When we think of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), if we think of him at all, what comes to mind are two of his operas – The Fairy’s Kiss and Dido and Aeneas – and perhaps a few well-worn songs. You’ll pardon me the comparison, but this is like knowing Beethoven only through his first and second symphonies and few of his folksong arrangements. The comparison to Beethoven is apt. Purcell was not just the greatest English composer of his time but arguably the most important and innovative composer living and working during the second half of the seventeenth century. Purcell’s contemporary, the English musician and Professor of Music at Cambridge University Thomas Tudway (circa 1650-1726), spoke for pretty much his entire musical community when he called Purcell: “The greatest genius we ever had.” That appraisal stood for well over two hundred years; the next English-born composer of (perhaps) equal stature to Purcell was Benjamin Britten, who was born in 1913 and died in 1976. In his time, Purcell was referred to by his contemporaries as being as “our musical Shakespeare.” (Observes our contemporary, the English harpsichordist and music director Trevor Pinnock: “Wherever Shakespeare went, pulling the whole English cultural bandwagon […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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Joan Sutherland (1926-2010) had a preternaturally big voice, one that spanned three octaves and had the size and punching power of Sonny Listen. Yet she had the vocal “hand speed” of Sugar Ray Leonard and was consequently able to specialize in repertoire ordinarily sung by women with voices lighter, smaller, and presumably more flexible than hers. That repertoire was the so-called “bel canto”, or “beautiful song/beautiful singing” style characteristic of much late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century Italian opera. Here is the textbook definition of “bel canto” from Nicolas Slonimsky, writing in Baker’s Dictionary of Music: “The art of lyrical and virtuosic performance as exemplified by the finest Italian singers of the 18th and 19th centuries, in contrast to the declamatory singing style brought into such prominence by Wagner. The term represents the once glorious tradition of vocal performance for beauty’s sake. The secret of bel canto was exclusively the property of Italian singing teachers. It was, above all, applied to lyric singing, particularly in opera. The operatic repertoire composed to highlight bel canto singers, notably early Romantic Italian opera, fell into disuse until after World War Two, when singers such as Callas, Sutherland, and Sills brought new life to the works […]
Continue ReadingClassics for Pleasure and Music for Pleasure The British record label Classics for Pleasure was introduced in 1970 as a budget, “classical music” label. The majority of its releases are reissues from the EMI/His Master’s Voice (HMV) catalog. Classics for Pleasure is a subsidiary of the London-based Music for Pleasure Limited, a holding company for a number of record labels and music publishing companies. The whole shebang is a subsidiary of Parlophone Records (founded in 1896 and today headquartered in London), which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, which is a subsidiary of the multinational natural resources, chemical, media, telecommunication, venture capital, and real estate giant Access Industries. Whew. Let’s get back to Classics for Pleasure and its parent company, Music for Pleasure. Some good people might find these names an irksome, implying as they do a sort of vanilla, easy-listening musical content (commute-time, wallpaper music: Vivaldi mandolin concerti and Pachelbel’s Canon-like fare, the sonic equivalents of Velveeta on Wonder Bread with a dash of mayo). At the same time, the names/phrases Classics for Pleasure and Music for Pleasure implies that “classics” and “music” not so described are, somehow, unpleasurable. There is a school of […]
Continue ReadingThe backstory: in 1970, the 26-year-old Tilson-Thomas conducted Ruggles’ masterwork – Sun-Treader – in concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (That performance was followed by Tilson-Thomas’ recording of Sun-Treader with the BSO recommended above.) At the time, Carl Ruggles was 94 years old and living in a nursing home in Bennington, Vermont (he died the following year, in 1971). We’ll let MTT tell the story from here: “Ruggles, enigmatic and granitic man – how his music and spirit have haunted me. I first heard his music at age thirteen. The piece was Men and Mountains and I remember how stunning it was. Years later I began to perform Mr. Ruggles’ music and to discover more of his remarkable testimony in each new performance. The fascination continued over the years and turned to awe and appreciation as through repeated performances I began to understand the depth of the music and power of its testimony. It was in this mood that following a performance of Sun-Treader with the Boston Symphony, I set out to meet Mr. Ruggles. Syrl Silberman of WGBH-TV in Boston had worked on a film about him and had become friendly with the old man, who even then […]
