Sunday, August 31, 2008

"Notes of Ripe Figs and Port Wine, with a Chocolatey Finish"


So the new variety of coffee that I have drunk this morning is described on its label, and, I must admit, I can't think how else you could describe it--It's scrumptiousness is nothing less than musical, with a velvety richness and fruitiness just like figs and port and chocolate. And so, all nature and ¡Tunes conspire: First, at first light, on our morning's program was K. 526, a violin sonata in A Major, well deserving of its place in the catalog between 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' (K. 525) and Don Giovanni (K. 527); I found the score online immediately and read along with it--always so profitable a practice with those late Koechel numbers. And then, as Phoebus' radiant Harbinger empurpl'd th'eastern Or'zon, prompted by I know not what happy impulse, I tuned in the opera station--and, with the rising sun, as I blog, I'm listening to the 'famous' Hasse's Cleofide, just as it was done in the good old bad old days at Sans Souci. Let us pause here to note that--gravamens and acrimonious charges that have-we to bear against the Barb'rous Modern Age--the late flourishing of Original Instruments and Authentic Performance Practices leaves almost nothing to be desired in the miraculous re-creation of the very most delectable music of that most delectably musical century...Dr. Burney himself could have found nothing to fault in the wonders of this spookily and spiritedly miraculous resurrection of music until quite recently thought--and often flatly pronounced--dead as a dodo.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

"When I am grown I shall be as famous as Hasse or Graun!"






































According to Nannerl, writing in her diary after Wolfgang's death, "Johann Christian Bach [shown here, upper left, in the superb (both as painting and as portraiture) portrait by Thomas Gainsborough], music master of the queen, took Wolfgang between his knees.  He would play a few measures; then Wolfgang would continue.  In this manner they played entire sonatas. Unless you saw it with your own eyes, you would swear it was just one person playing."

Friday, August 29, 2008

Astonishing! And Ravishingly Beautiful...

Listening, for the first time ever in my life, to La Scala di Seta (Freiburg 2005) on Internet Radio.  By happy chance I've found the libretto online at first-Google--God, am I grateful to have learned Italian!  Superb singers!  Wonderful music! Funny libretto!  To appreciate Rossini one has only to abandon the notion that Beauty must be affecting: Perfectly neat and clever is even better, once you're used to it.  Heartless is best of all.  Which is why, in a certain sense, the best of the best of Rossini is, or can be, a performance of these oddly steely female rôles by drag-queens in falsetto.  But, of course, if it isn't perfectly sung (and played), it's a sordid, nasty mess.

Perfect singing and playing, you'd think, would be something that could never be lost sight of, at least as the ideal to which all singers and players devote themselves.  But you forget that, even as the world's perhaps most spectacularly accomplished singers and players that ever there were, appeared on the world-stage in the first half of the 19th century, something quite the reverse of musical perfection was becoming the ideal of musical performance:  The expression of the personality of the performer; i.e., Romanticism.  Giacomo Rossini, perhaps the most intelligent composer the world has ever known, understood what had happened to music and singing, as we may surmise from his remark--wrongly believed by most to have been insincere and captious whimsy--that, "Mozart was lucky to have toured Italy, as a boy, in the 1760's, when it was still possible to hear good singing." Further proof of Rossini's intelligence is: that he never explicated his implicit, damning criticism of the age he lived in (wisely declining to be right when all the world was wrong); and that, rather than continuing to write music aimed well over the heads of his contemporaries, as soon as his fortune was made, he retired to the epicurean paradise of Paris, devoting the rest of his life to the music-like science and art of gourmandism, living beautifully, giving wonderful dinners, and growing, 'tis said, enormously fat. 

In a marvelous memoir, Dumas père writes of dining at the Villa Rossini, and asking his host why he'd given up writing operas.  "Laziness," Rossini replied.  "So you mean," Dumas persisted, "that if I were to put a pistol to your throat, and order you, on pain of extinction, to write me an opera....?"  "I'd give you one of my best."


Thursday, August 28, 2008

Murder, Humbug and Hypocrisy




Le "Bien-Aimé," Louis XV, if anybody was, was your typical non-connoisseur patron of music. He could carry a tune. He liked Jean-Jacques Rousseau--as a composer--and sometimes would sing ditties (they are scarcely arias) from Les Troqueurs and Le Devin du Village, memorable perhaps more for the words than the tunes; but sing them he did, in a pleasant baritone voice, and danced about while he did so, in the company of his intimates, in a most amusing fashion. He was, evidently, a sweet sort of man, but a man for all that, passionately fond of hunting, and with a robust, perhaps not overly fastidious, but thoroughly hygienic sexual appetite: His saying, "Préalablement au dentiste et à la bagnoire!" of the nymphs procured for him still causes Frenchmen who cherish his memory to chuckle.


