This is very sad, all the more horrible, coming as it does during the holiday season. Jubilant Sykes appeared in the world’s great opera houses and sang the Celebrant on a Grammy-nominated album of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass.”
He died on Monday of stab wounds allegedly inflicted by his son.
Sykes was 71 years old.
I couldn’t lavish my usual love on Krampus this year, because Krampus Night, December 6, fell on a weekend, and I had to give preference to promoting my radio shows. I know, what a drag.
Thankfully, only days after St. Nicholas’ dark helper was unleashed upon the naughty children of the world to lash them and toss them into hellfire comes the birthday of Emil Waldteufel. Waldteufel is German for “Forest Devil.” He was born on this date in 1837.
Although Waldteufel had long been a mainstay of Paris society balls of the Second Empire, he was nearly 40 by the time he achieved international fame. It was the Prince of Wales – the future King Edward VII – who introduced him to London, and his music came to dominate Queen Victoria’s state balls at Buckingham Palace. One of his best-known works, “Les Patineurs” (“The Skaters’ Waltz”) was introduced there in 1882. Another of his most successful waltzes, from the other end of the decade, was “Roses de Noël” (“Christmas Roses”).
The holidays are in bloom! Take some time to smell the roses with Emil Waldteufel.
“The Skaters’ Waltz”
“Roses de Noël”
Because of the unusual nature of the conductor, in period costume and facial hair, to this I add the Rimsky-Korsakov Central Navy Band of Russia playing “Estudiantina”
Happy birthday, Waldteufel, you devil.
I’d forgotten what a terrific writer William Saroyan is. As someone who has haunted, worked in, and owned bookstores throughout his life, of course I had encountered Saroyan’s name and gleaned from some of his titles that he was proud of his Armenian heritage.
But what drove me finally to seek out his work was a viewing on TCM some years ago of a moving wartime drama called “The Human Comedy,” in which Mickey Rooney, surely giving one of his best performances, plays a high school student who moonlights as a telegraph delivery boy, helping to support his family after the death of his father, while his brother is away at war.
The cast also includes Frank Morgan (a.k.a. The Wizard of Oz), Donna Reed in one of her early roles, and Van Johnson, who for once doesn’t annoy the hell out of me. It’s a heartwarming film that delivers. A really beautiful slice of Americana. Sentimental? At times, but I think its tears are well earned. There’s an awful lot of “aw shucks” wholesomeness, but I’m not against that. I don’t know if I’d put it on the same shelf as “The Best Years of Our Lives” or “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it definitely exudes that same quasi-mythic sense of community and basic American decency.
Saroyan himself didn’t like what Hollywood did with the film, but he was, after all, the writer and understandably proprietary. Also, he had been nudged out of the director’s chair by Louis B. Mayer, after it was found Saroyan’s original screenplay would have pushed the running time to 4 hours. In response, Saroyan went home and immediately adapted his treatment into a novel, which was rushed into publication before the film could be completed and became a runaway bestseller.
It’s always been a bit of a mindbender for me to realize that so many of these figures who attained success during the 1930s and ‘40 were still basically middle-aged by the time they reached the 1970s. It’s crazy, for instance, to think that my grandfather, who served in World War II, turned 60 in 1975. So it was that I always thought of Saroyan as the outlandlishly mustachioed celebrity he was at the time he appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show” (with Veronica Lake and Leonard Maltin) in 1971. It’s hard to reconcile it with the handsome, dark-eyed, alternately exuberant and melancholy, earthy and unwaveringly independent writer of the 1930s and ‘40s.
Once upon a time, Saroyan was taken very seriously as a major voice in American fiction. He wrote acclaimed novels, plays, and short stories. And the power and personality of his individual voice never aged. It is still potent in the story collections he tossed off late in life, if perhaps tempered by accrued wisdom (but not always). At times, he can be positively Vonnegutesque, so I suppose it should have come as no surprise to learn that Vonnegut wrote a tribute to Saroyan that was delivered at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters the year after Saroyan’s death in 1981. Vonnegut, who had never met the man but clearly admired his work, characterized Saroyan as “the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists.”
