NASA’s projected arrival of Asteroid 2018 VP1 on November 2, the eve of the Presidential Election, reminds me of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck’s 1840 legal victory over her father. The two had initiated a long and acrimonious lawsuit against Friedrich Wieck, Schumann’s former teacher, in the hope of overriding his opposition to their marriage. By the time the court ruled in their favor, and they were allowed to tie the knot, it was the last day of Clara’s 20th year. One more day, and she would have attained majority status. At 21, as a matter of course, the decision to marry would have been legally hers.
Where was this asteroid in 2016, when we really needed it?*
Kaija Saariaho’s “Asteroid 4179 – Toutatis”
Schumann’s “Widmung” (“Dedication”), a gift to his new bride
*Not to worry, it’s only 6 to 12 feet wide and likely to burn up, mostly, or explode in the atmosphere.
It’s August, and the insect choirs are out! Wing your way over to this week’s Classic Ross Amico crossword for a musical celebration of our six-legged friends.
To fill out the puzzle, follow the link and select “solve online” at the bottom of the page. You’ll then be able to type directly into the squares. Once you feel you’ve exhausted the puzzle, you’ll find the solutions by clicking on “Answer Key PDF.”
César Franck was a strangely charismatic outsider. A Belgian abroad, he was required to take French citizenship in order to teach at the Paris Conservatory. A renowned organist, his unexpected genius for composition blossomed late.
His enduring fame rests on a handful of fairly late works. He managed to reinvigorate the French symphonic and chamber music traditions through his use of “cyclic form,” with themes throughout generated from a single motif. He also embraced the symphonic poem. In these regards he certainly bore the influence of Franz Liszt. In turn, he himself became highly influential among a generation of French and Belgian composers.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll examine music by two Belgians who fell under his sway.
Armand Marsick, born in 1877, trained as a violinist at the Liège Conservatory, before studying abroad in Nancy with Franck enthusiast Guy Ropartz. Then he moved to Paris, where he studied with another Franckian, Vincent d’Indy. His career led him to Athens, and then Bilbao, where he founded a conservatory and an orchestra. He returned to Liège at the age of 50, settling in to teach and direct the concert society there. He died in 1959. The bulk of Marsick’s compositional output, which consisted of some forty works, was written between the ages of 23 and 37. We’ll enjoy a symphonic poem from 1908, titled “La Source.”
Guillaume Lekeu was born in Verviers in 1870. He studied with Franck in Paris, then, like Marsick, with d’Indy following Franck’s death. Lekeu, unfortunately, is also remarkable for his very short life. He became ill with typhoid fever after consuming contaminated sherbet at a restaurant, and died in 1894, one day after his 24th birthday. Despite his sadly shortened existence, he managed to make important contacts and to write music of considerable promise. At the time of his death, he had already been composing for nine years, from the age of 15. In 1891 he was recipient of a second prize in the celebrated Prix de Rome competition.
In all, Lekeu composed about 50 works. We’ll hear his Violin Sonata from 1892, written for the great Belgian virtuoso Eugene Ysaye, and his Adagio from 1891, originally composed for quartet and string orchestra. The score to the latter bears an epigraph from a poem by Georges Vanor, “The pale flowers of memory.”
I hope you’ll join me for music by these Belgian followers of César Franck. That’s “Franckly Belgian,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
When I was a kid, I remember, everything seemed like ancient history. Even in my teens, I looked upon the early 20th century as if it were another world, albeit a ceaselessly fascinating one. Now that I’m in my 50s, it astonishes me that someone my age could go to the movies in 1974, to see “Blazing Saddles,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” or “Chinatown,” and the year of his or her birth would have been the year that women in this country were first legally permitted to vote.
In another eight years, we will be as far away from 1974 as 1974 was from the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Furthermore, if we scroll back another 54 years from 1920, we arrive at 1866 – one year after the passage of the 13th Amendment, making slavery illegal in the United States.
Whaaaaaaaaaat?? What kind of barbarism is this? And how young a country are we? Small wonder it’s been such an uphill battle for women and minorities. It’s only yesterday that anyone was acknowledged to have any rights!
In this week of the Democratic National Convention and the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment (on August 18, 1920), legalizing a woman’s right to vote, and with the Republican National Convention right around the corner, politics is everywhere. It’s one of my least favorite subjects on the planet, but sadly we now live in a world where it must be in the forefront of our consciousness always. Perhaps it always has been the case, and I was simply ignorant, albeit blissfully so.
Here’s an article on music in the women’s suffrage movement in America:
Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president – in 1872! The year before, Woodhull addressed Congress (the first woman ever to do so) and argued that the 14th and 15th Amendments already implicitly grant a woman’s right to vote. Essentially, she said, as an American citizen, her right to cast a ballot was protected. The committee overwhelmingly saw it otherwise. Woodhull was an indomitable force. She never stopped pushing for what she believed, and she lived to see women’s suffrage pass into law. She died in 1927, at the age of 88.
Woodhull is the subject of an opera, “Mrs. President,” by Victoria Bond:
Act I
Act II
Here’s a recent production of Virgil Thomson’s Susan B. Anthony opera, “The Mother of Us All,” on a libretto by Gertrude Stein:
Finally, “Musical Activism in the American Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1900-1920”:
We should be proud of how far we have come as a nation, but not be too arrogant or complacent. The “modern era” has been a short one, and we still have a long way to grow.
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