In a month of two full moons, and with Mars closer to the earth than it will be for another 15 years, sci-fi becomes “SCYTHE-fi,” as Roy and my focus this month will be on horror movies. Yayyyyyyyyyy!
Or perhaps I should say, AAAaaaaaOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…
Unfortunately, we had a problem with our Zuni fetish doll last week, which caused some connectivity issues, so our coverage of “Trilogy of Terror” (1975) had to be postponed until tomorrow evening.
The good news is, we’ve had time to discuss what else we’d like to do, and after careful negotiation, we now have a schedule in place for both Fridays AND Sundays through Halloween. That’s right, we’ll bookend EVERY WEEKEND this month, and spoil twice as many movies.
I hope you’ll join us tomorrow for a dissection of Karen Black’s horror television triptych. The conversation begins – and, as always, your insights are welcome – this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT.
Then on Sunday, the seed is planted… terror grows! Our topic will be “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978), surely one of the most satisfying remakes ever filmed.
Don’t fall asleep! Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner live-streams on Facebook every Friday and Sunday at 7 p.m.
In all his time beneath the Opéra Garnier, I wonder if the Phantom ever encountered any of Louis Vierne’s organ music?
They would have had to have been early works, to be sure. Gaston Leroux’s potboiler was first serialized in 1909. According to the narrative, the Phantom would have been dead for decades, perhaps since the 1880s, or so it is believed (unless you’re Andrew Lloyd Webber). So it is much more likely for Vierne to have encountered the Phantom than the other way around.
In any case, Vierne’s home was Notre-Dame de Paris, Quasimodo’s sanctuary – a respectable distance from the Palais Garnier – and he didn’t become resident organist there until 1900. Prior to that, he was Widor’s assistant at Église Saint-Suplice, even further from the Phantom’s base of operations. But the sewers of Paris hold many mysteries, no doubt. Vierne would serve at Notre-Dame until his own death, at the console, in 1937.
That said, the purpose of this post is not to linger on the colorful circumstances of his passing, but rather to thank those who commemorate his achievements, since today happens to mark the 150th anniversary of Vierne’s birth. To celebrate the composer-performer’s artistry and influence, organists everywhere are pulling out the stops.
In our own backyard, Princeton University organist Eric Plutz will undertake a mammoth marathon of all of all Vierne’s symphonies for the instrument, presented on the Skinner organ of Princeton University Chapel. Each of the six works will be presented, in succession, beginning at the top of every hour. This event is free and will be live-streamed, starting at 4 p.m. EDT, at facebook.com/SevenEightArtists.
In the meantime, catch up on Christopher Houlihan’s “Vierne at 150” online festival. Houlihan, who is organist and director of chapel music at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, has been hosting and posting Vierne-related material all week, including conversations with Notre-Dame organist Olivier Latry, noted scholar and organist Rollin Smith, author of “Louis Vierne: Organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral,” and artist manager Phillip Truckenbrod, who talks about his 50-year career. Yesterday, Houlihan shared a preconcert lecture and demonstration.
The series will culminate in a recital of Vierne’s music by Houlihan on the college’s chapel organ. This will take place at 7 p.m. EDT. If by then you’re already well-invested in Plutz’s marathon, Houlihan’s videos are being archived for later on-demand enjoyment, at http://www.christopherhoulihan.com/schedule.
As for Plutz, if you find you have to take a break for dinner, or perhaps you’d just like a souvenir, he’s recorded all the Vierne organ symphonies for future release on the Affetto Records label.
You don’t have to be a subterranean, lovestruck, psychopathic stalker to enjoy organ music. Vierne’s output could ennoble even a Rue Morgue ourang-outang. He is to be remembered with gratitude. Joyeux sesquicentenaire, Louis Vierne!
For the edification of Ralph Fisher, and to demonstrate Vierne’s versatility as a composer of wider achievement, here are a few additional links.
Vierne’s Cello Sonata:
His Piano Quintet:
And, in case you missed it in my post the other day (which also goes into a lot of the composer’s challenges and misfortunes), his purely orchestral Symphony in A minor:
With Halloween lurking right around a withered cornfield, in my cheerful morbidity, my thoughts drift to Keats’ “Lamia.” I’ve long been familiar with the symphonic poem on the subject by the American pianist and composer Edward MacDowell, he of MacDowell Colony fame. But this one is entirely new to me: a symphonic poem by Dorothy Howell.
Howell, born in Birmingham in 1898, was a private student of Granville Bantock. Bantock was founder of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and an active composer himself. He was also a conductor. He led the first performance of Delius’ “Brigg Fair” and was the dedicatee of Sibelius’ Third Symphony.
