Trains have always been very good for drama. They are symbols of departures and arrivals. They are conveyors of prisoners and vehicles of escape. They are objects of romance and objects to “hobo around” on. They are harbingers of civilization, and they are transports be robbed. You can fight on top of them. You can make out with Eva Marie Saint, or you can protect Marie Windsor so that she can testify against the mob. You can shuffle off to Buffalo.
From the beginning, trains have provided good escapist fun at the movies. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ve got an hour of music from four memorable films in which trains play an important role.
In “Strangers on a Train” (1951), arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s most underrated film of the 1950s, Farley Granger plays a tennis pro who unwittingly becomes involved in a double-murder plot (criss-cross!) through a chance encounter on a passenger train with a psychopath named Bruno (probably Robert Walker’s finest performance). The music is by Dimitri Tiomkin, who scored four films for Hitch – including “Shadow of a Doubt,” “I Confess,” and “Dial M for Murder.”
Burt Lancaster stars in a film titled, simply, “The Train” (1964), as a reluctant railroad inspector who is persuaded to join the French Underground’s efforts to delay the transport of masterpieces looted from the museums of Paris by the Nazis, since Allied liberation of France is imminent. Paul Scofield plays the art-loving German officer determined to move the art at all costs. Real trains were destroyed in the making of the film, real dynamite was employed, and Lancaster, as was often the case, did all his own stunts. The score is by Maurice Jarre.
“Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) is based on one of the best-known Agatha Christie vehicles involving her recurring character, celebrated detective Hercule Poirot. Albert Finney portrays Poirot most memorably in this, the first and best of the all-star Christie thrillers, set on a long-distance passenger train connecting Paris to Istanbul. The list of suspects includes Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark, and Michael York. The unforgettable score is by Richard Rodney Bennett.
Finally, we turn to the lighthearted caper “The Great Train Robbery” (1979), starring Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Leslie-Anne Down. Michael Crichton wrote the screenplay, after his own novel, which in turn was based on an actual historical incident – an 1855 heist, in which an unbelievable amount of gold disappeared from a moving train. Crichton also directed the film. The music is by the great Jerry Goldsmith.
All aboard! We’ll be taking the train today, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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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 – 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
Otto Klemperer was as monumental as his music-making. At 6-foot-6, he wore a look of granitic intensity. Seat him in front of a camera, and he assumed the gaze of a raptor staring down a field mouse.
An associate, friend, and disciple of Gustav Mahler, Klemperer championed new works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Hindemith. He tolerated no coughing or sneezing from his audience. When the New York Philharmonic failed to offer him a music directorship after 14 weeks as guest conductor, he fired off a scathing missive: “That the society did not reengage me is the strongest offense, the sharpest insult to me as artist, which I can imagine… This non-reengagement will have very bad results not only… in New York but in the whole world.” He settled in London, where a new orchestra, the Philharmonia, was created specifically for him.
Klemperer’s power of indestructibility is legendary. No one and nothing could stop him. Not Hitler. Not the U.S. State Department (that refused to renew his visa). Not even a brain tumor. He made Rasputin look like a mayfly.
His catalogue of misfortunes would have destroyed a lesser man. He suffered from severe cyclothymic bipolar disorder. He underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, a meningioma “the size of a small orange.” When placed in an institution, he escaped. (He was characterized by the police as “dangerous and insane.”) Later, he took a severe spill, requiring him to conduct from a chair. When he set himself on fire – while smoking in bed – he tried to douse the flames with spirits of camphor.
I’m not sure what kind of a woman would have the courage to get anywhere near him, but there’s no explaining charisma. Somehow he managed to sire actor Werner Klemperer (a.k.a. Colonel Klink). A daughter, Lotte, became his assistant and caretaker. Once, Georg Solti knocked at the door of his dressing room, and when Otto Klemperer answered, he was in his boxers and covered in lipstick.
In 1912, he was horsewhipped at the Hamburg Opera following a performance of Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” The perpetrator was the husband of soprano Elisabeth Schumann, who was apoplectic after his wife had run off with the conductor. Klemperer was taken off guard, but quickly recovered. According to soprano Lotte Lehmann, he clambered out of the pit “like a huge black spider.” When the two men were finally pried apart, Klemperer collected himself and turned to address the audience. “This man has attacked me because his wife loves me,” he said. “Good evening!”
