters that aren’t merely boring but soul-crushingly so, and been afraid to say so? Nobody will raise and eyebrow at an alert musician’s boredom at Carmina Burana, but  to take on the big boys is cool. Baroque opera is boring. There, I’ve said it. Since Holloway has gone after pieces by Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Scarlatti, let me e pater le bourgeoisie by nominating Beethoven’s violin concerto, almost all of Gershwin (which Holloway loves) and all of Faure (which Holloway also loves) as personal candidates for the snoozmobile. Holloway’s depiction of dental catastrophe augmented by a Best of Mozart tape is hilarious and all too familiar. 

I just wish that such an astute Englishman could explain to me what I need to be loving in the works of Elgar and Britten. He talks a lot about ‘em, as really great figures.They are fine composers, but let’s not get carried away. I think, alas, I’ll have to find out on my own. This book is extremely worth purchasing. And if I have made it seem comparatively lightweight, so many pages of enthusiastic music talk by such as Holloway makes an enduring and educational experience. 

A Final Reckoning: Viktor Ullmann's Last Piece

January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops. Representing the many victims, especially the doomed artists of Theresienstadt, we’re listening to the Seventh Piano Sonata of Viktor Ullmann. Under the Nazi regime, Ullmann was first silenced as a “degenerate” composer owing to his Jewish ancestry, then deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto/transit camp in September 1942. After contributing to the camp’s poignantly rich artistic life for two years — and composing most of the pieces of his which survive today — he was deported to Auschwitz in mid-October 1944 along with members of his family and many colleagues such as Hans Krasa (composer of the opera Brundibar), Pavel Haas, and Gideon Klein. He’s believed to have been gassed on October 18, 1944.

Here are the Variations and Fugue from Ullmann’s last work, his 7th Piano Sonata. The fugue is on Yehuda Sharret’s Song of Rachel, a popular Zionist anthem. It’s dedicated to Ullmann’s three eldest children and dated August 22, 1944. His youngest son, Pavel, had died in the camp at the age of three and son Max would die in Auschwitz at twelve.  Felice and Jean (Johannes) were safe in the England.

As was Ullmann’s habit, this movement is full of other musical quotations, the most audible of which may be “Now Thank We All Our God.”

The seventh sonata is also the short score for a planned Second Symphony, eventually realized by Bernhard Wulff. (Look for the CD and DVD conducted by James Conlon.) Reviewing a performance of the orchestral version, James Reid Baxter offers this chilling description:

Wulff described the final Variations and Fugue on a Hebrew Folksong as a ‘final reckoning with European culture, which allowed things like Terezin to happen’. It is simply the most disturbing music I have ever heard. The little melody is lightly varied several times, then subjected to vehement, superb fugal treatment which sets alarms ringing — the possible symbolism of which is stomach-turning. The horror grows as ‘Now Thank We All Our God’is sonorously declaimed by the brass over a furious counterpoint, which builds to a general pause. Then a single, derisory blare of ‘B-A-C-H’ is heard on trombine, and the father of German music is dismissed in a ferocious stretto using the Hebrew melody, which concludes the Symphony with heartbreaking energy, singing in the face of deliberate murder of so many millions of futures. The sheer strength required to write, in those circumstances, silences all criticism. Never has the idea of ‘music as music’ seemed so small: as Wulff wrote, this is not ‘engaged composition, this is music as the will to survive.

Ullmann kept a diary in Theresienstadt in which he addressed the idea of singing in the face of… (words fail).

