Though he composed many other works – including six operettas – John Philip Sousa’s great and enduring fame rests on his 136 marches. His first march, Review, was published in 1873; his final march, Library of Congress, begun in 1931, was left incomplete at his death in 1932. It wasn’t completed until 2003, when the Library of Congress commissioned Stephan Bulla (born 1953, the chief arranger of the United States Marine Corps band) to complete it. Sousa’s marches are so ubiquitous and so well-known that they have taken on the character of American folk music, as if they grew from “the fruited plain” of America’s soil all by themselves. Whether or not we know them by their titles – Semper Fidelis (the official march of the United States Marines); The Washington Post; The Thunderer; The Liberty Bell; Manhattan Beach; and El Capitan – we recognize them instantly, so much part of the national fabric they have become. Rather than attempt to tell the stories behind all or even a few of the Sousa marches on the prescribed discs, I have decided to tell the story of just one of them, as representative of them all. And for that I have […]
Continue Reading
Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Dr. Bob Prescribes – Page 3
Today is Halloween. Surprise, right? As if you didn’t know. For today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, I had considered recognizing the date by writing a post on “appropriately ghoulish concert works for your Halloween party.” I began assembling a list of the usual horrific suspects – Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, movements 4 and 5 (respectively entitled “March to the Scaffold” and “Dream of a Witch’s Sabbath”); Camille Saint-Saëns’ Dance Macabre; Franz Liszt’s Totentanz; the theme song from Petticoat Junction (“and there’s Uncle Joe, he’s-a movin’ kinda slow, at the Junction . . .”; damn, but that’ll send shivers up your spine!); and so forth. However, I soon realized that I was contemplating not a Dr. Bob Prescribes-type article, but rather, the sort of post for which the internet was invented: top ten (or twenty or thirty) liszts (yes, that was intentional) that present us with an array of items even as those items are trivialized by appearing on the list and by the minimal bit of explanation that accompanies them. As a public service, then, I have reviewed an all-too-large number of such “Halloween concert music” posts on the internet, and would recommend the following as the best of the bunch, […]
Continue ReadingThe First “Talking Picture”? For as long as I’ve been aware of the movie The Jazz Singer, its title has always been preceded or followed by the phrase, “the first talking picture,” meaning the first major, full-length commercial film to contain spoken dialogue. This is true but only just; in truth, the movie contains a total of two minutes’ worth of spoken dialogue, all of it improvised. The dialogue for the remainder of the movie is presented through the standard, silent movie use of “caption cards” (or what were called “intertitles”). We’d also note that all sorts of talking short films had been produced in the two years prior to the release of The Jazz Singer, films that used a variety of competing technologies for recording, reproducing, and synchronizingsound to visual imagery. (This issue of “synchronicity” was a huge, early challenge for the sound technologies employed during the “Early Sound Era.” We’ll talk more about synchronicity when we discuss the technology used to create The Jazz Singer, the Vitaphone process.) Nevertheless, it is that two minutes of spoken dialogue – along with its eleven musical numbers, six of them sung by its star, Al Jolson – that made The […]
Continue ReadingThe crowning glory of Schoenberg’s “emancipation of dissonance” period is Pierrot Lunaire. In terms of its importance and influence on the literate music of the twentieth century, Pierrot Lunaire stands second only to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky completed six months after Schoenberg (1874-1951) finished Pierrot. 1912 was, truly, a miraculous year for Western literate music. Pierrot Lunaire is a set of twenty-one songs for female voice and five instrumentalists playing piano, violin doubling on viola, cello, flute doubling on piccolo, and clarinet doubling on bass clarinet. Inspired by Pierrot Lunaire, this ensemble became so standard during the twentieth century that it is now simply referred to as a “Pierrot Ensemble.” Pierrot Lunaire was commissioned by a Viennese actress named Albertine Zehme (1857-1946), who asked Schoenberg to compose a work she could recite to a musical accompaniment. Schoenberg created a vocal part using a technique drawn from German cabaret music called Sprechstimme or “speech voice.” Sprechstimme is a sing-songy recitation technique in which the notated pitches are only momentarily touched upon, even as the rhythms, dynamics, and phrasing are performed as written. This is the first key to understanding, appreciating, and even enjoying Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: […]
Continue ReadingCamille Saint-Saëns and the Organ Saint-Saëns was almost certainly the greatest organist of his time and among the greatest who has ever lived. From 1857 until 1877 – from the age of 22 to 42 – he held the extremely prestigious position of organist at Paris’ most chic La Madeleine (Catholic) Church: a huge, Greek temple-like ediface in the 8th arrondisement, just south of the Place de la Concorde and east of the Place Vendôme. While Saint-Saëns could play anything he looked at (his sight-reading was as perfectly polished as any performance), his greatest skill as a performer was as an improviser. At La Madeleine, he performed an extended improvisation every Sunday, an improvisation typically based on the plainchant melody featured in that day’s mass. It was one of Saint-Saëns Sunday improvisations that prompted Franz Liszt to write in a letter to his friend Olga von Meyendorff that as an organist: “Saint-Saëns is not merely in the first rank but incomparable, as [Johann] Sebastian Bach is a master of counterpoint. No orchestra is capable of creating a similar impression; it is the individual communing with music rising from earth to heaven.” (Not that we need to be reminded, but this […]
