I am saddened to learn of the death of Dame Felicity Lott.
I never saw the English soprano live, and yet somehow from her recordings, performance videos, and vivacious interviews, I came to adore her. She seemed like a genuinely nice person and an inextinguishable spirit. Now, only days after revealing a terminal cancer diagnosis, she is gone.
“Flott,” as she was known to her colleagues and fans, earned her BA in French and Latin from Royal Holloway, University of London. During the course of her studies, she spent a year in France – and she certainly put it to good use, as she was always very much at home in French chansons.
She also excelled in Britten and Richard Strauss, in opera and recital, in drama and comedy. It seemed there was nothing she could not do well. Often, she performed in tandem with Graham Johnson, her accompanist since her student years.
Lott died on Friday at the age of 79. Only a few days before, she gave an interview on BBC Four, exuding her usual warmth, candor, humor and grace, in which she shared her terminal status. She said she had known about it for nearly a year.
“I’m just so happy at the moment,” she said. “I don’t want anybody to be sad, because I’m having a ball. I can’t understand it, because I’m not very well.
“I’ve known about being ill for almost a year and, my goodness, it was a shock. But here I am for a bit longer, and I’ve had time to look back and think, “Golly, you lucky thing… you’ve met all these wonderful people and had a wonderful life. You’ve been all over the world!”
Time and again, critics and admirers have cited the beauty and humanity of her characterization of the Marschallin in Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”
Of her many recordings I have broadcast over the years, this is one of my favorites. Ernest Chausson’s “Poèmes de l’amour et de la mer” (“Poems of Love and the Sea”) incorporates two texts by Maurice Bouchor. The poems, “The Flowers of the Waters” and “The Death of Love,” are separated by a brief orchestral interlude.
I can’t believe it’s been two months already since the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts announced that the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival will be “Mozart and His World.” The festival, now in its 36th year, will we be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 7-16. The fact that I didn’t share the news immediately is attributable to several factors:
Firstly, I’m sorry, Mozart may have been one the greatest musical geniuses who ever lived – and he wrote some music I would never want to be without (e.g. “The Marriage of Figaro,” an opera I like to say basically saved my life, or least got me through a very rough time) – but the idea of two weekends of his music doesn’t exactly thrill me.
In the past, I wouldn’t have considered it an issue, since the “and His World” qualifier ensured there would be plenty of fascinating discoveries by the subject’s contemporaries, those who influenced him, and those he in turn influenced.
Also, historically, Bard has been exceptional in digging deep into composers’ basements and turning up neglected scores from cobwebbed corners of their attics. This year, alas, seems to be a little disappointing in these regards.
For one thing, I was hoping the programs would mix it up a bit more and cast some light into the future. After all, there are so many pieces influenced by or written in tribute to Mozart. One program will include Tchaikovsky’s “Mozartiana” – hardly a rarity, but at least it will be presented in a lesser-heard piano version – though I would expect the concerts to also weave in works such as Jean Françaix’s “Hommage à l’ami Papageno” for wind ensemble or, say, Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, with its clearly Mozartian slow movement. If not those works specifically, perhaps a few like them.
Of course at Bard, you never know everything you’re going to get until the actual, physical program goes to print. This early in the process, what’s given on the website is frequently but a sketch. But I imagine the major works are in place.
Anyway, for all my grousing, I will be there for at least some of it, and once I am in the concert halls and into the music, I know I will have a good time, regardless, even if I can’t imagine buying a ticket based on being able to hear the “Prague Symphony” again.
Unquestionably, there will be rarities: a Michael Haydn mass, selections from a Salieri opera, a Clementi piano sonata that contains the germ for Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute.” But what about the Mozart-Salieri collaboration “Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ofelia,” rediscovered as recently as 2016? How about Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera “Mozart and Salieri?” Or Reynaldo Hahn’s “Mozart?”
