Marion Scott, our map and guide

Marion Scott entered the 20th century with her ears tuned to the future, writes Pamela Blevins. As a violinist, she often programmed new music in her recitals. In 1908, she formed her own string quartet to champion contemporary British music, some so new that the ink was barely dry on the manuscript page. As a regular contributor to The Music Student from about 1911 to 1918, she enlightened readers about the latest chamber music and wrote extensively about the work of contemporary women composers and performers.

As the 20th century progressed and music moved in different directions, Marion moved with it, always staying open to new music that often stirred controversy and provoked outrage among critics and the concert-going public. Never one to dismiss a work because it strayed from accepted norms, she embraced the “radical” music of her day and wrote about it with an insight and clarity that opened the minds of her readers. She made the seemingly inaccessible, accessible. As a critic/commentator for the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The Listener, the Radio Times and other publications, she introduced new works by Bartok, Webern, Tippett, Luytens, Dallapiccola, Britten, Messiaen, and many others to her readers.

One of Scott’s guiding principles in music rested in her belief that “Design in music is desirable, if that music is to be intelligible. Without it, great music is impossible. For design is not a machine-made pattern. It is the projection into the human consciousness of a divine and beautiful order. …Just as the laws behind natural phenomena do not die, so the realities behind music continue to exist whatever the changing phases of concrete music. Design is one of the hardest obligations for a composer to fulfill.” She found that design even in the most abstract music.

On an “arctic” February night in 1929, Marion attended the British premiere of Bartok’s third and fourth quartets performed by the Hungarian String Quartet. She regarded Bartok as “a composer who is a focal point in the work of his generation” and described his Third and Fourth String Quartets as “testaments in music’s new language”.

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, she observed: “On the whole the third quartet is the more approachable of the pair, even though ordinary listeners will feel in either that they enter upon the unknown region. ‘No map there, no guide,’ as Walt Whitman would have said. Yet though old maps are of little use, Bartok’s music gives evidence of powerful design throughout. It has the same kind of strength and sparseness met with in modern architecture.” In both quartets, Scott found “melodic material…in a minority” and that Bartok seldom used “more than the minimum necessary for thematic differentiation. …Of beauty in the sensuous style there is next to none”. Bartok “constantly employs harmonies drawn from the upper series of the harmonic overtones, and matches them by sound effects drawn from the non-normal kinds of string tone”.

But Marion found both quartets full of “harmonic character, exhilarating rhythm, patterned ideas, and swift logic. … Even on a first hearing it is possible to feel the strength which has bound all these elements of sound and modern mentality into firmly consistent works. Bartok’s style may be – and is – stark, but it is never dark, and never shallow. He has the dramatist’s, not the film producer’s gift.” She came to regard Bartok as “one of the greatest, and most dynamic musicians of modern times”.

She faced the challenge of Webern’s String Trio, op. 21 with an equally open mind. “Webern’s thin sounds, skewed phrases, and silences are about as much like ordinary string music as Shakespeare’s ghosts that did ‘squeak and gibber’ were like human beings. Even the programme note described the two short movements as ‘wraiths’. But this must be said: If they are wraiths, they are so in their own right; they are not phantoms of older music. Maybe that is because they have never lived. Will they later? – that is what matters. Is this exposition of Schoenberg’s theories by Webern the foreshadowing of a new era in music? Remembering that steam from a kettle and the twitching of a frog’s leg are now historic as first hints of steam power and electricity, must we regard Webern’s music as a portent of things to come? Time alone will show.” (No date.)

In 1929 Marion became the first person in England – as far as I know – to produce an in-depth study of Paul Hindemith and presented her findings before the Royal Musical Association. (Donald Tovey wrote his essay in 1936.) I think it is fair to say that some who attended her lecture were wary of Hindemith’s new music. After all he was regarded then as the enfant terrible of Europe, a composer who embraced atonality and whose music was too cerebral and abstract for some. W.W. Cobbett who attended the lecture admitted his "ignorance” of Hindemith and acknowledged that after Scott’s talk, he left “knowing” on the subject.

Scott had researched Hindemith’s life and studied his music, an odd choice for a lecture, it might seem, coming from a woman in her fifties who was standing on the threshold of becoming an internationally acclaimed authority on Haydn. Marion had read the entire scores of three of Hindemith’s early atonal operas with librettos so daring that she doubted they would make it past the English censor (one wonders how she got the scores into England). Marion observed that “Paul Hindemith is an apostle of Atonality and Linear Counterpoint. But he is also a real person in music -- a genuine composer who gives off music as a piece of radium throws off energy. That is what makes him interesting, and his music worthy of study.”

