I’ve had a busy day today, but on Franz Schubert’s birthday, I suppose it’s only fitting that I should leave this post “Unfinished.”
Instead, Casper will do the heavy lifting – by which I mean the friendly ghost, not Caspar David Friedrich.
Happy birthday, Herr Schubert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8z7U46e-2k
Chita Rivera was a force to be reckoned with. A dancer of remarkable stamina and electric stage presence, Rivera clawed her way back to the top after having her leg crushed in an automobile accident. She’s said to have danced as well in her 70s as she did as a younger woman (albeit without the flying splits and backflips).
Sadly, Chita was cheated whenever her Broadway triumphs were translated to the big screen. However, the recasting of “West Side Story” opened the door for Rita Moreno.
Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics for the showstopper, “America,” caused some controversy from the start, due to of its ironic barbs about life in Puerto Rico, but Leonard Bernstein’s dynamic take on the huapango and Moreno’s energy sold the number (with the lyrics tweaked over the years).
Rivera was the recipient of two Tony Awards (she was nominated for ten), two Drama Desk Awards, and a Drama League Award. She was the first Latina and Latino American to receive a Kennedy Center Honor, in 2002, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2009. She was awarded a Tony for Lifetime Achievement in 2018.
Besides “West Side Story,” she also created roles in “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Chicago,” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Rivera was 91 years-old. R.I.P.
I may exaggerate a bit when I say I don’t throw anything away, but not by much. A couple of days ago, I came across some envelopes containing rejection slips from 1989 for a story I sent out the old-fashioned way – U.S. mail! Of course, this was before the advent of the internet. If I couldn’t get published in Weird Tales, where could I get published? Apparently my Gothic horror pastiche was too eldritch even for them.
I finally got around to watching “Tár” the other night, and I have to say, the minute or two of Leonard Bernstein footage (from one of his “Young People’s Concerts”) that Lydia discovers on an old VHS tape in the closet of her childhood bedroom conveys more about the significance of the man and the artist than most anything on display in Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro.” Not that I disliked “Maestro.” I warmed to it the more it progressed, and it gets better once Bernstein hits middle age.
Interestingly, both “Tár” and “Maestro” – but especially “Tár” – toss off a lot of musical allusions and in-jokes very few viewers in the broader audience are going to get. (Tar even makes a crack about Jerry Goldsmith!) Not that anyone needs to understand these things in order to grasp the larger points.
But “Maestro” in particular drops “Easter eggs” all over the place. I can’t believe Cooper bothered to incorporate whatever piece of Bernstein arcana he may have happened across on the internet. Unsurprisingly, there’s the performance of Mahler 2 in Ely Cathedral, but there’s also a recreation of the “Fancy Free” demo recorded for Jerome Robbins (complete with Copland interjections), and Bernstein showing up for a performance looking all the world like a stereotypical French wharf rat. I’m surprised he drew the line at the hilarious video of Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic with his eyebrows.
I understand that these are merely backdrop to a story about Bernstein’s complicated marriage to Felicia Montealegre, but it would have been nice to have seen a broader cultural understanding of what Bernstein signified as an artist. WHY was he so important? It all whirls by in such a blur that none of it has any resonance.
Much has been made of Kazu Hiro’s Academy Award nominated make-up, applied to suggest Bernstein at different stages of his life. I can’t say it necessarily makes Cooper look any more like Bernstein, particularly when young. It just looks like make-up. In fact, what it truly reminded me of was the kind of uncanny valley I used to experience when watching many of Martin Short’s impressions on SCTV. And all the make-up in the world is not going to distract a viewer from Cooper’s piercing blue eyes. All those hours in the make-up chair, and nobody thought to give him some contact lenses?
A few Baz Luhrmann-style excesses aside (as with the transparently computer-manipulated, vertiginous segue from Bernstein’s bedroom to the podium of Carnegie Hall, or the fantastic superimposition of the composer dancing around in a sailor’s outfit during a rehearsal of “Fancy Free”), “Maestro” works well enough. I just hope there’s another Bernstein movie down the line. There WAS one already in the pipeline – that would have starred Jake Gyllenhaal – but that got bumped when the Bernstein estate threw its weight behind “Maestro.” (I guess Gyllenhaal then thought it was a good idea to remake Patrick Swayze’s “Roadhouse?”) Or better yet, a Ken Burns-style documentary. Of course, a documentary probably wouldn’t attract the same crowd as Bradley Cooper.