As always with these things, people will have their own ideas, and I know I should be thankful for anything this group organizes – and I am! But there’s no way I can pretend to be anywhere near as pumped for a Mozart festival as I was for those devoted to past subjects, such as Prokofiev, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, Berlioz, Vaughan Williams, Bohuslav Martinů, Carlos Chávez, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Okay, I’ve been putting it off, but now at last I come to the elephant in the room. I so badly do not want to even address it, but there’s the unfortunate quagmire through which co-artistic director Leon Botstein – also president of Bard College since 1975 – is currently slogging. If you don’t already know it, Botstein is in the Epstein files. Not with anything like the same frequency as the President of the United States, mind you, or, from what we know so far, with anywhere near the same degree of skeeviness. Actually, it doesn’t appear there’s any skeeviness at all. But the timing couldn’t be worse. The excrement hit the fan just before this year’s festival would have to be announced.
The New York Times has covered Botstein’s interactions with Epstein extensively, but a lot of “journalists,” I’ve noticed, in particular those writing for the local papers of the Hudson Valley, seem to have their knives out, through suggestive phraseology and loaded words. The last thing Bard needs, in this sensitive situation, is for anyone to be striking sparks.
I hasten to add, although Botstein is kind of a hero to me, I am in no way discounting the real and lasting trauma experienced by any of Epstein’s victims or that of anyone else who has suffered sexual abuse in their personal lives or at the hands of anyone on the faculty of the college itself (which has been alleged; after all, it is a college, and there are often abuses of authority at such institutions). There have been no allegations of Botstein himself participating in any illegal behavior.
However, one of Epstein’s victims made an interesting point in an interview when she stated that the fact that Epstein was able to attract someone as estimable as Botstein to his sphere – and Botstein is FAR from the only one – it lent to an illusion of legitimacy, so that she and others like her struggled with the disconnect between what they were seeing, this kind of acceptance, and what they were actually experiencing.
But Botstein himself appears to be clean, and the man himself has done so much for not only music, but for education, for social causes, and for the school itself. It would be unfortunate if he were forced out for the sin of trying to elicit additional funds from a millionaire, who made an unsolicited $75,000 donation to the college.
But an independent investigation is ongoing. I will stand by the findings, as I hope the student activists will. There is a group on campus raising hell as only young people can.
Botstein, who is brilliant and brilliantly articulate, is conspicuously absent, or downplayed to the extent that I don’t see him mentioned anywhere in the Bard promotional material. I’m hoping he is not forced out of the festival altogether, as there is no one currently involved that could ever fill his shoes.
He’s still attached to this year’s opera production, which precedes the festival, as part of Bard SummerScape, a larger celebration of the arts that spans June 25-August 16. I already have my ticket to hear him conduct Richard Strauss’ “Die ägyptische Helena” (“The Egyptian Helen”). The opera runs July 24-August 2.
Furthermore, I will hear him at Carnegie Hall this Thursday, with vocal soloists and the American Symphony Orchestra, as he introduces and conducts Berlioz’s rarely-encountered edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz.”
One of the reasons I feel so disheartened by my own reaction to this year’s music festival – a reaction that I suspect will be shared by others attracted to Bard for its advocacy of unusual and neglected repertoire – is that I do not want the college to misconstrue my or anyone’s lack of enthusiasm and/or low attendance for distaste for, or protest against, Botstein.
Be that as it may, you’ll find the program, as it currently stands, at the links below. If you’re a Mozart nut, I hope you will consider attending.
Long live the Bard Music Festival. I’m hoping we’ll still have a few more years of Botstein, who will turn 80 in December, but appears to be as vital as ever, and in comparatively good health, at least on the evidence of what I’ve seen at Bard and at his concerts in New York City.
Next year, another neglected or underappreciated composer, please!
For whatever reason (i.e. I sent in the wrong show), my New Year’s program aired on “Sweetness and Light” a few weeks ago. Aside from having eggnog on my face, no harm done, I suppose, although I’m sure listeners were wondering why I was going all Guy Lombardo three weeks before Christmas.
Since it’s already recorded, and because it’s the holidays, and because I’m lazy, I’m putting the kettle on to boil some more water for a festive tea party. The playlist will include Dmitri Shostakovich’s charming arrangement of “Tea for Two,” Samuel Barber’s “Souvenirs,” his musical evocation of the elegant Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in days of yore, and Richard Strauss’ hallucinatory dancing tea leaves from the high-calorie ballet “Schlagobers,” or “Whipped Cream.”
The show will achieve its nutty apotheosis when sugar and caffeine intersect with the hypnotic patter of the 1953 novelty song “The Little Red Monkey,” which tells of a simmering simian’s reactions to violin, euphonium, and tea.
Your eyes will pinwheel, your brain will hum, and your heart will go pitter-pat when you join me for a bottomless cuppa on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Few have done more to rehabilitate neglected Strauss, especially neglected Strauss opera, than Leon Botstein. But after all, rehabilitating the neglected is what Botstein does. He’s made a career of it, on record, in concert, and as part of the mission of the Bard Music Festival, a kind of music mecca that attracts the curious to Bard College every summer for total immersion in a composer’s work and world. (This year’s festival, which will take place largely over two weekends, August 8-10 and 14-17, will be devoted to the sleeping giant of Czech music, Bohuslav Martinů.) Botstein is the festival’s founder and co-artistic director. In that capacity he conducts the operas and most of the orchestral programs, serves on panels, writes illuminating essays, and delivers pre-concert lectures. At 78, he’s still an intellectual dynamo. His lumbering gait and considered speech belie a seemingly inexhaustible well of energy. Botstein has served as Bard’s president since 1975. Yes, you read that correctly. He assumed the office at the age of 29.
On Friday, Botstein took the stage of Carnegie Hall to guide the American Symphony Orchestra (a group he has directed since 1992) through the resurrection, in concert, of Strauss’ first opera, the problem child “Guntram.” The work was tepidly received at its premiere in Weimar in May 1894. Basically, everyone thought it was fine, if not particularly special. Pauline de Ahna sang the role of Freihild. Four months later she would become Strauss’ wife. (He announced their engagement on the day of “Guntram’s” premiere.)
In November, Strauss brought the work to his hometown of Munich, where he was serving as music director. Its reception there might be charitably characterized as brutal. So poorly did its single performance go down that the orchestra walked out on strike under the direction of its concertmaster (Strauss’ cousin). The two leads refused to reprise their roles, and a third singer was adamant about not returning until a better pension was negotiated. Ouch!
By then, Strauss had already tasted success with his tone poems “Don Juan” and “Death and Transfiguration.” “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” “Also sprach Zarathustra,” “Don Quixote,” and “Ein Heldenleben” were yet to come. He was a decade away from “Salome,” the work that would change his operatic fortunes forever. (But first, he would have his revenge on conservative Munich with his scandalous opera “Feuersnot.”) He would go on to become perhaps the most successful opera composer of the 20th century.
Still, you know how it is. One never forgets the sting of rejection. Strauss just couldn’t get over “Guntram’s” failure. He tried to put it behind him with a humorous gesture, figuratively burying the pain with a symbolic gravestone erected on his property that bore the inscription:
“Here lies the venerable, virtuous young Guntram—
Minnesinger, who was gruesomely slain by the symphony orchestra of his own father
May he rest in peace!”
Strauss would enjoy wealth and celebrity, but that early humiliation stayed with him. In 1940, when he was in his mid-70s, at the other end of a very fruitful career, he revised “Guntram,” making some cuts and hoping its merits would finally be recognized. But its fortunes did not improve.
“Guntram,” then, is right in Botstein’s wheelhouse. “Salome,” “Elektra,” and “Der Rosenkavalier” don’t need his help. Rather, he’s been working his way through Strauss’ lesser-known efforts, including the aforementioned “Feuersnot,” “Die ägyptische Helena,” “Die schweigsame Frau,” “Friedenstag,” “Daphne,” and “Der Liebe der Danae.” He and the ASO recorded “Die ägyptische Helene” and “Der Liebe der Danae” at Avery Fisher Hall in 2001 and 2003, respectively, for Telarc Records.
