There’s been an interesting mini-trend in operatic directing in the past few months: updating 19th-century comic operas to World War II settings. Emilio Sagi’s WWII La Fille du Regiment, originally produced in Bologna, had notable revivals at La Scala and in Washington (it comes to Houston later this year); here in Boston, the Boston Conservatory’s spring production of “L’elisir d’amore” had a WWII setting, as did Intermezzo’s Signor Deluso; and now Marc Geelhoed sends word of Chicago Opera Theater’s Béatrice et Bénédict.

In general, I’m more sympathetic to high-concept modernizations of opera than most. Bad ones just vaguely toy around with making the piece “relevant” or other such nonsense, but good ones are after bigger game: the immediacy of the dramatic situation. One of my favorite modernizations was Peter Sellars’ 1988 Tannhäuser for the Chicago Lyric Opera, with the title character a fallen televangelist in the Jim Bakker mold. The production was a scandal, mainly to those who already knew the piece; but for those of us who didn’t (including me, at that time), it made the dramatic stakes immediately apparent, rather than something in need of explanation or exposition. (For those who remember the staging with disdain, I’ll simply defend it by saying that it got me interested in Tannhäuser, and Tannhäuser is the opera that got me interested in Wagner.)

I charitably assume that directors with similar ideas are after the same thing, rather than mere novelty or shock. A rather charitable assumption, in many cases, but if we apply it to this latest spate of 1940s military imagery, what does it mean? It means the directors are sure that, as soon as we recognize the setting, we’ll be put in the proper frame of mind for light romantic comedy. Which is pretty weird, when you think about it.

I would think that, after the last century’s carnage, we would be pretty immune to the romanticization of war, but I guess these days, historically hung over from Vietnam, mired in Iraq, the perception of nobility and moral clarity offered by World War II has become more and more appealing. Of course, that conflict had as much ignobility and moral ambiguity as any. (Ponder the Allied response to the Holocaust, or the internment of Japanese-Americans. I’m not implying a blanket condemnation of our reactions in those situations, but just offering an example of how wartime is always messier and more complicated than we like to remember.) And WWII vets had the same difficulties readjusting to civilian life, something that was more readily discussed at the time than it is now. (Case in point: William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, released in 1946 to critical acclaim.)

And yet, the 60 intervening years have made that event not only comparatively benign, but a suitable backdrop for some of the sunniest operas in the repertory. It’s worth noting that nobody (myself included) has experienced these productions as cognitively dissonant, or somehow trying to directorially inject a note of bleak despair. I think what they’re tapping into is that peculiar historical moment, when it seemed that, for all the cascading political complications as the war ended, the Allied cooperation and the lessons of 1919 would ensure that the brave new post-war world would really be a better place. Romantic comedies are, after all, essentially optimistic; I guess the level of underlying poignancy depends on how well you know your history.

Terry Teachout throws down a nice challenge today: name a great Hollywood film score written for a comedy. Tough, because, like so much else about comedy, if you notice the score, it’s not really doing its job. Comedy is all about efficiency—film scoring is all about luxury. For a comedic one to work, the effort has to be imperceptible.

For an example, let’s examine what I think is one of the all-time best comedy film scores: Franz Waxman’s for The Philadelphia Story. The first thing you notice is that it’s hardly there at all—maybe twenty minutes of music, and that includes some ambient Cole Porter arrangements for the big party scene. Which leaves, what? Ten minutes of actual cues? Maybe less? Yet without those ten minutes, the movie doesn’t work at all.

Take the opening scene, a flashback in which Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant acrimoniously end their marriage. She breaks his golf clubs; he winds up to punch her, and instead puts his hand over her face and pushes her to the ground. Pretty tough start for a guy we’re supposed to spend the rest of the movie rooting for. Waxman smooths it over with pure cartoon music, mickey-mousing every bit of action with imitative instrumentation. Not only does it decisively confirm the scene as slapstick, it reassures us that the main dramatic conflict is not serious enough to turn into drama. Waxman doles out a little more of the same later, when, depressed and confused, Hepburn downs an entire tray of champagne saucers. Incipient alcoholism? Nah—the insouciantly echoing clarinet line slyly signals that it’s the beginning of her salvation.

