In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Lionel Barrymore plays heartless Old Man Potter, a modern-day Scrooge, who views his fellow citizens of Bedford Falls as so much grist to be ground for his own profit. Barrymore the man, however, was full of generous human qualities, with a great enthusiasm and aptitude for the arts. I’d long known that he was also a composer, but it is only in doing a YouTube search this week that I discovered a broader cross-section of his output than the last time I checked, now perhaps eight years ago.
Barrymore was born in Philadelphia in 1878. He was, of course, part of a venerable acting dynasty that also included his famous siblings, John and Ethel Barrymore. He’s also the great-uncle of Drew Barrymore.
He was especially fine in character roles, playing a variety of them on screen, in retrospect perhaps most memorable for his curmudgeons. He played the irascible Dr. Gillespie in the “Doctor Kildare” movies of the 1930s and ‘40s. He was Ebenezer Scrooge in annual radio broadcasts of “A Christmas Carol.” Of course, he is probably most familiar these days as the soul-crushing capitalist Mr. Potter. He was honored with an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in “A Free Soul” in 1931.
Despite his natural aptitude and widely acknowledged success in the field, it had never been his ambition to act. Instead, he was interested in being a visual artist. He even trained in Paris, and his prints and etchings were widely circulated.
As a composer, several of his piano works were published. His “Tableau Russe” was played, in both its piano and orchestral versions, in the film “Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day.” His orchestral piece, “In Memoriam,” written to the memory of his brother John, was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also wrote an historical novel, “Mr. Cantonwine: A Moral Tale.”
Barrymore died in 1954. He had suffered from crippling arthritis for decades, which is why you’ll generally see him a wheelchair in most of his later films. He also broke his hip twice. He required morphine and cocaine to get through a shoot and to get to sleep at night. It was only through frequent injections of painkillers that he was able to get through “You Can’t Take It with You” on crutches.
Barrymore’s “Halloween Suite” can be heard here, beginning at the 36-minute mark. Barrymore is the narrator. Mario Lanza also appears on the concert. Miklós Rózsa conducts.
Music for the ages? Who cares? I would be the first in line if Naxos were to put out such an album.
Happy birthday, Lionel Barrymore!
PHOTOS (counterclockwise from top) As Old Man Potter; as himself; behind the scenes of “Rasputin and the Empress” (1932), the only film he ever made with both his siblings; and at lunch with fellow composers Eugene Zador, Charles Wakefield Cadman, Nat Finston, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Daniele Amfitheatrof.
It’s been observed (and borne out) that composers are not always the best interpreters of their own music. But when composer Péter Eötvös turned his hand to conducting Beethoven, the result was one of the most thrilling 5th Symphonies I have ever heard.
Eötvös, born in Transylvania, was aided and encouraged by Zoltán Kodály at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, and Béla Bartók was in his blood.
He continued his studies in Cologne with Bernd Alois Zimmerman. He also apprenticed with Karlheinz Stockhausen, working as Stockhausen’s engineer and copyist, and kept up his modernist credentials as a founding member of the live electronics-heavy Oeldorf Group and director and conductor of the Pierre Boulez-founded Ensemble InterContemporain.
In addition, he was drawn to the music of Renaissance madman and murderer Carlo Gesualdo and American jazz.
Eötvös composed in many genres, including experimental music for film and at least 13 operas.
To my ears, he was at least as good a conductor as he was a composer. Eötvös died yesterday at the age of 80. R.I.P.
Conducting Liszt’s “Dante Symphony”
His own “The Gliding of the Eagle in the Skies”
“Dialog mit Mozart”
Beethoven (each of the four movements posted separately)
If Daron Hagen weren’t a composer, he would be one hell of a writer. He IS one hell of a writer. I already knew that, from the too few times I’ve visited his blog. But I finally got around to reading his memoir, “Duet with the Past,” last month, and I have to say, it is one of the best-written books, fiction or nonfiction, I’ve read in a while.
I would think it would be an absorbing read for anyone who would chance to open the front cover, but it is especially compelling for somebody with a deep interest in mid-century American art music. Not that Hagen is of that generation – he’s only a few years older than I am – but his experiences as a student, composer, and copyist brought him into contact with an astonishing array of legends and luminaries of the era, including Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, David Diamond, Virgil Thomson, Gian Carlo Menotti, Lukas Foss, Eugene Ormandy (and Philadelphia’s associate conductor William Smith), Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Jack Beeson, and Aaron Copland – as well as Joan Tower, David Del Tredici, Michael Torke, and Aaron Jay Kernis, among others.
The writers he’s known and collaborated with include Paul Muldoon and Gore Vidal. My friend and colleague, Kile Smith, gets a few mentions (Hagen once worked with him at the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia), as does pianist Hugh Sung (who I finally just met for the first time a few weeks ago). The ghost of Marc Blitzstein, with whom Hagen in his youth is said to have borne some resemblance, also frequently rears his head.