Before I forget: it is essential that you get there early for any Leon Botstein performance. I guarantee his insightful pre-concert talks will enrich your experience of the music. On this occasion, had I missed his remarks, it would have gone right over my head that this was no mere Wagner knockoff, but rather a sly subversion of the Wagnerian aesthetic it would seem to embrace. I would have missed out on the entire social and historical context that allowed me to take vicarious pleasure in knowing that “Guntram” pissed off Strauss’ contemporaries. Of course, the music itself also happens to contain passages of great beauty, especially when heard live.
Botstein conducted “Guntram” from that 1940 revision of the work, the only performance edition. While the opera may not be a world-beater, we’re far enough along from the prejudices and animosities that pummeled it in the 1890s to at least give it a fair and objective hearing.
Strauss wrote his own libretto, which is full of the turgid Teutonic iconography familiar from so many German Romantic operas. A corrupt ruler, high-minded minnesingers, civil unrest, a saintly woman, thwarted love, and heavy swords that in my opinion never get enough use. Strauss further emulates Wagner through the employment of leitmotifs – musical snippets associated with certain characters or ideas that undergo transformation as they recur throughout the opera. Guntram’s is insistently memorable, helped no doubt by the fact that it’s basically the first three notes of the Enterprise fanfare from the original “Star Trek” television series. A leitmotif associated with Freihild’s love anticipates a similar one in Strauss’ “Die Frau ohne Schatten.”
Certainly, “Guntram” has got its share of castles and pageantry and lofty-minded singing societies – in this case, a pacifist rebel alliance united against a tyrannical duke. Too bad Guntram kills him. If it were Wagner, you would expect the hero, or any rate the self-sacrifice of the heroine, to change the world. But there is no redemption in “Guntram.” Instead, the protagonist retires, like Strauss’ vision of the Hero at the end of his epic tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” – which actually quotes “Guntram” in the section celebrating “The Hero’s Works of Peace.” The climactic moments of the opera also put one very much in the mind of “The Hero’s Retirement from this World and Completion.”
There are intimations of other Strauss works, as well. “Death and Transfiguration,” already written, finds its way in. There’s no question as to the identity of the composer. Strauss was already a master orchestrator, and his thumbprints are easily detectable without a magnifying glass. But the ghost of Wagner is forever lurking behind a column. One thing I forgot to mention is a dance that Strauss includes twice, which to my ears is a Romantic gloss on the same Tielman Susato dance Peter Warlock used as the basis for the last movement of his “Capriol Suite.” Can that be possible? How well known would Susato have been in the 19th century? Perhaps the similarity is just a coincidence? A chorus of monks also gets to intone some faux Gregorian chant. Great fun!
Despite all the music’s feints at “Tristan und Isolde,” especially in the third act, “Guntram” is an opera without any sense of Wagnerian transcendence or redemption. It’s more like there’s the POSSIBILITY of redemption, perhaps, someday, I’ll have to get back to you, as Guntram wanders off into a life of renunciation, reflection, and seclusion; but before he goes, he exhorts Freihild, who clearly reciprocates his attraction, to devote herself to charitable works. What a guy.
According to Botstein, this subversion of Wagnerian ideals would have been seen as heretical by his contemporaries. Read Alex Ross’ “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music” for a better understanding of just how pervasive Wagner’s influence was. No exaggeration, it permeated just about every aspect of human existence and thought – philosophy, fashion, architecture, politics, and of course the arts – apparently so much so that Strauss’ teacher, Alexander Ritter, an ardent Wagnerian, totally cooled on their friendship in the wake of “Guntram.” (On the other hand, Strauss’ rival, Gustav Mahler, respected its merits enough to include two of its preludes on a concert – at Carnegie Hall, as a matter of fact.) To mess with Wagner would have been to rock the pillars of the earth.
