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Wolfgang Amadeus Remembrance

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January 27, 2016

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart shares his birthday with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. There’s a moving kind of harmony in that . . . . Albert Einstein once said that Mozart’s music was “so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.” Later in life, the scientist confessed that “Mozart remains as beautiful and tender as he always was and always will be.” Here’s to Mozart in 2016 — and always — with his very last concerto, his only one written for the clarinet. Its middle movement is of the ever-present stuff Einstein mentions: both inimitable and inevitable.

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Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten: A Language of Remembrance

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November 11, 2015
Composer Arvo Pärt

Composer Arvo Pärt

I typically mark Remembrance Day (Veterans Day in the U.S.) by playing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, a dramatic, secular meditation on memory, war and loss. Here, however, I’d like to draw attention to another related musical meditation.

Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, is a reflective homage, a remembrance of the composer of the War Requiem. It simply doesn’t get more inward looking, more striking, than this. Pärt summons a musical language from an age we don’t know but which is paradoxically our own.

“The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.”

(The old Lie; How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.) – Wilfred Owen, 1918

Shantih    shantih    shantih

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Leonin and Perotin: Windows into Notre-Dame

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July 7, 2012

Perotin Magnus (the Great) at Notre Dame

The history of early music is largely nameless, but two faces peer out at us from a cathedral in 12th / 13th century Paris.  We know little about the working lives of Leonin (1159–1201) and Perotin (1170–1236) but we owe much of what we do have to the mysterious Anonymous IV, the name attributed to an English student who studied or worked at Notre Dame in the late 13th century.  It’s Anonymous IV who, in his manuscript on medieval music, writes of the Notre Dame School of composition and singles out Leonin and Perotin as the two leading musical figures in the first decades of the cathedral’s history.  We can assume that there were still others; but in naming two of them, that nameless writer gives shape to the stone.

Anonymous IV tells us that Leonin first compiled the Magnus liber organi – the Great Book of Organum – which contained written notation for chant settings that accompanied events of the liturgical year.  In Leonin’s music, we find some of the earliest examples of polyphonic writing: music for two voices (“voices” here referring to the number of distinct vocal parts, not to the number of singers proper).  In essence, Leonin slowed down the plainchant of the Gregorian tradition to create a drone-like foundation, above which he could position a wandering melodic line.  This new layering of vocal parts was known as organum duplum or two-part polyphony.  You can listen to Leonin’s impressive Videnrunt omnes here (sung by Tonus Peregrinus).

Perotin elaborated on Leonin’s creative impulse and wrote music for three, even four, voices.  Anonymous IV points to two instances of Perotin’s organum quadruplum – Sederunt principes and Viderunt omnes – in which the rhythmic swirling and interweaving of vocal parts make for a strikingly original sound-world.  Experience Sederunt principes, yet another window into the medieval imagination, as performed by The Hilliard Ensemble.  It was first performed in dedication to a new wing of Notre Dame Cathedral in 1199.

New sound to fill new space.

Prior to these developments, liturgical chant remained relatively static, transmitted orally and, in accordance with Catholic Church decree, unchanged.   (I am reminded of brother Jorge’s regretful insistence, in The Name of the Rose, that there can be no development in human knowledge and art, but only “a continuous and sublime recapitulation.”*)  In Leonin and Perotin, plainchant remained theologically tethered to the Church, but was increasingly musically freed through polyphonic exploration.  In some sense, there’s a slow reaching out by the artist for relative creative freedom, if still willingly swallowed up by an anonymous, devotional whole.

Like Notre Dame’s vaulted ceilings, Leonin and Perotin help us to map out some semblance of the medieval imagination, which sought at once to mirror the orders of the cosmos and to point beyond the fabric of the material world.  It is a foreign land, perhaps, but it’s hard to feel like a tourist when listening.

Reconciling the beauty of medieval art with the dark dance of dogma, with bloodied stones since washed clean, remains an impossible calculus.  Still, it’s quite possible that in these works of the medieval mind we are able to hear distant relatives of ourselves.

It’s certainly true that, thanks to Anonymous IV, we’re able to name at least two of them.