Monday, August 25, 2008

So Whoever Heard of Johannes Matthias Sperger?


I certainly don't recall the name--though, doubtlessly, Dr. Burney did mention him.  The problem with having read Dr. Charles  Burney [shown here above the morning star in his doctoral gown, in the wonderful speaking likeness by Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted in 1781], even in his entirety (as I believe I may have done), is that Dr. Burney mentions everybody--and all so engagingly, justly, compendiously, like a perfect host who would be mortified to forget anybody, in what may be the most delectable expository prose I have ever read.  I consider myself fortunate (nay, bless'd) to've retained as much as I have, with no subsequent reminder, of Jomelli, Saari, Nardini.  My present complacent ignorance of the Bohemian-born near-contemporary of Mozart, contra-bassist and, even for his day, exceptionally prolific composer, Johannes Matthias Sperger (1750 -- 1812 Would that Mozart had lived so long!), damnable though it be, is understandable without my having heard examples of his work to enlighten it.  Well, I've just heard an example--one of Sperger's many symphonies, conducted by (who else? Harnoncourt)--and a perfect jewel it was and is.  Never more shall I forget the name Johannes Matthias Sperger (mnemonic device: like the classifier of the mental affliction, without the alpha-privative).

Sunday, August 24, 2008

But in the Afternoon...



Just when I'd begun to think the world was one vast, vicious, incompetent humbug, I tuned into someone named Skip Sempé playing the Bach Partita No. 4 in D on the harpsichord--Genius!  So I Googled him and his Group, Capriccio Stravagante--all of them Geniuses!  And astonishingly good-looking.  Olivier Fortin (Québecois), Sempé's alter-clavéciniste, in fact has major porn star allure.   Anyway, I've heard and listened attentively to a lot of performances of this partita--including Glenn Gould's achingly beautiful but oh so unauthentic piano version--but nothing, not even Gould, comes up to the knees of this.  And now I see that Sempé has written essays about music...and they are delightful too.  Well, well....


Up Betimes...

I was smitten with the exquisite freshness of how things smell here in Paradise (I'd forgot) in that briefest of whiles between the crack of dawn and sunrise.  Without my morning coffee, running in fact down to the Star Market to get cream for it, the delicious tang stole upon my ravished senses like a tune from Twelfth Night.  What might I not accomplish on a day begun so fair?

Then...corruption, distaste, disillusion: I read the world and national news on-line.  I listen to a perfectly fine version of the Beethoven 4th symphony (Kleiber, the Bavarian State Orchestra)...God knows it's fast enough, faster even than the musicians can well play; but it's not played on original instruments...it lacks articulation, string/wind balance..it is not perfect.

The "news" is half Neo-Con partisan horseshit (e.g., "Russia started (!) the current hostilities with Georgia, should withdraw and hand back to Georgia the 'rebellious, break-away provinces' of South Ossetia and Abkhazan."), and half Orwellian froth, too stupid and too fugitive even to be called news ("Although the two Austrian composers [Mozart and Mahler] were born nearly 100 years apart, they shared a knack for composing transcendent music under extreme emotional pressure."--my choice for the Dumbest Remark of the Month).










Saturday, August 23, 2008

Religious Discourse Among Cannibals






Some months ago, in the spacious, gracious and lovely main library of the Hawaii State Library System, I was looking for the collected works of Judith Martin, a.k.a. "Miss Manners," a surprisingly and gratefully prolific author.  I found them, all right--but I regret to say that I have not yet read them.  Because, as serendipity, or plain luck, would have it, in this library Miss Manners' instructive and entertaining writings are to be found in a sort of reclusive niche or dog-leg of shelves, directly beneath a small (8 or 9 volume) collection of books on Cannibalism.   Miss Manners will forgive me, I trust, for having forgotten all about her.... 


The history of cannibalism is, so to speak, the history of Mankind, in that the history of Mankind is, sadly, the history of periodic famine. Wherever dearth and starvation have occurred--in Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, Medieval (and Renaissance!) Europe, Ireland--there the variety of cannibalism, called 'Subsistence Cannibalism' has arisen; invariably, horrifyingly, as the grimmest of Grimm fairy tales imply, involving the eating of children. 

