Quote of the Day (Richard Morrison, on Staging Classical Music and Opera in Unusual Venues)

“Sad to say, many people are still put off by the rigmarole and ritual of classical concert venues and particularly by opera houses. For a hundred reasons, ranging from dress code and ticket prices to clapping etiquette and audience social mix, they feel out of place. So, a venue where everyone feels ‘out of place’—in a good way, because it’s never been a classical venue before—can be a good leveler.”—English music critic and cultural writer Richard Morrison, “Opinion: Can Classical Concerts in Unlikely Settings Attract New Audiences?”, BBC Music Magazine, June 2023

Quote of the Day (Musician Maurizio Pollini, on Great Art and ‘The Dreams of a Society’)

“I think great art has entirely progressive aspects within it, elements that are somehow outside the detail of the text or even the political opinions of the person who made it. Art itself, if it is really great, has a progressive aspect that is needed by a society, even if it seems absolutely useless in strictly practical terms. In a way art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art."— Italian pianist and conductor Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024), quoted by Nicholas Wroe, “Maurizio Pollini: A Life in Music,” The Guardian (UK), Dec. 31, 2010

The image of Maurizio Pollini that accompanies this post was taken during a reception in Tokyo on May 17, 2009, by Dundak.

Quote of the Day (Matthew Aucoin, Redefining ‘Classical Music’)

“Western classical music is an unusual case. The reference point for a given piece of music is the score, rather than a studio recording or a live performance. Beethoven's symphonies have been recorded hundreds—if not thousands—of times, and they’ve been performed more times than that, but every one of those performances and recordings refers to the same scores. For a composer, the score is the foundational site of creativity, and the act of score-making links together artists who could hardly sound more different from one another—say, an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period like Claudio Monteverdi and a 20th-century American avant-gardist like John Cage…. If we let ourselves be guided by this basic question—which musical artists regard the score as a creative starting point?—we arrive at the broadest and most welcoming definition of ‘classical’ music.”—American conductor and composer Matthew Aucoin, “What Is Classical Music?”, The Atlantic, May 2025

The image of Matthew Aucoin accompanying this post was taken Apr. 22, 2022, by Beehivesspaghetti.

Quote of the Day (Jessica Duchen, on Librettists as the Unsung Heroes of Opera)

“We tend to credit opera composers ahead of their librettists. But can you imagine Mozart without [Lorenzo] Da Ponte [pictured]? Verdi without Piave? Strauss without Hofmannsthal? Our favourite operas, such as Le nozze di Figaro, La traviata or Der Rosenkavalier would be nowhere without their words and their drama – provided by the writer. Composers might grumble, cajole or bully their wordsmiths, but they know on which side their bread is buttered.”— British journalist, music critic, novelist, playwright, and opera librettist Jessica Duchen, “A Way With Words,” BBC Music, February 2025

This Day in Classical Music History (Ingmar Bergman Stages Mozart's ‘Magic Flute’ for Swedish TV)

Jan. 1, 1975—To celebrate the 50-year anniversary of Swedish Radio, Ingmar Bergman premiered his adaptation of The Magic Flute on Swedish TV, reaching an estimated one-third of the nation that night.

Though made on a comparatively modest budget of only $650,000, it was still technologically innovative, featuring the first soundtrack ever recorded in stereo for a television broadcast. And, running counter to the movies-to-TV model of the prior two decades, its premiere in U.S. theaters came 11 months after it was exposed to Swedish TV audiences.

I had heard before that a movie had been made of this Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera, but I had never seen it before. And, I might as well confess now, I am hardly an opera aficionado, having attended less than 10 productions of any kind over the years.

But, when I saw that the movie would be played near me in northern New Jersey at the Barrymore Film Center over this past weekend, I was curious. The idea that Bergman, of all people, with his whole filmography of Scandinavian gray skies and gloom to match, might have tackled an opera—well, it struck me as a case of man bites dog.

In other words, this I had to see.

So, what was it like? As I watched, I thought that Bergman was mounting this production as a holiday from his usual anxiety and dread. And, with a new year around the corner, I experienced much the same thing—a revival of spirits that left me continually smiling.

The exterior establishing shot of a grassy outdoor scene led me to expect something naturalistic, shot on location. But those expectations were immediately overturned as the camera switched to the inside of a theater.

Instead of a long list of opening credits, the camera moves throughout the overture to close-ups of faces—and not to the conductor or orchestra musicians, but to featured audience members, especially a young blond girl continually highlighted.

To be sure, Bergman and cinematographer panned to audience members special to them, such as Bergman’s wife and son and actress-muse Liv Ullmann. But what was striking about this seven-minute sequence was the sheer variety of faces—men and women of all ages, ethnicities, and races, even individuals plucked off the street for the occasion.

By the end of the show, contemporary listeners would have appreciated that Mozart intended this work to be savored by people of all kinds.  In our time, with opera suffering from the perception that it caters to an aging, elite audience, the opening sequence can be read as a reminder of the genre’s fundamentally universal aspirations.

We see the cast and crew onstage and backstage, an injection of reality into a landscape of fantasy—with a singer, for instance, suddenly aware of his cue, rushing around, or performers reading another libretto (Wagner’s Parsifal) or far from it (a “Donald Duck” comic book).

How do you adapt a work meant for the opera house to very different audiences—television and movie theaters?

For starters, there is the matter of length. The Magic Flute has been known to stretch to nearly three and a half hours (counting intermission) in the opera house. Bergman trimmed it back to two hours and 15 minutes, including by omitting Act 2 trios and ignoring Mozart’s Masonic references.

As he recalled in Images: My Life in Film, Bergman was exposed to this opera as a child, when he "loved to roam around”:

“One October day I set out for Drottningholm (in Stockholm) to see its unique court theater from the eighteenth century. For some reason the stage door was unlocked. I walked inside and saw for the first time the carefully restored baroque theater. I remember distinctly what a bewitching experience it was: the effect of chiaroscuro, the silence, the stage. In my imagination I have always seen The Magic Flute living inside that old theater, in that keenly acoustical wooden box, with its slanted stage floor, its backdrops and wings. Here lies the noble, magical illusion of theater. Nothing is; everything represents. The moment the curtain is raised, an agreement between stage and audience manifests itself. And now, together, we'll create! In other words, it is obvious that the drama of The Magic Flute should unfold in a baroque theater."

In some ways, Bergman was like the title character in one of his films: “The Magician,” a manufacturer of illusions.  

He had hoped to film at Drottningholm Palace Theatre, one of the few surviving Baroque theatres in the world, but the scenery "was considered too fragile to accommodate a film crew.”

Upon learning this, the director set about meticulously reconstructing the stage—including wings, curtains, and wind machines—in the studios of the Swedish Film Institute. Moreover, the stage dimensions and the props color tones match the original 1791 premiere in Vienna.

In some ways, sound came in for as much care as image, with conductor Eric Ericson and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra recording the score in in an old circus building. Bergman used the “playback” method, scrutinizing prerecorded music so that lip synchronization and performers met his exacting standards.

Even with material that was already light and fluffy, Bergman was unafraid to poke viewers in the ribs. The creature who chases Prince Tamino, for example, may well be the most sorry, silliest dragon ever put on celluloid; the three spirits are borne aloft in a flying machine more out of 19^th-century sci-fi than 20^th-century aircraft; and periodically, singers hold up cue cards to prompt audiences to chant along.

Kenneth Branagh attempted his own interpretation of the opera in 2006, but it was widely regarded as inferior to Bergman’s. The latter won a BAFTA TV Award for Best Foreign Television Programme and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design.

That the great Scandinavian film director pulled it off is something of a miracle. His opera adaptation appeared in the same year as Ken Russell’s version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. It’s hard to imagine more dissimilar approaches to the genre than these two men displayed. While Bergman’s was sprightly, Russell’s was positively surreal.

Quote of the Day (Soprano Barbara Bonney, on How Mastering a Text Helps With Stage Fright)

"When you start to sing it after all this preparation, you have that wonderful deep memory; it’s like you’ve implanted it in the soles of your feet. So when you’re in a concert, let’s say you’re distracted by something and the words fly out of your head, there’s so much memory inside of you that you can quickly get back into it when you are about to completely fall apart. When I teach I find usually the first thing that goes when kids get nervous is their text; because they haven’t learnt the text—they’ve learnt the music and then sort of got the words along with it; that’s the wrong way to go about it. It’s much more fascinating and much more useful in life to have the words, because let’s say you’re driving along a country lane and all of a sudden the passage—not just the music, but the words—will come to you, and you make a connection in life as a poet would, and it’s so much more rich than just knowing words and knowing music, and performing them.” —American soprano Barbara Bonney quoted by Daniel Jaffe, “The Intimate Art of Barbara Bonney,” Classic CD, May 1999

Quote of the Day (Sir James MacMillan, on Music and Sacrifice)

“Music can transform our lives. We all have favourite musics, or even music that takes us by surprise, that we can in retrospect see as a crucial, defining moment in our lives, which has changed us in some way. But in order for music to do that, I think the human soul has to be ready to sacrifice something, sacrifice a certain amount of our time; something of our attention, something of our active listening. Music’s not something which can just wash over us. It needs us to sacrifice something of ourselves to meet it, and it’s very difficult sometimes to do that, especially the whole culture we’re in. Sacrifice and self-sacrifice – certainly sacrificing your time – is not valued anymore.”—Scottish classical composer and conductor Sir James MacMillan, “High Priest of Music,” Classic CD, May 1999

The image accompanying this post of Sir James MacMillan was taken Aug. 9, 2012, at "Meet the Composers," a panel discussion hosted by Music Director Marin Alsop, at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and provided by CTV Santa Cruz County.

Quote of the Day (Alex Ross, on the Piano’s ‘History of Weirdness’)

“It has never been just about the music. The notion that performers should be faceless butlers of genius, impersonally conveying sublime messages in sound, has no basis in tradition. The bonkers antics of virtuoso pianists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prove otherwise. Franz Liszt, whose stage costumes ranged from Magyar military garb to priestly robes, would sometimes stop between pieces to chat with admirers. The infamously acerbic Hans von Bülow, while on an American tour, became so irritated at the promotional efforts of the Chickering piano company that he took out a jackknife and scraped the brand’s name off the instrument. Vladimir de Pachmann once appeared at a recital holding a pair of socks; these, he claimed, had been knitted for Chopin by George Sand. And so on: the history of the piano is a history of weirdness.”—Music critic Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern” (a profile of pianist Yuja Wang), The New Yorker, June 3, 2024

The image accompanying this post shows the last of the three “bonkers” piano virtuosi mentioned by Ross, Vladimir de Pachmann (1848-1933). He sure doesn’t look crazy here, does he?

But the adjectives that most commonly pop up in any online description of this magician of the keyboard are “controversial,” “notorious,” “eccentric,” and, most charitably, “florid.”

I imagine that Ross has had quite a chuckle at some of the cinematic representations of this “history of weirdness,” such as Roger Daltrey in Ken Russell’s Lisztomania and John Cleese’s mynah bird-afflicted Beethoven on “Monty Python.”

This Day in Classical Music History (Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in Triumphant Premiere)

Feb. 12, 1924—The audience that heard Rhapsody in Blue on this cold, snowy night greeted the ground-breaking “jazz concerto” with rapture at its premiere at New York City's Aeolian Hall—a distinct relief for George Gershwin, who composed it in haste, with the utmost reluctance, without formal music training, and performed it at the end of a long, otherwise boring concert.

A good thing that listeners that night (including John Philip Sousa, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Rachmaninov) embraced what the 25-year-old composer called his “musical kaleidoscope of America—our vast melting pot,” because many critics and even some fellow composters were nowhere near as enthusiastic.

Critic-composer Virgil Thomson, for instance, sniffed that Rhapsody, though “quite a satisfactory piece,” didn’t amount to much, because “Rhapsodies…are not very difficult to write, if one can think up enough tunes.” And, despite conducting the piece and performing its piano portion, Leonard Bernstein followed Thomson’s lead in dismissing it as “not a composition at all [but] a string of … terrific tunes … stuck together with a thin paste of flour and water.”

Even this year, The New York Times, in a piece of blatant contrarian clickbait, ran pianist, composer and writer Ethan Iverson’s essay calling it “The Worst Masterpiece,” using adjectives like “naïve,” “corny,” and “Caucasian,” and the comment that, because the composition didn’t achieve a true fusion of jazz and classical genres, it “clogged the arteries of American music.”

Oh, please! Gershwin can’t be held responsible for either the lack of daring of fellow composers or the racist musical tastes of American audiences that couldn’t accept the innovation of Louis Armstrong and other jazz creators.

He simply wanted to resolve a miscommunication with popular bandleader Paul Whiteman, who, after hearing the composer’s vague desire to write a piece blending jazz and classical elements, publicly announced that Gershwin would contribute to “An Experiment in Modern Music" only a month away.

Whiteman overcame Gershwin’s protest that he was on the way to Boston for a pre-Broadway tryout of his latest musical project (it turned out to be Lady, Be Good). Fortunately for the composer, it was on the ensuing train ride, “with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is often so stimulating to a composer that I suddenly heard — and even saw on paper — the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end.”

A few more facts about the creation of this standard in the American classical music repertoire:

*Lyricist brother Ira contributed the title;

*Gershwin also sought to incorporate the sounds of New York: hurdy-gurdies, player pianos of Harlem, the chugging of trains, the construction of midtown skyscrapers;

*Clarinetist Ross Gorman, in rehearsals, played a joke on the composer by playing the opening—17 distinct notes—as a long smeared glissando. Gershwin loved the effect and kept it in the piece;

*Gershwin had scored the piece for two pianos, but confessed that he knew nothing about arrangements—leading Whiteman to put it in the hands of his associate Ferdi Grofe;

*Gershwin himself was the pianist at the premiere; he didn’t have time to write out the solo passages for the instrument, so he played them from memory (and probably improvised some of it);

*Rhapsody in Blue not only announced the arrival of a unique talent to the concert gall, but also the cultural start of the American Century.

The composition propelled Gershwin into any serious discussion of homegrown practitioners of classical music. In the short 13 years remaining to him, even though he continued to crank out popular songs for Broadway and Hollywood with his lyricist brother Ira, he also created ever more ambitious works for the concert hall and opera stage, including Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess.

As Phillip D. Atteberry wrote in an article for The Mississippi Rag, “Like the land in which he grew up, Gershwin did not understand boundaries or limits. Anything that could be imagined, could be attempted.” 

This Day in Classical Music History (Leonard Bernstein’s Anguished ‘Kaddish' Symphony Premieres in Israel)

Dec. 10, 1963— The third—and, it turned out, last—symphony created by Leonard Bernstein had endured a long gestation period, but when it finally premiered in Tel Aviv, with the composer himself conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, recent events had given the new work even more tragic relevance than anticipated.

Taking its name from the Hebrew prayer chanted for the dead, at the graveside, on memorial occasions and at all synagogue services, The “Kaddish” Symphony reflected the composer’s ongoing crisis of faith.

But the assassination of John F. Kennedy only a few weeks “threw me for a loop,” he wrote, inspiring him to add a late dedication to “the beloved memory” of the culture-conscious President.

I'm sure that the recently released biopic Maestro, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, will contain more than enough material about the career of this multi-talented musical Renaissance man. But it would be especially interesting to see if the film deals with The Kaddish Symphony.

Finishing the symphony proved more arduous than expected for Bernstein, who had been commissioned to write it in 1955 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 

Some of the difficulty derived from his wide-ranging interests (composer, pianist, conductor, and, in the form of his televised “Young People’s Concerts,” music educator for the masses), which led him to take on multiple projects and procrastinate (“To achieve great things,” he was fond of observing, “two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”)

But the main problem seemed to be settling on a text compatible with the music conception he had in his head. Three librettists were tried and found wanting.

The most prominent of these, poet Robert Lowell, turned in verses “of a certain obscurity which would not have served the purpose of immediacy which was needed in the concert hall with a piece like that,” Bernstein said in a 1967 interview with John Gruen. (“God hung the rainbow in the sky,/the sign of his contrition and our peace./He knew man’s self-dominion would increase./We need no help from providence to die.”) 

The three poems that Lowell wrote for the occasion before Bernstein halted their collaboration did not see the light of day until 1979, when they were published in the literary magazine Plowshares.

At last, Bernstein decided to write the libretto himself, and set to work in earnest on the composition in 1961. Two years later, upon hearing at the family’s country home that he’d at last completed it, his delighted wife Felicia “jumped into the swimming pool with all her clothes on," daughter Jamie told music critic David Patrick Stearns in a 2008 article for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Bernstein’s elation was short-lived, and not just because Bernstein also took on the “monstrous task” of scoring, rehearsing, preparing, revising, and translating it into Hebrew for the Tel Aviv performance. The news from Dallas on November 22 devastated him.

Kennedy’s liberalism not only paralleled Bernstein’s, but the composer and president had genuine high regard for each other. 

The President had gotten Bernstein to compose a fanfare for his inauguration. For his part, the composer thought that, “of all the political men that I have ever met, [he] was certainly the most moving and compassionate and lovable,” and kept a photo of JFK on his piano.

All of this was accentuated by shared personality traits. Graduating from Harvard within a year of each other, each was extroverted, attractive, married to a glamorous woman, and as restless in their spirituality as their ambitions.

In his autobiography, Just As I Am, the Rev. Billy Graham recalled his surprise when JFK asked short but incisive questions about the Second Coming of Christ and the world peace he would bring upon his return. 

Though Bernstein did not keep the Sabbath or observe the high Jewish holidays, he would “go from temple to temple in Manhattan and time it so he could hear the cantors that he liked,” his son Alexander told NPR's Peter Crimmins in a 2018 interview. “He knew all the rabbis. He could sing all the prayers. Could read and speak Hebrew.”

Pressed by many friends and admirers to concentrate more on composing (even after he was appointed the New York Philharmonic’s music director in 1958), Bernstein longed to create an opera about the Holocaust. He never got around to it. 

“Symphony No. 3” was probably the closest he ever came to fulfilling the ambition, and even in this case, it was a different musical form, with Wall Street Journal critic John Anderson suggesting that the 12-tone piece could just as easily be seen as “an oratorio or a monologue with music.”

As originally envisioned by Bernstein, the narrator was female—an unusual choice, given that “women are not officially supposed to say Kaddish in the old tradition,” he told an interview for Japanese TV in 1985. He wrote the part with Felicia in mind, and in fact she narrated when the symphony had its U.S. premiere in January 1964.

In the spoken-word portion that Bernstein ended up creating himself, the narrator pointedly questions at one point the justice and mercy of God:

Are You listening, Father? You know who I am:
Your image; that stubborn reflection of You
That Man has shattered, extinguished, banished.
And now he runs free—free to play
With his new-found fire, avid for death,
Voluptuous, complete and final death.
Lord God of Hosts, I call You to account!
You let this happen, Lord of Hosts!

In his anguished and angry wrestling with the Almighty, Bernstein was squarely in a Jewish tradition running from The Book of Job to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. He found such existential matters even more urgent at this point in the 20^th century: While the Holocaust had involved the annihilation of the Jews, the atomic bomb raised the specter of nuclear annihilation of all humanity.

While the narrator spiritually wrestles with God for much of the 40-minute performance, Bernstein continued to wrestle with the text. “I made it over communicative….Even I am embarrassed when I hear the record here and there.” Eventually he rewrote it so that the narrator could be either male or female.

Even with all this rearranging and especially tightening, Bernstein seems to have been ambivalent about this work, explaining its movement from atonality to tonality as being paralleled by the narrator’s journey towards resolution with God.

In effect, The Kaddish Symphony represented the first in a spiritual musical trilogy springing from the violence and dislocation of the Sixties. 

Two years later, he wrote Chichester Psalms in a more life-affirming vein, and MASS—the first work performed at the opening of the JFK Center for the Performing Arts in 1971—with its eclectic mix of musical genres, challenged American values as well as, again, God.

As time went on, Bernstein came to better terms with this composition that had so unnerved him. You can see it in this YouTube clip of a 1985 performance in Japan, commemorating the 40^th anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

Just before the piece begins in earnest, you can see Bernstein with eyes closed and hands clasped, almost surely in prayer—perhaps for a good performance at this show, perhaps for the better world this composition called for, or maybe for both.

Quote of the Day (Anne-Sophie Mutter, on What Musicians Can Learn From Roger Federer)

“Art has to do with self-doubt, renewing yourself, being open to all the possibilities of perceiving music, pursuing music, having great joy on stage, sharing music. That should be the goal above anything: communicating being there in the moment, giving it your all. Of course, you are aiming for technical perfection because that’s the groundwork from which you can take off like a bird. That’s like being an athlete. [Retired Swiss tennis great] Federer has been exemplary and a great inspiration for me personally because he always brought so much passion, precision, joy and persistence to his game. That pretty much sums up what being an artist is about.”— German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, quoted by Ariane Todes, “Master of the Strings: Mutter on Tennis’s Roger Federer,” BBC Music Magazine, June 2023

The photo accompanying this post was taken of Roger Federer serving during the Qatar Exxonmobil Open in Doha, on January 4, 2012, by Vinod Divakaran.

This Day in Classical Music History (Sergey Rachmaninov, Melancholy, Much-Imitated Maestro, Born)

Apr. 1, 1873— Sergey Rachmaninov, who established a worldwide reputation as a composer and conductor before political exile forced him to change career direction and become a virtuoso concert pianist, was born in Semyonovo, Russia.

“I reflect the philosophy of old Russia—White Russia—with its overtones of suffering and unrest, its pastoral but tragic beauty, its ancient and enduring glory,” this self-acknowledged “last of the romantic composers” said, in an interview published by Glenn Quilty in 1959, 16 years after Rachmaninov’s death.

It was the Bolshevik regime’s loss when it made life in Rachmaninov’s “White Russia” untenable by seizing his Ivanovka estate during the Communist takeover. Packing only enough belongings to fit in a few suitcases, he embarked on a Scandinavian tour featuring 10 piano recitals, then settled in America, where he built a reputation as arguably the greatest pianist that many concertgoers had ever seen.

It’s easy to imagine Rachmaninov as the kind of wistful aristocrat nostalgic for a lost estate envisioned by Anton Chekhov. But his melancholy strain has been more likely to have been experienced in popular culture less onstage than through recorded music—credited frankly, on film (Piano Concerto No.2, in David Lean’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter), or uncredited, at least initially (Eric Carmen—but more on that shortly).

Pick up almost any summary of the life of Rachmaninov—even a short article—and the author will probably remark on this musical icon’s remarkably large hands—how he commanded, even exploited, all the capabilities of the keyboard, so much that his own compositions often challenged subsequent pianists without his lengthy fingers.

It’s true that he could span 12 piano keys from the tip of his little finger to the tip of his thumb. But physical assets can only carry a musician so far, in the same way that quick wrists can help but not fully account for how fast a baseball slugger can turn on a pitch.

Just as important, in both cases, are intensive training, self-discipline, and an appropriate temperament.

The training came primarily by way of the Moscow Conservatory. The self-discipline came through the slow but diligent practice regimen he learned there and urged on later students. The temperament followed an early crisis, when conductor Alexander Glazunov—whom a persistent legend claims was drunk at the time—botched the premiere of Rachmaninov’s first symphony.

The 23-year-old’s trauma was so intense (he hid on a spiral staircase during the performance, then fled into the street with catcalls ringing in his ears) hid on a spiral staircase while it was going on and then ran into the street to escape the catcalls) that he underwent hypnosis while under a psychologist’s care to overcome). When he did, the result was a triumph: the Second Piano Concerto.

The public loved Rachmaninov—sometimes too much.

Maybe you’ve heard of authors groaning over apprentice works still out there that can no longer withstand their scrutiny, right? Like W. H. Auden tweaking his early verses, with not-always-happy outcomes? That was the case with Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor, written in 1892 after his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory.

As Timmy Fisher notes in the popular “Life of a Song” column in The Financial Times early last month, Rachmaninov “considered this youthful piece unrepresentative — inferior to later efforts that were ‘not appreciated half so much.’” The composer’s lack of affection for the piece was so pronounced that he begrudged its popularity—even going so far as to risk an audience’s displeasure in 1923 by refusing to play it as an encore.

(I don’t want to leave you with the impression that Rachmaninov was always so grouchy or that he utterly lacked a sense of humor. Given the proper occasion, his ironic wit could be keen. During one performance, his friend violinist Fritz Kreisler, anxious over losing his place in the music, whispered, “Where are we?”  Rachmaninov quipped, “Carnegie Hall.”)

Even during his lifetime, Rachmaninov saw his work adapted in singular ways by pop musicians. In 1918, George L. Cobb’s “Russian Rag” transformed Prelude into—yes, ragtime music.  Twenty years later, Duke Ellington employed a swinging arrangement of the same work at the Cotton Club.

But few musicians have occasioned as much commentary for borrowing so heavily from the Russian as Eric Carmen. When I first heard that the former frontman of The Raspberries had done so for “All by Myself” for his first solo LP, I had assumed that the influence could be heard most heavily in the extended piano solo in that hit’s break. But as it happened, it was the melody itself form the Second Piano Concerto that had been used.

Then, several years ago, while listening to the Adagio movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, I sat bolt upright: that was Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” that I was hearing!

These borrowings can be viewed very differently by different people. A decade or two later, Carmen could have said that this was a case of “sampling.” Others might have claimed that he was paying tribute to an idol, in the manner of Brian DePalma with Alfred Hitchcock.

But because they saw no credits on the album sleeves, Rachmaninov’s descendants saw plagiarism—and they sued. Carmen has said he mistakenly believed the song was in the public domain. Before long, the lawyers got to work and everyone was happy.

“The reason that I used those things was twofold,” Carmen explained 16 years later, in an interview with Gordon Pogoda. “First, they happened to move me. That stuff gave me goose bumps every time I listened to it. Also, I thought that it's a crime that there are some spectacular melodies in classical music that the general public doesn't get exposed to. I thought this was a way for me to bring some of the classical music that I love, incorporate it into a pop song for a new decade of kids, and introduce them to those beautiful melodies that they might not otherwise hear.”

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattering, that Rachmaninov would be thrilled by all the “flattery” he’s gotten since his death. Carmen is hardly the only pop postwar composer who’s looked to Rachmaninov for inspiration: Jeff Lynne and Barry Manilow, among others, have done so.

In the decade before his death in 1943, just a few days short of his 70^th birthday, Rachmaninov may have wondered about the strength of his legacy in classical music. Such musical authorities as Virgil Thomson, Paul Rosenfield, and Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians dismissed his work.

The passage of time, though, has seen his work incorporated into the repertoire of most orchestras. Piano specialist Jeremy Nicholas goes further, writing without reservations in the January 2023 issue of Gramophone Magazine that the Russian was “perhaps the most complete musician of the past 150 years,” observing that he “operated at the highest level in three different disciplines: conducting, composing and piano playing.”

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, Proposing ‘A Financial Symphony’)

“Why not a Financial Symphony? Allegro: Impending Disaster, Lento maestoso: Stony Broke, Scherzo: Light Heart and Empty Pocket, Allegro con brio: Clouds Clearing.”—Anglo-Irish Nobel Literature laureate George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), June 29, 1932 postcard to English composer Sir Edward Elgar, quoted in F.W. Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round (1942)

Shaw, a music critic before he became a playwright, certainly did not feel bashful about suggesting to “Pomp and Circumstance” creator Elgar—in semi-retirement, following the death of his wife a dozen years before—what his next musical subject would be.

Elgar didn’t take him up on it. But he did accept the commission for a symphony that Shaw strongly urged the BBC have him do. That work was unfinished at Elgar’s death from cancer in 1934.

But his extensive 130 pages of notes enabled British composer Anthony Payne to finish the job over 60 years later. Symphony No. 3 in C Minor ended up being performed 25 years ago this week, to considerable acclaim.

When Shaw contributed his puckish idea to Elgar, the world was in the grip of a worldwide depression. Considering the repercussions of that economic collapse—not just the rise of Nazism in Germany, but also the starry-eyed wonder many intellectuals in the West would hold for the Soviet Union in those years—it definitely took a while for the “Clouds Clearing” movement to develop.

If a “financial symphony” were created today in line with Shaw’s concept, I’m afraid that the result could be every bit as discordant as what happened during his time and Elgar’s.

(By the way, if you want to hear how Payne completed Elgar’s project, listen to this YouTube clip of the performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.)

This Day in Classical Music History (Copland-Scored ‘Our Town’ Opens in Theaters)

May 24, 1940-- Our Town, Hollywood’s adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thornton Wilder, with a screenplay by the playwright himself, was released in the United States. 

The movie, distributed by United Artists when Americans feared being drawn into an overseas war, appealed to critics and audiences alike for affirming eternal values found in even the smallest communities in the country. It went on to be nominated for six Academy Awards.

When writing about a collaborative medium like film, there are all kinds of subjects to consider. In the case of Our Town, I could talk about how it represented a step forward for William Holden after his debut in Golden Boy; how director Sam Wood expertly guided the other members of the cast; and how producer Sol Lesser worked to win Wilder’s approval of the finished product.

But instead, I will focus on another aspect: the score by Aaron Copland. It fits squarely into a roughly 15-year period, from 1935 to 1950, when this and other works such as Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, Hoe-down, and A Lincoln Portrait virtually redefined the notion of “Americana” in music. 

At first glance, the 39-year-old product of Brooklyn might seem an unlikely candidate to render a small-town setting created by Wilder. But in fact, he had already begun to do so the year before, with his score for John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which had enabled him to morph from a modernist art composer to one working in a mass medium. 

When Copland discovered that Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corner was inspired by Peterborough, N.H., where the composer had created several of his own works, he felt an immediate affinity with the playwright and setting.

In a 1980 interview with Roger Hall, Copland explained the delicate balance maintained by film composers: “When you’re writing music for a film, you know that it’s not going to be listened to like concert music. People should be absorbed in the story of the film. Very often they don’t even know that music is going on, though it affects their emotions. The music mustn’t get in the way. But on the other hand, it must count for something.”

Our Town represented a particular challenge. The playwright was at pains to dispense with conventional stagecraft, to allow the text to convey his deepest meanings. 

“Each individual’s assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner,” Wilder wrote in a preface to this and to his two other most successful plays, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker. “And here the method of staging finds its justification — in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables; but when Emily revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birthday, the very chairs and tables are gone. Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind — not in things, not in ‘scenery.’...The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.”

But film is a vastly different medium from the stage. Wordless closeups can convey all that a playwright might try to express in a five-minute monologue. In fact, extensive talk is antithetical to the combination of movement and image inherent in the concept of “motion picture.” On the other hand, music can subliminally express this emotion, as long as it remains unobtrusive.

Studio executives and Wood were "counting on the music to translate the transcendental aspects of the story,” Copland later recounted. “I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the story."

The experience with Our Town was successful and pleasant enough that four years later, Copland arranged his soundtrack for an 11-minute orchestral suite, dedicating it to protege Leonard Bernstein. That compressed take (here in this YouTube clip) has become a staple of symphony orchestras since then.

As he had been for Of Mice and Men, Copland was nominated in the Oscar categories Best Music, Score, and Best Music, Original Score for his work on Our Town. He would be nominated two years later in the category Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for The North Star before finally winning at the close of the decade for his score for The Heiress.

But the latter film marked the end of Copland’s Hollywood activity. Director William Wyler cut and unevenly dubbed much of the composer’s carefully wrought music, and Copland now had enough financial resources that he could afford to be more selective about his projects. As a result, the only other movie that Copland worked on for the rest of his life was the 1961 independent production Something Wild.

More disappointing for Copland, he never got the chance to work with Wilder again, despite the great esteem the two had for each other. When Copland broached with Wilder the idea of collaborating with him on adapting Our Town for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the playwright declined: 

“I'm convinced I write a-musical plays: that my texts 'swear at' music; that they're after totally different effects; that they delight in the homeliest aspects of our daily life . . . Music and particularly opera is for the unlocked throat, the outgoing expressive 'idea and essence' behind our daily life. I hope my plays don't lack that idea and essence, but they singularly shrink from an explicit use of it. They are homely and not one bit lyrical.'' 

If Copland’s association with Wilder was fleeting, the composer’s influence on subsequent Hollywood film music was enduring, most notably in soundtracks by Elmer Bernstein (To Kill a Mockingbird), Randy Newman (The Natural) and James Horner (Field of Dreams). 

The latter two baseball films so vividly evoked the wistful pastoral nostalgia associated with “America’s pastime” that Spike Lee decided to go directly to the original source, so to speak, in recasting the image of a different sport. For He Got Game, the director borrowed directly from Copland with the selections “The Open Prairie," "Appalachian Spring," "John Henry," "Lincoln Portrait," "Hoe-Down."

(The image accompanying this post shows William Holden and Martha Scott from the film Our Town.)