Before American composers like Jerome Moross and Elmer Bernstein made the western distinctly their own, the task of scoring the genre fell largely to European émigrés. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll take a look at some outside perspectives on how the West was won.
Literally the godson of Richard Strauss, Max Steiner (born on this date in 1888) came from Vienna, where he studied with Johannes Brahms and Robert Fuchs. In Hollywood, he wound up scoring such classics as “King Kong,” “Gone with the Wind” and “Casablanca.”
Among his over 300 film projects were a number of westerns. One of these was “They Died with Their Boots On” (1941), which starred Errol Flynn as George Armstrong Custer and Olivia de Havilland as Libby, the woman who becomes his wife. Steiner’s score features familiar folk material, some old-fashioned faux “Indian” music, and one of his characteristically lush love themes.
Dimitri Tiomkin (born in Ukraine on this date in 1894) was a pupil of Alexander Glazunov. He came to revolutionize the sound of the American West, when he wrote the music for “High Noon,” the first of his “ballad” scores. Advance word, based on an early screening for the press, was that the picture would be a failure. However, Tiomkin had such faith in the theme song, sung in the film by Tex Ritter, that he hired Frankie Laine to record it, and the record became a world-wide hit. In fact, his score is largely credited with having saved the film.
Tiomkin was recognized with two Academy Awards: one for Best Original Song, and one for the score itself. It was the first time a composer won two Oscars for his work on the same movie. It also changed the way western scores were done. In the 1950s, Tiomkin became THE western composer of choice. He produced a number of subsequent ballad scores, including that for “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957). Asked how it was that a composer from Ukraine could write so convincingly for the American West, Tiomkin quipped, “A steppe is a steppe is a steppe.”
Another unexpected source of classic western music, Franz Waxman was born in Upper Silesia. He arrived in the U.S. by way of Germany. Nonetheless, as part of the composer’s varied and prolific output, he did indeed score a number of films in the genre, including “The Furies” (1950), a peculiar noir-western hybrid. Walter Huston, in his final film, plays a cattle baron who remarries and throws his empire into jeopardy. Barbara Stanwyck is his strong-willed daughter.
Hungarian-born composer Miklós Rózsa scored many films with historical settings – “Quo Vadis,” “Ben-Hur,” and “King of Kings,” among them. However, to my knowledge, his only western was “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956). James Cagney stars as a rancher who doles out some frontier justice.
Finally, we’ll hear music by Ennio Morricone, from arguably the most operatic of all spaghetti westerns, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968). As a reaction to Tiomkin’s ballad scores and the neo-Coplandisms of Elmer Bernstein and the rest, Morricone brings his own quirky sensibility to bear on the classic western iconography. Get ready for indelible motifs for harmonica and banjo, but also an unexpectedly moving elegiac arioso, underscoring the close of the American West with the arrival of the railroad.
Doublecheck your train tables and wind your pocket watches. Old World composers go west this week on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for those of you listening in the East. Here are the respective air-times for all three of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EASTERN)
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday on KWAX at 8:00 AM PACIFIC TIME (11:00 AM EASTERN)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EASTERN)
Stream all three, at the times indicated, by following the link!
Despite the sporadically hot weather, somehow the summer has really crept up on my me. But then, time moves very quickly anymore. I spoke with my college-age nephew on Tuesday and he had just completed the last of his final exams. I’d forgotten how long college summers were! And then yesterday, while scrolling on Facebook, I saw that somebody noted that it was 40 years to the day since the release of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” I don’t know why this hit me with such force. I am a nostalgic person by nature, so I am very much aware of the passage of time. But I guess since 1984 was really my last summer of uncomplicated freedom, it carries a little more significance than usual.
Looking back, movie-wise, that summer turned out to be the last and least of our high school summers, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t go to the movies all the time and that I wasn’t entertained.
