Here, from 1935, Krazy Kat is seduced by the Devil into claiming ownership of Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei.”
The stage is set from the beginning, as we witness various anthropomorphized Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, desperate for a hit, ruthlessly plagiarizing from one another. Krazy, however, has higher standards. Clearly he’s a fan of the classics, as a bust of Schumann is seen perched on a cabinet in the background. His superior attitude makes him a perfect mark for Mephisto. Frustration builds, as he paces a hole in the floor, racking his brain for inspiration.
“Good artists borrow, great ones steal” is a maxim often attributed to Igor Stravinsky (who would have stolen it from Picasso). Who needs inspiration, when the Devil gets the best tunes? The Deceiver tempts Krazy to pilfer from his idol. To this end, he corrupts “Träumerei” into “The Hot Cha Melody.”
Schumann’s spirit becomes so indignant that it returns like Mozart’s Commendatore, only to discover a veritable Pottersville, garish and decadent, in which the Devil’s appropriation has become the number one hit of the day. Schumanngeist determines to exact his revenge on Krazy.
This Krazy Kat is not anything like the George Herriman creation I remember. However, there are some fun caricatures of popular singers of the time.
If the cartoon theme music sounds familiar, it too was cribbed – from the aria “M’appari” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera “Martha!”
Watch here:
You’ll find a more detailed analysis on this blog page:
It seems everywhere I turn these days everyone is playing Schumann – in a way that, judging from the comparatively tepid response to his bicentennial 14 years ago, I would have never thought possible.
Let me be clear from the start that this is not intended to be a “hit piece” on Schumann, who, by any standard, should be regarded as one of the greatest composers who ever lived. When one becomes immersed in his world, it’s not unusual for everything to go topsy-turvy. Intellectual rigor and a literary sensibility are dashed against the rocks of passion. I emerge from the brine, wringing out my clothes, exhilarated, but wondering what the hell happened. At its most personal, his music is like a siren song. But is it for every season?
On the evidence of concert and radio programmers, it would seem so.
Whenever I’m around my digital radio, I swear, two hours will not pass without an encounter with Schumann. Even that ne plus ultra of classical music programmers, Peter Van de Graaff, airs Schumann’s music regularly. My most recent enthusiasm is Yle Klassinen, a classical music service out of Finland. Its playlist is breathtakingly diverse, and yet, all at once, there he is again – Robert Schumann. (Even now, I am listening to Karl Goldmark. The performers: the Robert Schumann Philharmonic!)
Is Schumann the new Brahms?
Perhaps part of the reason we are hearing more Schumann is that we’re oversaturated with music by his star discovery. (I’m not noticing any comparable surge in the performance of music by Albert Dietrich.)
In terms of classical radio, surely this boost is attributable in part to the form’s lamentable race to the bottom, in programming the most, and therefore shortest, selections, allowing for so much variety within a single hour, like dicing the world’s masterpieces into an overwatered gazpacho. If a work is presented complete (even classical radio hosts need to run to the bathroom), the tendency is to go “short.” Hence the insane popularity of Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, which at a half an hour or less is being aired much more frequently now than any of the Brahms’ symphonies. In their complete form, that is. Vapid radio will still drop in the third movement of Brahms 4th symphony (the one adapted and recorded by the progressive rock group Yes) from time to time.
I’m also hearing a lot of Schumann piano music (beyond the ubiquitous “Kinderszenen”) and songs (if it’s a station that isn’t queasy about vocal music) and even substantial chamber works. I haven’t approached it scientifically, but it also seems to me that Schumann is being heard more on live concert programs.
Is it a case of renewed curiosity, now that we’re hearing more about Clara? Is Robert riding Clara’s skirts, as she once rode his coattails? If so, I am not seeing a comparable effect with the Mendelssohns, Felix and his sister Fanny. Not that Felix Mendelssohn ever hurts for performances. It’s just that, like Schumann, everyone seems to turn up their noses and regard him as somehow “second tier.” Or perhaps as seated far to the back of the first tier.
Of course, in the right mood, those of us of a certain disposition have no problem connecting with Schumann’s kaleidoscopic Romanticism – by turns tender and turbulent, lyrical and seething, tormented and perhaps even a little eldritch.
There really is no one else like him – even if, of the great composers, he seems about the furthest away from Tarzan, in every respect, that I can imagine.
