posted 17 April 2004
Newsletter No. 7, April 2004
edited by Martin Anderson
Editorial
The past few months has seen the deaths of a number of friends of the International Forum for Suppressed Music, chief among them two composers and one composer's daughter — Peter Gellhorn , Vilém Tauský and Spoli Mills , who was also a Patron of the IFSM. This issue of the Newsletter carries obituaries of all three — and, in the interests of promoting the music Peter and Vilém have left behind them, I have added worklists for both composers. Indeed, the IFSM is setting up a fund to mark their passing.
Geraldine Auerbach of the IFSM was in near-constant touch with Spoli Mills for the planning of a special Mischa Spoliansky tribute day, intended to feature his Symphony (as yet unperformed), his piano works, his cabaret songs and a theatre piece to be commissioned about him. Her untimely and unexpected death has increased our resolve to present this event at the South Bank Centre in November 2005.
Although both Gellhorn and Tauský were in their early 90s, their deaths came days too soon — quite literally — to allow them the satisfaction of seeing a work of theirs on CD. For the two-disc set, Continental Britons: The Émigré Composers, the fruits of the IFSM's two concerts in the Wigmore Hall in June 2002, is at last available (details under Recordings, below). Our plans were initially hatched in conjunction with Andante, whose plans to develop a series of CDs of such repertoire — music composed under, or after flight from, dictatorship — came to nothing when a change of business partner took them in a different direction. We were delighted to find that Nimbus is very interested in exploring 'suppressed music', in its broadest sense, and our first experience in working with Nimbus, on Continental Britons, has proved extremely heartening: they have shown flexibility, open-mindedness and a concern for quality which encourages us to look forward to working with them in the future.
As promised in the last issue, this IFSM e-newsletter has been prepared with the intention of getting news to its readers in a timely manner. Accordingly, the article on Szymon Laks intended for this issue has again been postponed so as not to hold up the rest.
We are delighted to welcome Jutta Raab-Hansen — author of NS-verfolgter Musiker in England: Spuren deutscher und österreichischer Flüchtlinge in der britischen Musikkultur (von Bockel Verlag, Hamburg, 1996) and now London-based — onto the committee of the IFSM; her knowledge and expertise will be of considerable help in our work. We are also very pleased to welcome the Austrian conductor Gottfried Rabl among the patrons of the IFSM — his efforts on behalf of the symphonies of Egon Wellesz (five of the symphonies are now available on two CPO CDs, and all but No. 5 have now been recorded) have been instrumental in re-establishing Wellesz's reputation as a major twentieth-century symphonic voice.
Once again, of course, I encourage you all to submit news, reviews, articles, etc., to the newsletter. The reviews section in this issue as last consists entirely of pieces written by Steve Schwartz and myself, and I for one would be delighted to find this dominance undermined!
I. Articles
Why 'Entartete Musik'?
by Michael Haas
As reported in the previous IFSM e-newsletter, the 'ZaterdagMatinee' season
in Amsterdam in 2004-5 features the largest retrospective of 'Entartete
Musik' ever mounted by a single organisation, including no fewer than
four operas (Schreker, Zemlinsky, Schulhoff, Wellesz) as well as numerous
orchestral and chamber concerts.
Full details on all events can be found at
www.zaterdagmatinee.nl
The article below is Michael Haas' edited English version of the introduction
to the season brochure.
'Entartete Musik' has become the term for something that is almost a musical genre, in much the same way that we speak of 'Venetian Baroque', or 'French Impressionism'. In fact, the term is an umbrella concept that allowed unscrupulous politicians to justify deeming music 'unsuitable for public consumption' and for reasons which went beyond pure aesthetics. In an attempt to justify racial theories, backed up by pseudo-science, draconian measures were taken to stamp out not only the cultural contribution of a long-established European tradition, but the adherents of the European tradition itself: Judaism.
In Ernst Krenek's memoires, Im Atem der Zeit, he recounts a conversation with a Viennese Bishop who was complaining of 'Jewish composers and their atonal artistic pollution'. Krenek retorts to the Bishop's astonishment that in his opinion, of the important so-called 'atonal' composers being performed at the time in Vienna, he could only recall one with Jewish ancestry: Arnold Schönberg. The others — himself included, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern — were all Catholics. At this, the Bishop nearly fell from his chair in astonishment. 'But how could they write such degenerate music if they weren't Jews?' Herein lay the crux of an historic contradiction: Jews were being blamed for a musical development that they were not responsible for. The man who thought up tone-rows in music, something known today as 'twelve-tone' or 'serial music', was Josef Matthias Hauer, another non-Jewish Austrian, whose music 'had the effect on Schönberg that Satie's had on Debussy', as Egon Wellesz mentions in his Oxford lectures on Schönberg. Nor was Schönberg the first to compose 'atonal' music, a term he himself tried not to use until much later. To his students in Vienna, among them Berg, Webern and Wellesz, he mentioned that his music was absolutely not 'atonal', but 'atonic', that is music not dominated by the presence of the tonic.
What Vienna's Bishop was demonstrating was the effect of propaganda in action. The words 'atonal', 'Jewish' and 'degenerate' had become so intertwined and interchangeable, that the logic of the resulting policies could never be questioned. For the Nazis, the Jews were a 'race'. For the Nazis, in fact, Slavs or Mediterraneans were other races: even the concept of 'race', as used in the early part of the century, is so far from our understanding of it today that we cannot fully comprehend its misuse. Add to this misuse an unhealthy dose of pseudo-science, which believed that any exposure to works by 'inferior' races would somehow have a biologically degenerating effect on the listener, and one has an argument that provided an adequate basis for outlawing anything that does not accord with the personal prejudices of the ruling parties. In much the way that 'the fight against terrorism' is frequently used today to infringe basic liberties, so in the minds of people 70 years ago could preservation from racial degeneration justify the most culturally damaging of actions. At a stroke, Jewish composers, musicians and performers were banned, despite the fact that the vast majority used a relatively traditional musical language. Ironically, the atonal avant-garde was also banned because it suited conservative elements within the Nazi propaganda machine that people should believe it sounded 'Jewish'. But even the Nazis realised that it would be unreasonable to expect the larger part of the population to swallow so many illogical policies, all easily traceable to either medieval bigotry or personal artistic prejudice, and so a new 'scientific' term was sought: 'entartet', an obsolete word from nineteenth-century criminology. It was perfect. It meant degenerate in a progressive, biological sense. The music wasn't dangerous because of its Jewish authorship, or because it was atonal, it was dangerous because it was the result of 'biological degeneration', or 'Entartung'. It was as bad for the consumer as eating an egg which had passed its 'sell-by' date. Biological processes had taken place in art and music which made it dangerous to consume. It had to be banned and its practitioners, i.e., composers and performers, had to be banned along with it.
Music was the most quickly learned language of assimilation, says Leon Botstein, the eminent American musicologist and conductor. Herein lies the possible explanation of why so many popular composers were Jewish. Austrian Jews were granted full civil rights in 1867, German ones two years later. By this time, it was a pure formality since many Jewish citizens of the two empires had already started the assimilation process. By allowing Jews to study in universities, marry whom they liked, live where they wanted and take advantage of all of life's opportunities, the last barriers had been removed. What had already de facto started before 1867, gathered steam and surged forwards so that in a little over a generation, a majority of Vienna's lawyers and doctors were Jewish. Jews made up only approximately 12% of the population yet they represented a third of all students at Vienna's Conservatory. This environment was clearly not conducive to the development of cultural revolutionaries. Though most bourgeois Jews in Vienna tended to support left-of-centre political parties, it was because the others on the right were German nationalistic in an otherwise pluralistic state and anti-Semitic. The tools to prosperity had only recently been placed into the hands of central Europe's Jews. Most were happy to use them well and advance themselves as far as their natural talents would allow. Not only did they advance themselves, they brought a new philosophy and attitude towards support of the arts. Indeed, it could be argued that it was the liberation of this dynamic social sector that led to the flourishing of the arts at the turn of the twentieth century. Central Europe's newly enfranchised citizens would consume, support and disseminate the arts beyond anyone's expectations. The Jewish families who supported Klimt and Schiele, such as the Lederers, Wittgensteins, Bloch Bauers, Zuckerkandls and the Waerendorfers, or the musical 'salons' of the Wertheimers or the Wittgensteins give an idea of this new and dynamic haut bourgeoisie. Few held to ideas of destroying the very structures that had allowed them to do so well. This was as true of society, as it was of art.
If the list of atonal composers is notable for the absence of large numbers of Jewish composers, so the lists of popular and traditional genres are notable for the dominance of Jewish ones. Ralph Benatzky in his diaries wrote that he and Franz Lehár were the only non-Jewish operetta composers he could think of (he was conveniently, though not maliciously, forgetting Robert Stolz!). 'As far as librettists are concerned, I cannot think of a single one who isn't Jewish', he goes on to write. Jewish composers wrote countless hit songs, and dominated popular music to the extent that one wonders how the general population did not rebel at the removal of such popular stars as Jan Kiepura and Richard Tauber, The Weintraub Sychopators, The Comedian Harmonists and many others, or the banning of the most popular of Viennese chanson, such as Das Fiakerlied or Fein, fein schmeckt uns der Wein; or Berlin Schlager such as Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt, Durch Berlin Fließt immer noch die Spree or Allein in einer Großen Stadt.
It could be argued that two figures set the tone for much of this period. They were both Viennese, and both went to Berlin, where their composition classes would produce a string of brilliant young progressives who after 1933, found musical life under the new regime impossible: Franz Schreker and his friend Arnold Schönberg. Both men were culturally typical of the day: Schreker was the son of a Jewish photographer and a non-Jewish Hungarian minor aristocrat. In any case, typical of the day, religion had been discarded and Schreker most likely never set foot in a synagogue. Schönberg was a convert to Protestantism. Much of this sort of 'conversion' had been the result of pre-Nazi anti-Semitism, such as practised by the mayor of Vienna, Dr Karl Lueger, and his Social Christian Party at the turn of the century. As a devout Catholic, he and his party viewed Judaism solely as a religion. As soon as someone converted, they were allowed to hold municipal positions from which they had been previously banned. Though Mahler was the music director of the Imperial Opera, and the Emperor was a well-known philo-Semite (refusing on frequent occasions even to meet Karl Lueger) it would be in this environment that Mahler would also 'convert'.
