Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady

A while ago, I was writing my monthly listings for the North America edition of Gramophone when, in working on a piece about the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute, I discovered Polina Nazaykinskaya thanks to works posted on WQXR and the University of Texas Composition Department. Polina’s the kind of person you simultaneously love and hate; her command of the orchestral form is disarming and reminiscent of the likes of Shostakovich, Glazunov and Korngold. She’s also a zygote. As such, her youthful ardor and honesty shows, but it’s matched by a probing maturity that the 26-year-olds playing teenagers on TV could only dream of achieving. She’s unabashed with a lot to say, the tools to say it and the intelligence not to say it all at once. It’s hard not to envy her for that. Admittedly, I’m a Russophile and a sucker for a wintry soul, but in a time like this where snow falls on days that end in “y,” I’ll happily take some Polina with my mulled wine and new translation of Doctor Zhivago. More like this, please.

I’ve Been Saying it For Years

Though I have to find ways of working “Soviet hipster” into conversation more often.

(Thanks, Bangable Dudes in History.)

An Album Cover

I promise I won’t go on about this Ten Great Composers business, but one of the comments on WQXR’s page for the podcast was kind of funny. Or rather, it was a series of comments, expressing distaste at QXR “graffiting” a “tulip” in Beethoven’s mouth. The original comment was deleted, but what no one has pointed out to the followup is that the image is actually the album artwork for a Westminster Gold Best of Beethoven LP.

I have a love for Westminster Gold LPs bordering on cult obsession. I remember distinctly their artwork for Holsts’s The Planets, which I grew up being shocked and gladdened by every time I pulled it out of the shelf in my grandparent’s basement (behind their bar, because every house built and designed in the 50s/60s had a bar).

I remember speaking with a publicist maybe six or eight months ago about their client’s newest album, which had some pretty sexy—though more standard—cover art in its own right. Their disappointment, however, was that said client’s instrument was still prominent in the artwork itself. How many mainstream/pop/rock ensembles or solo artists appear on their album covers with guitars, drums, basses, etc.? (For that matter, how many mainstream/pop/rock ensembles or solo artists appear on their album covers at all?). The classical reissue label that was Westminster was pretty damn forward-thinking in the 1970s for eschewing the standard shot of a conductor with arms raised, a violinist with instrument tucked under chin, or a soprano in full period regalia. Take, instead, the witty Julian Bream Plays Bach (taking a literal interpretation of plays), a ridiculously wonderful interpretation of Die Walkure or the striking Best of Puccini:

That’s the kind of album art I’ll get behind. Unsurprisingly, designer Christopher Whorf is perhaps more famous for working with the likes of Isaac Hayes and John Lennon. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t currently bidding on several WG LPs with an eye on decorating my front hallway with them. More examples of his insouciant takes on the more classical players after the jump.

Down from the Mountaintop

Before Moses ascends Mt. Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, his father-in-law cautions him against burnout. I think continuing in the line of trying to rank and ascribe a qualified and quantified level of greatness to classical composers would yield a similar burnout (as it stands, china was nearly broken during the process of constructing my list). Regardless, my personal yet less-than-perfect Top 10 Greatest Composers list is now up on WQXR’s website, published in conjunction with a podcast I did alongside Judd Greenstein and Fred Plotkin, moderated by Terrance McKnight. You can listen to the whole thing here and enjoy the dulcet sound of my nasally, New England-tinged voice.

Since Anthony Tommasini spent a good portion of the new year thus far mining the greatness of his ultimate list, I figured I’d back up my choices a bit as well—and to lay to rest one commentator’s concern that my inclusion of David Lang was a joke. So let’s start with David and go in reverse chronological order:

10. David Lang
At the end of our podcast, Terrance brought up the idea of discussing the top ten worst composers, a thought that Judd, Fred and I all found to be a rather fruitless conversation for the obvious reasons, one of which being that one’s perception of the worst (” “) composer is influenced greatly by what one wants to hear (or play) in a piece. Cellists hate Pachelbel because that infernal Canon in D is five notes played over. And over. And over. And while I haven’t touched a bass clarinet since maybe my second semester of college, I wonder if on some subconscious level I do gravitate towards Lang’s music for his favouring of that most sexy of instruments. Regardless, Lang represents to me the propagation of 17th- 18th- 19th- and 20th- musical idioms while creating a unique sound for the 21st century. You hear everything from Bach to Varese, a quality that I find less apparent in other minimalist and postminimal composers from the 1950s onward. Moreover, Lang is one-third of one of the (if not the) greatest new music outfits and composers in conservatories and feisty, independent music ensembles today can thank him for a lot of the ground that has already been broken for performers in the 2000s. It is, moreover, a multidisciplinary music that can be a standalone piece or combined with other forms of media for a truly transcendent experience. If any composer is representing our modern zeitgeist, it’s Lang.

9. Igor Stravinsky
Dude got arrested for rearranging “The Star Spangled Banner” in Boston. Come on. Beyond that, however, Stravinsky represented an increasingly-cosmopolitan world when, at the dawn of the 20th century, mass communications and world wars made everything more tight-knit and connected. His music, from The Rite of Spring and Les Noces to The Firebird and the Violin Concerto to Oedipus Rex and The Rake’s Progress, is a sonic representation of the collective dynamic of small world networks and shifted the rhythmic and structural elements of the genre forever. Like Lang and like all great composers, he forged a new style without ignoring his roots and history.

8. Charles Ives
I find Ives one of the more challenging composers to listen to, not that I equate difficulty with greatness or used that as the sole criterion for inclusion on this list. But the complexities are certainly trademark for the composer that did for Americans what Mozart, Haydn, Lully, Meyerbeer, Verdi and Puccini did for the Euros. He made us our own song, and it was a song befitting our brief but multifaceted history. Look at the Concord Sonata versus Memories and tell me that’s not a spread that covers our amber waves of grain and purple mountains majesty. And for all of the influence he took from church hymns and the ghost of Stephen Foster and his polytonal connections to Bartok and Stravinsky, Ives created something genuinely unique.

7. Gustav Mahler
Like many composers on my list, Mahler wasn’t included in Tommasini’s list—though the vast majority of New York Times and WQXR comments included this same composer in their top ten lists. Fred hypothesized on our podcast that Tommasini was looking past melodic genius, a characteristic Mahler had in spades. I question, however, if having some insanely popular melodies—as was the case with Puccini, another composer snubbed by TT, or with Mildred and Patty Hill, the sisters behind the world’s most popular song, “Happy Birthday”—can be synonymous with greatness. After all, music is a very democratic thing. We the people choose what lives on, regardless of the critics. And even though a performance venue/ensemble doesn’t generally solicit audience input when planning each season, we talk with our wallets. I’m shamelessly capitalizing on Alex Ross’s legwork here, but Mahler was quoted to have said: “In a hundred years, there will be great folk festivals devoted to my symphonies, in gigantic halls seating twenty to thirty thousand people.” And, as Alex points out, we’ve yet to see the Mahler stadium tour, but we’re getting closer with each year. His symphonic works and chamber works alike are obsession-generating and his connection with New York in particular makes not including Mahler unthinkable. For me, at least.

6. Giuseppe Verdi
I admit this may be a conflict of interest for me as my Italian family has a longstanding history with Joe Green, but when you talk about popular melodies and being beloved by a group of people worldwide, you can’t not talk about Verdi. His connection with the Italian Risorgimento, however, was what made me particularly gravitate toward him for this list. When your name is used as an acronym in politically-unstable climates and your music is sending secret, coded messages of hope to the Italian people, when your chorus of Hebrew Slaves is considered the unofficial Italian national anthem, when someone can send you a letter just by addressing it to “Maestro Verdi, Italy,” when you’re considered for a governmental role because of all this and when you can still write something like La Traviata in honour of your own immortal beloved, you’re great. No question. (And, per Leo Nucci below, THAT’S how you do an encore.)

5. Franz Schubert
John Darnielle, of that indie-rock darling group The Mountain Goats (which turns out some righteous lyrics in its own right) just Tweeted today: “Franz Schubert wrote 600 songs, 9 symphonies, one of the best quartets of all time, and died before he turned 32. I apologize for being lazy.” For my money, Schubert is the king of intimate, affecting and accessible art song. When you start listening to song cycles, you start with Winterreise or Die Schone Mullerin. Even his standalone lieder are exhaustive crucibles for symphonic-scale emotional arcs. And his symphonies are nothing to sneeze at either—nor is his Quartet (or, for that matter, the ever-popular “Trout” Quintet). Not every composer on this list is one of my favorite, desert-island composers, but if I’m ever boarding Oceanic 815, you can be sure I’m going with an iPod loaded full of Schubert.

4. Ludwig van Beethoven
As I said on the podcast, Beethoven could have eschewed all of his compositions, only written one—any one—of his symphonies, and would still make my list. Here’s one composer who needs no explanation, whose works speak for themselves.

3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I was somewhat shocked to see Mozart left off of Judd’s list, and while I see what his justification was, I’m still not sure I agree with it. Mozart was, categorically, the greatest at everything—except for living long. It’s almost unfair in some respects to have him on a Top 10 list because it may as well start and end with him. Operas, chamber works, symphonies, sacred, secular, art song, concerti…name a compositional form and you’ll find a great Mozart work behind it. He has probably spawned more books on the idea of greatness than any other composer, more biographies and academic texts that try to distill the essence of his genius. And his works are some of the most popular, both in and outside the realms of classical music. And despite being older than even Abe Vigoda, they still sound fresh and revolutionary to 21st-century ears.

2. Johann Sebastian Bach
Unlike any other composer I can think of, Bach is the sort of composer who, even today, can be the sole focus of a musician’s artistic output and still make for a provocative and fulfilling career. It’s also a kind of music that, for a listener, can be whatever you want—brainy, intricate and challenging or pleasant and melodic. You can be a devout Catholic or a staunch atheist. It’s rare for a composer to transcend such polar opposites. Bach was also, of course, instrumental in the development of musical form. You can see his influence down the line with many composers on this lists—even up to and including Lang.

1. Hildegard von Binghen
Oh hell to the yea it starts with a woman. In taping the WQXR podcast, we go more into why only two women ended up on the four lists constructed by myself, Judd (who included Meredith Monk), Fred and Tommasini. Of course, one of the issues is that many female composers were prevented from becoming as famous as their male counterparts in their time because, while composing a sonata was all well and good, they had to focus more heavily on composing dinner. Who knows how many of Fanny Mendelssohn’s works were published under her brother’s name, or how many works Alma Mahler could have created without the spectre of her husband? It fascinates me, then, that one of the earliest and greatest composers is a woman. Even though Hildegard herself said she was not as good as her male counterparts, she was key in developing the form beyond monastic chant to something that could blossom and flourish to the ear. She also wrote, for all intents and purposes, the first opera and made the female voice a viable instrument. All this before the dawn of the 13th century, and while serving as a nun, writing theological texts and performing several other duties that would eventually lead to her canonization.

There are, of course, dozens of other composers that I couldn’t include. It broke my heart. And I’m still not sure I’m entirely happy with the ten I was able to work out, but thinking about something like this for too long can lead to some severe burnout. And, as Terrance pointed out, what greatness comes down to for the individual is who is on your iPod.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

So chances are if you realize you’ve neglected an opera from a certain period of French music and you’re unsure as to whether or not said opera exists on recording, chances are William Christie has recorded it. With apologies to Bill, Les Arts Florissants and Charpentier, I go back a few years to see Les Plaisirs de Versailles. And I actually do get to see it, for while it’s not on DVD some smart soul on YouTube synced up the LAF recording to the score. Now THAT’S fascinating. And if someone has a trove of Baroque/Classical opera scores that they just plan on using for kindling during these cold months, send them over my way. Once you go staff…

You notice things as a listener, little touches that push the art form forward. But those details become far more crystalline with a visual notation. Like the half-rests that Charpentier uses in the overture that make stops throughout the piece. It’s so syncopated and a straight line to the 60s pop that has been getting some fair play in the house as of late, thanks to a viewing of An Education. (Side note: What an allegory for Versailles that movie is. The excesses and indulgences at the expense of the nameless lower classes, the bubble that bursts and the metaphoric guillotine that lops off Carey Mulligan’s head in the final act.) Another fun thing to play around with when comparing score to recording are the embellishments and liberties taken with the notes as they lay. I just finished reading an essay on vocal embellishments in Mozart’s Mitridate today and, while this jumps ahead by well over half a century and as a result puts the cart before the horse, the way vocal embellishments developed in the early century of opera are something. Here, the orchestra takes precedent, as can be seen and heard in the solo passages for La Musique:

A purity of vocal tone seems to be favored while the orchestra is free to embellish upon similarly straightforward notes. Relistening to some recits, you can also hear the presentiments of Bizet. In the score, that is. I think it’s safe to say the libretto for Les Plaisirs de Versailles is ridiculous, even by Versailles standards.

On the other hand, and returning to our regularly scheduled programming, La descente d’Orphée aux enfers isn’t nearly as flippant a subject as the earlier Charpentier works. Though it does bring the Ovid count to an even 10. And musically there is still major keys galore. In fact, it’s even more placid and pastoral than Les Plaisirs. Of course, Charpentier does take some dramatic liberties, letting Eurydice live to keep the lilting music going at a lively pace. Which begs a question: If opera was created as a form of exemplifying Greek tragedy, why drop the tragedy? Monteverdi’s Orfeo, while still giving us a positive note as Eurydice dies twice, was full of cathartic musical lines and dramatic chords that paid an elegant homage to the original source. Not to take away from the beauty of Charpentier, and with the notion firmly in mind that the Sun King was really calling the majority of dramaturgical shots here, this all feels a little backward-thinking—especially when you consider opera as the attempt to perfectly marry words and music. The words, the libretto are, in this case, sacrificed, it seems, for the sake of pretty music. Substance<Pretty things.

