Bookish Gardener

Fallen, fallen

Another autumnal equinox, another Rilke poem. As it did last year, Rilke's poetry came back into visible orbit for me via this summer's Token Creek Chamber Music Festival. The final program of the music series featured a performance of Peter Lieberson's "Rilke Songs", composed to five poems from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (I:4, "O ihr Zärlichen"; II:1, "Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!; II:12, "Wolle die Wandlung"; II,5, "Blumenmuskel"; and II:29, "Stiller Freund"). Wanting to familiarize myself with the poems before the program, I found myself in the poetry stacks of the B&N, four different translations propped open to the first of the poems, and relied on instinctive reaction to choose Edward Snow's translation, which, after more hours in its company, still reads just right to me.

I moved onto reading Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William Gass, which sends me into a little orbit of my own. The academic stilt of its title is misleading; this is a very personal and personable book. Rilke emerges as a three-dimensional human from the strokes of Gass's biographical sketch in the opening chapter. Somehow I'm unexpectedly relieved that the revered Rilke is flawed and real, not out of indulgence (I don't believe that it's okay to be a jerk so long as you produce great art) or sympathy (...nor that it's okay to be a jerk if you are oh so sensitive), but because unflattering truth is always better than hagiographical spin. Rilke, the poet of the Big Idea, believed in and worshiped passion...but mostly in his head. The existential losses of youth, love and life are celebrated in his poetry, but unsung, and perhaps unknown to the poet, are what he's lost by having passed up the chance to be a good father, and having never experienced an honest day's hard work. Why is it that Rilke's poetry is now even more appealing to me even after the unveiling of these hairy warts? Gass gets at this mystery in describing Rilke's poems as "lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself...lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength."

As advertised, the meat of Gass's book is the philosophy and practice of poetry translation. Gass lays out and examines selected stanzas in multiple iterations by several different translators (including himself), parsing them with time-honored methods of literary criticism, his own poetic sensibility, and sometimes just a little bit of Simon Cowell ("Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid", he says about their translations of the first stanza of II:12 of the Sonnets). After reading Gass, I'm grateful for the bounty of English translations available on bookstore shelves, and hopeful that I can get closer to the essence of the elephant by putting all the blind men in a room and listening to each of their stories.

But where were we? Oh, yes. It's the first day of fall. Rilke's poem "Herbst" ("Autumn"):

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Gass translates the first stanza: "The leaves are falling, falling from far away, / as though a distant garden died above us; / they fall, fall with denial in their wave."

"Herbst" is recited and sung in German, set to acoustic guitar accompaniment, here.

The way I want to hear this poem today is in the Edward Snow translation, set to music for voices by Joshua Shank (scroll down the post for the translation), which was brought to us earlier this year through the good offices of The Fredösphere. (Links to a sound file of its performance and its score can be found in the first paragraph of this post.)

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

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.

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.

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).

 

I'll see your Barth and raise you a Tillich

Holy theological aesthetics, Batman...Robert the Llama Butcher has a great post on church, music, church music, and spirituality in music, inspired by the occasion of having had Mozart's Missa Brevis in C incorporated into a recent Sunday church service. I especially appreciated the excerpts of Karl Barth on Mozart (having squeaked through my one-year div school masters without having read nearly as much Barth as I should've, these were all new to me). But when Barth says "But neither did there exist this 'demoniac Mozart' whom our century wanted to substitute", is this a dig against Kierkegaard's take on Don Giovanni in Either/Or? This article from Richard John Neuhaus seems to point in that direction. And while Barth might consider the spiritual message of Mozart's music to be self-evident, I'm mindful of this caution from Paul Tillich, in a footnote to Systematic Theology: "Every public performance of Bach’s Passion of St. Matthew carries with it the risk of making the gospel story more meaningless for people who admire the great art of Bach’s music without being grasped by its infinite meaning."

Now. As for whether Beethoven is "The Music of the Spheres" or "The Music of the Ego": I'm not so sure that that's a fight that needs to be picked. True, Beethoven's music is all him—joyful, stormy, playful, profound, and, yes, sometimes clumsy and intemperate, too—but I don't think it's all about him. When I hear Beethoven, I know that I'm in the presence of great music, never mind the musicological explanations why. That Beethoven's flaws and struggles, overtly expressed, are of a piece with such music, is its own revelation of grace.

