Svetlana Belsky's Busoni

The time came, as it inevitably must, in any DMA program, when the Director of Doctoral Studies looks sternly at the class and asks if all are ready to submit their dissertation proposals. The program in question was a performance doctorate; and we had just recently found out exactly how many degree recitals were required for graduation! So the answer all around was a pained “no”. I searched my brain for ideas, none came, but, undaunted (or not much), I appealed to the fount of all wisdom, pianistic and otherwise, my dear teacher, Nina Svetlanova.

The gleam in her eye was more frightening than the Director’s frown. It appeared that she had been waiting for the question – and had the answer. Shortly, I found myself with a well-thumbed tome in my hands, a masterpiece written by her own teacher that badly needed translating into English and I was just the person to do it (having command of Russian and English, a love for the piano and an inability to say no). The book was Busoni by Grigory Kogan (GK’s original one-word title, standing like a marble statue), putting it down once I started reading was impossible, and practicing suffered greatly for the space of those few days. (Little did I know how much future practicing time would suffer, along with teaching, housekeeping and motherhood, in the course of the writing itself!).

That first reading was somewhat of an interactive experience. I was frequently heard muttering to myself about the fabulousness of this idea or another, and occasionally bursting out with an “aha, so this is where that genius fingering from my last lesson came from!” The wheel of time turns inexorably, and, since the publication of the book in January, my own students, presented with some pearl of wisdom, have been known to exclaim – “this is right out of Chapter 11!”

Like most young pianists, I had only a passing acquaintance with the name Ferruccio Busoni. I knew him as a fabled pianist of the Golden Age, and the composer of impossibly difficult works. The name of Grigory Kogan, on the other hand, was very familiar to me. To any pianist, and, indeed, musician, brought up in the Russian-speaking world, he was a legend and a giant. The great Russian and Soviet pianistic tradition would not have existed without Kogan’s teaching, playing and writing. Other great pedagogues wrote works about the “hows” of piano playing, Kogan discussed the “whys”, those psychological aspects of listening, imagining, practicing and performance, without which any pianist, no matter how technically proficient, can never become an artist. Many of Kogan’s iconic works on piano playing unfortunately remain un-translated and unpublished, but I may quote them in my lessons with impunity!

Kogan’s Busoni as Pianist (the translation’s new and more precise title) s the first and only work of its kind – dedicated to painstaking study and discussion of Busoni’s place in the pianistic Pantheon. It is Kogan’s fascinating thesis that, unlike many great pianists whose careers shine bright but change nothing in the prevailing zeitgeist, Busoni’s contribution to the history of piano playing is as revolutionary and game-changing as that of Liszt, Chopin or Anton Rubinstein. Busoni’s esthetic was radically opposite that of the decadent style of Hofman and Leschetizky, in all aspects of technique, sound production, repertoire and even general approach, and served as a sort of counterweight. My very favorite chapter of the book contrasts the recordings of the Liszt-Verdi Rigoletto Paraphrase by Busoni himself and Anna Essipova, Leschetizky’s favorite student and wife; the revelation here is that Essipova’s playing is much more immediately attractive and pleasant, Busoni’s takes time and effort to understand and appreciate, and then becomes irresistible. The school of piano playing that emerged in the years after WWII, especially the Russian, is a wonderful amalgam of the two great movements of the decades before, and was indelibly influenced by Busoni’s art.

Outside of Busoni’s importance as a study of both theory and history of piano playing, the book is fascinating as a product of its time and place. Written (or, at least published) in 1964, during that brief period of relaxation of Soviet government’s iron censorship of every aspect of creative and literary life, the book was still required to include the prescribed amount of genuflection towards the powers that be and the usual socialist-realist cant which any Soviet reader would simply ignore. Because I cannot imagine that any reader not schooled in the art of instinctively skipping, on even the first reading, any paragraphs which include the word “bourgeois” and “Lenin”, will be able to discard those passages written clearly and exclusively for the censor, I felt it was imperative to provide an in-depth explanation of the “life and times” of the book. Lovers of history, or those not well acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union, might enjoy both the products of my own labors, and the little vignette of the time now passed unlamented.

Svetlana Belsky's translation of Grigory Kogan's classic study, Busoni as Pianist, is now available, published by the University of Rochester Press. An excerpt from this beautifully translated work will be published in a later post.

The Afterlife of a Maverick

John Cunnigham’s study of The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 has just been published by the Boydell Press. In this post, the author examines how his reputation declined and rose again after his dramatic death fighting for King Charles I at the Siege of Chester in 1645.

The cover of my book is graced with the recently discovered full-length version of the portrait depicting (the person thought to be) William Lawes. Although we may have expected the sitter to have been holding a viol or theorbo etc., the cane he actually holds gives us the impression someone who thought of himself as a gentleman, and who wished to be portrayed as such. This iconographic separation of Lawes from his music can also be observed in the conception and preservation of his reputation as the maverick Cavalier composer: a reputation that long outlived those familiar with his actual music. Lawes’s battlefield death ensured that his memory was quickly draped with a symbolic cloak of Royalist martyrdom; although his music was no longer fashionable (and rarely performed) by the late seventeenth century, Lawes’s reputation enjoyed a great deal more exposure in the centuries betwixt his and ours.