I have composed quite a lot of new music here in Theresienstadt, mostly at the request of pianists, singers and conductors for the purpose of the Ghetto’s recreation periods. It would be as irksome to count them, as it would be to remark on the fact that in Theresienstadt, it would be impossible to play a piano if there was none available. In addition, future generations will care little for the lack of music paper that we presently experience. I emphasise only the fact that in my musical work at Theresienstadt, I have bloomed in musical growth and not felt myself at all inhibited: we simply did not sit and lament on the shores of the rivers of Babylon that our will for culture was not sufficient to our will to exist. And I am convinced that all who have worked in life and art to wrestle content into its unyielding form will say that I was right…”

The Rolls-Royce Treatment

I like boxes. You know, compendiums of classical music consisting of 30 or more cds, at prices averaging under $2/disc.  I don’t listen to ‘em, necessarily, but I pile them on the piano and look at them from time to time. There are amazing deals out there, incl. Bayreuth’s old Sawallisch (what a Lohengrin!) and Bohm (What a Tristan!) records…33 cds in a pretty box.  Or “Berlin Alexanderplatz”; a deluxe Criterion 7 disc set of the greatest film ever made, with a book included as well. And a very pretty box.

Nobody with any sense is gonna dispute the above purchases. You’re probably no longer reading this, because you’re madly scrambling to order these items for yourself. But now for the insane part of this narrative. Cue the ominous music, let’s say Schoenberg’s “Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” or Weber’s Wolfglen music. Or on second thought, don’t bother. The facts are scary enough. Joining Bayreuth and Fassbinder on the piano is the 37-disc set of Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil. in complete editions of Beethoven, Bruckner, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Tchaikovsky symphonies.

Why, oh why! Where have we failed you, Mr. Gibbons? Haven’t we introduced you to Bohm and Bernstein, Furtwangler and Kleiber, Kempe and Kletsky? Better conductors every one! What went wrong? Oh, the Humanity! (humanity doesn’t necessarily include Karajan) Why this megalomanical, homogenizing, racist Nazi pig! 

Get mad, it’s your good right. Alert the teabaggers so they can humiliate me at a town hall. Kick me in the shins. But to paraphrase Marquis de Sade, predictably (now that you know my secret vice) one of my heroes, if you want to burn me in effigy you’ll just have to do it, because I will never change. 

Just set yourself-all back all comfy-like, straddle a cracker barrel and light a cheroot, while I tuck  my thumbs in my suspenders and regale ya’ll with a yarn.

When I was a wee tyke at the Peabody conservatory my friends (don’t laugh) and I went to the record store.  I wanted the Mozart Requiem, God alone knows why (it’s a problematical and uneven piece, and I should’ve been looking for the c minor mass or something else, instead, as I didn’t yet have any sacred music by Mozart). Anyway, I wildly grabbed the Karajan/Vienna version and tucked it under my arm with the beaming countenance of smug sophistication, eagerly anticipating my friends to congratulate me on my connisseurhood.  Instead they looked at me with condescension and pity.  Gently, in hushed tones, they expressed their concern that I wasn’t buying, say, the Norrington version, with authentic oboes and everything. I stamped my foot, and with tears welling in my eyes and my face going the wrong shape, I bleated: ‘This one is too good! It’s the best and I love it more then anything and I hate you guys for ever!”  

And since then, I’ve been scarred for life, hence my recent purchase. And Norrington isn’t a conductor, he’s a butler. “Norrington, show these gentlemen to the study, where we will take our brandy.” That’s who Norrington is. 

Haydn is big and slow, with majestic minuets and finessy finales.  Mozart is moribund, Beethoven is treated like Brahms, who is treated really well, actually. Bruckner sounds like an organ, so does Schumann, and the Tchaik is mercifully sober. Ain’t heard the Mendelssohn yet, as I live in deadly fear that the  “Lobgesang” will get in my face. Geez, ain’t life short enough already? Oh, wait: the Lobgesang will make it seem that time is stopped… I get to live forever!

The Berlin boys don’t make many mistakes and Karajan knows the music cold, too cold.  This stuff is perfect, too perfect, like a TV anchorman’s hair.  But it is the Rolls-Royce treatment.

Latest "Someone Else Composed It" Story: Beethoven & “Für Elise.”

Days ago, European classical music enthusiasts started tweeting that Beethoven’s authorship of Für Elise was being questioned in the European media. Italian musicologist Luca Chiantore is going public with the theory that Ludwig Nohl realized the piece from a sketch.