Continue ReadingJohann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) was, in his lifetime, considered Beethoven’s equal as a pianist and, if not his equal as a compositional innovator, then a rather more listenable alternative. The former head music critic for The New York Times, Harold Schonberg, put it this way: “He [Hummel] was a highly regarded composer in his day – overrated then, underrated now.” A snooty but not inaccurate appraisal. And it is true that as a composer – particularly as a composer of piano music – Hummel remains far underrated today. When his music is discussed, on those fairly rare occasions when it is discussed at all, it is assigned to that strange, in-betweeny netherworld as being “transitional.” In the case of Hummel’s music, it is blithely classified as being “proto-Romantic” or “post-Classical,” as if it were a lesser hybrid (half-breed?) between two otherwise “pure” musical styles, a cross between old music and new music; between the Classical era ideal of the composer as craftsperson and the Romantic era vision of artist-as-hero. Well, pooh on all of that, and double-pooh on these useless categories so casually bandied about by program annotators and presumed music historians. As both a pianist and composer, Hummel […]
Continue ReadingCompositional Bipolarity Alec Wilder, in his classic study, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1972), writes: “Vernon Duke was only one half of his musical self; the other half was Vladimir Dukelsky, a composer of concert works. Unfortunately for all of us, the concert, so-called ‘serious’ side of the man’s talent never, so far as I know, attempted to employ his popular side in a ‘third stream’ fashion [meaning a free mix of popular music and concert music content]. For although he was born in another culture, his absorption of American popular music writing was phenomenal. One never was aware in his songs of his not being rooted in this culture, as I was, for example, when I listened to the theater songs of Kurt Weill.” Duke/Dukelsky addressed his musical “duality” this way: “I always feel the duality in myself. My light music [meaning popular music] is decidedly extrovert, my serious music is introvert. There’s my Carnegie Hall self and my Lindy’s self [‘Lindy’s Restaurant’ was a famed Jewish deli in New York City’s Theater District on Broadway between 49th and 50th streets, named for its owner, Leo “Lindy” Lindermann], my Russian heritage and my American […]
Continue ReadingCarl Nielsen (1865-1931) composed six symphonies which are, outside of Denmark, his best-known works. His first symphony was completed 1892, when he was 27 years of age. As we would expect from a first symphony by a young composer, Nielsen’s influences are clearly in evidence: the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) and the German-born, Viennese composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), both of whom were still alive and kicking when Nielsen completed the symphony. (We’d observe that Nielsen chose his principal influences wisely.) In his Symphony No. 2, Op. 16 (of 1902) and Symphony No. 3, Op. 27 (the “Sinfonia Expansiva”, of 1911), Nielsen’s compositional voice is very much more his own. His Symphony No. 4 (composed in 1916, during World War One) and Symphony No. 5 (composed in 1920, not long after the conclusion of the war) stand apart from the other four. They are both exceedingly dramatic, at moments even brutal works, each representing a “battle between the forces of order and chaos.” No doubt due to their viscerally powerful expressive impact, Nielsen’s 4th and 5th Symphonies are his best-known and most popular works outside of Denmark. Finally, Nielsen’s Symphony No. 6, subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (“Simple Symphony”, of 1925), reverts to […]
Continue ReadingA Nice Hike In early September of 1940, Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma (1879-1964) – now married to the Jewish author Franz Werfel (1890-1945) – walked from France to Spain in order to escape the Nazi occupation of Europe. (Time out. We read constantly about those intrepid individuals who, in order to escape the Nazis, “walked across the Pyrenees from occupied France to neutral Spain.” The image so conjured is one of daring and desperate people braving an alpine climb and descent – after all, the Pyrenees rise to a height of 11,168 feet – all the while avoiding border patrols, searchlights, and barking dogs. In fact, the crossing from the French town of Cerbère to the Spanish town of Portbou involves walking a roughly two-mile-long path up and over a hill along the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a stroll, for heaven’s sake, one that hardly constitutes a hike!) Alma had been told to bring only what she could carry, but she showed up in Marseilles (the point of departure for escapees) with twelve trunks worth of luggage. The man who arranged her escape from France was the American journalist and first order hero Varian Fry (1907-1967). (For our information: working for […]
Continue ReadingRomanticism The nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new sort of European literature. The cutting-edge writers of the time were consumed by a number of particular themes: the glorification of extreme emotion, particularly love; nostalgia for a distant, mystical, legendary past; and a passionate enthusiasm for nature wild and free, unspoiled by humanity and its bourgeois values! Soon enough, visual artists and composers embraced these themes as well. For many such nineteenth century writers, poets, visual artists, and composers, over-the-top expressive content, nostalgia for the past, personal confession and the depiction of nature wild and free were the vehicles for achieving what their art – at its essence – was all about: spontaneous and magnified emotional expression. The adjective “Romantic” came to be used to describe such emotionally charged and self-expressive art. And no nineteenth century, “Romantic era” composer believed more fervently in music as personal, emotional, and spiritual confessional than did Robert Schumann (1810-1856). Robert Schumann: Early Life He was born in the central German town of Zwickau on June 8, 1810, the fifth and last child of August Schumann and Joanna Christiana Schumann (née Schnabel). We are told that if we do what we love, we’ll […]
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