Having featured highlights from the composer-supervised recording of Gustave Charpentier’s opera, “Louise,” today on my radio show, “The Lost Chord,” I was moved to search for the Abel Gance-directed film version that came out a few years later, in 1939. Gance is probably best known for his silent masterpiece, “Napoleon” (1927; once running close to 9-and-a-half hours; the latest restoration puts it at 7). And what do you know? I found it on YouTube, clocking in at a comparatively lean 1 hour and 25 minutes.
American soprano Grace Moore, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in “One Night of Love” (1934), sings the lead. (“One Night of Love” was the first recipient of an Academy Award for Best Original Score, even though much of the soundtrack is devoted to opera arias and traditional songs.) Tenor Georges Thill and bass André Pernet recreate their stage roles as Julien and Louise’s father, respectively.
Charpentier was very hands-on throughout the production, as he was with the 1935 recording, making cuts and alterations, coaching Moore, and advising Gance. At the time, the composer would have been about 79 years-old.
Charpentier died in 1956 at the age of 95. Until then, he lived pretty much as he always had, since at least 1885 (the year “Louise” is set) – an eternal bohemian in an artist’s garret in Montmartre.
“La bohème” – all those artists, creating and loving and freezing in their Parisian garrets. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take Paris in the spring!
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear highlights from Gustave Charpentier’s operatic masterpiece, “Louise.”
Charpentier himself was an inveterate Bohemian. Intoxicated by the artist’s life of Montmartre, he remained virtually suspended in time – the time, as a matter of fact, that is the setting of his most famous work.
Although “Louise” was not given its premiere until 1900, Charpentier had read an early draft of the libretto to a group of friends in the early 1890s. The action is set in 1885, the year Charpentier, like the poet Julien in the opera, fell profoundly in love with a seamstress. It was also the year he entered the composition class of Jules Massenet at the Paris Conservatory.
Charpentier was a surprise choice to win the Prix de Rome in 1887. He achieved several high-profile successes throughout the 1890s. “Louise” was finally completed in 1897. The composer’s fame, and the anticipated notoriety of the opera, with its independent heroine who follows her heart in defiance of convention, made “Louise” a box office smash.
The opera is touching in its conviction, and – although already a period piece at the time of its premiere – a prime example of Romantic subjective realism, actually conceived in advance of its verismo cousins by Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Puccini. (Puccini composed “La bohème,” based on Henri Murger’s 1851 novel “Scènes de la vie de bohème,” between 1893 and 1895.)
Charpentier revised his libretto and music incessantly. We’ll enjoy selections from a 1935 recording, tailored specifically to the needs of the gramophone by the composer, who arranged and abridged the work in a manner he thought most conducive to listening at home. Soprano Ninon Vallin is Louise; tenor Georges Thill is Julien; bass André Pernet is Louise’s father; and mezzo-soprano Aimée Lecouvreur, her mother. The Raugel Orchestra is conducted by Eugene Bigot.
The enterprise was so highly regarded, both as an artistic and as a technical achievement, that it was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque in 1936. Charpentier was 75 at the time of the recording, and still living in his garret.
An abridged film version of “Louise” was made four years later, in 1939, again under the supervision of the composer. The esteemed Abel Gance directed, with Thill and Pernet again in the cast.
After “Louise,” Charpentier took one more stab at the theatre with his opera “Julien,” a sequel describing the artistic aspirations of Louise’s suitor, but thereafter he fell virtually silent as a composer, as if in acknowledgment that his earlier blockbuster success was a matter of luck, of his being perfectly in tune, for but a moment, with the spirit of the times. He lived out the remainder of his days in Montmartre, sporadically feted for his most popular achievement. Charpentier died in 1956, at the age of 95.
I hope you’ll join me for “Jeez, Louise” – highlights from Gustave Charpentier’s operatic masterwork, in an historic 1935 recording – on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ve got the need for speed!
With yet another Mad Max movie in theaters, we’ll revisit music from the second installment in the series, “The Road Warrior” (1981). Australian composer Brian May (no relation to the Queen guitarist) wrote the music for the first two films. The director, George Miller, specified that he was looking for a gothic, Bernard Herrmann-type mood to underscore his dystopian vision of a post-apocalyptic Australian Outback.