All fascinating, of course, but Hagen’s story is even more riveting to me personally, as it seems he and I have lived parallel lives in a flabbergasting number of ways. Although I was never conscious of our paths having actually crossed, they must have. There are just too many shared interests and common hang-outs. You might say ours is a story of near-misses and there-but-for-the-grace-of-Gods.
Hagen arrived in Philadelphia only a few years before I did, to study at the Curtis Institute of Music. My college girlfriend worked at Curtis. He and I both like reading and books and are viscerally affected by the power of the written word. I worked in at least six bookstores in Philadelphia, one of them managed by Rorem’s niece. (Rorem was one of Hagen’s principal teachers.) One of the book shops I owned was within a block of Curtis. We’ve both amassed sizable libraries.
We both lived in the same neighborhood (as did, later, Jennifer Higdon), although perhaps at different times. But if you live in Center City Philadelphia, an expanse of less than 30 blocks and perhaps ten blocks up and down, you pretty much see everyone.
We were both regulars at the late, lamented neighborhood greasy spoon, Little Pete’s, on South 17th Street above Locust (right around the corner from Curtis), and Hagen totally nails the vibe, recollecting the smell of burnt coffee, the lime-green wrap-around counters, and the drunks nodding over their eggs in the wee hours of the morning. One of those drunks could very well have been me, on the way home from McGlinchey’s, prior to standing on a street corner with a friend and conversing volubly until the skies began to lighten. I read a substantial portion of “Les Miserables” there, and D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” and Edmund Wilson’s “Axel’s Castle,” the letters of Abelard and Heloise, and a charming book of essays, “Dreamthorp,” by Alexander Smith.
We also both clearly love classic movies. Hagen grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, within driving distance of a faded movie palace turned into a repertory house, and he writes lovingly of his experiences there. If I were to do the same, it would involve two or three such theaters I haunted during my teens and 20s.
Our upbringing was also eerily similar, with artistically-inclined, nurturing mothers and fathers ill-equipped to manage their impulses. I have to say, I was much luckier than Hagen was with how my situation turned out, as my mother got my sister and me away before any lasting physical or psychological damage could occur. Nevertheless, Hagen and I are both prone to nostalgia (though it’s possible I may be the more sentimental of the two of us) and melancholy. We’ve both gone on some legendary benders and stared into the abyss.
So, yes, perhaps the reason the book connected so well with me is because I identified so personally with many of his experiences.
Unlike me, Hagen managed to harness all those disparate elements and will himself into an artist of merit. Talent is great, but you also need drive, and Hagen’s work ethic, in all weather, is to be admired. He’s managed to build up quite the catalogue, especially, but by no means exclusively, as a successful opera composer. I’ve had several of his pieces in my library for years, and played a few on the radio. I could swear, at some point, I may even have introduced a concert broadcast of his opera “Amelia.”
Since finishing the book, I’ve ordered his four commercially-available operas (“Shining Brow,” “Vera,” “Bandanna,” and “Orson Rehearsed”). I am sorry so many of his major works have yet to be recorded. I would love to hear those he describes as Korngoldian – even his overture to “Much Ado About Nothing,” written for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which earned him much scorn for being so frothy and allegedly lacking in substance. I assure you, Hagen has composed plenty of substance. Are composers not allowed to enjoy themselves once in a while? Tragically, the handwritten manuscript for a “Much Ado” opera he had been at work on was left in his room at the Hotel Warwick (across the street from Little Pete’s) as he fled Philly in humiliation, and the opera is now lost.
But no matter what adversity life tossed his way, Hagen just kept churning out music. I honestly don’t know how he’s done it, subletting his living spaces (and with them, apparently, his adorable, impressively long-lived cat, Clara, always there to nuzzle him on his battered return, who made it to 24 and enjoyed the first year of Hagen’s happy, stabilizing marriage) to take off to Europe or for residencies at artists’ colonies, burning through all his money, but somehow always landing on his feet with a plum commission and finally finding domestic happiness in Rhinebeck, New York, near Bard College (where I travel every summer for the Bard Music Festival), in a quaint Victorian home with his loving family. (I have eaten at the Tivoli restaurant he mentions in the book, where he and Joan Tower dine.)
He’s not afraid to share his missteps, but if nothing else his life story demonstrates that even when you bottom-out, if you just hang in there, things might work out all right in the end. Talent and hard work are important, but luck, or chance, if you will, will always be a deciding factor. Life after all is a game of Chutes and Ladders. Hagen’s similes are less trite than mine, but he would be the first to admit he’s waded through quicksand on occasion, sometimes because of bad choices, sometimes not, only to have been lifted on the wings of angels. (His wife is composer, vocalist, and visual artist Gilda Lyons.)
