It’s Friday afternoon! Nearly time for another Classic Ross Amico double feature.
First, at 6:00 EDT, all that glitters is not gold, as we listen to music from movies inspired by novels set during the Gilded Age (post-Civil War to around the start of World War I), including selections from “The Heiress” (Aaron Copland), after Henry James, “The Age of Innocence” (Elmer Bernstein), after Edith Wharton, “The Magnificent Ambersons” (Bernard Herrmann), after Booth Tarkington, and “Mr. Skeffington” (Franz Waxman), after Elizabeth von Arnim. That’s on “Picture Perfect,” on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Then, at 7:00 EDT, Daniel Day Lewis is conspicuously absent, as we depart the Age of Gold for the Red Planet and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles.” Rock Hudson leads an all-star cast in this NBC miniseries, produced in 1979, through the magic of no-budget special effects and quasi-disco interludes. There’s plenty of talent on-hand, both in front of and behind the cameras, but somehow it all just doesn’t hang together. That’s my opinion, anyway. Roy Bjellquist and I will talk about it tonight, live-streamed on Facebook, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner:
The classical music world is left unstrung. One of the foremost guitarists of his generation, Julian Bream, has died.
Bream, who was essentially self-taught on his instrument, was an acknowledged master of over 400 years of repertoire. Not content to live in the past, he also commissioned new works from – or had them written for him by – Sir Malcolm Arnold, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Leo Brouwer, Hans Werner Henze, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Toru Takemitsu, Sir Michael Tippett, and Sir William Walton, to name but a few.
He set up his own consort, with which he revived music of the Tudor era and made many recordings on the lute. His services as a lutenist were employed for the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Gloriana,” written to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II. Bream subsequently arranged the opera’s courtly dances for the instrument, which he then recorded. In turn, Britten composed several other works for Bream, including at least one milestone of the 20th century classical guitar repertoire, his “Nocturnal, after John Dowland.”
In a valedictory comment, quoted by the BBC, Bream offered, “I devoted my life to music for a reason, and the reason wasn’t because I wanted to get on or make money, but to try to fulfil myself and also to give people pleasure. That’s been my credo.”
Julian Bream was 87 years-old.
Twin titans of the guitar, Bream and John Williams (not to be confused with the film composer), in concert:
Bream attempts to woo Stravinsky with the lute:
“Nocturnal, after John Dowland”:
Charming documentary, “Julian Bream: My Life in Music”:
“The Gilded Age” was a term coined by none other than Mark Twain to describe the era spanning, roughly, from the end of Reconstruction (after the Civil War) to the turn of the 20th century. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. A gilded age is one that conceals serious social problems beneath a veneer of gold. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we look past the dazzle to focus on music from films inspired by novels from, or about, the period.
“The Heiress” (1949) was adapted from a play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, which in turn was based on the book “Washington Square,” by Henry James. Olivia De Havilland plays the “plain Jane” heiress of the title, Ralph Richardson her overbearing father, and Montgomery Clift, the adventurer who may or may not be out for her fortune. De Havilland won an Oscar for her portrayal, as did the music, by Aaron Copland.
“The Age of Innocence” (1993) was written by one-time James correspondent, his close friend, Edith Wharton. The book was published in 1920, but looks back to the 1870s, its story dealing with the impending marriage of an upper class couple and the appearance of a disreputable interloper who threatens their happiness. The title is an ironic play on the contrast between the outward manners of New York society and its inward machinations. The novel earned Wharton a Pulitzer Prize, the first ever to be awarded to a woman. The film was something of a curve ball from director Martin Scorsese, who made his reputation on arguably meaner streets. Veteran composer Elmer Bernstein provided the lovely, Brahmsian score.
“The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942) is based on another Pulitzer Prize winner, this time by Booth Tarkington, from 1918. The novel is part of trilogy that traces the declining fortunes of three generations of an aristocratic Midwestern family. With industrialism on the rise, the Ambersons’ “old money” wealth and prestige wane.
“Ambersons” was only the second film directed by Orson Welles. Sadly, the financial failure of “Citizen Kane” and Welles’ uncompromising artistic vision caused the project to be removed from his control and re-cut by the studio, shaving a full hour off the original running time. It says something about the strength of Welles’ material that what survives yet remains a magnificent achievement.
