Richard Strauss' Kometentanz

As promised at the end of Wayne Heisler Jr’s post, Mr Mlakar and Richard Strauss, here is an excerpt from The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, recently published by the University of Rochester Press:

In addition to tone poems, numerous songs, and nearly perennial operatic musings, several dance scenarios passed over Strauss’s desk (or may have done so) in the years leading up to Kythere. Here, a brief survey of this composer’s encounters with ballet in the 1890s is in order.

As early as spring 1895, the litterateur Otto Julius Bierbaum had his sights set on Strauss to compose the music for his ballet scenario Pan im Busch (Pan in the Rose Bush). However, whether or not this plan was presented formally to Strauss at that time remains unclear; in the end, Felix Mottl created a score for Pan, which had its premiere in Karlsruhe on March 20, 1900. Bierbaum was not the only writer who desired to collaborate with Strauss on a ballet during the 1890s. In February 1896, Frank Wedekind wrote to the composer proposing a ballet entitled Die Flöhe oder Der Schmerzenstanz (The Fleas, or The Dance of Pain), a text that had been in the works for several years. Although Strauss apparently took this prospect seriously (Schuh reports that the composer even began sketching music for it), he abandoned Die Flöhe shortly thereafter. Next, in March 1898, the writer Richard Dehmel offered Strauss Lucifer. From Dehmel’s surviving correspondence with the composer, the latter seems to have found the scenario promising. Strauss may even have begun one short musical sketch for Lucifer: on page 68 of the composer’s Sketchbook No. 7 (ca. 1900–1), there is a passage labeled “Ballet. Solo mit Chor. II. Akt Schluss” (Ballet. Soloist with choir. Act Two finale). The music, in C major and 6/8 meter, is not fitted to any text, but Dehmel’s project is the only one of the ballets that Strauss took into purview in the 1890s that employs choruses at the end of each of its seven acts. Nevertheless, like Wedekind’s scenario before it, Lucifer languished after initial enthusiasm.

Aside from his own Die Insel Kythere, the ballet that seems to have piqued Strauss’s interest most strongly in these years was Paul Scheerbart’s Kometentanz (Dance of the Comets). On February 25, 1900, the composer reported to his parents, “The author Paul Scheerbart sent me a very pretty sketch for a one-act ballet: Kometentanz, an astral pantomime, which I will immediately set to music. Because one at least does not have to worry about singers and can storm about in the orchestra.” This is an interesting comment given Strauss’s miserable operatic track record at the time. The composer also articulated his balletic intentions to Romain Rolland, who recorded an account of Scheerbart’s scenario as narrated to him by Strauss in his diary entry for March 9, 1900—the day on which he and Strauss visited the Louvre together. Rolland also recorded that “the maître de ballet in Berlin has turned down [Kometentanz] ‘as not serious!’” In light of this information, it is a further testimony to Strauss’s commitment to Kometentanz that he misrepresented (albeit lightheartedly) its fate in Berlin when pitching the ballet to Gustav Mahler, who was at the time director of the Vienna Court Opera:

I am in the course of writing a one- or two-act burlesque ballet . . . —naturally something departing wholly from the accustomed hopping-about—by Paul Scheerbart. Would you accept the ballet for the Vienna Opera, have the first performance and use some nice scenery? On the strength of my honest face? If there is a chance of doing it anywhere else, I should prefer not to put on the first performance here in Berlin. It will be ready to be performed about autumn 1901.

Mahler’s answer followed promptly:

Your ballet is accepted in advance!—If I seem to attach a condition, it is only an elaboration of my unconditional agreement: I must have a look at the scenario mainly on account of the cost of the scenery. Could you let me see it, and also allow our set designers, wardrobe master, etc. to make a very rough estimate? In a few days you will have my answer, which you can then take as a binding acceptance. . . . I regard it as a matter of honour for the Vienna Court Opera to have the première. That you will be pleased with the production I can guarantee!

Strauss appears to have taken the possibility of a Viennese premiere for his first ever ballet quite seriously. In his Sketchbook No. 6 (ca. 1899–1911) there are approximately twenty-five pages of musical jottings for Kometentanz as indicated by textual cues, including: “with kind queries and bows to the king,” the agent for the dance performances in Scheerbart’s scenario; “the poet,” also a central character; and “nightingales and among them the contrasting music of the spheres,” referring to the two principal acoustic motives that Scheerbart specified should recur throughout the ballet. Where these sketches are identified, they seem to correspond mostly to act one of Kometentanz, and unfold in chronological order vis-à-vis the narrative. Strauss’s music is, however, far from composed; it is no surprise, then, that in the extant correspondence between him and Mahler there is no further conversation about Scheerbart’s ballet. Perhaps it did not meet Mahler’s “condition,” proving too expensive an undertaking for Vienna.

