The extraordinary Mr Chisholm

One of the joys of publishing books on classical music is that, in order to forge an identity for the list, one explores paths that are less well-trodden. It is remarkable, for example, that John Purser’s new biography of the Scottish composer and performer, Erik Chisholm, is the first since his death over 40 years ago.

As Sir Charles Mackerras points out in his foreword, 'Erik Chisholm was a musician of rare capabilities. He was a pianist and organist, a conductor, a composer, a lecturer on music, an entrepreneur and administrator, and to all these he brought a unique blend of originality, flair and energy. After an early start as a performing pianist, Chisholm established himself in Glasgow as an important influence on the progress of music in Scotland and Scottish music in general.' The two men had met in Cape Town, where they 'got on very well, partly because of a common interest in Janáček at a time when there were not so many experts on this composer as there are now.'

Anyone interested in twentieth century music will find much to engage them in this biography. Chisholm’s circle of acquaintances included Bartók, Sorabji, Hindemith, Walton, Bax and many others. Here is an extract from the book’s final chapter which gives some sense of the range of his achievement:

Of all the composers Scotland has produced, Chisholm has perhaps come closest to ‘finding a nation’s soul’, as Vaughan Williams put it, for the Scots are adventurers as well as traditionalists. They have planted their seed, and their music with it, all over the globe, and they have embraced the new while honouring the old – historically most obviously in the field of technological development, but also in the arts. When Chisholm was born, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow Art School was five years from completion. Building upon a profound knowledge of Scottish vernacular architecture, it none the less remains one of the world’s great modernist structures.

In many respects, Chisholm’s is a parallel achievement. His study of his own Scottish inheritance led him well beyond its traditional boundaries, while from childhood he was conversant with a vast repertoire of European music through the centuries. That repertoire he actively expanded through concert promotion and opera production, but it is as a composer that he should chiefly be remembered.

Looking at Chisholm’s compositional development, it is easy to identify an increasing freedom with his handling of source material such as piobaireachd, in which both virtuosity and dissonance become more prevalent. From the Sonatine Écossaise to the sonata An Rioban Dearg is no great stylistic leap: the techniques applied in the former are simply taken a stage further. Nor is there any great distance between An Rioban Dearg and Night Song of the Bards, which picks up on the virtuosity and the complexity of texture but still retains something of the mood of Scotland in its more static passages. From Night Song of the Bards to the Hindustani works is scarcely a move at all, for all are based upon râgas of similar character, at least to Western ears.

From the Hindustani works to the modernist operas such as Dark Sonnet and Simoon is also a logical move, for the choice of chromatic râgas had already dictated a degree of movement away from tonal centres towards a freer and more dissonant style. The Inland Woman shares material with Night Song of the Bards, and Simoon is heavily influenced by Hindustani styles, although it is, to a fair degree, a dodecaphonic work.

In his last years, Chisholm turned to a style informed by older musical traditions, notably in the Chaucer operas, with their strong medieval characteristics. This was not a new departure. The sonatinas of E Praeterita had already explored the Renaissance, and the second movement of Pictures from Dante is thoroughly medieval in character, as befits its subject-matter.

It is a considerable and varied output. In Chisholm’s case, the extraordinary catholicity of his taste, and the vast extent of his knowledge as performer, conductor, concert, ballet and opera promoter, teacher and dean of a faculty of music offered him many models. He was not shy of indicating the music, composers and individual works which had influenced him, and these influences have been traced throughout the book. Not to be overlooked is the significance of his having acted as secondo pianist for Casella and page-turner for Bartók, or of his performing Szymanowski in the presence of Szymanowski. In this, Chisholm was not outside a movement and learning from it; he was in it and creating it along with some of the greatest of his contemporaries – for he did not only sit beside them: they too sat beside him. They too heard how he played and what he had experienced, both in his native music and with the rest of that extraordinary mix of composers, who did not necessarily know each other or each other’s work. The connecting factor was Chisholm himself, chasing his restless muse, that he might embrace her loveliness once again, no matter what, if anything, she wore.