Maurice Jarre took over to write the music for the third installment, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” but it’s purely by coincidence that we’ll hear selections from another Jarre score built for speed, “Grand Prix” (1966). The film’s international cast includes James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, and Toshiro Mifune, but the plot’s assorted relationship and business conflicts take a back seat to driver’s-eye views of lapping the track.
When we remember Steve McQueen, chances are one of the first images that springs to mind is that of McQueen behind the wheel of his Ford Mustang GT 390 Fastback, tearing up and down the streets of San Francisco in “Bullitt” (1968). The high-octane action sequence became the yardstick against which all big screen car chases were measured (at least until “The French Connection”). Lalo Schifrin provided the jazzy score.
Finally, Marty McFly and Doc Brown’s time-travelling DeLoreon needs to hit 88 miles per hour in order to get “Back to the Future” (1985). Director Bob Zemeckis had already worked with composer Alan Silvestri on “Romancing the Stone,” but the producer of “Back to the Future,” Steven Spielberg, didn’t care for the music in that film. Zemeckis’ advice to his colleague: go grand and epic, since Spielberg had a marked preference for the music of John Williams. It was a very good choice.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of chases and races, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.
Just be sure you’re not driving when you do!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
Couldn’t be nicer weather in the forecast for the opening weekend of The Princeton Festival.
Tonight at 8:00, radiant soprano Angel Blue will perform arias by Puccini, Verdi, and Gershwin, with music director Rossen Milanov conducting the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in orchestral works by Puccini, Dvořák, Delius, and zarzuela master Ruperto Chapí.
Tomorrow night at 7:00, Broadway star and “American Idol” finalist LaKisha Jones will be a part of a pavilion-rocking Tina Turner tribute show.
Sunday at 4:00, Sonia De Los Santos and her band will be the main attraction of a festival Family Day. Gates open at 1:30 for free, kid-friendly activities, including an instrument petting zoo, musical crafts, and a large toe-tap piano.
73 degrees and clear at 8:00 this evening, for opening night with soprano Angel Blue;
77 degrees and clear tomorrow evening at 7:00, for the Tina Turner tribute concert;
78 degrees and partly cloudy on Sunday afternoon at 4:00, for Sonia De Los Santos. 75 degrees at 1:30 for the start of Family Day.
All three concerts will be held in the performance pavilion on the grounds of historic Morven Museum & Garden at 55 Stockton St. (Route 206).
The fun will continue through June 22, including music in a wide variety of genres, with three fully-staged performances of Mozart’s comic opera “Cosi fan tutte” (June 14, 16 & 18).
Also on the way: chamber music by Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Reena Esmail (with the Abeo Quartet, June 13), dance with American Repertory Ballet (choreography by Arthur Mitchell and Meredith Raine; music by Philip Glass, Edvard Grieg, Miranda Scripp, and Jean Sibelius, June 15), Black choral music (with the Capital Singers of Trenton and friends, directed by Westminster Choir College’s Vinroy D. Brown, Jr., June 19), Baroque favorites, including a selection of “Brandenburg Concertos” (with the ensemble The Sebastians, June 20), genre-bending classical crossover (with the trio Empire Wild, June 21), and cabaret (with Tony Award winning artist – for his tour de force performance in Broadway’s “Tootsie” – Santino Fontana, June 22).
Concerts featuring the Abeo Quartet and The Sebastians will be held across the road at Trinity Church Princeton (technically 33 Mercer St.).
For more information about parking and concessions and additional events, including pre-performance talks, the Juneteenth celebration, and Yoga in the Garden, visit the festival website at princetonsymphony.org/festival.
On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, my thoughts turn to American composer George Rochberg, who could write symphonies with the best of them, but was also a man of principle, who had real guts.
Rochberg, born in Paterson, NJ, in 1918, was for decades a fixture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he chaired the music department until 1968. He continued to teach there until 1983.
But his big claim to fame – or, in some circles, notoriety – is that he was one of the first composers of his kind to emerge from the strictures of serialism, predominant in academic circles from mid-century, to embrace a new tonality. The shift was brought on, it is said, by the untimely loss of his son, Paul, to a brain tumor in 1964.