Whatever happened to Reggie?

‘Even if you lived to be 150 years old you would still not discover all the secrets of the Ring,’ said Reginald Goodall, and indeed he continued to study the scores of this and other Wagner operas until the end of his life. And what a colourful life it was, as anyone who knows John Lucas’s biography of the conductor, Reggie, will confirm. Next month we will be reissuing the book for the first time in paperback, updated with a new Foreword by Sir Peter Moores, under the new title The Genius of Valhalla. Here is a short extract from the Introduction:

I first heard Goodall conduct in the 1950s. He was on the staff of Covent Garden, though his appearances in the pit there were sporadic. He gave performances of Manon, Turandot and Bohème that were cogent and illuminating, and he breathed life into Britten’s Gloriana after its unfortunate premiere under John Pritchard. His Meistersinger – “Not my Meistersinger,” I can hear him saying crossly, “Wagner’s” – won him glowing notices in the press, as did the performances of Die Walküre he conducted on tour. Yet by the end of the decade he had all but disappeared from view. It was puzzling, but I knew nothing then of operatic politics.

At a party at the 1961 Edinburgh Festival I was introduced to a Covent Garden stalwart, the baritone Geraint Evans, who regaled his fellow guests with tales of the Opera House. What, I asked him, had happened to Goodall? He adopted a solemn expression. “Ah, Reginald,” he said, rolling the initial R theatrically. “Poor Reginald.” He then changed the subject. Clearly, as far as Covent Garden was concerned, Goodall was a spent force. Yet seven years later, at the age of sixty-six, he made an extraordinary comeback, with a production of The Mastersingers for Sadler’s Wells Opera that demonstrated beyond dispute that here was a great Wagner conductor in a tradition stretching back through Hans Knappertsbusch and Karl Muck to Hans Richter, conductor of the first Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876.

Goodall had watched Knappertsbusch at work during his visits to Bayreuth throughout the 1950s, and from him had learned how to build the acts in great, seamless arches, how to relate one tempo to another, how to balance the sound so that each individual strand in the orchestral fabric could be heard, how to ensure, through close attention to the dynamic markings in the orchestral parts, that singers were never drowned. Goodall complained that most conductors failed to observe Wagner’s dynamics; as a result, he said, singers were encouraged to sing stridently in order to compete with the orchestral flood. Big steely voices were not for him – he liked voices that were even in quality and sonority from top to bottom of their range. “Too much metal, dear,” he grumbled at even his favourite sopranos when they sang high notes – and he would stick his fingers in his ears to underline the point. In low-lying passages he demanded the rich characteristic of the violin’s bottom string – “More G string, dear” was a constant plea.

Not all singers could cope with Goodall and the demands he made of them. But those who could revered him. A Goodall regular, the bass Gwynne Howell, has written, “He could be infuriating and cuttingly critical with, at peak moments, a quick stamping of the feet. With luck the next singer would arrive – preferably female, he liked female company – and calm would be restored. I would return home on some exhausted high, but just as I felt I wanted to give up it would all fall into place. All those shaky gestures of his conducting style would become clear and meaningful.”

Goodall attached the greatest importance to Wagner’s final injunction to his singers before the 1876 Ring at Bayreuth: “Die grossen Noten kommen von selbst; die kleinen Noten and ihr Text sind die Hauptsache” – “The big notes look after themselves; the little notes and their text are the main thing.” All the semi-quavers, said Goodall, were to be given their proper sonority; they were not to be “snatched at”. Words had to be sung with the utmost clarity and attention to meaning. Notes had to be “coloured”, either to mirror the harmonies in the orchestra or to reflect the emotional mood of the scene or phrase. “Angel of death,” he would say to his Brünnhildes in the Todesverkündigung in Act 2 of Die Walküre, urging them to adopt a dark, grave sound; during King Marke’s long solo in Act 2 of Tristan, he would ask the singer to match the timbre of the accompanying bass clarinet. Goodall was responsible for a remarkable flowering of Wagner singing that led to a generation of British and Commonwealth Wagner singers he had coached taking leading roles at Bayreuth, stretching from Jon Vickers in the late 1950s to John Tomlinson and Anne Evans thirty years later.

Goodall was sometimes mocked for his painstaking rehearsal methods, yet he worked in a way that would have been considered natural by Wagner’s earliest interpreters. He was shocked by the fact that international conductors in the latter part of the twentieth century rarely took the trouble to coach the singers for their own productions: “Imagine Klemperer behaving like that! That’s one of the things I like about Barenboim – he works with his singers. He’s one of the few who does, and it shows. Most of the others are flitting here and there, conducting this and that. It makes me tired.”

The Chandos recording of Goodall’s Mastersingers has been nominated for a Gramophone Award. The Genius of Valhalla: The Life of Reginald Goodall by John Lucas, author of the acclaimed Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, will be available from all good booksellers from October.