Erik Chisholm, Scottish Modernist (1904-1965): Chasing a Restless Muse was published on June 18th by the Boydell Press in association with the Erik Chisholm Trust. Author John Purser is, like his subject, a man of many parts: a Research Fellow at the Gaelic College on the Isle of Skye, an award-winning poet, composer, dramatist, broadcaster, historian of the BBC Scottish SO - and crofter. A later post will outline how he came to discover the work of Erik Chisholm.

Elliott Carter comes to Aldeburgh

The Aldeburgh Festival joins in the Elliott Carter centenary celebrations with a series of inventively-programmed concerts and a visit from the composer himself.

Mosaic (2004) is tucked away in a pre-concert performance on June 20th, as a sort of prelude to one of the evening’s- if not the Festival’s - main events, the world premiere of Carter’s On Conversing with Paradise. In his tenth decade Carter often draws upon his rich store of memories to kindle ideas for new compositions. Mosaic recalls Carter’s old friend Carlos Salzedo (1885-1961), the French-American harpist, pianist and composer who had been active in Edgard Varèse’s International Composers’ Guild, and whom Carter had known in the 1930s. Scored for a chamber ensemble of winds, strings and harp, Mosaic also pays homage to Salzedo’s exploration of advanced playing techniques which helped to bring the harp into the world of twentieth century music. Also on the bill of this pre-concert performance is a new work by the young Canadian composer now living in London, Christopher Mayo, and a short piece by Oliver Knussen.

Louis Lortie is the soloist in the ferociously difficult Night Fantasies (1978-80) on June 23rd. Although Carter has composed a number of works with prominent piano parts, this was his first piece for the solo instrument since the Sonata some thirty years earlier. Night Fantasies was commissioned by four pianists – Paul Jacobs (who organised the project), Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens and Charles Rosen – all experienced performers of Carter’s work. Identifying specific passages that might have been composed with the playing styles and personalities of each of the four in mind has become something of a musicological parlour game. More significant than any hidden code, however, is the sheer variety of the writing in this piece. David Schiff, who was studying with Carter at the time, explains, “Quite early in the course of composing the work he told me that he had already written fifty different kinds of piano music, and was now looking for ways to bring them together.”

Tamara Stefanovich plays two Carter miniatures for solo piano, in a concert scheduled during the afternoon of June 20th in the beautiful setting of Blytheburgh Church. The evening before George Benjamin will conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of his own Duet for piano and orchestra, alongside Carter’s Three Occasions (1986-89). Although Carter generally conceived his works as unified wholes, these pieces only received their present title post facto. The third piece, Anniversary, was dedicated to his wife, Helen, in honour of their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1989. Three Occasions was premiered by this same orchestra under Oliver Knussen in London’s Royal Festival Hall twenty years ago.

Carter’s attendance will make a unique occasion of the world premiere of his new song cycle, a setting of poems by Ezra Pound. The 20-minute work was commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival and features baritone Leigh Melrose and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Knussen. Carter sets parts of two of Pound's Cantos, where he despairs of not having written the perfect poem, which to him was paradise. The title On Conversing with Paradise is a quote from William Blake that Pound considered as a title for an early book of his own poems.

Elliott Carter’s centenary year of 2008 brought over 700 performances, according to Boosey & Hawkes. As these Aldeburgh concerts demonstrate, the celebrations continue alongside Carter’s own composition schedule. Figment V for marimba is premiered by Simon Boyar in New York on 2 May and the completed Poems of Louis Zukofsky for soprano and clarinet receives its first performance by Lucy Shelton and Stanley Drucker at the Tanglewood Festival on 9 August. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2009/10 season includes the US premiere of the Flute Concerto on 4 February 2010 with soloist Elizabeth Rowe conducted by James Levine, as well as performances of Dialogues with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, artistic director of this Aldeburgh Festival.

