Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Debussy

If Fjord in a Morning Mood for Lyric Peace, Don’t for-Gynt Grieg

Yay, it’s Edvard Grieg’s birthday today! I’ll have something interesting to listen to in the car. I love Grieg’s stuff, and I take it down from the shelf far too seldom. Did the guy ever write a bad note?

Celebrated as Norway’s greatest composer, Grieg embraced his native folk music, lovingly elevated it, and infused it with an intriguing delicacy, melancholy, and yes, lyricism. Like listening to a Nordic Schubert, you never know when a cloud will break across the fjords. Or perhaps, more to the point, a sunny jaunt across a field of wildflowers will be disrupted by an encounter with a troll.

The most common criticism leveled against Grieg is that he was essentially a miniaturist. You may as well attack Chopin for being a sloppy orchestrator.

From his letters, we know that Grieg himself was frustrated by his propensity for shorter works. “Nothing that I do satisfies me,” he wrote, “and though it seems to me that I have ideas, they neither soar nor take form when I proceed to the working out of something big.”

Claude Debussy was only too happy to kick him while he was down. He famously derided Grieg’s output as so many “pink bonbons filled with snow.” Yet it has been convincingly demonstrated that Debussy owed more than a bit to his Norwegian colleague in the writing of his String Quartet in G minor and in some of his own piano miniatures. What is it about Grieg that so galled the Gauls?

Myself, I could listen to Grieg all day. In fact, I think I will.

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If fjord in a “Morning Mood” for lyric peace, don’t for-“Gynt” Grieg! 😉

Neeme Järvi conducts the four “Symphonic Dances.” I used the second of these as signature music for an overnight show, back when I was starting out in community radio.

Emil Gilels plays a selection of the “Lyric Pieces.” Gilels hedged when asked to make the recording, fearing that no one would buy it. Of course, it went on to become one of the great piano classics.

Then husband-and-wife team Augustin Dumay and Maria João Pires whip up a fair amount of unsuspected passion in the Violin Sonatas. Here’s the full album.

“The First Meeting,” sung by Barbara Bonney

Six Songs, Op. 48

“Solveig’s Song” from “Peer Gynt”

“Peer Gynt” with creepy puppets

Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli shatters the stereotype of Grieg as “regional” composer with a volcanic performance of the Piano Concerto in A minor.

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PHOTO: Grieg is great! Happy birthday, master!

June 15, 2026
Impetuous Youth on “The Lost Chord”

Wagner wrote symphonies? That’s right. He took a crack at writing two of them, in a Beethovenian style, before finding his niche as a revolutionary opera composer.

This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear Wagner’s Symphony in E, alongside early attempts by Gustav Holst and Claude Debussy. Judging from their mature works, these three would be among the least likely to attempt sonata form.

Impetuous youth! I hope you’ll join me for “Bold Heads on Young Shoulders” – audacious composers at the start of their careers strive for symphonic mastery – 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 EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu

May 2, 2026
Debussy Clair de Lune Remembering Margaret

On Claude Debussy’s birthday anniversary, I remember one of my radio listeners, now no longer with us, and her fondness for “Clair de lune.”

The station I was with at the time had offered, as a fundraising incentive during one of its pledge drives, opportunities for contributors to select a host with whom to co-present two hours of their favorite music. That’s how I met Margaret. Margaret was a retired high school English teacher of 24 years. She was in her early 80s then. It’s been my experience that I get along very well with 80-year-olds. One of her selected pieces was “Clair de lune,” which she said reminded her of her mother, since her mother used to play it on the piano.

We had a lot in common, including the fact that she lived in my hometown of Easton, PA, and the shared experience of the radio show began a four-year friendship, during which she wrote to me frequently. I responded a little less frequently, but not shamefully so, as can sometimes be the case. She would send me photos of her garden, and the animals that visited, and relate her experiences and impressions of the seasons and her favorite places. She was a delightful person. It was a good, old-fashioned, snail-mail correspondence, nothing electronic. I wasn’t even on Facebook yet.

The last time I saw her was on a visit to her home in 2012, after she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. She tried to encourage me to take whatever I wanted, but I had a hard time with it. I was not in an acquisitive mood. Also, I felt as if I took something it would be an admission that it really was the end. Finally, after having been urged repeatedly, I selected a rolled-up copy of a poster of a panoramic view of Easton in autumn, of which she had several. She enjoyed quite a view from the window of her living room herself.

Margaret died nine days later, in December 2012. I still have her letters and a mug she gave me, with a reproduction of Franz Marc’s “The Dream.” We were both fans of the Blue Rider school and had visited an exhibition, separately, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ironically, my mother is buried probably within a mile of her home.

