Otters playing the piano? I suspect Camille Saint-Saëns would be delighted. (These are real otters, by the way, as will be immediately obvious when you follow the link.)
While we’re at it, here’s “Nessun dorma” with goats.
PHOTO: Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas
There have been innumerable pieces of music written about water spirits – sirens, naiads, lorelei, undines, mermaids and melusinas. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll sample just a couple of these for Rusalka Week.
In Slavic mythology, a rusalka is a spirit that dwells at the bottom of a river or lake. She lures unsuspecting men with her song, invariably resulting in a watery doom. Rusalki are never more dangerous than in early June, when the spirits roam free.
Rusalka Week plays a role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, “May Night,” drawn from Gogol’s collection, “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.” Alexander Dargomizhsky’s opera, “Rusalka,” is based on a dramatic poem by Pushkin. And the best known of the bunch, Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” was inspired by Czech fairy tales of Karel Jaromir Erben and Bozena Nemcova.
Of course, we won’t be listening to any of these. (We’ve treated Rimsky and Dargomizhsky in the past.) Instead, we’ll have a flute sonata from 1882, by Carl Reinecke, which bears the subtitle “Undine,” an allusion to a novella by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, which was very popular among the Romantics. Fouqué’s Undine tells the tale of a water spirit who marries a knight in order to gain a soul.
Then we’ll hear the complete ballet, “Les Sirènes,” from 1946, by Lord Berners. Berners, notorious for his sense of the absurd (a horse was a regular guest at his indoor tea parties) was a talented composer, writer and painter. “Les Sirènes,” on a scenario devised by Frederick Ashton, features mermaids combing their hair and singing on rocks at a seaside resort, where sirens of another sort behave coquettishly on shore.
That’s “Come on in, the Water’s Fine.” PLEASE NOTE: Due to the egregious length of the Sunday opera (Wagner’s “Parsifal,” beginning at 3 p.m. ET), “The Lost Chord” will begin one hour later than usual, at 11. The repeat will air Thursday at the same time.
You don’t want to be out walking during Rusalka Week anyway, so why don’t you stay indoors and enjoy the show? Or listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
Today is the birthday of one of my favorite composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with watching those Errol Flynn movies on television as a kid – you know, the ones that inspire you to take down the curtain rods and start dueling around the house.
Korngold was one of music’s great child prodigies. His ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann” (“The Snowman”), composed at the age of 11, was performed at the Vienna Court Opera before Emperor Franz Josef. His early piano and chamber works were picked up by Artur Schnabel. His “Sinfonietta” (a full-scale symphony in all but name) was performed by Felix Weingartner and the Vienna Philharmonic when he was 15. At one performance, Korngold shared a box with Richard Strauss.
Several of his operas are knock-outs. The double premiere in Hamburg and Cologne of “Die tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”) in 1920 made Korngold, at the age of 23, one of the leading opera composers of his time.
Several factors contributed to an enormous shake-up in Korngold’s reputation. One was the fact that his musical language never really developed. His earliest works are as finely crafted and as fully realized as those written at the end of his life – most impressive, except that what seemed strikingly modern when he was a teen later seemed hopelessly romantic and passé.
Another was that Korngold followed theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt to Hollywood for a big screen adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” This led to further offers from Warner Brothers, under terms he couldn’t refuse. In the meantime, the Nazis rolled into Austria, effectively sealing off his return home.
For decades, Korngold’s reputation among “serious” music aficionados suffered. His Violin Concerto was famously derided by one critic as “more Korn than Gold.” But that all began to change in the 1970s, with the issue of an album on the RCA label, featuring music from Flynn’s “The Sea Hawk,” “Captain Blood” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” that proved there was indeed a market for classic film music. Ironically, the very projects that had dragged him down in the eyes of some served to jumpstart his posthumous revival.
With the advent of compact disc, with labels searching for worthwhile though underexposed repertoire to lure consumers who had already replaced their entire record collections, Korngold’s reputation again began to soar. While he will never be regarded as the next Mahler or even Richard Strauss, it’s fairly obvious at this point that his place in “serious music” is secure.
Still it is with affection that many remember his film scores, which he regarded as operas without words. It was Korngold who brought Old World opulence to New World popular culture. His efforts earned him two Academy Awards.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll have two scores by Korngold as part of our second installment celebrating the films of 1939, which film historians frequently refer to as “Hollywood’s greatest year.” The first installment aired in February, and featured music from “The Wizard of Oz,” (Harold Arlen & Herbert Stothart) “Of Mice and Men” (Aaron Copland), “Gunga Din” (Alfred Newman) and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (Richard Addinsell).
This week’s episode will include Korngold’s “Juarez,” an historical drama about Mexican resistance against the French army of Napoleon III, which starred Paul Muni, Bette Davis and Claude Rains, and “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” with Davis and Errol Flynn, as Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, respectively. The latter features plenty of Korngold’s signature pageantry.