Rochberg felt the musical vocabulary he had been employing inadequate to express his grief and rage. Beginning with his String Quartet No. 3 in 1971, he began to incorporate tonal passages back into his music, much to the dismay of his academic peers. His String Quartet No. 6 of 1978 includes a set of variations on Pachelbel’s “Canon.” Horrors!
Little did anyone realize at the time that this was the most avant-garde thing Rochberg could have done. He was the unwitting prophet of a new pluralism that went on to become the norm.
What is perhaps not so well known is that Rochberg’s mettle had been tested well before the petty skirmishes of Ivory Tower politics, when he was thrown into the deep-end of one of the pivotal operations of World War II.
Rochberg was drafted into the U.S. Army infantry in 1942. A lot of musicians fulfilled their military service by composing marches or playing in military bands. Many were never even shipped overseas. While Rochberg did have his share of musical assignments, he saw real action as part of George S. Patton’s Third Army during its perilous breakout from Normandy following D-Day in 1944.
Amy Lynn Wlodarski writes about it in her book, “George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity” (University of Rochester Press, 2019):
“Nearly fifty years later, he could still vividly recall the ‘look of fear’ on the faces of the soldiers who had been wounded in the initial onslaught: ‘Walking away from the plane that had just landed on an airstrip on Omaha Beach… and seeing the wounded, walking and on stretchers, going to the same plane that had just taken us from England. The look in their eyes, a look I’d never seen before that day. Almost an animal look; glistening fear, anxiety, uncertainty radiating from their eyes.’ Upon arrival, his division was immediately dispatched to help with the second stage of the invasion, which involved breaking through the hedgerows in northern France, a deafening assault that required explosive charges to dislodge the thick, thorny bushes of the French countryside. The fatigue from constant marching and physical work was overwhelming despite nearly a full year of basic training: ‘I remember being dog-tired [at] night. Apparently I [once] slept through some minor bombing by German reconnaissance planes.’”
Mangled feet were par for the course, but Rochberg himself wound up taking a bullet, the first of several substantial injuries he would receive in combat. His doctors remarked that if it had been the First World War, it would have cost him a leg.
The accepted narrative is that the composer’s later grief over the death of his son motivated his drift toward a more communicative means of expression in his music. But Rochberg was always at heart a humanist, and already during the war, twenty years earlier, his worldview and aesthetic outlook were beginning to coalesce, as when he came to regard the destruction he witnessed at the town of Saint-Lô, where the Allies faced off against the Second SS Panzer Division of the German Army, as “a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture.”
Rochberg, of course, was not the only artist to think this way. The war left its indelible mark on all the arts. In music, especially, its devastation and sorrow were reflected in the creations of composers on all sides, as demonstrated in Jeremy Eichler’s recent, excellent book, “Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance” (Knopf, 2023).
The varied experiences of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten are examined at some length. None of them actually “saw action,” although Shostakovich was present during the siege of Leningrad and Britten performed on site for survivors of Bergen-Belsen. Rochberg is not part of the narrative.
Rochberg drafted a number of musical sketches during the European campaign. These later became the basis for his Symphony No. 6, completed in 1986. The work is tonal, yet harmonically extremely loose. I don’t believe it has even been recorded for commercial release. The linked performance is conducted by Raymond Leppard, which is interesting, since Leppard was regarded for so long as a Baroque specialist. But of course his repertoire was much broader than that, and he conducted a number of first performances of works by contemporary composers.
There’s another recording on YouTube, taken from a concert with Leppard conducting the Saint Louis Symphony, but the sound isn’t as good. So we’ll stick with this one, with Leppard’s own orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, the orchestra he directed from 1987 to 2001.
What’s with the video’s moon imagery is anyone’s guess.
Rochberg died in Bryn Mawr, outside Philadelphia, in 2005. He left more than 100 works, including six symphonies, seven string quartets, and an opera, “The Confidence Man,” after Melville. At the time of his death, he was 86-years-old.
His service is remembered, as is that of everyone who made the push through on D-Day possible, so that the free world could achieve victory over fascism.
Symphony No. 2 (1955-1956), serial but, contrary to the composer’s later concerns, still emotionally expressive
Pachelbel Variations from the String Quartet No. 6 (1978)
Opening of the “Transcendental Variations” (1971-1972, the third movement of Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3, transcribed for string orchestra in 1975)
PHOTO: Wlodarski and the cover of her book, with Rochberg in uniform
