The Enlightenment isn’t exactly remembered for its flights of fancy. If the odd novel embraced a fantastic tone, it was frequently in the service of satire, an entertaining means to send-up contemporary mores and pursuits or to mock authority figures and good old reliable human frailty. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll explore a few of these fantastic adventures of the 18th century.
“The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1785) pokes fun at one Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, a German nobleman and veteran of the Russo-Turkish War, whose reputation for telling outrageous tall tales is lampooned by Rudolf Erich Raspe. Raspe, looking to avoid a libel suit, published the work anonymously, with the result that it was commonly believed that the Baron actually dictated the tales himself. Naturally, the real-life Munchausen was upset by the unwanted attention. Thanks to Raspe, his very name came to be associated with feigned illness and pathological lying.
The book has been adapted to film several times, beginning with a silent version by Georges Méliès, all the way back in 1911. We’ll be listening to music from two subsequent adaptations. The first, “Münchhausen” (1943), is undeniably entertaining and exceptionally well-made. However, undermining one’s enjoyment is a sense of unease in the knowledge that the film was a pet project of Joseph Goebbels, who wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the UFA film studio by producing a lavish spectacle worthy to stand toe-to-toe with foreign efforts like “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Thief of Bagdad.”
Considering the source, one would have to look awfully hard to come up with anything resembling Nazi propaganda. The entire exercise comes across as a pastoral escape from the horrors of totalitarianism, total war, and the Final Solution. The elegant music, by Georg Haentzschel, would not be out of place in the concert hall. Haentzschel is regarded as perhaps the last representative of a generation of Middle European light music composers.
More than 40 years later, director Terry Gilliam undertook another production design-driven adaptation that resembles nothing if not a series of Doré illustrations brought to life. Contrary to received wisdom, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1988) managed to pull in a respectable amount of per-screen capital. The film was a casualty of a management turnover at Columbia Pictures, with the new regime eager to bury the projects of the old. Hence, it was never seen theatrically beyond a very limited release. The score, by Michael Kamen, while in a romantic heroic style, wittily contains abundant allusions to music of the 18th century.
“The Manuscript Found in Saragossa” (1805) is a transitional work, with its ecstatically lurid opening chapter – replete with gypsy storytellers, highwaymen, dueling skeletons, lesbian vampires, and a couple of corpses dangling in a gibbet – dragging the Enlightenment kicking and screaming into the Romantic age. It starts out as a masterpiece of surrealism, by way of Gothic convention, but the spell is eventually broken, sadly, by a large, cold bucket of Enlightenment water, in the form of a perfectly rational explanation at the end. But until then, the author, Jan Potocki, gets an A for effort. The interlocking structure, with stories inside stories inside stories looks ahead to postmodern experiments by writers like Italo Calvino and John Barth, to say nothing of Jorge Luis Borges.
The book was made into an acclaimed Polish film, “The Saragossa Manuscript,” in 1965. Its cult status led to a restoration financed by Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola that was released on VHS and DVD in 2001.
Who else could provide the perfect soundtrack to such a hallucinogenic experience but Krzysztof Penderecki? Penderecki intersperses spooky passages with neo-classical and baroque interludes.
Finally, we’ll hear music from one of the many adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726). “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” (1960) simplifies the book’s narrative and dispenses with a great deal of the misanthropic humor in favor of children’s fantasy. You won’t catch Gulliver extinguishing a fire in the Lilliputian Emperor’s palace with his urine in this version. What you will find is a good deal of technical wizardry and a delightful score by Bernard Herrmann.
What, you doubt my veracity? Then surely the music must speak for itself. Join me for fantastic adventures in the 18th century, now in syndication on KWAX Classical 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 EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
——–
PHOTO: A fancy flight with Baron Munchausen
Category: Daily Dispatch
-
Aural Enjoyment with Aurèle Nicolet
The great Swiss flutist Aurèle Nicolet was born 100 years ago today. Nicolet served as principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic during the 1950s. He was appointed by Wilhelm Furtwängler and remained through the early Karajan years, before striking out to become a renowned soloist and an influential teacher. Composers who dedicated music to him include Toru Takemitsu, Josef Tal, György Ligeti, Aribert Reimann, and Edison Denisov. Among his pupils was the Berlin Philharmonic’s current principal flute, Emmanuel Pahud. Nicolet died in 2016 at the age of 90.