The score was by Bernard Herrmann, CBS staff composer from Welles’ radio days. Herrmann had followed Welles to Hollywood to supply the music for “Kane.” With the trimming of “Ambersons,” his score was drastically edited and half the music removed. The famously irascible Herrmann, who had just written his Academy Award winning music for “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” was so angry that he threatened legal action if his name was not removed from the credits. (The studio complied.)
The action of “Mr. Skeffington” (1944), based on a 1940 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, begins at a point some consider to be the twilight of the Gilded Age, the eve of World War I. Bette Davis stars as a woman so enamored with her own beauty, and the suitors it attracts, that she fails to value the affections of the man who eventually becomes her husband. Mr. Skeffington, played by Claude Rains, is a Jewish financier, riding high in the ‘teens, but his fortunes change when he’s caught in Europe during the rise of the Nazis.
Davis and Rains both earned Academy Award nominations for their work. The vivid score is by Franz Waxman. Davis was going through a period of emotional turmoil during the filming, so that she was allegedly insufferable to be around throughout the entire shoot. Someone finally poisoned her eyewash. When the police questioned the director, Vincent Sherman, he wished them good luck with their investigation. “If you asked everyone on the set who would have committed such a thing, everyone would raise their hand!”
Certainly all that glitters is not gold. We peel back the veneer of prosperity, this week, with “Novels of the Gilded Age,” on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
PHOTOS: The late Olivia de Havilland (left), as Catherine Sloper (upper right), and posing with her Oscar for “The Heiress”
So how bad was the NBC miniseries “The Martian Chronicles” (1979)? I suppose it depends on who you ask.
Ray Bradbury, who wrote the original stories, first collected in 1950, hated it. The all-star, three-night event, produced at the height of television’s “miniseries fever,” was all set to kick-off the NBC season. But then Bradbury mouthed off to the press, and the executives got cold feet. All at once, the show was yanked from the schedule, and its debut took place far, far away, seen complete on the BBC, and elsewhere in a heavily-edited theatrical version. After the dust had settled, “The Martian Chronicles” was dropped quietly back into the NBC line-up where it was thought it might do the least damage – just before the guaranteed ratings juggernaut of the Winter Olympics.
I don’t want to tip my cards too soon, but having re-read the book recently, I have a few issues with the adaptation myself. Roy Bjellquist and I will convene for another heady discussion, on the next “Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner,” this Friday evening at 7:00.
Then we figured we might as well make it an all-Mars weekend. So we’ll join up again on Sunday to talk about “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” (1964).
Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner is live-streamed on Facebook every Friday and Sunday at 7 pm EDT.
Remember that sequence in “Citizen Kane,” when newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane forces his second wife, Susan Alexander – who has a modest singing voice at best – into the title role of a grand opera, with disastrous results?
In the original script, the opera was to have been Jules Massenet’s “Thaïs.” If I hadn’t read that in Steven C. Smith’s biography of Bernard Herrmann, “A Heart at Fire’s Center,” I may never have learned of the interesting connection between Massenet and William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, of course – as was well-known even at the time – was the model for Orson Welles’ Kane. Much of what I share below is not in the Herrmann biography. I was spurred to search for it myself. It is certainly worth noting.
Massenet, like Hearst, had been infatuated with Sibyl Sanderson. Sanderson, unlike her shrill, overpowered “Kane” counterpart, was a naturally gifted singer, for whom Massenet created not only “Thaïs,” but also “Esclarmonde.” “Esclarmonde” provided her with what was then the highest note in all of opera, G above high C, preceded by an F# – which Sanderson nailed with aplomb. Saint-Saëns was also a fan, and likewise crafted one of his own operas, “Phryné,” specifically for her. She must have made for a very convincing courtesan! When asked her favorite role, Sanderson quipped, “The one that allows me to display the most decolletage.”