On the last day of a Princeton Public Library book sale in October, I returned to run my eye over the picked-over inventory to see what I might have missed and maybe pick up a few deals from among the orphans during the half-price closeout. Imagine my delight, when I espied a crisp, leather-bound Franklin Library edition of Saroyan’s “Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” from 1976, with illustrations by Al Hirschfeld, marked $10 – $5 half-price. This was especially exciting as it happened to contain Saroyan’s account of his meeting with Jean Sibelius. Sibelius, of course, is one of my favorite composers. He was born on this date in 1865.
Somehow, at some point, I had learned about this literary anecdote and have had my eyes open for “Jean Sibelius at Home in Jaarvenpaa” [sic] ever since. Basically, the writer at 27 pops into a record shop in Helsinki in 1935 and requests a recording of “Finlandia,” a piece of music with which he had come to strongly identify for personal, as opposed to nationalistic, reasons. The clerk pulls a performance and puts it on a turntable, and the two listen transfixed. Reading his enthusiasm, the clerk insists on calling up the composer to ask if it would be okay for Saroyan to drop by. The account is especially interesting in that it offers a bit of a counterpoint to the usual portraits of Sibelius as a solemn recluse.
Here, he’s hospitable and good-humored. Saroyan is surprised by the composer’s “boyish and boisterous courtesy” and whisky is consumed. (Saroyan, however, declines the offer of a fine cigar.) But it isn’t long before he detects a sorrowful undercurrent in his host’s character that he recognizes from another of his personal favorite pieces by the composer, the “Elegie” from “King Christian II,” which the writer references in at least two other stories in the collection.
The meeting grows awkward as Saroyan mentions “Valse triste,” one of Sibelius’ most successful works, but one for which the composer was screwed out of enormous royalties, thanks to an early agreement with his publisher. In the silence that follows, Saroyan is glad to have retained a taxi, which is waiting for him outside. Still, he is so buoyed by the experience of meeting Jean Sibelius that he decides to write a story about it as soon as he gets back to his room. This he also calls “Finlandia.”
It was only in reading “Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” last week that I learned of the existence of this earlier Sibelius-related short story. This I have been unsuccessful in obtaining prior to the writing of this post. It appeared in Saroyan’s book “Inhale and Exhale” and was subsequently collected in “The William Saroyan Reader.” Sadly, I could find neither on the shelves of Princeton’s Labyrinth Books or Barnes & Noble (no Saroyan represented at either store, as a matter of fact), and the Princeton Public Library only had “The Human Comedy” and “My Name is Aram.” So I have a copy of “The William Saroyan Reader” on order from a seller on eBay.
(Parenthetically, at some point within the last few years I also picked up a good used copy of “My Name is Aram,” which I had passed over many times, even when I had it on the shelf in one of my own shops, not realizing how very interested I would be to read it until my conversion experience with “The Human Comedy.” That said, I have yet to get around to it. It’s in one of the stacks on my desk.)
“Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” is a like a collection of vignettes, entertaining free-associations spanning some three or four pages recollecting some aspect of Saroyan’s world, whether it be his boyhood in Fresno, his experiences in Hollywood in the 1930s, or the sights and sounds of New York City’s 57th Street. Some of the other artists and celebrities of whom Saroyan records his impressions include Jack Benny, Paul Bowles, Marc Chagall, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, Ernest Hemingway, Miriam Hopkins, Walter Huston, Gypsy Rose Lee, H.L. Mencken, Marilyn Monroe, George Jean Nathan, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, George Bernard Shaw, George Stevens, Gloria Swanson, and Darryl Zanuck (with a cameo by Humphrey Bogart). And he doesn’t pull any punches. If he finds someone lacking, he lets you know. He really didn’t like Will Rogers or Harold Clurman or Louis B. Mayer. Mostly, though, he’s pretty genial and matter-of-fact, often with a touch of empathy, or at any rate, humanity glowing beneath the surface.
I have since discovered that Sibelius is not the only classical composer with whom Saroyan had associated. He also collaborated with American composer Alan Hovhaness, who shared his Armenian ancestry. (Hovhaness was also an ardent Sibelius enthusiast, who kept up a correspondence with the Finnish master.) Together, they wrote the song “Bari, Bari” and Hovhaness composed incidental music for Saroyan’s play “Jim Dandy.” After Saroyan’s death in 1981, half his ashes were interred in the Komitas Pantheon in Armenia near the grave of Aram Khachaturian, whose artistry Saroyan had also lauded. Komitas himself is celebrated as the founder of an Armenian national school of music.
