The Lion roars for Wagner

In a week when the flood waters threatened Venice more dramatically than at any time during the past two decades, here is John W Barker, author of Wagner and Venice, on the composer's relationship to that great city:

The Lion of St. Mark, eternal symbol of Venice, has witnessed a lot over the centuries, good and bad, and even since the fall of the Serene Republic in 1797. All the tourists might not think so, but the Lion has had some fun even since then. He has actually taken a shine to some of the many foreigners who visit. One in particular, a funny chap named Richard Wagner.

Short and stubby, with an ego at least double-sized. And opinionated! But, you know, a genius, too. A great composer, and lots more. The Lion first got to know some of Wagner's music when the Municipal Band played a few arrangements. Then the Lion heard some of Wagner's full operas. The Lion loves opera -
after all, his city of Venice almost invented it as a form of public entertainment in the sixteenth century, and built the first permanent theaters for it.

Sure, the Lion didn't like Wagner himself too much at first. The guy came to Venice the first time in 1858 and spent some months there. Gloomy fellow, keeping to himself, not caring that the Lion had an Austrian muzzle at the time. But during that stay, Wagner composed the middle act of what the Lion was informed was one of the greatest of all operas. Though German, of course. Wagner came back for five more visits, eventually bringing with him his new wife, Cosima - now there was one tough lady! - and their children. At first they were just passing through, but the Lion was pleased to see that Wagner quickly came to love the Lagoon City. Cosima dragged her husband to art galleries, and they walked and gondola-ed about, while Wagner spouted his endless pontifications. Venice really got to Wagner, the Lion noticed. And Wagner even rented the facilities of the glorious Fenice Theater and Music Conservatory to conduct his major student work, one of those Germanic symphonies.

But then, on that last visit, Wagner suddenly died, in that grand old Palazzo Vendramin where he and his family were lodging. The Lion by then had recognized what a truly famous and important chap this Wagner was, and wanted to keep his body in Venice, or at least make a big splashy send-off to his remains. Well, the composer's corpse was quietly taken back to Germany for burial, but soon the Lion realized that Wagner had nevertheless left something of himself and his art to Venice. Just two months after the composer died, a visiting German company gave a fully staged production of that cycle of four operas, The Ring of the Niebelungen, at the Lion's beloved Fenice - honoring the theater and the city with the first such show of it anywhere in Italy. OK, in German, but what a blast! The Lion was now a true Wagnerian convert. And what fun to watch the circus as all the critics decided what Wagner's music meant for Italian music and how it affected Italian opera-lovers!

It didn’t stop there. That Municipal Band really took up the composer's cause in the city. Its leader, that brave little Sicilian with the Neapolitan name, Calascione, who had conducted for Wagner and had won his respect, became a real booster - giving concerts right under the Lion's twitching nose in the Piazza San Marco. Pretty soon, there was an annual commemoration on the day of Wagner's death. Those went on for decades, and that famous American lady in Paris, the Princesse de Polignac, even chipped in some cash to support those events. But the Lion wanted still more. Under his inspiration, some of the foreign residents in the city arranged to have a fine bust of Wagner set up in the Public Gardens. The Lion had to allow good Italians to set up an adjacent bust of Verdi, the following year, to satisfy national honor. So the Lion found in that daring egotist, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and some of his foreign friends, just the ones to create and set up a memorial plaque on the Canal wall of the Palazzo Vendramin, as a final riposte. Other markers, too. A plaque at the Lavena Café where Wagner liked to take his kids for sweets. And a marker outside the street entrance to the Vendramin. No other foreigner has acquired as many monuments and markers in Venice as has Wagner.

Of course, there were slights along the way. That silly strutter, Mussolini, and that evil dictator, Hitler, first met in Venice, and they never bothered to pay the slightest attention to the Wagner associations of Venice and the Vendramin. By now, however, the Lion has won over Venetians and Italians to appreciate Wagner's music. There is even a Wagner Association in the city, and although the Vendramin is now a part-year gambling casino, that Association has turned the room were Wagner died into a museum.