In drawing links between the musical designs of Bach and Hindemith, Scott observed that “composers of today, with Hindemith in the vanguard, have revived the structural designs of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. ...It may be said without irreverence that Hindemith’s masterful and quite terrible music for the mob in his opera Cardillac would have been impossible if he had never known Bach’s supreme treatment of the crowd in the St. Matthew Passion.” She held Cardillac in very high regard.

“Hindemith’s concentration and economy function at their highest power throughout the opera. …The contrapuntal parts, tingling, darting with vitality, are complex in appearance, clear in reality. Two of the most tremendous effects in the music are made by means so simple that one almost gasps on realizing how violently – on account of the context – one reacts to them. The first is the dead silence when Cardillac murders the Cavalier; the other is the long soft common chord of E flat on which the opera ends. For two hours Hindemith has held one…in a clenched fist, listening to his atonal, strangely staccato style. Then at last comes this diatonic, legato chord. The fist opens, one drops out, exhausted and amazed.”

Scott’s understanding and appreciation of Hindemith are clear yet she felt something was missing: “[Hindemith] is too radically a musician to evade for ever the great emotions that go with genius. If they thaw the little piece of ice that lies in his artist’s heart, the effect will be amazing.”

After World War II, Marion welcomed the opportunity to review concerts of contemporary music and found London “as music minded as ever, and infinitely more so than it was ten years ago”. She covered the “outstanding” Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in July 1946 that united countries so recently at war.

On Luigi Dallapiccola’s Songs from Captivity for chorus, percussion, harps and two pianos: “Only the last two movements were given at this concert [Boethius’ Invocation and Savonarola’s Farewell -- the first movement is Mary Stuart’s Prayer]. Technically they are distinguished by fine craftsmanship: and though not atonal they are fundamentally modern in their harmonic texture. But what winged the music straight into the sympathies of the hearers was its intensity of feeling. ‘These are they which came out of great tribulation’ one said to oneself.”

On Olivier Messiaen: “…another work was performed which also came out of captivity, but in this case it took the form of a mystical, apocalyptic quartet for violin, cello, clarinet and piano…called Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps. Here was a man to whom in captivity had come the vision of that transcendental freedom where Time is nothing and Eternity everything. His eight movements were each touched with a strange, unworldly quality; some were exceedingly lovely, and the scoring had often an almost ethereal frugality which yet was never untender, except where the composer intended fierce effects, as in the ‘Danse de la fureur’, which was plangently aggressive.”

“It was,” she wrote “a strange experience to come away from these concerts that had brought together so many nations, and then to turn up a little alley between shells of buildings and come suddenly upon a view of one of our own quiet griefs – a great devastated area…of open ruins…[where] now grew pink willow herb, wild fern and golden yellow weeds, in a great silence beneath a half moon…”.

For more on the music and life of Marion Scott, see Pamela Blevins' Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott, available from your favourite bookseller.

When all the notes are right: Songs, Sex and Schoeck

‘He sums up Schoenberg in twenty minutes and then spends half a bloody hour on some guy called Othmarrrr Shirk’ – I still remember the disgust with which a Scots fellow student rolled his broad Rs around Robin Holloway’s approach to music history. The occasion was Robin’s lecture course on the twentieth-century, back in 1983 in Cambridge. He had indeed dealt with Schoenberg remarkably swiftly that day (though memorably, as always – I shall never forget his summing up of the Wind Quintet as a work ‘masterly in every way except that all the notes are wrong’, which really says it all). And it was true that he had also spent a lot of time – in relative terms – on a Swiss composer called Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957), hitherto unknown to almost all of us. As it happens, I was probably the only one who had heard of him, as I’d accompanied a student’s final song recital the year before, whose programme had included ‘Herbstentschluss’ from the cycle Elegie. The song was utterly compelling. And when Robin played us the second movement of the song cycle Notturno in the recording by Fischer-Dieskau and the Juilliard Quartet, I was hooked. Being something of a Germanophile – I’d first gone to German-speaking Europe at the age of 14 with our local youth orchestra and had since spent every summer there – I was already on the lookout for a possible doctoral topic on something suitably German. Schoeck was Swiss, but German Swiss, and I reckoned that he might do as well as anything more northernly Teutonic. So I went to Robin, borrowed his Schoeck scores and records, and he put me in touch with Derrick Puffett, a friend from his own Oxford student days who had done his doctoral thesis on Schoeck’s song cycles.

I visited Derrick not long after, staying on a camp bed in his rooms in Wolfson College (being a student from the distant industrial north, I didn’t have the money for a hotel of even the flea-ridden variety). When I told him I was thinking of doing a doctorate on Schoeck’s operas, he said: ‘Don’t bother with that. What we need is a biography’. ‘Oh, OK’, I replied, and that was that.

