Beside the Seaside

The 64th Aldeburgh Festival opened last Friday with a bang. Several, actually - many from the gongs and tam tams in Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle. The second half of this thrilling concert was given over to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with an ailing Magdalena Kozena nevertheless giving a superb performance right down to the closings Ewigs. Such is the variety of the Festival programme, even after this big opening number there will be much more to enjoy over the coming weeks.

The New Aldeburgh Anthology is as essential an accompaniment as the highly-collectable Festival programme book. This remarkable collection of prose, poetry and images of Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coast has, at its heart, the Aldeburgh Festival in Benjamin Britten’s time and beyond. We celebrate both the Festival and the Anthology with excerpts from Steven Isserlis’ contribution to the latter, appropriately titled ‘Aldeburgh: A Magical Festival’:

My first performance at Aldeburgh was as part of a short masterclass seminar given by the distinguished Danish cellist Erling Blondal Bengtsson. I remember playing the Prelude of Bach’s fifth suite at the end-of-course student concert; about ten minutes after I’d finished, Britten arrived. So alas, I just missed my only chance to play to him. I did, however, get to play Bach to Imogen Holst, who was a friend of my teacher, Jane Cowan. As a result of that, I became friends with ‘Imo’ (well, if a rather bumptious teenager and a distinguished eccentric in her late sixties can be called friends), and she invited me to play her lovely piece for solo cello, The Fall of the Leaf, at a concert that marked her seventieth birthday in 1977. (I received my first-ever national review for that, the Telegraph graciously describing me as ‘the talented Roger Isserlis’.) Later, she invited me back to the festival to give the first performance for many years of her father’s only work for cello, Invocation. So my early memories of Aldeburgh are very much bound up with her. I really don’t think that a character like Imo’s could exist now. I remember her speeches to audiences: bending from the waist down, she would inform them, in the sort of voice now heard only in nursery schools, that they were about to have a ‘lovely, lovely time’. They would sit there meekly, putty in her hands.

At the concert in which I played The Fall of the Leaf, Peter Pears sang songs by Quilter and his contemporaries, with Roger Vignoles at the piano. I listened backstage and was bowled over by the performance; when they came offstage, I was ready for them. ‘That’s the best performance I’ve ever heard of British music!’ I gushed. Peter Pears looked at me a little strangely, as well he might; to him, having introduced so many of the greatest works ever written by a British composer, it must have sounded very foolish. Well, it was a silly thing to say; but I was young…

Another striking memory is from 1974, when Rostropovich was finally allowed out of the Soviet Union and was able to give the premiere of Britten’s Third Suite for solo cello, which had been written for him some years earlier. Again, Britten was sitting in the box; I remember thinking how frail he looked – but he was still a strong presence. We knew that we were listening to history in the making. Since then, I have performed that same Suite (the only one of the three that I play) several times at the Maltings; on each occasion, I have glanced towards the darkened box and imagined that Britten’s ghost was sitting there. It is quite an eerie feeling!

As I think of Aldeburgh and Snape, other memories come tumbling into my brain: the sight of Joyce Grenfell striding into a concert, seemingly oblivious to the excitement she was stirring up among her fellow audience members; Peter Pears and Murray Perahia getting to the very heart of Schumann’s Dichterliebe; Olly Knussen’s torso heaving with enjoyment of a somewhat risqué joke, with his co-director Steuart Bedford sitting with cocked head and knitted eyebrows, doing his good-natured best to understand it; my friend the pianist Paul Coker watching with amused concern a temper tantrum of mine backstage including (I’m ashamed to admit) some kicking of a dressing-room wall, when I felt my cello hadn’t been speaking properly during the first half of a recital; my mother attending a Bach recital I gave in the beautiful Blythburgh church, shortly before she died; Stephen Hough being thrilled by the sound of Britten’s piano, kept at the Red House; and so on. Variety has always been a hallmark of the festival and its associated activities, every visit offering a new and different experience.

The New Aldeburgh Anthology, edited by Ariane Bankes and Jonathan Reekie, is available in paperback, hardback and a limited edition. More books on Benjamin Britten, music associated with Aldeburgh and the history of Suffolk may be found here.

Pronunciation note: Aldeburgh almost rhymes with Marlboro rather than Nuremberg.