———-

Notes:

*Quote taken from Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (Harcourt, 1983).

**Photograph, “Interior of Notre-Dame,” © Declan McCullagh.  You can visit his website here.

Recommended Recordings:

  •  Perotin (The Hilliard Ensemble; ECM New Series 1385, 1988).
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Innervisions: Arnold Schoenberg, the Painter

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January 22, 2012

Schoenberg's "Gehendes Selbst-Portrait" / "Going Self-Portrait," 1911. All images courtesy of the Arnold Schönberg Centre, Vienna*

In a prior piece on Alban Berg (1885-1935) I pointed to a 1910 painting of the composer.  (You can click here to view it.)  The painter was Berg’s composition teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.  The idea there was that the portrait leaves us with a faint trace of life in pre-war Vienna – a period which, as Stefan Zweig idealized it in The World of Yesterday, was for the citizens of that city an “age of security.”

In later letters, Schoenberg would also recall the period as a time of peace and pause, before that age of war and unrest when twentieth century European history seesawed into darkness.  With a view to the composer’s creative life, the pre-war years find Schoenberg undertaking his earliest experiments with atonal composition – listen to the Six Little Piano Pieces of 1911, for instance – and in this respect mark his first soundings into the uncharted depths of the future.  But they were also the years in which he experimented most concentratedly with painting.

Enter Schoenberg the painter.

"Blue Self-Portrait" (February 1910)

From 1908-1912 Schoenberg produced paintings and sketches of distinctive style.  While he was hesitant to consider himself part of an established school of any kind, his work is generally recognized to orbit the Expressionist movement.  For a short time, Schoenberg even belonged to Wassily Kandinsky’s Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group, a circle of friends who held that the ultimate aim of art was to seize and give expression to the spiritual dimensions of experience.

In a telling 1911 letter to Kandinsky, Schoenberg expresses his belief in the unconscious character of artistic perception:

"Hass" / "Hate" (October 1910)

“. . . I am sure that our work has much in common – and indeed in the most important respects: In what you call the ‘unlogical’ and I call the ‘elimination of the conscious will in art’. . . .  Every formal procedure which aspires to traditional effects is not completely free from conscious motivation.  But art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself!  Express oneself directly!  Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.  Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive. . . . But whoever is capable of listening to himself, recognizing his own instincts, and also engrossing himself reflectively in every problem, will not need such crutches.  One does not need to be a pioneer to create in this way, only a man who takes himself seriously – and thereby takes seriously that which is the true task of humanity in every intellectual or artistic field: to recognize, and to express what one has recognized!!!  This is my belief.”**

In this way, many of Schoenberg’s paintings aim less to represent the world in its outward semblance than to capture things as they “really” are on the subjective plane: the world refracted through the lens of the inner eye.

"Denken" / "Thinking" (October 1910)

Consider “Thinking,” the painting immediately above.  It’s just one expression of thinking in its most immediate or unconscious sense: the subjective experience of thinking in a manner that’s unmediated by the concepts that ordinarily order, the lines that frequently frame conscious thought.  It’s a glimpse of the mind’s eye, the artist’s experience freed from the terms of traditional perspective.

"Blauer Blick" / "Blue Gaze" (1910)

If the perspective in Schoenberg’s paintings feels askew, it’s because artistic expression in the expressionistic mode isn’t meant to capture the world as it outwardly appears to us through our sensory faculties.   This orientation, like art itself, is ultimately born of the unconscious.  Freed from both the mind-forged manacles of conscious thought and the shackles of sensory perception, the objects of the external world fade.

Schoenberg’s Gazes

What is experience without the tether of the senses?  Schoenberg’s mesmerizing set of visions and gazes gives us some feeling for his conception of it.  Nature abandoned, the artist inwardly encounters gazes rather than faces:

"Blick" / "Gaze" (May 1910)

“I painted gazes . . . .  That is something that only I could have done, for it is in my nature and is fully opposed to the nature of an actual painter.  I have never seen faces, but rather, where I have seen into others’ eyes, only their gazes.  From this is also happens that I can recreate the gaze of a man.  A painter, however, captures with a glance the entire human being – I only his soul.”***

According to Schoenberg’s view of artistic experience, at least, these gazes subsist on a plane of perception where everything is illuminated by the light of the unconscious.  They are visions – let’s call them innervisions – beyond the pale of the senses.  It isn’t important whether Schoenberg’s conception of artistic perception is wholly accurate; more crucial is the recognition that experience (both conscious and unconscious) is rich and layered, that there are many different ways of perceiving it – and that art is one very real part of it.