Further visits to Derrick followed over the next months, I went to Zurich to do some research in the Schoeck archives at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich – making many friends who have remained friends ever since – and I got a place at Christ Church Oxford to begin my doctorate the next year. As luck had it, Derrick at the exact same time got a job in Cambridge, so we sort of crossed, metaphorically speaking, at Tring. I was allowed to retain him as my main supervisor (thus seeing rather a lot of Tring from the window of a bus over the next couple of years), but was also assigned an Oxford man in order to have someone on the spot. This was John Warrack, who was somewhat bemused, admitting readily that he knew little about Schoeck. While most of my work was obviously with Derrick, whom I visited in St John’s Cambridge about once a term, I remember my conversations with John with no less fondness, and owe him far more than I think he ever realized.

It was clear that visiting Switzerland in the summer holidays wasn’t going to be enough to get the information I needed to write a biography, so after a year in Oxford I applied for a postgraduate scholarship from the Swiss government. I left for Helvetia in July 1986, intending to return to Oxford a year later, but in fact have never lived in England since. Once the doctorate was done, I survived for a while as a freelance translator of everything from chocolate adverts (sadly no free samples) to TV thriller scripts. Then it was off to Munich on a Humboldt Fellowship, researching into Richard Strauss. But in 1990 I found myself back in Zurich with what one’s mother always calls ‘a proper job’, running the very same music library whose avid visitor I had been during my studies.

My Schoeck biography finally came out – in German translation – in 1995. I had sworn back in the mid-80s that three or four years researching into an obscure Swiss composer would be enough for any healthy young fellow, for as such I regarded myself. But I found that the man’s music had a remarkable hold on me. It wasn’t anything exclusive or obsessive, thank god (my desert island discs remain Parsifal, the Magic Flute and Mendelssohn’s Octet), but rather like the advert for a certain beer back in England, I still find that Schoeck reaches parts that many other composers don’t. Of course he also wrote some weak music. But of his three hundred songs with piano, the majority are very fine, while his best half-dozen works (above all the instrumental song cycles Lebendig begraben and Notturno) are wonderful and can bear comparison with the greatest works of the age. His orchestration at its best has the luminescence of Berg and the delicacy of Ravel. Of how many composers could one say that?

My research also led to close ties to the Schoeck family, in particular to the composer’s nephew Georg, his wife Elisabeth and their seven children (yes, seven, and they’re not even Catholic!). Elisabeth became godmother to our first daughter, who bears her name, while our third child and only son has Elisabeth’s eldest daughter Salome as his godmother; he is also named after Salome’s three brothers: Alvaro Wolfgang Konrad Walton. (Confused? Never mind, so’s my son.) As I write this, I’m about to go off to the Schoeck family home in Brunnen, where the eldest son (called Alvaro, of course) is getting married tomorrow. Perhaps unusual for composer families, the Schoecks have always been wholly supportive of my research, helping wherever they could, and never once batting an eyelid whenever I criticized in print their ‘Denkmal-Onkel’, as they occasionally call him. As Derrick once said of another composer: it’s a poor tribute that confines itself to praise. And as a family of scholars, the Schoecks knew that any serious biography can’t discuss the good without offering a critique of the bad. Two years ago, Georg and Elisabeth died within five weeks of each other; I miss them still, much, just as I often think of Derrick, who died just before his fiftieth birthday over a decade ago.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death approached in 2007, I began to think about publishing the original English version of my Schoeck biography. After all, most of his works have since been released on CD, which means that the potential Anglo-American reading public now has access to the actual music (a complete recording of his songs on eleven CDs was published back in the 1990s on the Swiss label Jecklin, featuring singers such as Ian Bostridge, Kurt Streit, Lynn Dawson and Christiane Banse). But there were two problems. First, I had in the meantime published so much more on Schoeck, and had discovered so much more about him, that I couldn’t really regard the old book as up-to-date any more. Secondly, the rights to the book lay with the original publisher. So I decided to write a whole new book.

The original doctorate had been a ‘life’, with the music discussed only in passing. But since it was unlikely that a book on Schoeck in English would prompt a rapid flood of further studies of him, any new biography would have to go the full Monty and deal with the music as well as the man. So I went ahead and wrote it in my last year as a professor in Pretoria, before we returned to Switzerland. Having already brought out a book with a Boydell imprint (my Richard Wagner’s Zurich), I was keen to repeat the experience, and so approached the University of Rochester Press. To my delight, they accepted it. The manuscript was dreadfully long, but upon re-reading it, I saw that there was much ballast that could be excised easily. I naturally hope that the result is a leaner, fitter Schoeck. It’s a pretty meaty Schoeck all the same, as the text alone is over 150,000 words, not counting the bibliography and all. But still – I hope – within the bounds of what the average public is prepared to read. And it has some very nice photos.