Once upon a time in Vienna

Marc Moskovitz’s superbly readable biography, Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony, has already attracted some enthusiastic reviews. Zemlinsky’s Zelig-like progress through the fin-de-siècle Viennese musical world has obscured his own achievement. In this excerpt, we witness the composer working with another figure who had to wait for the fame he so richly deserved, Gustav Mahler:

At the start of the twentieth century Zemlinsky experienced one of the greatest triumphs he would ever receive at the hands of his fellow Viennese. When Gustav Mahler led the premiere of Zemlinsky’s newest opera, Es war einmal (Once Upon a Time) on January 22, 1900, Zemlinsky was forced to acknowledge the ovation — including the war-whoops from the younger members of the audience — at the conclusion of each act. Both thrilled and embarrassed, Zemlinsky bowed awkwardly from the Hofoper stage. Such accolades had been commonly accorded to composers like Johann Strauss jr. or Franz Lehár, darlings of Vienna’s operetta world, or even occasionally to Johannes Brahms, particularly toward the end of his life, but ovations of this nature were something Zemlinsky had only experienced once before, at the premiere of Sarema. Coming off that opera’s success, it appeared Zemlinsky had found his calling.

Brahms’s death three years earlier had left Zemlinsky without vital support in the musical establishment, but Mahler quickly moved to fill the vacuum. Following the successful Munich debut of Sarema, Mahler, who was looking at a Hofoper diet comprising Mozart and Wagner, along with occasional productions of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Thomas’s Mignon and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, approached Zemlinsky about bringing Sarema back to Vienna. While doubtless flattered at the prospects of having a work premiered under such auspicious circumstances, it appears that Zemlinsky sought to convince Mahler that he was capable of much better. Keenly aware of the success Engelbert Humperdink, Karl Goldmark and Hans Pfitzner had had with fairy tale operas, Zemlinsky too wished to try his hand at the genre and indeed had already sketched out some ideas. Mahler gave his consent, and in August of 1897 Zemlinsky set to work in earnest.

Zemlinsky turned to Holger Drachmann’s Der var engang, a grand five-act national drama that had been played in Vienna in 1894. Drachmann’s fairy tale pivots around a Princess for whom no courtier is good enough and a Prince who is determined to win her love. Tricked into marrying a gypsy (the Prince in disguise), the once haughty Princess is reduced to living in a forest hut and selling pots in the marketplace. Though initially contemptuousness of her new life, she gradually re-evaluates her world and her desires and develops a genuine affection for her husband and their simple life together. The fidelity of the former Princess is soon put to the test, but her love for the gypsy remains steadfast, even in the most tempting of circumstances. By the story’s close, the Princess confesses to having found a love greater than even a Prince could provide. Her transformation complete, the gypsy-prince finally unveils his true, aristocratic identity.

At the end of June of 1898, Zemlinsky submitted an early draft of Es war einmal’s piano score to Mahler, but Mahler’s initial impression was far from encouraging. There was no question that the younger man possessed a formidable talent and technique. Zemlinsky’s characters possessed distinct musical profiles, and his language was efficient and refined, with rhythmic and melodic vitality that never overpowered the voice. It was the work’s overly derivative nature that troubled Mahler. Some degree of outside influence could be expected, since building on the ideas of others was a natural part of the learning process and Zemlinsky had not yet turned thirty. Nevertheless, the manuscript Zemlinsky presented to Mahler was “so full of resemblances and plagiarisms” that its composer “must have a very bad memory to have failed to avoid them”.

Mahler had put his finger on a critical issue : Zemlinsky had learned all that can be taught and had a complete grasp of the elements associated with orchestral and vocal writing. What he had yet to find was the one thing nobody could give him : a distinctive sound, a sonic fingerprint, the unexpected turn of a phrase that says “Schubert”, or the unique orchestration that renders Mendelssohn or Shostakovich or Copland immediately recognizable. Zemlinsky would, of course, find his personal idiom, a voice distinctly his own, but that ownership was still years away. In the meantime he continued to rely heavily — far too heavily, Mahler thought — on the music of others to help lead the way. The critics would concur.

To his credit, Mahler was willing to have his misgivings allayed. Zemlinsky took Mahler up on his offer and played the opera through for him at the piano. Whether because of the conviction of Zemlinsky’s own interpretation, the realization that the work did indeed have potential, or the reaffirmation of Zemlinsky’s undeniable talent, the music director agreed to accept Es war einmal for performance. But the offer came with a caveat : the score would have to undergo significant modifications. For Zemlinsky, Mahler’s proposal held two benefits : first, Mahler’s experience with the demands of the theater would help transform Zemlinsky’s efforts into an opera worthy of being offered up to Hofoper audiences and critics who had come to expect productions of the highest caliber ; second, the project would again place Zemlinsky directly under the wing of one of Vienna’s most influential and powerful musicians. Zemlinsky didn’t have to think twice about the offer.

Mahler’s own knowledge of the theater stemmed more from his dedication to the operas of others than to his own stage works. his only personal operatic attempts had occurred much earlier, and he had long since given up on the idea of composing opera. Years in the theater had taught him what was needed to bring a story — even a fairy tale — to life, and this was precisely the information and experience for which Zemlinsky thirsted. Under Mahler’s direction, the entire opera — music and text — was overhauled, resulting in significant cuts, modifications and rewrites. Mahler’s understanding of stagecraft — the complexities of which Zemlinsky was only beginning to learn — also resulted in a number of practical suggestions and revisions, such as lengthening the Interlude to Act I, which allowed greater time for a costume and scene change. In December of 1899, the full score was complete and the following month the curtain rose on Es war einmal for the first time.

Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony by Marc Moskovitz is available from your favourite bookseller or, in case of difficulty, direct from Boydell and Brewer in the US or the UK.

Our 100th Post: Going behind their backs

Born out of papers presented at a study day in April 2008, Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on his Life and Work is a fascinating volume. Edited by Lucy Walker, it represents the most recent work in Britten scholarship, covering such areas as musical and non-musical influences on the composer (as varied as Ovid, the cinema and Shostakovich), studies of individual works, and a discussion of a work that was never written – the un-set libretto by Australian novelist, Patrick White.

In the following short extract from a much longer essay, composer Colin Matthews looks at the fraught question of publishing and recording unfinished and unpublished works. It is a subject on which he is unusually qualified to speak: for many years he collaborated with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. In addition, he has been much involved with editing Britten's unpublished music, including the recent reconstruction of a clarinet concerto and three songs for Les Illuminations which were omitted from the published version.

We would urge anyone interested in this subject to read his essay in its entirety, as we can only give a flavour of the argument here:


The most significant unfinished piece to have fully entered the repertoire is, of course, Mozart’s Requiem. There can be very few, if any, who would maintain that it should not be performed at all, as not representative of Mozart’s final wishes, but of course there has been controversy for over 200 years about Süssmayr’s contribution as regards both its extent and its competence; and as scholarship has become more focused, different versions have emerged, although none has completely won the day and supplanted the standard editions.

Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is a different case, since it seems just as likely that Schubert was content with it in its incomplete state as that he tried but failed to complete it. Like the Mozart Requiem, it has been a repertoire piece from the outset, as has the torso of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony; but here we have a different and tragic state of affairs. It is almost certain that Bruckner not only finished the Finale in sketch form, but completed a much larger proportion than survives in orchestral score. The chaotic dispersal of the manuscript after his death, with his friends appropriating pages of the Finale as souvenirs, means that – unless those missing pages turn up (which is not impossible even now) – the Finale cannot be reconstructed other than hypothetically.

As we move nearer to our own time – with the unlikelihood of discovering, say, a previously unknown Strauss symphonic poem – attention turns to juvenilia or to earlier versions of well-known works. Here the record industry, in its insatiable quest for novelty (as long as this does not mean recording genuinely new music) has been responsible for unearthing works that might be better forgotten.

The Thematic Catalogue of Britten’s music will comprise a completely open and unexpurgated account of everything he wrote. There will in future be no excuse for the kind of misinformation where, for instance, works are regularly described as having been ‘discovered’ at the Britten–Pears Foundation, as though they had been previously unknown or unrecognized. In fact the basic listing of works, including juvenilia and unfinished pieces, was made while Britten was still alive, and at his instigation. Myth and misinformation tends to become attached to ‘unknown’ works, and especially to the music that I have been discussing – Mozart’s Requiem most notably, of course, but at the first performance of the three completed movements of Bruckner’s Ninth, seven years after his death, the existence of even the sketches for the Finale was deliberately denied. Those musicologists who examined Mahler’s Tenth largely failed to grasp the scope of the work, or its scale; there are still some today who wish it had remained in manuscript and unplayed. No one, before Anthony Payne, thought to look properly through Elgar’s sketches; and the announcement of the reconstructed Third Symphony’s first performance in 1997 brought forth howls of protest from devoted Elgarians who would have preferred that Elgar’s wish that the manuscript should be burned – expressed once only and immediately contradicted – had been carried out.

Would Britten have approved of works that he had put to one side being revealed for all to see? Probably not. But would anyone argue, given the archive that we have charge of, that we should not make it as accessible as we can? This does not mean publishing or recording everything – far from it – but so long as this ‘unauthorized’ music is given its proper perspective, it can only add to our overall understanding of the composer. I have to admit myself to a particular fascination with the hidden workings of composers, and have learned far more from pursuing this path than from analysis, whose insights by comparison can sometimes seem a little cold and clinical – something Britten himself is known to have felt. He would have been somewhat dismayed at the idea of a study day being devoted to him, especially one which brought so much attention to the juvenilia – ‘here was no Mozart I fear’, he wrote, in typically disparaging tone, in the introduction to a collection of his early piano pieces – but I cannot help feeling that he would also have been secretly pleased.


The essay from which this post is taken may be found in Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on his Life and Work edited by Lucy Walker and published by the Boydell Press in the Aldeburgh Studies series. Unknown Britten, Colin Matthews’ reconstructions of rediscovered works by Britten is available on CD and download from the NMC online shop. While there, take a look at some of their other inventive releases including their Gramophone award-winning NMC Songbook.

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.