Yes, the Lion honors many other composers, like Gabrieli and Monteverdi and Vivaldi. But Wagner is special. Venice has stolen some of him from the Germans and made him a naturalized Venetian.

The Lion is still there, proud and undaunted, an unashamed Wagnerite. And Wagner himself is still there, too, a permanent part of Venice's mystique.

John W Barker's superbly evocative Wagner and Venice is available now from all good booksellers.

Richard Hickox 1948-2008

As a publisher with a long-standing interest in books on British music, we would like to join those who have expressed their shock and sadness at the sudden death of Richard Hickox. Coming so soon after Vernon Handley, music is robbed of two great conductors who weren’t afraid to stray from the well-worn path. On his Guardian blog, Tom Service writes “[His death is] a huge blow for those British composers - Rubbra, Dyson, Alwyn, Bliss - who Hickox championed but who other conductors rarely go near.”

He recorded over 300 CDs – a remarkable work rate and an indication of his passion for the repertoire – many of them for Chandos. “His long-standing relationship with the Chandos label resulted in a formidable discographical output centred on British music of the last hundred years or so: Elgar, Parry, Stanford and their many successors,” wrote Barry Millington, also in the Guardian. “Among the orchestral byways explored were William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Frank Bridge and Edmund Rubbra, while neglected items such as George Dyson's Canterbury Pilgrims joined classics by Tippett, Walton and others from the choral repertoire.” He was also an acclaimed interpreter of Britten’s operas and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

With typical eloquence, On an Overgrowth Path, writes: “He championed music that has been quite scandalously ignored by higher-profile conductors, despite its obvious merit. We have lost a truly great musical figure. Richard Hickox was a wonderful musician. But he was also prepared to devote much of his career to going where others fear to tread. That is something very rare among top conductors today. Nothing can offset the feeling of loss. But at least Richard's passion will live on in his wonderful recorded legacy.”

Music Scholars come to Music City

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - At 3am on November 7^th, a woman in Nashville, having learned that her husband was in Fuel Bar and Nightclub with another woman, came by and called him out into the parking lot, writes Ralph Locke. A quarrel erupted, she cut him in the back with a broken bottle, and he took out a gun and fired a warning shot in the air. I heard about the incident the next morning on the local TV news, and could not help but thinking that it sounded like a country-and-western song.

I was one of some two thousand musicologists and music theorists who were in Nashville that week, attending the joint annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory. Our hotel was a short walk from Second Street, and many of us walked by Fuel at one point or another. After I heard the news about the violent episode, I asked around but was relieved not to find anybody who had been within shooting distance of Fuel (or, I really mean, being-shot distance) during the wee hours of the 7^th.

Aside from newsworthy events of that sort, Nashville - the epicenter of the country-music industry, featuring dozens of high-level, if sometimes too well-fueled, clubs and bars at which an amazing array of hopeful performers strut their stuff - proved an inspired choice. We academics like to flatter ourselves as open-minded, and there are few things that can force open a music scholar’s mind with more drastic efficacy than encountering music of a sort that he or she normally can barely tolerate. True, there were some country-music aficionados among us - I know one, at least - but I imagine I was more typical.

Walking by what looked like a nineteenth-century red-brick church (because that’s what it originally was), and never having heard of this building - the Ryman Auditorium - I was surprised to hear loud chords and joyous applause coming from inside. The guard at the door gave me a ticket that I suppose had been given to her by somebody leaving early. The ticket listed the main performer as Ronnie Milsap, a name that sounded faintly familiar to me, though I wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a woman or a man.

I quickly discovered that Milsap is one of the most beloved male country-music artists and the first country superstar to have been born blind. (He has had, across his decades-long career, more number-one songs on the country chart than any performer except George Strait and Conway Twitty.) We all sat in wooden pews, and people were bringing food and drink from the concessions in the lobby into the hall, as if this were a big outdoor festival. The audience loved Milsap’s banter about his career, and they welcomed as old favorites such love-forever-lost songs as “That Girl Who Waits on Tables Used to Wait for Me at Home.”