Alex Ross has a witty summary of the scoop, in which he manages to get in a few digs on “the ringtone classic” and link to some choice YouTube parodies. He urges caution lest the entire blogosphere rush to crown the new composer based on apparently easily debunked news summaries:

One assumes that Chiantore’s study is more nuanced than news accounts make out. In any case, it’s a little early to start talking about Ludwig Nohl’s ‘Für Elise.’

Speaking of witty, this piano recital commercial has fun with the piece’s place in society. (“Fancy having to live with ‘Für Elise’ for eight years,” quips Jessica Duchen on the reported duration of Chiantore’s research project.)

And speaking of Alex Ross, it seems he’s decided to open a new classical music blog at the New Yorker where he is a music critic. Bonnie (who makes her career in website stuff, blogging and something having to do with search engines) says this is bold move, considering the popularity of The Rest Is Noise, which will be deemphasized. Congratulations, Alex.

Related: Bonnie discussed last year’s rush to credit Anna Magdelena Bach with authorship of the Bach Cello Suites.

Tribute to the Late Michael Steinberg, Sunday October 4

A public celebration of Michael Steinberg, the prolific musicologist who died in July, will be held on the campus of the University of Minnesota on Sunday, October 4. If I can find a link to a radio broadcast, I’ll add it to this page.

To me, Michael Steinberg was originally a name I kept seeing on liner notes I was reading as a music student, then came his Listening Guides and other books. He was also a music critic for the Boston Globe and a frequent writer of program notes for several major orchestras.

To lucky audiences in San Francisco (where his wife, Jorja Fleezanis, was a violinist) and then in the Twin Cities (where she was the concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra), Steinberg was a beloved musical personality, popular for his accessible pre-concert lectures. Audiences outside those cities could hear his commentary on NPR — he even performed as a narrator on occasion.

To get a taste of what you might have been missing, listen to Michael Steinberg on his appreciation for the Symphony genre, followed by a commentary on Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis:

After Steinberg’s death on July 26, wonderful tributes were posted by dozens of journalists, bloggers and colleagues. Here is a representative accolade from Yvonne Frindle:

He never lost sight of the central goal of a concert program note, which is to help the listener. (Not to inform the casual reader, although he does that too, but to guide the person who is at the concert, listening.)

There is so much to praise and to emulate in Michael Steinberg’s writing. Not simply the lucid expression and the musical insight, but the deft analogies and metaphors, so aptly chosen, so vivid and so original. But one of the things that inspired me the most was the way he injected his sheer love of music into everything he wrote.

The other thing which inspired me from the outset was the way his notes were written from the perspective of someone who had been there. He didn’t just know the music he wrote about, he hadn’t merely researched it – he’d helped plan performances of it, heard it in rehearsal, discussed it with conductors and soloists, experienced it in concert. And he wrote this way.

NPR obituary by Tim Huizinga and NYT obituary

Minnesota Public Radio

• MPR Biography by Jessica Mador (includes audio where Steinberg recounts his life-changing encounter with Fantasia)

• Tom Crann interviews Brian Newhouse on Steinberg’s legacy

• Photo Gallery of Michael Steinberg

Steinberg’s Liner Notes are celebrated by Ronen Givorny

Donations:

The Michael Steinberg & Jorja Fleezanis Fund to Spur Curiosity and Growth through the Performing Arts and the Written Word

Attn. Shelli Chase
CHASE FINANCIAL
7900 Xerxes Avenue South, Suite 910
Minneapolis, MN 55431.

Met “Tosca” Booed: Luc Bondy vs. Franco Zeffirelli

“He’s not second rate. He’s third rate.”
 – Franco Zeffirelli in anticipation of Luc Bondy’s new Tosca at the Met.

“I’m a third-rate director, and he is a second assistant of Visconti.”
– Luc Bondy, on Franco Zeffirelli, following the opening night boos of his Tosca.

