This week on “The Lost Chord,” brace yourself for Icelandic composer Jon Leif’s “Saga Symphony.” Scored for tuned anvils, stones, whip, shields of iron, leather, and wood, great wooden casks played by large hammers, and six ancient long horns, or lurs, the work is an intriguing blend of extravagance and austerity.
Leifs studied in Leipzig and wound up stranded in Nazi Germany for much of World War II. You’d think the National Socialists would have gone ape for this musical advocate of Norse heroism, but two things worked against him: the modernist language of much of his output, and the fact that his wife and children were Jewish. Also, he found Wagner repellent, asserting that Wagner completely misunderstood the essence and artistic tradition of the North. Public performances of Leif’s works were discouraged (and would have been impractical anyway). Under the circumstances, he preferred to attract as little attention to himself as possible. He found escape in rereading the Icelandic sagas, even as he was used for propaganda purposes to strengthen Germany’s relations with Scandinavia.
Leifs finally managed to obtain permission to leave Germany in 1944. Unfortunately, suspicion of Nazi associations further hindered acceptance of his music abroad. It was only with a series of compact disc recordings released on the Swedish label BIS, beginning in the 1990s, that Leifs – who died in 1968 – was revealed to be Iceland’s most important composer, with a voice as distinctive as any of his time.
Iceland of a hundred years ago was a very different place than it is now. Leifs didn’t hear his first orchestra until he traveled to Leipzig. The “Saga Symphony” is a direct response to Franz Liszt’s “A Faust Symphony,” a performance of which sent the young composer into ecstasies. He went home and immediately began work on the piece we’ll hear tonight. However, his own approach is quite different from Liszt’s. In terms of symphonic development, there is none to speak of. In its place are evocative fields of static harmonies.
Each of the work’s five movements is a character portrait of a hero from the Norse sagas: the vitriolic warrior Skarphéðinn Njálsson (Njál’s Saga), who hacks and hews with his battle axe; the strong-willed Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir (Saga of the Laxardals), who avenges herself against her husband’s killer; the latently heroic comic braggart and coward Björn of Mörk, who takes shelter behind the swashbuckler Kári Sölmundarson, as Kári avenges the deaths of Njál and his sons; Grettir Ásmundarson, who vanquishes the ghost of Glámr in a wrestling match, only to be haunted ever after; and the warrior-poet Tormod Kolbrunarskald (The Foster Brother’s Saga), who pulls an arrow from his heart and even in the throes of death formulates an intricate poem.
Greet your fate with courage and stoicism. Join me for “Liking the Viking,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
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Liking the Viking on “The Lost Chord”
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in Daily Dispatch, The Lost Chord
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Let It Snow on “Sweetness and Light”
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7 responses
It’s funny, when you’re a kid, there’s nothing more exciting than snow. You stay up half the night, waiting for the first flake, and then in the morning you’re out the door making snowballs and building forts until your mom calls you back for lunch (grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup), and your gloves are wet and your fingers are frozen and you’re half-blind as you knock the snow out of the wales of your corduroys, and Mom tells you to take off your boots and not get snow on the carpet.
When you’re an adult, you put away childish things, and freak out.
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” we’ll keep calm and carry on, with a program designed to boost your serotonin and minimize your chionophobia (snow anxiety). We’ll welcome what comes with a playlist of snow-inspired works by Ronald Binge, Frederick Delius, Georgy Sviridov, Sergei Prokofiev, Angela Morley, Edward Elgar, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Adam Saunders.
Tune in and drop out – in front of the fireplace with a hot beverage of your choice. There’s no music like snow music, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
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IMAGE: Princeton’s own Patrick McDonnell tells it like it is
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Fantastic Adventures in the 18th Century on “Sweetness and Light”
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7 responses
The Enlightenment isn’t exactly remembered for its flights of fancy. If the odd novel embraced a fantastic tone, it was frequently in the service of satire, an entertaining means to send-up contemporary mores and pursuits or to mock authority figures and good old reliable human frailty. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll explore a few of these fantastic adventures of the 18th century.
“The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1785) pokes fun at one Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, a German nobleman and veteran of the Russo-Turkish War, whose reputation for telling outrageous tall tales is lampooned by Rudolf Erich Raspe. Raspe, looking to avoid a libel suit, published the work anonymously, with the result that it was commonly believed that the Baron actually dictated the tales himself. Naturally, the real-life Munchausen was upset by the unwanted attention. Thanks to Raspe, his very name came to be associated with feigned illness and pathological lying.
The book has been adapted to film several times, beginning with a silent version by Georges Méliès, all the way back in 1911. We’ll be listening to music from two subsequent adaptations. The first, “Münchhausen” (1943), is undeniably entertaining and exceptionally well-made. However, undermining one’s enjoyment is a sense of unease in the knowledge that the film was a pet project of Joseph Goebbels, who wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the UFA film studio by producing a lavish spectacle worthy to stand toe-to-toe with foreign efforts like “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Thief of Bagdad.”
Considering the source, one would have to look awfully hard to come up with anything resembling Nazi propaganda. The entire exercise comes across as a pastoral escape from the horrors of totalitarianism, total war, and the Final Solution. The elegant music, by Georg Haentzschel, would not be out of place in the concert hall. Haentzschel is regarded as perhaps the last representative of a generation of Middle European light music composers.
More than 40 years later, director Terry Gilliam undertook another production design-driven adaptation that resembles nothing if not a series of Doré illustrations brought to life. Contrary to received wisdom, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1988) managed to pull in a respectable amount of per-screen capital. The film was a casualty of a management turnover at Columbia Pictures, with the new regime eager to bury the projects of the old. Hence, it was never seen theatrically beyond a very limited release. The score, by Michael Kamen, while in a romantic heroic style, wittily contains abundant allusions to music of the 18th century.