Handel’s 'Orlando'

With the end of the Proms, BBC Radio 3’s cycle of Handel’s operas resumes on September 17th with Orlando. In this extract from Handel’s Operas 1726-1741, Winton Dean looks at the composer’s introduction of the figure of Zoroastro into the opera:

Handel’s choice of this subject marked a sharp change of direction from the heroic/epic/historical plots that had occupied him almost continuously since Amadigi in 1717 towards magic and romantic subjects. It may well have been the discovery of Ariosto that governed not only the follow-up with Ariodante and Alcina but a more relaxed attitude to classical stories in Arianna and Atalanta. He was to revert to the epic-historical type, less successfully, for four more operas before modifying his approach towards a lighter, ironical manner in his last three.

The libretto of Orlando poses a number of questions. Both the literary ancestor, Aariosto’s epic Orlando furioso, and the source libretto, Carlo Sigismondo Capeci’s L’Orlando, overo la gelosa pazzia, produced in the private roman theatre of the exiled Queen Maria Casimira of Poland in 1711 with music by Domenico Scarlatti, are known. But Handel’s libretto is no mere adjustment of the old text to suit local conditions in London, whether of taste or for a particular cast of singers. It takes a radically new direction. Although Ariosto’s poem is full of sorcery and sorcerers, the Angelica–Medoro–Orlando story is conducted on a purely human level, as it is in Capeci. Neither Zoroastro nor Dorinda appears in Ariosto, and Zoroastro is not in Capeci, or any other Ariosto libretto of the period. His commanding figure shifts the whole focus of the plot, introducing the element of magic and spectacle and controlling the destiny of the characters by acting as a benevolent deus ex machina. Where did he come from, and who brought him into Orlando?

Reinhard Strohm in a fascinating essay points out that Zoroastro figures in several contemporary operas on the Babylonian Semiramis story, generally as a rival monarch using his powers for his own ends; but in Johann Ulrich König’s Ninus und Semiramis, set conjecturally by G. C. Schürmann for Brunswick in 1730, he brings the plot to an end by acting as peacemaker. König was a friend of Mattheson and Brockes in Hamburg, a circle with which Handel may have been in touch. A contributory model could have been Ariosto’s Atlante, Ruggiero’s tutor, who casts plenty of spells in Orlando furioso, notably in the Alcina story. It may be more than a coincidence that Handel’s Orlando opens with a tableau showing atlas (Atlante) sustaining the heavens on his shoulders.

Capeci was an early member of the Arcadian Academy in Rome, the group dedicated to substituting a reasoned classicism for the extravagances of the seventeenth-century libretto. His Orlando eschews not only magic and spectacle but the mixture of comic and serious language so repugnant to the Arcadians. His Dorinda is very different from Handel’s; though a shepherdess, she uses the same elevated speech as the other characters, including Isabella and Zerbino, the chivalrous lovers suppressed in Handel’s opera. Orlando himself, it is true, was by tradition an ambivalent figure; Dent aptly likens him to Don Quixote. A hero who confuses the identity of the persons he meets, mistakes a shepherdess for Venus, rushes about invoking the ancient gods, and constantly expresses himself in the most extravagant language (though there is less of all this in Capeci’s libretto than in Handel’s) could be treated as a comic figure, and often was. A madman was fair game for laughs. It is possible to imagine a number of scenes in Handel’s libretto, especially the conclusion of Act II and Orlando’s confrontation with Dorinda in III.iii, as material for the eighteenth-century equivalent of an Offenbach farce. We do not know how Scarlatti coped with this, since his music is lost. It is only Handel’s music that converts these episodes into profound psychological drama.

We can surely credit Handel with the general plan of the opera and the introduction of Zoroastro. He presumably had a collaborator, and one of no little skill. Who was he? Strohm puts forward Nicola Haym, who adapted the librettos of Handel’s most successful royal academy operas. But Haym died on 31 July 1729, and Orlando was not composed till the autumn of 1732. Moreover if, as Strohm suggests, the inspiration for Orlando came from Handel’s visit to Italy in 1728–29, which ended with his return to England on 29 June, Haym would have had barely a month – the last month of his life – in which to confer with Handel and write the libretto. There is a stronger argument against Haym's authorship. The part of Zoroastro was clearly conceived for a powerful bass, such as Montagnana, who created it, and who did not reach London until autumn 1731, whereas in both the 1729/30 and 1730/1 seasons Handel had only mediocre singers for the bass parts, Riemschneider and Commano. Riemschneider was a failure in Lotario and allowed only one aria in Partenope, and in any case was a high baritone; Commano in Poro had no arias at all.

Handel’s collaborator remains a mystery.

More can be found in Handel’s Operas 1726-1741 by Winton Dean (Boydell Press 2006). The first volume of this monumental study – Handel’s Operas 1704-1726 – which Dean wrote with John Merill Knapp - will soon be available again in a matching edition and the two volumes as a set. An essential purchase for anyone who has rediscovered these marvellous works through the BBC season.

Schoeck, Shaken and Stirred

This month sees the publication of Chris Walton’s superb Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works. As in all good biographies, Walton’s book brings Schoeck’s endearing, irritating, charming, frustrating, magnetic personality to life, as well as the rather turbulent times in which he lived. He also demonstrates why we should pay his music – increasingly available on CD - more attention than we have until quite recently. No mere academic butterfly pinned inside a glass case, Schoeck lives and breathes in this compelling biography. In this extract, we see how the composer dealt with lost love. The first paragraph sets the scene:

In August 1923, Schoeck was abandoned by his lover of the past five years, Mary de Senger. That same month, he encountered the musical avant-garde for the first time at the Salzburg festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. The loss of Mary, plus the realization that musical progress had left him far behind, had an impact on him that resulted in a stylistic shift as sudden as it was drastic: within a few months of finishing the song cycle Elegie with its neo-Brahmsian tonality, he was writing the atonal first scene of a new opera, Penthesilea.

How does one cope with losing the love of one’s life, the woman whose very existence seems to define one, and without whom the mere fact of being seems to lose its purpose? The answer, felt Schoeck, was to have lots of sex with lots of other women as soon as possible. That is precisely what he did within a fortnight of losing Mary. In compensation for his loss, he also began to display a heightened sexual bravado among his (male) friends, once more claiming that fidelity was different for men and women: women remained faithful by remaining faithful, while men could sleep around without being unfaithful per se. Furthermore, he claimed, not one of his friends’ wives had ever failed to make a pass at him, with the sole exception, he remarked pointedly, of Stefi Geyer. He now boasted for weeks on end of how many women he was sleeping with, and of how many came to beg him for sex. All this macho posturing was presumably to compensate for the fact that the one woman he really wanted was the one he had lost—through no one’s fault but his own—and would never win back. And while he might have somewhat exaggerated the number of his conquests, he nevertheless was indeed consoling himself in the arms and orifices of several women. The least fleeting of them was Annie Gottlieb-Sallenbach, whom Schoeck called “Angelie.” She was Swiss, was married to a Dane, and had two children. Although resident in Dresden, she frequently visited her mother back in Zurich, into whose care she had placed her children during the inflation years in order to spare them the economic privations inevitable in Germany. Angelie’s family knew the local music scene well. Her mother’s home on the Bellerivestrasse was used as a rehearsal venue by de Boer’s Zurich String Quartet, and Angelie had probably got to know Schoeck through one or both of their mutual friends Ilona Durigo and Stefi Geyer. She had been in love with Schoeck for some time—she would later claim that he had been the love of her life—and when she appeared at his apartment two weeks after the break with Mary and found him in need of consolation, she bestowed it amply.

At about the same time that Angelie appeared, Schoeck composed the song “Die Entschwundene” (“The Girl Who Disappeared”), a setting of the first poem in Gottfried Keller’s cycle Erstes Lieben (“First Love”). If it was meant as a farewell to Mary, its obsessive two-measure ostinato accompaniment and its vocal line hovering around the notes of a broken chord make it just as much a farewell to the sound-world of the Elegie. But it also points the way forward, inasmuch as Schoeck’s songs for the next five years would be to poems by Gottfried Keller alone—a poet whom he had long avoided. While we must be suspicious of spotting all-too-convenient parallels between biography and work, Schoeck’s life “post-Mary” undeniably coincides almost exactly with a phase in his compositional life that was breathtakingly new. It is not really “the girl” who disappears, for it is the Schoeck of the Elegie who is “der Entschwundene.” The first signs of the new direction in his music are to be found in a “Lento” movement that he added in early September to his suite for string quartet (soon to be renamed simply “Second String Quartet”), in which sustained dissonant chords in parallel motion suspend tonality for much of the time; he called it an “Abendbild” (“Picture of Evening”).

This summer also brought Schoeck in closer contact with one of the leading proponents of modern music, Hermann Scherchen, conductor of the Winterthur City Orchestra. To judge from a letter that he sent his wife at this time, Scherchen seems to have been somewhat swept off his feet by the strength of Schoeck’s personality: “I love Schoeck. . . . The fellow has all the marks of the exceptional in his overflowing personality, in the fire of his eye. A highly robust chap, but without being crude. Talented down to the tips of his fingers. Full of eroticism, wit, and with it all, above all, likeable . . . not intelligent in the sense of ‘clever,’ but at times almost enlightened in his physical/emotional intelligence. That’s the source of his marvellous judgments and insights.” A performance of the Elegie that Scherchen had scheduled in Frankfurt in September 1923 had to be cancelled because of a lack of rehearsal time, but his passion for Schoeck and his music would remained undimmed over the coming decades.

