Young musicians of Capital Harmony Works will present “Mambo to Mozart,” an evening of music for orchestra and chorus, together and separately, including the world premiere of Princeton composer Julian Grant’s “Lop-Sided Sonata.”
The event will be held tomorrow, May 25, at 6:30 p.m. at the Social Profit Center at Mill One, 1 N. Johnston Avenue, in Trenton. Craft soft drinks, light snacks, and family-friendly fare will be available for purchase. Doors open at 5:30.
Capital Harmony Works is the home of three creative youth development programs: Trenton Music Makers, an El Sistema-inspired string and percussion orchestra; Trenton Children’s Chorus, made up of K-12 choirs; and Music for the Very Young, an award-winning pre-K program conducted in partnership with Trenton and Ewing public preschools.
Follow the link to learn more about Capital Harmony Works.
I do much of my reading in bed, in the hour or two before lights-out, frequently beneath drooping eyelids and interrupted by intervals of nodding; so it can take me a while sometimes to get through a book. In this case, it took me five or six weeks, probably, but they were unquestionably pleasurable ones, passed in the company of one of America’s greatest composers.
If you’re at all interested in American art music of the mid-20th century, I’m confident you too will enjoy Howard Pollack’s exhaustive biography “Samuel Barber: His Life & Legacy,” issued last month by University of Illinois Press.
The book has to be the culmination of years of research – of the 686 numbered pages, 118 are devoted to footnotes and index – yet the content is often astonishingly up-to-date, with references to performances, recordings, and even YouTube content so recent, it would seem as if it couldn’t possibly have been included by the time the book went to press.
It’s also pleasant to find people I’ve known or worked with drifting in and out of the narrative. For instance, I had no idea that Karl Haas, longtime host of the radio series “Adventures in Good Music,” was responsible for commissioning Barber’s “Summer Music.” Nor did I realize the series began in 1959!
Another radio personality, David Dubal, now host of “The Piano Matters,” but then music director of New York’s WNCN, preempted the station’s regularly-scheduled programming to broadcast an hour of Barber’s music in the afternoons during the composer’s final days, and Barber listened.
And H. Paul Moon, who I have interviewed on the air a couple of times about his film projects, and now count among my concertgoing companions and friends, is acknowledged for his lovely, award-winning documentary, “Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty.” Paul also receives credit for assisting the author in compiling the book’s photographs.
Of course, Barber had many important connections to the Philadelphia area, having attended and taught at the Curtis Institute of Music and had many of his works, including a few premieres, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also exhibited a lifelong affection for his birthplace of West Chester, PA – which, as a small-town Pennsylvania boy myself, I find relatable and touching.
Barber was buried in West Chester in 1981, next to a gravesite held vacant for Gian Carlo Menotti, his friend, frequent collaborator, and romantic partner of decades. The two met during their student days at Curtis. Menotti would be buried in Scotland, but the West Chester would-be grave is marked by a headstone that reads, as per Barber’s request, “To the Memory of Two Friends.”
Pollack’s biography is successful not only in expanding the reader’s knowledge of the composer’s sizeable and varied output – more varied than one might suspect on the evidence of his most frequently played works – but also in conveying a real sense of the man, who could be patrician and impeccably turned out, often aloof in public, with a waspish sense of humor, but also warm and supportive to his friends. And even, on occasion, unexpectedly whimsical. He once remarked that because of his fondness for soup, his coffin should be pelted with croutons. At his burial service, his friends took him up on it.
There is also a charming anecdote earlier in the book, about how once Barber was attempting to get something straightened out with a utility company. In an unorthodox method of identity confirmation, the phone representative asked the composer to sing a few bars of his “Sure on This Shining Night.” Barber later remarked, “I’m afraid I sounded nervous. I had never sung for the telephone company before.”
Pollack’s writing is everything it should be: lucid, informative, and engrossing. There’s nothing to jerk a reader out of the narrative (save perhaps the frequent use of “tellingly,” which after a while becomes endearing). One doesn’t have to be a specialist to get something out of the book, and it is frequently an enjoyable read, though I grant that some chapters will be more compelling than others, depending on the depth of one’s devotion to Barber’s music. The chapters of purely biographical and historical interest are especially absorbing. One will learn a lot, unquestionably, as even I have.