This is no reflection on Margaret (and I think she would find that aside amusing), but here’s an abridged version of Debussy’s enduring piano piece, played for an 80-year-old elephant.

This was the version we played on the show.

Deleted segment from Disney’s “Fantasia,” with an orchestral version conducted by Leopold Stokowski

Happy birthday, Claude Debussy, and thinking of you, Margaret, wherever you are.

August 22, 2024
Mary Garden Opera’s Scandalous Diva at 150

Mary Garden, “the Sarah Bernhardt of opera,” was born 150 years ago today.

The Scottish-American lyric soprano (later mezzo-soprano) lived in France for many years, where she became the leading soprano at the Opéra-Comique. There, she worked with many successful composers and participated in several world premieres, including that of Claude Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” in 1902. She also collaborated with Jules Massenet, who wrote his Cherubino opera, “Chérubin,” specifically for her.

In 1901, she entered into an affair with André Messager, who had conducted her in Gustave Charpentier’s “Louise,” the work in which she made her unscheduled debut, stepping in for an ailing Marthe Rioton. When the Opéra-Comique director Albert Carré asked her to marry him, she graciously declined, coyly admitting there was someone else in her life.

She created a sensation when she performed the French version of Richard Strauss’ “Salome,” a role she eventually brought with her to America. Though she executed the Dance of the Seven Veils in a bodystocking, audiences were scandalized when she languorously kissed the severed head of John the Baptist.

It was Oscar Hammerstein who lured her back to the United States, where she joined the Manhattan Opera House in 1907. She scored further successes in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. She sang the world premiere of Victor Herbert’s “Natoma” in Philadelphia in 1911. In 1912, she joined Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera to raise funds for survivors of the Titanic.

In 1921, she became director of the Chicago Grand Opera Company. There, she directed the world premiere of Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges.” The company went bankrupt in 1922, but as always, Garden landed on her feet. She became director of the Chicago Civic Opera, with which she sang until 1931.

Long a household name, she also appeared in two silent films for Samuel Goldwyn: “Thaïs” (1917), one of her signature operatic roles, and “The Splendid Sinner” (1918). After retiring from opera in 1934, she became a talent scout for MGM. Later, when Orson Welles described to composer Bernard Herrmann the kind of opera he envisioned for the painful Susan Alexander montage in “Citizen Kane,” he characterized it as a Mary Garden vehicle.

Garden’s firsthand experiences with Debussy and his music provided ample material for her later lectures and recitals. In 1951, she retired to Scotland, where she lived her last 30 years, and published an autobiography, “Mary Garden’s Story.”

By all accounts, she was a force to be reckoned with, the archetypal diva, who engaged in epic feuds and forbidden love affairs. Invariably, she got what she wanted and emerged the stronger for it. She lived a flamboyant lifestyle and was a relentless self-promoter.

In a 1954 interview, she declared, “I was never a singer. You go to hear Caruso. You go to hear Melba. But you come to SEE me.”

She died in Aberdeen in 1967, at the age of 92.

Garden singing Mélisande with Debussy at the piano in 1904, and a selection from a Garden interview about the composer:

INTERVIEWER: “Is it true that Debussy was in love with you?”

GARDEN: “Oh, no. Never. He may have been in love with my work, but I never was in love with anybody with whom I created. No, no. Not in the musical world. They’re all crazy.”

Radio interviews from 1937 to 1961 – beginning with Bing Crosby! Interesting content aside, the advance in technology over 24 years is striking.

Garden as “Thaïs”

“Depuis le jour” from Charpentier’s “Louise”

Allegedly, the only one of Garden’s recordings she could bear to listen to

Bernard Herrmann’s Garden-influenced pastiche opera for “Citizen Kane”

Clip 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFAq27TK9l8

Clip 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmSoDkXJ2aw

I posted a good deal more about the segment in August of 2020

February 20, 2024
Debussy’s Birthday & My “Flaxen Hair” Moment

Following a leisurely walk through Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia about 30 years ago, I sat down at a keyboard in my studio apartment, hoping to recapture the hazy, haunting music that had flitted around the periphery of my consciousness. I smiled with relief and satisfaction, when I knew I had finally gotten it down. I was proud of myself to have created something so beautiful! It was only later that I realized it was “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.”

Claude Debussy, always stealing my thunder. Happy birthday, mon vieux!

Here it is, performed by flaxen-haired twins in a field full of wild flowers.

August 22, 2023

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