Besides finishing his new string quartet in autumn 1923, Schoeck now also planned a setting of Keller’s narrative cycle of fourteen poems entitled Lebendig begraben (“Buried Alive”). It proved intractable, however, and after considering having certain sections spoken, not sung, he put it to one side (he would return to it three years later). He turned instead to Keller’s Gaselen (“Ghazels”), a brief cycle of ten poems that mix erotic love lyrics with satire, and whose only real unifying factor is the verse form (aa–ba–ca–da, etc.). These poems are even more abstruse and awkward than those of the Lebendig begraben cycle, and Schoeck at first found them just as intractable. He considered setting them to an accompaniment of cello and piano, with the most difficult verses once more spoken, not sung; but he soon decided instead to have all the verses sung to the accompaniment of an ensemble of trumpet, flute doubling piccolo, oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and percussion. Derrick Puffett has suggested that this “top and bottom” instrumentation was influenced by Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, though the opening of the work, with its brash solo trumpet followed by the nasal, almost “vulgar” sound of the woodwind scoring, actually takes us into a sound-world that is perhaps most reminiscent of Kurt Weill. Once Schoeck had begun, the floodgates opened by themselves, for five of the ten poems were apparently sketched in the space of two hours, and the cycle was finished by early November 1923, with the exception of the very ending. Schoeck claimed to have been disturbed by a visitor just as his moment of inspiration came (his “Einfall”), and it took him till December to find an ending that truly satisfied him.

The opening poem of Gaselen runs: “Ours is the fate of the Epigones who live in the vast halfway-world; look how you squeeze one more drop from old lemon rinds!”. The final poem tells of the poet’s old hat whose rim is crumpled and attracts the mockery of passers-by; so he turns it round, but then people only laugh behind his back; and he then turns it round again, as he would rather face down his critics than have them mock him out of sight. Schoeck’s friends assumed that it was such satirical verses that had attracted him to the cycle, but if the strength of the music is a reliable guide, then it was the love songs that appealed to him the most. They contain some of the most blatantly erotic imagery that he would ever set to music. The central poem runs thus:

I hold you in my arms, tenderly you hold the rose,

And the rose holds deep within it a young bee;
Thus we arrange ourselves like pearls on life’s single thread,
Thus we rejoice as petal upon petal gathers round the rose,
And when my kiss glows on your mouth, a flame darts
Into the heart of the bee as it mates with the chalice of the rose.

—and its music is suitably erotic, the flute and bass clarinet weaving a canon around the voice to a background of luscious triplet figurations in the piano. The song climaxes on a top F for the voice as the flame darts into the heart of the mating bee before subsiding into “an expansive Straussian postlude” (thus Puffett), whose aesthetic effect is, obviously and intentionally, the musical equivalent of the post-coital cigarette.

Gaselen was also Schoeck’s first continuous song cycle. The model he chose, as Puffett has demonstrated cogently, was An die ferne Geliebte, “Beethoven’s continuous cycle with interludes, a recapitulation, and a well-balanced tonal scheme. All these devices [Schoeck] incorporated into Gaselen, almost as if he were afraid that the work would not stand up without them.” What Puffett did not know was that An die ferne Geliebte was the song cycle that Schoeck admired above all others and already knew well as an accompanist—he had played it just over a year before, on 30 March 1922 in St. Gallen, with Alfred Jerger as soloist. “Weisch,” Schoeck once said to his nephew Georg, “d’bescht Zyklus isch d’ferni Geliebti” (“You know, the best cycle is the Distant Beloved” ). The significance of the model might even go beyond the merely musical, given that Schoeck’s longings were still very much for his own beloved in distant Geneva. He had interrupted his composition of the cycle to go on a brief concert tour to Holland with Ilona Durigo and had summoned up the courage to write to Mary from The Hague. He received no answer.

In a later post, Chris Walton will tell us how he came to write about Othmar Schoeck. In the meantime, Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works will soon be available from all good booksellers. The photograph of the composer above is reproduced in the book courtesy of the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich.

Mr Mlakar and Richard Strauss

Think of Richard Strauss and it’s the operas that spring to mind, or the tone poems, perhaps even the concertos. Strauss’s ballet music, now the subject of a fascinating new book by Wayne Heisler Jr., The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, is something of a forgotten treasure. Here Professor Heisler describes how he discovered this music, and a historic meeting in Slovenia with two of the composer's original choreographers.