What’s ultimately important is Schoenberg’s belief that the vision of the creative artist isn’t veiled by custom.  Instead, one task of his imaginative work is to pierce the fabric of convention – a life of humdrum habit – and to tune in to a key of experience to which we customarily grow deaf.  In “listening to himself,” the artist’s aim is to probe the innermost reaches of the self and to translate that which he inwardly hears into a form that we, the onlookers, can outwardly witness.

Schoenberg’s paintings stand as glimpses into the creative depths of one of the twentieth century’s great composers: innervisions of a man who strove for art that was decidedly more than meets the eye.

"Christus" / "Christ" (October 1910)

__________

References and notes:

  • *  All images appear courtesy of the Arnold Schönberg Centre in Vienna.  You can visit them here for a “complete printed overview of Schönberg’s pictoral works.”
  • **  In a letter of January 24, 1911, A Schoenberg Reader, edited by Joseph Auner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 90-91.
  • ***  My translation.  The original German reads:

“Ich habe Blicke gemalt […] Das ist etwas, was nur ich getan haben konnte, denn es ist aus meiner Natur heraus und ist der Natur eines wirklichen Malers vollkommen entgegengesetzt.  Ich habe niemals Gesichter gesehen, sondern, da ich den Menshen ins Auge gesehen habe, nur ihre Blicke.  Daher kommt es auch, dass ich den Blick eines Menschen nachmachen kann.  Ein Maler aber erfasst mit einem Blick den ganzen Menschen – ich nur seine Seele.”

(Cited in Elmar Budde, “‘Ut musica pictura – ut pictura musica’: Musik und Bild. Ein Rückblick nach vorn zu Arnold Schönberg,” in Der Maler Arnold Schönberg: Bericht zum Symposium, 11-13 September 2003.  Published 2004 by Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien, Wissenschaftszentrum Arnold Schönberg.)

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Merry Humbug: A Classical Christmas with Praetorius, Schütz, and Bach (featuring Heino and Hasselhoff)

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December 24, 2011

David Hasselhumbug - "The Night Before Christmas"

Christmas time is here, and with it the bescrooged revelation that people will use the festive season as an excuse to listen to some of the most torturous music to have been conjured in the human brain.  We should all, of course, be free to listen to whatever we feel pleases us most, and I have no trouble watching people listen to music – whatever the kind – on headphones.  But there’s a marked difference between the plotted murder in a private study and the circus of a public execution in town square, and one problem is that prefab holiday schmaltz greets you in the most public of spaces.  Picture Christmas music extending its net over the crowds in a shopping mall food court.  Merry humbug!

Someone was kind enough to put together this humorous pictorial run-through of the “Fifty Worst Christmas Albums of All Time.”  There’s something wowingly warped about so many of the albums pictured there – in the twilight zone manner, say, of North Korean propaganda posters.  So it has become my seasonal obligation to remember that two of the more otherworldly artists on that list – Hasselhoff and Heino – are not the only words that begin with the letter H.

Humbug!  

Happily, like Jacob Marley, Hasselhoff’s career as a pop artist is as “dead as a door-nail” – “a coffin-nail” – and future generations will chiefly remember the ghostly Heino for his memorable album art.

(Allow me here to link parenthetically to one of the most remarkable and utterly confounding holiday moments, Christmas with Heino, which is seemingly without parallel and possibly the stuff of pure transcendence.)

Jest aside, Christmas in Germany has not always been all Heino and Hasselhoff.  It was after all a German (and another “H”), Georg Friedrich Handel, who with the Messiah in 1742 gave the English-speaking world its most famous choral Christmas work.

Since Handel’s Messiah continues to fill concert houses the world-over, I want to point casually to three other masterworks (of German origin) that could be as mandatory a part of one’s holiday season as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” album, and the act of routinely spiking the eggnog.