Remember him and put a spring in your step with some C.P.E. Bach. -
With Washington National Opera Out, I’m In
When I heard that Washington National Opera would be performing Robert Ward’s “The Crucible” this season, my ears pricked up. Ward’s opera was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1962.
At the time of the work’s premiere at New York City Opera in 1961, Ward’s musical language, unabashedly accessible and melodic, must have seemed awfully old fashioned to the academic Rapunzels walled up in their towers girded by thorns. But the powerful subject matter cries out for directness of expression.
Bernard Stambler’s libretto is based on Arthur Miller’s play, a dramatic response to the climate of fear, abuse, and hysteria shaped by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, in his zeal to stamp out what he characterized as an internal communist threat. The metaphorical witch hunts, during which civil liberties were suspended, lives destroyed, and basic human decency corroded, are now a not-so-distant mirror. In 1953, Miller’s play practically wrote itself. I mean, where are you going to look, when you’re in the middle of a witch hunt, but Salem in 1692?
Alas, everything old is new again. With demagoguery, extraordinary popular delusions, and “justified” atrocities back in style, the time is ripe to put “The Crucible” back in opera houses.
Maybe so, but I wasn’t exactly eager to walk into the Kennedy Center. My interest in the opera is musical, not political, but somewhere along the way somebody got the bright idea to politicize everything. Well before the “renaming” controversy, my inclination had already been to stay the hell away. For as much as I would have loved to have seen it, Washington’s “The Crucible” was out.
Then all out once, so was Washington National Opera.
With the intensifying flow of talent away from what clearly had become a toxic waste dump, the WNO, in the most gracious, diplomatically worded statement imaginable, announced it would be departing the Kennedy Center. The Opera had been affiliated with the center SINCE ITS OPENING IN 1971. The statement was conciliatory (the move characterized as an “amicable transition”), the writer bending over backwards to extend well-wishes to the center’s administrators.Not long after, Kennedy’s executive director issued his own statement, acting as if it was not the Opera’s decision, but rather that of the Kennedy regime. That’s right: the WNO hadn’t quit; they were fired. Pure class, but would anyone expect anything less? Then he put on a happy face and tried to persuade everyone that it was a GOOD thing WNO was leaving. Patrons “clearly wanted a refresh,” he wrote, and now the center can bring in visiting companies. Yeah, good luck with that. The post was subsequently deleted.
At any rate, now that WNO has extricated itself from a bad situation, I am happy to support them. So I’ll be joining my friend, Mather Pfeiffenberger, to see “The Crucible” at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium in March. Mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny will head the cast.
I would also consider seeing Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” (March 7, 8 & 15) had I not scheduling conflicts. Yet to come: a revival of Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” with Marin Alsop conducting (dates and venue TBA).
In a more recent statement, Francesca Zambello, WNO’s artistic director of 14 years, had this to say about the season’s offerings:
“We will present three American works that explore themes at the heart of what makes our country great. ‘Treemonisha’ celebrates the triumph of education over ignorance, while ‘The Crucible’ is a cautionary tale about a righteous mob that murders innocent women and tears families apart. We close with ‘West Side Story’, a modern spin on the Shakespeare play that Leonard Bernstein called ‘an out and out plea for racial tolerance.’”
The arts are so woke! /s
Viva Washington National Opera!——–
Washington National Opera website
More about “The Crucible”
-
The Return of “Kavalier & Clay” – to the Met and at the Movies
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” is the first opera I’ve seen that plays more like a movie. A triumph of production design, in some respects it realizes the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamkuntswerk, the synthesis of disparate elements into a “total work of art,” here employing technology of a sort Wagner couldn’t possibly have imagined. That’s not to say Mason Bates’ music is anywhere near the same exalted level, which probably, in this case, is not such a bad thing. As a piece of pop art, “Kavalier & Clay” works. Mostly.
