This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s an hour of top hats and crinoline, with music from movies set during the Victorian Era. Enjoy selections from “The Importance of Being Earnest” (Benjamin Frankel), “Oliver Twist” (Arnold Bax), “Champagne Charlie” (Lord Berners), and “The Great Train Robbery” (Jerry Goldsmith). Even the pianos wear skirts, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Category: Daily Dispatch
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Robur Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner Master of the World
Robur the Conqueror believes he must destroy the world in order to save it. But why does he have to pick on Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner?
Because of Roy’s continuing tree issues, we’re postponing our discussion about “Master of the World” (1961). That will give you the weekend to watch the movie.
Then bring your cranes and chainsaws as we livestream on Facebook, from our Appalachian lair, this Sunday evening at 7:00 EDT.
https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner
“Master of the World”
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Master of the World Vincent Price Takes Flight
A sense of déjà vu hangs like a propeller-driven baguette over “Master of the World” (1961).
Like Jules Verne’s other revolutionary “pacificist,” Captain Nemo, Robur the Conqueror understands that in order to make an omelette, you’ve got to break some oeufs. He spouts Bible passages while hammering everyone else’s swords into plowshares, dropping bombs from his heavier-than-air craft, forged in an apparent “volcano” outside a small Appalachian town in Pennsylvania. (We meet several of the principal characters in Philadelphia.)
At least, that’s the spin we get from American International Pictures, for whom Verne’s miraculous conquest of the skies is not enough, so Robur’s motives are twisted and the “Albatross” is reimagined as a “Nautilus” of the air. And while they’re at it, why not attempt to emulate the breezy romance of Michael Todd’s “Around the World in 80 Days,” so popular and acclaimed (the recipient of five Academy Awards, including that for Best Picture) when it was released only five years earlier? Trouble is, AIP had neither the budget to replicate that film’s scope nor it’s star-studded cameos.
“Master of the World” has everything you would expect from an American International Picture – Vincent Price, abundant stock footage, and a nowhere music score by Les Baxter. Even so, this was AIP’s most expensive film produced up until that time.
Of added interest is the fact that the screenplay is by sci-fi and horror legend, Richard Matheson, whose stories formed the basis of innumerable classic movies and television shows. Matheson also provided the screenplays for AIP’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle, also starring Price.
Je ne sais quoi teeters into WTF, as the film’s schizophrenic tone careens from suspenseful adventure to slapstick comedy (what’s the deal with the beleaguered French chef?) to out-of-left field romance (a title song trying too hard to recall the success of Victor Young’s “Around the World”). Phileas Fogg may have traversed the globe in 80 days, but Robur boasts he can make the trip in three weeks! Mon Dieu! What he would have made of the Concorde is anyone’s guess…
I hope you’ll join Roy and me as we discuss the family-friendly (?) “Master of the World,” co-starring Charles Bronson, in his first leading role, and David Frankham.
Incidentally, Frankham will be our guest for a livestreamed interview from Trekonderoga, in Ticonderoga, New York, on Sunday, September 26, at 1:30 pm EDT! For more information about this three-day event, visit https://www.startrektour.com/
What Price peace? Why, Vincent Price, of course! Drop your bombs in the comments section, as we discuss “Master of the World.” We’ll be donning our propeller hats, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, when we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!
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Ferdinand Hiller
Who was Ferdinand Hiller, and what does he have to do with the most famous setting of “Kol Nidre” in all of classical music?
Hiller, born to Jewish parents in 1811 (his father changed his name from Hildesheim), was a child prodigy. By 10, he was playing Mozart piano concertos in public, and by 12, he completed his first original composition. As a child, he met Felix Mendelssohn, who was two years his senior. Their friendship deepened in their teens and endured for over 20 years. Eventually, Hiller succeeded Mendelssohn as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which likely precipitated a rapid cooling between them. Within four years, Mendelssohn was dead at the age of 38.
Hiller, who nearly doubled his friend’s lifespan (he died in 1885), composed in all forms – opera, symphony, concerto, chamber and instrumental works, and choral music, including an oratorio, “The Destruction of Jerusalem.” An outstanding pianist, he became the dedicatee of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto. Chopin also dedicated his three Nocturnes, Op. 15, to him.