Continue ReadingThis is an admittedly odd post. I’m not recommending Gould’s complete Mozart Piano Sonatas as a “principal set”; it’s just too quirky. For principal sets, I would heartily recommend Ronald Brautigam’s, performed on a fortepiano (on BIS); or Mitsuko Uchida’s recorded on a modern Steinway (on Decca). Typical of pretty much any Glenn Gould performance, his recording of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas might best be labelled as “Glenn Gould plays Mozart,” rather than as “Mozart, as played by Glenn Gould.” Nevertheless, Gould’s Mozart – like pretty much everything he played – can be compelling. Which makes Glenn Gould’s graceless carping about Mozart being a bad composer all the more curious. Gould’s infamous statement bears repeating: “Mozart died too late rather than too soon.” A quick story, then on to Gould’s video. Beethoven and Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K. 491 The first movement of Beethoven’s own Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37 of 1803 was inspired by Mozart’s Concerto in C Minor, K. 491 of 1786. Mozart’s concerto was a work that Beethoven often performed and adored. Beethoven once attended a rehearsal of Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto with his friend, the pianist-composer Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858). […]
Continue ReadingAs we observed in last week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, Act I of Lohengrin is a “public” spectacle. As such, Act I is about “appearances”: that is, how the characters choose to portray themselves in public. For example, what’s-his-name – the knight in shiny armor (“Waffenschmuck” in German) – would “appear” to be a God-sent hero. But in truth, we – as an audience – don’t really know that yet. In fact, we don’t know anything about him, not his name, where he’s from, whether he’s got a Quaalude problem, nada, and really, what’s with the swan? Friedrich von Telramund would “appear” to be an honorable knight of Brabant, yet he has sworn what “appears” to be false witness against a young-ish, dizzy blonde virgin, and that’s lower than whale poop. As of yet, we know little about his wife, Ortrud, except that she’s proud and imperious and seems to have a problem with swans. Of the principal characters, the only person who we sort of “know” is the distressed damsel herself, Elsa, who is pretty much exactly what she appears to be: a lonely, helpless, day-dreaming, kind of kooky post-adolescent duchess-in-waiting who has lost her parents and her brother and […]
Continue ReadingBoth Music History Monday (for August 28) and Dr. Bob Prescribes (for August 29) were dedicated to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. That Dr. Bob Prescribes post examined three traditional video performances of the opera, and ultimately recommended a Bayreuth Festival performance recorded in 1982, featuring Peter Hofmann as The Mystery Man in Silver (Lohengrin), Karan Armstrong as Elsa; Elizabeth Connell as Ortrud; and Leif Roar as Telramund; the production conducted by Woldemar Nelsson. Back on August 29, I wrote: “The recommended Peter Hofmann/Bayreuth Festival performance of Lohengrin is, in my estimation, the best traditional staging of the opera currently available on video. But it is not my favorite performance available on video, not by a long shot.” As it turns out, that favorite video performance is an “updated” (though not absurdly so) production that was recorded in Baden-Baden in 2006, featuring the cast listed above and conducted by Kent Nagano. Here’s what I really like about this Nagano-led performance. Lohengrin is a fairytale: it’s my experience that various Knights of the Holy Grail do not typically “show up” in little boats pulled by bewitched swans in times of dire need. In fact, they do not show up at all, whether by […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post acknowledged the strange and by any measure, stupid death of Charles-Valentin Alkan on March 29, 1888. (You needn’t flip back to yesterday’s Music History Monday; we’ll recount Alkan’s “death by umbrella rack” later in this post.) By the time Charles-Valentin Alkan died in Paris on March 29, 1888, at the age of 74, his decades-long self-imposed isolation had effectively removed him from public consciousness. According to his obituary in the influential Parisian music journal Le Ménestral: “Charles-Valentin Alkan just died. It was necessary for him to die in order to suspect his existence. [He was] an artist infinitely greater than thousands of his more celebrated and praised contemporaries.” Damn straight. Born on November 30, 1813, in Paris, Alkan (born Charles-Valentine Morhange) was a prodigiously gifted pianist and composer. Pianistically, both Chopin and Liszt considered him their equal. (According to the English music writer and critic Jeremy Nichols [born 1947], Alkan had: “a keyboard technique that even Liszt admitted was the greatest he had ever known.” As I’ve not been able to substantiate that statement from another source, I’ve put it here in parentheses.) The virtuoso pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow described Alkan as being: […]
Continue ReadingBruckner, whose 199th birthday was celebrated in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, was born in the Austrian village of Ansfelden, near Linz. His father – Anton Senior – was the town schoolmaster and the church organist, and it was at the local Catholic Church that Bruckner heard his first music, sang as a choirboy, and learned to play the violin and organ from his father. Bruckner was educated in the churches and monasteries of his native Upper Austria, and for his entire life, the Catholic Church was Bruckner’s spiritual home, his refuge, and his inspiration. Bruckner was as devout as they come, and he seemed to have believed completely that everything he did should honor God. Bruckner’s faith in his god might have been exactly what it appeared to be: religious altruism. But knowing the guy as we do, it’s also difficult not to see that faith as a compensation for his pathological lack of faith in himself. As a young adult, despite his musical training and obvious talents as a musician, he apparently had little belief in his own abilities. The consensus today is that as a young man Bruckner lacked the confidence or the grit to brave the […]
Continue Reading