I. Michael Praetorius: Mass for Christmas Morning (~1620)

Praetorius (1571–1621), possibly the first historically significant composer of Lutheran church music, put together his Christmas mass at some point towards the end of his life.  In a recording by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort we have one of the more remarkable performances of Christmas music on the market.  The album is one in a line of many McCreesh projects that attempt to reconstruct the experience of being in the particular time and place of a work’s genesis.

Listen here for a taste of what it might have been like to attend a Lutheran mass on Christmas morning in 1620 Dresden.  It’s an ambitious recording that breathes history, and as a musical experience, it’s incredible.

II. Heinrich Schütz: Weinachtshistorie (1664)

Schütz (1585–1672) was nearly 80 years of age when he published his Christmas Story in 1664.  As a young man, Schütz had studied under Gabrieli (and later Monteverdi) in Venice, the then-centre of European music.  In an attempt to write music fit for the ostentatious interior of St. Mark’s basilica, Gabrieli had taken to writing music on a grand scale: Dividing his choir and instrumentalists among the upper galleries on all sides of the room, he inaugurated the so-called polychoral style.  Schütz returned to Germany, heavily influenced by the musical life of Catholic Venice, and he took up work principally in Dresden, where he devoted his remaining decades to the composition of sacred music.  Like Luther, Schütz freed up the German language, and his Christmas Story of 1664 – which you can listen to here – is a fine and festive example of his art.

III. Johann Sebastian Bach: Christmas Oratorio (1734)

And where else to end this quick jaunt through Luther-land than with Bach (1685-1750), to whom all roads seem to lead?  You can listen to the opening movement of his Christmas Oratorio here.  Anyone who’s visited Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church (Thomaskirche) won’t have difficulty picturing the periwiged Bach leading his musicians on a Christmas afternoon in 1734:  Sunlight warms the stained-glass windows; a seasonal, communal calm meets the crisp air.  And then a thought – the thought of Heino, of Hasselhoff, creeps in.  Humbug!

Johann Sebastian Humbug (stained-glass window of Bach in the Thomaskirche, Leipzig.

Bach Humbug!  Merry, merry Humbug!
__________
Suggested Classical Recordings:
  • Praetorius: Mass for Christmas Morning (Paul McCreesh & the Gabrieli Consort; Archiv, 1994).
  • Heinrich Schütz: Weihnachts-Historie (Rene Jacobs & the Concerto Vocale; Hamonia Mundi, 2011).
  • J.S. Bach: Weihnachtsoratorium / Christmas Oratorio (Nikolaus Hanoncourt & the Concentus Musicus Wien (Teldec, 1993).
Very Special Mention:
  • Vince Guaraldi Trio: A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1965).
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Arnold Schoenberg: Brilliant Corners

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December 6, 2011

Arnold Schoenberg, 1935 (photograph by John Gutmann)

I’ve known people who gravitate to Schoenberg’s music in the way that one might to a burning building.  In my own apartment, Schoenberg (1874-1951) is pretty much the stuff of contraband, alongside Albert Ayler, Steely Dan and a host of others in whose music I take great pleasure but am forced to enjoy either on headphones or on the sneak.  My wife wants to assassinate the sax player on “Deacon Blues.”  My two Ayler albums have mysteriously vanished.  And if they could rig sound systems such that they would explode with the playback of a twelve-tone composition, my guess is that I’d be the unwilling owner of at least two.  It can take effort and patience to orient oneself in Schoenberg’s angled world.  But why should that keep us from listening?

What does it mean to orient oneself in listening?

Listen here to Glenn Gould in a performance of one of Schoenberg’s earliest experiments with so-called “atonal” composition, op.11.  It was Gould who once speculated that a child raised on a remote mountainside, and exposed to nothing but music without tonal centre, would still manage to find some kind of beauty in it.  There would be no equivalent measure by which to perceive what we, by force of habit, have come to call “dissonance.”  There would be no default point of vantage from which to consider that particular aspect of the world disorienting or unnatural.  The youngster would still, like us, be a creature of nature and of convention – just differently positioned, the music differently slanted.  If disorientation is everywhere our default condition, if we are born into the world without a fixed point of reference, then it becomes a matter of pure circumstance as to the formal means by which we come to arrange it.  Who has turned us around like this?

