We’ll tackle individual operas of the Ring – Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung – in due course: each one represents a challenging, exasperating, but in the end enormously satisfying, subject.  For now, we’ll just play the overture, or the Prelude, as Wagner called it, to Das Rheingold – that’s how the monumental tetralogy starts, the beginning of all beginnings (Sir Georg Solti conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in a 1967 recording).

A very different artist was also born this week, the French composer Jean Françaix.  Born 99 years and a day after Wagner, Françaix may be considered Wagner’s opposite.  Françaix once said that his goal is to "give pleasure": you would’ve never heard anything similar from Wagner.  Françaix was born into a musical family which encouraged his studies.  He was still a child when Ravel noticed him and wrote a glowing letter to his father, Alfred, the director of the Le Mans Conservatoire.  Françaix studied with Nadia Boulanger who later became his champion, playing and conducting many of his premiers.  His work was met enthusiastically.  Not very complicated, it had a natural charm and brilliance.  In addition to orchestral and ensemble music, Françaix wrote music for ballets (in collaboration with the great choreographer Roland Petit) and a number of film scores.  He wrote several operas; La princesse de Clèves (1964) was very well received.  Here’s his Concertino for piano and orchestra, from 1932.  The pianist is Claude Françaix, Jean’s daughter.

Book 8 was published in 1638 but some of the works in it were composed earlier.  The set consists of two parts: Madrigals of War (Hor che 'l ciel is one of them) and Madrigals of Love.  The war may refer to the terrible events of 1530 during and following the War of Mantuan Succession.  Even though Monteverdi was living in Venice, he was considered a citizen of Mantua and was receiving a pension from the Duchy, so these events affected him more than most.  Monteverdi left Mantua after the death of the Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga, in 1612.  The sons of Vincenzo, Francesco, who fired Monteverdi, and Ferdinando, died without leaving a male heir.  That led to a conflict between the claimants to the duchy, mainly the Holy Roman Empire and France.  In July of 1630 the imperial troupes sacked Mantua.  That was only part of the tragedy: the invading army also brought the plague.  Some of the escaping Mantuans went to Venice and infected that city as well.  In the following year, out of Venice’s population of 150,000 almost 50,000 people died.  Asking for protection from the Virgin, the city erected the church of Santa Maria della Salute, now part of the Venetian cityscape; music of Monteverdi was played at the foundation ceremony.  Whether thru divine intervention or natural causes, by November of 1631 the plague was over.  Monteverdi’s mass with the famous Gloria was performed during the celebrations.  Rather than playing the excerpts from the Mass, here is one of the Madrigals of Love from Book 8: a lovely Lamento della Ninfa (The Consort of Musicke is conducted by Anthony Rooley). 

In April of 1632 Monteverdi entered the priesthood; even so, he continued to write secular music, operas among them.  The last one, L’incoronazione di Poppea, was premiered during the Carnival season in 1643.  Monteverdi died several months later, on November 29^th of that year.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Lourié served in the Department of Education under Anatoly Lunacharsky.  For all practical purposes, Lunacharsky, who in the early years after the Revolution supported all kinds of radical artistic innovations, was functioning as Minister of Culture.  Lourié was his deputy in charge of music.  In Moscow Lourié shared an apartment with Sergei Sudeikin and his wife, Vera de Bosset.  Sudeikin was an exceptional painter who became well-known in Paris for his decorations to Diagilev’s ballets.  Vera de Bosset, a dancer, would play a very important role in Lourié’s life: in 1920 she and Sudeikin moved to Paris where she met and soon become a lover of (and much later the wife of) Igor Stravinsky.  Vera would eventually introduce Lourié to Stravinsky which started a long, if contentious, friendship.  Lourié’s work at the Soviet ministry didn’t last long, and in 1921 he moved to Berlin where he befriended Ferruccio Busoni and Edgar Varèse.  A year later, in 1922, he moved to Paris, and through Vera met up with Stravinsky.   He became one of Stravinsky’s most important supporters, writing articles and speaking on his behalf.   There is no doubt that of the two it was Stravinsky who possessed an enormous creative talent but many musicologists point out that Lourié’s compositions may have influenced Stravinsky’s work: for example, Lourié’s A Little Chamber Music (here) was written in 1924, and it sounds stylistically very similar to Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète, which was written three years later, in 1927.