Descriptions of Carter’s works abridged largely from Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents by Felix Meyer and Anne C Shreffler, published by the Boydell Press in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation, except for On Conversing with Paradise which was excerpted from the Boosey & Hawkes website. Some tickets remain for the Aldeburgh Festival and may be purchased online via their website. Festivalgoers may also be interested in The New Aldeburgh Anthology, in which an impressive collection of writers examine the history of the Festival and its connection to Benjamin Britten and his circle, as well as aspects of the Suffolk countryside and its history. Both of these books are available from good booksellers and from the new visitors’ centre at Snape Maltings, venue for most of the Festival.

An ideal Mélisande?

"What must it have been like," asks Gillian Opstad in a new book on Debussy's opera, "to witness the composition of one of the seminal musical works of the twentieth century...to be in the same room as the composer as he played with sounds, changed harmonies as you sang, as you listened to chords you had never heard before and tried to make sense of a vocal line which was more like natural speech than song?" In Debussy's Mélisande, just published by the Boydell Press, Opstad looks at the colourful lives of three singers who made the role their own. Here is a short extract from the opening pages of the book:

An ideal Mélisande? Debussy certainly believed the first two singers to perform the role fulfilled his ideal, yet neither of them was the woman Maurice Maeterlinck had in mind. The part meant so much to these women that Mélisande became a pivotal role referred to throughout their lives. They were the interpreters of the role. Its creators were men, undoubtedly socially and artistically more powerful and influential in this environment: author, composer, director, conductor. Without them the women could never have achieved such fame. This is the inescapable truth in the lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte. But what women! The toughness of the life of a female opera singer, her inferior position in hierarchical society at the turn of the nineteenth century, meant that they had to be resilient and to have unshakeable belief in themselves. And then there is a dichotomy. Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande is regarded as quintessentially French, yet the two first great Mélisandes came from Britain. Both these women were determined, characterful personalities, far removed from Maeterlinck’s childlike creation.

Larger than life roles in a larger than life art form must inevitably be won by characters with a certain lack of compromise, and the willpower to succeed. To follow their story is to realise that women who were building their careers over a hundred years ago were just as capable as those of today of taking charge of their own lives, demanding attention to get their way, and that long before the age of television and mass communications, the press could be manipulated by ‘celebrities’, in an age when such a term hardly existed. The lives of the women who created Mélisande demonstrate the hardships and sacrifices such dedicated professionals had to make to keep in the public eye. Arguments and intrigues surrounding the casting of the role evoke the atmosphere of the opera house of the era. The men needed the women to bring to life the images filling their imaginations yet the praise of these men is hard earned. How damning can be their comments. Georgette Leblanc in particular suffered from their dismissive attitude. Not just contemporaries, but even later writers who could not have heard her, insist on her lack of talent. In La Passion de Claude Debussy, Dietschy claimed that Georgette was indirectly associated with the failure of Maeterlinck’s play in 1893. Yet she had not even met the author at the time of its first performance. He also finds it ‘odd’ that the Chanson de Mélisande set to music by Gabriel Fabre was dedicated to her, yet she sang this work with Fabre himself accompanying her many times. His assumption appears to be that Georgette claimed the role of Mélisande passionately as though she foresaw the dazzling success of the opera, implying that this was merely to further her own ends. Lockspeiser, in his two volume biography of Debussy dismisses Georgette with the claim that she ‘had a wretched reputation as a singer’ even though she received praise from both professionals and amateur music lovers on many occasions.

Recordings of Georgette Leblanc are very rare and, of course, the industry was in its infancy when both she and Mary Garden recorded songs so it is difficult to judge the true quality of their voices. A recent issue on CD brings us evidence of Georgette’s voice as recorded by Gramophone and Typewriter Limited in Paris in 1903, just one year after the première of Debussy’s opera, when she was thirty four. Here she is accompanied at the piano by Jules Massenet in the aria Pendant un an je fus ta femme from his opera Sapho. Massenet’s playing is so discreet that he can barely be heard at all in the background, but despite the inevitable hiss, Georgette’s voice is distinct. From descriptions of her manner, one might expect an overtly dramatic interpretation, yet whilst this aria is sung with feeling and a range of dynamics, the expression is not exaggerated. There is some vibrato, wider than Mary Garden’s, but not excessive, some scooping up to the high notes, these – particularly the top A on the last syllable of ‘ton coeur s’ouvrira’ – being clear, if a little thin. The words are well projected but not overenunciated. The same set of two CDs contains recordings of Mary Garden accompanied by Debussy, so a direct, although necessarily very limited comparison can be made of the two voices at about this time. On the basis of this brief extract, even if her rival has a purer, more lucid voice, Georgette Leblanc’s performance here does not appear to merit the derogatory criticisms made of her vocally.