No wonder the French royals would lose their heads a century later.

On a side note: Hi, Paul Agnew (aka, Orphee)? I love you and your pipes and your corduroy blazer:

Chanson du Roland

Salut, Jean-Baptiste, we meet again. Lully’s Roland premiered on January 8, 1685, so it seemed appropriate to listen to it in the same month (granted a few centuries later). I’m not sure if it’s my over-romanticizing of setting, but the overture seemed to work well with the gusty winds blowing outside my window, the hiss of my pre-(civil)-war radiator and the overcast skies that have threatened travel plans and MTA schedules for the last month. It’s actually kind of comforting.

In taping at WQXR today (for a podcast that’ll be up this weekend), a colleague suggested that it’s beneficial for listeners—especially virgins—of classical music to listen without historical or biographical context. Without thinking, since I never think before I speak, I voiced a disagreement that came off rather academic and wasn’t an entirely accurate statement. Not having to worry about texts and subtext is, of course, a lovely thing. Ignorance is, after all, bliss, and I’m the first to say “I liked it, but what do I know?” It’s a tactic that’s especially helpful when listening to Wagner or, on a lesser level, Strauss. But I also think that it’s hard to divorce the artist from their work. And even though here it’s such a small, trivial thing—one that Lully probably had no control over—the winter of Orlando’s discontent shines through musically in the score. Some sections are rifer with snowy imagery than The Nutcracker. And maybe, since the eternal sunshine of my spotless mind has become increasingly overcast in the swiftly passing 2011, a little chill is all the more comforting.

Orlando is also, of course, an addled mind in his own right and this is one of the first operatic representations of the mad medieval maestro. I also happen to have a soft spot for it as it was Handel’s interpretation of the character that unlocked the complexities of the composer’s operas and, as a result, much of opera pre-Mozart. I think, as well, that this seems to be the Lully opera doing it for me moreso than the predecessors, mainly rooted in classical mythology. Talk about a metaphor that would soon hold sway over operas as composers switched from honouring gods to honouring men. Though really, given who was making these commissions, isn’t treating men like gods what 17th-century opera was all about?

Before William Christie

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last 24 hours or so about what makes a composer great. There was the recent, (in)famous article by Anthony Tommasini that detailed his ambitious (and perhaps misguided) project of rating the top 10 greatest classical composers and its ensuing discourse—a discourse I’m going to help perpetuate tomorrow in the WQXR studio with Judd Greenstein and Fred Plotkin. I have made lists based on insane criteria that cannot be held constant for ten people, I’ve listened to hours of my iTunes library, and feel like I’m running in circles around a laughably impossible task. And I’m not talking about listening to every opera in chronological order.

Which is probably what facilitated my return to the idea of listening to every opera in chrono order. It helps that the composer in question today is nowhere near one of my top 10, at least in most contexts (top ten composers of the 1600s would most certainly include him). But the idea of greatness is still omnipresent in Charpentier’s Les Arts Florissants. I suppose it’s fair to call Les Arts Florissants an opera, especially since it gave birth to one of the finest period-opera companies/orchestras in the world, though there isn’t much of a dramatic thrust. Rather, the conflict between Peace and Discord is secondary to praising Louis XIV. The shortness of length doesn’t do much to hide the shill factor, though the chorus numbers are sublime and indicative of Charpentier’s talent for sacred music.

Chiefly, I was reminded of two things during the quick romp: Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, written with the spirit of an artist under a patron (much like Charpentier under the Sun King) of a very modern place—Heathrow. Thinking of that reminded me, in turn, of this piece for the Specator by James Rhodes, particularly the idea of a modern Mozart writing a Figaro opera for eHarmony.com or the Jupiter Symphony for an eponymous Asset Management firm. We don’t have that anymore, and while de Botton’s book seemed anomalous, it’s not so shocking next to a work by Machiavelli or Dante—or Mozart or Beethoven for that matter. And if my brain weren’t currently a gelatinous swamp of names, symphonies, operas, chamber works and the “Understanding Poetry” scene from Dead Poets Society, I could probably come up with a coherent and cohesive rant about private and public arts funders in the 21st century. But what I will say is, without those patrons, we wouldn’t have a healthy amount of the works that help to make the great (” “) composers…well…great. And whether or not Charpentier falls into someone’s list of those lines is irrelevant.

I Have No Words, Part II

What I love about this are the chord progressions, mirrors of “Nessun Dorma.”