There’s a certain freedom in Gould’s line of thinking.  Music can challenge, and orienting oneself in listening can be a healthy fight for perspective.  Music, once impenetrable, can illuminate.

In an undated notebook entry from his last years, Schoenberg takes up the conventional association of music and the beautiful:

“My subject: beauty and logic in music, shall deal with the mutual relation between beauty and logic in music.  Its main purpose shall be to dethrone beauty as much as possible as a serious factor in the creation of music.

It shall be assumed that it is neither the aim of a composer to produce beauty nor is a feeling of beauty a producing ‘agent’ in his imagination.  It might and often does occur that, in spite of an occupation with a different direction, the complete work produces a feeling of beauty in a listener.”*

You could say that, for Schoenberg, the musical idea is everywhere greater than the mere notion of truth or beauty.  Conceptions of truth and beauty – and with them, musical styles, tastes – change.  Invention does not.  So long as we’re around, the musical idea, the human urge to shape sound in space, will subsist absolutely.

My own gateway to Schoenberg’s music was his only piano concerto.  You can listen here to one of the great living pianists, Mitsuko Uchida, reflect on her experience with the concerto, which she says “involves an enormous amount of brainwork . . . .  You must be stubborn to want to learn it.” While talking about music may not always be like dancing about architecture, nothing can replace listening: So here is the concerto in full.

Listening, like learning, can require a good deal of what Uchida calls “devotion.”  My own experience has been that the character of a work will reveal itself naturally, but generally with repeated listening.  A first listen is very much like attempting to view a mural at arm’s distance.  Every successive listen is a step back, and eventually, some kind of whole comes into view.

Orienting myself in this way, I’ve come to find that where Schoenberg’s world is loaded with sharp angles, it is also full of brilliant corners.

__________

* Quote taken from A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life, edited by Joseph Auner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984),  p. 326.  Sourced from archival material at the Arnold Schoenberg Centre in Vienna (T67.02, Notebook III).

Two Choice Recordings

  • Schoenberg: Piano Works – Glenn Gould (2CD reissue on Sony, 1995)
  • Piano Concerto etc. – Mitsuko Uchida (with Pierre Boulez & the Cleveland SO; on Philips, 2001)
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Pablo Casals (I): Bach’s Cello Suites

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September 28, 2011

Casals, Abbaye Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, 1954 (copyright Yousuf Karsh)

No conversation about historic recordings of J.S. Bach’s music can begin to take flight without mention of Pablo Casals’ early discs of the Six Suites for Solo Cello.  And no musician has been more closely associated with the Suites than the Catalan cellist who first discovered a dusty score of the set in a small shop on a Barcelona side street.  That was in 1890, just as he was entering his teens.  Casals would later tour them in the interwar years, eventually giving them relative permanence on record, both in sessions at Abbey Road and in Paris (1936-39).

Watch him perform the first half of the opening Suite in this documentary footage taken in the French abbey pictured to the left, in 1954.

It’s important to remember the 1930s as a decade of certain striving for classical music in the studio.  Only to scratch the surface: In that period we find Edwin Fischer carrying out the first complete recordings of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on the piano (1934-36).  For his own part, pianist Arthur Schnabel sat down in the studio to capture the first complete cycle of the Beethoven sonatas (1932-35).  So it is that Casals’ recordings of the Six Suites take their place somewhere alongside those historic studio performances of the “48” and the “32,” respectively, the so-called “Old Testament” and “New Testament” of keyboard literature.

But when Casals set up to put down the complete performances of Bach’s music for solo cello, the six suites were not yet part of a fixed tradition of any kind.  If it’s true that tradition can never quite properly be called fixed, it’s still the case that unlike Fischer’s contemporaneous recordings of Bach, or Schnabel’s of Beethoven, Casals was not putting his stamp on works that were considered part of a perceived “canon” as such.  Few, at the time, were at all familiar with the Cello Suites.  It was through Casals that they saw the light of day for the very first time, and it was Casals who illuminated the road for cellists and audiences to come.