Klemperer’s career was capped by a glorious Indian summer that spanned some 20 years (roughly 1952 to 1972). Half-paralyzed, he maintained control of his players with piercing eyes and a baton sometimes held in his left hand. It’s rumored that he actually fell asleep during the recording sessions for Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony, and rather than rouse an angry god, the orchestra just kept on playing. This juggernaut of the podium finally ground to a halt at the age 88. Like the man, his recordings are built to last.
Happy birthday, Otto Klemperer.
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Klemperer in Philadelphia
Live Bruckner from 1947, quite at variance with the glacial recordings of the elder Klemperer
Just looking at these box sets of D’Oyly Carte LPs of the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas fills me with bittersweet nostalgia. I remember the smell of the boxes and recall with pleasure reading along with the enclosed libretti.
I was a G&S bug in high school. Joseph Papp’s silly, roistering, 1981 Broadway revival of “The Pirates of Penzance” launched me on my way. The musical alterations would have horrified the composer, but the performers were all game (with an uncanny Tony Azito, though singing in the wrong register as a Keystone Kops Sergeant of Police, all physical grace and genius), and the choreography fun and fleet.
It spurred me to collect a number of the other G&S favorites from my local record store, and I committed the best of them to memory. What a bizarre teenager I was, to be able to sing “Pirates” then, from first note to last. Furthermore, how screwy my best friends were, who would sometimes sit and listen with me after school.
At the same time, I was an enormous Marx Brothers fan. In the early films, Groucho often made a ludicrously grandiose entrance, heralded by chorus, and launched into a ridiculous song. It was obvious to me that the songwriters were emulating Gilbert & Sullivan. Later, Groucho would appear in a televised production of “The Mikado.”
My mother and I and occasionally a friend or a girlfriend would catch every Gilbert & Sullivan revival within reach. Muhlenberg College used to stage excellent musical theater productions in the summers, and I remember their superb, Broadway-worthy G&S with affection.
The ‘80s also brought some pretty dodgy G&S adaptations to PBS, with Peter Allen in “The Pirates of Penzance,” William Conrard in “The Mikado,” Joel Grey in “The Yeoman of the Guard,” and Vincent Price in “Ruddigore.” Some of these were frankly quite bad, to the point of embarrassment, but I still got enjoyment from watching them. Clive Revill (as “The Sorcerer”) was always first rate in anything he was in.
I once worked for a pompous bookstore owner, who was also a Savoyard, and it was all I could do to gently correct him when he misquoted Gilbert & Sullivan. He never backed down, but I was always right, which he once uncomfortably conceded. Later, I heard he went to jail for something. Ironically, I remember him once singing the refrain, “A policeman’s lot is not an ‘appy one.” I imagine a triumphant Tony Azito flailing his limbs outside his cell.
Sullivan eventually grew exasperated with the phenomenal success of his collaborations with William S. Gilbert. One always imagines creative artists who work so well together must be the best of friends. Of course, it’s not always the case.
Sullivan had a sense of his own worth, and sometimes it would be nice, he thought, if he would be recognized equally as a serious composer. It could easily be argued that he was the greatest English composer of his day, but his success with musical comedy made it hard for him to be taken seriously, just as today it’s hard for a certain, underinformed segment of the musical community to take John Williams seriously. But both composers were/are masters of their craft, who achieved much beyond the comfort zone of their greatest popular successes.
It wasn’t until the compact disc era that posterity was allowed, for the first time since the Victorian era, to take in the full extent of Sullivan’s musical endeavors. My favorite Sullivan-without-Gilbert has always been the “Irish Symphony.” I’ve heard a lot of his other music, and while well-crafted and certainly enjoyable, none of it really has the vitality and immediacy of that he wrote to Gilbert’s libretti. The alchemy between the two was so powerful, it continues to crackle. It gives you the best sense of what it must have been like to be alive at the time.
Of course, there’s also this cylinder of Sullivan speaking at a dinner party in 1888 (on which he makes some perspicacious remarks about the future of recorded music), reproduced here with 17 minutes of astonishing recordings and footage from Sullivan’s world. As someone points out in the comments section, the dinner party took place only five days after the double murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes by Jack the Ripper.
Documents like these really make history come alive. People born in this era still walked the earth when I was a boy.
Happy birthday, Sir Arthur Sullivan!