Funny, looking at a list of the releases now, I realize what a weak summer it was, next to those of the earlier ’80s. Indy will always be closest to my heart, of course, although this one was the shakiest of the ’80s trio. It’s still like “Citizen Kane” next to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” proving that even the disappointing movies back then were better than anything being made now! And John Williams’ music, as it so often was, was the soundtrack to my summer.
It was also the summer of “Ghostbusters,” of course, and “Splash” was fun, if slight. I was really looking forward to “Greystoke,” which was entertaining (it was beautifully mounted and Ian Holm was great), but it seems like someone must have edited the hell out of it. I’m not a fan of “directors’ cuts,” but this one could have really used one. Again, “Gremlins” was entertaining, but even then I knew it was slick, sick trash. By then, the Spielberg formula was well-worn, and this one skimmed very close to the surface. (It should be noted that this was the summer that led to the PG-13 rating, due to the mounting intensity of movies marketed to the young.)
“Star Trek III,” though a step down from “Khan,” on which it heavily relied, got the job done. Poignantly (and all-too-appropriately, with the frontiers of youth dwindling), the Enterprise goes down in flames. “Buckaroo Banzai” was self-consciously hip, and again entertaining, but not all that it could have been. “Romancing the Stone” (actually released in March) was okay. Again, entertaining, but pretty disposable. I’m glad it gave Zemeckis a boost, but it was no Indiana Jones. At least it took a different approach (and to be honest, it was more consistent than “Temple of Doom”).
But of course it was the off-screen adventure and romance that really resounded. It would be our last hurrah before the old gang was disbanded, our American Graffiti summer. People continued to return from school for holidays and for a good portion of the summer of ’85, of course, but soon other opportunities, interests, and friendships began to present themselves, and we saw one another less and less, and then everyone started to get jobs and get into relationships and gradually disappear from our Neverland. Believe me, I extended my childhood as long as any person possibly could. But there was much weight on my heart back then, nostalgia and longing and melancholy, and much torment in my soul, if I ever tried to rewatch the movies I’d watched during my school years or revisit the stories I’d written.
Of course, my mother was still alive and the house continued to function pretty much as it always had. Hard to believe that we moved in only in the summer of ’83, before my senior year of high school. But I returned to it whenever I could, on weekends and holidays, through the time I opened my own business and started working at the radio in 1995.
After that, my attic bedroom gradually became a storage space, a dumping ground for old clothing, curtains, bins of wrapping paper, boxes of photos. To revisit now is like taking a submersible through the wreckage of the Titanic, everything perfectly preserved under layers of sand and coral. I need to finish cleaning that place out. I’ve already retrieved some of my most valued items, but I’ve even got shoes and clothing up there from back-in-the-day, which really should go. Do I have the heart to get rid of it? Every piece of bric-a-brac is loaded with memory.
I know I said much the same thing a couple of years ago, when recollecting the summer of ‘82, but when I die, if there’s a heaven, and they let me in, I hope it’s an awful lot like the early ‘80s.
It was on V-E Day, marking Allied victory in Europe on this date in 1945, that Aaron Copland became the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his ballet “Appalachian Spring.” It remains one of the most successful of Pulitzer Prize winners, very few of which have remained in the active repertoire.
This is a good opportunity for me to acknowledge the fact, only slightly belatedly, that this year’s honoree is Tyshawn Sorey, who was awarded the prize on Monday for “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” a 20-minute work for alto saxophone and orchestra. Sorey describes the piece, which was co-commissioned by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Lucerne Festival, as an “anti-concerto,” designed to “provide a respite from the chaos and intrusiveness on modern life.”
Arthur Honegger’s “Pacific 231” was first performed on this date, one hundred years ago.
Originally, Honegger had given the work a more generic title, “Mouvement symphonique,” asserting that he had written it as “an exercise in building momentum while the tempo of the piece slows.” However, like Dvořák, he was widely known to be a train enthusiast. It seems almost too convenient that the music resembles the journey of a steam locomotive.
In Whyte notation, such a locomotive would be designated as 4-6-2 (four pilot wheels, six powered and coupled driving wheels, and two trailing wheels). However, in France, where axles rather than wheels are counted, the arrangement would be 2-3-1.