Lawes’s modern reputation primarily rests on his instrumental music, most of which seems to have been composed after he was appointed to that elite section of the Royal Music, the ‘Lutes, Viols and Voices’. Tracing the popularity of Lawes’s music in contemporary sources gives us a good idea of how well it was disseminated beyond rarefied court circles; judging from manuscript sources, the fantasia-suites and viol consorts were popular, the Royall Consort particularly so. However, in his own day Lawes’s songs and catches were also popular; indeed, the first music by him to be printed was vocal – Choice Psalmes (1648). Published by Henry Lawes in memory of his brother, Choice Psalmes carried some of the earliest seeds of William’s reputation. The volume included eight elegies set to music, most notably by John Jenkins. In the preface, Henry also referred to ‘those Elegies which many of his noble Friends have written in a peculiar [i.e. special] Book’. This volume is lost; however, Robert Herrick, Robert Heath and John Tatham all published elegies. William was clearly well liked and respected among contemporary poets and musicians. Few musicians, however, inspire grief in kings. According to Thomas Fuller’s famous account in A History of the Worthies of England (1662), upon ‘hearing of the death of his deare servant William Lawes, [Charles I] had a particular Mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living, and commonly called the Father of Musick’.

Lawes’s death was encapsulated in Thomas Jordan’s well-known punning epitaph:

Concord is conquer’d; in this urn there lies
The Master of great Music’s Mysteries;
And in it is a riddle like the cause,
Will. Lawes was slain by those whose Wills were Laws.

Lawes’s music remained popular in the decades that followed his death, thanks in part to John Playford’s re-vitalisation of music publishing in England. Playford – a staunch Royalist – emblazoned Lawes’s name on the title-page of his first music publication, A Musicall Banquet (1651). The Banquet included a section of two-part airs ‘By the Rare and accomplished Master in Musick, Mr. WILLIAM LAWES, Deceased And by severall other Excellent Masters in Musick, now living’. Lawes’s music went on to feature prominently in many of Playford’s printed collections, last appearing in a Playford print in 1673. The last seventeenth-century printed collection to include William’s music was Banister and Low’s New Ayres and Dialogues (1678). In terms of manuscript dissemination, the Royall Consort was easily Lawes’s most popular ‘collection’; dances from it are found in manuscripts copied as late as the 1680s. After this his biography and reputation comes to the fore; over the next three centuries William was primarily remembered as the brother of the more famous Henry (friend to the poets), and for the circumstances of his death. The political symbology of Lawes’s death had lost its immediacy, though his name could still evoke images of martyrdom and tragedy.

The first significant biographical account is by Fuller (1662); it formed the basis for many subsequent accounts, including that of Anthony Wood in his ‘Manuscript Notes’ (?c.1680). However, he also noted: ‘William Lawes … an excellent composer for instrumentall musick – but to indulge the ear – he broke sometimes ye rules of mathematicall composition.… His things before and after ye restoration alwaies culled out’. In addition to attesting to the contemporary popularity of his music, Wood’s comments typify Lawes’s subsequent reputation as a musical maverick, though this was not always presented in a positive light. This is perhaps best reflected in Charles Burney’s account of Lawes (and his contemporaries) in A General History of Music (1776–89). His description of the Royall Consort is (in)famous: ‘always mentioned with reverence by his admirers in the last century [it is] one of the most dry, aukward [sic], and unmeaning compositions I ever remember to have had the trouble of scoring’. Burney also used faint praise to damn Lawes’s anthem ‘The Lord is my light’: ‘the best and most solid composition that I have seen of this author; though it is thin and confused in many places, with little melody, and a harmony in the chorus … which I am equally unable to understand or reconcile to rule or to my own ears’. (The anthem had been in use since the Restoration; its inclusion in William Boyce’s Cathedral Music (1760–73) kept it in the repertoire until well into the nineteenth century.) It is easy to understand Burney’s attitude to Lawes’s music: he couldn’t relate it to the ‘rules of mathematicall composition’ that governed the music of his day. Unfortunately, his remarks did much to silence the music of Lawes and his contemporaries for the next century or so.

One finds biographies of William and Henry Lawes in several histories published in the nineteenth century. Such references generally favour Henry (in length and praise), and demonstrate the influence of Burney’s disparaging assessment of the instrumental music. A revival of Lawes’s music did not begin until the 1890s. Sir Frederick Bridge, who (as Professor of Music at Gresham College) gave several lectures on ‘old English music’ in the 1890s, dedicated two lectures to the Lawes brothers: ‘He said it was the custom of musical historian to speak slightly of these distinguished brothers.… He wished to direct a more wide-spread attention to their skill as musicians and their melodious writings.…’ Significantly, musical illustrations were played at both lectures. ‘The Professor said that though some sounds were unfamiliar to modern ears there was so much real music that it could not fail to be appreciated on being heard. The music was not only melodious, but was worth careful study, and he hoped a taste for it would be revived’ (The Morning Post, 11 November 1891). These were among several lectures given by Bridge in which Lawes’s music was played as an exemplar of ‘old English music’. Nonetheless, it was Henry Lawes who was counted as one of his Twelve Good Musicians, from John Bull to Henry Purcell (1920).