These studies laid the foundation for her acceptance into the Royal College of Music at the age of 15. Howell achieved fame early, with her symphonic poem, in 1919, at the age of 21. Sir Henry Wood premiered “Lamia” at The Proms and repeated it no less than five times within a single season. Subsequently, it was revived by Wood in 1921, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1930, and 1940. The work then fell into neglect, essentially for a lifetime, until it was resurrected, also at The Proms, in 2010. It received another, centenary performance there last year.
Howell, who was brought up musically (she began composing at the age of 13), received her formal education at a convent school. It’s interesting, then, that her greatest success would be a musical response to a shapeshifting seductress, and a serpent no less!
Following the premiere of “Lamia,” Howell was declared a genius and hounded by the press. Her family was disconcerted by her sudden celebrity, but she appeared to take it all in stride. She continued to compose until at least mid-century – a time when many tonal composers found it difficult to secure performances – and taught at the Royal Academy for 46 years, retiring in 1970. After that, she continued to give private instruction. She died in Malvern, weeks before he 84th birthday, in 1982. She is buried near Sir Edward Elgar, whose grave she tended.
In her lifetime, Howell received the nickname “The English Strauss,” a comparison that I think does neither composer justice.
Keats’ Lamia is a serpent woman, who has the power to send her spirit abroad. On one of these spiritual journeys, she espies a lovely Corinthian youth, by the name of Lycius. She assumes human form and places herself in his path, and it isn’t long before they are living together as man and wife. Lycius wants to make it legal, but Lamia resists. Finally, with reluctance, she consents, but only if Lycius agrees not to invite the philosopher Apollonius. All seems to go well. Lamia uses her enchantments to oversee preparations for a lavish nuptial feast. Unfortunately, then Apollonius crashes. He recognizes Lamia for who she is, the feasting and music stop, Lamia vanishes, and Lycius falls lifeless. Thanks a lot, Apollonius.
Howell’s “Lamia”:
Her Piano Concerto, in its first public performance since 1925:
Rehearsing “Two Pieces for Muted Strings”
Dorothy Howell (right) with detail from “Lamia, the Serpent Woman” (1906), by Anna Léa Merritt (American painter), 1844-1930
View complete the painting and learn more about Merritt here:
As any student of psychology is well aware, we’ve all got monsters inside us. In my case, monsters, to great extent, have made me what I am.
Before classical music, before comic books, there were monster movies. I watched the old Universal horror films as a small child, sitting on the couch next to my mother – “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “The Mummy,” “The Wolfman,” “The Invisible Man.” Monsters became an obsession with me throughout my boyhood. I caught every creature feature on Saturday afternoons. I read Forrest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. I even put together my share of Aurora monster models, with their glow-in-the-dark accessories. (I remember being dissatisfied with the Wolfman’s glowing head, which really didn’t match the body, so I borrowed some of my mom’s paints to create the semblance of fur, leaving only the face exposed. Of course, it was oil paint, so it smelled and took forever to dry.)
Apparently I wasn’t alone. It astonishes me to look back now and realize the hold that these movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s still had on us children, in particular boys, in the early 1970s. Why were these 40 year-old films still so compelling? Well, they were atmospheric, for one. Later, I would compare them to dreams, and the older they were, and the murkier they were, the more potent I found them to be. When I discovered “Nosferatu,” presented one Halloween in a darkened auditorium at school, it took monsters to a whole other level. Of course, I never missed a showing of “King Kong” (my grandmother would allow me to eat in front of the television), and I remember my uncle taking pity on me once, arguing my case, so that my parents came back and got me out of bed, so that I could stay up and watch Henry Hull in “The Werewolf of London.” I was a purely black-and-white guy back then – which meant no Hammer! Too lurid and far too much blood.
Of course, we all only had a few channels in those days, and these films were still in heavy rotation. So the young were exposed to a lot of what entertained their grandparents, and their parents found enjoyment in it too. To some extent it provided a pop cultural foundation, so that, whether we knew it or not, three generations were all drawing on shared experience. Personal preferences may have varied, depending on a viewer’s age, with Pap drowsing to westerns, Mom tuning in to Sonny and Cher, and the kids watching Saturday morning cartoons, but we were all familiar with Bette Davis and Bugs Bunny and the Bowery Boys. I liked TV a lot better back then.
The Universal classics were spooky, no doubt, but also somehow reassuring. They were like shadow plays, they were cathartic, and they became part of my everyday life. Two movies, however, really got under my skin and freaked me out, and both of them were based on stories by writers who were still very much active – although of course I didn’t know it at the time. One was “The Last Man on Earth” (1964), with Vincent Price fighting a world full of post-apocalyptic vampires. This, I would later learn, was based on the book “I am Legend,” by Richard Matheson. Matheson had written some of the most memorable “Twilight Zone” episodes (including the one with the gremlin that taunts airborne William Shatner), as well as the stories for what became “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” “The Legend of Hell House,” and “Trilogy of Terror,” among many, many others.
