This Week in Classical Music: September 18, 2023.  Several conductors.  We missed a lot of anniversaries while exploring the music of the transitional period between the Renaissance and early Baroque.  Today we’ll get back to a group of conductors.  First, Karl Böhm, one of the most successful of them.  Böhm was born on August 28^th of 1894 in Graz, Austria.  His career took off in the 1920s, with some help from Bruno Walter; in 1927 Böhm was appointed the chief musical director in Darmstadt, and in 1931 he took the same position at the prestigious Hamburg Opera.  In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany and Böhm took over the Dresden Semper Opera, after Fritz Busch, the previous director, went into exile.  Böhm was a friend of Richard Strauss and conducted several premiers of his operas.  In 1938 Böhm appeared at the Salzburg Festival, and in 1943 took over the famous Vienna opera.  For many years Böhm was a Nazi sympathizer, though never a member of the NSDAP; after the war, he went through a two-year denazification period, and then his career took off again.  He continued his engagements with Vienna and Dresden, conducted in South America, and made a very successful New York debut in 1957.  He frequently led the Metropolitan, premiering operas by Berg and Strauss and successfully conducting many of Wagner’s operas (Birgit Nilsson debuted under Böhm’s baton).  Böhm’s final engagements were in London, at Covent Garden and with the London Symphony.  He died on August 14^th of 1981, two weeks shy of his 87^th birthday.

Here is Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), a tone poem from 1898.  Karl Böhm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.  This recording was made in 1976.  Also, quite recently we came across a DW documentary from 2022 called Music in Nazi Germany: The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz (here).  It’s very much worth watching.  The maestro in question is not Karl Böhm but Wilhelm Furtwängler, eight years older than Böhm and more established.  Still, much of what is said in the documentary about Furtwängler applies to Böhm (we think that to an even higher degree).  A note: the “kapellmeister” of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, Alma Rosé, mentioned in the documentary, died there in April of 1944.  Alma was the daughter of Arnold Rosé, the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic for 50 years and the leader of the famous Rosé Quartet.  Alma’s mother was Gustav Mahler’s sister. 

We mentioned Bruno Walter’s name above; he also happens to be one of the conductors we wanted to write about.  Walter was born on September 15^th of 1876 in Berlin.  We celebrated him several years ago here.  At least as talented as Böhm, his life couldn’t have been more different.  Walter was Jewish, for many years he collaborated closely with Mahler and, in 1912, led the posthumous premier performance of the composer’s Ninth Symphony.  He was the music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he conducted most of Wagner’s operas.  Walter escaped from Germany in 1933 (at the time he was the principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra).  After working in Europe, he moved to the US in 1939 and settled in Beverly Hills, the area that hosted a large German expat community.  In the US, he worked with many orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.  Bruno Walter was 85 when he died in 1962.  Here Bruno Walter is playing the piano and conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20.  This is a live recording made on November 3^rd of 1939.

Just to list other conductors in our group: István Kertész (b. August 28, 1929); three conductors, born on September 1: Tullio Serafin (in 1878), Leonard Slatkin (in 1944), Seiji Ozawa, (in 1935).  Christoph von Dohnányi was born on September 8, 1929, and Christopher Hogwood, on September 10, 1941.

This Week in Classical Music: September 18, 2023.  Several conductors.  We missed a lot of anniversaries while exploring the music of the transitional period between the Renaissance and early Baroque.  Today we’ll get back to a group of conductors.  First, Karl Böhm, one of the most successful of them.  Böhm was born on August 28^th of 1894 in Graz, Austria.  His career took off in the 1920s, with some help from Bruno Walter; in 1927 Böhm was appointed the chief musical director in Darmstadt, and in 1931 he took the same position at the prestigious Hamburg Opera.  In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany and Böhm took over the Dresden Semper Opera, after Fritz Busch, the previous director, went into exile.  Böhm was a friend of Richard Strauss and conducted several premiers of his operas.  In 1938 Böhm appeared at the Salzburg Festival, and in 1943 took over the famous Vienna opera.  For many years Böhm was a Nazi sympathizer, though never a member of the NSDAP; after the war, he went through a two-year denazification period, and then his career took off again.  He continued his engagements with Vienna and Dresden, conducted in South America, and made a very successful New York debut in 1957.  He frequently led the Metropolitan, premiering operas by Berg and Strauss and successfully conducting many of Wagner’s operas (Birgit Nilsson debuted under Böhm’s baton).  Böhm’s final engagements were in London, at Covent Garden and with the London Symphony.  He died on August 14^th of 1981, two weeks shy of his 87^th birthday.