Debussy's Mélisande is available now from all good booksellers. Gillian Opstad will be writing about the appeal of this opera for her in a later post.

The Way We Listen Now

We have already posted an excerpt from Bayan Northcott’s acclaimed new collection, The Way We Listen Now, on this blog. The book was given its official launch in mid-April at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London. Christopher Wintle, publisher of Plumbago Books and editor of the collection, gave the following address at that launch:

Many years ago, I used to rent a holiday flat in Cornwall from the artist Patrick Heron. Patrick was gregarious, and liked his guests to know what he was up to. One day, when I got back from the beach, he said, “Come and see what I’ve done this afternoon.” And there, in his studio, was a beautiful gouache.

“An afternoon’s work,” I cried, “and you’ll sell it for thousands!”

Patrick drew in his breath.

“An afternoon’s work, yes,” he said tersely, “but also a lifetime’s work.”

Bayan’s collection of essays – which is his first – is rather like Patrick’s gouache. In publishing terms we put it together rather quickly – it took about seven months from start to finish. Yet, one way or another, it seemed we’d been talking about it for half a lifetime. Back in the early ‘eighties, Bayan and I were closely involved in trying to make sense of the mass of writings that now make up the Hans Keller Nachlass: how on earth were we going to divide it all up – chronologically, topically, philosophically, or what? The categories we came up with eventually stood behind the CUP Essays on Music of 1994; but they’ve also formed the basis for all our later Keller books. So we’re used to sorting.

Then again, when I began Plumbago Books in 2000, with its emphasis on criticism and composition, Bayan was my strongest ally and has remained so ever since. Those of you who’ve read his preface to Hugh Wood’s Staking Out the Territory, which we published last year, know just how well he can position composers and their writings, not only of our time, but also of remote times. So he knows Hugh’s book well. And, in fact, Bayan’s book is directly modelled on Hugh’s: it’s the same size, about the same length, and is comparably illustrated – in Bayan’s case with marvellous portraits by Milein Cosman and iconic images by Michael Daley. The text even opens with a drawing of Hans by Milein – an appropriate start, as Keller is one of Bayan’s critical touchstones. Indeed, I can proudly say, The Way We Listen Now testifies to how deeply Austro-German thought has helped mould recent British musical thought. More still, Michael Daley’s cover shows Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky symbiotically fused; and in doing so, it distils that key aspect of twentieth-century self-consciousness that Keller used to describe as ‘foregrounding’ our cultural ‘backgrounds’. The work the cover refers to, of course, is The Fairy’s Kiss (1928).

But there the parallels stop. For whereas Hugh’s book is the work of a composer who approaches every literary genre from the standpoint of an Oxford-trained historian, Bayan’s is written by an Oxford-trained English scholar, later turned composer, who loves to bring everything into his purview. Musically, he chronicles our times in all its serious manifestations: Jean-Paul Sartre might have called him a compulsive ‘totalizer’. There are marvellous set-pieces here on different aspects of composition, on words and music, on composers from Sebastian Bach to Judith Weir, and on the flow of the musical scene through authenticity, the revolutions of 1968, broadcast music, world music, Philip Glass and Oasis. Sometimes his sentences overwhelm us with a Kantian sublimity of allusion. Here, for instance, is how he follows up praise for George Benjamin’s song of 1990, On Silence, for mezzo-soprano and five viols:

… an increasing number of other composers have been rising to the opportunities of early music ensembles – from the 1991 Glyndebourne Serenades for period wind ensemble commissioned from Jonathan Dove and Nigel Osborne in celebration of the Mozart Bicentenary, to John Woolrich’s deployment of the full Mozartean line-up of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in The Theatre Represents a Garden – Night (1991), by way of whole arrays of viol pieces commissioned by Fretwork in celebration of the 1995 Purcell tercentenary, and more recently by Concordia to complement the pavan sequence of Dowland’s Lachrymae.

