Bookish Gardener

Carnival of Music #13

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of The Carnival of Music.

Opera and sports, fans and snobs: See why Sarah at A Glass of Chianti says, "Basketball is the Cosi fan tutti of sports." Sarah's also got an intriguing idea for a new opera of her own (but which sport will it be?). Thanks to Don at Mixolydian Mode for nominating these posts...

Palliative music: ...and more thanks to Don for the pointer to this fascinating article on harpist and soprano Therese Schroeder-Sheker's pioneering work in music-thanatology.

It's so funny how we don't sing any more: The self-titled "Headmistress/Zookeeper" of The Common Room asks the excellent musical question: whatever happened to singing in daily life?

Music out of chaos:  For a couple of teeth-chattering tales of gigs gone wrong, here's a sad saga from Melinama of Pratie Place about the bad things that happen when a performer can't be in two places at the same time, and the behind-the-scenes history (found via be.jazz) of the making of Charles Mingus's The Complete Town Hall Concert.

Remembering Robert Moog: Noteworthy remembrances include this tribute by Keith Emerson (found via Colby Cosh) and this post by Mr. Sun (including a link to his earlier post featuring the Bob Moog action figure).

And now, a bit about the snapshot at the top. It's the poster-within-a-movie for the opera-within-a-movie "Carnival," whose music was composed by Oscar Levant for the movie Charlie Chan Goes To The Opera.

According to Levant's memoir A Smattering of Ignorance: "This epic in abnormality brought together Warner Oland, as Chan, and Boris Karloff as a Mephistophelian Bing Crosby, for the first time in pictures. The producer's blind instinct, coupled with a limited budget, had sought me out to compose the opera." (Karloff is quite the good sport in this movie, hamming it up with gusto, in a sibilant baritone speaking voice that is unnervingly reminiscent of Jeremy Irons.) Levant's influences? Not Schoenberg, and not Beethoven: "Having had little experience in writing opera, I asked Schönberg for some advice. He advised me to study the score of Beethoven's Fidelio. Since this is one of the most unoperatic of all operas it was just what I didn't need."

You're the Piano Man: Charlie Chan At The Opera opens with a scene that takes place on a dark and stormy night in an insane asylum, where an amnesiac whose identity has been a mystery for seven years is engaged in his nightly ritual of playing the piano and singing an operatic aria in a foreign language in the sanitarium's rec room...not unlike this summer's "Piano Man." More on this summer's now-solved mystery is found On An Overgrown Path. Here, Karloff is the baritone Gravelle, who escapes the sanitarium in order to take the stage again in his signature role. Levant describes the aria (sung here and in the pivotal scene of the opera) as "a potent mingling of Moussourgsky and pure Levant." Boris Badanoff, er, Karloff plays the role of Mephisto in "Carnival."

Frankenstein: Before Charlie Chan At The Opera, Boris Karloff had already achieved fame and notoriety for his role as the Monster in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. (In this scene, William Demarest, playing a police detective assigned to assist Chan, which he does with all the sputtering, indignant cluelessness that he will have honed to perfection as Uncle Charlie in My Three Sons decades later, is informed by the opera's stage manager that "This opera will go on tonight even if Frankenstein walks on stage!")  Dr. Frankenstein created his monster by grafting together parts from body-snatched remains, but a project with much happier results is Dynamite Ham's "I Believe In You", a unique Frankenfusion of songs of Dr. Frank and Frank Loesser.

Costumes from hell and heaven: Levant recalls that "Twentieth Century-Fox had just completed an elaborate spectacle with Lawrence Tibbett, of which one of the high spots was a Faust scene in which the star wore a magnificent Mephistophelian costume. [....] One of our first problems arose when the costume was assigned to Charlie Chan at the Opera, with instructions for us to put it to work. I had heard of music being written around a singer, but never for a costume. Nevertheless, determined to become a cog in the wheel, I set myself to writing an operatic sequence in which the big aria found a baritone wearing this elegant Mephistopheles costume." (Surely you jest, Mr. Levant.) For a costume for the opera that truly is to die for, let's look in on Anne-Carolyn as Lucia di Lammermoor at the concert.

The Valhalla Effect: That's the name given to the unusual transfiguring phenomenon that occurs (only?) in The Fredösphere, applied here to Madame Lilli Rochelle, the soprano in "Carnival."

Before                            After 

Credits:

Thanks to those who submitted posts, and also to those who may be waking from innocent slumbers to find that their posts are unwitting (but, I hope, not unwilling) participants in this week's Carnival.

Special thanks to TexasBestGrok's JohnL, The Carnival of Music's creator and impresario.

Music is timeless, and so is the Carnival: visit the Carnival of Music page for links to prior Carnivals, to volunteer to host a future Carnival, or to submit entries, and be sure to join the Carnival again next week when it appears at Owlish Mutterings.