The inspiring story of two Jewish cousins – one a Brooklyn native, the other a refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia – who channel their hopes, heartbreaks, and thirst for justice into the creation one of the comic’s bestselling superheroes – is back at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with all its whiz-bang dazzle. I caught it earlier in the season, in the fall, but The Met had a special on tickets around the holidays, so I’m going to see it again with a friend next month. The production will run through February 21.
Can’t make it to New York? You’ll have a chance to experience it at select movie theaters this Saturday, January 24, and next Wednesday, January 28, as part of “The Met: Live in HD” series, presented through Fathom Entertainment. (Look for the link below.)
As a fan of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, I knew going in that concessions would have to be made. Even at its most surfacy, Chabon’s book (which I read for a second time to prep for the opera) is simply too grand – even with the Met’s stagecraft being as wondrously vertiginous as it is – and too epic to be conveyed even on the boards of the world’s largest opera palace. It also happens to be beautifully and characterfully written. There is only so much of that (the story is told from a third person omniscient perspective) that is going to survive translation to the theater.
In the end, this panegyric to the power of comic books and the role of popular culture in the American Dream at an especially dynamic time in this nation’s history – while simultaneously exploring comics as an outlet through which the artists grapple with their personal demons and grasp for redemption – can never hope to serve as more than “Classics Illustrated.” So definitely read the book.
But the opera recreates a great escape from the bottom of the Moldau, a superhero, called The Escapist, punching out Nazis in the best Jack Kirby tradition, Salvador Dali in a diving suit, a thunderstorm over the observation deck of the Empire State Building, and a final act, with the stage in its full, mechanized glory, that departs significantly from the action of the book, but contains a touch of poetry and grace courtesy of another one of the cousin’s heroic creations. I do miss the business with the Golem, the World’s Fair, the entire Antarctica segment, the cameo by Orson Welles, and the recurring allusions to Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. Only Chabon could have written it. (Gene Scheer is the opera’s librettist.)
Opera as a genre rises and falls on its writing for voice, at its most powerful, arousing overwhelming emotions. At its most magnificent, there really is nothing else like it. From a purely musical standpoint, “Kavalier & Clay” never achieves that level of irrational grandeur, but as I indicated at the start, this may be the rare instance in which that’s okay. It would have been nice had it cracked the extraordinary, but the music does actually serve as but one component, and an equal one, in the three-hour entertainment. It’s almost like underscore, breezy in the New York street scenes and rhythmically driving in flights from the Nazis. There’s a spiritual kinship to film music. The emotional moments are lower-voltage than I would have liked – pretty, but hardly indelible – and the hard-driving action scenes and scenery changes sound like John Williams with a bit of a John Adams gloss.
Manhattan street and office scenes sport “jazz” inflections of a Gershwinesque variety, there’s a bawdy dance party that bristles with Bernstein, and at times in the European scenes, you could make out the inclusion of a mandolin – not necessarily the first instrument I associate with either Czechoslovakia or Jewry, but it is an instrument with a long folk tradition that reaches across the continent. I concede, this particular observation could simply reveal a blind spot in my own education.
Bates’ much-vaunted electronic additions (he experiments with electronica and even DJs on the side) really don’t add up to very much. That element of the score barely registers in the opera’s first act. In the second, it could just as easily not have been there. It’s just another element of seasoning.
The work’s real energy comes in its frequent, dizzying set changes and eyepopping set pieces, propelled by technical/technological wizardry. A great escape at the opera’s start prepares the audience for the synthesis of opera, movie, and even comic book, to come. There are entire montages that conjure the layout and dynamism of a comic’s page.
It’s insane to even consider that “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” could be made into an opera, and I’m not sure that it actually succeeds as one. But I am unshakeable in my conviction that it is a hell of a good show.