Concerts featuring William’s music were also given at the turn of the twentieth century by Sir Hubert Parry. However, in The Music of the Seventeenth Century (1902) he was clearly disappointed with Lawes’s ‘long and elaborate Fancies’: ‘His reputation might well give rise to a hope that they would be interesting. But they are indeed dry and mechanical to quite an extraordinary degree, and do more credit to the composer’s patient ingenuity than to his common sense’. Parry’s analysis is typical of the apologetic stance adopted by nineteenth and early twentieth century English music historians in reference to native music in the seventeenth century before Purcell. Over a century on, Burney was still casting a long shadow.

Arnold Dolmetsch also played a central role in the modern revival of Lawes’s music, and reputation. He and his students gave many concerts in the 1890s that included Lawes’s vocal and instrumental music (including Bridge’s lectures, 1890-92). Lawes’s music also regularly featured in Haslemere programmes; indeed, a performance of a six-part fantasia and ayre at the 1931 Haslemere Festival prompted Rupert Erlebach’s paper on the composer which appeared in The Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association (1932-33).

It was, however, Murray Lefkowitz’s pioneering monograph (1960) which brought Lawes’s music to the attention of the post-war Anglo-American musicological community. Lefkowitz, a former GI, first came across it while stationed in England during WWII. He was the first musicologist to investigate Lawes’s life and music in detail; fifty years on, little has been added to his biographical account. He included a catalogue of Lawes’s works and autograph sources (then-known). His sensitive and enthusiastic discussions of the music exerted a profound influence on subsequent researchers. Lefkowitz also noted the absence of editions of Lawes’s music, an essential aspect of modern performance: his volume of Select Consort Music in the Musica Britannica series (1963, 2/1971) was another landmark in the revival of Lawes’s music.

In the years since studies have been published on many aspects of Lawes’s music, by notable scholars such as Gordon Dodd, Peter Holman and especially David Pinto. Perhaps the crowning glory of Pinto’s Lawes research is his edition of the Royall Consort and accompanying monograph (1995). Pinto was also a participant in the conference held in Oxford in September 1995 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Lawes’s death; many of the papers given were published in 1998, edited by Andrew Ashbee. My own book is inevitably indebted to the work of previous scholars. In it I have attempted draw attention to the autograph sources (which have never been systemically examined), exploring how Lawes went about composing and what role his music played in the cultural context of Charles I’s court.

Since his death William Lawes was primarily remembered as a talented yet maverick composer, a tragic victim of conflict. In literary and musico-historical accounts, he became one of the symbols of ‘old English Music’. However, writers such as Burney and Parry could not reconcile his reputation as the man whom Charles I ‘commonly called the Father of Musick’ with his tendencies to sometimes break the ‘rules of mathematicall composition’. Today, historical perspective places us in a much greater position than Burney et alia to understand Lawes’s reputation and the music at its heart, and allows us to reconcile the two.

The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 by John Cunningham is available now from good booksellers.

Berlin, 1 April 1933

Tully Potter's two-volume exploration of the life and turbulent times of the violinist and composer, Adolf Busch, will soon be published by Toccata Press. In this extract, Busch and his colleagues in the quartet are confronted with the reality of life in Nazi Germany:

The Nazis had named Saturday, 1 April, as the first day on which they would enforce a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses (in Munich local thugs jumped the gun, beginning it at noon on Friday). The ban was to last from 10.00 a.m. to 10.00 p.m.: Nazi cells were to appoint themselves ‘commissioners for the staff’ in Jewish firms, forbid dismissal of non-Jewish employees and demand the sacking of all Jewish colleagues. At 3.00 p.m. all employees of Jewish concerns were to leave the premises and demonstrate outside. Cameramen would tour every city, filming people who bought from Jewish stores. All such premises were picketed by stormtroopers and bore a placard with a yellow circle on a black background, reading: ‘Closed as a protest against the Jewish atrocity propaganda at home and abroad – the Jewish proprietor of this business is responsible for the safety of this placard, which must be prominently shown’. In Berlin Jews were denied access to the Stock Exchange, Prussian State Library and University; virtually all cafes and cabarets were closed and knots of people stood about, jeering or waiting for trouble to start. The Gestapo made their presence felt, calling at Jewish addresses and taking people away – just an intimidatory move at this stage. ‘Most of us stayed indoors that day,’ Berthold Goldschmidt said, ‘though people were not actually being assaulted in the street.’ Among those defying the boycott and visiting the few Jewish shops which had dared to open was Frau Julie Bonhoeffer, 91-year-old grandmother of the anti-Nazi pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer – she ‘ostentatiously walked through the SA cordon’ to shop at the Kaufhaus des Westens. Carl Flesch Jnr, then 22 and working as an unpaid civil servant or Referendar – until he was barred from entering his office that morning – walked through the Berlin Westend reflecting that as he had lost his job, he had all the time in the world on his hands. He later wrote:

I was amazed by the attitude of the thousands of ‘nice’-looking Germans who crowded the streets. There was no obvious fanaticism, but rather an atmosphere of harmless fun, like a bank holiday on Hampstead Heath. They pointed out to each other and their children gleefully, but usually without sounding in the least malicious, the various insulting graffiti on Jewish shops and the SA men in front of them stopping the occasional defiant customer from entering (although most of the establishments had prudently remained closed anyway). It was then I realised that, for the time being, every layer of the German nation had become infected and there was nothing one could do about it in the foreseeable future.

The atmosphere in Berlin that Saturday was the last straw for Busch and his colleagues, who had to hold their rehearsal at the height of the disturbances. ‘On the way to the church, they saw people smearing stores with swastikas’, said Lotte Busch, ‘and on the way back they saw the mob again.’ The effort of concentrating their minds on Haydn’s most elevated music was harrowing in the circumstances, but a reviewer concluded: ‘The Busch Quartet played the profound pieces […] with the beautiful combination of expression and objectivity that distinguishes its interpretations of classical music’. […] After the concert, the players were openly saying that they could no longer work in Germany. Members of the audience who had come backstage, many of them Jews, were tearfully pleading: ‘You must not leave us. Now we need you more than ever’. But the die was cast. […] Years later Gösta Andreasson reminisced to his opposite number in the Amadeus Quartet, Siegmund Nissel, that Busch called the others to his hotel room at 2.00 or 3.00 in the morning to make their final, agonising decision. Irene Serkin-Busch remembered that her father telegraphed to a few German concert organisations that very night from Berlin, to cancel imminent performances. And Maltschi Serkin, who was staying in the Riehen house, testified that

Frieda was a very impulsive person. Busch, on the other hand, was very quiet but when he was in a rage, he was like an element. He was so enraged that when Frieda saw him in that state, she just quietly packed the suitcases and took him home. If he had shown the rage that was in him, he would have ended up in a concentration camp.

On their way back to Basel, Adolf, Frieda and Rudi were waiting for a train connection at Frankfurt station when they ran into Gustav Havemann. This was the man who in 1932, with the composers Paul Graener and Max Trapp, had proposed forming a Musikkammer to embrace the whole profession, demanding that it should be politically and racially pure – which meant devoid of Communists and Jews. […] ‘The movement is not directed against artists such as Serkin’, he now tried to assure Busch who, with the memory of the anti-Semitic demonstration at the Düsseldorf sonata recital still fresh, angrily brushed him aside. […] At home in Riehen later that day, Adolf was examined by his physician, who diagnosed a severe depression and said he must on no account play in public for the time being. Next day he telegraphed to the organisers of concerts scheduled for Breslau, Darmstadt, Frankfurt and Bremen: ‘Impossible to come, sadly. Letter follows’. The letter, copies of which were sent to the press and interested parties such as HMV, read:

I am sorry that with my sudden telegraphic cancellation I necessarily placed you in a disagreeable situation. Because of the impression made on me by the actions of my Christian compatriots against German Jews, which are aimed at displacing Jews from their professional occupations and robbing them of their honour, I am at the end of my spiritual and physical strength, so that I find it necessary to break off my concert tour in Germany.

Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter will be published shortly by Toccata Press as a two-volume set with two CDs of Busch's music, both as a performer and a composer. It is available from all good booksellers.

Finding Zemlinsky

To call Alexander Zemlinsky a forgotten composer would be an exaggeration: a quick search on the site of a leading online retailer shows nearly a hundred available recordings of his music. Yet how many of us can name more than a handful of his works beyond the Lyric Symphony? Marc Moskovitz’s new biography will help train a spotlight on this composer/conductor/pianist, lover of Alma Schindler and brother-in-law of Schoenberg. Here is an edited extract from the book’s preface:

My interest in Alexander Zemlinsky began in 1995, when I taught an honors seminar focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna. In the course of my preparations, Zemlinsky’s name occasionally turned up, but always in the context of more famous contemporary figures. Perusals of music histories and biographies rarely included more than the most basic facts about his life : Viennese born and trained ; a conductor in Vienna, Prague and Berlin ; lover of Alma Schindler; brother-in-law to Schoenberg. More often, Zemlinsky’s name was simply absent from the general English-language musical literature. Also around this time I performed a concert of works by Viennese composers, among them Zemlinsky. My reaction was similar to many who encounter his music for the first time — how has a composer this gifted remained so obscure ?