Here is Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), a tone poem from 1898.  Karl Böhm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.  This recording was made in 1976.  Also, quite recently we came across a DW documentary from 2022 called Music in Nazi Germany: The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz (here).  It’s very much worth watching.  The maestro in question is not Karl Böhm but Wilhelm Furtwängler, eight years older than Böhm and more established.  Still, much of what is said in the documentary about Furtwängler applies to Böhm (we think that to an even higher degree).  A note: the “kapellmeister” of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, Alma Rosé, mentioned in the documentary, died there in April of 1944.  Alma was the daughter of Arnold Rosé, the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic for 50 years and the leader of the famous Rosé Quartet.  Alma’s mother was Gustav Mahler’s sister. 

We mentioned Bruno Walter’s name above; he also happens to be one of the conductors we wanted to write about.  Walter was born on September 15^th of 1876 in Berlin.  We celebrated him several years ago here.  At least as talented as Böhm, his life couldn’t have been more different.  Walter was Jewish, for many years he collaborated closely with Mahler and, in 1912, led the posthumous premier performance of the composer’s Ninth Symphony.  He was the music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he conducted most of Wagner’s operas.  Walter escaped from Germany in 1933 (at the time he was the principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra).  After working in Europe, he moved to the US in 1939 and settled in Beverly Hills, the area that hosted a large German expat community.  In the US, he worked with many orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.  Bruno Walter was 85 when he died in 1962.  Here Bruno Walter is playing the piano and conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20.  This is a live recording made on November 3^rd of 1939.

Just to list other conductors in our group: István Kertész (b. August 28, 1929); three conductors, born on September 1: Tullio Serafin (in 1878), Leonard Slatkin (in 1944), Seiji Ozawa, (in 1935).  Christoph von Dohnányi was born on September 8, 1929, and Christopher Hogwood, on September 10, 1941.

This Week in Classical Music: September 11, 2023.  Transitions.  For the last four weeks, we were preoccupied with two Florentine composers, Emilio de' Cavalieri and Jacopo Peri.  In a way, this is unusual, as neither of them was what we would call “great,” as were, for example, Tomás Luis de Victoria, just two years older than Cavalieri, or Giovanni Gabrieli, born sometime between Cavalieri and Peri.  But somehow the Florentines became instrumental in furthering one of the great shifts in classical music, from polyphony to monody of the early Baroque.  This is a fascinating topic in itself: How could the relatively simplistic works of Cavalieri and Peri replace the grand and sophisticated music of the High Renaissance?  How could such stunning works as Victoria’s Funeral Mass or Gabrieli’s In Ecclesiis fall out of favor while the first rather clumsy attempts at opera became all the rage?  As far as we can tell, Baroque music, as interesting as it was in its early phases, didn’t reach the level of Palestrina or Orlando di Lasso till the late 17^th century and into the 18^th, when Handel and Bach composed their masterpieces.  This introduces another great example: Johann Sebastian Bach, who, in his later years, was considered old-fashioned, past his time; his great Mass in B minor was completed in 1749, a year before his death, when the music of his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, was much more popular.  The first public performance of the Mass had to wait for more than 100 years (the history of St. Matthew Passion was similar).  In the meantime, composers of the Mannheim school, nearly forgotten now, were working at the court with the best orchestra in Europe and developing, unknowingly, the style that would bring us, several decades later, the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.  The “not-so-greats” leading the way, leaving the greats behind but paving the way for a new generation of supreme talents…

Yet again we don’t have the time to properly acknowledge the composers born this week (among them are Arnold Schoenberg and Girolamo Frescobaldi, and also Arvo Pärt, Clara Schumann and William Boyce, who, like Beethoven, went deaf but continued, for a while, to compose and play the organ).  We wanted to go back a month and commemorate some of the composers born during that time: too many to mention, but two of them, Henry Purcell and Antonin Dvorak, were born last week.  And of course, we’ve missed a lot of performers and conductors, among whom were the pianists Aldo Ciccolini and Maria Yudina, Ginette Neveu (violin) and William Primrose (viola), the singers Kathleen Battle and Angela Gheorghiu, and conductors Wolfgang Sawallisch and Karl Böhm.  Till next time, then.