Quite a contrast to the sessions at the scholarly conference two blocks up the hill: no shouts of love and appreciation from the floor, for one thing! To be fair, though, many of the attendees noted that there was less contentiousness during this year’s sessions than has sometimes occurred in the past. Perhaps the two societies’ program committees chose particularly well: the papers that I attended were on a very high level. But the people in the audience can take some credit, too. The discussion and debate - often plentiful - was generally carried out in a remarkably constructive spirit. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of methodological pluralism: scholars may be beginning to accept that no one approach or interpretive angle necessarily invalidates another.

A particular excitement at any scholarly meeting surrounds the exhibit of new books. The tables for the Boydell and Brewer/University of Rochester Press family of firms received many visitors and many book orders. I edit URP’s Eastman Studies in Music series, so I looked on with particular pleasure - while trying to be inconspicuous! - as visitors to the booth discovered such recent titles as Beethoven’s Century, by Hugh Macdonald, and Variations on the Canon, a book of new essays created in tribute to the great pianist and critic Charles Rosen. (I kept hearing remarks along the lines of “Look at these names: Treitler, Lockwood, Kerman, even Rosen himself…!”) The fact that the many important books published by Toccata Press are now distributed by Boydell further enriched the wares on display.

But the biggest “wows” were heard as people opened the covers of Boydell’s richly illustrated Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents. Carter turns 100 on 11 December 2008 and continues to compose actively. A wealth of previously unpublished documents, scores, letters and photographs in the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation (in Basel, Switzerland) enabled the authors - Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler - to include 90 illustrations of this material, 60 of them in color. The documents are connected by a flowing and thoughtful text: this is one picture book that can be read with pleasure and profit from beginning to end. Sometimes, at the book table, it seemed that people who picked up this inviting book could barely stop themselves from reading on and on.

And maybe that is the scholar’s equivalent of the whoops, cheers, and applause heard at country-music concerts!

Surprising Hans Keller

Having recently published Adrian Wright’s superb biography of William Alwyn, The Innumerable Dance, we thought it might be interesting to see what Hans Keller had to say about his film music. In Film Music and Beyond, published last year by Plumbago, Keller addresses the subject of surprise and speech rhythm in The Ship that Died of Shame:

Measured against its context, the loudest shock we know is probably the one in Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony. But it does not introduce any immediate news; on the contrary, the fortissimo chord and drum tap seem but a jocular variation on the perfect cadence of the period’s first statement. “That will make the ladies jump,” was the composer’s comment.

Keller focuses on the element of surprise in the second half of Alwyn’s music for Ship, a score he found dull until a point where Richard Attenborough, the ship’s evil captain, shouts “Come on out!” to a hidden murderer he was about to help escape. His cry was the exact counterpoint, in both rhythm and intonation, of a new three note motif:

From this surprising juncture onwards the score proved novel and fascinating. Attenborough’s trisyllabic sentence was crucial from the dramatic standpoint: the ship had not behaved all too decently before, but now its real shame had begun, its doom was sealed. By acquiring the rhythm of the dialogue’s most operatic sentence, the score proved able to replace film-musical tautology by genuinely musico-dramatic interpretation.

This impressed Keller so much that he wondered if “I had not missed many a relevant point while drowsing during the first half of the score; unfortunately I had no opportunity of hearing it a second time.”

On what Peter Pears described as "the eternal struggle between song and words, sound and sense," Keller remarks:

Alwyn’s achievement, hardly imaginable outside the cinema, consists in unifying the two belligerent parties at the very stage where their differences are at their acutest, where speech remains speech and music remains wordless; and the incisive contrast between the two sharpens our wits for the understanding of new musico-dramatic unities between them…Thanks to the cinema, Alwyn has been able to go all the way, nor will his shock treatment easily wear off, for the eternal struggle between music and speech is not likely to become any less eternal in future.