Although Zemlinsky was associated with some of the most influential and talented musicians and artists of his generation, he kept no diary, left no memoirs and remained nonchalant about correcting biographical errors that appeared in print while he was alive. Alban Berg, a composer strongly drawn to Zemlinsky and his music and who recognized the value of Zemlinsky’s contributions, once considered undertaking a biography about him, but sadly he died and the work never materialized. Had Berg’s plan come to fruition, it might well have bolstered Zemlinsky’s reputation, particularly toward the end of his life and in the immediate years that followed. At the very least, Berg’s efforts would have provided valuable information for future scholars. As it is, there are gaps in Zemlinsky’s life that are unlikely ever to be filled.

Fortunately, much of Zemlinsky’s early, unpublished musical manuscripts have survived, along with his later published compositions, and the music often provides answers and insights into his life when words or hard facts are absent. Certainly the most significant details about Zemlinsky’s life are found in his letters, two collections in particular which must be mentioned. The first is Horst Weber’s superb edition of Zemlinsky’s letters to and from Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Schreker, published in 1995, which remains the definitive source of information concerning Zemlinsky’s whereabouts and activities at various times between the years 1901 and 1923.

Second are the letters Zemlinsky sent to Alma Schindler during their courtship in the first years of the twentieth century. These letters reveal an intimate portrait of Zemlinsky and provide insight into nearly every aspect of his life at the time, including familial relations, his manner of dress, and his personal attitudes toward art and love, all the while capturing his frailties, sensitivity and humor. To read them is to appreciate the core of Zemlinsky’s nature, for they unveil the passion in everything he did and reflect the rollercoaster of emotions he endured at Alma’s hands. Only the most dispassionate reader could not fail to be moved by the frustrations, disappointments, and endless longing to which Zemlinsky here gives voice. Although Zemlinsky confided that he had great difficulty expressing all he felt, at times it seems that to read more would be unbearable, a breach of privacy.

Writing this book was also my way of trying to understand how one of the great musicians of the early twentieth century faded so quickly from European musical life and was passed over by music historians. Zemlinsky’s talent alone should have ensured him a place in posterity. As one of the last in a long line of Viennese “complete musicians”, Zemlinsky excelled as a pianist, was a conductor of the first rank, and wrote significant compositions in all genres: lieder, chamber and choral music, symphonies and opera. Few of his peers could make such claims. But then neither did Zemlinsky, and his modesty, though arguably a personal virtue, proved detrimental to his career and legacy. He never developed the skills necessary for self-promotion, and he rarely programmed his own music. Zemlinsky was fully conscious of his abilities, which he believed should have secured his reputation, and his seeming inability to promote his own cause :

I most certainly lack that special something that one must have — and today more than ever — in order to come out on top. Amidst such a crowd it does little good to have elbows — one must also know how to use them.

Years later, the theorist Theodor Adorno took up Zemlinsky’s cause :

a man may be cheated of his desserts by nothing more than a lack of ruthlessness. It is possible to be too refined for one’s own genius and in the last analysis the greatest talents require a fund of barbarism, however deeply buried. This was denied to Zemlinsky.

But barbarism wasn’t part of Zemlinsky’s persona. Although he had a pronounced influence on a number of other Viennese composers, including the young Arnold Schoenberg, Zemlinsky possessed neither a dominant nor controlling personality. As a conductor he lacked the powerful ego and ruthlessness required to obtain and maintain a world-class position, such as that held by Gustav Mahler or Otto Klemperer. And while he demanded the highest level of artistic competency in every theater he worked, he did so through inspiration, conviction and intelligence, not through intimidation. Zemlinsky was “a conductor for the ears and not the eyes”, and an artist who gave himself tirelessly to his craft. his actions, almost without exception, were diplomatic.

Of course, the issues surrounding Zemlinsky’s struggles and subsequent descent into obscurity extend well beyond his personality, although had he been eccentric, flamboyant or megalomaniacal — all fashionable characteristics of the artist that so often captivate the public and lead to posthumous celebrity — his reputation may actually have fared better. For one, there was the issue of poor timing, bad luck, or both, which dogged Zemlinsky throughout his life. There was also Zemlinsky’s complicated relationship to Vienna, the city of his birth, a city that held seemingly unlimited possibilities but which often failed to support the talent in its midst. And finally, in the opening years of the twentieth century, a time that often welcomed — almost demanded — innovation and modernism, Zemlinsky was unable to forge a new musical path, unable to embark fully on his own Weg ins Freie or “road into the open”, to borrow a phrase from Arthur Schnitzler. All of these themes worked in concert. They shaped the fabric of Zemlinsky’s life, affected his reputation both during and following his lifetime, and are essential to understanding his musical and historical persona.

I have attempted to describe Zemlinsky as he lived and worked, whether in the opera house or the coffee house, revealing him as a victim of musical politics and world wars, as a musician who championed modern music but remained unwilling to forsake his classical pedigree, and as an artist living among, yet always in the shadow of, musical giants. In spite of my unapologetic affection for Zemlinsky, I have tried to be fair and unbiased in my portrayal of his professional and musical successes and failures. My desire was to create a readable and broad picture of his life and art, which blossomed as Habsburg rule disintegrated, and faded with the unforeseen rise of an art-student-turned-Führer named Adolf Hitler. Among the most gifted musicians of his age, Zemlinsky was both a product and a victim of his time, and his story is a compelling tale and a window into that world.

Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony by Marc D Moskovitz is published by the Boydell Press and available now from all good booksellers.

Music Speaks

“Criticism so relentlessly intelligent is rarely so buoyant, so ready to charm while it challenges.” Thus did Scott Burnham (author of the widely acclaimed book Beethoven Hero) welcome Daniel Albright’s Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song upon its release by University of Rochester Press in November 2009. Albright, who holds a named chair in the English Department at Harvard University, is the author of two previous books for the Press: Berlioz’s Semi-Operas and Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres. The new book, Music Speaks, is indeed brilliant, and its subject matter is remarkably diverse, ranging from subtle art songs by Schubert to Brünnhilde’s full-throated war cry (in Wagner’s Ring Cycle), and from Stravinsky’s hieratic oratorio Oedipus Rex to a dreamy painting of dancer Loïe Fuller by Toulouse-Lautrec. Below we reprint Albright’s tasty preface to this important—and unceasingly delightful—book of studies on the interactions of music with literature and dance.

Music Speaks is a sort of rehearsal-piano reduction of a number of multimedia lectures I’ve given in the past few years.

I might argue that there’s a hidden unity behind its miscellaneous character by pointing to some of the features that bind these essays together. My continuing preoccupations are these:

1. How to deal with the problems of articulating the meaning or meanings of music.

2. How to deal with the larger question of how music and language interact, whether music is “like” spoken/literary language, whether it transcends language, whether our musical apperceptions are of a different sort from those we engage in regard to words or visual images.

3. How, especially in the world of Lieder, text-setting highlights certain areas of meter, or theme, or ironic undertone, and leaves others in darkness.

4. How a musical composition can behave as a critique of a previous composition: how it can be an homage, or an act of affectionate mockery, or a full-scale repudiation.

5. How music interacts with bodily gesture (and, again, how both become “legible”). Sometimes dance seems to spell out words with an alphabet of the whole body; sometimes it refuses to constitute itself as a language.

6. How one might rehabilitate certain underappreciated or much-scorned figures, such as Meyerbeer, by showing that the very terms of invective used against them can be seen, from another angle, as an indication of what is exciting in their work.

I mean to show how music history has an aesthetic of its own, and how music history interacts with intellectual history (from Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes to Paul de Man). The method of these essays is juxtapositive: by abutting music against literature and painting, and by abutting the musics of different centuries, I try to frame a particular work, to isolate what is arresting and important in it.

Some readers are likely to object to my preference for a contrapuntal rather than a linear mode of argument. Almost all of the chapters take detours, forward or back in time, sometimes a few decades, sometimes centuries. But I hope that the lack of chronological boundaries, or genre boundaries, or language-region boundaries, might be seen as natural extension of the freedom that the individual chapters allow themselves—to make one genre comment on another, to make one era comment on another, to make one artistic medium comment on another.

I might also note that this book can be understood as a tribute to mechanical reproduction—to the LP record, the compact disc, the .mp3 file, which have integrated music into our daily lives in a way once scarcely available even to kings, and which have not only gratified an appetite for music but also created one.

All these pieces (except one) were written in a span of four years (2004-8), and mostly concern the music of the last two centuries. During much of this period I was working on Jacobean and Restoration music for a project on Shakespeare, and I found it most pleasant to turn from Robert Johnson and Lanier and Purcell—delightful though they are—to the composers treated here, my oldest loves. As to the two essays on dance that conclude this volume, they were called forth by my friend Simon Morrison of Princeton University, who, on the Day of Judgment, may have to answer for them.

In a future posting, we shall provide some sprightly excerpts from various chapters of Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song.

Adrian Wright's Salad Days

It’s not all Mahler, Britten and Berlioz at Boydell & Brewer and the University of Rochester Press. We enjoy a hummable tune as much as the next person. It is therefore an enormous pleasure to publish Adrian Wright’s A Tanner’s Worth of Tune, his magnificent look at the post-war British musical. Here they are, the writers and composers who forged an identity that owed little to Broadway: Noel Coward, Sandy Wilson of Boy Friend fame, Julian Slade, Lionel Bart and many others. For Adrian Wright, it all began with a Marmet pram and his Aunt Beryl…