The New York Times summarizes a defense of the production by the Met’s Peter Gelb and Bondy’s spirited comeback to Zeffirelli.

I think it’s fair to disclose that we here at the palatial world headquarters of Holde Kunst are basically in favor of Regietheater (aka Eurotrash, aka Director’s theater) because it’s better than being afraid to try new things for fear of upsetting the old guard. On the other hand, we find ourselves dismayed at the majority of particular examples of Regietheater that we’ve encountered.  I probably missed some nuances in Diane Paulus’s Don Giovanni at Chicago Opera Theater because I kept getting distracted by the “exclusive night club’s” recognizable KLIPPAN sofas from IKEA.  I’ve seen the Nurse in Romeo et Juliette sung,  apparently, by Mary Todd Lincoln. And I can’t tell you how alarmed I was when I first saw this picture from the current Bayreuth production of Parsifal – and how (relatively) relieved I was to find that this hospital ward wasn’t actually the church of the grail and the guy in fishnet stockings was at least Klingsor and not Amfortas or Gurenamnz.

In this case, Bondy’s vision is replacing a beloved, traditional production by Franco Zeffirelli, who took an opportunity to pre-emptively trash the production:.

“I have not seen yet any Puccini operas successfully adapted to this idiotic new way to approach his music,” he said. “You have to follow Puccini’s precise instructions.” Bringing interpretations to the staging of “Tosca” is especially tricky given that it is set in highly identifiable places in Rome, where any tourist can go. (Franco Zeffirelli, on Luc Bondy’s production of Tosca)

This wasn’t exactly sporting of “F-Zeff,” but his thesis matches one that John has advanced in this pages: Puccini’s original settings are too much fun to sacrifice on the altar of Regietheater. That’s why Puccini seems rarely subjected to directorial intrusion, and perhaps why messing with Tosca at the expense of the Zeffirelli production seems a particular affront to some members of the audience.  Add the fact that this opening was the season’s Gala (with an audience self-selected for perhaps a greater conservative tendency) and we have ourselves a big, fat “Boooooo…”

So what’s so bad about the new Tosca? You can see for yourself at your local theater on October  10. Here’s what I’ve heard:

• Tosca stabs Scarpia in a more sensitive anatomical area than is customary.
• Instead of laying out Scarpia’s body respectfully with candles and and a cross, she fans herself on the sofa.
• Prostitutes are seen earlier in the action — on said sofa as well as crawling around on all fours.
• Cavaradossi paints a topless Mary Magdalene, which Tosca slashes with a knife.
• Scarpia writhes against a similarly nonvirginal statue of the Virgin Mary.
• Tosca’s suicidal leap is depicted by a body double hanging from a string as the curtain falls.

Here is a non-snarky negative review from NJ.com.

Opera Chic offers a contrarian view, declaring that “Only in New York City would an essentially conventional, prudent opera director such as Luc Bondy be considered some sort of insane, incendiary bomb-thrower…” – part of a detailed treatment of the production covering several blog posts.  

But the prize goes to this Edith Wharton take on Monday night’s opening. It’s a spot-on rewrite of the opening scene in The Age of Innocence…

Today’s post is by Bonnie Gibbons.

Live in HD Series 2009-10 Schedule

• Tosca by Giacomo Puccini — October 10, 2009
• Aida by Giuseppe Verdi — October 24, 2009
• Turandot by Giacomo Puccini — November 7, 2009
• Les Contes d’Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach — December 19, 2009
• Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss — January 9, 2010
• Carmen by Georges Bizet — January 16, 2010
• Simon Boccanegra by Giuseppe Verdi — February 6, 2010
• Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas — March 27, 2010
• Armida by Gioachino Rossini — May 1, 2010

A Belated "Leb Wohl" to Hildegard Behrens

During our vacation in Spain, the dramatic soprano Hildegard Behrens died unexpectedly from an aortic aneurysm.