By coincidence, Hagen’s latest album, “The Art of Song” (recorded at Curtis with Lyons one of the singers), was just released by Naxos within the last couple of weeks. Words and poetry have always been central to Hagen’s inspiration (which likely explains, in part, why he himself is such a good writer), and opera, song, and large-scale cycles comprise a significant portion of his output. As stated in the promotional material, “Divided into four ‘life seasons,’ this richly emotional cycle embraces themes that range from the human cost of America’s politics since the Civil War; the rueful wisdom of aging, love and nostalgia; and on towards tragedy, faith and an acceptance of nature’s cycles.”
Hagen can be nostalgic and hardnosed, pensive and reckless, ugly and beautiful, vainglorious and modest. But who among us has not been?
He writes with all five senses. Proust had his madeleine; Hagen had… well, everything apparently. We’ve all had the experience of certain scents conjuring memories, but Hagen, it seems, never forgot a smell, whether it be that of a dusty curtain in an old movie house or that distinctive blend of aromas that characterize any city. You can tell he’s always been a faithful journaler, which is only one more thing to admire. (Regrettably, my own very sporadic attempts have never made it past a few entries.)
He also has a good mind for similes and metaphors and all those tools of master storytellers and literary artists that make their work that much more engaging and enriching.
Not that the subject matter is always delightful. Hagen can be brutally honest, and it’s not always pretty. But in his writing, as in his music, he is dedicated to serving truth. He does so with enviable recall, a powerful command of observation, often great sensitivity, and a poetic disposition.
In the interviews I’ve seen, he’s as thoughtful and well-spoken in life as he is on paper.
There are plenty of samples of his music posted online and a lot of recorded interviews. You’d be doing yourself a favor by getting to know Daron Hagen.
Schickele was best known for his “discovery” of P.D.Q. Bach, whom he slyly promoted as the last and least of Johann Sebastian Bach’s progeny – “the 21st of Bach’s 20 children.” P.D.Q.’s manuscripts invariably turned up in the most undignified of places (leaky-ceilinged castles, the bottoms of bird cages, and as coffee maker filters). The music was introduced in performance and on record by “Professor” Peter Schickele, an equally amusing, unreliable source. The combination entertained for more than 50 years, a veritable automat of freewheeling parody, excruciating puns, and good old-fashioned, pie-in-the-face slapstick.
Some of the gags flirted with tedium, but there was always a diamond or two in the rough. If nothing else, you could always count on Schickele’s Jekyll-and-Hyde act to skewer the solemn conventions of classical music.
Frustratingly, his comic success undermined Schickele the “serious” composer. He studied with two of America’s most respected symphonists, Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti. Under his own name, he produced over 100 works. These could be wildly pluralistic in nature, drawing on folk, jazz, blues, or rock influences. A number of his contemporaries pursued similar impulses (William Bolcom, for one, and it didn’t keep him from winning a Pulitzer), but Schickele never escaped the long shadow of low humor. Which is a shame, as his music is ceaselessly vital, conveying exuberance, invention, and a kind of genial wit.
Schickele also wrote scores for film (“Silent Running”) and songs for Broadway (“O Calcutta!”). For 15 years, he hosted his own syndicated radio show, “Schickele Mix.”
I interviewed him once and met him at a concert at the College of New Jersey in 2014. By that time, he was no longer swinging onto stage by a rope, as he did at Carnegie Hall. Instead, his comic creations were executed by others as he oversaw the shenanigans like something of a dignified lion – albeit a wry lion – providing commentary by way of brief and informal exchanges with Wayne Heisler, TCNJ Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music.
P.D.Q. was classical music’s most prolific dad joke, perpetrating groaners like “No-No Nonette,” “Unbegun Symphony,” and “Pervertimento for Bagpipe, Bicycle and Balloons.”
An obituary in the New York Times encapsulates it very well: “In creating P.D.Q.’s oeuvre and putting it onstage, Mr. Schickele cannily deconstructed the classical music of Mozart’s time and just as cannily reassembled it in precisely the wrong configuration.”
It was humor that could engage on two levels, appealing to anyone who ever laughed at someone slipping on banana peel, but also to those who understood the enormity of his musical crimes.
He was rewarded with five Grammy Awards (one for him, and four for P.D.Q.) and by audiences full of chortling fans for over five decades.
Schickele died on Tuesday at the age of 88 – coincidentally the number of keys on a short-tempered clavier.
R.I.P.
On “The Tonight Show”
With Itzhak Perlman and John Williams
Part 1
Part 2
In better definition, and still entering on a rope in Houston in his 70s
Playing it straight: Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano
