Wouldn’t you know, as soon as my Shaker show wrapped up the other night on “The Lost Chord,” I opened up my collection of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories and randomly selected “The Canterbury Pilgrims” – which turned out to be about the Shakers!
If you missed the broadcast on WWFM – The Classical Network, it’s been posted as a webcast at wwfm.org. What are you waiting for? Get shaking!
The “Picture Perfect” pre-Thanksgiving show has also been archived. Enjoy selections from “Friendly Persuasion” (Dimitri Tiomkin), “Our Town” (Aaron Copland), “Plymouth Adventure” (Miklós Rózsa), and the building-the-barn sequence from “Witness” (Maurice Jarre).
In part to surreptitiously extend my Halloween celebration into November, and in part to vicariously wallow in secret Puritan guilt in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks revisiting a volume of Nathaniel Hawthorne favorites. Some of these I’ve not read for close to 40 years. Very much to the author’s credit, I still remembered most of them fairly well.
Hawthorne is never over-the-top macabre enough to bring genuine shudders in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, nor do I think that was particularly his aim. His allegory is always just a little too refined. And in the 21st century, sadly, I think we are all a little too much inured to the horrors of history, hypocrisy, and the human heart for many of these tales to pack much of a surprise.
That said, for me “The Birthmark” will always remain a masterpiece of dread. Furthermore, at his best, Hawthorne can be atmospheric and even witty, both in his phraseology and in his depictions of wackadoodle witches’ sabbaths and deviled-ham Satans.
But for the most part, even though the stories are short, I feel as if he tends to overstate his point, if not outstay his welcome. We get it, Nate. Next!
It was while reading “The Celestial Railroad” that I recalled this piano piece by Charles Ives, and that gave me the idea to share a few links to some Hawthorne-inspired classical music.
“The Celestial Railroad”
Ives revisited the material in his Fourth Symphony’s second movement, subtitled “Comedy”
He also devoted a movement to Hawthorne in his Piano Sonata No. 2, the “Concord Sonata.” Here’s the whole thing. “Hawthorne” begins at 16:26. As instructed, the pianist employs a 14 ¾ strip of wood on the keys, the better to achieve Ives’ tone clusters.
A suite from Howard Hanson’s “Merry Mount,” after “The Maypole of Merry Mount”
Lawrence Tibbett as Wrestling Bradford, from “Merry Mount”
A selection from Margaret Garwood’s “The Scarlet Letter”
An aria from Daniel Catán’s “La hija de Rappaccini” (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”)
A suite from Vaughan Williams’ opera “The Poisoned Kiss,” inspired in part by “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
If the long holiday weekend has filled your head with warm and fuzzy notions of Pilgrims sitting down to dine with Native Americans in perfect concord, think again. I am guest host on “Sunday Morning Opera with Sandy” today, and we are listening to Howard Hanson’s “Merry Mount.” An adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” the work is an at times hallucinatory study in fanaticism, sexual obsession and demonology. Enjoy that with your leftover turkey sandwiches!
It’s on right now, on “Sunday Morning Opera,” until 10:00 EST, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com.