But there are other varieties of Cannibalism:  Judicial, Ritual, Opportunistic--and, in China, Gourmet Cannibalism.  Judicial Cannibalism, as formerly practiced in Fiji, meant simply the eating of some part of a condemned criminal in front of him.  Ritual Cannibalism (not without a tinge of gourmandism, perhaps even of sustenance) best describes that practiced by the civilized peoples of pre-Columbian Meso-America.  Opportunistic Cannibalism is practiced by those who, occasionally finding themselves alone and unobserved with a corpse (as when standing vigil at night over the body of a deceased family member laid out in a suggestive manner on a kitchen table), surreptitiously consume a portion of the corpse in a manner not likely to be discovered later; e.g., knocking a hole in the back of the skull and abstracting a portion of the brains, eating them raw--thus transmitting the slow-virus disease kuru among the female population of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea.

But to China belongs the distinction of having invented, long practiced, and perhaps never given up the culinary art and, no doubt, science of Gourmet Cannibalism.  There was the "king" who in the latter days of the Northern Song gave a monthly feast at which the body of one of his best-looking concubines was served, cooked up in various tasty ways.  To impress upon his convives that they were getting the genuine article--and not some inferior, not-so-good-looking sort of concubine--her severed head would be brought in and shown to them.  What makes this the more shockingly plausible is the custom which prevails to this day in Chinese restaurants--perhaps thought to stimulate the appetite--of displaying to diners, living, about-to-be-consumed animals, at the beginning of a meal.  I once ate a kind of lobster ragoût in a very expensive Chinese restaurant--which ordinarily I would have found delicious--but which turned to ashes in my mouth because I had been "introduced" to my lobster by my nimble, alert, and oblivious waiter, who didn't (important point) notice my gagging.  Until as late as the end of the Qing Dynasty (1912) in China, the blood and body-parts of criminals executed by law were openly and matter-of-factly sold as gourmet specialty foodstuffs.  And today?  Who would know?

So, with these things in mind, I am reading Anthony C. Yu's abridgement of his own translation of The Journey to the West, and I am noticing things which quite escaped my attention when, many years ago, I was reading Arthur Waley's version of the same thing, called by him Monkee. It so happens too, that a year or so ago, I read (by I know not what random impulse) two or three books on the dissemination, sometimes despite obstacles, of Buddhism in China.  One forgets how deeply China and (with the curious exception of India) other oriental societies have been bitten by the Confucian bug.  I had always sort of assumed, with Chuang-tze yucking it up alongside me to confirm me in my misapprehension, that when Buddhism encountered Taoism in China, they both soon realized that they were simply different aspects of the same Middle Way, and so blended into one another to produce Ch'an and Pure Land Buddhism: End of happy story.  But not so.  All along there had been Confucius, Ancestor Worship, and (what is so very important in China) Imperial Absolutism. And this unitary core of Things Chinese has bitterly opposed Buddhism in China from the very beginning; sometimes even getting Buddhism proscribed--with disastrous results for the welfare programs that only Buddhism ever instituted, thereby plunging Chinese society into anarchy; such that, though with much righteous reluctance, the proscriptions had to be rescinded.

Well, all this is summed up and given a lot more in-depth analysis in The Journey to the West than I had ever realized.  Thus, on page 182, the Tang Emperor's official historian, Fu Yi, properly prostrate, addresses a "memorial" to the Throne, saying, "The teachings of the Western Territory deny the relations of ruler and subject, of father and son....They emphasize the sins of the past in order to ensure the felicities of the future.  By chanting in Sanskrit, they seek a way of escape....It was not until the period of the Emperor Ming in the Han dynasty...that priests of the Western Territory were permitted to propagate their faith.  The event, in fact, represented a foreign intrusion in China, and the teachings are hardly worthy to be believed."

The emperor, of course, doesn't reply directly, but he has the memorial distributed among 'the various officials' for 'discussion' (which, as we continue reading, we discover means something rather different--and with different consequences--from 'discussions' envisaged by Western Humanism).  The prime minister, Xiao Yu, at this point, by way of 'discussion,' says, "the teachings of Buddha...seek to exalt the good and restrain evil.  In this way they are covertly an aid to the nation, and there is no reason why they should be rejected.  For Buddha is also after all a sage, and he who spurns a sage is himself lawless.  I urge that the dissenter be severely punished."

Against which Fu Yi snarls back disdainfully, and in Confucian terms perfectly correctly, that "propriety has its foundation in service to one's parents and ruler.  Yet Buddha forsook his parents and left his family; indeed, he defied the Son of Heaven all by himself....Xiao Yu (speaking of present instances) might not have been born in the wild, but by his adherence to the doctrine of parental denial, he confirmed the saying that an unfilial son had in fact no parents."  All straight out of the Analects, and you would think, unanswerable--But,

Xiao Yu folds his hands, and says, "Hell was established precisely for people of this kind." [!?]