The second biography parallels the first in many ways, but that’s only because they are both about the same composer writing the same music, married to the same wife and with the same friends. I could no more change my ‘cast list’ than could a Beethoven biographer leave out nephew Karl, the Immortal Beloved or Beethoven himself. But my two biographies are in fact very different, especially because the new book discusses the music in some detail (offering a plethora of music examples compared to the first book’s none). I’ve also allowed rather more sex to penetrate the new book, as it were, and there’s a bit more deconstruction too (though to the reader, I hope it will smack more of common sense than of anything remotely theoretical). The more observant reader might even spot a reference to the Dead Parrot Sketch in the first chapter – as I plummet into middle age, I become ever more convinced that mainstream musicology can only benefit from a good deal more Python. As for me personally, I can never read Adorno without thinking of the Spanish Inquisition.

What’s been oddest for me, writing this new book, is that the quarter-of-a-century since I began its predecessor has seen the passing of most of the witnesses upon whose memories I depended so much. When I started my research on Schoeck, he had been dead for just twenty-six years, and many of those who had known him were still alive. I also found them remarkably candid – aged 70, 80 or more as they were, they obviously felt themselves too old to be embarrassed about anything. Thus it was that as a twenty-four-year-old student, I on one occasion sat listening to a lady in her 70s, reminiscing about her mother’s death-bed confession of how fantastic Schoeck had been between the sheets. I’m afraid you’ll have to read the book for more details. You’ll also learn how the humble sandwich takes on a whole new meaning in Schoeck scholarship.

As I wrote the book – and as I write now – the faces and (above all) the voices of the men and women I interviewed, but who are now no more, were and are as fresh as when I met them. In some cases, even their exact words and their tone of voice are etched into my memory. I realize now that they in their turn had equally vivid memories of Schoeck himself, and how lucky I was to meet them. They are almost all dead, so Schoeck researchers present and future must content themselves with second- and third-hand information. I shall remain ever grateful to have been granted instead the privilege of such proximity to the source.

Othmar Schoeck is available from all good booksellers, along with Chris Walton’s previous book, Richard Wagner’s Zurich. Read a sample from Schoeck here and an earlier post by Chris here. We congratulate Chris on winning the 2009 Max Geilinger Prize.

Living with the Polignacs

We will be taking a short break while we ply our trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week (hall 8, stand number C926 in case you’re passing by). To keep you entertained during our absence here is a rather longer-than-usual post by Sylvia Kahan, teacher, pianist and author of two superb books, In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octantonic Explorer, and Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac. Here Ms Kahan introduces us to this talented, unusual and – dare we say, glittering couple:

My fascination with Winnaretta Singer-Polignac began with an occurrence of pure serendipity. In 1991, at the "a.b.d." point of my doctoral studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, I was looking both for a thesis topic and for an interesting program for my final degree recital. I decided to plan the recital first. Atop my piano was a pile of music that I had always wanted to perform but had never gotten around to learning. The piece at the top was Ravel's famous "Pavane pour une infante défunte." I opened the score, and glanced at the dedication: "A Madame la Princesse E. de Polignac." After reading through Ravel's stately and poignant work, I returned to the pile of music. The next piece on the pile was Stravinsky's Piano Sonata. I was amazed to see that this work, as well, was dedicated to the Princesse de Polignac! "Who is this woman?" I wondered. The next day, I looked through New Grove; the Princesse's name was nowhere to be found. But the coincidences continued the following week, when a soprano came to my apartment to rehearse. "Let's start with 'Mandoline' by Fauré." I opened the score - and my jaw dropped, for, yet again, above the mélodie, was another dedication "A Madame la Princesse de Polignac."

Around the same period I chanced upon a slim volume by Bruno Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger. Here, Boulanger told of the Princesse de Polignac:

Princess de Polignac's salon was one of the centres of artistic and musical life in Paris between the wars. Princess Edmond was an American and adored the arts. The birthday present she wanted as a girl of fifteen was a performance of a Beethoven quartet. Her collection of paintings was fabulous, and it was while arguing over the purchase of a painting that she met the man who was to become her husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac. It was even said that he finally decided to marry her in order to gain Monet's Turkeys, which was part of his future wife's collection.

