When the Hungarian pianist Tamás Vásáry died last week, I had too many other obligations to honor him properly.
Vásáry was a child prodigy who entered the Debrecen Conservatory at the age of 6. At 10, he became a student of Ernő Dohnányi. He was personally supervised by Zoltán Kodály at the Franz Liszt Academy. He graduated in 1953. In 1956, the year of the Hungarian Uprising, Vásáry fled to Switzerland. Later, he made his home in London.
In the U.K., he diversified. With Iván Fischer, he shared the title of joint principal conductor of the Northern Sinfonia from 1972 to 1982. He was principal conductor of the Bournemouth Sinfonietta from 1989 to 1997. Beginning in 1993, he also served as principal conductor of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
As a pianist, he toured widely. His international fame was bolstered by a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon.
I remember in the 1970s and ’80s, Vásáry’s early recordings were already being reissued at budget price, making them very affordable. It was the heyday of soft-focus, Elvira Madigan-type cover art. His performances were further disseminated on grab-and-go cassettes.
Chopin and Liszt were always central to his repertoire.
Performing Debussy, Chopin, and Liszt on the French television series “Les grands interprètes”
At the age of 80, playing the last movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3
He was a smith who forged gold from the basest of materials – film music’s alchemist extraordinaire. Once John Williams kickstarted his blockbuster hog, Jerry Goldsmith may have been destined for the side car, but he possessed a refined genius all his own.
Goldsmith was a consummate professional with a rare talent for speed. When Randy Newman was dropped from “Air Force One,” it was Goldsmith who stepped up, writing and recording the music in less than two weeks. He wrote the replacement score for “Chinatown” in ten days.
Unfortunately, not all the films were “Chinatown.” For every “Planet of the Apes,” “Patton,” and “Papillon,” there was “The Mummy” (with Brendan Fraser), “The Haunting” (remake), and “Looney Tunes: Back in Action.”
Williams got “Superman.” Goldsmith got “Supergirl.” Williams got “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Goldsmith got “King Solomon’s Mines” (with Richard Chamberlain). Williams got “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.” Goldsmith got “Baby: The Secret of the Lost Legend.”
But even when the movies were terrible, Goldsmith’s music served as a consolation prize. And nothing can take away the classics. He was one of the last of the greats, and he lived through a great era, so we certainly have enough to cherish. He just had the bad fortune to have had more stamina than the movies themselves, which got weaker and weaker and weaker.
The composer himself expressed frustration at his music being drowned out by ever more-elaborate sound effects, which is why his scores tended to become more streamlined – and less memorable – in the ‘90s. He would have lost his mind in these days of laptop editing, when movies can be trimmed and shuffled within an inch of their lives, virtually right up until the day of distribution.
For television, he wrote music for “Dr. Kildare,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “The Waltons,” “Room 222,” and “Barnaby Jones.” He was the recipient of five Emmy Awards.
Incredibly, despite EIGHTEEN nominations, he was honored with but a single Oscar, for his influential score to “The Omen” (1976). Goldsmith died in 2004, at the age of 75. If he were to come back today, he would mop the joint with all the Hans Zimmers of this world.
Happy birthday, Jerry Goldsmith. I sure does miss you.
If one were to bake a birthday cake for Alban Berg, one would be forgiven for rendering a handgun in icing and hollowing out the layers to make room for prostitutes and madmen.
When Berg came to write his sordid, darkly humorous, ultimately bloodcurdling masterpiece “Lulu,” he based it on the plays of Frank Wedekind. However, significantly, the influence of film also permeates the work.
I don’t know that it’s ever been proved, but the composer had to have seen Louise Brooks’ sensational performance in G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” (1929). The scandalous silent film classic, based on the same material, was an international triumph, and to this day, stage Lulus frequently emulate Brooks’ iconic style.
Also, at the very center of the opera is a filmed interlude. The composer was obsessed with symmetry and palindromes. They pervade the opera, so much so that in the cinematic centerpiece, a silent film that dramatizes the events surrounding Lulu’s incarceration and escape, the music reads the same backwards and forwards.
In a piece that’s so aggressively contemporary in its decadence and cynicism, it’s unsurprising that Berg would embrace modern technology. One wonders what he would have made of the digital age.
Love, eroticism, and death were nothing new to opera, but there is something about “Lulu” that’s especially disturbing and transgressive. It’s subversive, sleazy, squalid, and calculated to shock. It’s not for nothing that Lulu, the protagonist, is introduced by a lion tamer!
But Lulu is just being Lulu. The title of the first of Wedekind’s plays is “Erdgeist” – “Earth Spirit.” Lulu is plucked from the streets, and her raw sexuality has devastating effects on both the men and women in her life. Moral confusion abounds. Sure, she makes some monstrous choices. But we’re left to wonder, as with Jessica Rabbit, is she bad, or did society just draw her that way?
Lulu in her amorality is the product of in an inauthentic world. After three acts of unfettered destruction, she dies at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Serialism’s greatest heroine falls prey to history’s most notorious serial killer.