The show will also include two scores by Alfred Newman, for “Wuthering Heights” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
A third installment, focusing on the indefatigable Max Steiner – who worked on 13 films in 1939 – will air in the fall. So no more brickbats from you “Gone With the Wind” fans, please!
Join us on the second leg of our journey to celebrate the 75th anniversary of “Hollywood’s greatest year,” on “Picture Perfect,” Friday evening at 6, or enjoy it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (right) works with a score mixer laying down the tracks for “Juarez.” That’s Paul Muni onscreen.
I can’t believe György Ligeti has been dead for eight years already. An avant-garde composer whose music could actually inspire affection, Ligeti rocketed to broader fame when his music was used, against his will, in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Ligeti was born in Transylvania in 1923. He survived many hardships. Most of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust; he was conscripted into a forced labor brigade; he lived for a time under strict communist rule. He survived the violent Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution, and finally escaped with his on-again/off-again wife in a pair of mail sacks, leaping off a night train and crawling for miles through the mud to find safety in Vienna. He went on to become one of the leading composers of the second half of the 20th century.
Ligeti was not the kind of artist who would have flourished under totalitarianism. (Come to think of it, what artist is?) He even abandoned the avant-garde circle in Cologne, which included Karlheinz Stockhausen, because he found the environment to be too dogmatic. Though he wrote little electronic music himself, he incorporated the lessons he learned at the Cologne Electronic Music Studio into his instrumental works, often creating otherworldly textures.
Remarkably, for all he endured, he was able to hang on to his sense of humor, and this shone through in his music from time to time.
Here’s the car horn prelude to his opera, “Le Grand Macabre.”
And perhaps his greatest hit (thanks to Kubrick), his “Requiem,” most recently heard in the trailers for “Godzilla.”
Lastly, Barbara Hannigan in “Mysteries of the Macabre,” a distillation of three coloratura arias from “Le Grand Macabre,” sung by the character of Gepopo, the chief of secret police. In case you’re curious, the text is semi-nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFFpzip-SZk
Happy birthday, György Ligeti!
What are the odds of two horror icons being born on the same day? It’s like Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler sharing a birthday (February 2), or Ferruccio Busoni and Sergei Rachmaninoff (April 1). Today is the birthday of both Vincent Price (1911-1993) and Christopher Lee (born 1922).
Though he’d been a professional actor since the 1930s (he appeared as Sir Walter Raleigh in “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, in 1939), Price settled into the horror genre in the 1950s, with films like “House of Wax,” “The Fly,” “The House on Haunted Hill,” and “The Tingler.”
In the 1960s, he became closely associated with Roger Corman, appearing in a series of films loosely inspired by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Of course, he turned in great performances in a number of extra-genre classics, such as “Laura,” “The Baron of Arizona,” and the rib-tickling “Champagne for Caesar,” but he will always be remembered as Prince Prospero, Dr. Phibes and the narrator on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
He was an actor blessed with campy self-awareness (though he could dial it down when required), and he was quick to capitalize on both his image and his indelible voice.
Though he too has played a broad range of roles over the course of a career which has spanned more than six decades, Christopher Lee will always be linked to the Hammer Studios horror explosion of the 1950s and ‘60s. Younger fans will recognize him as Count Dooku, from the even more horrid “Star Wars” prequel trilogy, and as the turncoat wizard Saruman, in Peter Jackson’s self-indulgent “The Lord of the Rings.”
When Lee determined to become an actor, his plan was to model himself on Conrad Veidt, the German Expressionist icon who had created Cesare the Somnambulist in “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” and later played a string of refined though despicable Nazis – notably Major Strasser in “Casablanca” – in Warner Brothers films of the 1940s.
Lee’s imposing stature and bass-baritone voice make him a natural for screen villainy – though some of my favorite Lee roles are heroic (for instance, that of the Duke de Richelieu, the gentleman occultist who matches wits with a band of Satanists in “The Devil Rides Out”).
Thankfully, at 92, Lee is still very much with us, with recent appearances in “The Hobbit,” Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” and Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.”
Fun fact: it had at one point been Lee’s ambition to become an opera singer. In fact, it was Jussi Björling who recommended Lee audition for the Swedish Opera. Lee did just that and was accepted. Unfortunately, he was unable to afford the training, but whenever he filmed in Scandinavia, he made it a point to go slumming with Swedish amateur companies under an assumed name.
His singing talent has been sinfully underutilized on film, though he does get to belt out a couple of numbers in “The Return of Captain Invincible,” also starring Alan Arkin. The film, with songs by the composer and lyricist of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” was widely panned.
Happy birthday, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee!
Lee in “The Return of Captain Invincible:”
Price playing Mendelssohn’s “The War March of the Priests” in “The Abominable Dr. Phibes:”
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