Schumann of the Apes, cartoon by Pablo Helguera from 2012
I really missed a trick this morning in not including Robert Schumann on my radio show, “Sweetness and Light.” Today is Schumann’s birthday anniversary, and my theme is June weddings. It would have been perfect had I included Franz Liszt’s arrangement of “Widmung” (“Dedication”), a song Schumann had written for his bride, Clara, as I had four or five minutes to fill at the end of the program. But perhaps it’s best that I didn’t.
For whatever reason, Liszt really rubbed Clara the wrong way. Essentially, everything about him ran counter to what she and her husband thought music should be. But it wasn’t always the case.
Clara first met Liszt in 1838, prior to her marriage. Clara Wieck was 19 years-old. Like everyone else, she was in awe of his superhuman technique, but it also made her feel inadequate, especially when they played piano four-hands.
For his part, Liszt was very complimentary. In a letter to his mistress, Marie d’Agoult, he wrote, “Her compositions are truly remarkable, especially for a woman. They contain a hundred times more inventiveness and real feelings than all former and present fantasias by Thalberg.” Sigismond Thalberg was one of Liszt’s chief rivals. But this wasn’t simply “trash talk.” Liszt was consistently impressed by both Schumanns.
In 1840, he dedicated his “Transcendental Etudes” to Clara. She continued to include his music on her concert programs until 1847. Sadly, familiarity bred contempt, and increasingly she came to find everything about him repugnant. She didn’t like that he was a showboat. She recoiled when he took liberties with the scores he played. And she was totally put off by the indelicacy with which Liszt described her husband’s Piano Quintet as “typically Leipzig.”
Liszt, clueless, continued to make friendly overtures, championing Robert’s music. Robert, for his part, responded cordially. Liszt published a long essay in praise of the artistry of both Schumanns in 1855, but Clara remained implacable.
As the War of the Romantics began to heat up in 1860, with heightened antagonism between the Brahmsians (including the Schumanns) and the New German School (followers of Liszt and Wagner), contact became rare.
In 1884, Clara wrote to Liszt with the aim of copying the correspondence he maintained with her husband, who had died in 1856. Liszt responded that he hadn’t saved any of the letters. That essentially ended all interaction between them.
45 years earlier, in 1839, Schumann completed his “Fantasie in C major,” during an imposed separation from his future wife. Clara’s father, Schumann’s piano teacher, flew into a rage when he discovered their relationship and forbade any further contact between them. (Clara had not yet reached her majority and had no say in the matter.) Following a protracted and acrimonious legal battle, the court found in favor of the young lovers, and the two married the day before Clara turned 21 – at which age she could have done as she pleased!
Schumann wrote to Clara about the “Fantasie,” “The first movement is the most passionate I have ever composed; it is a profound lament on your account.”
Ironically, it was Liszt who received the dedication. Liszt returned the favor by dedicating his own Piano Sonata in B minor to Schumann in 1854.
Clara confided to her diary, “Today, Liszt sent me a Sonata dedicated to Robert and some more pieces, together with a polite note. But those pieces are so creepy! Brahms played them to me and I felt really miserable… This is only blind noise – no more healthy thoughts, everything is confused, one cannot see any clear harmonies! And, what is more, I still have to thank him now – this is really awful.”
Of course, Robert, at 44, had already lost his grip on sanity and was by then confined to an asylum.
With that in mind, on Robert Schumann’s birthday, enjoy his Fantasy in C major.
Henry Daniell, one of Hollywood’s most supercilious villains, hilariously cast as Liszt in “Song of Love” (1947), with Katharine Hepburn as Clara Schumann and Paul Henreid as Robert. As if this weren’t ridiculous enough, Robert Walker plays Brahms!
Hepburn pantomimes selections from Schumann’s “Carnaval.” That’s Arthur Rubinstein on the soundtrack.
Van Cliburn in concert, playing Liszt’s transcription of Schumann’s “Widmung,” written as a wedding present for Clara.
Happy birthday, Robert Schumann!
“Sweetness and Light” streams on KWAX Saturday mornings at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT.
“Oh God! If it be thus, and thou art not a madness and a mockery, I yet might be most happy…” So laments Lord Byron’s Manfred when confronted by the specter of Astarte.