She must have been at least thirty and he twice her age. As he himself was the son of elderly parents, she claimed that her father-in-law was born under Louis XV. Living in Paris, London or Venice, passionate about music, she had made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth in company with Chabrier and Fauré, and became one of the last great patrons in history. Everywhere she went, Greek was translated, Latin was translated, music was made. She'd arrive in London and an hour later, you'd be playing music or reading poems. How many soirées we all went to or helped with, where we played lots of Monteverdi, Schutz's Resurrection, Carissimi's Jephte, and then all the works she commissioned!

Much ill was said of her; but I only know her great generosity; she was not blind—she would discriminate. And with discrimination, she gave a great deal and is owed a great deal. There was the famous evening when her butler entered, appalled, "Madame la Princesse, four pianos have arrived. . . ". Stravinsky's Les Noces was to be played for the first time.

After reading this, I knew I'd found the topic of my doctoral dissertation: the salon of the Princesse Edmond de Polignac. Ten years of continuous research later, the dissertation re-emerged as a book, Music's Modern Muse.

Winnaretta Singer-Polignac still fascinates today. Her parentage was exceptionally colorful: she was the 20th child (of 24) of sewing-machine magnate Isaac Merritt Singer, who was born in poverty and died one of the richest industrialists in the world. Her Parisian mother, Isabella Boyer, was reputed to be the model for Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty. The story of Winnaretta's birth in the Yonkers, New York mansion that Isaac named "The Castle" goes as follows:

At the time of Winnaretta’s birth, her father was busy renovating The Castle, intent on filling his house with the most up-to-date appliances and sumptuous furnishings that money could buy. A new coal furnace was installed to stave off the winter cold. The rooms were filled with costly and elegant furniture. Behind the main house, a hothouse was constructed in the form of a palace, with four separate wings for the different varieties of exotic flowers and plants. “We have just picked a bushel of oranges,” Isabella wrote to her mother, “and we have the most rare flowers all winter.” But oranges in winter could not replace the lively bustle of New York City. Twenty-three-year-old Isabella keenly felt the solitude of country life.


The Singers’ home on Fifth Avenue had always been filled with Isaac’s business associates and friends, but in Yonkers the Singers were isolated, ignored by the local population. The only people her own age that Isabella saw were Isaac’s older children. In addition to caring for two infants, she had to minister to the needs of a fifty-three-year-old husband who was beginning to suffer from rheumatism and the other encroaching discomforts of middle age. Isaac’s ailments had no effect on his virility, however: only a few months after Winnaretta’s birth, Isabella found, to her dismay, that she was pregnant once more. She suffered a miscarriage in June, but was pregnant again by September. Finally, Isabella insisted that she could no longer endure the rural existence: if she must continue to bear children, she wished them to be born in Europe. This time her husband acceded. In November 1865, Singer sold The Castle and its possessions—including the canary-yellow carriage—to a hat manufacturer, and sailed for London with his growing brood.

Early photographs of Winnaretta posed with her mother and three brothers when she was about three years old show a very serious-looking little girl. In these family portraits, Winnaretta’s chin juts out and the corners of her mouth turn downward, taking the shape of an upside-down “U.” This unfortunate configuration of features became a cause for comment by contemporary chroniclers in her adult life; one wonders therefore what sort of reaction Winnaretta’s seemingly “negative” demeanor may have evoked in those close to her during her formative years. The pretty and vain Isabella may have rejected a daughter who was not fashioned sufficiently in her own lovely image. The extant letters from Isabella to her own mother, which extend through Winnaretta’s fifteenth year, lend credence to this theory: after writing in March 1865 that her two-month-old daughter “is getting on very well,” Winnaretta is never again mentioned in her mother’s letters.

Winnaretta entered the world of patronage during her first marriage, to Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard. The marriage was an unhappy one, given Winnaretta's nascent lesbianism, but her aristocratic milieu gave her the opportunity to establish herself in Paris's music circles:

That summer, the Scey-Montbéliards made the round of villégiatures, or country house visits, an obligatory part of the aristocratic calendar. They traveled with Winnaretta’s brothers down to the Château de Tencin, the Grenoble estate of the Marquise Joséphine (“Mina”) de Monteynard, where Winnaretta and the Marquise spent their days painting and playing through the latest songs by Fauré. From there the Sceys continued on to Bayreuth to attend performances of Parsifal and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. That summer Meg Baugnies had arranged a mysterious “lottery,” whose proceeds allowed the impoverished Fauré and fellow composer André Messager to fulfill their unrealized dream of traveling to Bayreuth. Fauré was ecstatic to be in attendance, but he was puzzled by some unspecified behavior of Winnaretta’s, which prompted him to write to Meg, “Madame de Scey-Montbéliard is three parts mad!!!” It was a madness that clearly appealed to the composer, however. Upon his return to Paris he gave Winnaretta a gift of a little piece of music, a one page manuscript in his own hand bearing the comical title Pensée fugitive mais définitive—“Fugitive but Definitive Thought, by Roger Jourdain, transcribed for three hands and one foot by G. Fauré.”