Waxman brings his full romantic arsenal to bear in only one scene, the late-night dance between Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart—and even here, he sneaks in, ingeniously dovetailing the cue with some languid jazz coming from an on-screen radio. That’s his strategy all the way through: slip into the scene, gently tip it in the right dramatic direction, and then slip out again.

Big, epic comedies can produce great scores (John Williams’ underrated score for 1941 springs to mind), but such scores are usually forgotten because the resulting movies almost never work. (I’m racking my brains to come up with an example of one that does, and the only one I can think of is Ghostbusters, in which Elmer Bernstein’s Stripes-redux score jostles for space with a lot of 80s pop.) Interestingly, some of my favorite music for comedies is pre-existing: Scott Joplin rags in The Sting, Carmen in the original Bad News Bears, the Marriage of Figaro overture in Trading Places. Lisa Hirsch nominates the collective work of Warner Brothers animation composer Carl Stalling—divorced from the films, the music does have a modernist, fragmentary musique concréte energy, but that’s a response to the structure of the visuals, not an inherently musical inspiration. Alex Ross suggests Danny Elfman’s score for Beetlejuice—I’d go back farther to Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Elfman’s first score and still one of the best things he’s ever done, a pitch-perfect musical embodiment of the movie’s loopy atmosphere. I searched high and low for that soundtrack, and when I found it, I wore it out.

That’s the exception, though. I remember a few years back, when the Modern Library came up with their list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the last century. I was ticked that the Julia Child-Louisette Bertholle-Simone Beck Mastering the Art of French Cooking didn’t make the list, but really, the elegance and wit of that book’s writing will always take a perceptive backseat to its functionality. That’s what good comedy scores are like: ideally stylish, but necessarily efficient.

The readers, blessedly more intelligent than me, have posted many a fine comment.

In honor of Memorial Day, here’s the finale of Dmitri Kabalevsky’s 1963 Requiem, “for those who died in the war against fascism.”

Kabalevsky: Requiem (Finale: “Pomnite!”) (mp3, 7.2 Mb)
Valentina Levko, contralto; Vladimir Valaitis, baritone
Moscow Chorus
Children’s Chorus of the Art Education Institute
Moscow Philharmonic, Dmitri Kabalevsky, conductor

Kabalevsky (1904-1987) said that he dreamed for years of writing this piece; I don’t doubt that, but, given the timing, it’s hard not to hear his Requiem as some sort of Soviet response to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem of 1962. Coincidence or not, it’s a classic example of a good piece of music being overshadowed by a similar, great piece. Kabalevsky’s music is undeniably effective, and often inspired, but his socialist-realist vocabulary precludes any of the questioning of pro patria mori that produces such crackling tension in the Britten, and Kabalevsky’s text (by poet Robert Rozhdestvensky), while solidly dramatic, can’t compare with the combination of Wilfred Owen and the timeless Latin of the Mass (which, of course, Kabalevsky eschews). But if all you know of Kabalevsky is the overture to The Comedians and some of his often-anthologized piano pieces, the Requiem is worth a listen. And it’s hard to argue with the climax:

Today’s the first really hot day we’ve had here in Boston this year—projected high of 91º F, a record for the day. For you all in the South and Southwest who are thinking to yourself 91? That’s not even close to hot, I confess: I’m a cold weather person, and once it gets above 75, I start to wilt. (I was telling my dentist this yesterday, and he theorized that I was an Eskimo orphan and my parents never told me.)

Anyway, I started thinking about good records to put on to take one’s mind off of the heat, and I realized: I think of those in two categories. There’s naturally cold music that, to me, conjures the illusion of arctic wastelands or snow-covered bare trees or iced-over rivers. Here’s a few—some are obvious, some not.

My lovely wife says, for her, the orchestral versions of Strauss’s “Ruhe, meine Seele” and “Allerseelen,” along with Wolf lieder in minor keys, produce a nice chill.

But then, there’s an entirely separate category of music that is like air-conditioning—a sleek, technological cool that’s self-contained and unfailingly comfortable.

I’m a child of American excess: Concerto in F and “So What” it is. It’s a long weekend: any other suggestions? (Particularly on the pop side—I had to think to come up with those two examples.)

A request: I’m working on a follow-up to this tattoo post from a few weeks back. If you’re a classical musician with body art, or have a classical-related design, I’d love to hear from you: use the e-mail address at the bottom of the sidebar.