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Clive Revill as “The Sorcerer”
Tony Azito in “Pirates”
Groucho Marx in “The Mikado”
Sideshow Bob does “H.M.S. Pinafore”
Stratford Festival “I am the very model of a modern Major General” (with meta reference to “Pinafore” and some fun and games with the lyrics during the encore)
“Irish Symphony”
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TOP: Caricature of Sullivan, with impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte and collaborator W.S. Gilbert
When I started my book business in Philadelphia in the mid-1990s, it was the pioneer days of AbeBooks – an online service (ABE an acronym for Advanced Book Exchange) that allowed independent dealers to hawk their more esoteric wares to a worldwide audience. In 2008, ABE was swallowed by the great Satan, Amazon.com (earlier, there were seller agreements with all the major platforms), but by then I was closing up shop anyway and eager to move on to other things. For those 13 years, I was a house divided against myself, as I had been hired as a classical music radio host right after I had negotiated my lease on my first storefront!
As you can imagine, I had built quite the music inventory. I was located about block from the Curtis Institute, people wandered in after Philadelphia Orchestra matinees, and thanks to ABE, I developed a decent international clientele. But when you’re a bookdealer, if you want to be successful, you really have to draw the line between being a seller and being a collector, and I couldn’t always do that. Furthermore, I was maddeningly inconsistent. So I would sell off books inscribed by Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, and John Philip Sousa, but I would turn around and skim off for myself a letter scrawled by Jean Sibelius. (I’m not crazy!)
My greatest regret was the time I sold one of the original, privately-printed pamphlets of “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern, which he sent out to friends as a Christmas card and later became the basis for the perennial favorite “It’s a Wonderful Life.” There were only 200 of them in existence. It’s a piece of memorabilia that’s only going to go up in value, and I sold it to some pig lawyer for cash on the barrel. He was a regular customer, a real arrogant son-of-a-bitch. He held a lit cigar between his fingers as he counted out the bills. I wish it had gone to anyone except him. But I had to keep the doors open.
Seller or collector… grrrrrrrr.
Further blurring the line between the sides of the register occurred because I often viewed transactions from the point-of-view of a customer. It was a great weakness of mine, because I knew as a booklover how excited I’d get when I discovered a real book bargain. So I underpriced many of my items, understanding the thrill, even when I could have squeezed more money out of a lot of them. Another upside, of course, was that I was able to turn over my inventory fairly quickly.
There wasn’t always a lot, if anything, online in those days to guide one, so a dealer had to rely on his knowledge and intuition, not only to stock and price books, but to come up with attractive and witty descriptions of their contents for the ABE catalogue. Naturally, I couldn’t read everything. But on this birthday anniversary of the composer Jules Massenet, I am reminded of his memoir, “My Recollections,” that, in leafing through, struck me as especially witty and eccentric, as it concludes with a chapter describing his own death and departure from this world. It was so bizarre that it popped into my head yesterday, as I was glancing at today’s music birthdays.
While my own description seems to have been lost to time (I thought I might have been able to find a sales invoice in the far reaches of my email account), I have managed to locate the actual text, reproduced by Project Gutenberg. As proof that people never change, when Massenet’s memoir was first published in installments in the newspaper L’Écho de Paris, some readers pointed out that the story was incomplete and asked him why he hadn’t included a chapter about his death (!). Massenet, as an intelligent person, laughed this off, but after he turned 70, contemplations of his own mortality were inevitable. It was then that he decided to add an appendix, “Pensées posthumes,” a translation of which follows.
CHAPTER XXIX
THOUGHTS AFTER DEATH
I have departed from this planet and I have left behind my poor earthly ones with their occupations which are as many as they are useless; at last I am living in the scintillating splendor of the stars, each of which used to seem to me as large as millions of suns. Of old I was never able to get such lighting for my scenery on the great stage at the Opéra where the backdrops were too often in darkness. Henceforth there will be no letters to answer; I have bade farewell to first performances and the literary and other discussions which come from them.
Here there are no newspapers, no dinners, no sleepless nights. Ah! if I could but counsel my friends to join me here, I would not hesitate to call them to me. But would they come?
Before I came to this distant place where I now sojourn, I wrote out my last wishes (an unhappy husband would have taken advantage of the occasion to write with joy, “my first wishes”).
I had indicated that above all I wanted to be buried at Égreville, near the family abode in which I had lived so long. Oh, the good cemetery in the open fields, silent as befits those who live there!
I asked that they should refrain from hanging black draperies on my door, ornaments worn threadbare by use. I expressed the wish that a suitable carriage should take me from Paris, the journey, with my consent, to begin at eight in the morning.
An evening paper (perhaps two) felt it to be its duty to inform its readers of my decease. A few friends – I still had some the day before – came and asked my concierge if the news were true, and he replied, “Alas, Monsieur went without leaving his address.” And his reply was true for he did not know where that obliging carriage was taking me.
At lunch acquaintances honored me among themselves with their condolences, and during the day here and there in the theaters they spoke of the adventure,
“Now that he is dead, they’ll play him less, won’t they?”
“Do you know he left still another work?”
“Ah, believe me, I loved him well! I have always had such great success in his works.”
A woman’s lovely voice said that.
They wept at my publishers, for there they loved me dearly.
At home, Rue de Vaugirard, my wife, daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered and almost found consolation in their sobs.
The family was to reach Égreville the same evening, the night before my burial.
And my soul (the soul survives the body) listened to all these sounds from the city left behind. As the carriage took me farther and farther away, the talking and the noises grew fainter and fainter, and I knew, for I had my vault built long ago, that the heavy stone once sealed would be a few hours later the portal of oblivion.
THE END
You can find the complete text of “My Recollections” here:
I am proud to say I was a William Grant Still advocate before it was cool to be so. When I first encountered his “Afro-American Symphony” in the early 1980s, it was love at first sound. It remains one of my favorite symphonies by an American composer.
Perhaps it’s not “The Great American Symphony,” self-consciously aspirational, oratorical, or grandiose in the manner the third symphonies of Roy Harris, William Schuman, or Aaron Copland; but it does go straight to the heart, which is something none of the composers of that great American triumvirate do, at least in those particular works.
Still’s symphony is poetic, it’s genuinely reflective, it’s beautiful, and it brims with great tunes. It’s congenial, and in the end quite moving. When I want “big statements” made on an Olympian scale, I will turn to those Lincoln Center composers, who would have us believe they are eating out of lunch pails in their spare time and riveting skyscrapers or busting sod in denim overalls. But let’s face it, they are mostly hobnobbing in suits, jostling to get their music conducted by “Lenny.”
Still is a composer in the mold, if not the manner, of Charles Ives. He’s a perpetual outsider, and always true to himself. His music grows directly out of his autobiographical experience, the blues, ballads, and spirituals of his childhood, in Woodville, Mississippi, and Little Rock, Arkansas, and later his experience playing in pit bands during the Harlem Renaissance.
He also studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and privately with George Whitefield Chadwick and Edgard Varèse, of all people. There is no Varèse to be found in Still’s music.
He composes with the directness of a Virgil Thomson, but with none of Thomson’s affected naiveté. He shares with George Gershwin a refreshing lack of pretention – or at any rate his music does (he did, after all, subtitle one of his symphonies “Autochthonous”) – and a wonderful facility with melody.
Of course, any discussion of Still must come with a litany of “firsts.” His “Afro-American Symphony” was the first written by a black composer to be performed by a major orchestra (the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall). He was the first to be given the opportunity to conduct a major orchestra (the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl). His opera, “Troubled Island,” became the first to be produced by a major company (the New York City Opera). Another of his operas, “A Bayou Legend,” was the first to be performed on national television (as late as 1981). His works were performed internationally by the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and the Tokyo Philharmonic.
For years, all I could find was the “Afro-American Symphony,” and that only in two out-of-print, albeit very fine recordings (with Karl Krueger and the Royal Philharmonic, and Paul Freeman and the London Symphony Orchestra). It wasn’t until the digital era that the other four symphonies gradually – very gradually – became available. Thankfully, all of them now have been recorded and are available for purchase.
I think we have to thank the revival of the fortunes of Florence Price for the boost in exposure brought to so many other Black composers recently. Who would have thought that Price, Still, and William Levi Dawson would not only be performed, but recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra – for the Deutsche Grammophon label, no less?
Of course, it would nice if DG didn’t change horses midstream and issue the final installment of their Price cycle exclusively as a digital download. I don’t do downloads, at least for the purposes of collecting. I would snap up the rest of their Price, Still, Dawson, and Margaret Bonds recordings if they actually existed on physical media (even if I was less than impressed with Yannick’s Dawson in concert). It’s exciting that a world-class band would take up the cause of these composers. I don’t need any more Philadelphia Orchestra Rachmaninoff!
Be that as it may, whether or not DG eventually grants him the respect of some compact disc releases, for me, William Grant Still is still the one.