Manfred is the quintessential Byronic hero, a Romantic superman who endures unimaginable sufferings and mysterious guilt in connection with the death of his beloved. He wanders the Alps, longing for extinction, and meets his fate defiantly, rejecting all authority, corporeal and supernatural.
Robert Schumann was intoxicated by Byron’s dramatic poem from the time he first encountered it at the age of 19 in 1829. In 1848, he began to compose music for it, concurrently with that for his “Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust.’” Wrote Schumann, “I have never before devoted myself to a composition with such love and such exertion of my powers as to ‘Manfred.’” The piece was given its first performance in Weimar in 1852, with Franz Liszt conducting.
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear highlights from a recording made 102 years later by Sir Thomas Beecham.
When Beecham came to record Schumann’s incidental music in 1954, it was an act of total reimagination. Unquestionably the work, as written, contains much attractive music. However, if we’re to be completely frank, it can be a bit dramatically static at those times when the music falls silent in deference to florid monologue. Beecham recognized this and enlisted the help of Eugene Goossens and Julius Harrison to assist him in orchestrating a number of Schumann’s piano pieces to be used as underscore for some of the spoken dialogue. He also incorporated a couple of part-songs and even invented a ballet. Fear not! Beecham’s license is nowhere as extreme as that he would later take with Handel’s “Messiah.”
Beecham’s Byronic credentials are unimpeachable. Byron was among his favorite poets. Of course, he also happened to conduct one of the great recordings of “Harold in Italy” (after “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”), with the violist William Primrose. Furthermore, Beecham had been familiar with Schumann’s “Manfred” since at least 1918, when he led two performances of the complete incidental music at the age of 39. Some 36 years later, he decided to resurrect the work via a broadcast performance and then as a program at Royal Festival Hall.
I first encountered this remarkable recording in the 1980s, in the middle of the night, when it was broadcast over the late, lamented WFLN, for 48 years Philadelphia’s classical music station. Henry Varlack used to play it from time to time on his program, “Sleepers Awake.” Having not heard it for a while, I called in to his Friday night/Saturday morning listener request show, and he told me with regret that the record had become so worn that it was no longer suitable for airplay.
Imagine my excitement, then, when I learned in the mid-‘90s that it was being reissued on CD. I promptly special-ordered it from England, and it couldn’t get here fast enough. That was on the Beecham Collection label – alas now long out of print. It has since appeared and disappeared (like Astarte?) on Sony.
The recording features actors, chorus, and orchestra. Laidman Browne may be a bit long-in-the tooth for Byron’s anti-hero, but no one relishes “eeeeeeeeviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllll” quite like him.
I hope you’ll join me for “Byronic Beecham,” 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!
When life gave him syphilis, he made lemonade. Or something like that.
In 1854, after a twenty-year latency, Robert Schumann began to lose his grip on sanity. He complained of a persistent “A” note ringing in his ears, hallucinated that he was being hounded by devils, and hurled himself into the Rhine. He would spend his final years in an asylum, to which he committed himself at the age of 44.
Even in the best of times, Schumann often struggled with what we now call manic-depression or bipolar disorder. His two extremes are reflected in the assumed literary doppelgangers, Florestan (the impetuous) and Eusebius (the introspective), also frequently referenced in his piano music. Evidently, there could be an undercurrent of intensity about him, even when he was at his dreamiest.
Both before and after Schumann’s icy plunge from the bridge, he was at work on his final composition, the “Ghost Variations,” believing the theme to have been dictated to him by the spirit of Mendelssohn or Schubert. In reality, Schumann had used the theme several times before, including, only a few months earlier, in his Violin Concerto.
Clara, his wife, wouldn’t allow the piece to be published. No doubt it held for her extremely personal, likely unpleasant associations. Still, family friend Johannes Brahms, whom Schumann had mentored and championed, would quote it in his own composition, “Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann.”
Brahms dedicated his tribute to Clara, who, awkwardly, also happened to be his secret (?) crush. When Schumann went into the asylum, she was pregnant with her seventh child and left to care for the family herself. She was discouraged from visiting her husband until the very end, for fear of triggering a relapse. In the meantime, Brahms was her only link, as he could enter and leave the sanatorium freely.
The “Ghost Variations” may not be Schumann’s healthiest music, but what do you expect? It is undeniably intimate and achieves a kind of fragile beauty. You won’t encounter it very often.
It’s also bittersweet. Kind of like a glass of lemonade.
