Am I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch?
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll celebrate William Shakespeare, just a few days shy of the anniversary of his birth, on April 23 (observed). Tune in for an hour of music from film adaptations of his comedies. We’ll enjoy selections from “As You Like It” (William Walton), “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Korngold), “The Taming of the Shrew” (Nino Rota), and “Much Ado About Nothing” (Patrick Doyle), even as we wryly acknowledge that the course of true love never did run smooth.
What fools these mortals be!
Verily, the wise ones know to stream it, wherever they are, at the link, this Friday evening at 8:00 EDT/5:00 PDT!
We don’t know exactly when Shakespeare was born. We do know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. Scholars must have found the potential for symmetry irresistible: since he died on April 23, 1616, the Bard’s birthday has traditionally been observed on the same date as his death.
Of course, he’s one of the most influential artists who ever lived. Regardless of what anyone may argue to the contrary, his relevancy will never wane, for as long as humans continue to exist. Who knows, maybe longer. I’ll have to consult Sycorax.
In the meantime, I’ll be doing my small part, in anticipation of the Bard’s birthday anniversary, with three programs of music inspired by his works.
First, on “Picture Perfect” (tonight at 8:00 EDT/5:00 PDT), we’ll have an hour of selections from cinematic adaptations of the comedies, including “As You Like It” (William Walton), “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Erich Wolfgang Korngold), “The Taming of the Shrew” (Nino Rota), and “Much Ado About Nothing” (Patrick Doyle).
Then, on “Sweetness and Light” (Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PST), we’ll do our best to charm and to cheer with Shakespearean inspirations by Johan Wagenaar, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Felix Mendelssohn (transcribed by Sergei Rachmaninoff), Sir Thomas Morley, and again, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (same composer, different work).
Finally, on “The Lost Chord,” power corrupts, as we juxtapose musical adaptations of “Macbeth,” by William Walton and Sir Arthur Sullivan, with works inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” by Louis Gruenberg and Heitor Villa-Lobos, on a program titled “Power Plays” (Saturday at 7:00 p.m. EDT/4:00 p.m. PDT).
If music be the food of love, stream on, on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm during the First World War. Rather than abandon his career, he commissioned works for the left hand from some of the great composers of his day, including Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, and of course Maurice Ravel.
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll highlight two of Wittgenstein’s lesser-known commissions.
In 1922, Wittgenstein approached Paul Hindemith – at 27, a rising star of German modernism, indeed the radical avant-garde – to produce his “Klaviermusik mit Orchester.”
Wittgenstein’s reaction to the piece is unknown, although we can easily surmise. He never played the work in public. Furthermore, since he had secured exclusive performance rights, he wouldn’t allow anyone else to play it, either.
Following the pianist’s death in 1961, his widow relocated to a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where for decades she kept all of her husband’s belongings in a single room. When the estate was finally catalogued in 2002, a copy of the Hindemith concerto was discovered among Wittgenstein’s effects, along with other scores, correspondence, and items of interest, including locks of both Beethoven’s and Brahms’ hair.
It was Leon Fleisher who gave the belated premiere of the concerto, some 80 years after it was written, with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. I was present at the U.S. East Coast premiere, with Fleisher and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. Listen carefully to see if you can hear me applauding, in a recording made at Philadelphia’s Verizon Hall, at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, on April 27, 2008.
As a rule, Wittgenstein gravitated toward composers of a more Romantic bent. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of music’s most astounding prodigies, a Viennese wunderkind and celebrated opera composer, who later achieved world fame in Hollywood. There, he produced over a dozen classic scores, for films like “Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and “The Sea Hawk.”
His greatest operatic success was “Die tote Stadt,” given its debut in 1920. Korngold was 23 years-old. In 1922, he became the first composer to be approached by Wittgenstein for a left-hand piano concerto. (It was the same year, by the way, that Wittgenstein enlisted Hindemith.) The result was the Piano Concerto in C-sharp. On today’s program, Marc-André Hamelin will be the soloist, an outstanding virtuoso figuratively playing with one hand tied behind his back.
Interestingly, Wittgenstein much preferred this piece to Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. It was the Ravel, commissioned in 1929, that would secure his place in music history, but he must have felt Korngold’s Romanticism and sense of struggle played more to his strengths. For whatever reason, Korngold became a Wittgenstein favorite. In the few minutes remaining at the end of the hour, Leon Fleisher will return to the keyboard for a performance of the “Lied,” the ardent slow movement of Korngold’s Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano Left-Hand.
I hope you’ll join me for “What’s Left?” – rarely-heard commissions by Paul Wittgenstein – on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for those of you listening in the East. Here are the respective air-times for all three of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EST)
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday on KWAX at 8:00 AM PACIFIC TIME (11:00 AM EST)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EST)
Stream all three, at the times indicated, by following the link!