See and say

I got your picture hangin' on the wall
It can't see or come to me when I call your name
I realize it's just a picture in a frame
          - Ashford/Simpson (via Gaye/Terrell)

But all I've got is a photograph
And I realize you're not coming back anymore
          - Starr/Harrison

The camera can never go as far as the eye can see. How many times have I been thwarted from capturing a vision? The jeweled green glint of a hummingbird in blurred darting flight. Plumed ornamental grasses standing sentry in a hundred-foot formation. The sun of high noon so bright that everything is seen in an illuminated haze through a squinty gaze. The big sky in summer so cloudless and clear that you feel like you're standing at the bottom of a deep blue sea. The serendipitous glimpse of three clumps of three different agastaches in three different beds yards apart, echoing hullo-ullo-ullo in an unplanned but perfectly spaced diagonal. But even shots that adhere to the limits of light and dimension and yield pleasing results are, ultimately, no more than pretty pictures. Their beauty can be enjoyed, they may even evoke a memory or two, but they cannot send you into a time machine where you get to relive the experience you were trying to record. I certainly should know better; every parent learns this lesson a couple of hundred rolls of film or so into their first baby's first year; but the urge to catch and to keep that which cannot be possessed is one that I can overcome only with intense conscious effort, accompanied by much ersatz zen-talk.

I was sitting in the "sunroom" the other day, the name given to a room built onto the back of our garage, with its south-facing front and ceiling all in glass. It's a wreck, really, isolated from the house's heating and ventilation, prone to roof leaks, and subject to temperature extremes that make it unsuitable for growing any plant known to me. Except: the door, when open, frames one of the most beautiful views there is of the garden as a festive and orderly jungle, with magenta petunias and chartreuse and black sweet potato vines billowing out of the window boxes, flowering and done-flowering spikes of agastache and penstemons in their most attractive profile view, and mounds of multicolored snapdragons and petunias, sown from seasons past, filling in the blanks. Sitting in the sunroom, I was rereading Henry Mitchell's The Essential Earthman, and he (as is his wont) set me right straight:

Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.

Calling all carnies

The carnival is coming! Carnival of Music #13 will be hosted right here next week. Submissions made to the email address on the Carnival of Music page by noon on Friday will be most gratefully accepted. What kind of music? In the immortal words of Gamble and Huff (via the O'Jays): "I love / I love / I love / I love / music .... Any any kind of music." Until then, enjoy this week's Carnival at Musicircus.

Joey, Joey, Joey

I've dipped a toe into water gardening this season with this half whiskey barrel. (Which whiskey? The interior of the barrel was still fragrant as we carried it out of the garden center. One deep whiff each, and my husband and I looked at each other and said: "Jack Daniel's.") For this instant garden, put in a plastic barrel liner, and just add water. Toss in a Bacillus thuringiensis mosquito-larvae-killing donut, and let the water sit for a few days to off-gas the chlorine. This garden is "planted" with triangle-stemmed dwarf papyrus, parrot's feather, horsetail rush, some submerged oxygenating plants, and the lovely hardy water lily pictured above, 'Joey Tomocik'. Its gently fragrant bloom is a bright, but not strident, pale yellow. The undersides of the leaves are wine-colored, and the tops of the leaves are lightly splotched with the same color. The flower is held up above the surface of the water, opening in bright sunlight and closing by mid-afternoon. After a day or so, as future blooms lie loosely coiled underwater, then it's time to go...time to go.

Newly blooming: Tricyrtis hirta (toadlily); Impatiens balsamina 'Blackberry Trifle' (self-sown).

Green bean harvest

Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

'Fortex' is in the house! These tasty pole beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) have clambered up the rope trellises in the raised beds and fruited heavily, paying no heed to the hordes of jabberkneed feebles that find their newly emerging foliage particularly toothsome. These beans grow long without turning tough. With the tips taken off in crisp snaps (...no strings, Ma!), they're ready to be tossed into a hot pan with a flick of salt, a modest amount of olive oil and an immodest amount of chopped garlic. Keep stirring until the beans green up; keep stirring some more until they dimple and blister; then enjoy: these beans have flavor.

Newly blooming: Anemone tomentosa 'Robustissima' (Japanese anemone); Linum perenne lewisii (blue flax); Machaeranthera tanacetifolia (Tahoka daisy); Clethra alnifolia 'Ruby Spice' (summersweet).

Levantesque

Humoresque has been showing up a lot on the classic movie channel this summer, coinciding with the release of a new DVD set of Joan Crawford films. This movie's one of those that I'd always had a vague impression about but had never really watched all the way through until a few months ago.

The movie's title (and not too much else) comes from the short story by Fannie Hurst, about a child prodigy whose gift is nurtured by his immigrant mother. After achieving fantastic success as a world-renowned concert violinist, he enlists to fight in the Great War. The story ends with his brief visit home on leave. He plays "Humoresque" for his mother ("It's like life, son, that piece. Crying to hide its laughing and laughing to hide its crying."), and then a piece he's composed to accompany Alan Seeger's "I Have A Rendezvous with Death." He asks his childhood sweetheart to marry him, then leaves for Europe.