The Wrights have never been a rich family, but my childhood was – so far as the world could tell – charmed. My maternal grandmother was a dictatorial creature, a Court dressmaker (when such titles were common parlance) whose demanding standards affected my young and impoverished parents. As a child, I was apt to startle, dressed as I was from head to foot in the finest white satin. My pram, a Marmet (the Rolls Royce of such vehicles, according to my mother), had been selected, indeed commanded to be brought from a highly reputable local store, to my parents’ home: my grandmother’s choice, for which my poor mother had to pay. The pram, like me, was decked out in white satin coverlets and satin blankets and satin pillows and no doubt a little satin bonnet to finish off the effect, as it finished me. I probably had a specially commissioned crest painted on its side. It should have come as no surprise to my mother that one day, despite the fact that she had securely strapped me into position within the perambulator, she looked down and to her astonishment saw nothing. Except a pram with a space where a space shouldn’t have been. The effect of satin on satin had done its worst: I had slipped out of the Marmet, and was later discovered at a location that would doubtless have appalled Lady Bracknell. To all appearances, this was merely payback for being such an ostentatious family, and I suppose some of the blame must attach to me (I was a great wriggler), although I was innocent of being dressed in all that satin, and at the age of twenty-one struck out on my own and shed the slippery garments that were by then exciting much unwanted comment.

What, one may ask, has all this to do with having written a book about the British musical in the twentieth century? Indeed, the first book ever to be devoted to the subject. Because money matters, and appearances matter, and looking at a pram in a shop window and actually being the privileged little person taken for a blow in it are two completely different matters. A fascination with theatre of any kind is, after all, a luxurious pursuit. You need money to buy theatre tickets; nowadays, a very considerable amount of it, with which I am increasingly unwilling to part. Only recently, I happened to be in London and thought I should see the Broadway production of Hair which was playing on Shaftesbury Avenue, having missed the show the first time around (on purpose; I mean, all that group nudity and those dreary songs). Even now, in 2010, it was not that I particularly wanted to see Hair, but that I needed to see it, working as I am on a book about the American musical in London. I asked the price of a ticket. ‘That will be £65 please.’ After recovering my breath, like the reporter at the striptease club I made an excuse and left. I wanted to say ‘Don’t you know that I saw Liza of Lambeth at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1976 for £3.50? Front stalls! It was only 75p to get into the balcony! When I was a student in London I used to go every matinee to Sadler’s Wells to see the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. You could get in for a patter song! Where is all this money going anyway? What am I going to see that is worth fifty pence a minute? How are young people today ever going to be able to see decent theatre? Evelyn Laye was getting £15 a week starring in a West End musical in the mid-1960s! And they’ve all got little voices that need massive amplification! And half of them don’t know how to behave on stage! This is a joke, isn’t it? Come on, mate, you’re having a laugh!’

But, let me repeat, the Wrights were never rich. I was reminded of it again, or perhaps realised it for the first time, when my mother took me to London one day (in a year that I will not specify, although I was still in all that white shiny stuff). I think she had booked for us to see Liberace at the London Palladium. What long-term effect this experience had on any of those who saw him one can only guess, but fortunately I can recall nothing of him, not even a candlestick. I seem to remember we went to Lyons Corner House at Charing Cross, an exotic complex of restaurants now gone. I certainly remember that we walked along the Strand, nothing in itself to get excited about. Indeed, one has always wondered what was in the mind of the man who celebrated that most boring of thoroughfares in the music-hall song ‘Let’s All Go Down the Strand!’ One wanted to ask, ‘Why?’

On this day there was, as it happens, a reason. My Aunt Beryl had recently taken me to a touring version of Salad Days, a musical by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds that had somewhat unaccountably run for over five years at the Vaudeville Theatre. It had just come off, in fact, and the Vaudeville was now presenting another Slade and Reynolds musical, Follow That Girl, a slight, whimsical fantasy about a modern miss who goes back in time and becomes a Victorian miss. She jumps off the Albert Bridge and meets some mermaids in the Aquarium and then comes back into the present because Julian and Dorothy had written a number about London’s public transport ... well, I did say it was a fantasy! And, of course, the Vaudeville Theatre is in the Strand, and there we were, just before we had a date in the evening with Liberace, outside the Vaudeville Theatre.

By this time, by that moment when I stood outside the Vaudeville Theatre, I was already obsessed with the British musical, and obsessed by Julian (and Dorothy). Looking at the blown-up photographs of the cast outside the Vaudeville, I stood on that pavement enraptured. I was caught in an inexplicable world of magic, ready for those images to cast their spell over me. But I was outside. Unable to get in. Excluded. No Can Do. At that (unspecified) age I didn’t anyway have money of my own. I was an outsider, and in a way always have been, and that has brought its own rewards and disappointments. Standing there, and bringing away the memories of those hoardings, those glorious black and white blow-ups of Susan Hampshire as the girl that everyone on stage inside the Vaudeville would be following, I was a changed person. Coming home from London to Norwich (probably on the coach, a bilious end to the day) I never thought that when I was older I would become a great friend of Julian’s, sit beside him at the Vaudeville to see yet another revival of his Salad Days, become a person who has had some sort of small voice about the British musical. A passionate one, I hope; a voice from outside the theatre.