He concludes:

We must not forget that the instrumental version of “Come on out!” is, after all, a surprise of the most genuinely artistic order, for it is a necessary consequence of the extreme contrast to whose extreme unification it draws our attention.

To read all of Keller’s essay, see Film Music and Beyond, pp.87-89. The book is available in both cloth and paperback from all good booksellers.

Paul Griffiths' Ophelia

Paul Griffiths – music critic and historian, novelist, biographer, librettist and beyond – is about to publish a new work entitled, Let Me Tell You, a short novel using only the vocabulary allotted to Ophelia in Hamlet. This constraint, the publisher notes, gives the discourse a haunting and poetic quality. Read an extract here.

Griffiths wrote the libretto for Elliott Carter’s opera, What Next?, which had its premiere in 1999 under Daniel Barenboim. Anyone within reach of Vienna in December will be able to hear the Neue Oper version. Its composition and premiere are covered in Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents by Felix Meyer and Anne C Shreffler, for publication shortly.

Also from our own lists we recommend Paul Griffiths’ acclaimed biography of Jean Barraqué, The Sea on Fire, and his collection of essays, reviews and interviews, Substance of Things Heard, which includes a section on Carter and a superbly evocative piece on Canadian composer, Claude Vivier. “Griffiths writes more eloquently and with greater insight than any of his peers...Illuminating, translucent, sagacious,” said the Times Literary Supplement. We wholeheartedly agree.

Let Me Tell You is available from Reality Street Editions. The Sea on Fire and Substance of Things Heard are available from good music booksellers or from Boydell & Brewer.

Playing Carter with Charles Rosen

In November the University of Rochester Press will publish Variations on the Canon, a collection of essays by leading musicologists in honour of Charles Rosen’s 80th birthday. Covering a range of topics from Bach to Modernism, the book will also include a section on “Criticism and the Critic”, an essay by Rosen himself, and three tributes: from Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter and Charles Mackerras, from which the following is extracted:

Although conducting the Chopin concertos with Charles was indeed a revelatory experience, for me, the greatest revelation of all was when we did the Elliott Carter Piano Concerto together in 1978. At that time I was Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Although one of the main functions of that orchestra is to play contemporary music, at that time my experience of twentieth-century music was limited to the styles of such composers as Britten, Shostakovich, Bartók, and Schoenberg. Thus, the immense complications of Carter’s Piano Concerto were for me rather daunting. However, Charles had already played the concerto several times in America and was able to steer us successfully through the very gruelling rehearsals, and especially rehearsals with the concertino, which plays such a crucial part in this work. When it came to rehearsals with the full complement of solo piano, concertino, and large symphony orchestra, I was quite nervous when Carter himself appeared. But Charles had as intimate an understanding of that charming man as he did of his cerebral but passionate music, and the composer seemed delighted with our efforts. The concert in the Festival Hall also included the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements and the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra, but it was the virtuosity and intellectual power that Charles Rosen brought to the Carter Piano Concerto that transformed it into the hit of the evening.

Later in the year we repeated that memorable concerto at a Prom. The number of rehearsals for the Proms is always fairly severely limited because of the huge number of concerts that the BBC Symphony Orchestra has to perform during that period. But with his extremely sympathetic attitude toward his concertino and the orchestra, Charles got us through, despite the fact that we had less than a quarter of the rehearsal time that we had originally had. Afterward, I remember the Prommers stamping their feet with the same enthusiasm as if it had been a concerto by Tchaikovsky.

Charles and I are approximately the same age, and I regard it as a privilege to have known and worked with him and, in fact, to have learned so much from his prolific writings and his charming conversations. Charles Rosen is one of the truly great musical minds of our time and a great virtuoso to boot.

Variations on the Canon is edited by Robert Curry, David Gable and Robert L. Marshall.