A frequent criticism leveled against Botstein, a prolific scholar who has published in multiple disciplines (in multiple languages, for that matter) and is the head of a liberal arts college, is that as a conductor he conducts like a hell of an academic. It’s his curiosity that drives the performances as opposed to penetrative insight. I can’t say that has always been my experience, and in fact more often than not, I have attended Botstein concerts that have left me juiced – often in both senses, as in electrified AND drained, as those Bard concerts can attain epic dimensions. On the other hand, an Ives’ Second Symphony I heard Botstein conduct at Carnegie last season lacked any suggestion, in its execution, of a work that can live and breathe in a unique, vital, and even transcendent way. Under Botstein’s direction, it was just there. Like John Knowles Paine on a bad day. That’s the risk you take, with the vagaries of live performance.
On Friday, I can attest, Botstein was like a surfer harnessing the energy of one bitching wave. I had been totally ignorant of John Matthew Myers, but he had a ringing heldentenor that rang effortlessly over the orchestra and carried out to every corner of the hall, gliding on Carnegie’s legendary acoustics. In fact, the acoustic flattered practically everyone. There was a lot of very good and attractive singing from a diverse cast. Katharine Goeldner sang with passion and commitment in the supporting role of the Old Woman. I was amused to recall Rodell Rosel, who sang the Duke’s Fool, as the Jester in Botstein and the ASO’s performance last season of Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder.” When in need of motley antics, they must have him on speed dial. To keep it short, I could pretty much dole out praise across the board. Myers was the revelation, but for as stunning as he was, in the end anyone present would have had to concede the laurels should be cast at the feet of Angela Meade, who stunned especially at the end of Act II, when her character, Freihilde, the kind wife of the evil duke, was finally given something more to do than swoon. When she belts, “Ich liebe dich!,” that’s pretty much that. All you can do is go to intermission.
Strauss famously characterized himself as “a first-class second-rate composer.” You can practically detect the twinkle in his eye when he said it. The performance of “Guntram” on Friday night certainly bore out his assessment. In all, I found the opera worked marvelously well in concert – I found it rewarding and even revelatory – although I can imagine the challenges for anyone attempting an actual staging. For one thing, all three acts are hampered by dramatically-stagnant monologues (three for Guntram and one for Freihild), making it a textbook park-and-bark. Any staging is bound to come off seeming like a series of tableaux, with the other singers waiting around for long stretches, holding poses, or doing their best to look natural. But with voices like these, who cares? Sometimes all you need are big voices and a powerful orchestra. Anyway, I happen to groove on ersatz Wagner.
I must say, it was instructive, if perhaps a little foolhardy, to listen to this on the same weekend as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”
Thank you, Leon Botstein, the American Symphony Orchestra, and the men of the Bard Festival Chorus. It was a wonderful evening!
Strauss was the focus of the Bard Music Festival in 1992. In 2011, Bard offered a series of staged performances of “Die Liebe der Danae” (“The Love of Danae”). In 2022, the opera was “Die Schweigsame Frau” (“The Silent Woman”). These can be viewed, with a number of other Bard opera productions, on YouTube.
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” I invite you to a holiday tea party. That’s right, the music will all in some way be related to tea.
We’ll get the kettle roiling with Dmitri Shostakovich’s charming arrangement of “Tea for Two,” recollect the elegant Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in days of yore with Samuel Barber’s “Souvenirs,” and experience sugar-induced hallucinations of dancing tea leaves in Richard Strauss’ high-calorie ballet “Schlagobers,” or “Whipped Cream.”
Lewis Carroll’s Hatter may have been mad, but even he would think twice before imperiling an “unbirthday” with a fidgety monkey. The maddening patter of the 1953 novelty song “The Little Red Monkey” relates a simmering simian’s reactions to violin, euphonium, and tea.
Your eyes will be pinwheeling and your brain will be humming from an overindulgence of caffeine and cake when you join me for “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