“The Manuscript Found in Saragossa” (1805) is a transitional work, with its ecstatically lurid opening chapter – replete with gypsy storytellers, highwaymen, dueling skeletons, lesbian vampires, and a couple of corpses dangling in a gibbet – dragging the Enlightenment kicking and screaming into the Romantic age. It starts out as a masterpiece of surrealism, by way of Gothic convention, but the spell is eventually broken, sadly, by a large, cold bucket of Enlightenment water, in the form of a perfectly rational explanation at the end. But until then, the author, Jan Potocki, gets an A for effort. The interlocking structure, with stories inside stories inside stories looks ahead to postmodern experiments by writers like Italo Calvino and John Barth, to say nothing of Jorge Luis Borges.
The book was made into an acclaimed Polish film, “The Saragossa Manuscript,” in 1965. Its cult status led to a restoration financed by Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola that was released on VHS and DVD in 2001.
Who else could provide the perfect soundtrack to such a hallucinogenic experience but Krzysztof Penderecki? Penderecki intersperses spooky passages with neo-classical and baroque interludes.
Finally, we’ll hear music from one of the many adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726). “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” (1960) simplifies the book’s narrative and dispenses with a great deal of the misanthropic humor in favor of children’s fantasy. You won’t catch Gulliver extinguishing a fire in the Lilliputian Emperor’s palace with his urine in this version. What you will find is a good deal of technical wizardry and a delightful score by Bernard Herrmann.
What, you doubt my veracity? Then surely the music must speak for itself. Join me for fantastic adventures in the 18th century, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
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PHOTO: A fancy flight with Baron Munchausen
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Aural Enjoyment with Aurèle Nicolet
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The great Swiss flutist Aurèle Nicolet was born 100 years ago today. Nicolet served as principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic during the 1950s. He was appointed by Wilhelm Furtwängler and remained through the early Karajan years, before striking out to become a renowned soloist and an influential teacher. Composers who dedicated music to him include Toru Takemitsu, Josef Tal, György Ligeti, Aribert Reimann, and Edison Denisov. Among his pupils was the Berlin Philharmonic’s current principal flute, Emmanuel Pahud. Nicolet died in 2016 at the age of 90.
Remember him and put a spring in your step with some C.P.E. Bach.
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With Washington National Opera Out, I’m In
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3 responses
When I heard that Washington National Opera would be performing Robert Ward’s “The Crucible” this season, my ears pricked up. Ward’s opera was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1962.
At the time of the work’s premiere at New York City Opera in 1961, Ward’s musical language, unabashedly accessible and melodic, must have seemed awfully old fashioned to the academic Rapunzels walled up in their towers girded by thorns. But the powerful subject matter cries out for directness of expression.
Bernard Stambler’s libretto is based on Arthur Miller’s play, a dramatic response to the climate of fear, abuse, and hysteria shaped by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, in his zeal to stamp out what he characterized as an internal communist threat. The metaphorical witch hunts, during which civil liberties were suspended, lives destroyed, and basic human decency corroded, are now a not-so-distant mirror. In 1953, Miller’s play practically wrote itself. I mean, where are you going to look, when you’re in the middle of a witch hunt, but Salem in 1692?
Alas, everything old is new again. With demagoguery, extraordinary popular delusions, and “justified” atrocities back in style, the time is ripe to put “The Crucible” back in opera houses.
Maybe so, but I wasn’t exactly eager to walk into the Kennedy Center. My interest in the opera is musical, not political, but somewhere along the way somebody got the bright idea to politicize everything. Well before the “renaming” controversy, my inclination had already been to stay the hell away. For as much as I would have loved to have seen it, Washington’s “The Crucible” was out.
Then all out once, so was Washington National Opera.
With the intensifying flow of talent away from what clearly had become a toxic waste dump, the WNO, in the most gracious, diplomatically worded statement imaginable, announced it would be departing the Kennedy Center. The Opera had been affiliated with the center SINCE ITS OPENING IN 1971. The statement was conciliatory (the move characterized as an “amicable transition”), the writer bending over backwards to extend well-wishes to the center’s administrators.Not long after, Kennedy’s executive director issued his own statement, acting as if it was not the Opera’s decision, but rather that of the Kennedy regime. That’s right: the WNO hadn’t quit; they were fired. Pure class, but would anyone expect anything less? Then he put on a happy face and tried to persuade everyone that it was a GOOD thing WNO was leaving. Patrons “clearly wanted a refresh,” he wrote, and now the center can bring in visiting companies. Yeah, good luck with that. The post was subsequently deleted.
At any rate, now that WNO has extricated itself from a bad situation, I am happy to support them. So I’ll be joining my friend, Mather Pfeiffenberger, to see “The Crucible” at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium in March. Mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny will head the cast.
I would also consider seeing Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” (March 7, 8 & 15) had I not scheduling conflicts. Yet to come: a revival of Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” with Marin Alsop conducting (dates and venue TBA).
In a more recent statement, Francesca Zambello, WNO’s artistic director of 14 years, had this to say about the season’s offerings:
“We will present three American works that explore themes at the heart of what makes our country great. ‘Treemonisha’ celebrates the triumph of education over ignorance, while ‘The Crucible’ is a cautionary tale about a righteous mob that murders innocent women and tears families apart. We close with ‘West Side Story’, a modern spin on the Shakespeare play that Leonard Bernstein called ‘an out and out plea for racial tolerance.’”
The arts are so woke! /s
Viva Washington National Opera!——–
Washington National Opera website
More about “The Crucible”
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