Proud papa Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote his “Baby Serenade” after receiving news from his wife, Luzi, that she was expecting another child. This was in the spring of 1928. Korngold completed the work in time for the birth of his second son, Georg. It was good training for the composer, as there would certainly be plenty of firm deadlines in his future.
Korngold, of course, became one of the great composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, fondly remembered especially for his scores for the films of Errol Flynn. But he was also an astounding prodigy who achieved international fame for his operas and concert works.
He came to the U.S. to assist theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt on a film adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Warner Bros. Warner Bros. understood a good thing when they had it and offered Korngold a very generous contract, allowing him to pick his own projects and even permitting him to coach the actors on-set to get performances that would suit his musical ideas.
It was while he was here scoring “The Adventures of Robin Hood” in 1938 that the Nazis marched into Austria and changed the course of Korngold’s life. For the safety of his family, he remained in California and became a U.S. citizen in 1943.
The “Baby Serenade” was composed years before Korngold’s American adventure. Still, there’s plenty in it to suggest the cinematic Korngold to come. Also, there are saxophones and some jazz-inflected passages that very much reflect the era in which it was written. It’s certainly a lighthearted work, with leaner texters than those of the rich orchestral utterances of his larger concert pieces.
Georg (whose family nickname was Schurli, but he went by George) repaid the favor years later, as a record producer who would help revive and preserve his father’s legacy.
The “Baby Serenade” falls into five movements:
I. Overture: Baby Comes Into the World
II. Song: It’s a Good Baby
III. Scherzino: It Has the Most Beautiful Toys
IV. Jazz: Baby Tells a Story
V. Epilogue: And Now It Sings Itself to Sleep
Listen to it here:
The arrival of Georg was one premiere which could not be postponed!
PHOTO: Korngold and family, with Georg front and center
One of classical music’s most astonishing composer prodigies – sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, as it were – Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the toast of Vienna. His opera “Die tote Stadt” was probably his greatest success, receiving double-premieres in Hamburg and Cologne. It became one of the most popular operas by a living composer during the 1920s.
With the rise of the Nazis, Korngold and his family found refuge in Hollywood, where he wrote film scores for such classics as “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Prince and the Pauper” (1937), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939), “The Sea Hawk” (1940), and “Kings Row” (1942).
Even as a boy, Korngold had amazed audiences with such works as the ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann,” or “The Snowman,” composed at the tender age of 11 and first performed at the Vienna Court Opera in the presence of Emperor Franz Josef. His Piano Trio was composed at 13 and given its premiere by Artur Schnabel and members of the Vienna Philharmonic. The Sinfonietta, a symphony-in-all-but-name, was composed at 15 and first conducted by Felix Weingartner, while Korngold shared a box with an admiring (and, by his own admission, somewhat intimidated) Richard Strauss.
With the premiere of his opera “Die tote Stadt,” or “The Dead City,” in 1920, at age 23, Korngold’s reputation seemed assured. He wrote a piano concerto for Paul Wittgenstein, undertook a revival of the operettas of Johann Strauss II, and was publicly honored by the president of Austria.
However, the trajectory of his career took an unexpected turn with the ascendancy of Hitler. To escape the creep of fascism, Korngold embarked on a second career, settling in Hollywood to write film scores for Warner Brothers.
The first of these was composed at the invitation of famed impresario Max Reinhardt, with whom Korngold had collaborated on the Strauss revivals. Reinhardt was in the process of adapting Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the big screen, and he enlisted Korngold to rework Felix Mendelssohn’s famous incidental music.
In true Korngoldian fashion, the composer went well beyond what was expected, weaving in passages from Mendelssohn’s symphonies and “Songs Without Words,” writing his own connective material, and sprinkling the whole with fairy dust.
Korngold’s work on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935) led to an exclusive contract at Warner’s, where the composer revolutionized the language of film music, applying the kind of opulence, pageantry and romance characteristic of his operas to silver screen historical dramas and swashbucklers.
The result was kind of a pop cultural immortality, but to the detriment of his reputation as a serious composer. The center of European musical culture was off-limits, indeed severely limited by Nazi strictures, and the language of musical modernism, as exemplified by the output of his contemporary and compatriot Arnold Schoenberg, made Korngold seem positively old-fashioned. It would be decades before his reputation would recover, and unfortunately by then he was long dead.
I feel like I was in on the ground floor of the Korngold revival, snapping up everything available, though a mere fraction of his output, shortly after it appeared on LP during the 1970s. Then came a veritable Korngold bumper crop during the compact disc era, especially in 1990s. Since then, we’ve been blessed especially with multiple recordings of the Violin Concerto, now in the repertoire of practically every major violinist.
It’s been very exciting for me, personally, to live through the comeback of one of my favorite composers, and one who has been so important to me for most of my existence. Well before I knew anything about music, my best friend and I used to “sing” the music from “Robin Hood,” after the film’s television broadcasts, while executing curtain rod duels around the house.
With gratitude to Erich Wolfgang Korngold on his birthday. May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, sire!