He then cites Alexander Goehr, Tansy Davies, Gavin Bryers, Peter Sculthorpe, Paul Ruders, Tan Dun and ‘even Elvis Costello’.

Over two-thirds of these essays are drawn from the weekend review section of The Independent as it appeared in the 1980s and ‘90s. It is hugely to the credit of a national paper that it gave Bayan such freedom to map out his views, and we must all count ourselves grateful. Such an enterprise, I fear, is no longer possible. Yet, for all the quality of The Independent, assembling this collection was not just a matter of transferring newsprint to bookprint. On the contrary, much of our effort was spent trying to create a house-style that kept the fluency of reportage while rising to academic demands for accuracy. The outcome, I believe, is literary, focussed and sometimes witty. Here, for instance, is Bayan on W. H. Auden in the late 1940s:

… Auden had evidently known some of Mozart’s and Wagner’s operatic works since his youth, even if he claimed he only learned to love [Wagner’s] after reading Nietzsche’s arguments against it. Nor for that matter, were his interests entirely absorbed by opera in his later years. Despite such naughty aperçus as ‘people who attend chamber music concerts are like Englishmen who go to church abroad,’ his conversations and letters … are full of enthusiastic comments on choral, symphonic and chamber-music works by [composers from] Bach [to] Stravinsky.

However, there is a third and vital aspect to the book. I believe that in every thinker or artist worth their salt, we look, not just for the scavenger and the martinet, but also for the dancer who is prepared to leap through fire. Bayan is just such a dancer. He is nothing if not forthright in his views; he isn’t led by fashion; and for decades he has stuck out for genuine standards in composing, performing, and listening – and in this, he is a true heir of Hans Keller. Those who don’t bend with the times, of course, can be thought of as spoilers: but the test of time has shown that Bayan’s caveats remain, even when it concerns those whom he personally knows and likes best. For example, he notes that –

While the coruscating surfaces of a Carter, Boulez or Maxwell Davies score may be welcomed as the most exhilarating, dazzling or disturbing expressions of transformation, what is being transformed is by no means so obvious – and this is ultimately felt as an absence, or lack.

That was written in 1984. Yet the deeper questions, what does it mean for a composer to write thematic music on a theme which is never disclosed, and does that ‘lack’ have to be negative?, are still, 25 years on, worth debating. Modern composers, after all, are generally theme-shy; many of their popular precursors weren’t; and, audiences, oddly, still like tunes, or at least something to hang on to.

Nigel Fortune and Vernon Handley

Bruce Phillips, our music editor-at-large, writes:

One funeral and a memorial concert on the same day on Friday, May 1st. In Birmingham the funeral of Nigel Fortune, who died on Good Friday at the age of 84. A large crowd of people turned out for the Humanist ceremony at West Bromwich Crematorium virtually filling the chapel. There were two addresses, the first by Clare Short, Fortune’s neighbour in Handsworth, Labour Member of Parliament for Birmingham, Ladywood, and controversial erstwhile government minister for overseas development. Fortune, a lifelong Labour supporter, was as tireless in his political campaigning as he was in the development of high standards in musicological research, the editing of text and music, and the production of a generation of Birmingham music graduates. One of them, the composer John Casken, delivered a moving tribute to a figure who had obviously profoundly influenced his life and career, as he had that of so many others.