In his memoirs, Licht und Schatten (Light and Shadow), Casals expresses the state of neglect into which the suites had fallen:

“These suites had been deemed academic rubbish, mechanical studies without musical warmth – can you imagine that?  How could they be considered cold – these works, that positively radiate poetry, warmth and feeling of sound?  They are the quintessence of Bach’s work as a composer – and Bach is the quintessence of all music.”*

Before Casals, to search for the suites was to jump at shadows.

In The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece journalist and author Eric Siblin illuminates the story of the cello suites in the context of Bach’s own life, sketches out Casals’ lifelong relationship with them, and colours the whole with personal reflections about his own initial search for, and continuing journey with Bach’s cello music.  Siblin’s stellar and approachable book is an invitation to come along for the ride.

As Siblin suggests, it is in no small way due to Casals that we have come to listen to Bach’s music for solo cello as part of a greater musical story of some kind.  These six soliloquies, voiced by a single performer on his solitary instrument, have since found their audience.  This is desert island music.  An inexhaustible well.

If there’s something strikingly apocryphal in talk about historic recordings such as these, then perhaps it’s because they have the paradoxical effect of holding a continued sway over the imagination while simultaneously granting us a view of how things no longer are.  It’s conceivably an expected consequence of the ever-changing nature of musical taste that the slippery notion of historic vision should be recast in the more measurable concept of the historical document.  This, so it goes, has proved to be the fate even of the most influential of “testaments.”

Casals’ Bach.  Cello Suite Jesus!

__________

*Quote taken from the liner notes to the Naxos Historical issue of Casals’ Cello Suites (linked to below).

**Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009).

Recommended Recording:

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Edwin Fischer’s Bach: Dropping the Curtain of Memory

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May 25, 2011

Edwin Fischer (1886-1960)

My grandfather, who was a disarmingly intelligent but warm and selfless storyteller (not pictured), once told me of a concert he attended at some point in his youth.  The recital took place in Düsseldorf, the city of his birth, and the pianist was Edwin Fischer.  I can’t be sure of the exact date of the performance, but my struggling sense is that it would have taken place somewhere between 1918 and 1925.  To insist on nailing down the specifics would be to crucify the moment, since so much of the meaning we draw from the past takes shape through a hazy layering of myth and fact.

“all the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory, the recognizable I, but changing from phase to phase as the butterfly changes once the cocoon is cleared, carrying nothing of what was into what is…” ~ William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

My grandfather never relayed to me the details of the program itself, but one thing stuck with him for decades: Fischer had the younger members of the audience join him on stage.  He invited them to gather around the piano to watch him perform an encore.  With that warm gesture my grandfather found himself next to one of the old masters of the piano, youthfully spellbound by a performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Minor (BWV 849)  from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Listen here to Fischer’s 1933 studio recording of that very piece.

The prelude is all beauty in a minor mode; the fugue, which eventually reaches out with its “trumpet call” (4.44), is a darkish gem.  My grandfather always singled out that moonstone as his most treasured of the “48.”

In 1960, some three to four decades after that recital in Düsseldorf, Fischer’s renowned student, Alfred Brendel, would reverently recollect that “with Fischer, one was in more immediate contact with the music: there was no curtain before his soul when he communicated with the audience.”*

When I listen to Fischer’s recording of the C-sharp Minor Prelude and Fugue, I suppose that a “curtain” of some sort does fall.  But it’s a curtain drawn by the invariably limited reach of memory, drawn between me and the faded world of a childhood in Düsseldorf, between me and a Germany pre-‘33.

_________

Recommended Recordings:

  • Edwin Fischer: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 & 2 (EMI).  You can read a review of this CD issue here.  These are the very first recordings of the complete “48.”  The same performances have been reissued on the Naxos Historical label, but I haven’t heard them and am unable to speak to their sound quality.

Notes:

* Quote taken from Alfred Brendel’s “Edwin Fischer: Remembering My Teacher” (1960), published in Thoughts and Afterthoughts but legally fetched online.