Hiller was a forceful writer on music and an influential teacher. His star pupil was Max Bruch, who was not Jewish. Bruch became acquainted with the cantorial chant “Kol Nidre” after being introduced by Hiller to the Berlin hazzan, Abraham Lichtenstein. In 1880, the same year that Bruch composed his “Scottish Fantasy” for the violinist Pablo de Sarasate, he embarked on his famous cello elegy.
“Even though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies,” Bruch wrote in 1889. He uses the plural because the second section of the work is a treatment of a setting by Isaac Nathan of Lord Byron’s “Oh! Weep for those that wept by Babel’s stream.”
“Kol Nidre” – the traditional prayer, not the cello work – opens the evening service on Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, begins tonight at sunset.
Bruch, “Kol Nidrei”
Nathan’s setting of Byron, which supplies the work’s B-section.
Selections from Hiller’s neglected oratorio, “The Destruction of Jerusalem”
His once popular Piano Concerto No. 2
An absorbing article on the power, influence, and universality of “Kol Nidre”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-haunting-kol-nidre-melody-harnessed-the-power-to-convert/
IMAGES (counterclockwise from top): “Kol Nidre” by Wilhelm Wachtel; Ferdinand Hiller; Janos Starker’s classic recording of “Kol Nidrei;” and its composer, Max Bruch
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Schoenberg Riddle Mystery Enigma
Winston Churchill’s assessment of Russia in 1939 could have just as easily been applied to Arnold Schoenberg. He was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma – a man cloaked in irony and contradiction.
For one thing, his very name, “Schoenberg,” translates as “beautiful mountain,” yet those who would characterize his music as such are distinctly in the minority.
He was the greatest prophet of dodecaphonic music, who claimed an artistic kinship with Johannes Brahms.
He preached the death of tonality, even as he orchestrated his share of Viennese operettas and arranged Strauss waltzes for performance by his friends.
He was a Jew, who converted to Lutheranism, but swung back hard to Judaism, in defiance of Hitler, with the rise of the Nazis.
He was probably the least “popular” composer in the world, but his tennis partner was none other than George Gershwin. The two also shared a love of painting.
Schoenberg was a triskaidekaphobe, who died on Friday the 13th. It was all right to count to twelve, apparently, but never to thirteen.
Adding to this beautiful mountain of contradictions, Schoenberg, like that other titan of 20th century music, Igor Stravinsky, wound up living in Hollywood.
Both men were suspicious of the movies (and each other), yet both were hoping to break into films. Stravinsky wrote cues for “The Song of Bernadette,” “Jane Eyre,” and “The North Star” (ultimately scored by Copland). None of his music was used in the pictures – Stravinsky was too slow and demanded too much money – but some of it was recycled in his concert works.
Likewise, Schoenberg was courted for a film adaptation of “The Good Earth,” but his proposed $50,000 fee put an end to that.
Twelve-tone music did eventually make it into the movies, thanks to composers like Leonard Rosenman and David Raksin. Rosenman’s landmark score for “The Cobweb” (1955) is credited as the first predominantly twelve-tone score written for a motion picture. Raksin, the composer of “Laura,” also employed a tone row in the Edgar Allan Poe mystery, “The Man with a Cloak” (1951).
Interestingly, Schoenberg, the creator of “Pierrot Lunaire” and “Moses und Aaron,” was also a great fan of Hopalong Cassidy. Like Walt Whitman, an admittedly strange comparison, Schoenberg contained multitudes.
Happy birthday, Arnie!
“Variations for Orchestra,” conducted by Bruno Maderna
“Pierrot Lunaire”
With goats!
A kinder, gentler Schoenberg – the Suite for String Orchestra, given its premiere in Los Angeles in 1935:
Stravinsky in Hollywood
Schoenberg in home movies – on the tennis court, naturally – with Gershwin and others. (Gershwin appears around 2:20.)
Leonard Rosenman’s “The Cobweb”
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