Thence to Worcester for a concert in the cathedral in memory of the great British conductor Vernon Handley, who died in September 2008 aged 77. Handley, universally known as Tod, was largely self-taught. Though he read English at Balliol he spent most of his time at Oxford conducting. He wrote out of the blue to Sir Adrian Boult and they met and became friends, Boult becoming mentor to Handley as he began to make his name as predominantly but not exclusively a conductor of British music. Tod inherited Boult’s preference (which Boult had inherited from Nikisch) for long conducting batons and for communicating his intentions through the end of the stick rather than through exaggerated bodily gestures. He was a tireless champion of British music, notably Bax, Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams but he also went out of his way to programme and record less well known composers such as Stanford, Bantock, Boughton,

Handley conducted most of the leading British orchestras in the course of his very full career, and in 2007 became associated with the English Symphony Orchestra. It was this orchestra, conducted by his pupil Laura Jellicoe, that filled that great cathedral with magnificent sound in one of Bliss’s fanfares, Elgar’s Overture Cockaigne, Finzi’s Shakespeare song cycle Let us garlands bring with baritone Michael George, and finally Vaughan Williams’ music inspired by Blake’s illustrations: Job—A Masque for Dancing, considered by Handley to have been his best recording. The saxophones depicting Job’s Comforters never sounded so oily, the Pavane of the Sons of the Morning never so stately and noble.

Wagner today and forever

From Beyond the Stave will take a short break for three weeks, returning at the end of May. In the meantime we leave you with Eastman Studies in Music series editor, Ralph Locke, whose own book has recently been published by a publishing house just down the road from Boydell & Brewer's Suffolk HQ.

Wagner’s operas repel some people and strike others as simply ridiculous. But many of those who scoff, or claim to be repulsed, have never listened to an entire Wagner opera, studied its libretto, or done much reading about the works, their background, and their importance. It is easier now than ever to get one’s ears and eyes around Wagner’s works. All of his operas (except to some extent his earliest three) are available in numerous superb recorded CD and DVD performances. The Metropolitan Opera sent a live high-definition video transmission of Tristan und Isolde to movie theaters around the world in March 2008, and repeated it on television a few months later. All told, the performance reached millions of viewers.

During a recent out-of-town trip, the car that I rented was outfitted with something new to me: Sirius Satellite Radio. I tuned in to the Metropolitan Opera Radio channel one weekday morning at 7:45AM, only to find myself in the middle of a recording from the Met’s audio archives: a 1971 Saturday matinee radiocast of Tristan. The opera must have started more than an hour earlier: we were already in Act 2, heading toward Tristan’s entry and the great love duet. The featured singers were soprano Birgit Nilsson (legendary for her rock-solid performances in the 1960s and 70s) and tenor Jess Thomas. For my taste, both of them were outshone by the less well-known Irene Dalis as a riveting Brangäne. Clearly, Dalis possessed one of the great mezzo-soprano voices—and mezzo temperaments!—of the twentieth century. (Her intense portrayal of Kundry, in the 1962 Bayreuth recording of Parsifal under Knappertsbusch, is praised by connoisseurs as one of the best ever.)

A few days before I was thrown into the heaving surges of Tristan und Isolde at such an early hour, someone at the Christian Science Monitor asked me to comment on the recently inaugurated Ring Cycle at Los Angeles Opera (more on this below). Though my own operatic research veers towards the Italian and French repertoire, the Met re-broadcast from 1971 and the news about Los Angeles’s Ring Cycle reminded me how important Wagner was and remains for the musical world, and for Western cultural life, generally.

Despite the remarks of confirmed anti-Wagnerians, the operas (or, as Wagner termed them, “music dramas”) remain commanding monuments of artistic inspiration and insight. And they have been broadly influential, besides. Indeed, it seems to me nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of Wagner’s theories and the operas in which he put those theories into often blazingly brilliant practice. Before Wagner, the full resources of symphonic music—the elaborate development of musical motive and astute handling of key, chord, and modulation—had been brought to new heights by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Wagner was the first to propose certain immensely effective ways in which these essentially symphonic and sonata-like resources could be harnessed to an acted-out story, in conjunction with other resources, such as sets and costumes.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle remains, to my mind, the highest of his achievements. It uses sharply etched motives and no less distinctive orchestral colors to characterize—brilliantly, movingly—the individuals and actions on stage. As many a Wagner commentator has recognized, the motives do not necessarily stay fixed but are altered, combined, reharmonized, and sometimes utterly transformed. (For the utter novice, one great place to start is Deryck Cooke’s perceptive 2-CD set, An Introduction to Der Ring des Nibelungen, which uses musical excerpts from the still-unsurpassed Solti recording. Another is the hilarious—and remarkably accurate—narrated version by “concert comedienne” Anna Russell, which is likewise now available on CD.) The resulting music, immensely varied and emotionally pointed, suggests how we might feel about the story that is being played out in front of us. Of course, we are not obligated to respond in the way that the music wants to impel us. As always with great art, we are free to give in to the tide’s flow—or to resist it, by which I mean think critically about it.