One final disappointment – and it’s a big one: “Maestro” doesn’t use any of Bernstein’s actual recordings on the soundtrack!
I had my issues with “Tár,” too. Although both films are competently executed, and “Tár” aims higher than “Maestro,” there’s almost always something “off” about movies that purport to be about music or musicians. I get that the music is not really what either film is “about.” It’s just that film, by its very nature, is limited in its ability to convey the essence of music.
Of course, that applies to any other medium. A piece of music can no more depict a painting than a painting can depict a piece of music. Such translations may lend to our understanding, and even offer insights of their own, but they can never be more than approximations, interpretations of the original.
Too often filmmakers ramp up the external drama – of which, of course, there is often plenty – but they can’t put their fingers on the ineffable: what makes music count, why certain gifted interpreters are more successful than others at capturing our imaginations, and why any of it is important.
If Daron Hagen weren’t a composer, he would be one hell of a writer. He IS one hell of a writer. I already knew that, from the too few times I’ve visited his blog. But I finally got around to reading his memoir, “Duet with the Past,” last month, and I have to say, it is one of the best-written books, fiction or nonfiction, I’ve read in a while.
I would think it would be an absorbing read for anyone who would chance to open the front cover, but it is especially compelling for somebody with a deep interest in mid-century American art music. Not that Hagen is of that generation – he’s only a few years older than I am – but his experiences as a student, composer, and copyist brought him into contact with an astonishing array of legends and luminaries of the era, including Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, David Diamond, Virgil Thomson, Gian Carlo Menotti, Lukas Foss, Eugene Ormandy (and Philadelphia’s associate conductor William Smith), Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Jack Beeson, and Aaron Copland – as well as Joan Tower, David Del Tredici, Michael Torke, and Aaron Jay Kernis, among others.
The writers he’s known and collaborated with include Paul Muldoon and Gore Vidal. My friend and colleague, Kile Smith, gets a few mentions (Hagen once worked with him at the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia), as does pianist Hugh Sung (who I finally just met for the first time a few weeks ago). The ghost of Marc Blitzstein, with whom Hagen in his youth is said to have borne some resemblance, also frequently rears his head.
All fascinating, of course, but Hagen’s story is even more riveting to me personally, as it seems he and I have lived parallel lives in a flabbergasting number of ways. Although I was never conscious of our paths having actually crossed, they must have. There are just too many shared interests and common hang-outs. You might say ours is a story of near-misses and there-but-for-the-grace-of-Gods.
Hagen arrived in Philadelphia only a few years before I did, to study at the Curtis Institute of Music. My college girlfriend worked at Curtis. He and I both like reading and books and are viscerally affected by the power of the written word. I worked in at least six bookstores in Philadelphia, one of them managed by Rorem’s niece. (Rorem was one of Hagen’s principal teachers.) One of the book shops I owned was within a block of Curtis. We’ve both amassed sizable libraries.
We both lived in the same neighborhood (as did, later, Jennifer Higdon), although perhaps at different times. But if you live in Center City Philadelphia, an expanse of less than 30 blocks and perhaps ten blocks up and down, you pretty much see everyone.
We were both regulars at the late, lamented neighborhood greasy spoon, Little Pete’s, on South 17th Street above Locust (right around the corner from Curtis), and Hagen totally nails the vibe, recollecting the smell of burnt coffee, the lime-green wrap-around counters, and the drunks nodding over their eggs in the wee hours of the morning. One of those drunks could very well have been me, on the way home from McGlinchey’s, prior to standing on a street corner with a friend and conversing volubly until the skies began to lighten. I read a substantial portion of “Les Miserables” there, and D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” and Edmund Wilson’s “Axel’s Castle,” the letters of Abelard and Heloise, and a charming book of essays, “Dreamthorp,” by Alexander Smith.
We also both clearly love classic movies. Hagen grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, within driving distance of a faded movie palace turned into a repertory house, and he writes lovingly of his experiences there. If I were to do the same, it would involve two or three such theaters I haunted during my teens and 20s.
Our upbringing was also eerily similar, with artistically-inclined, nurturing mothers and fathers ill-equipped to manage their impulses. I have to say, I was much luckier than Hagen was with how my situation turned out, as my mother got my sister and me away before any lasting physical or psychological damage could occur. Nevertheless, Hagen and I are both prone to nostalgia (though it’s possible I may be the more sentimental of the two of us) and melancholy. We’ve both gone on some legendary benders and stared into the abyss.