See it at the Met, February 17-21
https://www.metopera.org/season/2025-26-season/the-amazing-adventures-of-kavalier–clay/
Or at the movies, January 24 & 28
https://www.fathomentertainment.com/releases/the-metropolitan-opera-the-amazing-adventures-of-kavalier-clay/ -
MLK, Willie Stargell, and “New Morning for the World”
Back when I was a kid, baseball held enough interest for me that I used to follow the standings. Now I don’t know if I can name a single active ballplayer. What happened to that boy who collected baseball cards? What happened to those baseball cards?
In those days, Willie Stargell would have been part of my world. Funny how 50 years ago, it seemed everyone was. There was no internet, and yet I recognized and maybe even knew a little bit about important figures from the fields of entertainment, sports, politics, science, and the arts, even if I wasn’t particularly interested in all of them. And I was 10! The more “connected” we are, the more clueless we become.
Here’s a photo of me, in happier professional times, in the studio, doing a live air shift and sharing an out-of-print LP of Stargell narrating Joseph Schwantner’s “New Morning for the World: Daybreak of Freedom” – alongside other noteworthy, neglected music, for MLK Day. The text is compiled from speeches and writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Stargell introduced the piece with the Eastman Philharmonia conducted by David Effron, on January 15, 1983 (King’s birthday), at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. This was followed by performances in Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, and Rochester (home of the Eastman School of Music). Since then, the work has received hundreds of performances throughout the United States.
At the time of its premiere, Stargell was still first baseman and team captain of the Pittsburgh Pirates. You can read more about him here:
Schwantner was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1979 for “Aftertones of Infinity.” Inexplicably, this performance of “New Morning for the World” has never appeared on compact disc. Since I won’t be able to share it with you on the radio today, here it is, posted on YouTube:
This year, my community service was helping some of my neighbors shovel out their cars and cleaning up a few empty parking spaces. Hey, someone shoveled my walk yesterday. Just paying it forward.
I wrote the following in 2021. I’m not sure I have the faith to stand behind it anymore:
“I know I made the observation before, but it bears repeating: that Stargell would have been subjected to such discrimination and harassment in the still-recent past demonstrates how short history is, and how pertinent was King’s life’s work.
“Tolerance, respect, kindness, and basic human decency never go out of fashion. Points can be made without violence, and just because someone disagrees with a certain perspective doesn’t automatically make him a moron, or Satan. That’s not to say there isn’t right and wrong, or that there isn’t evil in the world. Take a stand. Have the courage to speak. But also have the patience to listen. Then pause to consider.
“Mobs and movements tend to do something to people. They can attract attention, they can inspire, and they can even spur change. But they also have a dangerous tendency to create straw men and to dehumanize. In my experience, most people, when encountered one on one, are fundamentally decent and want to do right by one another, regardless of how they vote.
“There are plenty of ‘broken’ people, to be certain. But fear and ignorance (not to be confused with stupidity), along with a propensity to view oneself as better or more worthy than somebody else, are at the root of so many of the world’s problems.
“The most basic attitude adjustment can mean so much. And I offer this as a highly-flawed human being, who doesn’t always practice what he preaches. We can always do more, all of us. And we should always strive to be better.”
Ah… younger, idealistic Classic Ross Amico.
Time for a shower, and then off to the wildlife center.
“Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music… there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
———–
PHOTO: One of the advantages of working on a federal holiday is being able to share Willie Stargell narrating “New Morning for the World.” Another is not bothering to shave.
Tag Cloud
Aaron Copland (92) Beethoven (95) Composer (114) Film Music (123) Film Score (143) Film Scores (255) Halloween (94) John Williams (187) KWAX (229) Leonard Bernstein (101) Marlboro Music Festival (125) Movie Music (138) Opera (202) Philadelphia Orchestra (89) Picture Perfect (174) Princeton Symphony Orchestra (106) Radio (87) Ralph Vaughan Williams (85) Ross Amico (244) Roy's Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner (290) The Classical Network (101) The Lost Chord (268) Vaughan Williams (103) WPRB (396) WWFM (881)