Vera de Bosset brought Lourié and Stravinsky together; she, apparently, was also the reason they fell apart.  While in Paris, Lourié continued composing, writing two symphonies and many songs on poetry from Sappho and Dante to Pushkin, Verlaine and Mayakovsky.   In 1941 the Germans occupied France and with the help of Serge Koussevitzky Lourié fled to the US.  He tried to write music for film, but was not very successfull.  His major undertaking was the opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, after Pushkin’s novel, which has not been staged to this day.  Lourié died in Princeton in 1966.

The portrait of Lourié, above, is by Theodore Stravinsky, Igor’s son from his first marriage.  The portrait of Vera de Bosset is by Sergei Sudeikin.

Johannes Brahms was born on May 7^th of 1833, and exactly seven years later so was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  Every year we try to compare the two: both wrote wonderful symphonies, their violin concertos are among the best ever written, and the same could be said about Tchaikovsky’s First piano concerto and Brahms’s First and, maybe even more so, his Second.  Still, the basic truth is that while they worked during the same period, it’s hard to imagine two composers more different than the conservative follower of Beethoven and the Russian nationalist Romantic.   One thing they do have in common is their songs: both wrote absolutely wonderful songs which were overshadowed by their larger compositions.   Brahms wrote songs throughout  his whole life, from his Six songs op. 3 to the Five songs, op 107.  Altogether he wrote about 200 songs.  Here’s his Sapphische Ode, op.94, no. 4, sung by the soprano Bernarda Fink with Anthony Spiri on the piano.  The same performer can be heard here in Brahms’s song Feldeinsamkeit, op.86, no. 2.   Tchaikovsky’s song output is smaller but contains many gems.  Here are two songs from his Op. 54, Song for Children.  First, Lullaby in a Storm, from op. 54 and then, Child’s song (“My Lizochek”).  The soprano Ljuba Kazarnovskaya is accompanied by Ljuba Orfenova.

The Soviets promised him a good life and artistic freedom, and initially that’s how it worked.  Prokofiev adapted his work according to the political climate, writing songs on patriotic texts and a cantata in 10 movements for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, whose orchestration included a military band and several accordions.  (Despite all this the Cantata had to wait its premier till 1966).  Then, in 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and Prokofiev, like all important artists, was evacuated to the eastern parts of the country.  Despite the hardship he continued to compose, which to some extent was easier as the musical censorship was relaxed.  The three War piano sonatas and most of the opera War and Peace come from that period.  And then, as the war ended, “Zhdanovshchina” erupted.  While Stalin’s underlings Yezhov and Beria were terrorizing people physically, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief ideolog, terrorized the Soviet cultural elite.  He started with the writers and the poets in 1946, then moved on to condemnations of theater and film.  Then, in 1948 the Politburo of the Communist Party issued a resolution criticizing “formalism” in classical music.  We’ll consider the tragic consequences of this resolution another time.  Here, from a much happier period, is Prokofiev’s answer to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – his Scythian Suite.  Claudio Abbado conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

 Johann Sebastian Bach composed some of the greatest music for Easter: two sets of Passions, one, set to the chapters of the Gospel according to St. John, another – St. Matthew.  Bach’s obituary mentions five Passions but these two the only ones extant.  Bach also wrote Easter Oratorio, the first version of which was completed the same year as the St. Matthew Passion, 1725.  Here’s the first part of St. John Passion.  Concentus Musicus Wien and Arnold Schoenberg Choir are conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

The Eastern orthodox church historically lacked the tradition of “composed” music.  Different chants, the so-called Znamenny chant being the major one, were used for centuries.  These chants go back to the Byzantine service and are written not in notes but special signs . Only at the end of the 19^th century did Russian composers turn to the liturgical music, Alexander Gretchaninov and especially Sergei Rachmaninov among them.  There are many recordings of the traditional services, but the one created by the choir of the Chevetogne Abbey is especially interesting.  They Abbey is dedicated to Christian unity and though it is a Benedictine abbey, it has both Western rite and Eastern rite churches and made recordings of both Eastern and Latin services.  Here’s the first part of the Service for Holy Saturday, performed by the Choir of the Abbey of Chevetogne.