Behrens wasn’t merely one of the most fearless-yet-expressive Brunnhildes — you’ll  find links to  her other roles below. But she’ll always be the “home” Brunnhilde for me.  I was in the upper reaches of the Met audience on the opening night of the Otto Schenck Goetterdammerung in 1989. In a typical “youth is wasted on the young” scenario, I had no idea at the time how fortunate I was (the cast also featured Matti Salminen at his frightening finest and Christa Ludwig in one of her last Waltrautes). I was a music major in my last year of college, but hadn’t gotten around to Wagner yet. (I was buried in Prokofiev’s War and Peace, racing to complete my senior thesis on that work somewhere near on time.) I had only listened once to the just-out-on-CD Solti Ring with some other students in preparation for the college trip that landed me in the audience that night. The friend sitting next to me (also a Wanger newbit) commented approvingly “Brunnhilde is being sung by a lady named Hildegard — that’s promising.”

This was a few years before the Met finally caved to supertitles, so that single preparatory hearing was my only guide. It was up to Hildegard Behrens to communicate the range of human experience Brunnhilde encompasses in those three heartbreaking acts. I’ve seen and heard Brunnhildes who are better, in various moments and in various ways, but the moral authority and raw vulnerability of Behrens remains unmatched for me. In Act Two I was “lost” in terms of the libretto, but riveted on her presence in the middle of the stage. It’s not just her visuals, either — it’s there on the Levine recording on DG, where the vocally friendlier studio conditions highlight her expressive phrasing and (yes, I’m saying it) beautiful, sometimes radiant voice. (Note to the Hildegard hatas: just how hoarse would YOU be at the end of a four-night Ring?)

Germaine Greer says it better:

There is no chance that I will see a Brünnhilde so utterly destroyed, so uncompromisingly tragic ever again. I would have thought it impossible to show such a depth of devastation and helplessness in music, but Behrens did it. How she did it – whether by her utter absorption, her rapt earnestness or her lack of self-consciousness – I shall never know. Never to have seen her do it would be never to have understood how a preposterous musical drama, with absurdly affected DIY verse for a libretto, could be transmuted into the highest of high art.

Behrens is well represented on YouTube as Tosca, Isolde, Fidelio, Elektra (and Elettra), Elisabeth (Tannhauser), the Kaiserin (from Frau), etc.

The Met has a photo gallery tribute. But let’s give the last word to James Morris’s Wotan. This clip begins as Brunnhilde is silenced forever — at least to the ears of this “unhappy immortal.”

Today’s post is by Bonnie Gibbons.

Is Tchaikovsky an 18th Century Composer?

From tchaikovsky-research.orgSome comments concerning my rereading of Richard Taruskin’s chapter “Tchaikovsky and the Human” from his book Defining Russia Musically. Taruskin’s contention is that Tchaikovsky’s explicit advocacy of autocratic rule and its social structure, coupled with his determination to provide musical entertainment rather than dragoon a listener into the creator’s private egotistical orbit makes Tchaikovsky’s agenda an 18th century one.

Taruskin’s claim that Tchaikovsky is essentially an 18th century composer needs to be taken seriously; not because of his (neoclassic) pastisches, not because of his adoration of Mozart, and certainly not because of some similarity of technical means or stylistic profile — but because Tchaikovsky’s explicit aims and vision of the prupose of art is so consonent with Mozart and his colleagues’ musical aims.

But what a composer wants to accomplish isn’t necessarily what he does accomplish. Mozart and Tchaikovsky wrote music that pleased contemporary audiences, for sure. But so did Brahms and especially Wagner (which Taruskin explicitly places outside the orbit of the popular or consumer-oriented music). My experience as a classical music teacher for the last 20 years leads me to suspect that among a construable general classical music public Tchaikovsky and Brahms are roughly equivalent in appeal and Wagner ultimately dwarfs them. How many complete DVDs of the Ring are available? How many CDs? I can’t walk across the street without arguing the merits of various Wagner conductors. And I think Taruskin want’s to lay at the doorstep of Brahms, Wagner and their modern heirs a kind of blame for what he perceives to be a disastrous course of 20th century music en generale.