The movie attempts melodrama of its own (boy from the slums meets violin, boy with violin meets rich girl, rich girl wins boy [mama has a fit], boy loses girl, boy keeps violin and mama), not quite as successfully. The violinist in the movie needs to be more of a wunderkind with a streak of mama's boy, but there isn't a grain of innocence in the world-weary John Garfield (whose character as a boy is played by Robert Blake). He's merely penniless and defiant, and completely unbelievable as he mouths platitudes about How Much His Music Means To Him and How Much Joan Crawford Means To Him. (However, although John Garfield is somewhat short for a leading man, and not at all handsome in my book, he is inexplicably, um, hot.) The movie is, of course, famed for its music (even inspiring this tribute album from Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg), but the violin solos in the movie (although played ably by Isaac Stern's fingers and John Garfield's furrowed brow), are mostly of the histrionic diva genre, not so much my thing.

But I find this film worth returning to, for a couple of reasons. I'm not a particular fan of Joan Crawford, but she is so pretty (not haughty, not brittle) that it makes you want to stare at the screen here, even (or maybe even especially) in the scene when she's drunkenly warbling along to "Embraceable You". Her classic line, of course, is: "I'm tired of playing second fiddle to the ghost of Beethoven!" (Funny...I think I had that said to me too, around Day Three or so of The Beethoven Experience.)

And then there's Oscar Levant, who does double duty as a concert pianist and the movie's comic relief. I had one of those "You know you're getting old when..." moments when I first saw him in this movie: Oscar Levant looks like a kid to me here. They give his piano playing a fair amount of screen time (considering), and it is thrilling to watch his outsized hands on the keys. Not to be missed are his inspired non sequiturs, which seem to be his own way of turning to the fourth wall and saying "What am I doing in this movie?":

Did I ever tell you I was in love once? It took me two weeks to get over her. I played all the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas. It took exactly two weeks.

Are you sure there's nothing else I can do for you? Maybe you'd like to hear me play the Hammerklavier sonata—it only takes an hour, if I leave out the repeats.

I realized at some point that I've felt a presumptuous familiarity with Oscar Levant for years, although I've only seen him in one other movie (The Band Wagon), have never seen any vintage reruns of his television appearances, and, aside from my copy of Levant Plays Gershwin and the various versions of "Blame It On My Youth" dotted here and there in my jazz library, don't know all that much about him as a performer or composer. I was curious to see what he was like as a writer, so I tracked down his first book, A Smattering of Ignorance, written several years before he appeared in Humoresque. It's a collection of musings and anecdotes delivered with deadpan hilarity, based on his life to that point, as a concert pianist, conductor and composer in New York City, as a composition student of Schoenberg and Hollywood studio "cog in the wheel" in L.A., and as a grieving friend of the then recently deceased George Gershwin. The book is as meaty as it is entertaining, and its best chapters are those in which Levant gets serious about the future of American music: "The progress that had been made toward insinuating new American works into the program of symphony orchestras was arrested because the support of the orchestras was dwindling, and the conductors did not wish to alienate their audiences further by forcing difficult works on them. [....] A new generation of composers was emerging which inevitably would be subject to the same cycle of mild patronizing interest and essential indifference as that which preceded them." (Plus ça change...?) But I'm also happy to indulge in the guilty pleasure of laughing at this tale of a particular studio boor:

The level of musical perception among Holywood producers is, if anything, slightly lower than their perception of values associated with the other arts. [....] I recall the plight of one, whose social prestige decreed his presence at a certain Hollywood Bowl concert. It chanced that the important work of the evening was the C minor symphony of Beethoven, which he suffered in silence until the coda of the final movement. This has, as you will recall, what could be desribed as an 1805 Roxy finish, with the tonic and dominant chords repeated a dozen times, with flourishes. At each insistent recurrence of the tonic he half rose from his chair to facilitate his exit . . . also because he was bored. When the third series of tonic and dominant chords still left him short of the actual end of the movement he turned and muttered, "The rat fooled me again."

[....]

Perhaps his most searching bit of musical criticism was propounded when he said to me dictatorially, "In my opinion"—marking the words carefully to allow the full weight of his thought to rest on me—"the greatest piece of music ever written is 'Humoreske.'"

It was after such a characteristic demonstration that S. N. Behrman said of this producer, "Now I know why he can make those instantaneous decisions—he is never deflected by thought."

Oscar Levant, A Smattering of Ignorance. Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1942 (reissue ISBN 0848821521).

 

The bolted and the beautiful

With week upon week of record heat, the lettuces have been bolting all summer, but here's one that I let go to flower on purpose. This extra seedling of 'Forellenschluss' strayed outside the lettuce row, so I popped it into a corner of one of the raised beds, next to the blue-flowered Witloof chicory and a couple of gladiolas. Its cheery lemon-ice flowers open and close within a few hours in the morning, and are well loved by teeny tiny bees.

Newly blooming: Monarda citriodora (wild bee balm); Lilium speciosum var. rubrum (rubrum lily); Talinum paniculatum (Jewels of Opar, self-sown); Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm' (Black-eyed Susan); Persicaria orientalis (kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate, self-sown).