My earliest serious encounters with Richard Strauss’s music were as an undergraduate at DePaul University in Chicago (1989–1994). First, there were the many opportunities to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—Orchestra Hall is just a short “L” ride away from DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus and the School of Music. I recall, too, many informal listening sessions with my music-major friends, including my hall- and roommate Oto Carrillo, who is now a horn player with the Chicago Symphony and a member of DePaul’s horn faculty. As a pianist, I had a collection of recordings that was dominated by piano music; not surprisingly, as a horn player Oto had a wealth of recordings of late-nineteenth-century orchestral music: Mahler, Bruckner, and, of course, Richard Strauss. My first experiences hearing and studying scores for such works as Tod und Verklärung or Till Eulenspiegel were “after hours” in the dorms.

Like most undergraduate music programs to this day, mine offered non-vocalists very little formal exposure to opera, much less ballet music. (The 'why’s' for this situation are too complex to unpack here, but suffice it to say that an almost exclusive focus on instrumental compositions in music history and theory clouds the perspectives of many audiences, performers, and composers throughout history.) It was not until I entered a master’s program in musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that I began to research, study, and love music for the stage, including works by Richard Strauss. During my first year at Madison I took a work-study gig under Karlos Moser, then the Program Director of the University Opera. As it turned out, the big production that season was an English-language version of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Through researching the production history of Rosenkavalier, including staging, cuts, and translations, I came to know the opera intimately. More transformative, however, were the lessons I learned about the non-linearity of history through that opera. Although I was a bit overwhelmed at the time, it was fruitful for a budding musicologist to become engaged with opera history, including Rossini and Wagner, via Rosenkavalier, and through the ears and worldviews of Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss’s ballet scores (who knew?) initially came to my attention in Professor Susan Cook’s stimulating interdisciplinary musicology seminary on dance and music in the twentieth century. Two of the topics I presented on that semester were the Ziegfeld Follies and Strauss’s 1924 ballet Schlagobers—readers of my book will see that these seemingly disparate interests turned out to be complementary!

While I was a Ph.D. student in musicology at Princeton University, I received grants from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) and Germanistic Society of America/Fulbright, respectively, to live and study in Germany. The latter residency, when I was a research fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, proved to be formative for my life and work. While I was in Munich, I had many experiences that would impact my study of Strauss and his ballets, both directly and indirectly: receiving guidance from Strauss specialists Dr. Reinhold Schlötterer and Dr. Roswitha Schlötterer-Traimer, who were extremely generous with their knowledge and time; spending days at the Richard-Strauss-Institut in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where my chosen work space in the institute library overlooked the composer’s beloved Zugspitze; purchasing a cheap Bayernkarte or a Schönes-Wochenende ticket and traveling to nowhere-specific on local and regional trains; taking time out to visit as many churches as possible decorated by the Asam brothers—Cosmas Damian Asam (1686–1739) and Egid Quirin Asam (1692–1750)—whose puffed up German rococo sensitized my palate for Strauss’s unfinished ballet Die Insel Kythere (1900), as well as his late ballet Verklungene Feste (1941); and, along with other scholars, getting an informal tour of Strauss’s Garmisch villa with his grandson, Dr. Christian Strauss - the unplanned capstone of a weekend-long seminar on rhythm and meter in Strauss’s music, hosted by the Strauss-Institute. This opportunity was eye-opening for me: because the Strauss villa is not open to the public, it has resisted for the most part an idealized representation of the composer, quite unlike Wagner’s Wahnfried in Bayreuth. The presence of 'everyday' objects (at least to a Bavarian of Strauss’s generation)—carved and decorated wooden crosses or mounted stag heads—alongside more ‘sublime’ Nippsachen (knick-knackery), such as eighteenth-century porcelain figurines, is quite consonant with Strauss’s musical art, I think.

Acknowledging the many people, places, and events in Germany that contributed to my research for and eventual writing of the book, the most inspirational experience during my residency there was actually a weekend in the spring of 2001 that I spent in Ljubljana, Slovenia, working in the home of Pino Mlakar (1907–2006), the last surviving collaborator of Richard Strauss. Mr. Mlakar and his wife Pia (1910–2000) were the choreographers of Verklungene Feste. Having solicited information on that largely unknown ballet via a letter, I received a warm response from Mr. Mlakar inviting me to Ljubljana. Materially, the reason for the trip was to study his personal copy of the Kinetogramm (dance score) for Verklungene Feste, notated in Labannotation. More consequential, however, was the opportunity to go over the extant materials with Mr. Mlakar himself, and learn of the many, many aspects of performance(s) that no written record can capture.