So, yes, perhaps the reason the book connected so well with me is because I identified so personally with many of his experiences.
Unlike me, Hagen managed to harness all those disparate elements and will himself into an artist of merit. Talent is great, but you also need drive, and Hagen’s work ethic, in all weather, is to be admired. He’s managed to build up quite the catalogue, especially, but by no means exclusively, as a successful opera composer. I’ve had several of his pieces in my library for years, and played a few on the radio. I could swear, at some point, I may even have introduced a concert broadcast of his opera “Amelia.”
Since finishing the book, I’ve ordered his four commercially-available operas (“Shining Brow,” “Vera,” “Bandanna,” and “Orson Rehearsed”). I am sorry so many of his major works have yet to be recorded. I would love to hear those he describes as Korngoldian – even his overture to “Much Ado About Nothing,” written for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which earned him much scorn for being so frothy and allegedly lacking in substance. I assure you, Hagen has composed plenty of substance. Are composers not allowed to enjoy themselves once in a while? Tragically, the handwritten manuscript for a “Much Ado” opera he had been at work on was left in his room at the Hotel Warwick (across the street from Little Pete’s) as he fled Philly in humiliation, and the opera is now lost.
But no matter what adversity life tossed his way, Hagen just kept churning out music. I honestly don’t know how he’s done it, subletting his living spaces (and with them, apparently, his adorable, impressively long-lived cat, Clara, always there to nuzzle him on his battered return, who made it to 24 and enjoyed the first year of Hagen’s happy, stabilizing marriage) to take off to Europe or for residencies at artists’ colonies, burning through all his money, but somehow always landing on his feet with a plum commission and finally finding domestic happiness in Rhinebeck, New York, near Bard College (where I travel every summer for the Bard Music Festival), in a quaint Victorian home with his loving family. (I have eaten at the Tivoli restaurant he mentions in the book, where he and Joan Tower dine.)
He’s not afraid to share his missteps, but if nothing else his life story demonstrates that even when you bottom-out, if you just hang in there, things might work out all right in the end. Talent and hard work are important, but luck, or chance, if you will, will always be a deciding factor. Life after all is a game of Chutes and Ladders. Hagen’s similes are less trite than mine, but he would be the first to admit he’s waded through quicksand on occasion, sometimes because of bad choices, sometimes not, only to have been lifted on the wings of angels. (His wife is composer, vocalist, and visual artist Gilda Lyons.)
By coincidence, Hagen’s latest album, “The Art of Song” (recorded at Curtis with Lyons one of the singers), was just released by Naxos within the last couple of weeks. Words and poetry have always been central to Hagen’s inspiration (which likely explains, in part, why he himself is such a good writer), and opera, song, and large-scale cycles comprise a significant portion of his output. As stated in the promotional material, “Divided into four ‘life seasons,’ this richly emotional cycle embraces themes that range from the human cost of America’s politics since the Civil War; the rueful wisdom of aging, love and nostalgia; and on towards tragedy, faith and an acceptance of nature’s cycles.”
Hagen can be nostalgic and hardnosed, pensive and reckless, ugly and beautiful, vainglorious and modest. But who among us has not been?
He writes with all five senses. Proust had his madeleine; Hagen had… well, everything apparently. We’ve all had the experience of certain scents conjuring memories, but Hagen, it seems, never forgot a smell, whether it be that of a dusty curtain in an old movie house or that distinctive blend of aromas that characterize any city. You can tell he’s always been a faithful journaler, which is only one more thing to admire. (Regrettably, my own very sporadic attempts have never made it past a few entries.)
He also has a good mind for similes and metaphors and all those tools of master storytellers and literary artists that make their work that much more engaging and enriching.
Not that the subject matter is always delightful. Hagen can be brutally honest, and it’s not always pretty. But in his writing, as in his music, he is dedicated to serving truth. He does so with enviable recall, a powerful command of observation, often great sensitivity, and a poetic disposition.
In the interviews I’ve seen, he’s as thoughtful and well-spoken in life as he is on paper.
There are plenty of samples of his music posted online and a lot of recorded interviews. You’d be doing yourself a favor by getting to know Daron Hagen.
Teaser for “The Art of Song”
Daron Hagen: The Human Element
Composer’s website
His blog
https://www.daronhagen.com/blog
An elegy for Little Pete’s
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