In November 1888 the Scey-Montbéliards traveled to Paignton for a series of balls and festivities given in honor of the coming-of-age of Paris Singer, who had married in 1887, and was now a family man and the new proprietor of the family estate. Other than brief mentions in newspaper articles, there is not much indication of how the Prince de Scey spent his time during his marriage. But it is clear that while Winnaretta may have paid obeisance to social convention on the surface, privately she did what pleased her, with or without her husband. She continued to entertain her avant-garde friends. An anecdote concerning Chabrier recounted by Francis Poulenc, who had had the story confirmed by Winnaretta herself, reveals the extent to which the composer felt free to speak “in the vernacular” in front of his hostess. One evening after the performance of Gwendoline, Chabrier dined with the Princesse de Scey. When his hostess had passed him asparagus, he leaned over to her, and said in an easily audible stage whisper, “You eat that, Madame, and it will make your urine stink!”

A second marriage, to Prince Edmond de Polignac, a composer and a homosexual, proved to be much more fortunate. It was a true love match for both Winnaretta and Edmond, and their love, while not sexual, was consummated through their mutual love of music:

With Edmond at her side, Winnaretta began her second career as an aristocratic musical hostess in Paris. Despite the fact that the Carriès and Fauré commissions had not been completed, Winnaretta decided nonetheless to “open” her atelier in early 1894, albeit without the intended fanfare. By day, the newly renovated atelier was Winnaretta’s painting studio; by night it became a recital hall. Measuring ten by twelve-and-a-half meters (roughly thirty-three by forty-one feet), the room was large enough to seat comfortably one hundred people. The vaulted ceiling was two stories high; a narrow balcony, built around the upper story’s west and south walls, housed the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ, whose pipes rose impressively to ceiling height. Below, the room was decorated in Louis XVI style, with Winnaretta’s favorite colors of blue and green predominating. Two grand pianos dominated one wall. Despite the formal décor, the wood-panelled walls gave the room a warm, homey atmosphere.

On Tuesday nights during that first winter of their marriage, the Polignacs hosted a series of “organ soirees,” where the great organists of the capital —Gigout, Widor, Vierne, Guilmant, Fauré—performed on the Cavaillé- Coll. Le Figaro reported on Winnaretta’s “organ evenings, so highly sought after in Parisian high society,” helping to add luster to her growing reputation as a musical hostess. On other evenings, chamber music was played. Still other gatherings featured Edmond’s music, often accompanied by Winnaretta or Fauré. Not all those who frequented the Polignac salon were there to hear the music, however, nor were they prepared to respect the musical interests of those who were. Some of the guests were there simply to see and be seen in the newest salon in the Parisian social landscape. Many of them had no qualms about jostling their spoons against their teacups, concentrating their attentions on their neighbors’ garb, or, worse, chattering to their neighbor through the course of the performance. Some of the husbands, required to accompany their wives on their social rounds, simply slept through the sonatas or the arias. But for the true mélomanes in the crowd, those who had come expressly for the performances, the seriousness of purpose surrounding the execution of the music must have been a welcome surprise.

The Polignacs' music room became the hub of the Parisian musical avant-garde. The "first wave," which included Debussy and Ravel, came to hear daring new works in acoustically ideal surroundings. Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, and Colette would figure among the writers who chronicled their impressions of hearing music in the Polignac salon.

After Edmond's death in 1901, Winnaretta devoted the rest of her life to promoting his memory by commissioning new works of music from modernist composers. The list of composers who were recipients of her largesse is long and impressive: Fauré, Stravinsky, Satie, Falla, Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre and Kurt Weill, among others. Winnaretta's original idea was to create a body of repertoire that was suited particularly to the small space of a home music room. Stravinsky received the first commission:

Listening to Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Winnaretta experienced something of an epiphany, setting her on a path that would define the rest of her life as a patron. She was struck by the opera’s small dramatic proportions and play-within-a-play format, which included comic elements and characters drawn from the Italian commedia dell’arte. The music too was written for small ensemble, a chamber orchestra of thirty-six players. In short, Ariadne was a work that might fit comfortably into a sufficiently capacious home space like the Polignac salon…She started to imagine her salon as the ideal place to launch a new repertoire reflecting this new style, and she decided “to ask different composers to write short works for me for small orchestra of about twenty performers.” And the first composer who came to mind was the one that most represented to her the future of musical modernism: Stravinsky. By the time she returned to Paris Winnaretta’s plan was fully formulated. She wrote to Stravinsky on 20 November.