I never know when to expect the music of the spheres, but the heavens seem to part to rain it down regularly. In the spirit of Billie Holiday's rendition of "I Hear Music" and Frank Loesser's lyrical laundry list ("The murmur of a morning breeze up there/ The rattle of the milkman on the stair/ Sure that's music/ Mighty fine music/ The singing of a sparrow in the sky/ The perking of the coffee right nearby"), here's my list (some churchly, some not): Kit Taylor playing the Goldberg Variations; the noon church bells in the Meadowood neighborhood chiming "Rock of Ages"; the Schubert Sanctus (although there are parishioners going hungry in the Diocese of Minnesota, where the Bishop Visitation guidelines say: "Please do not use the Schubert Sanctus (S130) unless the congregation really knows how to sing it."); and the music of the "Sphere"—that is, Thelonious Sphere Monk, when Hank Jones plays "'Round About Midnight".

Hearing Hank Jones

Hank Jones was recently interviewed by Terry Gross on "Fresh Air", in a segment that aired yesterday and which is archived here. I'd had no idea about the interview (I rarely listen to non-music programming on public radio), but—bless his heart—my husband phoned me from work to alert me that it was on (he'd heard about it from a colleague, whose wife had phoned him to let him know it was on, bless her heart). Did I say I'd had no idea? Strangely enough, earlier in the day I'd given a first listen to Steal Away, the album of traditional hymns and spirituals that Hank Jones made with Charlie Haden in 1995. "Go Down, Moses" from that album is excerpted in the interview, along with a generous sampling of recordings spanning the last half-century. Hank Jones turns 87 on July 31 and still actively plays and records (and practices his scales!). Disciplined and devout in how he lives, thoughtful and inventive in how he plays—Hank Jones is simply inspiring. I'm eager to hear his latest, For My Father, particularly for the Strayhorn ("Lotus Blossom" and "Johnny Come Lately") and for his take on Monk's "Bemsha Swing"; I love Monk, but most of all when he is played by Mr. Jones.

Newly blooming: Salvia verticillata 'Purple Rain', Clematis texensis 'Duchess of Albany', asiatic lilies (burnt orange and pink-tinged orange), Heliotropium arborescens (purple heliotrope), Phlox paniculata, Salvia viridis (annual clary sage, self-sown), Tanacetum parthenium (feverfew), Echinacea purpurea (coneflower), Aconitum napellus (purple monkshood), Sidalcea x 'Party Girl' (miniature hollyhock), Gilia tricolor (bird's-eye gilia), Alcea rosea 'Nigra' (black hollyhock), Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle', Hydrangea 'Endless Summer', Coreopsis verticillata 'Zagreb' and 'Moonbeam' (tickseed), Astilbe arendsii x 'Bressingham Beauty', thornless blackberries.

Dog; tricks.

My 12-year-old stood agape, eyes as big as saucers, as they say. She'd just heard Dad say: "Mom's going to be taking piano lessons". Each of my children has been yoked to involuntary servitude at the piano bench; she finds it incomprehensible that anyone would willingly choose such a fate.

Well, it has been a long time between drinks. I started with a couple of years of lessons in Korea (around the time Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon), but stopped when family circumstances (too many moves, too little money) made it difficult to continue.  I kept at it on my own until leaving for college, but didn't get a piano in living quarters again until we bought our Yamaha upright when our first child began her lessons several years ago. Surprisingly, I found that my fingers still worked, and, oddly enough, that my ability to read music had actually improved. About five years ago, I took a stab at starting lessons again, but the combination of infant in the house + dawn-past-dusk job precluded being able to get in a lick of practice, and I gave it up after a few months.

In the past couple of years, I've been able to make more time to feed this obsession that's burned like a lifelong, low-grade fever. There's not one iota of the performer in me, so I don't try to play for others or look to playing as a means of outward expression. Instead, I use it as a way of "close listening", to try to understand why or how a piece manages to push my buttons, whether it's a bit from Schubert's "little" A major sonata:

or from Beethoven's sonata no. 24 (op. 78 in F sharp major; my favorite, although I can play only a few fragments of it):

On the plus side, when the synapses in the brain fire, the fingers listen (aided, no doubt, by decades of daily contact with the typewriter keyboard), and (as a little-known beneficial side effect of years of training and practice in the law) I read music well. On the minus side, I don't play fast or with power; when I play softly, it's watery; and, like an aging actress who insists on the Vaseline-coated camera lens, I tend to leadfoot the pedal to gauze over my lack of legato.

What are my hopes? I'd like to improve technically and to play more expressively, but most of all, I'd like to be able to play without causing the contents of a grave or two in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof to heave and spin.

My first lesson is later today. Will I crash and burn from the anxiety of playing for someone whose job it is, after all, to observe, judge and (constructively) criticize? Will I finally be brought to confront the limits of my skills in the harsh light of day? Will I have acquired more self-taught bad habits than I can unlearn? Is it too late for this old dog to be taught new tricks? Stay tuned.

Are You Experienced?

BBC Radio 3's "The Beethoven Experience" began today, launching six days of all Beethoven, all the time, featuring every work that Beethoven composed. The temptation to give up family, work and sleep in order to immerse myself in this marathon is overwhelming, but I'm being regretfully sensible, and "tuning in" via the live web feed, catch as catch can, as time permits. Lots of good bits today, including the Fifth Symphony with Antal Dorati conducting and the Seventh Symphony with Carlos Kleiber conducting (both excellent choices, although it might have worked even better to have the Kleiber Fifth and the Dorati Seventh). BBC3 is also including in-studio performances as well as recordings as part of the "Experience", which is a terrific idea, and I was bowled over by a remarkable and vivid live performance by Alice Neary and Gretel Dowdeswell of Beethoven's fourth cello sonata. I've enjoyed all the lieder and other vocal works that seem to be interspersed throughout the programming, but particularly favor the chamber pieces. I was happy to have caught the seminal recording of the C sharp minor string quartet (Op. 131) from the '50s by the Hungarian Quartet, which brought back fond memories of hearing the Takács Quartet's energized performance of this same piece last fall here in Madison. I didn't get to hear as many of the piano sonatas today as I would have liked, but made sure I led myself back to the computer in time to hear Alfred Brendel discuss the final three sonatas, leading into his recordings of them. Brendel isn't my favorite Beethoven interpreter; I find myself often bickering with his tempo choices ("too fast, Brendel! too slow, Brendel!"), but his work on the late sonatas is very satisfying. (All the more disappointing that he had to cancel his recital in Madison a few months ago due to illness, but I'm hoping that his participation in this program means that he's been on the mend.) And now, the Kreutzer sonata with Sandor Vegh and Andras Schiff. I'll even stay up past my bedtime for another Seventh, this time with Otto Klemperer conducting. Hmm...can't I go AWOL for the next five days? Laptop, headphones, high-speed internet connection, room service and NoDoz? Sounds like a plan.

Newly blooming: Roses (Rosa carolina, rugosa rose 'Roseraie de l'Haÿ, David Austin rose 'Redouté'), peonies ('James Pillow' [Pillow, 1936], 'Lillian Gumm' [Gumm, 1921], 'Bev' [Krekler, 1975], 'Dai jo kuhan' [Millet, year unknown], and 'Festiva Maxima' [Mielles, 1851]), Viburnum dentatum (arrowwood viburnum), Physocarpus opulifolius 'Dart's Gold' (ninebark), Salvia x superba 'Mainacht' (May Night salvia), Alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle), Anchusa azurea 'Dropmore' (Italian bugloss), and Allium christophii (Star of Persia).

Awed by Audubon

Bring in a little spring with these visual, musical and poetic riffs on John James Audubon's The Birds of America, courtesy of the Musée de la civilisation. (Caveat: I'm guessing that the site might be difficult to appreciate fully without a high-speed internet connection.) I'm ever so grateful to ever so humble (who has more on Audubon) for this link.

You rock, John Roll.

The Mahler was awesome.

(Backstory: Madison Symphony's final concert of the season was Mahler's Eighth Symphony, long sold out. I didn't even entertain the thought of trying to beg, borrow, cadge or steal a ticket in order to be able to go. But then a phone call, Friday morning: "Wanna go see Mahler?" A colleague of my husband had a ticket and an unexpected schedule conflict, and remembered that my husband had a music nut in the household. As he handed the ticket to me, my husband asked, hopefully, "Are you going to blog this?" "Get your own blog!" I answered, disdainfully.

The concert was this afternoon. "Das Unbeschreibliche hier ist's getan.")

In other news, another May snow in Madison:

Newly blooming: Viburnum x juddii and Primula juliae 'Wanda'.

Update, May 2: And more snow.

               Photo credit: John Roll