Berg composed his opera between 1929 and 1935. The ‘30s were a fraught time in Europe. It goes without saying, the Nazis did not like “Lulu.” Berg himself may not have been Jewish, but his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, high priest of dodecaphony, was. Berg’s twelve-tone idiom alone would have been enough to get his opera banned. And his reputation had already been made with the equally disturbing “Wozzeck,” given its first performance in Berlin in 1925. He was added to the Nazi catalogue of “entartete” composers in 1933.
The composer did not live to see the Führer’s furor over “Lulu.” He died of blood poisoning, the result of an insect sting, on Christmas Eve 1935. He was 50 years-old.
At the time of his death, the opera was not yet quite complete. He was well along on the piece when two things occurred:
First, he learned from Wilhelm Furtwängler that the climate in Berlin was unfavorable to a performance there. So he broke off on orchestrating the opera to develop some of the music into a “Lulu Suite,” which he hoped to have played in concert. Erich Kleiber, who had introduced “Wozzeck” in 1925, programmed the suite at the Berlin State Opera. After the performance, he was forced to resign and basically run out of the country.
Berg paused a second time to compose his Violin Concerto for Louis Krasner. This he dedicated to the memory of 18 year-old Manon Gropius, one of Berg’s muses, whom he and his wife had come to view as their own daughter. Manon’s birth parents were Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, and Walter Gropius. The concerto would go on to become Berg’s best-loved work.
At some point, the composer wrote to Anton Webern to let him know that “Lulu” was essentially complete. He anticipated he would need only two or three weeks to overhaul it before he started in on its orchestration.
After his death, it was found he had managed to complete most of it. The parts he did not were left in short score, with detailed indications as to his plans for filling out the orchestration. Nevertheless, Schoenberg, Webern, and Zemlinsky, all friends of Berg, declined to take up its completion. Berg’s widow was left with the impression that the task must have been impractical, if not impossible. It was only after her own death in 1976 that Friedrich Cerha moved ahead with plans to finish it.
“Lulu” received its premiere, incomplete, in Switzerland, in 1937. Cerha’s edition was first staged soon after its publication in 1979. This was rapturously received, and it is now the preferred version.
Berg was always considered the Romantic among serialists. One critic dubbed him “the Puccini of twelve-tone music.” “Lulu” is freely-composed, but makes use of the twelve-tone technique promulgated by Schoenberg. Fascinatingly, each character in the opera gets his or her own tone row, so that each of the rows serves the purpose of a leitmotif – a fragmentary slip of music, bearing extramusical associations – as in the works of Richard Wagner. But if there is an opera further from Wagner’s Valhalla than “Lulu,” I don’t know it!
Interestingly, there was nothing at all sordid about Berg the man. There was no violence or scandal in his life. He was intellectual and well-spoken, and he didn’t consort with criminals and prostitutes. He just knew a good succès de scandale when he saw one.
“Lulu” has long since taken its place in the standard repertoire, alongside Berg’s “Wozzeck.” I can’t say it’s the most pleasant night at the theater, but it is an absorbing one, and it still retains its modern edge.
Who cares about the Super Bowl, when it’s John Williams’ birthday? Williams is 94 years-old today.
John Williams is everywhere right now. His Piano Concerto, written for Emanuel Ax – and given its world premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood this past summer – is making the rounds, with performances by the New York Philharmonic later this month and the Philadelphia Orchestra next season. His score for the film “Disclosure Day” – his 30th collaboration with director Steven Spielberg –will arrive in theaters on June 12th. (Allegedly, he just recorded it.) And right now, selections from his Olympic fanfares are being played as segues and bumpers throughout broadcasts of the games from Milano Cortina.
Williams hasn’t written anything new for this year’s Olympics, nor for that matter, for tonight’s Super Bowl (unless there’s a new trailer for “Disclosure Day”). However, on at least one occasion, possibly more, his “NBC Sunday Night Football Theme” has opened the broadcast.
In 2023, Williams composed music for the telecast of ESPN’s College Football Playoff Championship. Set the athletic mood with “Of Grit and Glory.”
I just remembered: Williams also wrote the score for the 1977 thriller “Black Sunday,” in which Robert Shaw races to prevent Bruce Dern from blowing up the Super Bowl – with the Goodyear blimp!
The indelible “Olympic Fanfare and Theme,” composed for the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles and part of Olympic broadcasts ever since
Also frequently heard: the fanfare from “Summon the Heroes,” written for the 1996 Atlanta games
When we listen to John Williams, we can imagine a better, more inspiring world.
Thank you, and happy birthday, John Williams!
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BONUS: Ten-minute Williams interview with Variety, filmed when the composer was 92
In determining his life’s course, Ulysses Kay (1917-1995), received encouragement from his uncle, King Oliver, and William Grant Still. Among his teachers were Howard Hanson, Paul Hindemith, and Otto Luening. He also attended the American Academy in Rome.
A longtime resident of Teaneck, NJ, he composed music in all genres. This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll sample “Tromba” for trumpet and piano, his Concerto for Orchestra, a suite from the semi-documentary “The Quiet One,” and “Six Dances for String Orchestra.”
I hope you’ll join me for “Giving Kay His Say.” Ulysses strings his bow, on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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