Wagner’s innovations shaped the operatic work of composers within Germany and abroad, such as Massenet and Debussy in France. Directly or indirectly (i.e., through the works of the post-Wagnerians), these innovations also became embedded in the practices of musicians who accompanied silent films. (Of course, Wagner’s works were by no means the only root of silent-film accompanying. Perhaps the single most basic influence came from the established practices of incidental music in the theater: a small orchestra played short tunes and more continuous figurations “under” mimed action scenes and even under many spoken exchanges.)

Once sound film arrived in the 1920s, the standard devices of silent-film accompanying found their way into the practices of film-score composers. These (partly Wagnerian) devices continue to work their reliable magic in our own day. Particular features from Wagner’s Ring Cycle find echo in Howard Shore’s background score to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: the orchestra underlines, with vividly characterized themes and distinctive orchestral colors and textures, the highly contrasted characters and their temptations and travails.

Elsewhere in the popular realm a different kind of Wagnerian ambition often shows up. One need only think of the sound-and-light shows that occur nightly in front of certain historic European buildings or, in Egypt, at the pyramids at Gizeh. Götterdämmerung-like effects have become standard at ice-skating exhibitions and stadium-rock concerts.

Still, Wagner’s achievement in the Ring Cycle remains incomparable. No other operatic work is at once so great and so vast. And so daunting. Few cities in the world have an opera company capable of mounting even one of the Ring operas in a given year. No wonder people in Los Angeles are getting so excited that the first two Ring operas are being performed there this season (Das Rheingold in February and March; Die Walküre during April, featuring Plácido Domingo as Siegmund) and that all four will be scheduled in 2010—along with a two-and-a-half-month city-wide Wagner festival involving over 50 arts and cultural organizations.

Los Angeles’s mammoth Wagner project will surely attract people who come from many walks of life and have many different tastes and, we might say, cultural commitments. Brünnhilde and Siegfried, armed with helmets (or not, depending on the costume designer) and industrial-strength voices (for sure), could even be considered the original heavy-metal artists! The Ring Cycle is a world unto itself. It can be explored again and again, in different productions and with different performers. And, like all great works of art, the more one brings to it, and the more one approaches it with an open and active, challenging mind, the more one gets in return.

I also imagine that opera lovers from elsewhere will make Los Angeles a chosen destination, as already happens every summer at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus that Wagner himself designed, and at the Seattle Opera (whose every-four-years Ring Cycle returns this coming August).

Meanwhile, those of us in more modest-sized cities and towns have access, as I mentioned earlier, to Wagner’s various operas through CDs and DVDs. There are also splendidly insightful and challenging books. Restricting myself to titles from the Boydell family of imprints (including University of Rochester Press and Camden House), I might mention the multi-authored companions to Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal and books on the importance of two cities in Wagner’s career: Venice and Zurich. Stephen McClatchie’s Analyzing Wagner's Operas tells the engrossing story of how the writings of a widely respected scholar of the 1920s-30s, Alfred Lorenz, served as a “musical metaphor” for Nazi ideology. (The often perverted appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich need not, however, scare us away from exploring the works today, and finding out for ourselves what they have to offer.) In another recent study, cultural historian Hannu Salmi reveals unknown details of Wagner’s early years in Riga (today the capital of Latvia) and Königsberg (today the Russian city of Kaliningrad). Salmi’s book also recounts the struggles of local musicians throughout the Baltic region to get Wagner’s operas performed even halfway adequately.