I was welcomed at the door by Veronika Mlakar, Pino and Pia’s daughter who is also a dancer. If my memory serves me correctly, she offered me coffee and got me situated at a table in the parlor with the Kinetogramm. Immediately I discovered that critical details of the musical arrangements and plot had been lost to history—as I posit in the book, this cannily follows the allegory of the ballet itself. After working for about ½ hour or so, I heard a slow shuffling coming from a hallway off the room, and after several minutes Mr. Mlakar greeted me as ‘Herr Heisler aus München’. (Although I am an American, the fact that I was visiting from Munich meant a lot to Mr. Mlakar, who had served as ballet master at the Staatsoper there for most of the 1930s, and from 1952–1954.) Although he was already in his 90s, Mr. Mlakar spent several hours with me over the next two days, even clarifying—embodying!—aspects of the dance notation with his feet, arms, and hands. In between our talks, when Mr. Mlakar disappeared once again down that hallway, Veronika assisted me and offered deep insights as she had danced in Verklungene Feste when it was revived in the 1950s. Also memorable was an impassioned conversation Mr. Mlakar, Veronika, and I had over a delicious homemade lunch about George W. Bush’s ‘election’ the previous fall. (But that would have to be the subject of a separate blog…) Ultimately, through my visit with the Mlakars I came closer to knowing the ‘heart’ behind the strange, problematic, and beautiful Verklungene Feste—and, I believe, in all of Strauss’s ballet collaborations.

The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss is available now. In coming weeks we will post a short excerpt from the book.

Merce Cunningham, the I-Ching & the first Happening

Surely any time traveller with an interest in the arts would want to touch down at the Black Mountain College in the ‘forties and ‘fifties. Who could resist painting with Willem de Kooning, discussing poetry with Jonathan Williams or building a geodesic dome with Buckminster Fuller? Had you been there in 1952 you might have witnessed, arguably, the first 'Happening' featuring John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who died last month. Here, by way of a tribute to the great dancer and choreographer, we post a short excerpt from Peter Dickinson’s interview with Cunningham, to be found in CageTalk published by the University of Rochester Press:

PD Do you actually use the I Ching?

MC I have used it in several dances. I could use it in all of them: sometimes because of practical necessities, such as the amount of time I have to make something, [laughs] I have to employ simpler ways like using coins. It’s the element of chance bringing up something my own experience might not produce. Even though I have made the movements that will be utilized in the dance, I use chance operations to devise the continuity so that what comes after what can be a new experience.

PD Wasn’t it when Christian Wolff’s father published the I Ching that it became a great discovery for John?

MC I don’t remember the exact moment. It must have been Christian Wolff who brought the book, and I remember very strongly the impression he [Cage] had of reading the preface where Jung asks the I Ching what it thought of being published in a different language. The answer was so extraordinary . . . I remember John being absolutely amazed. My own experience about it was that the book is so vast and the kind of thing it allows for is so open that if you asked it a question, the answers were always pertinent. Then I began to see that the numbers themselves—not what they represented in terms of hexagrams—could be used for my purpose. It was around that time that I began thinking much about space and dancing. I’d been taught that in dance there was the proscenium stage and there was a center of interest at the center of the stage, the most important part of the space. Even before the I Ching, that didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t have any other answer, I admit. Then I happened to read this quotation of Einstein’s where he said there are no fixed points in space. I thought that was perfect for the stage, and there’s no point that’s any more important than any other. In that sense it’s Buddhist or Zen. Any point could be important. Wherever anybody was, was in that sense a center. So I began to explore that by taking pieces of plain white paper and marking the imperfections, then drawing lines from one to the other; then taking another sheet of paper and drawing more lines because the imperfections are always different. Then I would superimpose them so that each sheet [represented a single] dancer’s space track. Where those [tracks] happened to coincide they could do something together. That eradicated anything about the center of the stage: it didn’t exist anymore. I thought that was wonderful! [laughs] Then I also found it was possible to make dances where the audience was all the way around you. One of the very first ones, called Suite by Chance, was done that way, and we presented it at Black Mountain College that summer - we were there with the audience all the way around us.

PD Did you find that you and John dominated the scene there?

MC Oh no, not at all. . . . First of all, from a practical and personal point of view, it was wonderful for me. I was there several summers, actually. The first summer John and I were there with Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and Bill de Kooning, and Albers, of course. What was so amazing was that, in spite of inadequate facilities for dancing, it was still made possible for me to work. The dining hall was the only big space they had, and they’d simply clear it every day. It was a community where the pupils and the teachers had a sense of interacting. You all ate at the same dining room and sat at different tables each day with different people, always having a crossing of ideas, listening to something totally out of the realm of dancing. As far as I was concerned it was marvellous to get out of it for a while. You could not only hear about something different, but it could make you change your ideas.

PD You took part in the happening at Black Mountain College in 1952. What was it like?