I’m running all over town today, but here’s some stories from the UK to keep you entertained.

Sympathy for Charlotte Harding, an 18-year-old from Yorkshire who traveled to the University of St. Andrews to hear their symphony give the premiere of her new saxophone concerto, only to have it drowned out by a nearby party.

The noise pollution came from an event run by the Lumsden Club, an “elite ladies” society that prides itself on social and charity parties, which was staging a noisy fund-raiser nearby…. “It was all right when the orchestra played loudly but, during the quieter bits of music, you couldn’t hear anything but the disco,” said [Harding’s mother].
…
The club’s website states: “We host fun social and charity events throughout the university calendar and make a difference within the community.” The poster for a coming Top Gun Night features a sexy photo of Tom Cruise and the dress code is “Take My Breath Away”.

So the performance was disrupted by a prom that came through a wormhole from the year 1987? I never want to hear classical music described as outdated and living in the past again.

In other news, a longtime friend of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who happens to be married to Maxwell Davies’ manager, has been arrested for allegedly embezzling 500,000 pounds from the Master of the Queen’s Music.

Michael Arnold, 73, husband of Judy Arnold, the composer’s manager for 32 years, was taken to Notting Hill Police Station for questioning about money allegedly missing from Sir Peter’s business account…. The Arnolds are close friends and he has in the past dedicated compositions to them. His music is even catalogued in what he calls J Numbers, named after Judy Arnold. Mr Arnold is said to look after his financial affairs.

This is playing Covent Garden within five years, I guarantee it. (It’s all over the UK papers, but I’ve linked to the Times report on the strength of its first reader comment.)

The other big story over there involves photos of Hitler taken at the 1939 Bayreuth Festival by Charles Turner, a composer who was also working for British intelligence.

It is believed that Mr Turner was one of the last Britons to speak face to face with the Nazi dictator before the outbreak of the conflict. The record of what words passed between the two men is locked away in the vaults of MI5, deemed too sensitive to be declassified. The Home Office has said the document may never be made public.

The German-speaking Turner, from Nottinghamshire, had been granted unprecedented access to the Führer and his entourage, which included Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. The photographer was hosted by the chairman of the Bayreuth chamber of commerce, who was a member of Hitler’s inner circle – as was British-born Winifred Wagner, the composer’s widow.

The photos were released to the public by Turner’s son, who also remembers driving around Moscow with his father, looking for Kim Philby’s apartment. I can’t find a whit of information on Turner, which means he must have been pretty good at his day job. (Anybody know any of his music?)

And finally, this. Note: playing “Memory” in the background while you read it really enhances the effect.

Erna Sack and Johannes Heesters in Nanon (1938).

I’ve been experimenting with transferring 78 rpm records to the computer; here’s a couple of sides from the legendary German coloratura soprano Erna Sack.

Johann Strauss, Jr:
“On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (mp3, 4.2 MB)
“Voices of Spring” (mp3, 4.3 MB)

One of the main things Sack was legendary for was her high C. And not that high C, but the one an octave up—five ledger lines above the treble staff, if you’re keeping score at home. She deploys it at around the 2:38 mark of “Voices of Spring”; the same riff, slightly lower, also turns up at the end of “The Blue Danube.” (To my ear, it sounds closer to a B, but given the vagaries of recording and playback speeds, I’ll give it to her. B would be crazy enough.)

If I was coaching a soprano with those kinds of notes, I probably wouldn’t begrudge her interpolating them wherever even just barely reasonable; if you got ’em, might as well use ’em. But if I was composing for the same soprano, would I build the piece around those notes? Nope—I’d certainly leave room for some ossia high-wire acrobatics, but I’d first make sure the music was maximally effective without them. Here’s why: I like the idea of notation. And to notate a piece that only one person would probably ever perform defeats the purpose, in my mind.

In a more detailed way, it’s about the difference between a piece of music as a series of sounds and as a set of notated instructions. I’m as fascinated by the latter as the former, not because I’m disinterested in sound, or devoted to augenmusik, but because I think that the translation from sound into notes and back into sound again is one of the most magical aspects of composition. There’s a slippery vagueness inherent in each step of that progression that’s the essence of the compositional challenge: designing a situation that allows for the greatest chance of an interpretive lightning strike without degenerating into diffuse aimlessness, or, on the other side, stifling precision. The exact position of those thresholds vary from piece to piece, and from composer to composer; under the right circumstances, everything from indeterminacy to total serialism can be effective. That’s the nature of notation: any notation at all is structuring the performance, but even the most fanatically detailed notation is necessarily incomplete.

For me, to structure a piece around the unique abilities of one particular performer closes that door. It’s not that I’m trying to make my music technically easier—far from it, in some cases. (And I’ve paid the price.) And I like writing for performers I know, keeping their personalities and particular sound in mind as I imagine the piece. But I make sure that, down the line, someone else should be able to pick up the same piece and make a go of it. The life of the music isn’t on the page, or even in the initial realization: it’s the possibility of other performers being able to take the same notes and, using their own sound and their own experience, make something brand-new out of them, something I hadn’t considered, something the original players hadn’t considered, creating a performing tradition for the music that’s not a set of rigid guidelines, but a fluid range of possibility that each subsequent interpreter can explore and expand.

That’s just my opinion—the advent of recording has opened up the possibility of the complete opposite approach, fixing an irreproduceable musical event for anyone to experience, at any time. I’ve dabbled with that on occasion in the form of electronic and sequenced computer music, and that ability to tweak and refine to your heart’s content could very well be a crucial element of the success of a work, depending on the ultimate goal. But I’m still too addicted to the thrill of hearing notes that only existed in my head suddenly conjured into existence, running out into the world, taking on a life of their own.

Our librarian friend Rebecca Hunt (really, all of you should have a librarian friend) alerts us to the launch of the online Juilliard Manuscript Collection, lovely digital images of the trove donated to the school last year by their board chairman, Bruce Kovner. Lots of serious, scholarly stuff here—autographs, sketches, composer-corrected proofs—but, this blog being what it is, we’ll skip the serious and scholarly and head straight to these two drawings of Aaron Copland that Leonard Bernstein saw fit to add to the manuscript of his piano arrangement of El Salón México.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) loved music, but he thought the joys of harmony paled next to the pleasures of the table. The famed author of Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste) and the honoree of Brillat-Savarin cheese (a triple-crême, 75% butterfat masterpiece), was a lawyer by trade, but also a musician—during a brief exile to the Untied States during the Reign of Terror, he taught violin and was good enough himself to play first violin in a New York theater orchestra. In his book, Brillat-Savarin regarded hearing a more subtle mechanism than taste:

Taste is not so richly endowed as hearing; the latter can appreciate and compare many sounds at the same time; but taste, on the other hand, is actually simple—that is to say, that two flavours at one are equally inappreciable.

But it may be doubled and multipled in succession—that is to say, that in one act of deglutition we may experience successively a second and even a third sensation, each of which gradually becomes more weak, and which are described by the words after-taste, bouquet, or fragrance. So, when a chord is struck, a skilful ear may distinguish one or many series of consonances, of which the number is as yet imperfectly known.

But the complete satisfaction of the gourmand is superior, and has superior side-benefits.

A married pair of gourmands have at least once a day a pleasant opportunity of meeting, for even those who have separate bedrooms—and in France there are a great number who have—eat at least at the same table, and have a subject of conversation which is always new; they speak not only of what they eat, but also of what they have eaten, what they will eat, what they have seen elsewhere, of fashionable dishes, new inventions, and so forth. Everyone knows that such a familiar chit-chat is delightful.

Music, no doubt, has powerful attractions for those who love it; but one must set about it:—it is an exertion.

Besides, sometimes one has a cold, our music is mislaid, the instruments are out of tune, we may have a headache:—there is a strike.

On the other hand, a common want brings the couple to table; the same inclination retains them there; they naturally show each other those trifling attentions which denote a wish to oblige, and their behavior at meal-time has a great share in the happiness of their lives.

Still, it was music that saved his life. Brillat-Savarin had to travel to see one citoyen Prôt, in order to obtain a passport, “which, probably, might save me from prison or the scaffold.”

I am not one of those persons who are rendered cruel from fear, and I think that M. Prôt was not exactly a bad man; but he was not very intelligent, and he did not know how to employ the formidable power put in his hands; he was like a child armed with the club of Hercules.
…
I was a little better received by Madame Prôt, to whom I went to pay my repects; for the circumstances under which I presented myself interested at least her feelings of curiosity.