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Landowska and Tolstoy – Landowska and the Sounds of War: Two Historical Snapshots

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May 19, 2011

First Snapshot: Landowska and Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana (1907)

A significant 1907 black and white photograph captures a young Wanda Landowska seated at the piano.  Behind her stands Russian literary giant, Leo Tolstoy, in the Cossack garb of his later years.  The photograph was taken at the author’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, by his wife, Sophia.  That would have been just three years before Tolstoy would leave both his wife and estate behind, ultimately dying of pneumonia in a lonely railway station of the remote Russian countryside.

The image of Tolstoy in his last moments is a lasting, if silent one: the final flash of a life that was everywhere marked by an introspective struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of human existence.  In his A Confession of 1882, you can get Tolstoy’s own account of his spiritual development.

The 1907 photograph also takes on something of a resonant note in the context of Landowska’s own life.  For it was one of the few personal possessions she could bring with her to America, a few months after the 1940 approach of the invading Nazi forces forced her to flee her adopted home of Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.  It was there, on the outskirts of Paris, that Landowska had founded her Temple de la Musique Ancienne, her school and concert house.  Her longtime student, Denis Restout, recounts that the Nazis looted all of Landowska’s treasure – her numerous instruments, her thousands of books and manuscripts – and left not a wreck behind.

Second Snapshot: Landowska's Wartime Scarlatti

In one of Landowska’s many 1940 recordings, we have one of the more remarkable musical documents of the era.  In the studio Landowska performs one of Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas.  In the distance we hear the sounds of bomb or artillery fire as the Nazis move in on the French capital.

You can listen to it here.

The bombs fall at approximately the two-minute mark.  As the studio engineers run for cover, an extraordinarily concentrated Landowska completes the performance without missing a beat.  Amazing.

That recording must have taken place only hours before Landowska would leave France behind.  In that sense, and like her cherished photograph of 1907, it anchors a would-be fleeting moment.

These two snapshots of Landowska’s life remind me of the power of such historical documents: They capture, they anchor moments.  And in allowing us to hear echoes of the past, they anchor us as well.

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Wanda Landowska’s Goldberg Variations (1933). With a Thought on the Myth of Historically Informed Performance Practice

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May 12, 2011

Landowska at her Pleyel harpsichord in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt (1933).

In November of 1933, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska put to wax the very first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  It’s true that the Goldbergs, at least since the time of Glenn Gould’s historic piano recording for Columbia in 1955, have been widely recorded by pianists and harpsichordists alike.  In fact, the market has been so inundated with stellar recordings of the Golbergs that I sometimes catch myself wishing that the record industry – to summon but one of the mercilessly many, inane slogans from the business world – would diversify its portfolio.  But I know that it’s ultimately an embarrassment of riches, and I remind myself that in 1933, before the Goldbergs met the gramophone (and well before the levy broke) the public had very little opportunity to hear this great music.  Audiences, for that matter,  had very little exposure to the harpsichord, Landowska’s ultimate instrument of choice.  Peering into the early twentieth century, we find a time in which the harpsichord was perceived as a relic of a bygone age.  We find an era in classical music history that is often characterized as the golden age of the piano.


Landowska was instrumental in reviving the harpsichord as something other than a mere museum piece.  By the time of her first recording of the Goldbergs, Landowska had already publicly championed the instrument for close to three decades.  She had scoured Europe for clavichords, harpsichords and examples of other period keyboard instruments.  Her years of study of the keyboard music and literature of the preceding centuries culminated in 1909 with the publication of La musique ancienne.  Shortly thereafter, she commissioned the Pleyel company to build her a personalized instrument that was capable of greater dynamic range and tonal colour than more conventional, less muscled harpsichords.  She exhibited four such Pleyels to American audiences during a tour of the US in 1923.

You can hear one in action here in a sampling of her Paris Goldberg sessions of the subsequent decade.

Landowska’s performances, like her writings, were positioned and persuasive, and their impact on music culture was both immediate and sustained.  As a result, the harpsichord came to be resurrected as the instrument on which to perform Bach “properly.”  So considerable was the move to “proper” – which is to say “historically informed” –  performance practice that pianists were reluctant to go near the music of the periwigged one.  (Edwin Fischer and Claudio Arrau in the ‘30s, and Rosalyn Tureck shortly thereafter, are three of the more remarkable exceptions to that lamentable trend.)

