W. Somerset Maugham is said to have been the highest paid writer of the 1930s.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll have music from four Maugham adaptations, including the 1946 version of “Of Human Bondage” (with music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold), the 1946 version of “The Razor’s Edge” (with music by Alfred Newman), and two versions of “The Painted Veil – one from 2006 (with music by Alexandre Desplat) and one from 1957 (released as “The Seventh Sin,” with music by Miklós Rózsa).
As a former medical student who experienced World War I, first as an ambulance driver and then in the British Secret Intelligence Service, Maugham was involved with adventures all over Europe and Asia, which he then turned to the service of his fiction.
In 1938, he remarked, “Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.”
Maugham also worked in Hollywood for a time, writing scripts and making a pretty penny from film adaptations of his books.
Maugham’s the word this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Tyrone Power sees the light in “The Razor’s Edge”
Inclement weather got you down? As long as the power holds, there’s no reason to be glum.
In recent days, my inbox has been a logjam of press releases for streamed concerts. It’s still a big, wide, wonderful world of music out there, and there’s something for just about every taste.
My pick for the weekend – and I realize it may not be everyone’s cup of cocoa – is a FREE stream of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s most opulent opera, “Das Wunder der Heliane” (“The Miracle of Heliane”). Korngold was a celebrated child prodigy and an opera composer well before he came to Hollywood to write music for Errol Flynn and Bette Davis. “Heliane” is a heady blend of eroticism, pathos, and redemption. I can’t speak for the production, but the music is guaranteed to be transporting. The opera is being offered on-demand, from Deutsche Oper Berlin, now through Sunday at 9 am EST (assuming the times on the website are German). Visit https://www.deutscheoperberlin.de/de_DE/das-wunder-der-heliane-als-video-on-demand?fbclid=IwAR0gsLk8oT5GFsq5q_73iwq6K9IVVBhOc9e7W5jYxn8ZwOvuKXvcKqbmx14
Closer to home, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra has posted the first of a four-part series devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach’s “The Musical Offering.” The installments, which include illuminating commentary by PSO assistant conductor Nell Flanders, will be released weekly over the coming month and can be viewed FREE. Part One is posted now at https://princetonsymphony.org/
Whether because of the political zeitgeist, for Black History Month, or the natural result of cumulative exposure to the repertoire, there has been a really nice representation of music by Black composers recently. And the development is a welcome one. This weekend, The Philadelphia Orchestra will present Florence Price’s Piano Concerto, alongside works by Rossini and Schubert. The on-demand concert will be available starting tonight at 8 pm and will stream through next Thursday at 11 pm EST. Tickets available at https://philorch.org/
If new music is more your thing, Bang on a Can will present a marathon of 16 world premieres by living composers, including avant-garde icon Alvin Lucier and Princeton’s own Bora Yoon. Streaming of the four-hour event will begin this Sunday at 1 pm EST. The marathon is FREE and can be viewed at https://live.bangonacan.org/
As always, free may be free, but donations are welcome – indeed encouraged – and help support the performers and organizations.
Snowbound? ‘S no problem! There’s still plenty to munch on. Classical music is like grilled cheese for the soul, and it’s a lot easier on the arteries.
If you’re a fan of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, as I most definitely am, you might want to consider tuning in for “Die Kathrin” on today’s WWFM Sunday Opera.
Korngold’s final work for the stage, it is also the one closest to the language of his film scores. He had already been to Hollywood to supply the music for “Captain Blood,” among others, and the opening of his opera, set outside a cinema, sounds all the world like a dry run for “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” Equally, the work draws on the legacy of Viennese operetta. Melodic, melancholy, and hopelessly romantic, “Die Kathrin” is a delightful confection for anyone with a musical sweet tooth, and a nice extension of the sentimental spirit of so many of the Strauss waltzes imbibed on New Year’s.
Unfortunately, Korngold’s opera had been scheduled for a 1938 premiere. With the Anschluss, the occasion had to be postponed until five years after Germany’s defeat, by which time much of Vienna was a post-war ruin, and the work’s brand of ingratiating Old World naiveté had passed into irrelevance. A pity, since it is a most agreeable piece. This treacly tale of love postponed may not scale the same heights as Korngold’s “Die tote Stadt” (his most successful piece) or “Das Wunder der Heliane” (his most ambitious), but for the dreamers among us, it definitely has its rewards.