MC I don’t know in detail what the others did. There were about five or six of us—Bob Rauschenberg, John, David Tudor, myself, I think M. C. Richards and maybe another person. I’m sure John has described this, but we each simply did what we did. That is, I danced around through the public, which sat in the center with aisles between. It was a kind of agreed-upon length of time during which these things would take place. There was no connection other than what anybody looking at this could make. All these things were separate, and everybody was sitting facing a different way so that they would see or hear something in a different way. It wasn’t all fixed so that everybody was to look at it one way. At the end of it they brought out coffee or something! [laughs]

PD Did it feel like something that would have reverberations right through the 1960s?

MC No. And it didn’t have a name. It was just something we did. Later they called them happenings. It was an idea about theater that John had — that anything could be theater. It can, depending on how you act or think about it. It doesn’t have to have a reference, a meaning, or a connection. It can simply take place.

PD John’s ideas open up the skies, don’t they?

MC Yes, a large mind open to so many kinds of things. His reactions to things have often been so amazing to me.

Merce Cunningham died on 26th July 2009.

CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage edited by Peter Dickinson (‘The ideal introduction to Cage’ Times Literary Supplement) is available from all good booksellers. The photograph of Merce Cunningham with an unidentified dancer in Roaratorio (1983) is reproduced in the book courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

Painting Music

We are pleased to add to our growing list of client presses by taking over the distribution of Jane Mackay’s astonishing The Turn of the Screw: Visual responses to Britten’s opera, first published by Sounding Art Press in 2007. As James Bowman writes in his Preface to the book, it is ‘a very special tribute to the genius composer whom it seeks to honour’ and a remarkable manifestation of a very unusual artistic gift. Jane Mackay herself explains:

Seeing images as a response to sounds has always been as natural to me as experiencing the touch of silky fur when stroking a cat or smelling the scent of roses in high summer. As a child I saw each day of the week in colours and shapes, and so did my sister. Her colours were quite different from mine though, and many were the arguments we had about why my Wednesdays were lemon yellow when hers were a dusky green. Names, numbers, months of the year all had their hues, direction of flow, patterns and textures, as did voices, poems and music. As far back as I can remember, these visions were part of life and it never occurred to me that most people did not share my experiences. I was given a set of oil paints on my tenth birthday and from that time became seriously interested in art. My paintings were invariably ‘out of my head’ – for some reason I considered it cheating to paint what was already in front of me. Consequently, painting music was frequently part of the scheme of things.

During the 1960s I continued with my art and music whilst studying medicine in London. Then, after thirty years of medical practice I changed my career to that of a full-time artist, marking the moment by ceremoniously throwing my engraved stethoscope into the Thames on the morning of the new millennium. I discovered that my lifetime facility to see sound had a name, and that ‘synaesthesia’ was a well-recognised and vigorously researched area of neuro-physiology.

Approximately one person in 2,000 is a synaesthete. The condition appears to be inherited, many synaesthetes having a family member with the same thing. The commonest manifestation of this cross-sensory perception is seeing letters, numbers or words in colour. However, almost any sensory mix-up is possible. I have myself, on several occasions, experienced coloured temperature (e.g. a creamy whiteness on picking up a hot mug of coffee), coloured pain (deep purple sciatica) and coloured positional sense (a striking shift from banana-yellow to reddish-purple on altering position in bed).

My musical synaesthetic experiences are legion though I often find them hard to describe and explain. How do I convey what it is like to listen to a tenor on the car radio and to be absolutely certain that the voice is coloured green and red at the same time? The sound also looks like the skeletal remains of a decomposed autumn leaf. This image is not located either in the radio or in my head, but somewhere ‘out there’, totally integrated with the sound and yet separate from it and utterly recognisable and memorable. I once described this vision as looking a bit like shot silk but that isn’t right either. It is more like peering at orange fabric under a neon street light. You know that it is orange but it looks grey. It is orange and grey at the same time.

In working on my paintings of Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw I responded to the whole spectrum of synaesthetic visions that this masterpiece presented to me. Images were evoked by instrumental colours (Prologue; Variation XI); dynamic changes (Theme); cross-rhythms (Variation I); extremes of colour contrast between voice and orchestral sound (Act I, scene 4); chord colours (Act I, scene 5, Variation XI); fugal patterns (Variation V); word colours and shapes (Act II, scene 7) and overall soundworlds depicted as semi-abstract images (Act II, scene 3), to give a few specific examples.

I am sometimes asked whether I would miss my synaesthesia if it were taken away from me. I am sure I would though it can be a disadvantage of course. It is difficult to remember acquaintances whose names and voice colours clash. Loud music in restaurants and shops can lead to visual as well as auditory overload. On the other hand, synaesthesia is mostly unremarkable, constantly operating in the background, always part of things. At best it is a condition in which the music I love gives rise to images charged with a sort of creative energy – images that just have to be painted.

The Turn of the Screw: Visual responses to Britten’s opera by Jane Mackay with a commentary by Andrew Plant and a preface by James Bowman is now available from Boydell & Brewer Ltd.