August 20, 2018.  Bernstein 100.  August 25^th will mark the 100th birthday of Leonard Bernstein, American composer, conductor, pianist and music educator.  Musical America has been celebrating this event for the past 12 months, and for good reason: Bernstein’s influence on American culture cannot be overestimated.  He was one of the most important American composers of the 20^th century; his tenure as the music director of New York Philharmonic was probably the most significant in the orchestra’s history.  He wrote wonderful musicals, such as Candide and West Side Story, the latter being made world famous when he adapted it to the film (everybody remembers the tunes but it’s worth listening to it again – for all its simplicity it’s amazingly sophisticated music).  And of course, his long series of Young People’s Concerts remain one of the great examples of music education: he didn’t condescend to kids, didn’t try to dumb-down the approach (in his very first concert in 1958 he played a piece by Anton Webern) but shared with them his love and understanding of music in his own, communicative and contagiously enthusiastic way.  Bernstein was a Renaissance figure, and much was written about him, especially in preparation to the centenary.  We’ll address one small aspect of his creative work: the (re)introduction of the music of Mahler into the American culture.  Mahler is so ubiquitous these days that it’s hard to imagine that up to the late 1950s his music was rarely heard in concerts.

It’s not quite true that Mahler wasn’t performed at all.  Bruno Walter, Mahler’s assistant and friend, programmed his music into some concerts and made several recordings, including Das Lied von der Erde with Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak. 

August 13, 2018.  Two Italians.  Nicola Porpora, a prolific opera composer, was born in Naples on August 17^th of 1686.   He was 10 when he enrolled in the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo.  In 1708 he received his first opera commission but had to wait several years to get another, as the Neapolitan opera scene was dominated by Alessandro Scarlatti who had  returned to Naples from Rome that year.  In the meantime, Porpora was earning money at the Conservatorio di S Onofrio and giving private lessons.  In 1719 Scarlatti went back to Rome and that opened the stage for Porpora.  One of the operas composed during that period was Angelica, on the libretto by the young Pietro Metastasio.  The role of Orlando was sung by Porpora’s star pupil, the 15-year old castrato Farinelli, who would become one of the most celebrated singers in the history of opera.  Among Porpora’s pupils was also Gaetano Majorano, known as Caffarelli, also a castrato, second only to Farinelli; he became one of Handel’s favorite singers.

August 6, 2018.  Three French composers.  Cécile Chaminade, one of the few French women composers, was born on August 8^th of 1857 in Paris.  Her first music lessons came from her mother, a pianist and a singer.  Later she studied composition with Benjamin Godard. She started composing very young (when she was eight, she played some of her music for Georges Biset) and gained prominence with the publication of Piano Trio in 1880.  An excellent pianist, she toured England many times, playing mostly her own music and became very popular there.  In 1908 she went to the US, the country of “Chaminade fan clubs” and played in 12 cities, from Boston to St Louis.  Between 1880 and 1890 Chaminade composed several large orchestral compositions and music for piano and orchestra.  In the following period she scaled down, limiting herself to piano character pieces, of which she wrote more than 200.  Many of them are charming though they became dated even during her time (Chaminade lived till 1944).  Here ’s her short piano character piece, Scarf Dance. It’s performed by Lincoln Mayorga.

André Jolivet was also born in Paris and also on August 8^th but in 1905.  In his childhood he studied the cello but never went to the conservatory (he did study composition with Paul Le Fem, a composer and critic).  In his youth Jolivet was influenced by Debussy and Ravel, but it all changed when he became familiar with atonal music: in December of 1927 he attended a concert at the Salle Pleyel during which several Schoenberg pieces were performed and that changed his life.  Soon after he became a pupil of Edgard Varèse, an influential French-American avant-garde composer.  He also befriended Olivier Messiaen, who was better known at the time and helped Jolivet by promoting his music.  After the war Jolivet served as the musical director of the Comédie Française and composed a number 14 scores for plays performed at the theater. 