This Week in Classical Music: September 4, 2023.  Jacopo Peri and Florence.  Last week we started the story of Jacopo Peri, an important but mostly forgotten composer.  Before we get back to it, we’d like to mention a Florentine institution that was instrumental in the development of ideas that Peri followed in his work.  This institution is called Camerata de’ Bardi, or Florentine Camerata.

Count Giovanni de’ Bardi was a nobleman, writer, composer, and, in his younger years, a soldier.  He was also an important patron of the arts and organized a society dedicated to the study of ancient Greek music in relation to the music of the day.  That was in the 1570s and ‘80s, so we have to remember that the important music of the time was composed in the form of polyphony by the likes of Palestrina.  We love his music, and that of Orlando Lasso or Tomás Luis de Victoria Victoria, and consider it the pinnacle of the Renaissance, but for Bardi and his circle, it felt outdated.  They believed that the polyphonic idiom doesn’t allow the creation of emotionally expressive works and makes the words unintelligible (the criticism shared by many in the church).  Thus, as an alternative, they came up with the “monody,” which replaced the multi-voiced polyphony with a single melodic line and instrumental accompaniment.  The ideas of the Camerata were based on the members’ understanding of the music of Classical Greece, which most likely was wrong: they believed that Greek plays were sung, not spoken.  That didn’t matter much as these ideas led to the creation of the recitative and the aria, and soon after, the cantata and, importantly, opera.

The most active members of the Camerata were composers Giulio Caccini, Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo Galilei, and Pietro Strozzi, but the society included many Florentine intellectuals and composers.  Jacopo Peri was one of the first to put these ideas into practice, creating Dafne and Euridice, the first two operas in history.  The librettos to the operas were written by another member of the Camerata, the poet Ottavia Rinuccini.

Euridice was performed in October of 1600 in the Palazzo Pitti during the celebrations of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV, King of France.  Peri’s rivals, composers Caccini and Cavalieri, also took part in the production: the jealous Caccini rewrote the parts sung by his musicians, and Cavalieri staged the opera’s production (that was not enough for Cavalieri: he expected to be put in charge of all the festivities, which didn’t happen; disappointed, he left Florence for good.  We recently mentioned this episode while writing about Cavalieri). 

In the 1600s, while residing in Florence and continuing to compose for the Medici court, Peri established a close relationship with Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.  He wrote two operas for the Mantuan court, neither of which were performed, and many songs and instrumental pieces, the majority of which are now lost. Later in his life, he worked mostly in collaboration with other composers, a practice quite unusual for our time.  He wrote two operas with Marco da Gagliano, the second, La Flora, for the occasion of the election of Ferdinand II as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  Pery died in 1633 and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Here is the Prologue from Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, and here – the first scene of the opera, about five minutes of singing, with two wonderful choruses.  The soloists and the Ensemble Arpeggio are conducted by Robert de Caro.

This Week in Classical Music: August 28, 2023.  Jacopo Peri.  For the last two weeks, we've been preoccupied with Emilio de' Cavalieri, partly because his music is so interesting, but also because he and his parents had fascinating lives.  And the period during which they lived – the Italian Renaissance and early Baroque – is captivating.  One composer, whose birthday we missed while being engaged with Cavalieri, lived during the same time and was Cavalieri’s rival.  His name is Jacopo Peri.  Peri was born on August 20^th of 1561, either in Florence or, more likely, in Rome, like Cavalieri.  About 10 years younger than Cavalieri, he spent most of his productive life at the court of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, in Florence, the place where Cavalieri was employed for about 20 years.  There was a difference in their position: the older composer was also the duke’s confidant, while Peri was “only” a musician and organizer of dramatic events. 

Peri’s youth was spent in Florence; he had a very good voice and was employed in different churches (it seems he also sang in the choir of the Baptistery).  He was a virtuoso player of the theorbo (chitarrone in Italian), a lute with a very long neck.  Severo Bonini, a Florentine composer and Peri’s younger contemporary, said that “he could move the hardest heart to tears through his singing” and superb accompaniment.  Peri also excelled at playing  the organ and keyboard instruments.  He was hired at the Medici court in 1588, soon after the accession of Grand Duke Ferdinando I.  Like Cavalieri, he took part in composing music for different intermedi (we discussed these “proto-operas” last week), and participated in staging the festivities celebrating Ferdinando’s marriage to Christine of Lorraine.  He also performed in these intermedi, singing and accompanying himself. 