With so many interviews and so much information to assimilate, I really don’t know how Pollack does it. I only just finally got around to reading his Copland bio, “Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man,” this past November, and the book, which was released over twenty years ago, is equally praiseworthy. And he’s done similar service for Marc Blitzstein, John Alden Carpenter, George Gershwin, Walter Piston, and lyricist John LaTouche. This guy deserves every award he’s ever received.
80 years ago today, Barber’s “Commando March,” written while he was serving in the U.S. Army Air Force, received its first performance in Atlantic City, with the Army Air Force Technical Training Command Band under the direction of the composer. Hear it performed at the link by “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band:
Barber’s final work, and one of his loveliest – the trunk of an oboe concerto he was too ill to complete – the “Canzonetta,” first performed posthumously in 1981:
“Sure on This Shining Night,” frequently heard in an arrangement for choir, here sung by a baritone, as it would have been by Barber himself to the telephone company:
“Summer Music,” commissioned on the recommendation of Karl Haas:
More than any other medium, the movies come closest to fulfilling Richard Wagner’s vision of Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – the all-encompassing synthesis of artistic elements into a kind of “artwork of the future.”
Modern technology has made possible a total immersion of the senses of a sort that Wagner could only have dreamed of. In the right hands, the tools of cinema can handily eclipse the stagecraft the composer worked so hard to achieve at his specially-constructed Bayreuth Festspielhaus, conceived to present works like “The Ring of the Nibelung.” Wagner would have been amazed and delighted at the potential of film, and horrified by its frequent vulgarization.
One thing’s for certain: the Wagnerian concept of the leitmotif – of establishing associations in music between certain themes or thematic cells with onscreen characters, objects, and ideas – was a lesson not lost on film composers. Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and others shepherded the technique from the opera house to the silver screen, and the tradition has been kept alive by composers like John Williams and Howard Shore.
Of course, there have been many times when Wagner’s music was simply lifted or adapted for use in film, from at least Joseph Carl Breil’s appropriation of “Ride of the Valkyries” for the Klansmen in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915.
The power of cinema, with its synthesis of images, editing, sound, and music, can overwhelm the senses. Herbert von Karajan claimed that when he saw “Apocalypse Now” he was so caught up in the helicopter sequence that he didn’t even realize in the moment that he was listening to “Ride of the Valkyries,” a work he had conducted countless times.
Wagner’s legacy is a complicated one. Some filmmakers play to his more disturbing associations. Others poke fun at the grandiosity and portentousness of his music. Others still look past the shortcomings of the man to embrace the transcendence of his creations. Leonard Bernstein summed it up nicely, when he said, “I hate Wagner… but I hate him on my knees.”
Wagner may not have lived to see the movies, but the movies certainly “saw” him, and they carried his vision to undreamed of lengths. But for all that, few of them have been able to achieve his resonance.
Happy birthday, Richard Wagner.
Klansmen ride to “Rienzi” and “Ride of the Valkyries” in “The Birth of a Nation”
Charlie Chaplin’s balletic dream of world domination in “The Great Dictator”
Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in “What’s Opera, Doc?”
“Ride of the Valkyries” in Fellini’s “8 ½”
Ken Russell’s eyebrow-raising “Lisztomania”
Schwarzenegger outruns Teutonic stereotype in “Running Man”
Trek to the vampire’s castle in Herzog’s “Nosferatu”
I’m only perhaps one sitting away from completing Howard Pollack’s biographical doorstop (at some 700 pages) “Samuel Barber: His Life & Legacy,” issued last month by University of Illinois Press. Barber was one of America’s greatest concert composers. Surely, you recognize him, at the very least, for his ubiquitous “Adagio for Strings.”
Pollack’s book is praiseworthy for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it kindles a desire in the reader to listen to Barber’s music, but also to revisit those pieces one may not have encountered in a very long time. Furthermore, it exposes even a fairly conversant Barberophile like myself to a number of works I never even knew existed.
One of these is the “Chorale for Ascension Day,” which Barber composed between “Antony and Cleopatra,” the opera that opened the Met at its new location in Lincoln Center in 1966, and “The Lovers,” his choral settings of poems by Pablo Neruda, given its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1970.