July 20, 2018.  Pre-Mahlerite: the tragic story of Hans Rott.   Hans Rott’s name is practically unknown these days.  Usually when a composer, especially one born in modern times, is rarely performed, there’s a reason for it: it’s probably because his (and it’s almost invariably “his,” not “her”) music is not very interesting (the numerous minor Italian late-Baroque composers come to mind).  We think Rott is an exception, even if we don’t expect his music to join the classical cannon any time soon.  Rott’s life was both short and tragic.  He was born on August 1^st of 1858 in a suburb of Vienna.   His father’s original name was Roth, which means that Hans was most likely Jewish, although we don’t know whether he, like Mahler some time later, had later converted to Catholicism.  Rott attended the Vienna Conservatory, where his organ teacher was Anton Bruckner.  His composition teacher was Franz Krenn, who also taught Mahler.  Mahler, two years younger, and Rott even shared a room for a while.  But it was Bruckner, and also Wagner, who influenced Rott the most.  In 1878 (he was 20) Rott decided to participate in a composers’ competition, submitting the first movement of his Symphony in E Major.  Everybody on the jury, except for Bruckner, was highly negative.  Two years later, Rott presented the complete symphony to Brahms.  He should’ve known better!  Brahms intensely disliked both composers whose influence he could discern in Rott’s music: Wagner and Bruckner.  Brahms’s criticism was vicious: he told Rott that he had no talent and should look for a different vocation while he was still young.  We can assume that at that time Rott was already mentally ill, because just several months later while traveling to Mülhausen by train (he had reluctantly applied for and received a position of the director of the Alsatian choir association) he pointed a revolver at a fellow passenger who was trying to light a cigar.  The previous encounter with Brahms was probably on his mind, as in his madness he claimed that Brahms had planted dynamite on the train and he, Rott, was just trying to save his fellow travelers from being blown up.  Rott was brought back to Vienna and institutionalized.  He spent the rest of his short life in a lunatic asylum.  Rott died of tuberculosis on June 25^th of 1884, at age 25. 

July 23, 2018.  Cilea, Granados, Dohnanyi, Fleisher.   This week is full of anniversaries: composers, conductors, pianists and a singer.  We’d like to mention (for the first time) Francesco Cilea, the Italian opera composer who was born on this day in 1866.  He’s remembered for his opera Adriana Lecouvreur, written in 1902.  Even back then it probably sounded rather dated, and clearly sounds so these days, but the young Enrico Caruso sung at the premier to great acclaim, and some of the arias are very beautiful.  All great sopranos of the last half century have sung Adriana: Montserrat Caballé, Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas.  Here’s the incomparable Renata Tebaldi in the aria Io son l'umile ancella with the Orchestra of the Accademia de Santa Cecilia under the direction of Alberto Erede (Mario del Monaco and Giulietta Simionato are also in this fabulous 1962 recording).

We celebrate the Spanish composer Enrique Granados, who was born on July 27^th of 1876, practically every year (here, for example is the entry from a year ago).  So today we’ll just play his Los Requiebros, the first piece from Granados’s piano suite Goyescas.  It’s performed by  Jie Chen, a young Chinese-American pianist.

Ernst von Dohnányi was not as popular these pages as Granados.  One reason is that as a composer he was not as interesting as some of his contemporaries.  Dohnányi was, though, and under very difficult historical circumstances, a highly moral and principled person.  Dohnányi, famous first as a pianist and conductor, was born on July 27^th of 1877 in Bratislava, then called Pressburg in German and Pozsony in Hungarian.  (His last name probably sounds familiar to many readers: he was the grandfather of the distinguished German conductor Christoph von Dohnányi).  In the late 1890s he played piano concerts across Europe and the US.  In the 1920s, he was appointed the head of the Budapest Academy of Music, and in that position he promoted Hungarian composers, Béla Bartók or Zoltán Kodály among them. 

July 16, 2018.  Flagstad and Stern. We missed two anniversaries last week.  One was the birthday of Carl Orff, a somewhat controversial German composer, who was born on July 10^th of 1895.  He deserves a full entry, and that’s what we’ll do next year.  Also last week was the birthday of Kirsten Flagstad: she was just two days younger than Orff, born on July 12^th of 1895.  The Norwegian soprano was regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Wagner singers of all time.  She had a voice of phenomenal beauty, clarity and power. For the first 10 years or so of her operatic career Flagstad sang mostly lyric roles in the opera houses of Sweden and Norway.  She then took on the heavier roles in Verdi’s Aida and Tosca, and, in 1932, sang the role of Isolde in Tristan und Isolde.  She successfully auditioned for Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s pro-Nazi daughter-in-law who ran the Bayreuth Festival, and in 1934 sang Sieglinde in Die Walküre and Gutrune in Götterdämmerung at the Bayreuth.  The next year she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, first as Sieglinde, then in the role of Isolde.  Her Brünnhilde, later that same year, was a phenomenal success.  An invitation from the Covent Garden followed, and there she was also received with great enthusiasm.  By the end of 1936 she was world-famous.  In 1941 she returned to the Nazi-occupied Norway; that chagrined some of her American listeners (her husband was accused of collaborating with the Nazis but died before his trial ended).  The British were more forgiving, and Flagstad resumed her after-war career in London.  She sang the difficult Wagner roles, plus Strauss and more till about 1952.