And now, as I indicated at the outset, there is the Metropolitan Opera Radio channel (via Sirius Satellite). No Ring Cycle operas were to be heard during the few days when I was driving that nicely outfitted car. But it is surely only a matter of time before Sirius will be broadcasting them. Perhaps all four operas will be scheduled, one after the other, running for some 16 or more hours straight. Operaphiles may end up driving out of town on the highway and then back home, repeating the trip as many times as needed. Or they may prefer to sit listening in their driveway, running down the battery until that sweet-sad moment of release when the fabled Rhine overflows its banks and what we perhaps mistake for real life can begin again.

Wagner fans will also be interested to hear that the Boydell Press will reissue John Lucas' acclaimed biography of conductor Reginald Goodall later this year.

Whom the Gods Love

George Butterworth (1885-1916) is probably best known for his orchestral miniatures The Banks of Green Willow and A Shropshire Lad, which turn up on most anthologies of British music, and a handful of songs - mainly settings of Housman. His compositions stem largely from the five years leading up to the war: he destroyed a number of early works before joining the army and some - including a string quartet and a violin sonata - remained unpublished and have since been lost. Excluding some folksong arrangements there are 18 surviving songs, and yet, according to the late Trevor Hold

Butterworth's achievement...is in quite different ratio to his slender output and his importance as a songwriter lies in the entirely new conception of what English art-song could be. He wanted to shed the claustrophobic clutter of so much late romantic song and replace it with a new directness of expression and simplicity.

Like Vaughan Williams and Grainger he found his model in folksong, of which he was an avid collector. Hold continued:

Here he found lyrical ease and melodic directness as well as the forgotten tonal world of modal music, which would replace what, to him, were the exhausted resources of late 19th century musical language.

Later this month Toccata Press will publish a paperback edition of Whom the Gods Love, Michael Barlow's acclaimed study of Butterworth's short life and surviving works. The sincerity and musical value of these works will, according to Barlow, "assure him of a place in the history of English music."

By way of introduction to this brief but important book, we reproduce the Foreword by Vernon Handley, who died last year:

Art criticism has always been at pains to keep artists firmly in categories: great, important, influential, minor. The exercise has its uses, especially for students of art history - but the more music one hears, the less useful the two extremes in this list seem to matter. As a performing artist, my mind during preparation for a concert is frequently invaded by music I am not about to perform; when I am resting, I am beset by such music. The invasion is not made by exclusively 'great' music; indeed, the interesting thing about it is that so much of it is by unfamiliar or 'minor' composers.

In the last twenty years I have conducted regularly in Scandinavia and Australia, taking care to play a good deal of the music of those regions, the works of lesser composers as well as those of the established masters. The experience I described above holds good: some of the lesser works and composers will not leave me alone. This pleasant itch is the good furtune of many who know the music of George Butterworth, and it yields to no lasting remedy.

The death of young artists in the First World War has been well documented, and it might be called the 'if only' factor exhaustively explored. Michael Barlow's study does something more valuable. It dwells on the positive and vigorous aspects of Butterworth's character, aspects not obviously suggested by the character and inspiration of his works. I say 'obviously' because many who comment on art glibly transfer the prevailing atmosphere in an artist's works to the artist as a person. Delius the young mountain-walker and older irascible is lost in the last cadence of the first cuckoo, as is the self-pity of Beethoven in the initial gesture of the Fifth Symphony. But is the message that the reflective idyll is weak and the obvious optimism strong? The former is accepted with more damage to the composer than the latter. Michael Barlow will give pause for thought to those who have seen Butterworth as merely a gentle dreamer.

It is as well to remember that in only a few years Butterworth's handful of works will have lasted as long as many of those accepted as masterpieces when he was born. He appeals to 'the more thinking among mankind'. To all those who are susceptible, his works leave a clear picture of the strength of his vision and inspiration. The character emerging in this book is an absorbing and almost formidable young man, and his emergence establishes a balance between the man and his music. I welcome the itch, and I know I am not alone.