You know my very great admiration for your talent. You will not be surprised then that I thought of you in asking you to write for me a pantomime, or a symphonic work, which would belong to me and which I would have played in my music room which you are familiar with. It would obviously have to be a short work and for a small orchestra—maybe 30 to 36 musicians. Will you permit me to propose that you accept for this work a sum of 3000 francs—and to ask you if it could be finished around the 8th of April so that I can have it performed at my house around the end of April or the beginning of May.

Stravinsky apparently responded to the plan with enthusiasm, offering Winnaretta the exclusive rights of performance until such time that the part would be published. She jumped into the details of the plan with fervor:

Does the following orchestra suit you? 5 1st violins, 5 2nd violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos (or 3), 1 bass, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 harp, 1 percussion. The performance date could be put off until the month of November next if your work prevents you from being ready earlier. I had thought of a piece which could last around 15 minutes.

And two days later:

To my list of yesterday there could be added perhaps a piano and a celesta—but do what will suit you best. Do you have something for 2 pianos or 4 hands that I could play?

It is astonishing to read these words, in which Winnaretta essentially dictates the orchestration of the proposed work to the composer, but Stravinsky did not seem to take offense; on the contrary, he got into the spirit of things:

Now having thought about my future work I have decided to compose a Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. So here are the instruments that I would need: 2 Flutes (the 1st changing to the piccolo), 2 Oboes, 2 Clarinets (the 2nd changing to the Bass Clarinet), 2 Bassoons (and the Contrabassoon if that would be possible), 2 Horns in F, 2 Trumpets in C, 2 Tympani, a Grand Piano (of course), a Harp, 2 Quartets (2 First Violins, 2 Second Violins, 2 Violas, 2 Cellos) and a Double Bass. . . . Unfortunately I have nothing to offer you in the way of 2- or 4-hand music except an old thing (4 Études pour piano—rather difficult besides) that you wouldn’t like, I’m certain.

Winnaretta was a formidable, headstrong woman whose fortune and sphinx-like inscrutability allowed her to hide in plain sight. But "Tante Winnie," as she was called by her familiars, had a mordant sense of humor. One of the most famous stories involves her pulling rank with her querelous friend Madame Legrand:

Paul Morand, a young attaché in the French foreign ministry and a budding author, chronicled many of these dinner musicales. Morand’s recollections of Winnaretta’s lively dinners include incisive descriptions of “the celebrated Madame Bulteau . . . whose hard jutting chin contradicts the sweetness of her gaze,” and of Athelstan Johnson, British chargé d’affaires in Budapest, “his face shriveled up under the ice cube of his monocle,” who softened only when he heard the marvelous Borodin string quartet that followed the meal. Morand’s best-known anecdote concerns Winnaretta’s querulous friend Madame Legrand. The cantankerous “Cloton” visited Winnaretta so frequently that she practically lived at avenue Henri-Martin. She was born into the socially prominent but cash-poor Fournès family, and Winnaretta’s life of ease never ceased to arouse her ire. One evening, in a fit of jealousy, she spat out furiously, “Don’t forget that the name Fournès is worth more than that of Singer.” “Not at the bottom of a check,” replied Winnaretta.

Music’s Modern Muse and In Search of New Scales are both published by the University of Rochester Press available now from all good booksellers.

Marion Scott on British Music

Some reviewers of Pamela Blevins' otherwise acclaimed Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty have questioned the dual biography concept. One (male) critic seemed to wonder why Blevins was wasting so much space on a figure of 'modest interest' like Marion Scott. Another (female) wanted to know more about this remarkable woman and her numerous achievements. So for those in the latter camp, here is a piece on Marion Scott as critic and champion of British music.

Soon after Marion Scott embarked on her new career as the London music critic for the Christian Science Monitor, she began introducing readers throughout the world to British composers and performers in a way that no newspaper critic had done before. During her tenure from 1919 to 1933, the names Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Stanford (her teacher), Holst, Ireland, Delius, Smyth and the younger generation including Finzi, Howells, Gurney, Bliss, Bax, Gibbs and many others appeared with different degrees of frequency and intensity.

In addition to writing reviews, Marion also wrote numerous feature articles and in-depth profiles of musicians. The first among them was a three-part series on the musical and poetic wells-springs of Gloucestershire (July to August 1919), the home turf of her friends Ivor Gurney, Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams. Her references to Gurney in this series were not the first time his name had appeared on the pages of the Monitor. In 1918, through her connections with the newspaper, she had arranged for the publication of excerpts from two of Gurney’s poems from his first collection, Severn and Somme - “Firelight” on 22 May and “Song at Morning” on 28 May.