The other film I found particularly disturbing was “Mr. Sardonicus” (1961). A cruel lord of a skull-like castle inflicts terror upon its inhabitants because of his frustrations over a horrible disfigurement. A specialist is summoned from London in a last-ditch effort to find a cure. As incentive, Sardonicus devises further hideous tortures, to be inflicted upon his young wife, whom the specialist transparently loves. Sardonicus’ make-up is impressionable – or at least it would have been to a boy in the ‘70s – as is his over-the-top cruelty. He is a marvelous villain in the melodramatic tradition, and the movie builds to a satisfying twist.
William Castle was producer and director. Castle was notorious for spicing up his B-movie entertainments with in-theater gimmicks, like electric buzzers installed under the seats, skeletons sent flying over his audiences, and calculated “fright breaks,” or sustained pauses to scream away the “tinglers.”
For “Mr. Sardonicus,” Castle himself appears toward end of the film to address the audience, asking us to vote for the villain’s punishment or acquittal. In the theater, apparently, glow-in-the-dark ballots were distributed to patrons. Really, though, can there be any other resolution than Sardonicus’ condemnation and death? It’s believed that no other ending was ever filmed. That William Castle was a genius!
Is this someone you want in charge of an election? In this instance, definitely! Obviously Castle’s films had a high camp quotient. It’s not for nothing that some of the best starred Vincent Price. But at 9 or 10, all I saw was that horrible grin, and Sardonicus’ harsh but wholly deserved fate.
The screenplay was by Ray Russell, based on his own story. Stephen King once proclaimed “Sardonicus” perhaps the finest example of the modern gothic ever written. In the original, Russell has got his Edgar Allan Poe down pat – as pastiche, it’s virtuosic – and for any fan of this type of fiction, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
The story “Sardonicus” actually first appeared in Playboy, believe it or not, in 1961. Anyone who ever wryly remarked that they purchased Playboy for the fiction was not being half as witty as they thought they were. Russell was hired as Playboy’s fiction editor in the 1950s. In that capacity, he championed the work of many science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers. He also attracted cult favorites like Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut. James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Bernard Malamud, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and countless others would eventually submit stories to the magazine.
In 1962, Russell wrote a book called “The Case Against Satan,” which anticipated William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” (which has essentially the same plot) by nearly a decade. He scored another success in 1976 with “Incubus.” Along the way, both he and Matheson padded their bank accounts by writing screenplays for Roger Corman.
I first encountered the story “Sardonicus” decades ago, before the internet, when I spent much of my time haunting used bookstores in search of supernatural fiction. A lot of the classics that were always being referenced in horror histories were not at all easy to come by. Dover had published many of them in affordable trade paperbacks, but a lot of them had gone out of print. It was during these years that my heart would be set racing by the sudden discovery of any Sheridan LeFanu I had not yet read. Once, I even came across a hardbound volume of H.P. Lovecraft. But my greatest coup in this regard must be the time I purchased an entire set of hardbound Arthur Machen from a homeless man who used to set up a blanket of books next to the old TLA Video, on Locust Street near 16th, in Philadelphia.
This unlikeliest of booksellers went by the name of Spider. Cities can good places to stumble across abandoned treasures. Many was the time that I would add another bookshelf or bureau to my furnishings, simply because they were left behind in a move. Spider used to patrol streets and dumpsters in search of saleable inventory, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t turn up Machen. None of these were available in any form that I knew of, except perhaps for a few anthologized short stories, and occasionally a secondhand copy of “The Great God Pan.” My heart was pounding and my palms sweating as I forked over the cash.
Those were different times, my friends. That which was marginalized in the past (specifically science fiction, fantasy, and horror) has since become mainstream. Now Lovecraft can be purchased as a bargain book at Barnes & Noble. What has become truly damaging to the movies – where everything, it seems, is apocalyptic, superheroic, or simply loud, stupid fantasy – has been a boon to lovers of lost supernatural fiction.
Surely, some sort of tipping point was reached when Penguin Classics, no less, began to embrace authors like M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany. Of course, some of the romance has been sacrificed along with all the dust and the thrill of the chase, but it’s great to live in an age when these things are now readily available, and at an affordable price. The volume devoted to Russell is titled “Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories.”
Interestingly, after serving in the Pacific with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, Russell also attended the Chicago Conservatory of Music. I love that. In “Sardonicus,” there is an exchange about Verdi and a name-drop of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
Another story, “Comet Wine,” is a reworking of the Faust tale, as applied to the milieu of the Mighty Handful. In fact, a sizeable portion of the story is set at a salon at the residence of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Russell works in some amusing details about the Russian Five and their cool regard of Tchaikovsky. Mussorgsky has a colorful bit. Borodin is glimpsed. Cui comes in for a dismissive insult. But there is something downright diabolical in the plight of poor Balakirev. There are also some observations by one of the characters on the negative influence of Pushkin on Russian opera. The story is told in epistolary form, and the year of the letters is established from a reference in one of them to the recent premiere of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” (in March 1879).