Another thing that bothers me about Taruskin generally is his inability to take seriously the aesthetics of passionate and sincere minority viewpoints. I promise you, as much as I love Tchaikovsky, I love Schoenberg more (and, in fact, for similar reasons). I respond to the feverish hysteria, the fecund melodiousness, the kaleidescopic colors, and even the hysteria which is occasionally present in both composers. Taruskin makes what I think is a crucial and correct point that Tchaikovsky anticipates and probably influences Mahler. If Tchaikovsky anticipates and influences Mahler, he necessarily anticipates and influences composers in Mahler’s wake who exemplify the diastrous 20th century musically.

Also, Taruskin’s fixation with the musicological Teutonic hegemony appears to me to be professionally inspired and I can only sympathize wholeheartedly for the company he keeps in this regard. Right he is about the condescension and annoyingly jingoistic blather that has afflicted musicological discourse. Right he is, too, that the ghettoization of composers outside the Germanic mainstream has been pervasive and most likely carries racist and bullying overtones. Right he is that the so-called universal is a Teutonocentric fantasy.

Absolutely salutory are Taruskin’s perceptive comments on Tchaikovsky’s astounding technical prowess. Nobody needs to appreciate Tchaikovsky: but to deride his superlative competence in almost every meaningful area of musical technique is to reveal oneself as either bigoted or ignorant. And, in fact, the bigoted are nearly always ignorant though I don’t necessarily contentthat the ignorant are always bigoted.

By far, the most powerful and persuasive part of Taruskin’s essay is his brilliant examination of the sociological totems represented by Tchaikovsky’s use of the waltz and polonaise. I’m also quite persuaded by his analogy between Tchaikovsky’s and Mozart’s use of contradanse. Also, I find it totally refreshing that the homosexual element in Tchaikovsky is relegated to the personal sphere and not seen as some overpowering conditioning element of the music itself.

(I’ve never heard a gay note in my life, although, come to think of it, g-sharps are iffy. And Francophilia doesn’t imply a gay agenda. Goodness, it’s iconic that the French are the ménage à trois people!

Taruskin discusses an apparently dismal conference on Tchaikovsky in which the idea of “exemplary 19th century composer” is said to exist. Lemme tell ya about exemplary composers: Grieg is the exemplary composer of the snowflake-motifed, sweater-wearing, cosy domestic amateur tradition in Bergen, Norway. Wagner is the exemplary composer for the lengthy opera on mythological themes. Percy Grainger is the exemplary composer for the “my composer must be a curly-headed Scandinaviophile” audience. There is no such thing as an exemplary composer and it’s embarassing to try to find one.

As an aside I’ve found Tarusking comment that in Fidelio Beethoven had discovered a limitation in himself (i.e. that he was not an opera composer). I agree. But the irony is that Fidelio is a great as any Mozart opera and Mozart’s operas are every bit as great as they are made out to be. But that’s Fidelio.  Underailed by a clumsy theatrical modus operandi, Fidelio shows a dimension beyond the merely practical. As all great music does. Here I find a strain in Taruskin’s writings to be problematical: the exaltation of general (and thereby inevitably visceral) popular appeal as an endorsement of the art in question.

To make an irony I’d like to suggest that Tchaikovsky was no more an 18th century than a 19th century composer. His suites, ballets, and serenades, etc. are hardly negligible in his output in quantity or quality. And his yoking of the Mozartian with the Gothic in The Queen of Spades is a pinnacle of the operatic repertoire. But here, naturally, I’m being impartial. The fact that The Queen of Spades is my favorite Russian opera altogether has no role in my completely objective evaluation.