Although Marion used her position to advance the careers of her friends (particularly Howells) and associates, she was a fair and discerning critic who possessed the remarkable ability to get right to the core of a composition that she was hearing for the first time often without benefit of a score to follow.

After attending the premiere of the Elgar Cello Concerto, she observed that the work was too big “to analyze or appraise quickly. The most that can be done after a single hearing is to record the salient impressions received.” Scott found Elgar’s conception of concerto form “totally different to that of the majority of composers. With him a concerto is not a public oration, nor a pyrotechnic display, but a psychological poem. He feels the solo instrument to be as much a person as Browning felt his characters to be real in the ‘Dramatic Romances and Lyrics’, and exactly as the characters speak for themselves – unfolding their ideas through his poems – so does the concerto deal with a subjective drama, the solo instrument expressing a sensitive, intimate train of thoughts in the language of music,” she wrote. “This necessitates a wholly different attitude in soloist, orchestra, and audience from that usually taken toward a concerto, and while Mr. [Felix] Salmond understood and acted upon it perfectly, one had a sense that the London Symphony Orchestra [conducted by Elgar] only partially apprehended their role in this work, fine as they are and well though they played”. (For the complete review published on 13 December 1919 look here).

Marion Scott was undoubtedly the first person to introduce her readers outside Britain to a young Gerald Finzi when she reviewed his Violin Concerto in May 1927. She and Finzi would eventually work together (not necessarily in harmony) to preserve Ivor Gurney’s musical and poetic legacies. Marion had attended the 4 May premiere of the second and third movements of concerto in a performance by violinist Sybil Eaton with Malcolm Sargent conducting the British Women’s Symphony Orchestra.

“Of late years composers have been chary in writing for solo violin,” she observed. “So, when a new violin concerto is announced…the mere choice of medium seems to promise independence of thought….Independence is certainly a quality of the violin concerto by Gerald Finzi. Finzi is among the younger men in British music. His work is uncompromisingly honest, yet restrained, disdainful of advertisement, unafraid of solitude,” she continued. Noting that the concerto was in three movements, she felt it unfortunate that the complete work was not presented as the opening “must surely be heard to give full meaning to the second movement…in the manner of an introit with its soaring phrases of melody for the solo violin against the liturgical counterparts of the orchestra…But even starting from zero the introit established itself as an individual and often really beautiful movement…Its youth, vitality and the natural independence of the moving parts produced harmonic clashes as crude, clear and attractive as blades of fresh spring grass.”

Marion featured Gurney occasionally in Monitor reviews but never wrote a long profile on him as she did for Howells, Thomas Dunhill, Vaughan Williams and others. She did not let friendship cloud her opinion. If she believed a work was flawed she said so. Upon hearing the first performance of Gurney’s War Elegy in 1921, she wrote: “…a war elegy by Ivor Gurney is comparatively short but produces an impression of great aims. The themes are heartfelt and sincere, their treatment is grave and sensitive, and the opening and closing sections of the work are eloquent. Toward the middle, the music loses its grip and wanders around rather than holds the direct onward flow. It will probably gain by being rewritten.”

She found much to praise in Gurney’s Ludlow and Teme in a review published on 25 December 1920. “There is a fine, clear, out-of-doors ring about the setting of ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’, she wrote, ‘and one could well imagine the tune upon the lips of any ‘young yeoman’ as he ‘strode beside his team’; while the second song, ‘Far in a western brookland,’ is a pure efflorescence in music of that poetry of the ‘windless night time’ alluded to by Housman, and expressed here by the composer with tender truth and beauty of melody.’ ‘The lads in their hundreds’ and ‘On the idle hill of summer’ are equally rich in imaginative qualities: also virile in style (as the words demand), while ‘When I was one and twenty’ is a good little thing in the folk style as one could wish to meet anywhere. The unexpected and fascinating run of the tune delighted the audience. ‘The Lent Lily,’ with its beautiful melismatic passages, brought the cycle to a close, and the composer to the platform.”

From an early age Marion Scott willingly entered into the spirit of contemporary music. She never shied away from writing about “radical” composers nor did she dismiss new trends. She believed that “time alone” would render the final judgment but she always stood ready to enlighten doubters. In 1929, she wrote a comprehensive study of the young Paul Hindemith, probably the first of such depth to appear in Britain. Later she would write insightfully about the music of Webern, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Tippett and many other “new” voices.

In a future post, Pamela Blevins will share some of Scott’s comments on the music of composers who were quite different from Elgar, Finzi and Gurney, including one Scott described as a “genuine composer who gives off music as a piece of radium throws off energy”.

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.