Amusingly, we learn in a framing device that the letters were purchased at auction, from the estate of the late Francis Cargrave. Cargrave is the grandson of Sir Robert Cargrave, the narrator of “Sardonicus!”
I have yet to read the other stories in the so-called “S” trilogy – which includes, along with “Sardonicus,” “Sanguinarius” – but Guillermo del Toro, who shares my enthusiasm for this type of thing, highly recommends “Sagittarius.” I am looking forward to reading it tonight. These kinds of stories, and this kind of prose – with a marked affection for the language and the storytelling of the 19th century – are the very things I hunger for in October. It takes me back to my childhood. Which one, I am not so sure.
On June 2, 1937, Louis Vierne had just concluded his 1,750th organ recital, which eyewitnesses claimed had been as fine a concert as he had ever given. He was just about to launch into two improvisations on submitted themes, and had already selected the stops, when all at once he pitched forward. As he collapsed, his foot hit the low E pedal, and the sustained note resounded throughout the vast cathedral. Whether it was a heart attack or a stroke that ended his life is unclear. What matters is that Vierne went out the way he said he had always wanted: he died at the console of the great organ of Notre-Dame de Paris.
This Thursday, October 8th, will mark the sesquicentenary of the birth of this colossus of the console, and representatives of the organ world will be pulling out all the stops as they celebrate his artistry.
Organist Christopher Houlihan will anchor a “Vierne at 150” festival, TODAY through October 8th. The four-day event will include online interviews with Notre-Dame organist Olivier Latry, noted scholar and organist Rollin Smith, author of “Louis Vierne: Organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral,” and artist manager Phillip Truckenbrod, who will talk about his 50-year career.
The series will culminate in a recital of Vierne’s works, with Houlihan at the organ of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he serves as organist and director of chapel music. Also included among of the festivities will be a pre-concert lecture and demonstration, a live Q&A, and some archival concert recordings.
All events will begin at 7:00 p.m. EDT. A complete schedule and streaming information are available at http://www.christopherhoulihan.com.
Closer to home, on the actual anniversary, Princeton University Organist Eric Plutz will undertake a mammoth organ marathon, offering all of Vierne’s symphonies for the king of instruments on the Skinner organ at Princeton University Chapel. Each of the six works will be presented, in succession, at the top of every hour, beginning Thursday at 4:00 p.m. Again, this is a free event that will be live-streamed.
It looks as if we have a boxed set of Plutz recordings of all the Vierne symphonies to look forward to, produced by Princeton’s own Affetto Records!
COVID may have limited access to live performances, but the internet endures. Get yourself some good bookshelf speakers or an HDMI cord and run it through your television set.
The manner of Vierne’s demise proved a fitting capstone to a turbulent life. Vierne served as organist of Notre-Dame de Paris for roughly 37 years. Among his students were Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Duruflé. In fact, Duruflé was at his side at the moment of his dramatic leave-taking.
For years, the legendary organ had been in a sorry state. It was Vierne who undertook a grand tour of the United States in order to raise funds for the instrument’s restoration. Among his stops was the Wanamaker Department Store in center city Philadelphia.
Vierne was born nearly blind, as a result of congenital cataracts, in 1870. When he came to notate his music, he did so by using outsized manuscript paper. Later, as his eyesight continued to deteriorate, he employed Braille. He endured a painful divorce from his wife, who had left him for his best friend. He also lost a brother and a son during the First World War.
A street accident resulted in compound fractures to his left leg. The injuries were so bad that for a time it was thought that the limb would have to be amputated. But the leg healed, and Vierne began the arduous process of relearning his pedal technique.
At a point, he traveled to Switzerland in the hope of improving his eyesight. There, he underwent an advanced treatment that included living in a completely darkened room for six months. Alas, it proved to be unsuccessful.
He was also a three-pack-a-day smoker, addicted to tranquilizers and sleeping pills, and used ether as a sedative. But for all he went through, and for all he achieved, I think we can forgive Vierne his vices.
Heroically, he managed to ride out every adversity, and he continued to compose prolifically in nearly all forms. Of course, he is most renowned for his organ works, of which the symphonies serve as essential milestones.
Celebrate Louis Vierne this week. Here’s a link to his rarely-heard Symphony in A minor (conceived for orchestra this time), composed between 1907 and 1908.
Joyeux anniversaire, mon vieux!
Christopher Houlihan, organist
Eric Plutz: The Vierne Project
Seven Eight Artists
Princeton Pro Musica
Affetto Records
#Vierne150