Ominously, at this point the emperor seems almost not to have heard what his two major 'discussers' have been saying, and addresses another, seemingly unrelated topic, by asking his Lord High Chamberlain and the President of the Grand Secretariat together, "How efficacious are the Buddhist exercises in the procurement of blessings?"

These two answer, "Blah, blah, blah...It has been held since antiquity that the Three Religions are most honorable, [and] not to be destroyed or abolished.  We beseech your majesty, therefore, to exercise your clear and sagacious judgement."  Which does not sound like much of an answer--But

the emperor is highly pleased: "The words of our worthy subjects are not unreasonable. Anybody who disputes them further will be punished."  Blah, blah...From that time also comes the law that any person who denounces a monk or Buddhism will have his arms broken. 

I rest my case.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

The Real First Viennese School




The picture at the upper left is of an anonymous Dutch gentleman from a slightly earlier generation, evidently an amateur of the 'cello and a composer, standing in (because there are no pictures of him to be found in Cyberspace) for [1.] Georg Mathias Monn (1715 -- 1750).  In the upper right is an image of [2.] Josef Starzer (1726/7 -- 1787).  In the lower left, his full-bottom wig flowing, is [3.] Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715 -- 1777), about whom all anyone remembers today is that the kid, almost still an infant, Mozart--after the Empress Maria Theresa had kissed him and dandled him on her knees for a bit--said to him, "You turn over, Herr Wagenseil, and I will play!"  Which made everyone laugh because it sounded funny.  So, chuckling, Wagenseil put some music on the harpsichord and stood by to turn the pages (which is what little Wölferl had meant), and the tiny little boy from Salzburg played it at sight: perfectly.   Three years later, when he was eight, during his appearance at the French court in the château of Versailles, when Mme. de Pompadour had coldly pushed him away, he said, "Who is she who will not kiss me?  The Empress always kisses me!"  Out of the mouths of babes.   

Dismissing for a moment, however, the interesting topic of Austrians who, having been kissed by Maria Theresa, went on to have fatefully prickly non-relationships with Louis XV's Maîtresses en Titre--I have only heard the music of one of them (thanks to ¡Tunes and Internet Radio), a symphony by Georg Mathias Monn, rendered, as I recall, by Harnoncourt:  Rapturous Italianate delight!  Though with solid Teutonic counterpoint.  These guys, the real "First Viennese School," were all the figurative sons of Johann Joseph (Gradus ad Parnassum) Fux; Wagenseil, in fact, studied with Fux , and was considered his natural heir presumptive. We can be pretty sure, knowing who they worked for (Was there ever such a dynasty of instinctual connoisseurs as the Habsburgs?), that the music they wrote was top-notch, just the way they wrote it.   

Times, however, change, copyrights and royalties lapse.  Eventually, people lose the techniques and sensibilities, and the taste, that "old music" requires for its performance...even for its comprehension.  There had been this clavier concerto of Monn's lying around--who knows where?--and Arnold Schönberg, who had more in common with Pablo Casals than most people realize (see blog of July 29, '08), wanted, or needed, to write a 

'cello concerto' for Casals.  This presented certain difficulties for both of them.  

In the first place, despite the unconscious anachronism of his own playing of Bach (In Stravinsky's happy skewering, "Casals...plays Bach in the style of Brahms"), Casals detested the contemporary music of his day, roundly and often declaring he would have nothing to do with it.  But he was careful (One had to be!  Why?  Why indeed?) not to attack it or the sacrosanct Schönberg directly, saying no more even of Stravinksy than "Stravinsky always has to be à la mode."  It was only in his opinion of the popular, but not dangerously prestigious, music that he heard in his old age, that Casals felt free to say what he meant: "[Rock and roll is] poison put to sound--a brutalization of both life and art."

Schönberg understood--or thought he understood--this about Casals, whom he besieged with letters which glozingly laid out what he presumed to be the common ground which lay between himself and Casals on the subject of other music of the 18th century than that of Bach, Haydn, or Mozart (specifically the music of Handel, which Schönberg detested--or, should we say, felt free to detest); so setting up his desecration of the Monn clavier concerto, imagining (like the crass, oblivious Jew he evidently was) that Casals must find it irresistible as a cello concerto dedicated to himself: "Just as Mozart did with Handel's 'Messiah,' I have got rid of whole handfuls of sequences (rosalias, 'Schusterflecke'*), replacing them with real substance.  Then I also did my best to deal with the other main defect of Handelian style, which is that the theme is always best when it first appears and grows steadily more insignificant and trivial in the course of the piece."     