The chorale may not stand as one of Barber’s major works, but since I only just discovered it in time for Ascension Day, today, I figured I’d take the opportunity to give another plug to Pollack’s book, which goes into exhaustive detail about virtually everything Barber ever wrote, and to share a link to this, for me, until-now unknown music.
The work was originally composed for brass choir for the dedication of the new Gloria in Excelsis Tower at the Washington National Cathedral in 1964. The cathedral’s organist and choral director, Paul Callaway, had premiered Barber’s “Toccata Festiva” with the Philadelphia Orchestra to inaugurate the Academy of Music’s new Aeolian-Skinner organ in 1960.
Callaway likely saw to it that new works for the tower dedication were also commissioned from the likes of Lee Hoiby, John LaMontaine, Ned Rorem, and Stanley Hollingsworth. Soon after the premiere of Barber’s brass chorale, the composer provided Callaway with a setting of the piece for chorus, in this case employing a text by Robert Pack Browning.
The piece is also sometimes identified as “Easter Chorale.” On the basis of what I can find on YouTube, it appears that the choral version is much more common. All the brass ensembles, it seems, would rather play arrangements of “Adagio for Strings!”
After 28 years of intimacy, I imagine there are moments when any relationship can feel strained. Without proper maintenance, even the strongest edifice can develop fissures. Lack of appreciation, lack of trust, unapologetic exploitation, and downright condescension hasten the erosion of kindly feelings.
I’m not saying that was the case with these Czech composers, but only just emerging from the slight regard I experienced at WWFM, after nearly three decades of sharing my life’s blood, I feel an especial sympathy for those who were compelled to move on.
Happily, I have found a loving home at KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon, where my shows continue to air in syndication, while I regroup, record, and reestablish my presence.
All this is preamble to my thesis this week on “The Lost Chord,” on which I’ll present two examples of Czech composers whose newfound love resulted in flowering creativity.
Anyone at all acquainted with the life story of Leoš Janáček knows about his relationship with Kamila Stasslova. Stasslova was the married woman, 38 years Janáček’s junior, who was the recipient of his “intimate letters” (hence, the subtitle of his autobiographical String Quartet No. 2). Though the relationship was a chaste one, she instilled in the composer an ardor that propelled him to the creation of a series of masterworks that spanned his final decade. This is the music that essentially made Janáček’s reputation.
Less well-known perhaps is the case of Vitězslava Kaprálová. As both a composer and a conductor, Kaprálová undoubtedly would have achieved much greater things had her life not been cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 25. Among her teachers were Vitězslav Novák, Václav Talich, Charles Munch, Nadia Boulanger and Bohuslav Martinů.
Her relationship with Martinů deepened into one of romantic love, which fueled some of the older composer’s most powerful works, even as he grappled with his emotional turmoil, caught as he was between his wife and an irresistible attraction to his star pupil.
Kaprálová reciprocated, producing a number of pieces under Martinů’s influence, generally submitting them for his approval. One such work was the “Partita for Piano and String Orchestra,” composed in 1938 and 1939. Martinů is said to have made a substantial contribution to its final version.
But really the idea for this particular topic grew out of a consideration of Zdeněk Fibich, the unsung Czech master who was roughly nine years younger than Dvořák. Fibich lived something of a turbulent emotional life. When his first wife was about to give birth to twins, one of her sisters came to help out with the delivery. The sister and one of the newborns fell ill and died. They were followed within two years by the other child and Fibich’s wife.
Fibich promptly married another of his wife’s sisters, only to abandon her and the son she bore him, in favor of one of his pupils, Anežka Schulzová. He documented the affair, musically, in his collection of piano pieces, “Moods, Impressions and Reminiscences,” composed between 1892 and 1899. He referenced material therein in a number of works written during the last decade of his life.
One of these was the Symphony No. 2, which incorporates the musical reminiscence about the day he declared his love to Schulzová. This occurs in the second movement of the symphony, with another full-blown statement in the finale.
Alas, these Czechs are not alone in having bounced. I hope you’ll join me for “Bohemian Lifestyle: Illicit Love in Czech Music,” now exclusively in syndication. You’ll find my shows on KWAX, with a link to the times of their streaming below.
Keep in mind, the station is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour time difference – actually rather convenient for those of us located in the vicinity of WWFM. Here are the conversions of the respective air-times:
PICTURE PERFECT – Fridays on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD – Saturdays on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