With operatic successes such as Der ferne Klang, Die Gezeichneten and Der Schatzgräber playing on virtually every German and Austrian stage, Schreker was the most performed living composer in the German-speaking world between 1912 and 1922. His musical language was so much the essence of Klimt and the other Successionists that he was commissioned to write his ballet Der Geburtstag der Infantin for the opening of their startling new building next to the Imperial Academy of Art. Schönberg was the genius who decided things had to change suddenly and radically rather than organically. Egon Wellesz wrote in his Oxford lectures that Schönberg somehow sensed the explosion to come following the collapse of the Empire and the old order, and the urge to write in a new and abrasive language was a result of this. This speculation has been often repeated but there can be no doubt that progressives such as Schreker and Zemlinsky were suddenly left rather on the sidelines compared to Schönberg's radical departure from the hitherto accepted musical principle of functional tonality. His twelve-tone writing would not come until well after his experiments with free tonality and atonality. Wellesz also writes that, unlike other composers who were happy to experiment within tonality, he would incorporate huge intervallic leaps while at the same time, removing as much of the music's sense of natural pulse as possible. What pushed Schönberg was not the gradual transition into another language, but the use of a confrontational idiom which hardly anyone at the time could understand. If Schreker was the musical equivalent of Jugendstil, Schönberg was the equivalent of Expressionism. His total mastery in all compositional techniques meant that what he tried to say in this new language demanded to be heard. Though Mahler was perplexed, he too was impressed. Schreker, not only a colleague, but a close personal friend of Schönberg, was another master of all hitherto developed musical and compositional techniques. The students in their classes would nearly all be forced into exile. Yet these composition classes stood like two pillars supporting the emerging aesthetic of a new age.
However long the shadow as Schönberg cast over Berlin and Vienna between the Wars, he stood opposite another giant whose influence was arguably even stronger: Stravinsky. The classical clarity which gripped much of young Europe of the time would find its German voice not only in the likes of Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch, but also amongst many of Franz Schreker's composition students, such as Berthold Goldschmidt and Karol Rathaus. Outside of German-speaking Europe, his influence was immense, and perhaps nowhere more so than amongst the younger generation of Czech composers. The music of Hans Krása, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Erwin Schulhoff share characteristics that are not only typical of Czech surrealism but also display a clarity reminiscent of contemporary French music with an angular grotesquery that recognised Stravinsky as the leading new voice of the day. Yet, as different as each of the composers remained, there was something distinctively Czech about them. Their worlds moved seamlessly between dream and reality with extraordinary technical skill and clarity. And though many of the most important figures who came to prominence in Vienna, such as Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler, Ernst Krenek and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were themselves Czechs, those who remained in Bohemia and Moravia developed a sound-world which would be denied the prominence of other distinctive musical developments of the same period. That is the result of a near-total extinguishing of all of Czechoslovakia's most talented composers by 1945.
Every country that would fall to the Reich of a Thousand Years would equally forfeit a generation of bright young composers: Holland and France as well as Poland, the Ukraine, Italy and Greece. But this music has now started to re-enter and enrich the repertoire after a long period of silence. Behind every composer lies a musical personality which demands to be heard, not only to learn and understand his or her distinctive and individual world, but also to understand the plurality of the musical world we live in today.
2. The New Jewish School - An Unknown Chapter in Music History
by Jascha Nemtsov
The topic of my essay is Jewish art-music and, specifically, a group of composers who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, created for the first time in music history a national Jewish style in the art music. This group is called sometimes 'the national Jewish school' or 'the Russian Jewish school' or 'young Jewish school' or even 'St Petersburg group' (this name is wrong because it wasn't confined to St Petersburg at all). I prefer the name 'New Jewish School'.
The New Jewish School can be compared to other national currents which have formed the European musical landscape since the middle of the nineteenth century. But whereas the Russian, Czech, Spanish or Norwegian national music was able to unfold and establish itself in the cultural conscience, the development of the Jewish school was violently terminated after only three decades by Stalinism and National Socialism.
Jewish art music is often confronted with a kind of mistrust: 'Is there such a thing?' Some time ago I participated in a festival project devoted to Jewish music with many concerts, film and theatre performances, a scientific conference and so on. But the title of the entire project - 'Jewish music? Portrayal and self-portrayal' — appeared a bit strange. This question mark after the words 'Jewish music' irritated me, and during the conference one could see that this question mark reflected an attitude towards Jewish music which held it to be something questionable, something which had to prove its existence.
I asked myself then what the reason for this scepticism could be. In fact, I think there are several reasons. The first is a common ignorance: when you don't know about something, for you it doesn't exist. And who really knows Jewish art music — even if you've been to a few klezmer concerts?
Another reason: Jewish art music is expected to be something rather exotic, completely unlike every other music; in other words, so to speak, every note is expected to be Jewish. When these expectations are not confirmed, one says there isn't any special Jewish music.
Reason three: many people still cannot accept the term 'national' in connection with the Jews. 'What is there in common between you and an Ethiopian Jew?', they ask. For them the Jews are not more than a religious community, as they were perceived in the nineteenth century. They fail to see the whole process of forming of the Jewish nation, Jewish national culture and Jewish national music as a part of it.
And finally a misunderstanding plays a role on the field of Jewish art music: the terms 'Jewish music' and 'Jewish composer' are often mixed up. The fact that most composers of Jewish origin didn't write Jewish music is used as an argument to prove that Jewish music doesn't exist.
The Origins of Jewish Art-Music
Jewish art-music appeared in Russia. Of course, it was no accident. In
1881 the Jewish national movement later known as Zionism was founded there.
In the same year the assassination of Tsar Alexander II was used as an
excuse for the first bloody anti-Semitic pogroms in the modern Russian
history. There were many victims. These pogroms and the following suppressions,
which included new anti-Semitic laws, destroyed the illusions of assimilation
or, at least, integration in the Russian society. Many Russian Jewish
intellectuals came to the conclusion that only the reconstruction of a
national Jewish state could be a solution of the Jewish problem. One of
the most important premises for a national life should be a cultural rebirth.
The ideas of that kind were the ideological basis of the national Jewish
music.
More than 5 millions Jews lived in Russia at that time. Most of them (about 95 per cent) were forced to stay in the so-called Pale of Settlement — an area in the West of Russia that was the biggest ghetto in the world. They were not allowed to settle in other parts of the country and were separated from other groups of the Russian population. So they preserved not only their religious traditions but also their culture and among others their musical folklore. It became the musical basis of the national Jewish music.
Several young Jewish musicians, most of them students at the conservatory in St Petersburg, absorbed ideas the national rebirth. In 1908 in St Petersburg some of them founded a Society for Jewish Folk Music. It was the first explicitly Jewish musical institution in the world. At first it was not really clear for these young musicians what the goals of the Society should be and what music should be fostered as Jewish. Fortunately one of the members had already had some experience on this field. His name was Zusman Kiselgof and he was not a professional musician. Jewish musical folklore was his hobby. Beginning in 1902 he went to the Pale of Settlement and collected Jewish folksongs there. His wife came from the village Lubavichi, an important Chassidic centre, her relatives lived there and so Kiselgof went to Lubavichi and wrote down numerous Chassidic songs. After the Society for Jewish Folk Music was founded he put his materials at the disposal of the young composers. A short time later the first arrangements of these and other songs were written. They were published and performed in concerts not only in St Petersburg but throughout the country. The activities of the Society soon became an important part of the new Jewish culture in Russia. By 1913 it had already over 1,000 members and branches were opened in seven cities.
Soon some of the composers were no longer content with the materials they had obtained from Kiselgof and tried to find other areas of Jewish traditional music besides Chassidic tunes. Lazare Saminsky was the first to point out liturgical music as an important, probably the most important, part of Jewish music. He lived in the Caucasus, since he was then serving in the army and he had the opportunity to visit villages of the Georgian Jews in the mountains. There he heard for the first time the biblical cantillations: as these Jews lived in separation from the rest of Jewry, they had managed to preserve this music in a very pure way.
These cantillations, also called tropes, are the motifs for performing of the text of the Holy Script. The motifs are supposed to be very old: they probably derive from the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (the centre of Jewish spiritual and political life until the destruction by the Rome in the first century). So they sound very archaic, since they consist of a few tones within a small intervallic range. Every motif is noted down with a special mark called an accent. It is a very complicated, diversified system because one and the same mark stands in different texts for different motifs. Learning these cantillation motifs is a part of Jewish religious education.
After his return to St Petersburg Saminsky lectured to the Society about his discovery and made a considerable impression on the other composers. They began to study biblical cantillation and to integrate it in their works. Using the short cantillation motifs opened new possibilities for them. They were no longer forced to cite a complete song-melody and thus were now able to shape the musical form absolutely freely. This new source also brought about a considerable refreshment and renewal of their harmonic language.
Exile and Return
Soon after the revolution in 1917 a period of economical collapse and
political chaos began in Russia. The Society for Jewish Folk music had
to give up its activities. Most of the leading members emigrated. Some
went to Berlin where they founded two musical publishing houses —
Jibneh and Juwal. It was absurd, of course, that two musical publishing
houses from the same group of composers existed at the same time in the
same city in competition: it would have been much better if they had joined
forces. What made that impossible was ideological difference. Juwal, headed
by Joel Engel, represented with its folklore arrangements the aesthetic
programme of the early phase of the St Petersburg Society. Jibneh, under
Joseph Achron and Mikhail Gnesin, proclaimed the new 'Hebraic' style based
on synagogal cantillation.