The composer once confided, “I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses.”
“Pacific 231” is one of the composer’s most frequently performed works.
In 1948, Jean Mitry choreographed and edited an award-winning film inspired by the piece, which employs Honegger’s music as the soundtrack. The composer was always cagey about tying music, which he regarded as an absolute art form, to visuals in the minds of his audiences, so he was quick to indicate that he had come up with his titles after the fact. Perhaps the film did him no favors. You can watch it here:
Ironically, Honegger enjoyed a successful side career as, that’s right, a film composer. It was his advice that helped a struggling young artist by the name of Miklós Rózsa to discover his métier. Rózsa, of course, went on to win three Academy Awards and is perhaps best known for his music for “Ben-Hur.”
How canny is it to give your music a descriptive title, even it is a bit after the fact? Honegger composed three “mouvements symphoniques.” Beside “Pacific 231,” there’s also “Rugby” (actually my favorite of the three). The third? It has no descriptive title. Unsurprisingly, it remains the least well-known.
But “Pacific 231?” A hundred years later, it’s still a runaway train.
Honegger probably would have hated this video, because of all the images of locomotives, but the performance, with Ernest Ansermet conducting, is a classic.
In the past, May 7 was a day for frenemies, as I’ve always been fond of emphasizing the uneasy friendship of Brahms and Tchaikovsky on their birthday anniversaries – artists repelled by one another’s creations, who were pleasantly surprised by how well they got along once they met in person (though they still disliked one another’s music). The alcohol they consumed certainly could not have hurt.
However, today, we put all that frenemy business aside, as all men are brothers, when the birthdays of Brahms and Tchaikovsky coincide with the 200th anniversary of the premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The Ninth, of course, is the visionary symphony that climaxes with an ecstatic setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” Everyone knows the melody, even if they think they don’t. The text proclaims, depending on the translation, “All mankind will become as brothers!”
The tune is demonstrated here by Schroeder, insistently joyous even in the face of Lucy’s hostility:
Beethoven’s revolutionary masterwork, striking for both its scale (oversized orchestra with a quartet of vocal soloists and chorus) and length (running to well over an hour), cast a forbidding shadow. Much ink has been spilled about the struggles of composers throughout the 19th century to come to terms with the Ninth. In fact, I remember reading a book by conductor Felix Weingartner, a renowned Beethoven interpreter (he was the first to record all nine symphonies), titled “On the Performance of Beethoven’s Symphonies and Other Essays,” in which he addresses the successes and failures of all the major symphonic composers that followed.
The story of the legendary first performance of the work, on May 7, 1824, is well-known, but bears repeating. The auditorium of Vienna’s Theater am Kärntnertor (Carinthian Gate Theater) was packed – Schubert was in attendance, and so was Czerny – and the orchestra was staffed by many of the great musicians of the day. No complete roster of performers survives, but as was the case with the all-star team that played in the premiere of Beethoven’s 7th, many of Vienna’s most elite musicians participated.
It was Beethoven’s first public appearance in 12 years. By that time, of course, the composer was almost completely deaf. But that didn’t keep him from air-conducting as the ideal interpretation unfurled in his head. The official conductor was the theater’s kapellmeister, Michael Umlauf, and he instructed the musicians to watch him, not the composer, as he had witnessed an earlier disaster with Beethoven in the pit for a dress rehearsal for “Fidelio.”
According to one of the violinists, Beethoven “stood in front of a conductor’s stand and threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor, he flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.”
When the piece concluded, the hall resounded with applause, but Beethoven was still conducting. The contralto soloist, Karoline Unger, approached the composer and gently turned him around to acknowledge the cheers. Members of the audience, who recognized they could not be heard, waved their handkerchiefs, hats, and hands, so that even in his isolation, the composer knew he had scored a hit.