The first words she said were to ask me if I loved music. What an unexpected happiness! She was passionately fond of it, and as I am myself a very fair musician, out hearts beat in unison from that very moment.
…
After supper, she sent for some of her music-books. She sang, I sang, we sang. I never used my voice to greater advantage, and I never enjoyed it more. M. Prôt had already several times said he was going, but she took no notice of it, and we were giving in grand style the duet from [Grétry’s] opera la Fausse Magie,

“Vous souvient-il de cette fête?”

when he told her he really must insist upon her leaving.

We had to finish; but at the moment of parting, Madame Prôt sait to me, “Citizen, a man who cultivates the fine arts as you have done, does not betray his country. I know you have asked some favor from my husband; it shall be granted; it is I who promise you.”
…
Thus the object of my journey was accomplished. I returned home with my head erect; and, thanks to Harmony, charming daughter of Heaven, my ascension was for a good many years postponed.

Having saved his neck in a most quintessentially French manner, Brillat-Savarin survived the Terror, returned to France, and wrote the book for which he became justly famous. In addition to that delectable cheese, he also lent his name to a cake: a savarin nowadays refers to any liqueur-soaked yeast cake without raisins (which would turn it into a baba au rhum). Eat well.

We don’t usually do birthdays on this blog, but we’ll make an exception for Liberace, who would have turned the exquisitely appropriate age of 88 today. I’m not sure that anyone who wasn’t alive during Liberace’s heyday realizes just how big a star he was—headlining his own TV show at various times throughout his career, guest-starring on every show imaginable (Batman! Kojak! The Monkees!), even venturing into movies now and again. (He’s memorably good in his one non-piano role, as the casket salesman in Tony Richardson’s The Loved One.) In the 1980s, he sold out two famous runs of shows at Radio City Music Hall, and was pulling down $300,000 a week in Vegas. For playing the piano.

Well, more than that, obviously: the outfits, the jewelry, the mirror-mosaic piano cases, the Rolls-Royce that drove him onstage—the spectacle always in effective counterpoint to his relaxed and easy stage demeanor, fully enjoying the absurdity of his flamboyance with coy self-deprecation. But the man could play. Liberace honed his technique with Florence Bettray-Kelly (herself a student of Moriz Rosenthal), and was good enough to solo with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock as a 14-year-old. This clip shows his way with Chopin—the arrangement, combining the “Minute” Waltz and the A-flat Polonaise, is an abomination, but it’s Chopin’s notes, for the most part, and Liberace shows some nice limpid fingerwork as well as a real feel for the style. (Had he not opted for glitz, Liberace probably would have been a Chopin specialist in the tradition of Paderewski, his childhood idol; family legend has the old master personally encouraging the young Liberace during a visit to Milwaukee.)

Here’s a couple more clips: this performance of “Mack the Knife,” from a 60s episode of the Dean Martin Show, is shameless and scintillating in equal measure, and you get to see just what a good time he’s having putting the tune through its paces. (The mash-up of Weill with Strauss is a superb musical pun.) And here he is in Vegas, in unusually fine technical form, spinning a surrealistically-juxtaposed medley—”As Time Goes By,” “Chopsticks,” and “Send In the Clowns.”

I sometimes wonder if, had he been born a century earlier, Liberace would have been grouped in with such Romantic virtuosi as Liszt and Alkan. I would imagine that an actual Liszt recital was probably closer to a Liberace show than we think. (Ken Russell thought so, too: his gleefully anachronistic, over-the-top version of the composer in Lisztomania [warning: NSFW backstage toplessness—concert starts at 4:28 mark] owes as much to Liberace as it does to psychedelic-rock excess.)

The image at the top is the cover of a collection I found at Bookman’s Alley a while back, and the arrangements are a cut above similar folios I have by the likes of Frankie Carle and Eddy Duchin, who tended to dilute the technical challenges of their style for the popular sheet-music market. Not Liberace: these versions are lush and tricky, with some sweet harmonic substitutions and effective use of 19th-century textures and flourishes. Here’s Liberace’s arrangement of the Jack Lawrence-Walter Gross standard “Tenderly” (click on each page to enlarge):


Here’s my rendition of it. I’m no Liberace; for one thing, he kept his pianos tuned. But, yes, it’s as much fun to play as it sounds.