Michael Kownacky is your host for the Sunday Opera. Following the performance, enjoy more Korngold, including the precocious ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann,” or “The Snowman” (written at the tender age of 11), and the Symphonic Serenade.
“Die Kathrin” begins at 3:00 pm EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
An interview with Korngold from 1937, the year he completed work on his opera:
One hundred years ago today, Erich Wolfgang Korngold achieved his greatest operatic success at the age of 23, with the double-premiere, in Cologne and Hamburg, of “Die tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”). One of music’s most astounding child prodigies, Korngold had been the talk of Vienna since the age of 11, when his ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann” (“The Snowman”) was first performed at the Vienna Court Opera. By then, Gustav Mahler had already declared him a genius. Richard Strauss would express terror at the boy’s frightening precocity.
Undoubtedly, Korngold is much better known to movie-lovers for his contributions to the Golden Age of Hollywood, including his classic scores for the swashbucklers of Errol Flynn (“Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and “The Sea Hawk,” among them). Sadly, fascism and war gutted the Vienna of Korngold’s youth, and avant-garde arbiters and ideologues ensured that his brand of tonal, melodic music would be pushed out of the concert halls for decades
Interestingly, the opera’s scenario bears a striking resemblance to that of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” with an overwrought protagonist falling for a free spirit, who happens to be the spitting image of his dead wife. The dysfunctional relationship quickly spirals out of control.
For 18 years after its debut, “Die tote Stadt” was the most frequently performed opera in Vienna. Then for half a century, it fell virtually silent. Performances were rare, but in recent decades, once more, it’s begun to pick up steam. “The Dead City” lives again, in the affections of opera companies and their audiences, though too many modern productions clash with the essentially Romantic nature of its music. There are psychological depths to be plumbed, for sure, but the imagery should never be aesthetically unpleasant.
I’ve been privileged to see “Die tote Stadt” twice on stage, but of course I’ve listened to it many more times on recordings. It is a melancholy masterpiece by one of my favorite composers. It’s only a pity he didn’t live to enjoy the fruits of its belatedly revived fortunes.
Carol Neblett and René Kollo perform the opera’s famous duet, “Glück, das mir verblieb” (“Joy, that near to me remained”), commonly presented in recital as “Marietta’s Lute Song” (actually just the first five minutes of this video):
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll celebrate one of the most influential composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, by way of two of his most popular scores, both of them for film adaptations of the novels of Rafael Sabatini.
Though Sabatini’s own popularity has faded somewhat with the passage of time, in his day the Italian-English writer might have been regarded as heir apparent to Alexandre Dumas. His bestselling novels are full of romance and derring-do. However, I’m not sure if any of them have really endured in the consciousness of the wider public.
Sabatini’s incident-filled pages seem ready-made for the silver screen. Film adaptations of “Scaramouche,” “The Sea Hawk” and “Captain Blood” were made during the silent era. A long-lost John Gilbert classic, adapted from Sabatini’s “Bardelys the Magnificent,” has only recently been rediscovered. Several of these, of course, were remade, more or less, to great success during the era of talking pictures.
We’ll hear Korngold’s music for the Errol Flynn classics “Captain Blood” (1935) and “The Sea Hawk” (1940). The former provided Flynn with his breakout role; the latter actually has nothing at all to do with Sabatini’s original plot, despite the writer’s prominent onscreen credit.
We’ll also enjoy Alfred Newman’s rollicking main title music for the pirate opus “The Black Swan” (1942), which starred Tyrone Power, and one of Victor Young’s most rousing and melodically inventive scores, for “Scaramouche” (1952), which featured Stewart Granger in probably the best swashbuckler of the 1950s.
Polish up those seven-league boots and don your gaudiest plumage. Then join me, as we set sail with Erich Wolfgang Korngold and friends, and the novels of Rafael Sabatini, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