A Tanner’s Worth of Tune was described by the Stage as ‘an instant must-have’ and is available from good booksellers.

‘The Life of an Honest Man’

Thirty years in the making, Tully Potter’s monumental two-volume Adolf Busch is now at press and will be available in the UK at the end of July and elsewhere the following month. ‘Eagerly awaited’ hardly begins to describe the level of anticipation that surrounds it.

Adolf Busch was not only a remarkable musician but an admirable man living in desperate times. Potter’s biography will look at his life and work in detail and will certainly remain the definitive source for many years to come. Two CDs accompany the books, providing an opportunity to hear Busch’s playing as well as his own compositions.

If anyone is thinking of following in Potter’s footsteps and starting a biography of a many-faceted musician, here is how you begin:


We had the Glyndebourne recording of Don Giovanni at home when I was growing up, so I was aware of the name Fritz Busch. But I probably first heard of his brother, the violinist and composer Adolf Busch, in the early 1960s, through LPs issued by EMI as ‘Great Recordings of the Century’. I remember finding his violin tone strangely haunting. Living in South Africa had made me aware of the evils of racism; and when I learned how well Adolf Busch had behaved during the Third Reich years, when many of his colleagues had behaved abominably, I began to be interested in him as a man, not just as a musician.

Back in Britain from 1966, I developed a fascination for string quartets, although I had been led to believe that Beethoven’s late quartets were rather daunting. When I actually acquired the three LPs of the Busch Quartet that were available from Germany, I discovered that all one had to do was listen – and this I did, often into the early hours of the morning. I count myself lucky that my introductions to Beethoven’s Op. 59/3, Op. 95, Op. 131 and Op. 132 came via the Busch ensemble. The only drawback has been that the playing of Busch and his colleagues has spoilt me for anyone else.

Gradually I discovered that a number of Busch’s friends and pupils lived in London. By 1975 I had begun collecting memories of him; and it was borne in on me that these precious recollections were unique. Hearing Rudolf Serkin in concert and speaking to him further fired my enthusiasm; and whenever anyone from Busch’s past came to London, I would try to see them. I also wrote to many people, such as the delightful widow of his younger brother Herman. In due course many members of the extended family were helpful to me, the sole exception being Fritz Busch’s son, Hans.

I went up to Edinburgh on the milk train to interview the composer Hans Gál, a friend and contemporary of Adolf and Fritz Busch. The train was five hours late and I only just made it to the interview in time, but it was a memorable meeting. Dr Gál, a tiny man in his late 80s, had heard both Joachim and Mahler and could recall what they were like as musicians. He kept leaping up to demonstrate something at the piano. I twice interviewed Sir Robert Mayer, who could remember Brahms, and I travelled to Paris to meet the American pianist Eugene Istomin. Hearing him in concert, I was amazed when just about every wind player in Paris turned up to boo the evening’s other soloist, Gervase de Peyer, because he was using an English clarinet.

I got to know Paul, the son of Busch’s violist Karl Doktor; and Björn, the son of Busch’s second violinist and assistant Gösta Andreasson, was supportive – sadly Gösta himself had already retreated into a twilight world. I missed speaking to Horszowski, because I did not realise at first how well he had known Busch. Fortunately, with his wife’s help, I was able to make up this particular lack.

Discovering, through contacts with the Busch Society in Germany, that Busch’s brother-in-law Otto Grüters had compiled a detailed chronology of his life, and had noted down many of their conversations, was another spur. Although Dr Grüters had understandably made mistakes – some of which sent me on wild goose chases – his frequent personal contacts with Busch had provided invaluable material.

Over more than 30 years, I have written and rewritten, checked and rechecked. One particular paragraph took me something like 20 years to get right. When I started out, most Continental orchestras and other musical organisations had very little available in the way of archives – many German sources had been destroyed by Allied bombing. But much has been recovered over recent decades and digitised.

In 1984 a friend and I published a little home-made paperback called Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Man, Volume 1. It was full of mistakes and, as so often happens, Volume 2 never materialised. The title came from something written by Charles Péguy, which was a favourite quotation of Busch’s: ‘The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity.’

I am grateful to Martin Anderson of Toccata Press for the opportunity to issue a much expanded biography. I have changed ‘Man’ to ‘Musician’ in the title and I am taking the precaution of publishing both volumes simultaneously! My text is very detailed in places and there are a dozen appendices but I believe that Busch’s importance, as a leading figure in tumultuous times, demands this exhaustive treatment. I hope I have managed to provide a picture of a whole era – among Busch’s friends were such giants as Max Reger, Fritz Steinbach, Albert Einstein and Arturo Toscanini.

Working on Busch’s life has been worth every minute and far from getting bored with him or beginning to dislike him, as has happened to many other biographers vis à vis their subjects, I now like him more than ever. Meeting many of his friends, among them Serkin, Gál and Sir Ernst Gombrich, has enriched my life.

Adolf Busch: the Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter will be published shortly by Toccata Press, distributed worldwide by Boydell & Brewer.