As for the 19th century, you can hardly discount the influence of Berlioz and Liszt in works such as Francesca da rimini and the Manfred symphony. For that matter, you can find a Mendelssohnian strain in Tchaikovsky — look at the Scherzo of the 1st Symphony. You can find Chopin and Schumann as wall (and not just because they’re specifically invoked) in his Op. 72 piano works. In fact, the spirit of Schumann seems to hover over Tchaikovsky frequently.

Like all truly great artists, Tchaikovsky is ultimately irreducible. Taruskin provides a welcome corrective but he also notices, for instance, an “underrated skill at grotesquerie” in Tchaikovsky (hardly a Mozartian trait) and he is perfectly willing to invoke patent Russianism is the music when it suits his purpose to refute the likes of Cesar Cui and patent Germanisms (i.e. the beginning of the Finale of the 2nd Symphony) to refute the ghettoizing judgments of David Brown, etc.

By the way, David Brown’s Tchaikovsky article in the New Grove may not be a disgrace, but it’ll do till the disgrace gets here. Poznansky’s book Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man is reasonable, meticulous, sober and exceptionally well documented. But I couldn’t possibly justify it as the text for my class because it wholly excludes musical analysis and concentrates for 600 pages on issues related to Tchaikovsky’s sexuality. This is too much. The impression from Poznansky is problematical although perfectly fair. This book is perhaps a necessary refutation of previous biographies of Tchaikovsky but frankly, the overall assessment of Tchaikovsky’s character could be suitably condensed into a much smaller span. An unexpurgated collection of Tchaikovsky’s letters (which I understand Poznansky has been working to achieve) could conceivably replace his biography.

Periodically in my reading of the Poznansky I found it necessary to set the book aside and listen to the waltz from the Serenade for Strings, the final scene of Mazeppa, or Sleeping Beauty to remind me of why I was reading the book in the first place.

Defining Russia Musically by Richard Taruskin

Get to know Tchaikovsky Online

Sheepishly, as usual, I find myself down to the wire in releasing the syllabus and book recommendations for my two upcoming classes that start next week.

But those in the Tchaikovsky course (beginning this coming Thursday) are in luck. Bonnie has located two free web resources to introduce you to Tchaikovsky’s biography and milieu through the prism of his Fourth Symphony (one of his two “biographical” symphonies).

The first is a 60-minute web video on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s website, captured from their terrific “Beyond the Score” program. Narrator Gerard McBurney interprets the symphony as a convergence of Tchaikovsky’s literary influences and personal romantic upheavals. Like any self-respecting, late romantic orchestral composer, it seems that Tchaikovsky cast himself as his favorite literary characters, viewed his own romantic disappointments as another episode of Eugene Onegin or War and Peace, and used the fourth symphony as the soundtrack.

The second pick is another treatment of the Fourth Symphony from the Keeping Score website (a project of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony). Rather than watching a straight video, you play interactively with the four movements of the 4th Symphony as a representation of Fate, Childhood, Play and Russia. Bonus features include a timeline showing Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries and a look at the instruments and their special moments in the symphony. In addition to the free web application, there’s a DVD for rent on Netflix or for sale on Amazon.

Both of these are an entertaining basic intro to Tchaikovsky himself as well as the symphony. The CSO program is more literary, while the SanFran program tells you a little more about the music of the symphony and the historical context.

YouTube Symphony Mashup

Google’s YouTube Symphony plays live at Carnegie Hall this evening under Michael Tilson Thomas. Head to YouTube at 7:30 ET to watch the concert.

The “Global Mashup” is ready for your viewing pleasure right now. This part of the YouTube Symphony project is a video performance of Tan Dun’s “Eroica” (composed for this project) spliced together from the audition videos.

Offhand I heard homages to (obviously) Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, Wagner’s Valkyrie yodels, and… Magnificent Seven by Elmer Bernstein? Did I hear that right?

More about the YouTube Symphony, which began life as one of those personal projects Google famously encourages their employess to explore during 20% of their workweek:

Meet the YouTube Symphony

YouTube Symphony: The Latest Thing to Do About Classical Music