Exploring honkyoku with Minoru Miki

Minoru Miki is one of Japan’s leading contemporary composers. His orchestral works often champion Japanese traditional instruments such as the koto and shakuhati, while his operas are performed to considerable acclaim worldwide (of Joruri, Andrew Porter wrote, “the audience seemed spellbound, and at the close the silence that is the deepest mark of appreciation yielded gradually to cheers and a long standing ovation”). The University of Rochester Press has recently published his classic work, Composing for Japanese Instruments. Here, its translator, Marty Regan, reflects on the origin of the project:

I first met Miki in 2000 when I was enrolled as a government–sponsored research student at Tokyo College of Music. The composition faculty knew I was interested in learning how to compose for Japanese instruments – and urged me to sit in on his classes. These classes – which never had more than half a dozen participants – consisted of listening to Miki’s works and enjoying sometimes hours of anecdotal stories, following by a casual dinner as a group. By the second year, this “class” had dwindled down to two students, and I officially requested Miki as my composition teacher. Early attempts at composing for Japanese instruments were futile. Then, one day Miki asked me to show him the honkyoku – a term used for classical shakuhachi repertoire from the Zen Buddhist tradition – I was working on for my shakuhachi lessons. The ‘scores’ for these pieces, like traditional Japanese texts, are read from right to left and top to bottom. He took the score to this piece and turned it vertically so that what previously appeared to be vertical lines to indicate sustained pitches of indeterminate length now appeared to flow from left to right. In a moment – like a moment of satori, or enlightenment – I discovered how I could compose for Japanese instruments or even Western instruments and imbue them with a Japanese aesthetic – I had to remove the bar lines to allow the music to ‘float’ through time and adopt the graphic ornamentation symbols of shakuhachi honkyoku as a means to notate ‘Japanese’ ornaments in Western staff notation. There were countless moments just like this with Miki, and the original Japanese version of this book served as an invaluable source of reference for my lessons. This allowed me – and his other student! – to come prepared to our lessons with ‘basic’ knowledge such as the ranges of instruments, various idiomatic techniques, and their respective notation. The book helped to demystify these instruments on a profoundly practical level, making the learning curve less steep.

In 1964 Miki founded the Pro Music Nipponia, an ensemble of instrumentalists devoted to creating new repertoire for traditional Japanese instruments. As Artistic Director of the ensemble for over twenty years, they performed more than 160 concerts abroad in an effort to globalize Japanese instruments. Through his collaborations with the members of the Pro Music Nipponia, Miki had an opportunity to perfect his craft and arguably became Japan’s – and hence the world’s – foremost authority on composing for traditional Japanese instruments. Those experiences form the basis for this book. As Miki himself writes in the Afterword after thanking his former colleagues from the Pro Musica Nipponia, “The theories and descriptions in this book are based on notes I have been taking for many years.” I hesitate to simply call this book an orchestration–instrumentation manual, although this is somewhat of the role that it may fulfill for many potential readers. Rather, it is also partly autobiography/aesthetic treatise, as Miki contextualizes the practical details of the instruments into his lifework and musical ideas/compositional approach. Composing for Japanese Instruments was also translated into Chinese, which, according to Miki, has resulted in countless numbers of idiomatic compositions for Japanese instruments by Chinese–literate composers.

Despite the fact that I finished the translation eight years after our initial meeting and felt that I had come a long away in my own creative work with these instruments, having to translate this book for an English–speaking audience forced me to address personal gaps of knowledge. In short, although I had used the book in my lessons and read it in Japanese, for this translation project I had to approach the book with more precision and degree of detail. As I translated the book and struggled through many difficult Chinese character readings and opaque passages, I became aware not only at the extensiveness of Miki’s intimate knowledge of these beautiful instruments, but also his love and passion for them. I sincerely hope, and in fact, predict, that the English translation of this book will lead to an embracing of Japanese traditional instruments on a worldwide scale. Composers from around the world who have wanted to delve into the world of Japanese instruments now have the resources to do so.