A few years later the economic crisis wiped both Juwal and Jibneh from the Berlin musical stage. Some of the composers went to Palestine and the USA, others went back to Russia where what seemed like a new liberal period had begun — the New Economic Policy (NEP). This policy enabled again private business — small factories and stores for example. Jewish private business provided the financial support for the establishment of a new Jewish musical institution — the Society for Jewish Music in Moscow. The most important composers of this new Society were Mikhail Gnesin, the brothers Alexander and Grigori Krein and Alexander Veprik. Founded in 1923, the Society organised several dozens of concerts, mainly with works of the 'Hebraic' direction. A number of renowned Russian and Russian Jewish musicians took part in these concerts, among them the pianists Maria Yudina and Samuil Feinberg, the cellist Raya Garbuzova, the members of the Beethoven Quartet and many others. These concerts were regarded by the contemporaries as a valuable part of the Moscow cultural life. They encouraged also young Jewish composers to write music in Jewish style. Hundreds of pieces — mainly chamber music and songs — were created in those years under the influence of the Society.
The Suppression of Jewish Culture
The liberal period in the Soviet Russia didn't last long. Even before
the Society was founded, the whole Hebraic sphere of Jewish culture had
been banned. The only Jewish language permitted was Yiddish. From 1925
onwards, the Society came under increasing political pressure. A complete
re-orientation was demanded. So the composers gave up the Hebraic idiom
and began again to involve Yiddish folklore in their works. That explains
the peculiar zigzag stylistical development of Jewish music in Russia:
from Yiddish folklore to the synagogue music and then from the synagogue
music back to Yiddish folklore.
This re-orientation was not enough to prevent the dissolution of the Society in 1931, along with many other Jewish cultural and educational institutions. The time known in Russia as 'the Great Break' brought about also the end of the Jewish art-music in this country. In the 1930s Jewish culture in Russia was reduced to a necessary minimum for representative use and was later completely destroyed.
But at that time the New Jewish School was no longer confined to Russia. It also had a considerable influence on international Jewish musical life. Just as its activities in Russia had almost come to a standstill, this music spread throughout Europe, with Vienna as the most outstanding centre. In 1928 a Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music was founded in Vienna. Its protagonists were Joachim Stutschewsky, Israel Brandmann and Juliusz Wolfsohn.
The cellist and composer Joachim Stutschewsky was the moving spirit of this institution. In the beginning of the 1920s he had belonged to the Arnold Schoenberg circle. As a co-founding member of the Kolisch Quartet (first called the Vienna Quartet) he participated in numerous performances of works by the Second Viennese School. After 1928 he devoted himself almost entirely to the new Jewish music. He organised the most concerts of the Society, performed as cellist at these concerts and wrote articles for Jewish press. He also composed in a very original Jewish style. Stutschewsky, moreover, had contacts with Jewish organisations in almost all European countries which were interested in organising concerts of modern Jewish music. He helped them in getting scores, shaping the programmes and engaging the musicians. In his archive in Tel Aviv one can find hundreds of letters to and from these organisations proving that the music by the New Jewish School was successfully performed not only in Vienna but almost everywhere in Europe at those time. For the most part it was the music by the Russian Jewish composers, but Jewish composers from other countries were also represented, like Stutschewsky and Brandmann in Austria, Aron Marco Rothmuller in Yugoslavia, Lazare Weiner in the USA, Vladimir Dyck in France and many others all over the world who were all contributing to this repertoire in the 1930s.
But this hopeful development was suddenly broken off by the Nazi invasion in Austria and then of other European countries. After the World War II the New Jewish School was completely forgotten. Only a few years ago performances again began to take place, and a number of recordings were made. The centre of musicological research about the New Jewish School is now the Potsdam University where a centre for Jewish music is being established. In May 2004 an international congress about 'The New Jewish School in Music' will be organised in Potsdam (cf. 'Academic Activities', below ).
3. Rediscovering Mieczyslaw Weinberg
by Martin Anderson
The release of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Fifth Symphony and First Sinfonietta from Chandos heralds the start of one of what ought to be one of the most important series of recordings in years, one which should reveal to a largely unsuspecting musical world the recent presence of a master symphonist, one of the most powerful, and powerfully affecting, composers of the second half of the twentieth century — and also, one gratefully observes, one of its most prolific, so that even when this series has run its course, there will still be an immense amount of Weinberg awaiting discovery.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg is not, of course, an entirely unknown quantity.
Olympia did him proud, from the early 1990s on, with a number of orchestral
CDs licensed from Melodiya and several original
recordings of chamber and instrumental music — seventeen CDs to date
(details at http://www.olympia-cd.com).
Claves, too, came to the party a few years back with a fine disc of the
Chamber Symphonies Nos. 1, 3 and 4 (CD 50-9811) and now again,
just released in a mixed Russian programme (CD 50-9811), with the Three
Palms (relatively modernist Lermontov settings from 1977) for soprano
and string quartet; the performers are Elena Vassilieva, who sings with
a caricature Russian wobble, and the Quatuor Sine Nomine (and Weinberg's
name is misspelled 'Vainberg' — more on that below). Naxos has just
brought out (8.557194) a pairing of the Violin Concertos of Myaskovsky
and Weinberg (spelt wrongly here, too), in a performance spoiled by the
consistently poor intonation of the soloist, Ilya Grubert. BIS, too, has
released the Weinberg Trio for flute, viola and harp (or piano), Op. 127,
with Sharon Bezaly (flute), Nobuko Imai (viola) and Ronald Brautigam (piano)
in a programme of Duruflé and Hahn (BIS-CD-1439). Of equal importance
to the appearance of Weinberg's music on CD is the fact that it now has
a western outlet, in the form of the publishers Peer Music and Sikorski,
both based in Hamburg.
Weinberg's life has the makings of a film script — rather a horrific one at times. He was born in Warsaw, on 8 December 1919, into a musical family: His father was a composer and violinist in a Jewish theatre there. He made his first public appearance as a pianist at the age of ten, and two years later became a student at the Warsaw Academy of Music, then under the direction of no lesser a figure than Karol Szymanowski, and there he took piano lessons from Josef Turczynski. But then, as for millions of others, years of hell descended. Weinberg's graduation in 1939 was soon followed by Hitler's invasion. He therefore fled eastwards, taking shelter first in Minsk, where he studied composition with Vassily Zolotarev (another composer whose work deserves re-evaluation). Soon after his flight, his entire family was killed, burned alive by the Nazis, although it wasn't until the mid-1960s that he was able to establish what had happened to them. Two years after the invasion of Poland, as Hitler now pushed into Russia, Weinberg again had to flee, this time finding work at the opera house in Tashkent, in Uzbekistan.
It was there, in 1943, that he took the action that was perhaps to be the most decisive for the future pattern of his life: he sent the manuscript of his newly completed First Symphony in the care of his father-in-law, the eminent Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels — to Shostakovich in Moscow. Shostakovich's response was typically helpful and immediate: Weinberg received an official invitation to travel to Moscow, where he was to spend the rest of his life, living largely by his compositions, though he also made many appearances as a pianist. One of the most prestigious was when — in October 1967, with Vishnevskaya, Oistrakh, and Rostropovich — he played in the first performance of Shostakovich's Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok, replacing the ailing composer. And when Shostakovich presented his latest orchestral works to the Composers' Union and to the Soviet Ministry of Culture, it was generally in four-hand versions in which Weinberg was his habitual accompanist (in 1954, for example, they recorded the Tenth Symphony at the piano — a document of immense importance).
Having only just escaped the Nazis with his life, Weinberg was not to find matters much easier under Stalin. During the night of 12 January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was brutally murdered on Stalin's orders, an early victim of the anti-Semitic obsession that was to be a feature of his last years in power — it was rumoured that Stalin had already ordered that four massive concentration camps be constructed in Kazakhstan, in preparation for his own version of the Final Solution. When, in February 1953, Weinberg himself was arrested, it seemed that he, too, might 'disappear'. Shostakovich immediately acted true to form, taking the step, one of almost foolhardy generosity and courage, of writing to Stalin's police chief Beria to protest Weinberg's innocence — this when, only five years earlier, Shostakovich's music had been banned and he had been removed from all his official positions. The conventional reaction of a Soviet citizen when an acquaintance was arrested was to put as much distance as possible between oneself and the 'guilty' party and his family; far from such understandable self-preservation, Shostakovich also went to see Weinberg's wife, Natalya (née Vovsi-Mikhoels) and they agreed that, if she, too, were arrested, he and his wife would adopt their daughter. But fortune intervened: Stalin's death on 5 March removed the imminent danger; a month later Mikhoels was posthumously rehabilitated in the Soviet press, and soon after Weinberg himself was released, at which point Shostakovich and the Weinbergs joyfully tore up the adoption document.
Weinberg's association with Shostakovich was not based only on mutual personal esteem. Shostakovich often spoke very highly of Weinberg's music (calling him 'one of the most outstanding composers of the present day'); he dedicated his Tenth String Quartet to him; and in February/March 1975, although terminally ill (he was to die on 9 August), he found the energy to travel from Moscow to Leningrad to attend all the rehearsals for the premiere of Weinberg's opera The Madonna and the Soldier. Weinberg's identification with Shostakovich's musical language was such that to the innocent ear the best of his own music might also pass muster as very good Shostakovich. Weinberg was quite unabashed, stating with unsettling directness that 'I am a pupil of Shostakovich. Although I have never had lessons from him, I count myself as his pupil, as his flesh and blood'. But there is much more to Weinberg than these external similarities of style, although his music — much of which achieves greatness — has yet to have the exposure that will allow his individuality to be fully recognised. It also embraces folk idioms from his native Poland, as well as Jewish and Moldavian elements; and towards the end of his career he found room for dodecaphony, though usually set in a tonal framework. His evident taste for humor, from the light and deft to biting satire, was complemented by a natural feeling for the epic: The Twelfth Symphony, for instance, dedicated to the memory of Shostakovich, effortlessly sustains a structure almost an hour in length; and Symphonies Nos. 17, 18 and 19 form a vast trilogy entitled On the Threshold of War.