Peri’s interests were broad and, as a member of different learned Academies, he actively participated in the vigorous intellectual life of Florence.  He became friends with Jacopo Corsi, a fellow composer and important patron of the arts, second only to the Medicis.  Through Corsi he met the poet Ottavio Rinuccini.  In 1597, Rinuccini wrote a libretto for Dafne, a dramatic piece, the music for which was composed by Peri and Corsi.  Dafne is now considered the first opera in the history of music.  While the libretto survived, the music for Dafne is mostly lost, with only six fragments extant; four were written by Peri and two by Corsi.  The opera’s instrumental accompaniment is small: a harpsichord, an archlute (a type of theorbo), a regular lute, a viol, and a flute.  Claudio Monteverdi, who by many is considered the “father of the opera,” even though his L’Orfeo was written 10 years later, in 1607, significantly expanded the accompanying ensemble.  Dafne was a big success, and in 1600, for the festivities surrounding the marriage of King of France Henry IV and Marie de' Medici, Grand Duke Francesco’s daughter, the court requested another opera.  Rinuccini was again the librettist, but this time Peri collaborated with Giulio Caccini.  Their effort produced Euridice, the second opera ever written and the first whose music fully survived.  (These days Caccini is best known for the music he never wrote, the so-called Ave Maria, composed around 1970 by a Russian lutenist Vladimir Vavilov, author of many musical hoaxes).  Euridice was very successful (Peri himself sang the role of Orfeo and his performance was highly praised) and was later staged in other cities.

We’ll finish our story of Jacopo Peri and play some of his music next week.  One last note before we go: Itzhak Perlman will turn 78 in three days.

This Week in Classical Music: August 21, 2023.  Cavalieri, part II.  Last week we began writing about the Italian composer Emilio de' Cavalieri and all we had time for were his illustrious parents.  Emilio started his musical career in Rome – we know that he was an organist at the Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso and was responsible for the Lent music there.  While in Rome, he made the acquaintance of Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici. A historically important fact about the Cardinal is that soon after he became the Grand Duke of Tuscany, returned to Florence and brought Cavalieri with him.  A minor, but curious, detail is that the Cardinal was an art lover and acquired the famous collection of Roman statues from Cardinal Andrea della Valle, the uncle of Emilio’s mother, Lavinia, thus connecting the families of Cavalieri, della Valle, and Medici.

In Florence Cavalieri became not just a court composer and overseer of crafts and music, but also a trusted personal diplomatic envoy to the Duke.  Elections of the Pope were among the most important political events in Italy, and Cavalieri helped Ferdinando to elect popes predisposed toward the Medici family, often going on secret missions to buy cardinals’ votes.  This was a turbulent time, with popes lasting no longer than the Politburo Secretaries General at the end of the Brezhnev era.  Pope Urban VII, elected in September of 1590, died of malaria just 12 days after taking office, Pope Gregory XIV followed and ruled for 315 days, then Pope Innocent IX, who ruled for 62 days, and finally, Clement VIII, who would go on to rule for more than 13 years.  The turmoil kept Cavalieri’s diplomatic career busy.

In Florence, Cavalieri was provided an apartment in the Palazzo Pitti, the main residence of the Duke of Tuscany, and a handsome salary.  As the court administrator and composer, he was responsible for staging intermedi, theatrical performances with music and dance.  The famous ones were set up in 1589 for the marriage of Duke Ferdinando to Christine of Lorraine.  Cavalieri produced many of these intermedi in the following years, often to his own music. 

He traveled to Rome often and maintained relations with major composers in the city.  In 1600, his work titled Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo (Portrayal of the Soul and the Body) premiered in the Oratorio dei Filippini in Rome.  Rappresentatione is considered the first oratorio in the history of music and, with the intermedi, a predecessor to opera.  The significance of it becomes apparent if we consider how the oratorio, also developed by Cavalieri’s contemporaries Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, has evolved since 1600: this was the musical form that Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Caldara, Johann Adolph Hasse, Heinrich Schütz, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel used to create some of their most important compositions.

Cavalieri left Florence for Rome in 1600 under a cloud: the wedding of Henry IV of France and Maria de' Medici was lavishly celebrated, and the main event was the staging of the opera Il rapimento di Cefalo.  Cavalieri expected to be in charge, but the staging was given to his rival, Caccini.  Cavalieri died in Rome two years later and was buried in Cappella de' Cavalieri in Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline Hill. 

Together with Rappresentatione, Lamentations of Jeremiah for the Holy Week is Cavalieri’s major work.  It consists of four parts, to be performed on consecutive days.  Here’s the first section, Lectio prima, of the Lamentations for the first day.  It’s performed by the Concerto Italiano under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini.