This Day in Music History (Mary Travers, Golden Center of ’60s Folk Hitmakers, Dies)

Sept. 16, 2009— Mary Travers, a willowy blonde whose soaring soprano and liberal-left politics helped lift the vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary and a generation of folk music singer-songwriters onto the top of the charts and into the heart of the civil-rights and antiwar movements, died at age 72 in Danbury, CT, of side effects from chemotherapy for leukemia.

As I write this, Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris led Donald Trump first to speculate that the singer-songwriter might “pay a price for it…in the marketplace,” then to post, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social. 

In a sense, Swift is the spiritual descendant of Travers—who, like fellow trio members Peter Yarrow and Noel (Paul) Stookey, was an outspoken social activist—and, unlike Swift, advocated relentlessly on multiple issues.

PPM’s 1963 cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for instance, almost instantly became an anthem of the civil-rights movement, and brought his literate, serious songs to the attention of a public that at the time was buying softer pop fare like Lesley Gore’s “Judy’s Turn to Cry.”

This Kentucky native came to Greenwich Village as a child with her mother. A newspaper reporter and single parent, Virginia Travers had little time to spend with Mary, but left her with an important bit of advice—beware the thin line between compromise and complicity—and with an unexpected adult female role model: an African-American friend who often took Mary into her Harlem home on weekends, where the young girl developed an acute understanding of racial inequality.

Though in high school she joined the Song Swappers, which sang backup for Pete Seeger on several recordings, her initial diffidence about performing left her at loose ends on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s until Bob Dylan's aggressive manager Albert Grossman decided to manufacture his own counterpart to the all-male Kingston Trio—only with the svelte Travers to provide sex appeal in combination with the goateed Yarrow and Stookey.

Grossman had particular instructions for Travers. Perhaps to increase her mystique, she was to leave the speaking onstage to Yarrow and Stookey (a request she agreed to, given her stage fright at the time). More oddly, according to a December 2020 episode of the podcast "500 Songs" by Andrew Hickey, Grossman also insisted that Travers stay inside, lest any tan that resulted spoiled her image.

Yarrow and Stookey composed only a handful of songs themselves (“Puff the Magic Dragon” and “I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music”) and they exhibited serviceable rather than virtuoso guitar skills. But, after considerable refinement by arranger and producer Milt Okun, they learned how to blend their harmonies effortlessly with Travis.

Moreover, they proved excellent interpreters of works by others, as they exposed listeners not only to Dylan but also to the likes of Gordon Lightfoot (“Early Morning Rain”), Laura Nyro (“And When I Die”), Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and John Denver (“Leaving on a Jet Plane”).

Commercial success and high cultural visibility followed. Twelve hit singles came in the nine years after their formation in 1961, and the three singers appeared at the 1963 March on Washington, at the White House for the celebration of John F. Kennedy's second year in office, and at Martin Luther King's 1965 march on Selma.

The group broke up in 1970, not because of the clashes over ego, money, and creative direction that bedevil so many other musical combos, but simply because Stookey feared a heavy touring schedule would jeopardize his family life.

Travers used the next several years away from her musical partners to good effect—writing poetry, hosting her own radio show (even landing the first interview that Dylan had given in over a decade), and, by necessity, taking greater command in her solo concerts than she had done with Yarrow and Stookey.

The three singers stayed on good terms after they ceased working together in 1970, so no tensions had to be eased over when they reunited eight years later for a no-nukes benefit concert.

An album, titled, appropriately enough, Reunion, followed, and though its pop arrangements reportedly disappointed Yarrow by departing from their more folk-oriented sound, it provided a pretext for touring and reconnecting with their audience.

When I saw them in an August 1978 concert at Central Park, they were received rapturously by fans.

Peter, Paul and Mary continued to perform together, albeit less frequently, until a few months before Travers' death. But they were aware that they were fighting rather than in sync with the national zeitgeist, as they contrasted the "Us Decade" of the 1960s with the "Me Decade" of the Jimmy Carter years.

Moreover, from the 1980s on, they were often condescendingly regarded as relics of a bygone era, even the model for "The Folksmen" for the film mockumentary "A Mighty Wind," according to this January 2015 blog post by Glen Herbert. 

All of this was beside the point, as far as their musical legacy was concerned. Was the trio's sometimes-derided earnestness really any worse than other musical artists' snarkiness? 

In any case, the group still enjoyed playing for appreciative audiences, and their harmonies remained largely undimmed by the inevitable aging process. Travers herself was now more ready to challenge convention, whether in public, on US policy towards Central America in the Reagan years, or even privately with Yarrow and Stookey. 

Even in these later years, she was influencing a later generation of folksingers, according to singer-songwriter Nerissa Nields in a blog post appropriately titled "Thank You, Mary" right after Travers' death:

"The Mary we all saw in the sixties was much more complicated and interesting than the blond, leggy, silent-except-when-belting-her heart-out Greenwich Village waif we mostly got to see.... By the time [sister] Katryna and I got to watch her perform in person in the mid-80s, she was silent no longer. Au contraire: she was full of opinions. She was also significantly overweight, a fact she joked about from the stage. She was breaking all the rules, tossing out all the adjectives assigned to her. And through that singular revolution, she liberated two future folk singers." 

Now in their eighties, Yarrow and Stookey continue to perform together, but I am sure they would acknowledge that something is inevitably missing without their longtime female partner. Those yearning for that missing element can find a Peter, Paul and Mary tribute band on YouTube. But nothing compares to the charismatic blonde with the ringing alto that touched the heart.

This Day in Music History (Birth of Dave Brubeck, ‘West Coast Jazz’ Pioneer)

Dec. 6, 1920—Dave Brubeck, a pianist, bandleader and composer who over a six-decade career epitomized the cool sounds of “West Coast Jazz,” was born in Concord, Calif.

Brubeck became the center of this Northern California-centered musical movement through his attempts to create a modern jazz sound that incorporated the advanced compositional techniques of French composer Darius Milhaud. His friendships with and advocacy for Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, and Cal Tjader placed him at the epicenter of West Coast Jazz.

Brubeck may be most recognized in his own right for a song written by the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Paul Desmond. Since its 1959 release, “Take Five” has become the biggest-selling jazz single ever, with the album on which it appears, Time Out, earning the distinction of being the first jazz record to go gold. Their interplay--Desmond, with a sound he likened to a dry martini, and Brubeck with his propulsive large chords--is especially remarkable on this recording.

Though Brubeck took piano lessons with his mother at age four and his two older brothers were also professional musicians, his future livelihood, let alone his fame and long life, was by no means assured. He gave up the piano at age 11 to concentrate on rodeo roping, and the following year, when the Brubecks moved to the foothills of the Sierras, he began to work with his father on the family’s 45,000-acre cattle ranch.

Even when the lure of the piano lured him away from his intention of majoring in veterinary medicine, a hitch developed in his new plans. His inability to read music was discovered by the dean of the music conservatory, who only relented on his threat not to graduate him when younger teachers protested that he could write great counterpoint and when Brubeck promised “never to teach and embarrass the conservatory,” the future jazz great said in a 1999 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross.

In a 1973 humorous essay for the British magazine Punch, “How Jazz Came to the Orange County State Fair,” Desmond observed that one consequence of Brubeck’s ranch upbringing was a concern for “which way the hole slopes.” That same sense of the physical environment was paralleled by awareness of the musical landscape.

For example, Brubeck traced his inspiration for polyrhythm (i.e., playing more than one rhythm in the same piece) back to working on his father’s ranch, when he imagined the sounds most compatible with the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. And the exotic time signatures he heard in Turkish street music and multi-rhythmic African traditions while on tour led to his quartet’s commercial zenith, Take Five—a musical direction his record company accepted only reluctantly.

These journeys abroad would take on moral as well as musical dimensions. As early as World War II, while he was serving in General George Patton’s army, Brubeck led an integrated band. In 1960, at the height of his popularity, he took an even more public stand against racism, as he canceled a 25-date tour of colleges and universities across the American South that had banned the quartet’s bassist, Eugene Wright. (The background for this controversy is examined in a spring 2019 essay by Kelsey A. K. Klotz in Daedalus.)

Over time, spirituality became an increasing concern for Brubeck. Much of this was manifested in the 1960s and 1970s, when he found in Biblical texts the inspiration for works that addressed racial justice (e.g., the toccata Truth Is Fallen in 1971). But a decisive moment came in 1979, as a result of a commission from Our Sunday Visitor Magazine to compose a Mass. The powerful feeling of creativity he experienced not only resulted in To Hope! A Celebration, but in his conversion to Roman Catholic. (For an account of Brubeck’s musical evolution, see Michael Sherwin's 2003 essay "Jazz Goes Back to Church" in the Jesuit publication America.)

Honors came Brubeck’s way from early to late in his career. In 1954, he became only the second jazz performer (after Louis Armstrong) to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine. In the decade before his death in 2012 (a day shy of his 92^nd birthday), he received a Living Legacy Jazz Award from the Kennedy Center; a Lifetime Achievement Award from the London Symphony Orchestra; and the Kennedy Center Award from President Obama. He may have derived some of his greatest personal satisfaction, however, by performing with sons Darius, Chris and Dan—also professional musicians—starting in the 1970s.

(For a recent discussion of Brubeck music being released in time for the centennial of his birth, see this blog post for the magazine Jazz Times.)

(The image accompanying this post is “Portrait of Dave Brubeck”, with sheet music as backdrop, taken by Carl Van Vechten, Oct. 8, 1954. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection.)

This Day in Music History (Death of Oscar-Winning Film Composer Jerry Goldsmith)

June 21, 2004—Jerry Goldsmith, a prolific and versatile Oscar- and Emmy-winning composer of film and TV scores that deserve to rank with the classics of the studio system, died at age 75 after a protracted, arduous battle with cancer.

Chances are, you may have heard a Goldsmith score without realizing it: he did, after all, create around 250 soundtracks over nearly five decades in the business. The next time you find yourself humming the theme for the series The Waltons, for instance, you have Goldsmith to thank.

Surely you’ve guessed by now that the image accompanying this post is not of Goldsmith, but of a scene from one of his most prominent projects, The Omen, the 1977 horror film that earned him his only Academy Award. Director Richard Donner and producer Harvey Bernhard urged Twentieth Century Fox studio head Alan Ladd Jr. to increase the film's post-production budget so they could hire Goldsmith, whom they had come to believe, after seeing him live at the Hollywood Bowl, would be just right for the project. Ladd did so, and Donner subsequently became convinced that the film's eventual box-office success owed much to the mood Goldsmith was able to create with his score: his most avant-garde music to date, relying heavily on a chorus that, even with strange noises (barking, howling, grunts, whispering Latin phrases), were incorporated as if they were musical. 

Yet The Omen was not Goldsmith's only great work onscreen. You also might recall his music from the Star Trek film series, Basic Instinct, The Planet of The Apes, The Blue Max, Patton, The Russia House and Chinatown.

After the success of Easy Rider and American Graffiti in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the wall-to-wall, symphonic motion-picture soundtrack became an increasingly lost art in Hollywood. Directors such as Martin Scorsese, Cameron Crowe and Lawrence Kasdan decided to buy the rights to hit (often rock ‘n’ roll) songs that seemed to fit perfectly a particular scene, rather than collaborate with a composer to create something completely new. It all fit with another trend: Hollywood’s attempt to find songs that, when released separately from the film, could not only drive traffic to the movie but also generate revenues in association with it. Goldsmith, James Horner and John Williams remained the master practitioners of a style that had nurtured some of Hollywood's finest music.

Goldsmith was something of a throwback to the golden age when classically trained European composers, fleeing the Nazis, found work in Hollywood. Max Steiner (Gone With the Wind), Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane and a decade of Hitchcock films), Franz Waxman (Sunset Boulevard), and Erich Maria Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood) contributed scores as integral and memorable to classic dramas and comedies as their scripts, cinematography and stars. Goldsmith learned this vibrant art from one of its best practitioners while studying film composition at the University of Southern California: Miklos Rosza, composer of the Ben-Hur soundtrack.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Goldsmith built his reputation and honed his working methods through such series as Dr. Kildare, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Twilight Zone and the Boris Karloff-hosted anthology series, Thriller. (See my prior post on the latter.)

Thriller may have been especially significant in providing him multiple and varied opportunities to work in different musical styles and in meeting relentless deadline pressure. Each story received its own especially composed musical accompaniment. Goldsmith ended up scoring 10 episodes in the first season alone, one-third of the entire roster that year. The complete series DVD allows listeners to hear these compositions not just within the contexts of the episodes, but as separate entities.

Eleven years ago, Film Comment magazine published an article titled "Soundtracks101 – Essential Movie Music: A Listener's Guide." Five of Goldsmith’s made this list of 101 classics.

Goldsmith, like many of his peers, was subject to an unfortunate aspect of his collaborative craft: often, his soundtracks were a good deal better than the films they were meant to accompany. He worked as a master of one medium that was meant to support another. In addition to those titles already listed here, readers (and film fans) might also want to listen to A Patch of Blue, The Wind and the Lion, Papillon, Lilies of the Field, The Sand Pebbles, and Total Recall.

This Day in Music History (“Silent Night” Played for First Time)

December 25, 1818—One of the most glorious of Christmas carols, “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”), was sung for the first time at St. Nicholas Church in Obendorf, Austria. The lyrics were written by the assistant pastor of the church, Fr. Joseph Mohr, who had taken them to choir director Franz Gruber (pictured), who composed the music the night before.

Countless myths have encrusted the creation and reception of this song, as recounted by Bill Egan. One wishes there was somewhat more documentation on this—the song, after all, was not composed in the time of Shakespeare, when records were kept and preserved indifferently—but then again, I suppose we are lucky to know even what we do about it.

Mohr and Gruber were not, after all, Mozart, Beethoven, or Josef or Michael Haydn, who were all variously believed to be the composers in the first half-century or so after it was created. They had nothing elaborate with which to work—just Mohr’s guitar and the voices of the choir. They never became rich off of a song that people began singing and playing the world over within their own lifetimes. They were simply officials at a village church, with a job to do.

For those of us who work and wonder at the products of our minds, the two men represent a welcome reminder that even ordinary people can create the most extraordinary works.

It’s hard to believe, but the story of these simple, pious men figured in the life of a writer far more famous and far more complicated: Christopher Isherwood, friend of W.H. Auden and author of the “Berlin Stories” that inspired Cabaret. The Weimar Era decadence depicted in that musical certainly described that period in the life of the writer, who early on rejected not only the Anglican faith into which he was baptized but also Christianity and the message of Jesus as a whole.

Throughout his late 40s into his 60s, Isherwood supplemented income from novels with scripts for film and television. None of the latter, oddly enough for someone whose novels burst with colorful detail and insinuating dialogue (for an example, see Mr. Norris Changes Trains), turned out to be particularly memorable.

Except, perhaps, in one small instance, for one small boy: me.

At age eight or nine, I watched one Christmas, on network TV, an hour-long primetime special on how “Silent Night” was composed. From a distance of 40 years, I can’t recall many details about it, aside from the fact that it was a biopic about Franz Gruber.

But a few years ago, while reading the long but often fascinating biography of Isherwood by Peter Parker, I noticed that it mentioned one of his later credits as an expatriate writer-for-hire in Hollywood: a 1968 network special, The Legend of "Silent Night". This must have been the same one I saw. It was shown on TV exactly 150 years to the day when the song was first performed.

At first glance, this struck me as the most incongruous pairing of a religious skeptic and a religious themed script this side of Gore Vidal coming aboard to work on the epic Ben-Hur. It could only have been a job, no more.

On second thought, however, I wondered. True, Isherwood never re-embraced the faith of his childhood. But after he came to the United States with Auden, he experienced a search for meaning that led him to convert to Hinduism, a spiritual journey he chronicled in My Guru and His Disciple. (The “guru” of the title was Swami Prabhavanda.)

That experience, I think, gave him an entrée, a point of sympathy between himself and Gruber, that would not have been possible otherwise—for Isherwood eventually came to translate several Hindu texts into English, including Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. He had now become intimately familiar with the struggle that the creative artist faces in explaining to others not similarly gifted nor religiously inclined how the deity he embraces has altered his life.

I did not find any tape of this 1968 special in the catalog of the Paley Center for Media. Too bad: the credits (including Isherwood’s) meant little or nothing to me at the time, but nowadays any such array of talent, no matter how seemingly modest the project, would have to be regarded as all-star: narration by Kirk Douglas, music by Alex North (the scores for A Streetcar Named Desire and Spartacus), directed by Daniel Mann (Come Back, Little Sheba), teleplay by Isherwood and Harry Rasky, based on “The Story of Silent Night” by Paul Gallico, and starring James Mason as Gruber.

The Paul Gallico source material raises an interesting question. The sportswriter-turned-popular-novelist retailed a story that had little if any relation to fact: i.e., that “Silent Night” was originally performed with a guitar because the vital parts of the organ at St. Nicholas had been eaten away by mice! A great anecdote, certainly lending itself to the kind of dramatic detail Isherwood would have relished. Did the Hindu convert put this detail in his script?

I don’t know, but it’s certainly worth finding out—something that would be easier to do if those in Hollywood wake up to the interesting creative property they undoubtedly have buried in some vault.

This Day in Music History (Handel Survives Sword Duel--Barely)

December 5, 1704—The future composer of one of the most beloved pieces sacred music in the Christmas season, George Frideric Handel, became involved in a dispute with another composer that rapidly escalated into a sword duel. The two hotheaded young antagonists might have found themselves in a terrible holiday tragedy except for an act of God: the blade of his opponent was stopped by a button on Handel’s coat.

Once, the great humorist Robert Benchley wrote an essay that, to my surprise, has not dated in the slightest, more than three-quarters of a century later. As he surveyed “What College Did to Me,” the Harvard graduate did not bring to mind the great thoughts of civilization’s masterminds, but the oddball trivia that stuck to the mind like Velcro. (For instance: Charlemagne “either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.”)

I experienced something like this at Columbia University. Our Music Humanities instructor, Doug Stumpf, was just the kind of genial, well-prepared, well-informed instructor who makes required courses such as this one as painless as you can get. (And I’m happy to see, judging from the jacket of a recent book of his, that he’s not only an editor at Vanity Fair but that he’s aged considerably better than many of his students.)

But for all his skill, I’m afraid that I don’t remember the fine points about the basso continuo, development, or the Gregorian chant, but instead some bizarre phenomena of musical and religious history: the castrati. When I learned about the contretemps involving Handel and frenemy Johann Mattheson, I found another incident that, I’m afraid, I won’t be able to forget anytime soon.

Several years ago, I recall, The New Yorker ran a wickedly funny piece imagining several of the great figures in the Great American Songbook (Cole Porter? George Gershwin?) engaging in hip-hop style gunplay. The piece was so hilarious because of how incongruous those 1930s swells seem in comparison with Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac, etc.

But classical music is even more sedate than that, even. Or at least it was, the last time I checked. But the war-of-words-turned-swordplay between 19-year-old Handel and 23-year-old Mattheson suggested something else entirely.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately, folks: the fight, believe it or not, did not involve a woman. Not, that is, unless you regard an opera named Cleopatra—the handiwork of Mattheson—as a stand-in for the real thing. (Well, it would involve something with that hussy, wouldn’t it? For the latest evidence of the trouble she could create between two males, see the Season 2 DVD episodes of the HBO series Rome.)

As the opera was being performed, Mattheson wanted Handel to yield the harpsichord to him. Nothing doing, said Handel, who, by common agreement, was a big guy with an “explosive temperament,” according to critic Harold C. Schonburg.

At this point, I figure, what the two needed was a peacemaker, another young guy who could speak their language. Someone (if he could get past that German thing, that is), like Jeff Spicoli, the stoned-out surfer played by Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I can just imagine how he’d separate the combatants: “Dudes, what are you doing here? Chill out! Lighten up! Increase the peace! Pass the bong (not necessarily in that order, of course!).”

Well, I’ve just described above the events of that day. I didn’t mention the most oddball fact of all: Just before the new year, the two men broke bread, reconciled over dinner, and, in the words of Mattheson, became “better friends than ever.” A good thing, too, because it allowed Handel not only to live to see his first opera, Almira, performed in the new year, but also to live till nearly 40 years later, when his Messiah premiered in Dublin.

The way I figure it, Handel was saved by God so he (and we) could live to sing His praises.

The only other time I’ve heard about two men becoming excellent friends after a duel came in 1813. As you might expect, one of the figures was Andrew Jackson, who seemed to have gotten involved in affairs of honor with nearly half the males of North America. The other was Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri senator whose flamboyance as well as his political bravery made him a natural for John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

This Day in Music History (Kate Smith Sings Berlin’s “God Bless America” for 1st Time)

November 10, 1938—For her Armistice Day radio show, singer Kate Smith premiered “God Bless America,” a castoff that even composer Irving Berlin deemed too corny. An entire generation of Americans—waging two wars to contain the threat of tyranny around the globe—came to disagree.

In 1918, while inducted into the army, Berlin—already world-famous as the prolific Tin Pin Alley composer behind “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and numerous other hits—came up with the idea for Yip! Yip! Yaphank!, a show that would star 350 soldiers. The producers convinced him it wouldn’t work, and besides, he had more than enough tunes for the show.

Berlin stuck the tune in a trunk, where it remained for 20 years. Then the request by Ms. Smith’s manager for a song led Berlin to recycle it. Maybe it was his memory of a recent trip to Europe and his understanding of how the continent was about to go off another cliff that led him to reassess the merits of the song.

The song was a huge hit, of course. In fact, the success of this patriotic hymn was so immense that before long, even this songwriter intent on his prerogatives had assigned all future royalties to the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts and the Campfire Girls.

In the 1970s, hockey’s Philadelphia Flyers believed they hit on a lucky charm: not only were fans far more respectful during “God Bless America” than they were for “The Star Spangled Banner,” but the team itself won far more games than it lost—especially during crunch time, when somehow or other, the team would drive the singer down to perform the song during the Stanley Cup finals—and the team pulled out victories!

In the years following his death, music lovers and the public at large became aware that Berlin might have been the most litigious composer in the history of the American Songbook. Jimmy Breslin had to rewrite an entire part of a novel because Berlin wouldn’t give him permission to quote three words from “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott wryly lamented in a live appearance that a revue she did in tribute to him led him to sue her for copyright infringement!

It’s hard to square such paranoia with the wide-eyed, innocent embrace of the U.S. in “God Bless America.” But the same desperate early circumstances (a family fleeing anti-Semitic Czarist Russia, loss of his father before the age of 10) that made him overly wary about his privileges also left him grateful to the land that rescued him from death, persecution, poverty and obscurity.

In a course I took this semester at Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York on “Architects of Tin Pan Alley,” our effortlessly learned instructor, Phil Atteberry, related the story of Berlin’s last public appearance. At the largest-ever sitdown dinner at the White House, at an event celebrating the return of prisoners of war, the octogenarian composer led the 1,300 guests in a singalong of “God Bless America.”

You’d think that people would be moved by the spectacle of this aging embodiment of Americana making such a poignant appearance. But this was just after the end of the Vietnam War, at the height of the Watergate scandal. The POWs presented President Nixon with a plaque reading “Our leader - our comrade, Richard the Lionhearted." John Wayne, a symbol of America in his own right, said, “I want to thank you, Mr. President, not for any one thing, but for everything.”

Seeing Berlin’s gesture not for what it was but in the context of these other incidents, critics pounced on the composer. He was so dumbfounded by the uproar that he never made a similar appearance.

Phil Atteberry noted the generational difference in attitude toward people about this song. Older Americans, he observed, tend to welcome the song unapologetically, while older ones are cynical about the tune.

Too bad. As the sight of U.S. Senators on Capitol Hill bursting into impromptu harmony on Capitol Hill demonstrates, the song still retains the power to unite under special circumstances.

This Day in Music History (Tchaikovsky Dies Under Mysterious Circumstances)

November 6, 1893—With 16 people (including a priest) watching, in anguished disbelief, as he expired, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—wildly popular composer, insomniac, backpain-sufferer, gambler, homosexual, alcoholic, manic-depressive—died in St. Petersburg, Russia, after five days of physical agony. Almost immediately, the rumor machine went into overdrive on the circumstances of his death.

I just love mysteries, don’t you? Too bad there wasn’t a real-life equivalent of the Lieutenant Columbo forerunner in Dostoyefsky’s Crime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovich, around to make sense of the following:

* Did Tchaikovsky die of complications from cholera, as his younger brother Moleste and an attending doctor insisted?
* Did the neo-Romantic composer, already given to bouts of depression, decide to commit suicide after tiring from his constant struggle to maintain emotional equilibrium?
* Did Tchaikovsky’s pedophilia lead to threatened public exposure—even a criminal trial—that forced him to desperate measures?

Bad enough that Tchaikovsky’s own nature made him a subject for dispute. But what makes this a far more controversial musical mystery than, say, Antonio Salieri’s alleged poisoning of Mozart (an unlikely scenario given unexpected life by Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus) are the number of unexplained circumstances:

* Nobody can account for Tchaikovsky’s whereabouts at all on October 31.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even contract cholera? The overwhelming majority of Tchaikovsky’s fellow aristocrats knew the steps to take to avoid this epidemic circulating through St. Petersburg at the time.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even drain a glass of unboiled water while out dining—especially when his brother specifically warned him about it just as he did so?
* Why wouldn’t someone so fearful of death—not to mention someone whose beloved mother had died of cholera—have been more cautious about avoiding the disease?

Except for a passing reference in the 1954 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, dismissing unnamed “sensational accounts” of the death, nothing concrete was printed until 1980, when a Soviet émigré musicologist, Alexandra Orlova, wrote an article that gave form to the inchoate rumors. In her scenario, the following happened—or might have happened:

* Tchaikovsky abandoned all discretion by seducing the nephew of one Duke Stenbock-Fermor.
* The outraged duke spoke to a lawyer named Jacobi about it. An old classmate of Tchaikovsky’s from the Imperial Law School in St. Petersburg, Jacobi convened seven other classmates in a four- or five-hour “Council of Honor” to consider the duke’s threat of taking the case straight to the Czar.
* Tchaikovsky’s classmates at the meeting told him there was only one honorable way to avoid scandal for his family and his beloved alma mater—and he dashed out of the room without a word.
* The next day, Jacobi visited the composer and convinced him to take arsenic, which would, in effect, mimic the symptoms of cholera.
* On the day that Tchaikovsky was out dining, the arsenic was already circulating through his system when he staged the public charade of drinking the unboiled water when it was presented to him by a waiter.
* On the second day after the visit from Jacobi, at lunch this time, the composer left his table, feeling nauseous and vomiting. The royal physician came to treat him, but not till 10 at night.

Other variants on the incident leading to Tchaikovsky’s despair have also been cited, by Michael Steen in his excellent précis of the composer’s life in The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, including that he seduced the son of the caretaker of his brother Modeste’s apartment block; that it was the Czar’s own nephew, even his son, that caught the composer’s eye; and that he contracted cholera from one of his pick-ups in St. Petersburg.

At first, it seemed that this revisionist account of the death would become the accepted gospel. It spoke to a new age more frank about sexual matters than Tchaikovsky’s own Victorian era. Just as important, it was a conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone would have a field day with this, if he knew even a little bit about music (though anyone who’s seen the director’s JFK can attest that ignorance of a subject is no impediment to him filming it.)

Over the last nearly 30 years, however, a strong counterrevisionist school—led most notably by Alexander Poznansky in Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study--has countered these arguments.

In an act of historical ju-jitsu, it has taken the most sensational aspect of what the sterling music critic-blogger Alex Ross calls this “penny-dreadful” controversy and used it to its own advantage. Of course Tchaikovsky was a homosexual, even a pedophile, this argument goes, but that was commonly accepted in high St. Petersburg circles. Both the Russian court itself and the Imperial Law School were filled with homosexual affairs. In other words, who cared?

Poznansky and his followers pointed out other problems with the conspiracy theory:

* There was no “Duke” Stenbock-Fermor but a count by that name, who had direct access to the Czar and therefore needed no intermediary such as Jacobi.
* No poison could have duplicated the effects of cholera to the extent postulated in the conspiracy theory.
* The suicide theory requires a coverup among so many participants—in the infamous Joseph McCarthy phrase, a “conspiracy so immense”—that it could not possibly be sustained.
* Tchaikovsky had no free time even to meet with his old school friends at this time because of the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.
* At a time when the composer should have been in enervating despair, Tchaikovsky actually sat down and wrote a long letter listing possible dates for a trip to Odessa.
* The medical treatment Tchaikovsky received worked to some extent in that the effects of cholera were stemmed after treatment by the royal physician—it was, ironically, the concern of the composer and his family that the bath cure administered to his mother that had hastened her death from cholera which delayed this treatment in his own case until it was too late.

All of this sounds pretty plausible. But there are a couple of nagging aspects of this affair that render it unlikely to be resolved so quickly, in my opinion:

* As the critic Donal Henahan pointed out in the early 1980s, the penalty for homosexuality under the Czarist regime—repeated four times in criminal codes dating from 1842 to 1885—was lashing with birch rods, deportation to Siberia and loss of all civil rights.
* Rather than being blasé—gay, if you will—about his sexual tendencies, Tchaikovsky was tortured by them, even going so far as to contract a short-lived sham marriage (and advising brother Modeste, also homosexual, to do likewise).
* Tchaikovsky had already demonstrated a tendency toward self-destruction, becoming so repulsed by his wife that he’d waded into the Moskva River hoping to die.
* His final composition, the Sixth Symphony, was retitled, on the spur of the moment, “Pathetique” by the composer, startling listeners then and now with what Alex Ross calls “a dying roar of sorrow.”

Unless some new documentary evidence comes to light, my own theory is that we’ll never know for sure what happened. Add together the cloud of witnesses to Tchaikovsky’s final days, the background of the gay demimonde of Russian court and artistic circles, the true conspiracy of silence on what was deemed shameful sexuality in those days (the death by syphilis of Vincent Van Gogh’s devoted art-dealer brother Theo was not confirmed by the family until several decades later, even after publication of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life), and the introduction of modern sexual politics into the art of biography, and you have a very tangled web indeed.

Too bad. In the end, despite the natural human tendency to want to know everything, then share it in the form of gossip, what really matters is the music—something that the public has understood, even when critical opinion of Tchaikovsky’s own time (and even for a long time afterward) dismissed it as overly sentimental or bombastic rather than capturing the titanic flow of emotion at the heart of the composer’s troubled existence.

This Day in Music History (Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Premieres)

October 14, 1843—Perhaps the most famous incidental music ever composed, the score for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Felix Mendelssohn, premiered in Potsdam.

I’m afraid at least some of my readers—particularly younger ones or those who, like, totally dislike classical music, you know?—might not recognize this composition. But trust me—you know it, the way the words “William Tell Overture” might draw a blank but “The Theme From ‘The Lone Ranger’” makes you sit up.

So here’s a clue: the most memorable section of Mendelssohn’s masterpiece invariably produces more dread and sheer horror in males than even the unmasking of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, or the beady red eyes of Dracula sizing up a cut on poor clueless Renfield.

Yes, I’m talking about “The Wedding March”—which, if you must know, in the full work, constitutes an intermezzo between Acts IV and V, celebrating the triple wedding of Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Hermia, and Theseus and Hippolyta.

As Leon Botstein noted earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, classical music has never really been the kind of favorite with audiences that myth would have it. It’s depended crucially on patronage. In earlier days, that did not derive from Wall Street fatcats or endless PBS fundraising pitches, but rather from rulers. If the ruler were a megalomaniac, for instance, like England’s King Henry VIII, he’d mistake being a man born in the Renaissance for being a Renaissance man, and he’d fancy himself a composer and musician and his subjects would have to bow and scrape and agree.

German composers and musicians of the 19th century were luckier. Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, for example, when he wasn’t his castle Neuschwanstein (the one imitated by Disney), bankrolled Richard Wagner (he of the preposterously Brobdingnagian Ring cycle that spawned sopranos who were supposed to embody the hottest women this side of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and maybe even Angelina Jolie, but who instead looked like they could manhandle The New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor in his prime).

Mendelssohn was a little luckier in having Frederick William IV of Prussia, who had his imperial, conservative bent, to be sure, but who had also had a fine aesthetic streak and kept his head (and life) for longer than Looney Ludwig. He played a key role in the career of Mendelssohn, not only by commissioning this piece in 1842 but also in inviting him to compose incidental music for Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Racine’s Athalie. (Incidentally, when Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, the oldest child of Britain’s Queen Victoria, decided to get married to Frederick’s nephew, also named Frederick, she used “Wedding March,” establishing the tune’s current popularity as a bridal recessional theme.)

Frederick’s wide-ranging aesthetic tastes were not unlike those of the composer himself. In an earlier post, I mentioned how Mozart came from an entire family of the musically gifted. The Mendelssohn family’s cultural tastes were probably even broader than the Mozart family’s:

* Moses Mendelssohn, Felix’s grandfather, was a great Enlightenment philosopher and scholar.
* Abraham Mendelssohn, a Berlin banker, wanted the best of everything for his family, even going so far as to hire a private orchestra so his young son could hear his own music as he composed it.
* Sister Fanny was also an adept musician, and another sister, Rebecca, read Homer in the original Greek—quite a feat for a 19th-century girl.

In short, think the Royal Tenenbaums, or J.D. Salinger's Glass Family (a lot more alike than you might suspect at first), with all the precocity but minus the epic neuroses.

It was natural that young Felix, with his love for reading and theater, would be drawn to A Midsummer Night’s Dream—especially when August Wilhelm Shlegel (whose brother married Felix’s aunt—boy, is this getting complicated!) translated the play with the help of Ludwig Tieck. Mendelssohn composed the overture at age 17, and its premiere marked his first public appearance.

Sixteen years later, Frederick William provided Mendelssohn with the opportunity to expand his work. The composer did so—and now brides the world over know the result.

This Day in Music History (Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” Released)

June 2, 1978—In his first album after settling a lawsuit involving his former manager-producer, Bruce Springsteen released Darkness on the Edge of Town, signaling not only a change in management but also in musical direction.

I had waited, with growing impatience, for Springsteen’s follow-up to the album that put him on the covers of Time and Newsweek (the first time that feat was ever accomplished). A photo of him in concert during his three-year recording hiatus, sans beard, startled me. What other changes would occur when he emerged? I wondered.

I still recall a headline in the music press of the time, encapsulating his dilemma at this point: “Re-born to Run or Born to Re-Run?” Heightening the uncertainty was that the singer-songwriter was reintroducing himself to fans just when punk rock/new wave was making inroads. But, following the album’s release and his subsequent triumphant tour in support of it, Bruce’s relationship with fans was set on an even firmer footing than before.

(For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to him as “Bruce” rather than “Springsteen,” breaking my custom with other figures discussed on this blog. Now, I’ve never met the man, though if I did my reaction might be similar to Andy Richter’s on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” when he finally met William “Captain Kirk” Shatner”: i.e., bowing down before his master.

No, I haven’t met The Boss, but like legions of his other fans, I feel like I know him well. He’s the guy from the neighborhood who, by all rights, should have spent most of his adulthood as a grease monkey—except that he was in the grip of a dream and possessed of enough talent to make it come true. “And that,” as Robert Frost wrote in his great poem “The Road Not Taken,” “has made all the difference.”)

New Musical Forms and Lyrical Concerns and Styles

From album to album, changes in Bruce’s musical and lyrical content might seem incremental. You don’t see how much has changed until you view the entire 35-plus-year career. So it was with Darkness.

On the surface, at least, much remained the same from his first three albums, especially the obsession with cars (“I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396/Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor,” go the opening lines of “Racing in the Street”).

At the behest of new manager-producer Jon Landau, however, Bruce began to move away from the longer, more free-flowing songs of his first three LPs, such as “Kitty’s Back in Town,” “Rosalita,” and “New York City Serenade,” in favor of shorter three- and four-minute tracks. He was still backed by his “blood brothers,” the E Street Band, but the arrangements this time were tighter.

Even Clarence Clemons’ warm, commanding saxophone was much diminished, sometimes even MIA. Filling its place, more often than not, was Bruce’s own guitar—urgent, sometimes angry and blistering, particularly on “Adam Raised a Cain” (voted #67 on Rolling Stone’s recent “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time”).

At the same time, his lyrics, featuring simpler, less Dylanesque imagery and wordplay, burrowed more deeply into his blue-collar background, tightening his bond with millions in his audience. “Factory,” the most explicit example of this here, would soon give rise to “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Highway Patrolman” and “Seeds” in the 1980s.

Let me state my preferences clearly: Born to Run was and remains my favorite album by The Boss. You don’t ever forget your first love, after all, and with its Spectorian “wall of sound,” open-hearted romanticism and all-of-life-in-this-moment spirit, that album made me a lifelong acolyte of Bruce’s traveling rock ‘n’ roll revival show. I knew that, with the new Landau regime in place, I’d miss songs similar in ambition and impact to Born to Run’s nine-minute, West Side Story-style epic, “Jungleland.”

Secrets and Crossfires
But Darkness claimed its own portion of my soul’s allegiance. It was released a couple of days before I graduated from high school—fitting, in a way, as Bruce was the first rock-music god I came to worship on my own, without the guidance of my two older brothers.

The album spoke to me in a personal way. Leaving one way of life, I was deeply concerned about the one to come—an academic environment larger, more secular, and more competitive than the one I had known through 12 years of parochial school. The prospect ahead offered as much peril as promise, with the fears of my inadequacy filling me with foreboding and helping me understand what Bruce meant by, “Well, everybody’s got a secret, Sonny,/Something that they just can’t face.”

As he hunkered down in a farm in Holmdel in an attempt to grab the brass ring again, Bruce must have felt even more keenly another set of lines, from “Badlands”: “I’m caught in a cross fire/That I don’t understand.” Though original manager Mike Appel had been a tireless partisan for the musician when nobody would give him the time of day, he had also inked a contract that resulted in Bruce assigning him the rights to his music, retaining only a small fraction of his royalties. The legal struggle to sever the ties was long and frustrating, an experience that left the artist with a sour taste of music industry ethics and business practices.

A Business Promise Broken…and a Promise With Fans Renewed

Though Bruce denied the lawsuit’s influence on the song, “The Promise,” a number originally slated for the comeback album, seemed clearly inspired by his legal fracas, with lines setting down his anger and bitter disappointment in no uncertain terms: “When the promise is broken you go on living/But it steals something from your soul.”

He premiered it on August 3 at the Monmouth Arts Centre in Red Bank, N.J., and continued to play it on the Darkness tour until July (about a month before I finally had the chance to see him live). He did not perform it live again until his reunion with the E Street Band more than 20 years later.

Around that time, I finally had the chance to hear the song. Bruce kept it off all his albums, even the multi-disk Tracks, the set in which he pretty much opened his musical vault. But he finally relented, releasing “The Promise” on a cassette called 18 Tracks that featured three songs left off the more ballyhooed disk package. Even though I had most of the songs already on the larger set, I figured that the addition of these songs would make the purchase worthwhile. I was right.

For all the haunting, mournful beauty of "The Promise," I think Bruce made the correct decision in not putting it on the Darkness album. For one thing, Darkness was meant to turn the page in his life; any controversy concerning his former manager would have hindered that goal. Perhaps more important, “The Promise” was so bleak that it would have undermined the theme of the album: that even in the face of constant struggle and disappointment, you should set your face against the world with all the defiant (albeit hard-earned and wised-up) sense of affirmation that you can muster.

Darkness might have been a summary of Bruce’s crisis of the soul, but appropriately enough, in the jump-off-the-couch, fist-pumping-the-air anthem “Badlands,” it was also dedicated to the spirit of aficionados like myself who had waited for his return: “For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside,/That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” Through it all, he had kept faith with us. From now on, we would return that all-consuming devotion.

This Day in Music History (“Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” Released)

May 27, 1963—Three days after his 22nd birthday, Robert Zimmerman, the boy from the North Country of Minnesota, completed his transformation into Bob Dylan, the most heralded new member of the suddenly exploding folk-music scene, with the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

In my favorite scene in A Hard Day’s Night, Ringo Starr is asked by a journalist out of touch with his music and his generation if he’s a mod or a rocker. “I’m a mocker,” Ringo answers, with a gravity belying the insouciance of the reply. With the quip, the cheerful Liverpool moptop served notice that he and his bandmates would not let the media pigeonhole them into a single category; that they’d absorbed both categories in their music; and that in fact his generation had created new categories beyond the imagination of their interlocutors. 

So it was with Bob Dylan. That’s what you would expect with this magpie of musical and literary influences, implied by one word in his album title: “freewheelin’.” 

The press latched onto the album’s protest songs, casting him as a kind of musical scion of Woody Guthrie, but in fact the subject matter extended into the personal as well as the political, because he was absorbing everything that came his way in the Greenwich Village where he had lived for the last couple of years—not just the usual suspects of the folk-music scene, but also Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Harry Belafonte, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly, and Smokey Robinson (“America’s greatest living poet,” he told a group of nonplussed music journalists). 

Over the years, Dylan’s albums have comprised a collective work in progress, with one identity and pose exchanged for another. The same thing can be glimpsed in microcosm in his sophomore effort. 

It all began on April 24, 1962, with producer John Hammond recording a mélange of traditional songs and others heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie. After several months, a second producer, Tom Wilson – later famous for tweaking Simon & Garfunkel’s acoustic “Sounds of Silence” with a rock beat—was brought in. 

Though not as startling in this instance, Wilson gave a booster shot to the raspy young singer, who promptly experimented with different styles and voices, on compositions that have become essential parts of his songbook: “Girl From the North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” 

The last of these, covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, became Warner Bros.’ fastest-selling single to date, reaching #2 on the pop charts that summer. The success of the LP justified the faith in him shown by Hammond, the legendary producer who discovered Billie Holliday and Bruce Springsteen. 

Dylan’s eponymous debut album had cratered, and Columbia Records was getting nervous about this unusual song stylist. In 1963, more than 200 folk-music albums were released, according to David Hadju’s Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. Now Dylan’s label had the artist who was not only acclaimed as the best of the bunch, but even as “the voice of a generation.”

This Day in Music History (Duke Ellington’s Birth)

April 29, 1899—His first and middle names at birth in Washington, D.C., were “Edward Kennedy,” but while still a youngster he became known by the name that millions of fans the world over now recognize him by: Duke Ellington.

“Class tells,” one of John O’Hara’s characters remarks in Ten North Frederick. As often is the case with the novelist, the noun in that sentence has a layer of irony: of course it refers to the social distinctions that divide people, arbitrarily and maybe even unfairly, but also signifies elegance, courtesy and simple human dignity. 

In that second sense, few embody the term as well as America’s premiere jazz bandleader-composer.

“Beyond category,” Ellington’s highest compliment, could just as easily apply to his life and career. 

He let nothing stand in the way of his creation—and audiences’ appreciation—of the notes snatched from his fecund brain: Not racial or national origins, not sexual preferences, not bandmembers’ weaknesses or audiences’ fickleness, not even the small-mindedness of people who should have known better (like the Pulitzer Prize board that overruled its own jury that in 1965 recommended him for a special citation).

From the shimmy back herringbone suit that first got the young pianist noticed in Washington to the cool remove he maintained between lovers and himself, he was a natural aristocrat—taking after his father James, “a Chesterfieldian gentleman who wore gloves and spats,” in the words of the musician’s sister Ruth.

In 1923, the 24-year-old Ellington paid his way into the segregated section of Washington’s Howard Theatre to hear saxophonist Sidney Bechet—his first real exposure to New Orleans jazz. 

Five years later, firmly established in Harlem, musicians, including white ones (like Bing Crosby), were coming to see him. By the end of his life, he had played all over the world, to audiences of all races and nationalities.

Ellington’s longtime musical alter ego was Billy Strayhorn. Ellington managed the delicate balancing act of according “Sweetpea” as much recognition as he could without thrusting him so firmly into the limelight that Strayhorn’s orientation as a gay man would be exposed in that less tolerant era.

Harder than keeping Strayhorn’s secret was holding the Ellington big band together. 

In the band’s heyday, it involved not just creating tunes with solos where musicians like Johnny Hodges or Cootie Williams could shine, but also keeping Ben Webster away from the bottle enough so he could show up for recording dates and concerts, or maintaining emotional equilibrium in the South, where the band constantly dealt with segregated accommodations, or playing small halls when their fortunes cratered with the bebop vogue after World War II.

In a warmly affectionate tribute to the Duke on his 70th birthday, when Richard Nixon was throwing a state dinner in his honor at the White House, Ralph Ellison noted the special irony of the occasion: at the turn of the century, Ellington’s father had served as a butler there. 

Now the son was recognized officially as a kind of roving ambassador of perhaps the only uniquely American art form in the world: Jazz.

Something in Ellington’s easy grace must have even impressed Nixon, who, we know now, had few equals as a racist in the 20th-century White House. 

Five years later, on the same day he had to go before the American people and reveal the damaging Watergate transcripts, the President still found time to call the dying musician and wish him a happy birthday. It was an unexpected grace note in a President notably lacking in any, but it also testified to the example of the nonpareil musician and man who called it forth.

Ellington’s physical decline also brought out the best in a man as complex as Nixon, but who, for all his roughness, was also far more given to warmth and generosity: Frank Sinatra.

Approached by a mutual friend of the composer’s to have Ellington’s doctors checked out, Ol’ Blue Eyes had the eminent heart specialist Michael DeBakey flown up, at his own expense, to New York. 

DeBakey quickly sized up the situation—Duke’s doctors had blown it, and his lymphoma was terminal.

Sinatra didn’t stop there, though. On Ellington’s 75th birthday, the singer (who seven years earlier had collaborated with the jazzman on Francis A. Sinatra and Edward K. Ellington), arranged to have the hall near Duke’s room lined with baskets of fruits and fosters, costing anywhere from $2,000-$3,000.

I probably have more CDs of Ellington than of any other jazz musician, but three stand out: Anatomy of a Murder, Live at the 1956 Stratford Festival and Ellington at Newport: 1956. 

The soundtrack for the 1959 Otto Preminger courtroom classic, like the film itself, is alternately urbane, lush, ironic, and sensuous. 

The bandleaders’ appearance at Canada’s premiere theater venue features one tune certainly chosen for its appropriateness: “Hark! The Duke’s Trumpets.” 

The Newport recording preserves forever one of the landmark moments in jazz history: When the bandleader, undoubtedly inspired by a sexy blonde dancing in the audience, allowed tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves to cut loose on “Diminuendo in Blue” with a 27-chorus solo that brought the festival to electrifying life and earned the Duke a Time Magazine cover story and a new recording contract with Columbia.