Clearly, Saroyan possessed a fierce ethnic pride, but the United States, after all, was the country of his birth, and despite early hardship (his mother was so poor that after his father died he lived in an orphanage for five years), he loved America, and he wrote warmly about the people of different ethnicities and backgrounds he grew up with.
For reasons he perhaps never fully understood, he felt a close affinity with Sibelius, living in the remote north, “a giant in the world, and not just the world of music, a giant in the world of mystery, of legend, of universal human meanings.”
A roundabout salute, then, to Jean Sibelius on the 160th anniversary of his birth!
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Sibelius, “Elegy” from incidental music to “King Christian II”
Alan Hovhaness, “Bari, Bari”
Selection from Hovhaness’ incidental music to Saroyan’s “Jim Dandy”
Veronica Lake and William Saroyan on Dick Cavett
“Finlandia”
In 1997, I was sitting behind the desk in my bookshop in Philadelphia, when an older couple wandered in. The man was evidently careful about his movements, understandable, even under the best of circumstances, since one had to navigate a foyer with some stairs and then usually a dog when entering the space.
After some time browsing, they approached the desk, and the man asked to see a piece of ephemera he noticed, a booklet on the composer and critic Virgil Thomson, that I had on low shelf beside me, waiting to be priced. This started a conversation, in the course of which it was revealed that he himself was a composer. When he told me his name, he seemed especially gratified that I knew who he was.
But John Duffy’s Emmy Award-winning music for the PBS television documentary “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews” was played quite often on the local classical music station, especially around the Jewish holidays. (Duffy himself was Irish Catholic.) He and I had a lovely exchange, and when he asked me how much I wanted for the book, I told him it was on the house.
The Duffys were in Philadelphia for the premiere of his new opera, “Black Water” (on a libretto by Princeton writer Joyce Carol Oates), at Plays and Players Theater, which was two blocks away from the shop. Perhaps in reciprocation for my generosity, he offered to comp me into the show.
This was on a weekday. At the time, I was working the weekend mornings at WWFM in Trenton-Princeton, so it would be around 1:30 or 2:00 by the time I got back to Philadelphia and found parking on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
That Saturday, I returned, and a friend of mine, who regularly sat the store in my absence, said that a kindly old gentleman had stopped by and dropped off something for me. John Duffy had gone to Tower Records and picked me up a copy of his CD “Freedom Works.” It was the only disc in stock that had selections from “Heritage.”
With the CD he left the following note, rendered in a shaky hand:
“Dear Ross: I wanted you to have a copy of FREEDOM WORKS. Tracks 6, 7 & 8 are based on my HERITAGE score. All best, John Duffy
“P.S. I hope you found BLACK WATER absorbing. Thank you for the Thomson book.”
Duffy already appeared unsteady when I met him, when he was only in his early 70s. He suffered from ill health later in life, but he held on until the 2015, reaching the ripe age of 89. He impressed me as an optimistic and gentle soul. In addition to his work as a creative artist, he went out of his way to help others in his field. He was founder and president of Meet the Composer, an organization that initiated countless programs to advance American music, from creation to performance and recordings.
On the same CD he left, with “Three Jewish Portraits” (from “Heritage”), was his Symphony No. 1 and “A Time for Remembrance” – a “peace cantata,” as he subtitled it – commissioned in 1991 by the U.S. government to mark the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2,403 Americans, wounded 1,178 others – sailors, soldiers, airmen, marines, and civilians – and precipitated the United States’ entry into World War II. After listening to the music, I promptly added it to my regular repertoire for radio broadcast on December 7.
In his booklet notes, the composer writes that it is “Dedicated to my sister, Agnes Duffy, Ensign, U.S. Navy, Nurse, IN HER MEMORY: and in remembrance of all those who die in war: the men, women, and children killed and maimed at Pearl Harbor; my cousin, Edward Quirk, Machinist’s Mate, USS Shaw; the men entombed in the USS Arizona; those at Hiroshima, Normandy, Bergen-Belsen, and more. MAY PEACE PREVAIL IN THEIR NAMES.”
The texts are taken from a poem by Rupert Brooke, a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an African American spiritual, and actual letters written by sailors aboard the USS Arizona. On the recording, the performance features James Earl Jones, narrator, Cynthia Clarey, mezzo-soprano, and the Milwaukee Symphony, conducted by Zdenek Macal.
I would love to share it with you here, but the audio comes and goes online. Occasionally somebody will post it somewhere, but after a little while, it will get taken down. I can’t find it streaming anywhere, but perhaps you will have more success, if you really dig. John Duffy is a fairly common name!
Duffy himself lied about his age when enlisting during the war. He became part of the Amphibious Scouts and Raiders, forerunners to the Navy SEALs, before deploying on the USS Hopping, a destroyer escort in the Pacific. His duties included detonating Japanese mines by shooting them from ship deck. When his ship took fire from shore batteries at Okinawa, the sailor standing next to him was killed. Duffy had to stand guard over the dead man’s body until burial at sea in the morning. That night watch determined the course of his life. “Since our time is so fleeting and unpredictable,” he later commented, “I knew I had to dedicate my life to music.”
John Duffy on his own war experiences and his decision to become a composer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBerCcmUyw4
I have no hesitation in ranking Jean Sibelius as one of my top two favorite composers. He and Vaughan Williams pretty much run a three-legged race. Sibelius was born on December 8, 1865. This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll anticipate his 160th birthday with an hour of early recordings of his music.
Robert Kajanus was Sibelius’ good friend, a sometimes rival, and often a drinking buddy. The duo was captured during one of their infamous binges in a painting by the artist Akseli Gallén-Kallela (pictured). Kajanus set down first recordings of a number of Sibelius’ major works, including the underappreciated Symphony No. 3, which we’ll hear in a 1932 performance, with the London Symphony Orchestra.
As a personal aside, it was actually this recording that served as an introduction for me to the composers’ grandson. For a number of years, I owned a second-hand book business in Philadelphia. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that if anyone ventured into the shop there would be probably an 8-in-10 chance that I would be playing Sibelius.
Well, on this particular occasion, the composer’s grandson, Anssi Blomstedt (son of Sibelius’ youngest daughter, Heidi), wandered in during the Kajanus 3rd, which impressed him sufficiently that he struck up a conversation with me. It turned out he is a documentary filmmaker who was actually living in Philadelphia at the time. By further coincidence, Simon Rattle was coming to town to conduct Sibelius’ 5th Symphony. I was able to get Anssi an introduction to Rattle, who invited us to attend a rehearsal. Somewhere in Vanity Fair’s archives there is a photo of Rattle planting a big kiss on Sibelius’ grandson’s forehead.
Anssi later returned the favor by introducing me to Einojuhani Rautavaara, who came to Philadelphia for the premiere of his 8th Symphony. I’ve got a snapshot of me with Rautavaara, and I’m grinning like a Tyrannosaurus rex. I know I’ve posted it before.
Back to tonight’s show: I’ll also include a highly regarded performance of Sibelius’ last major work, the tone poem “Tapiola,” from 1926. The piece takes its name from Tapio, the forest god mentioned throughout the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, who inhabits the stark pine forests of the wild North. Again, Kajanus gave the piece its first recording, in 1932, but we’ll hear an equally atmospheric, and at times awe-inspiring reading, given seven years later, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.
Sibelius would live another 30 years after the completion of “Tapiola.” Although he spent a portion of that time laboring at a highly-anticipated 8th Symphony, with the premiere promised to Koussevitzky, he eventually destroyed the manuscript.
We’ll give the last word to one of the heroes of the Kalevala, the swashbuckling Lemminkäinen. Eugene Ormandy was a superb interpreter of Sibelius’ “Four Legends from the Kalevala.” A stereo recording he made with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1978 must be one of his finest. However, his 1940 recording of the last of the legends, “Lemminkäinen’s Return,” is on a whole other level. It surpasses even Sir Thomas Beecham’s legendary account, in terms of sheer virtuosity and visceral excitement. If there’s a more hell-for-leather performance of the piece, I have yet to hear it.
I hope you’ll join me for “Vintage Sibelius,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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IMAGE: “Kajustaflan” by Akseli Gallén-Kallela. Pictured (from left to right), the artist, composer Oskar Merikanto, Robert Kajanus, and Jean Sibelius.
All you need to know about Gallén-Kallela and “The Symposium,” and then some, here:
https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn14/coleman-on-sibelius-gallen-kallela-and-the-symposium
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