In her teenage years, Sanderson and Hearst had been engaged. If I had read about this before in one of the many Welles’ biographies, I had forgotten it, probably since, at the time, for me, Sanderson would have been just another name. Sanderson’s father was a politician and lawyer who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California and, later, a legal advisor to the South Pacific Railroad. Hearst was still quite young, and Sanderson’s father opposed the match. Not long after, she was sent to Europe to study at the Paris Conservatory. Allegedly, Hearst continued to carry the torch for her for many years. Later, following her father’s death, she was joined by her sisters and her mother to live as expatriate socialites.
As a singer, Sanderson achieved popularity in her adopted city and throughout Europe – Puccini wanted her to sing “Tosca” – however, elsewhere, at London’s Covent Garden and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, she received lackluster reviews. She developed difficulties with her voice and eventually wound up marrying a Cuban sugar heir. At some point along the way, she began the sad descent into alcoholism, exacerbated by depression, and she was claimed by pneumonia at only 38.
I’ll have to refresh my memory about Welles and find out exactly how he may have learned of this particular Hearst connection. Surely, there were no tell-all biographies, at the time, of the man who threatened to crush everyone involved with the making of “Citizen Kane.”
As the shooting of the Susan Alexander sequence approached, Welles, characteristically, improvised. He decided it might be better for Herrmann to bypass Massenet’s existing opera, and perhaps create his own, more concise, Oriental pastiche.
In a telegram to Herrmann, Welles wrote, “Opera sequence is early in shooting, so must have fully orchestrated recorded track before shooting. Susie sings as curtain goes up in first act, and I believe there is no opera of importance where soprano leads with chin like this. Therefore suggest it be original… by you – Mary Garden vehicle… Suggest ‘Salammbo’ which gives us phony production scene of Ancient Rome and Carthage, and Susie can dress like Grand Opera neoclassic courtesan… Here is chance for you to do something witty and amusing – and now is the time for you to do it.”
The Mary Garden reference is also of interest, since she happened to be a Sanderson pupil. Sanderson introduced Garden to Massenet, who wrote his opera “Chérubin” for her. Garden also created the role of Debussy’s Mélisande. Later, she became director of the Chicago Opera Association and staged the world premiere, in Chicago, of Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges.”
The result of Welles’ telegram was the wholly fictional “Salammbô.” The faux opera’s subject is presumably lifted from Flaubert, but Welles’ associate, John Houseman, later revealed that the text was a pidgin creation he had cobbled together from Racine’s “Athalie” and “Phèdre.” As he put it, the result was fairly implausible and unintelligible, but dramatically effective.
Can you imagine any team of filmmakers today being capable of pulling this off? Welles and Herrmann were in their 20s; Houseman, a little older, was in his late 30s. The creation of this scene would have required a familiarity not only with the conventions of French opera of the Belle Époque (much more superficially parodied in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera”), but also the literature that inspired it. Granted, all of the participants were much closer to that world, but they all would have had to have been very well-read and possessed very discerning ears to be able to effectively emulate the genre.
Here it is as it was seen in the film (with perhaps also a hint of “Salome”):
Opera 1
Opera 2
Already, back in the day, Eileen Farrell showed what could be done with it, when Herrmann conducted the aria on CBS radio. Check out this uncovered gem, which I had never heard in this performance until only a few minutes ago:
Kiri Te Kanawa goes for the D6 high note (optional) on this album of Herrmann hits, originally set down for RCA Records in the 1970s:
Incidentally, RCA’s Classic Film Scores series, a landmark of its kind – with individual volumes devoted to the music of Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, Rózsa, Newman, and Tiomkin, and a few additional ones devoted specifically to the films of Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and Bette Davis – has been reissued as a Sony box set. It’s the least expensive incarnation of the series so far. You won’t get the fancy packaging or the liner notes, but you will get hours of transporting music, in what are still the best performances of these scores available. And yes, Te Kanawa does sing Herrmann’s “Salammbô.” If you don’t already own these recordings, they are highly recommended.
That said, for audiophiles, a series of brand new remasterings of the original RCA material is quietly being undertaken by the Dutton/Vocalion label. So far, they have completed the volumes devoted to Tiomkin, Waxman, Herrmann, Rózsa, Flynn, and Bogart, with bonus tracks included from “Spectacular World of Fantastic Film Scores,” an addendum to the original RCA series, that, for some reason, is not included in the new Sony box. You can search here:
