Catching up with "Hansel"

Just listened to the Met's broadcast of their new Hansel. I wonder if the children in the audience realized just how well sung this performance was. Alan Held (best Wozzeck I ever heard) was luxury casting as the father, and it was nice to hear the veteran Rosalind Plowright as the mother. Christine Schafer's and Alice Coote's voices blended ravishingly for their prayer. Lisette Oropesa, her sweet voice soaring, nearly stole the show as the Dew Fairy. And while I'm still not convinced that a tenor should sing the Witch, Philip Langridge did not camp it up; he sounded, as he should, ferocious and scary.

Vladimir Jurowski certainly showed why there's so much excitement swirling around him right now. The orchestra sounded lush, and their playing was excellent. Not everyone likes transparency in this kind of music, but I thought the clarity Jurowski brought to the score kept it from getting too schmaltzy--nonetheless, his reading was appropriately mellow and well proportioned. He found nice details in the score, accompanied his singers well, and gave the climactic moments the exact right touch. Most important of all, I had goose bumps continually throughout the afternoon.

Jurowski will lead the Russian National Orchestra in music of Shubert and Brahms at Avery Fisher Hall in February ... I am sure I will try to find a ticket.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Today is the birthday of the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks, who died in 1990. She would have been 95 today. (The Australian Music Centre has informative space about her on their web site.)

Her music seems to have become largely forgotten, which is a pity. I've heard some of it--her opera The Transposed Heads (for which no less than Thomas Mann furnished the libretto) and a piece for tenor and chamber orchestra called Letters from Morocco (the letters are by Paul Bowles, her friend).

Letters from Morocco is one of my favorite pieces. I can think of no composition that sets English words more naturally or musically, following the inflection of the language and deriving its rhythms from the words, rather than trying to impose a musical structure upon them.

Her music on CD is hard to find. Letters from Morocco I own on an old LP from MGM's series of 20th century compositions, with MGM's orchestra conducted by Carlos Surinach; The Transposed Heads I borrowed from the Princeton Music Library twenty-some-odd years ago, a Louisville Sympony recording if I remember correctly. (You can sample her music by going to UbuWeb's collection of short films by Shirley Clarke--she wrote the score for the Unicef-funded "A Scary Time.")

Musicians, orchestras, opera companies: Please consider performing the music of this wonderful and unfairly neglected composer!

More on the Turkish March

David B. Levy, a music professor at Wake Forest, has another take on the "Turkish March," one that is based on a close reading of the words. His letter to the Times is worth reading, but here's the key part:

"In my book Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony, I argue that the so-called 'Turkish march' is the first step toward a rapprochement between West and East, the culmination of which is achieved in the finale’s second double fugue.

"A close reading of Schiller’s words reveals that the 'Turkish march' is a paraphrase of the portion of Psalm 19 that refers to a metaphorical wedding procession. The bride and groom are the Occident and the Orient. "

Here's the relevant passage from the King James version of Psalm 19 (courtesy of Bartleby):

In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.

The imagery suggests that the sun, representing the east (since that is where it rises), is akin to a bridegroom, or a champion about to run his course (in this case, its course through the heavens).

Levy's gloss certainly fits in with the spirit of Schiller's poem and Beethoven's music, to encompass polarities, break the bonds of custom, and proclaim a true brotherhood of man.

"Forgotten" Opera

In order to show that the phenomenon of "repressed memory" (or dissociative amnesia) is a figment of the modern imagination, as it were, a researcher at McLean Hospital offered a prize "to the first person to identify a case of dissociative amnesia in any work of fiction or nonfiction prior to 1800." The winner? A French opera from 1786, Nina, by Nicholas Dalayrac. This from a report in Harvard magazine. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

A Peek at Chausson

The other day, I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recently unveiled 19th- and early 20th-century European painting galleries and came across this impressive and large canvas by Henry Lerolle, "The Organ Recital." Lerolle was Chausson's brother-in-law; his wife was the sister of Chausson's wife. In the painting, from the mid-1880s, Chausson's wife is the singer; Chausson himself is seated at the organ. It's hard to see, but the young man standing in profile at the extreme left is Debussy. It's worth a visit to the Met (museum) to see the actual painting.

Carmen Rides the IND

Jennifer Diamond is a young mezzo who is one of the members of the Resident Artists Program of the Opera Company of Brooklyn, the group for which I do development. She's just posted on YouTube a fun video in which she sings the "Habanera" from Carmen while riding New York's subways.

The Turkish March

A piece in today's Times Op-Ed page points out how Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" has been co-opted by governments and other organizations--including some tyrants--for their own purposes, making Beethoven's masterpiece into an "empty signifier." And there's this:

"In the middle of the movement, after we hear the main melody (the 'joy' theme) in three orchestral and three vocal variations, something unexpected happens that has bothered critics for the last 180 years: at Bar 331, the tone changes totally, and, instead of the solemn hymnic progression, the same 'joy' theme is repeated in the 'marcia turca' (or Turkish march) style, a conceit borrowed from military music for wind and percussion instruments that 18th-century European armies adopted from the Turkish janissaries.

"The mode then becomes one of a carnivalesque parade, a mocking spectacle — critics have even compared the sounds of the bassoons and bass drum that accompany the beginning of the marcia turca to flatulence. After this point, such critics feel, everything goes wrong, the simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never recovered. "

I'm not sure which critics are being discussed here. There is no doubt that the Turkish March section stands in sharp contrast to what has come before. It lightens the air somewhat, and provides an almost satirical commentary on the whole piece. It may also attest to Beethoven's devilish sense of humor, which is present in many of his works, although not everyone chooses to hear it. The Turkish March quickly turns into a fiendish fugato, so this moment of misrule is brief.

Still, I'm not sure if it's wise to invest too much into the Turkish March section. It's good to keep in mind the words that it's set to:

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

And the translation: "Joyously, as his suns speed/Through Heaven's glorious order,/Hasten, Brothers, on your way,/Exulting as a knight in victory." (Courtesy of Classical Music Pages.)

The Turkish March gives the sense of a small military band saluting the "knight [or hero] in victory." It's somewhat literal; I'm sure Beethoven heard bands of this style throughout his young life. It reminds me somewhat of the Salvation Army band that stalks the young lovers in Elgar's Cockaigne Overture--the semi-comical, seemingly inappropriate intrusion that introduces a crucial musical counterweight.

Let's never forget what Mahler said: "A symphony must be like the world. It must encompass everything." True for Beethoven's Ninth, too.