The list of Weinberg's compositions is enormous and deserves serious investigation both by musicians and record companies. There are no fewer than 22 symphonies (the last to be completed, Kaddish, is dedicated to the memory of the Jews who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, Weinberg donating the manuscript to the Yad va-Shem memorial in Israel; the 22nd was finished in piano score though not fully orchestrated); four Chamber Symphonies; two sinfoniettas; seven concertos (variously for violin, cello, clarinet, flute and trumpet); seventeen string quartets; nineteen sonatas for piano solo or in combination with violin, viola, cello, double-bass or clarinet; more than 150 songs; a Requiem (to secular texts by Garcia Lorca and others: a Soviet composer couldn't write a real Requiem); and an astonishing amount of music for the stage — seven operas, three operettas, two ballets, and incidental music for 65 films and cartoons, plays, radio productions and circus performances.
Weinberg was never a Party member, although he turned in his fair share of celebratory 'socialist realist' commissions. But the horrors he had lived through underlined his genuine antipathy to war, which was far from the empty harrumphing of the Soviet peace movement. It can be heard in (for example) his treatment of the theme of death in his passionately humanist Sixth Symphony (1963), where one of the three settings he sets for boys' voices, after a breakneck orchestral scherzo, harrowingly describes the mangled bodies of children murdered by the Nazis — an image that, after the slaughter of his own family, would have been desperately real for him.
Weinberg died just too early — on 26 February 1996 — to benefit from the revival of interest in his music. He spent his last months in his Moscow flat, confined to bed by ill health, often in considerable pain and afflicted by a deep depression occasioned by the wholesale neglect of his music — an unworthy end to a career the importance of which is now beginning to be recognised. Not before time.
It's worth adding a word on the spelling of Weinberg's surname. For years the first recordings of his music to appear in the west presented him as Vainberg — and Moisei Vainberg, at that. But spelling his surname as Vainberg merely perpetuates an inaccurate transliteration of his surname back from the Cyrillic transliteration of Weinberg — the original, Polish spelling of his family name, and the one he insisted later in life. And he became Moisei rather than Mieczyslaw as he fled into the Soviet Union, with the Nazis murderously hot on his tail. An anti-Semitic border-guard, establishing that Weinberg was Jewish, simply filled in 'Moisei' on his papers — rather as the Nazis insisted that all Jews be called Israel or Sarah — and that was it: you didn't argue with officialdom in Stalin's Russia.
Now, with a series of new recordings from Chandos that will take Weinberg's music to a major international audience, a monograph currently being written by Per Skans for Toccata Press, my own publishing imprint, and with two more Weinberg projects in store from my own label-to-be, Toccata Classics (more of that in a few months' time!), perhaps Weinberg will now be able to claim his rightful place in the pantheon of major twentieth-century composers.
There's a growing band of musicians standing up for Weinberg these days,
though it's still something of a pioneer corps. One of them is Gabriel
Chmura, born in Poland and raised in Israel, who has been Music Director
of the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice since the
2001-2 season. I first met him when he was looking for a home for the
series of Weinberg recordings he was initiating with his orchestra and
he wondered if Toccata Classics might be interested. Well, it would indeed
have been, but now the project has found an admirable home chez Chandos
which will bring his music the kind of exposure that he has long deserved.
I asked Chmura first how he came into contact with Weinberg's music. 'By
chance, actually. I was invited to conduct in a festival of Jewish music
in Amsterdam with the chamber orchestra of the Dutch radio. I was looking
for something that wasn't Mendelssohn and Schoenberg, and the director
said: "Why don't you look at Weinberg?" I had never heard of
Weinberg! Then I went and looked and couldn't find anything. Finally I
found some recordings and I got really very much interested.' This was
before Chmura was appointed to the position in Katowice, was it? 'Oh,
yes. It's six, seven, eight years ago. Then I conducted the Seventh Symphony,
for strings and harpsichord. Then a musician told me that his first wife
lived in Israel, so I contacted her and we spent time talking to each
other. I had to conduct in Warsaw before I was music director in Katowice,
and so I suggested the Eighth Symphony, The Flowers of Poland,
which sets text of Tuwim, who is a national hero in Poland. I thought
this would be something that they knew and wouldn't have been surprised
if they had said: "Oh, we just did it two years ago". But they
said: "Who? Weinberg? Never heard of him"! So then I did it
in Warsaw and it started. I tried to get a recording contract but nobody
was interested. They said nobody would buy it, or it was already done
because there were some Melodiya recordings which appeared on Olympia.
That went on until I became music director in Katowice. One of the first
things I did was to record the Fifth Symphony, and I sent
some copies to recording companies, and to my surprise everybody wanted
it. If you have your orchestra, you are in a position to do something.
Maybe also the times had changed. Now we're with Chandos and I hope it's
going to continue.' So if this CD goes well, it might be the first of
how many? 'We have a contract for three years, with a continuation every
year. First, we have to see how it's received and whether it gets good
reviews, and second, and perhaps not less important for them, how are
the sales.'
Was the Weinberg project something that Chmura had to force through institutional reluctance in Poland, or was it something that everyone embraced with enthusiasm? 'The orchestra likes it, especially after all the modern stuff they have to record. But it wasn't easy from the beginning, because in Poland nobody knew him. For them, it's Polish; it's not Polish, it's Russian; it's not Russian. And some of the works are very good, and some are a little Stalinist. It's not that I claimed that this is the greatest composer we ever had; I had really to find the best works. And I recorded the Fifth Symphony for the radio; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to do it.' It's a bit strong to describe some of Weinberg's music as Stalinist when he would almost certainly have been killed if Stalin hadn't died in a timely manner. 'Well, in some of the things in Shostakovich you have this socialist realism — everybody had to do it. And I always said that if only half of the music of Weinberg is good, that's enough to make him a great composer.'
The comparison was bound to come up: Weinberg's music does bear a superficial similarity to Shostakovich — and he did make that claim himself — but the better one knows Weinberg's works, the more one can hear that he is his own man. 'I think you are right. In the beginning it's like when you hear Ravel, you hear Debussy. You can put those guys together — the orchestration is similar, the mood is similar — but they are two different personalities. Weinberg is the more melodic one, the more epic one; he's telling you a story. Shostakovich is maybe the more Stalinist one! He's more cynical, more sarcastic. If Weinberg sometimes uses sarcasm, it's not in the same way that Shostakovich uses it. And there's also the Jewish aspect: Jewish folklore dominates in Weinberg's music much more, of course, than in Shostakovich.' Of course, the interest that Shostakovich developed in Jewish music in the 1940s must have helped bring them together as well. 'I've heard from Weinberg's biographer, Per Skans, that Shostakovich's From Jewish Folk Poetry was actually inspired by Weinberg, not vice versa, and also the Sixth Symphony — which has a children's chorus talking about the Holocaust — is Op. 79, the same opus number of From Jewish Folk Poetry. And it's not Shostakovich who has influenced Weinberg — there are many musicologists who say just the opposite.' Weinberg, indeed, is a more spontaneous melodist and contrapuntist than Shostakovich: he writes far more fluently. 'Yes, yes: no doubt. And look, the fact that we are comparing both composers raises the level of Weinberg, of course. And we can do it without shame because it's not a sport, and we can discuss these things.' Well, there's testimony to the quality of Weinberg's music in the very fact that Shostakovich himself had such a high regard for it. 'And he was right.'
Chmura is very enthusiastic about the companion piece on the CD, the First Sinfonietta, which he thinks 'is a really great piece. It's a piece I would love to take on tour. We will have a UK tour in 2005 with my orchestra and one of the pieces I would like to put in the programme is the First Sinfonietta. But first I have to convince my manager, IMG, to propose it to the organisers. I hope they're going to listen to it, and some might maybe take it. It would be great just to let the public hear it not just on the record but in a live performance. Before it was released, I played it for some good friends of mine, many of them musicians, and they were all really thrilled and asked: "How is it we didn't know this piece?" My first reaction, when I studied the piece, was the second movement was the most Jewish piece I had come across, even taking all of Bloch together. It has a clarinet solo which when we rehearsed it was fine: It was a normal musician and he played the normal way — forte was forte, piano was piano, phrasing was phrasing. But when I heard it, I said: "Look, this is not the way to play. It should be played sometimes out of tune, sometimes a little jazzy — why don't you listen to some klezmer music?" In Poland, especially in Kraków, klezmer music is quite well known — there are so many ensembles trying to imitate or reconstruct the klezmer ensembles. He came in the next day and played it with the famous Jewish clarinet vibrato and this is how it should be. We worked it a little bit through, and that's how you hear it on the recording. Weinberg knew why he put the clarinet there, and I like it this way.'
What are the plans for the next CD in the series? 'We are going to do the Fourth Symphony, the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes and the Second Sinfonietta. Then I would like to do the Eighth Symphony, The Flowers of Poland, which has never been recorded. But I have to arrange for a choir and to see with Chandos who pays for what. That's going to be quite expensive.'
It will be money well spent.
First published in Fanfare, Vol. 28, No. 1, May/June 2004.
II. News
CDs
Continental Britons: The Émigré Composers
The two-CD set of performances taken from the two IFSM concerts in the
Wigmore Hall in June 2002 is now available. It is published by Nimbus,
with the catalogue number NI 5730/1. The contents are as follows:
CD1
Wellesz Octet, Op. 67; Geistliches Lied, Op. 23, for medium voice,
violin, viola and piano; Kirschblütenlieder, Op. 8, for voice
and piano
Spinner Zwei Kleine Stücke for violin and piano
Goldschmidt Fantasy for oboe, cello and harp
Gellhorn Intermezzo for violin and piano
Tauský Coventry: A Meditation for string quartet
CD2
Gál Sonata in B flat major, Op. 17, for violin and piano; Fünf
Melodien, Op. 33, for medium voice and piano
Goldschmidt The Old Ships for voice and piano
Seiber Sonata for violin and piano, Op. 17
Reizenstein Quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn
Rankl War, Op. 10: No. 4, 'They', and No. 7, 'Böhmisches Rekruntenlied';
Sieben Lieder für Baritone, Op. 6, No. 6, 'The Whim'
To purchase this double CD for the special introductory price of £18.99
(plus postage and packing), please e-mail continentalbrits[at]jmi.org.uk.
Kletzki Third Symphony and Flute Concerto forthcoming from BIS
Readers who were intrigued by Tim Jackson's article on Paul Kletzki and
Reinhard Oppel in the previous issue of
this newsletter might be interested to know that the first CD of the
proposed complete recording of Kletzki's orchestral music will be released
by BIS (on BIS-CD-1399) in the next few weeks; it contains the Third Symphony
and the Flute Concerto (soloist Sharon Bezaly), in performances where
the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Thomas Sanderling.
Concerts apart, the CD is one of the first concrete results of Tim Jackson's 'Lost Composers' Project, which was described in detail in the following article, by Olin Chism, published in The Dallas Morning News of 10 March 2004; I am obliged to Olin Chism for his willingness to allow me to republish it here:
In the 1920s and '30s, a small group of composers in Germany — some
Jewish, some not — formed a band of artistic brothers. All were gifted,
and some were seen as budding geniuses. Then came the Nazi juggernaut
that smashed all of their careers.
More than half a century later, a University of North Texas professor
is crusading to rescue their work from oblivion. Timothy Jackson's 'Lost
Composers' project has retrieved vanished music and given it new life
long after its creators' deaths. Concerts in Denton on Friday and Fort
Worth on Saturday will feature some of the pieces.
Dr Jackson, 45, works out of a UNT office packed with the materials of musical creation. Boxes of scores, old programs and other papers reach toward the ceiling, CDs are scattered about, composers' pictures are on the wall. Less obvious but equally formidable are the uncounted megabytes of musical information in his computer.
'I'm trying through my own work and artistic endeavors to undo the damage', he says. 'To resurrect their work and to give them the recognition which was their due but which, because of circumstances, they were not in a position to benefit from.'
There's an even more personal reason for Dr Jackson's crusade. Many of his mother's relatives died in the Holocaust. Five of his grand-uncles were killed along with their wives and most of their children.
A UNT colleague, pianist Joseph Banowetz, describes him as 'a very idealistic person. He's not doing this for the quick buck; he's really involved on a very personal level'.
The most prominent of the lost composers was Paul Kletzki, music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 1958 to '61. Few here knew that when he was young, he was far better known as a composer, with performances by renowned orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic.
Other names are far less known. Men like Josef Knettel, Reinhard Oppel, Heinrich Schenker, Otto Vrieslander and Günter Raphael wouldn't get a glimmer of recognition today even from avid concertgoers.
John Norine, a graduate student at UNT, has orchestrated, edited and typeset some of the music. 'I would almost call them a lost generation', he says. 'We know what happened in music early in the 20th century and what happened in the second half, but there is a gap between the Wars. This project is providing fascinating insights into the progress of music.'
Dr Jackson's search for the lost composers' music has turned him into a detective. He says he's gone around 'like a vagabond, from library to library, especially in east Germany, looking for scores that had disappeared.'
His quest was helped because some German librarians, ordered by the Nazis to destroy the music of Jewish composers and other 'undesirables', simply took the material off the shelves and hid it.
'I found one of Kletzki's scores that his wife had looked for in vain for 30 years in a library in Berlin. It's an early work — actually, his first large-scale orchestral piece, called Prologue to a Tragedy. Nobody knew where it was. Kletzki himself thought that the score was completely lost.'
Not every find was in Germany. 'I found the only copy of his Opus 10 songs in the Dallas Public Library', Dr Jackson says. 'I don't know what happened. I suspect that he had a copy of it and gave it to someone in Dallas who then gave it to the library. It's the only extant copy of that piece in the world.'
Dr Jackson also befriended descendants of the lost composers. One is Kurt Oppel, son of Reinhard Oppel. A Protestant minister in Germany, Kurt Oppel has given his father's music and material to the UNT music library. Some of it, like that of Mr Kletzki, was buried to hide it from the Nazis.
Dr Jackson's mission is paying off with performances. Mr Kletzki's Symphony No. 2 was performed by Andrew Litton and the DSO in 2002. UNT staged the world premiere of Hans Schaeuble's opera Dorian Gray in February. Though Swiss, Mr. Schaeuble studied in Germany, where he was connected with the German composers and suffered discrimination in part because he was gay.
A concert in the UNT College of Music Recital Hall at 8 p.m. Friday will feature Mr. Kletzki's Piano Trio in D minor and the finale of the two-piano version of his Piano Concerto. Songs by Mr Oppel, Mr Vrieslander and Mr Knettel also will be performed. The piano trio will be repeated Saturday at 2 p.m. in The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
A number of recordings are in the works.
Mr Banowetz describes Mr Kletzki's music as 'extremely complex — not atonal but highly chromatic. It's beautifully put together. He knew every trick in the book about composition technique. But more than that, it has strong emotional content. It's not like some music, which is wonderfully put together, looks good on paper but does nothing for you. This is certainly not that kind of music'.
The ties that bound the lost composers were a stylistic affinity and the influence of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whose analysis of tonal music put him at odds with the developing atonal school of Arnold Schoenberg.
Several of the composers were associated with the Mendelssohn Conservatory in Leipzig, a major center of music-making in Germany. Mr Oppel taught Schenkerian analysis there. Mr Kletzki was in Berlin, where he knew renowned conductor Wilhelm Fürtwängler, a Schenker friend and admirer.
All knew each other or had mutual friends. And all had bitter stories.
Mr Kletzki's early life was a saga of narrow escapes. Born in Poland in 1900, he was almost killed in combat between the Poles and the Russians during World War I. Barely out of his teens, he went to Germany to study composition and conducting, quickly becoming known for his music.
Mr Kletzki was Jewish, so when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he fled to Italy. From there he went to the Soviet Union, where he became the conductor of the Ukraine's Kharkov Philharmonic. But his tenure there, from 1936 to '39, coincided with Stalin's Great Terror. His musicians began to disappear and then Mr Kletzki himself came under suspicion. Ironically, the Soviets considered him to be a German alien.
He returned to Italy but found that Mussolini's regime offered scant refuge. His wife's Swiss citizenship saved his life. With war sweeping the rest of Europe, he fled to the neutral country.
The trauma of the '30s and '40s finished him as a composer. He went on to renown as a conductor but never again took up his pen.
Mr Knettel was not Jewish, but he was the organist of a Jewish Reform temple in Bingen, Germany, a post he held long after it became unsafe to do so. His grandson, Dieter Maass, told Dr Jackson that his grandfather was deeply distressed on Kristallnacht, in November 1938, when thugs smashed Jewish synagogues and businesses all over Germany. Mr Knettel had supervised the construction of an organ in his temple. It was destroyed two weeks after its completion.
Mr Knettel survived the war, but his decency cost him his career as a composer.
Reinhard Oppel was another Gentile composer who suffered. Outspoken and strongly anti-Nazi ('He hated their guts', Dr Jackson says), he found his composing career shut down. The fact that he had served in the German army during World War I, was wounded three times and was awarded the Iron Cross may have saved him from arrest. He died of natural causes in 1941.
Dr Jackson became interested in their stories through his academic studies. What he calls 'the most important day of my life" came in 1980, when he spent several hours with Felix Salzer, a student of Mr Schenker who had fled to the States from Germany.
'Schenker died in 1935, and then his wife was killed in a concentration camp, and many of his students perished in the Holocaust. But there were a few students who managed to get out in time and take some stuff with them, and one of them was Salzer', Dr Jackson says.
A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Dr Jackson is a specialist in Mr Schenker and Schenkerian analysis who spent a year in the mid-'90s teaching the system in Germany. After teaching in Connecticut, he came to UNT in 1998 as co-director of the Center for Schenkerian Studies. Stephen Slottow is the other co-director.
Robert Davidovici, who will play the violin part in Mr Kletzki's trio
in Denton and Fort Worth, finds Dr Jackson's project invaluable. 'The
whole thing is incredibly fascinating', the violinist says. 'I've heard
a tape of the Second Symphony, and I thought that if we didn't know who
the person was, we'd say "Wow! This composer should be heard more
of". I get the same kind of surprising, positive feeling in playing
the trio.'
Suppressed Composers in the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music
from Naxos
The following 16 discs are among 50 CDs to be released over the next several
years by the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, the most comprehensive
collection of musical works pertaining to Jewish life and culture in America
ever assembled.
All proceeds from the sale of Milken Archive recordings will be directed back into the Milken Archive's non-profit programmes in furtherance of educational and cultural goals.
SAMUEL ADLER (CD #8.559415)
Samuel Adler, one of America's most respected composers, is equally known
for his Judaic and general concert works. The selection of works on this
CD embraces choral, cantorial, chamber, solo, and symphonic music, culminating
in the Symphony No. 5, We Are The Echoes, which is based on Jewish
poetry reflecting aspects of Jewish experience throughout history. The
finale quotes the Jewish philosopher Heschel: 'Now and then, high above
me, I catch a glimpse of the faceless face of God'.
For more information, go to http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=15
ERNST TOCH (CD #8.559417)
'Fetters fell, the captive rose. Old is the memory of Israel's escape
from Egypt. Told and retold for thousands of years, the story has given
strength to the weary, hope to the disheartened' - thus begins Ernst Toch's
Cantata of the Bitter Herbs, a unique musical-dramatic work begun
during the great German-Jewish composer's forced exile to the United States,
and premiered in Los Angeles in the midst of World War Two. Toch's retelling
of the Passover story is cast as an appeal for universal justice and liberation
from oppression. The composer's ultimately triumphant vision is set to
luminous late Romantic music and includes a solo quartet that recalls
the beauty of the famous trio from Der Rosenkavalier.
For more information, go to http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=16
Fourteen other Milken Archive discs are currently available through Naxos
American Classics, including:
HERMAN BERLINSKI [8.559443]
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=14
MARVIN DAVID LEVY [8.559427]
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=13
DAVE BRUBECK: THE GATES OF JUSTICE [8.559414]
'unfolds with energy and power, in a universal message of brotherhood
and nonviolence that is just as relevant today as when Brubeck wrote it'
— The Cincinnati Enquirer
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=12
BRUCE ADOLPHE [8.559413]
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=11
DARIUS MILHAUD'S SERVICE SACRÉ [8.559409]
'a glorious - and complete - rendition' — ClassicsToday.com
'an intriguing work from first note to last, sonic proof of the value
of the Milken Archive' — The Oakland Press
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=8
A HANUKKA CELEBRATION [8.559410]
'In a word, this effort is spectacular[...]. all of the selections are
fired with emotion. [...] a must-have for your record collection' —
The Los Angeles Daily News
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=9
JEWISH VOICES IN THE NEW WORLD [8.559411]
'unusually haunting music, with a distinctive combination of serenity
and boldness' — The Oakland Press
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=10
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: A JEWISH LEGACY [8.559407]
'The most illuminating Bernstein recording in years' — The Newark
Star Ledger
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=6
JOSEPH ACHRON [8.559408]
'Elmar Oliveira's edgy virtuosity and sweet throbbing timbre suit the
music very well and Joseph Silverstein draws superbly rich playing from
the Berlin Orchestra' — Gramophone
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=7
KURT WEILL'S THE ETERNAL ROAD (Highlights) [8.559402]
One of Amazon.com's 10 Best Opera and Vocal Music CDs of 2003
'fervent and touching' — The New York Times
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=1
KLEZMER CONCERTOS AND ENCORES [8.559403]
'The Jewish elements in [Robert Starer's Kli Zemer] emerge proudly and
poignantly, always conditioned by economy and taste' — The New
Yorker
'played with feeling and virtuosity by David Krakauer' — The Pittsburgh
Post—Gazette
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=2
MARIO CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO [8.559404]
'sung superbly by [...] soprano Ana Maria Martinez' — Fanfare
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=3
GREAT SONGS OF THE YIDDISH STAGE, VOL. I [8.559405]
'lively, affecting, beautifully performed pieces' — The New York
Daily News
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=4
AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN JEWISH MUSIC [8.559406]
'wonderfully eclectic' — RedLudwig.com
http://www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf?cdid=5
For more information, please visit www.milkenarchive.org
and www.naxos.com;
e-mail address milkenarchive[at]milkenarchive.org.
New Zemlinsky Lieder CD
The mezzo Hermine Haselböck writes:
'I would like to inform you that my new CD of songs by Alexander Zemlinsky
has been released by Pan Classics
Songs by ZEMLINSKY (1871-1942)
Hermine Haselböck, mezzo soprano
Florian Henschel, piano
Pan Classics (PC 10162)
www.panclassics.com
Three posthumous song-cycles (two songs are world first recordings); Waltz-Songs, Op. 6; Six mélodies d'après des poèmes de Maurice Maeterlinck, Op.13
More information at www.hermine-haselboeck.com
Publications
New Kaprálová Scores
Bärenreiter has just published Kaprálová's Concertino
for Violin, Clarinet and Orchestra, Op. 21 and Ritornel for Violoncello
and Piano, Op. 25. The scores are now available from:
http://www.editio-baerenreiter.cz/en/index.html.
For more information about these and other projects of the Society please
visit: www.kapralova.org/SOCIETY.htm
New Weinberg Scores
Peer Music in Hamburg has just added scores of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Piano
Quintet, Op. 18 (1944), and String Quartet No. 16, Op. 130 (1981), to
their growing list of Weinberg publications. More details at http://www.peermusic-classical.de/weinberg3.htm.
Exhibitions
Jewish Museum, Vienna
Two exhibitions are currently running at the Jewish Museum, Dorotheergasse
11, 1010 Vienna:
(1) Hans Gál and Egon Wellesz: Continental Britons, 25 February—2
May 2004
(2) Alma Rosé: From Concert Hall to Auschwitz, 2 April—31
October 2004
Details of both at http://www.jmw.at;
enquiries to info[at]jmw.at.
The catalogue of the exhibition will be reviewed in a future issue of
this newsletter.
Symposium
In the context of the Gál-Wellesz exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the Music Department of the University of Vienna put on a three-day symposium on the two composers on 23—25 March, organised by Professor Hartmund Krones and held at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and the Jewish Museum. The IFSM was well represented: Martin Anderson, Erik Levi and Jutta Raab-Hansen all gave papers; and Michael Haas was a part-time chairman. It is understood that the proceedings will be published in the fullness of time. A musical highlight during the symposium was the first performance since 1932 of Hans Gál's Violin Concerto.
The Suppressed Music mailing list — a reminder
Readers of this newsletter who do not yet subscribe to the Suppressed
Music e-mail discussion group might like a reminder of how they can sign
up.
Visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/suppressed-music.html
and follow the instructions there, or send a message (no header, no other
content) to subscribe suppressed-music Firstname Lastname (of course,
using your own first and last names) to jiscmail[at]jiscmail.ac.uk.
III. Forthcoming Performances
Opera
Braunfels in Wexford
The highly enterprising Wexford Opera in Ireland is staging a new production
of Walter Braunfels' E. T. A. Hoffmann-based opera Prinzessin Brambilla
for six performances as part of their festival in October 2004.
Details at www.wexfordopera.com.
Schreker's Irrelohe in Vienna
The Volksoper in Vienna is staging Schreker's opera Irrelohe in
October: the opening night is 16 October. This work was given a starry
premiere in Berlin under Otto Klemperer in 1924, but fell foul of changing
fashion and was unable to maintain itself in the repertoire. The Volksoper
production is in fact only the second time the work has been seen on stage
since Schreker's death in 1934. The event forms part of an 'Entartete
Musik' feature during the Volksoper's 2004-5 season which also includes
revivals of their acclaimed productions of Zemlinsky's Der König
Kandaules and Braunfels' Die Vögel; Korngold's Die
tote Stadt will receive a production at the Vienna Staatsoper during
the same season. A related symposium with talks and chamber music events
will take place in October of this year.
Details will be available at the Volksoper website, www.volksoper.at,
in due course.
Schreker revivals
The Berlin Staatsoper and Stuttgart Opera will revive their highly acclaimed
productions of Der ferne Klang and Die Gezeichneten respectively
in the 2004-5 season.
Shostakovich's The Nose in London
As part of the visit of the Mariinsky Theatre to the Barbican in London
in Spring 2004, Valery Gergiev will be conducting a single performance
of The Nose, on Saturday, 26 February, beginning at 7.30pm.
Details at http://www.barbican.org.uk/greatperformers
Concerts
Mátyás Seiber Missa brevis, Cambridge, 21 April
The Seiber Missa brevis gets a rare outing on 21 April during the
first concert of the Cambridge Magyar Music Festival.
Details at http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/chapel/choir/concerts/.
Ullmann and Borodová in St John's, Smith Square, London, 5
May
The baritone Nigel Cliffe writes:
'Our concert has in it two works with Terezín connections. Firstly,
the Ullmann String Quartet No. 3 and then a modern-day response to the
victims of the Holocaust. This piece is by Sylvie Bodorová, a Czech
composer, and is called Terezín Ghetto Requiem; it is scored
for voice and quartet. I gave the world premiere in Leamington in 1998
and have since performed the work at many British festivals, the Royal
Opera House (where I am a singer), in Munich (in the former Gestapo HQ)
and in Prague at the Spring festival in 2000. The programme is completed
with the Brahms Vier ernste Gesänge, two Mahler Rückert
songs and a Dvorák quartet (Op. 51). Sylvie Bodorová is
also involved with the restoration of Mahler's birth house in Kalište.
In her note to the score of her Requiem she says: "I wanted
to honour those who, under the most extreme conditions and in the face
of death, found the courage to protest against their torture by means
of something as ultimately human as Verdi's Requiem'. There were some
twenty performances of Verdi's Requiem [in Terezín] between 1943/44;
I'm sure you know this. There is a quote from the Verdi in the first movement.
The work mixes synagogue chant with catholic requiem text and is a wonderful,
humanitarian statement of reconciliation'. Further details of the concert
can be found at
http://www.sjss.org.uk/next-month/index.html.
Music from Terezín at Leamington Festival, 30 April—9
May 2004
This year's Leamington Festival includes works by Viktor Ullmann, Hans
Krása and Gideon Klein as part of its festival of Czech Music to
mark the centenary of the death of Dvorak. The programme by the Andrusier
Ensemble on 5 May also includes Berthold Goldschmidt's string chamber-works
Retrospectrum and Berceuse. Further details of the Festival
can be found at
http://www.warwickarts.org.uk/.
Shostakovich Symphony No. 11, Barbican, London, 12 May
Leonard Slatkin conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on
12 May; details from http://www.barbican.org.uk
Ullmann and Ben-Haim in Glasgow, 18 May
An adventurous programme by USA-based Phillip Silver, no stranger to Glasgow
audiences, features music by two composers whose lives were tragically
cut short by the Holocaust — Ullmann's Sonata No. 7 and selections
from Schulhoff's Partita for Piano Jazz-Like — together with
music by the first internationally renowned Israeli composer, Paul Ben-Haim.
University of Strathclyde Music Society
Tuesday 18 May
1.15—2.00pm, Ramshorn Theatre, Glasgow
Phillip Silver (piano)
Zemlinsky in the USA
Zemlinsky's colourful Hans Christian Andersen-inspired tone-poem Die
Seejungfrau ('The Mermaid') of 1902-3 continues to consolidate its
position in the orchestral repertoire with performances by the Chicago
Symphony, Houston Symphony, American Symphony and Cleveland Orchestras
scheduled in the forthcoming 2004-5 season.
Festivals
Salzburg Festival: Korngold feature
As part of their ongoing 'exiled composers' theme, this year's Salzburg
Festival features a new staging of Korngold's 'Die tote Stadt', a co-production
with the Staatsoper Vienna, the Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam und the Gran
Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. Conducted by Donald Runnicles and produced
by Willy Decker, Torsten Karl takes the role of Paul with Angela Denoke
as Marietta. Opening night is 15 August. The festival also includes a
large number of Korngold's concert works including the Symphony in F sharp,
the Violin Concerto and the Symphonic Serenade as well as numerous
chamber works.
Full details can be found at www.salzburgfestival.at
Bard Festival: Shostakovich and his World
August and November 2004
Attached is information about the 2004 Bard Music Festival: Shostakovich
and His World. Further information is available at
www.bard.edu/bmf
and www.bard.edu/fishercenter.
In its fifteenth season, the 2004 Bard Music Festival (13—15 and 20—22 August) will focus on the former Soviet Union's foremost composer, Dmitrii Shostakovich (1906-75). In two summer weekends of concerts, panel discussions and a symposium, co-artistic directors Leon Botstein, Christopher H. Gibbs and Robert Martin will appear along with a host of Shostakovich experts and musicians from the United States and abroad, including the American Symphony Orchestra, the Bard Festival String Quartet and other notable ensembles, along with contralto Ewa Podles, violist Kim Kashkashian, pianist Dénes Varjón, and many others.
Over the past fourteen seasons, the Bard Music Festival has set the trend in music-festival programming, combining diverse concert programs of well- and lesser-known works with panels, symposia and other special events, all designed to bring the musical world of a given composer vividly to life. With the recent opening of Bard's new Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, the Bard Music Festival is now part of the new Bard SummerScape Festival, the Hudson Valley's premier destination for summer performances of opera, music, theatre and more.
Shostakovich and his World will comprise nearly one third of SummerScape 2004's presentations: eleven concerts (including one of Soviet popular music), each preceded by an informative talk; panel discussions; and a symposium. Performances will range from solo piano compositions, songs, and chamber works through jazz and choral works, to several symphonies played by the resident American Symphony Orchestra and conducted by its music director, Leon Botstein. Many of the works included in the festival, by Shostakovich as well as his contemporaries, are rarely heard in concert either here or abroad.
Among Shostakovich's compositions on the festival programmes are his
First, Fourth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Symphonies, his orchestration of
Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, his cantata Sun over our
Homeland, the oratorio Song of the Forests, the Suite for Jazz Orchestra
No. 1, piano preludes and fugues from Op. 87, several string quartets,
and his satirical cantata Rayok. Works by such Shostakovich contemporaries
as Glazunov, Skriabin, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, Gavriil Popov, Vissarion
Shebalin, Aram Khachaturian, Mikhail Gnesin and Maximilian Shteynberg
will also be performed. The more recent generation of composers will be
represented by Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Boris Tishchenko and
Sofiya Gubaidulina.
Shostakovich-related performances at SummerScape include his comic opera
The Nose and his rarely-heard musical, Moscow: Cherry Orchard
Towers. Opera- and theatre-director Francesca Zambello will stage
both these works in her double-debut at Bard. Architect Rafael Viñoly
will design the sets of The Nose.
No cultural institution in the United States has undertaken such a wide-ranging examination of Dmitrii Shostakovich's legacy in the context not only of his music but also of his character, career, public and private personas, his position in music and the politics of the day, his public disgrace at the hands of his own colleagues and Josef Stalin, and his eventual elevation to public adoration and the posthumous role as a hero of artistic freedom. The examination of the composer in performance and discussion is enhanced by the BMF volume Shostakovich and his World, edited by Laurel E. Fay and published by Princeton University Press.
A third weekend of Shostakovich and his World will take place
on 5—7 November and will focus on the composer's life during and
after World War II and will include an examination of the close friendship
between Shostakovich and his English contemporary, Benjamin Britten (1913-76).
Performances will include a concert by the Emerson String Quartet.
Bard Music Festival box office, which begins selling tickets on 1 May
2004, can be reached at 845-758-7900. Tickets will also be available on
the Fisher Center website listed above.
Link to Press Release:
http://inside.bard.edu/tools/pr/fstory.php?id=691
Film
Prokofiev 2004: Five Films
Sunday 2 and Saturday 8 May 2004
The second part of the film season to mark the 50th anniversary of the
death of Sergei Prokofiev features two Russian films, Tonya (1942)
and Lermontov (1944), never before screened in the UK. Indeed Tonya,
was judged politically unsound and never released in Russia. The programme,
which also includes Lieutenant Kizhe (1934) and the masterpiece
Alexander Nevsky, complements the London Symphony Orchestra concerts
in the Barbican Hall. Presented in association with the Prokofiev Archive
at Goldsmiths College.
Sunday 2 May 2.15pm
Introduced by Prokofiev historian John Riley
Tonya (Nashi Devushki) (PG) British Premiere Abram Room's Tonya
tells the heroic story of a telephone operator who
sacrifices her life by drawing Soviet artillery fire onto the Nazi weapons
that are stored near her office. Like Room's earlier film A Severe
Young Man, Tonya was banned by the Soviet authorities. Prokofiev
wrote the stirring score in August 1942, basing part of it on a song for
which his second wife Mira Mendelson wrote the words.
USSR 1942 Dir. Abram Room 32 min.
Plus
Composer Sergei Prokofiev (PG)
A compelling portrait of Prokofiev's life and work, featuring archive
material, newsreel footage and interviews with Rostropovich, Mark Ermler,
Alexander Melik-Pashaev, David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin. Lidia Stepanova's
documentary also includes excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella
and War and Peace (with Galina Vishnevskaya), staged scenes from
Story of a Real Man, a sequence on Prokofiev's work with Eisenstein,
and extracts featuring Rozhdestvensky conducting Prokofiev's Fifth and
Seventh Symphonies.
USSR 1961 Dir. Lidia Stepanova 64 min.
Sunday 2 May 4.30pm
Lermontov (PG) British Premiere
A precious opportunity to hear Prokofiev's music for 1944 film Lermontov,
never before seen in Britain. Albert Gendelshtein's film is a portrait
of the great nineteenth century Russian writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov,
the inheritor of Pushkin's mantle, who, like his mentor, died in a duel
at the age of 26. Lermontov's affection for the serfs and peasantry, and
his criticisms of the Tsar, endeared him to the post-revolutionary Soviet
regime. Prokofiev was one of two composers for the film (the other being
Venedict Pushkov). Featuring Prokofiev's two pieces, Contradance
and Mephisto Waltz.
USSR 1944 Dir. Albert Gendelshtein 77 min.
Saturday 8 May 2.15pm
Lieutenant Kizhe (U)
Prokofiev's first composition for the cinema was one of the very earliest
Soviet sound films, a charming tale about an office clerk who, when copying
out a list of officers to be presented to the Tzar, inadvertently adds
a non-existent Lieutenant Kizhe. The unusual name catches the Tzar's eye,
and he promotes him. Kizhe later falls into disfavour and is sentenced
to Siberia, is pardoned, and promoted to General. When he 'dies', Kizhe's
empty coffin is given an imperial funeral. A clever satire on official
stupidity and bureaucracy. Prokofiev's score for the film, in a slightly
altered arrangement, is renowned in its concert form as the Lieutenant
Kizhe Suite.
USSR 1934 Dir. Alexander Faintsimmer 87 min.
Saturday 8 May 4.00pm
Alexander Nevsky (U)
An historical pageant of no equal, and one of the most perfect examples
of synchronisation of music and film. In 1242 on the ice of Lake Peipus,
the Russian army of Prince Alexander Nevsky defeats the Teutonic invaders.
Made at the time of the rising political threat of Nazi Germany, Eisenstein's
allegorical triumph is littered with dazzling pictorial effects: the vast
horizontal plains of ice and snow, the cloudy, glittering skies, the waiting
armies, the galloping lines of menacing helmets. Finally there is the
epic climax of the battle itself, during which the gloriously creative
collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev reaches its astonishing
apex.
USSR 1938 Dir. Sergei Eisenstein 112 min.
Booking information:
Full price £7
Concessionary rate: £5.50
Subscribers to Three Oranges of The Prokofiev Association are entitled
to a discount: £5.50 (please quote Three Oranges when booking)
Box Office: 0845 120 7527
Barbican Cinema
Silk Street
London
EC2Y 8DS
Other Events
Shostakovich, Weinberg and Prokofiev in Oxford and London
24 and 25 April 2004
The UK Shostakovich Society proudly presents:
'Shostakovich and Jewish Music',
sponsored by The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation
Saturday, 24 April
The Holywell Music Room, St. Aldate's, Oxford
Pre-Concert Talk (7.30 p.m):
'Shostakovich and Jewish Music' (Judy Kuhn, Manchester University)
Concert:
Shostakovich — Piano Sonata No. 2
Weinberg — Piano Sonata No. 4 (UK premiere)
Prokofiev — Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet
Pianist: Marina Primachenko
Tickets:
£5/£3 (members of UK Shostakovich Society, and concessions)
------------------------
The UK Shostakovich Society proudly presents:
Sunday, 25 April
'Shostakovich and Jewish Music',
Sponsored by The Lord Ashdown Charitable Trust and The Harold Hyam Wingate
Foundation
The David Josefowitz Recital Hall. The Royal Academy of Music. Marylebone
Road, London (Baker Street tube)
Pre-Concert Talk (7.00 p.m):
'Shostakovich and Jewish Music' (Judy Kuhn, Manchester University)
Concert:
Shostakovich — Piano Sonata No. 2
Weinberg — Piano Sonata No. 4 (UK premiere)
Prokofiev — Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet
Pianist: Marina Primachenko
Tickets:
£5/£3 (members of UK Shostakovich Society, and Concessions)
For further details please contact:
Dr Lewis Owens
President — The United Kingdom Dmitri Shostakovich Society
94 William Smith Close, Cambridge, CB1 3QF. Tel: 07739 568455.
Email: Lo201[at]cam.ac.uk
Membership to the UK Shostakovich Society costs only £20 per year
and entitles you to the bi-annual DSCH Journal and reduced entrance fees
to various events throughout the UK.
Prokofiev and America
Saturday 8 May 2004
Chancellor's Hall, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1
A conference and recital to explore Serge Prokofiev's American connections
organised by the Institute of United States Studies, University of London
(Head of Music: Professor Peter Dickinson), in collaboration with the
Serge Prokofiev Archive (Director: Noëlle Mann).
Conference
The conference will include presentations from leading Prokofiev authorities
including Alastair Macaulay, Noëlle Mann, David Nice, Barbara Nissman,
Harlow Robinson and Arnold Whittall. Registration £10 (£5
concessions). For further information please see website www.sas.ac.uk/iuss/events_prokofiev.htm
or call 020 7862 8693 or email iuss[at]sas.ac.uk
John Coffin Memorial Recital
The John Coffin Memorial Recital will commence at 5 pm and will feature
the distinguished American pianist Barbara Nissman. Barbara Nissman's
recital includes the two solo piano works that Prokofiev wrote in 1918
during his first American visit, Four Pieces Op. 32 and Tales of an Old
Grandmother, as well as the Sixth Piano Sonata and Prelude & Fugue
in D minor (Prokofiev-Buxtehude).
Entry to the recital is free, by advance registration. To register please
call 020 7862 8693 or email iuss[at]sas.ac.uk.
IV. Reviews
Books
Prokofiev biographies surveyed
David Nice, Prokofiev: From Russia to the West 1891-1935, Yale
University Press, New Haven & London, 2003
Reviewed by R. James Tobin
Comparisons:
Harlow Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev, A Biography, with a new foreword
and afterword by the author, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 2002
(original publication Viking Penguin, 1987)
Daniel Jaffé, Sergey Prokofiev, Phaidon (20th-Century Composers
Series), London, 1998
Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev, translated, edited and introduced
by Harlow Robinson, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1998.
Sergei Prokofiev, one of the most gifted of twentieth-century composers,
and one with one of the most distinctive voices, began as the bad boy
of Russian music: even as a young and prolific student composer he insisted
on going his own way, harmonically and rhythmically. When he first went
to America the term 'Scythian' clung to him and his music. Having heard
Stravinsky, Parisian audiences considered him retrograde, and Prokofiev
ended his career trying to write music that was simple and popularly accessible
as if his life depended on it. It very probably did. He still was not
able to get much of it past the bureaucratic censors in the Soviet Union
and he, along with Shostakovich, Khatchaturian and Myaskovsky, was condemned,
five years before he died, as a 'formalist'. One of his biographers, Harlow
Robinson, has called him a musical elitist, though not a social snob.
All his life he had a terrible time getting his operas and ballets produced,
even after they had been commissioned and accepted, and some of them were
not heard until long after his death. I was surprised to learn that his
ballet Romeo and Juliet, a staple of the modern repertoire, was considered
undanceable at first, because it has a degree of syncopation that Tchaikovsky's
ballets do not; not until the music became familiar though the suites
Prokofiev then compiled did it become acceptable to the Kirov dancers.
A fascinating episode involving Prokofiev and Galena Ulanova, the first
Juliet occurred at a celebration: when Prokofiev danced an ordinary foxtrot
with her, she had difficulty following his lead until she eventually caught
his 'unusual and utterly marvelous rhythm' (Robinson, p. 374.). She had
begun to wonder if she could dance at all!
Prokofiev re-wrote a number of his works repeatedly, either because of
personal dissatisfaction or objections from directors and bureaucrats.
The most galling of the latter sort again involved Romeo and Juliet,
where there was actual meddling and re-writing of some music by others.
This kind of outrage was unusual, but from the time of his early collaboration
with Diaghilev, who commissioned several ballets, he often rewrote on
request. Diaghilev considered him, if anything, too pliable. Prokofiev
actually liked to write some music to close general specifications, as
in the case of his film scores. He worked pleasurably with Eisenstein
and Meyerhold, until the latter came to a dreadful end in Stalin's purges.
His first (unperformed) ballet for Diaghilev was rewritten as the Scythian
Suite. His Third Symphony came from themes of the opera The Fiery
Angel, and the Fourth Symphony came from themes of the ballet The
Prodigal Son, and was rewritten later. His Sinfonietta, too,
was rewritten more than once and has more than one opus number. His method
of working was a matter of impressively steady daily work rather than
a matter of inspired spurts and rests. Interestingly, some of his most
popular works, such as the Classical Symphony, the Fifth Symphony,
Peter and the Wolf and the violin concerti were written quickly
and easily.
Prokofiev's personal life, of course, included as much tragedy as his professional life. He left Russia during the Revolution, after he had completed his studies, and returned at the worst possible time, just before the great purges began in the late 1930s. He had been considered a foreigner in the West and when he returned to Russia after many years abroad he was considered a foreigner there, too, and envied his international success. Some of that success was based on his powerful pianism; an observer said he appeared to have fingers of steel. It did not help that personally, Prokofiev appeared to be arrogant, condescending, tactless, and even cruel sometimes. Yet he succeeded in maintaining the lifelong friendship of Myaskovsky and he promoted the works of that and other Russian composers in the West. Prokofiev gained the love of several women, one of whom was foiled in her attempt to elope with him, and two of whom married him. He abandoned his first wife, Lina, his nearly grown sons, and their luxurious apartment, after many years, to be with Mira, a woman half his age. Lina later disappeared into Stalin's Gulag, at a time Prokofiev himself was in trouble, and right when Sergey and Mira married (without a prior divorce, and avoiding bigamy only by the technicality that the first marriage was not recognised in the Soviet Union.) Mira stayed with him until his death, which followed several years of bad health following concussion, and which happened to occur on the same day as Stalin's, in 1953.
The most satisfying of these biographies, all of which include attention to life, works and times, is the oldest, Robinson's; and his edition of Prokofiev's correspondence adds much to one's understanding of the biographical use of these sources. Much of what I said above is based on Robinson's work. His biography is long enough to give a full narrative account, in addition to meaningful musical commentary, and is clearly written.
I really wish I could say the same about the initial volume of David Nice's which, although well researched, is not terribly well written and would have profited from another draft or two, or a really good editor. The book could also benefit from a bit of reorganisation, bringing together more of what is said about various works. Its outstanding stylistic fault is a frequent and maddening lack of clarity stemming from sentences and paragraphs crowded with reference to different persons or things which then are referred back to with pronouns rather than names. The reader must then wonder which one he is referring to, sometimes requiring an inference. I hope the second volume will read better. Certainly the second volume, on Prokofiev's Soviet years, is to be much looked forward to, since Robinson's biography was written before the end of the Soviet Union, and many more sources are presumably available now.
Among the things I learned about Prokofiev from Nice is detail about Prokofiev's initial dislike, or failure to appreciate if you will, of major works by his contemporaries, Debussy or Ravel, for instance, as well as Roussel and Stravinsky. Prokofiev told Stravinsky that the opening theme of The Firebird was original with Rimsky-Korsakov. No surprise that Prokofiev and Stravinsky never became close. Prokofiev did not like Stravinsky's Neo-classicism, despite having written, in a passing phase, the Sinfonietta and Classical Symphony — about which, by the way, one will look in vain for an adequate discussion in any of these books, except for the brief Gavotte, which was the result of its composer's studies with Tcherepnin, who liked Haydn and Mozart, and whom Prokofiev held in the kind of regard he did not extend to Liadov or Glazounov. (His first tutor as a child in the countryside, incidentally, was the young Gliere.)
Nice includes a good deal of commentary about particular works, with extensive musical examples, which the other authors do not include. He discusses Prokofiev's songs and piano pieces, even the early ones, in detail. Much of his focus is on dissonant harmony, to a degree I find rather strange.
For anyone looking for a relatively brief book on Prokofiev's life and work, beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated, I can strongly recommend Daniel Jaffe's. It covers Prokofiev's whole life and career, with enough detail on the works and their composition to make it a useful reference in addition to being a good read. In fact, I bought it after reading it, not before.
Two new Shostakovich books
Solomon Volkov's Shostakovich and Stalin (Little Brown, London)
and The Shostakovich Casebook, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Indiana
University Press, ), have appeared more or less simultaneously, re-igniting
'the Shostakovich debate' in the press. I hope the next issue of this
newsletter will examine at least one of these publications; in the meantime
two articles in The New York Times reveal the dangers of asking
generalists to write about issues that require specialist knowledge:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/arts/music/04EICH.html?th
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/arts/10SHEL.html?
pagewanted=all&position=
CDs
Mieczyslaw Weinberg
The Golden Key, Op. 55: Suites Nos. 1-3; No. 4 (excerpts)
Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, cond. Mark Ermler
Olympia OCD473 (78:17)
Reviewed by Steve Schwartz
Summary for the Busy Executive: Wonderful.
'Fairy-tale' operas and ballets have always been pretty big in Russia,
mainly because of the country's draconian censorship, first under the
Romanov and then under the Soviet tsars. It was a good way for a composer
to avoid headaches or, with a good deal of guts and guile, to slip in
political content. Of course, one can read a fairy tale in many ways,
including a Socialist Realist one — which happened when Prokofiev's
Cinderella fell into the interpretative hands of the Soviet press,
an interpretation which survives and (with the passage of years) has become
truly laughable.
Weinberg's The Golden Key inhabits an ambiguous space. Alexei Tolstoy, a writer who understandably never wanted to make waves in the Stalinist state, provided the libretto. But Weinberg's music takes the basic story to other places. For me, Weinberg is the third great Soviet composer, along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. His musical idiom owes a lot to Shostakovich, and indeed he used to describe himself as a 'pupil' of the older composer, although he never formally apprenticed himself. In fact, Weinberg had an already fully formed creative personality by the time he met Shostakovich, and Shostakovich not only helped him earn a living, but probably (and at considerable personal risk) saved him from 'disappearance' during the anti-Semitic purges of Stalin's final years. Nevertheless, although Shostakovich and Weinberg share a certain musical language and iconography, miraculously neither becomes a trivial imitation of the other. Weinberg composes at Shostakovich's level, and over the years I've found him a less acidic artistic personality. There's something 'warmer' (but not fuzzier) about Weinberg's music, and I've come to regard the two in roughly the same relation as Brahms and Dvorák. Still, Weinberg's idiom carries with it a sharply satiric edge.
The story of The Golden Key mixes Pinocchio with Petrushka and a little bit of the beanstalk's Jack. As I say, the fairy-tale can be read many ways. The puppet-hero, Buratino, one can view either as a proletarian hero (he leads the other puppets in a revolt against the puppeteer) or as an anti-Soviet. He finds the golden key to the Country of Happiness, which implies that the Revolution isn't enough to make you happy. But who really wants to take a fairy-tale that s