The Harpsichord: “the sound of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.” ~ Sir Thomas Beecham

In Landowska’s wake came the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) brigade.  Its proponents, for whom I’ve coined the term HIPsters, followed Landowska in holding that music should be played in accordance with the standards of performance – and on the instruments – of the historical period in which it was composed.  Now it’s all in good fun that I call them HIPsters here; and I recognize that their opinions are rich and varied, if sometimes prone to dogmatism.  I’ll write more on another day, and I mention them here for a simple reason:

In following through on Landowska’s contention that musical interpretation should everywhere be informed by the principles of performance of a given historical period, HIPsters came to believe that Landowska’s own interpretations of Bach’s music were bygone and inauthentic – which is to say not “historically informed.”  Writing of the Pleyel and its chief ambassador, one writer tells it as he sees it:

“Undue emphasis was laid on the ability of the harpsichord to vary its tone color. . . .  These instruments produced an enormous variety of sounds, all bad.  However, Pleyel was blessed by the genius of a young Polish pianist named Wanda Landowska, who in a transcendent exercise of pure imagination found a way of using even the Pleyel to make viable music.  Thus, for nearly fifty years the movement to revive the literature of the harpsichord was to be dominated by this perversity.”*

The Pleyel was a harpsichord in name, perhaps, but it had the capacity for sonics that were not proper to keyboard instruments of Bach’s day.  Some chose to label it a “perversity,” and found equally perverse Landowska’s approach to Bach’s music: Landowska, high-priestess of Baroque music, played it like a hopeless Romantic (or so some thought).

“You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way.” ~ Wanda Landowska

It’s true that Landowska was also sometimes guilty of taking a firmer-than-necessary stance on the nature of correct or proper performance.  But the mythologized words above, so often taken out of context and even falsely attributed, were actually said in jest during an interchange with cello great Pablo Casals in 1941.

Landowska am Cembalo ("Landowska at the Harpsichord") 1920

In La music ancienne of 1909, published in English some 15 years later as Music of the Past, Landowska attempts to debunk “the sorry legislators of taste” who, in the name of progress, undersold the harpsichord and the musical riches of a bygone age: “In all times, not only the mediocre minds, but sometimes the cultivated musicians as well, have imagined that their art had surpassed that of their predecessors.”**

It turned out that in dusting off the harpsichord, Landowska had inadvertently laid the ground for a school of Historically Informed Performance that would imagine that its art had eclipsed her own.

Myths of progress, myths of “proper” performance: In the extreme, they run counter to the notion of art as something in motion, bound to unfold in ways unforeseen.

In coming to terms with the history of music, it’s as important to look ahead as it is to look back.  And that, in my view, is yet another expression of artistry that is truly historically informed.  If we can draw lines, if we can impose boundaries, then I see them as traced in sand rather than as set in stone.  I still believe that the history of music is guided by a principle of process rather than of progress.

Landowska’s 1933 recording of the Goldberg Variations – a work which she called “a secular temple of absolute music” – is an invitation to think it through all over again.

________

Recommended Recording:

  • J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations / Italian Concerto / Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (1933-36) – Wanda Landowska, Pleyel Harpsichord – Naxos Records. (More info here.)

Harpsichord Comparison:

You can sound out for yourselves the differences between Landoswka’s Pleyel harpsichord and a period harpsichord from Bach’s day by clicking on the two great performances below.  (Remember that in terms of audio fidelity, the Landowska has the disadvantage of some sixty years):

  • Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue – Landowska, Pleyel Harpsichord
  • Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue – Christophe Rousset, Harpsichord (Henri Hamsch, Paris 1751)

Notes:

* Quote taken from Frank Hubbard, “Reconstructing the Harpsichord,” in The Historical Harpsichord I, edited by H. Schott (New York, 1984), p. 8.

** Wanda Landowska, Music of the Past, translated by William Aspenwall Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), p. 5.

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