Mankind never does seem to get its act together, but even as the world teeters on the brink of disaster, the Ninth continues to resonate. Concert halls fill wherever it is programmed. When the compact disc was developed, technicians standardized the length at 74 minutes, so that the format could accommodate a complete recording of the work. (In the days of LP, I recall some rather awkward breaks in the middle of the third movement.) Used as the prototype was Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 recording.
In the history of music, the Ninth stands like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (Interesting that Kubrick would use the work to such ironic effect a few years later in “A Clockwork Orange.”) There was music before the Ninth and there was music after the Ninth. From a certain point of view, everything seemed to culminate in its creation, and afterward, all was decadence. It is the Continental Divide of classical music.
For the Romantics, the Ninth changed everything. Every composer for a hundred years had to grapple with its influence. For the rest of the century, experiments with orchestra and chorus became larger and larger, setting all manner of aspirational texts. Mahler pushed 74 minutes to 90 with his Third Symphony. His Eighth is so large, it was dubbed “The Symphony of a Thousand.” In the 20th century, there was nowhere to go but down. Even as composers embraced the leaner textures of neoclassicism they continued to labor in the shadow of Beethoven, whether assimilating his lessons or rejecting them.
The inclusion of the chorus is the most obvious innovation, but Beethoven wouldn’t be Beethoven if there weren’t plenty else to reward a closer look, and musicians and scholars have been dissecting the work and studying its secrets for the past two centuries.
Brahms, who lived from 1833 to 1897, and Tchaikovsky, who lived from 1840 to 1893, were no different from their contemporaries in feeling the heat of the 9th. It is well-known that Brahms experienced enormous pressure in his own mastery of symphonic form, postponing his first symphony for many years, as he continued to hone his skills on works such as the orchestral Serenades and the Piano Concerto No. 1, the latter conceived on a suspiciously symphonic scale. It took him over twenty years to own up to an actual symphony.
At its debut, conductor Hans von Bülow dubbed it “Beethoven’s Tenth,” no doubt because of its excellence, but also because of the perceptible influence of the earlier composer. It was Bülow who also formulated “the three B’s,” grouping Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms in a spontaneously-erected pantheon that music-lovers still invoke. Brahms was surely relieved that the work was so rapturously received, but (being Brahms) he was also annoyed when it was pointed out that the chorale theme that forms the basis of the last movement bears an uncanny resemblance to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” To this, Brahms gruffly responded, “Any ass can see that!”
I’ve cued the theme up for you at the link, but nothing’s stopping you from going back to listen to the entire symphony:
After the First, things came easier for Brahms. The ice broken, he composed his Symphony No. 2, with confidence, in a single summer.
In Tchaikovsky’s case, his own predilection gravitated more toward Mozart. This is evident, of course, in his Orchestral Suite No.4, subtitled “Mozartiana,” but also in the “Variations on a Rococo Theme” for cello and orchestra. He confided to his diary, “I do bow before the greatness of some of his works, but I do not love Beethoven.” That’s not to say he did not respect, or even revere him. His remarks are more nuanced than I make them out to be. You’ll find his complete thoughts here, including the diary entry from which I excerpt, at the bottom of the page:
Fascinating, then, that Tchaikovsky would exhibit such youthful bravado in setting Schiller’s text himself for his graduation examinations at the St. Petersburg Conservatory! This is a stunning display of self-assurance for a composer who frequently struggled with insecurity. He later dismissed the work as immature, but it is certainly worth hearing:
In Beethoven, as in all things, it seems, Brahms and Tchaikovsky were divided. Fortunately, they were united in the brotherhood of drink.
Happy birthday to the Felix and Oscar of classical music, and raise a glass to the most important symphony ever written, with a thought for the brotherhood of man, now to be desired as much as ever.
This brisk performance from 1958 is one of my favorites. Not for every day, perhaps, but thrilling.
Weingartner conducts in 1935
Furtwängler sets the standard length of the CD in 1951
Bernstein celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall with a multinational ensemble in 1989, substituting “Freiheit” (Freedom) for Schiller’s “Freude” (Joy)