Stupid he may--as Stravinsky suggests--have been; but Casals never in his life acknowledged, or mentioned, either the 'cello concerto,' or Schönberg's dedication of it to him, and never played it. I, of course, have never heard it  (And, cela va sans dire, never will), and I have only just recently heard of it in reading the Grove Encyclopedia of Music biography of Schönberg, where it is described in these mildly encomiastical terms: "The concerto is a new composition to almost the same degree as a set of variations on another composer's theme.  Thus in each movement he overlaid Monn's exposition with additional counterpoints and harmonies reaching as far forward as Brahms, or even later, and then continued independently in the same style."

And, according to Robert Gerhard, by not having heard the Schönberg/Monn cello concerto, I have been spared a painful experience:  "I have now heard the Schoenberg-Monn cello concerto.  It has been a painful experience.  In the first place, I think I understand Monn.  No doubt he is not more than a good second-rank composer [the fucking presumption!], but the original Monn harpsichord concerto (on which Schoenberg based his cello concerto) has a polished 'urbane,' or rather 'courtly' style, not without distinct individual touches of some charm.  Schoenberg's comment that he has taken out boring sequences 'by the handful' and substituted for them ones of true musical substance is of a hair-raising pomposity and silliness.  He has destroyed the original's stylistic integrity, its simple but clearly-shaped form, and trodden down every single feature that has charm in Monn's work. The result is ham-fisted, thematically, tonally and formally erratic, and a confused farrago.  This is not the work of an artist, it's the work of a pedant, a crushing bore...."

*  "Schusterflecke" = Shoemaker's spots (?)

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Hearing Mass in the Hofkirche of the Fürstbischoffliche Residenz at Würzburg, September 2001

It was a meek and motley group of Modern Catholics gathered around the dirt-plain little supper table in the middle of the Prince-Bishop's glorious architectural paean to the Church Triumphant.  They acted as if they were, each and every one of them, offended by the splendors that surrounded them--never once raising their eyes to the the High Altar at the back of the sanctuary, or to the pulpit poised over them like an Angel of God.  To their credit, they whined through the vulgar and ugly Vatican II tunes in a perfunctory, subdued fashion; their embarrassed hesitancy a mute apology for the blasphemy of singsonging such paltrey drivel in a setting designed for the performance of Haydn, Palestrina, and Mozart.  When they faltered to a stop and turned to one another--even to me--with a sick, frozen little smile for the "Kiss of Peace," I fled incontinent, making the crossed-finger "Vampire begone!" sign, and banging the outer door more loudly than I meant to.  I wanted to scream at them (though of course I didn't), "It's your religion now, and you can shit on it all you like, but it's not your damned Hofkirche!"

Monday, August 11, 2008

Tomasso Albinoni, Opus 9, No. 5 in C, Oboe Concerto


Time was, the only Albinoni oboe concerto anybody knew of was the one in D Minor--I heard it on the radio, and immediately called my piano teacher, and asked "Who is this Tomasso Albinoni who writes better oboe concertos than Bach?"  But, ¡Praise Allah!, there are in existence, despite the the Allied carpet bombing of Dresden which destroyed so many manuscripts of Venetian baroque music, at least 8 or 9 other oboe concertos by Albinoni....

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Amusing Salmagundi


of books I picked up at the library day before yesterday,  Waiting for me on reserve were Pamuk's Snow translated into Spanish as Nieve, and the New Grove Second Viennese School, with the composite photograph on the cover of Berg, Webern, and Schönberg; to these I added Out of the Past, a Gay and Lesbian History from 1890 to the Present, by Neil Miller.  Of these the easiest going, so far, for me, has been Nieve.  

Monday, August 04, 2008

A Google Homepage


Half intentionally, half not, I've got myself a 'Google Homepage.'  "They (Google?)" make it so easy to do, with so many 'features' that it's just a matter of setting one's mouse on and clicking--that, before I'd half thought of it, I'd amassed a great number of 'features,' about half of which I no more desire on my 'homepage' (or anywhere) than I desire, say, a wife, or bicycle insurance.  But some of the 'features' were so inherently ridiculous and absurd-sounding that I couldn't resist--supposing I could always cancel them once I figured out wotthehell they're in aid of and who-ever would want to be reminded of such things on a daily basis.  Many of these 'features' involve ¡Tunes; some, other things:  

(1)  There is something called 'Good Music,' which is, I gather, supposed to play what are called 'Music Videos' from YouTube; so far, none of its 'selections' has been any longer available.  (2) There is something called 'Free Amazon MP3 Downloads' which displays up to ten of these treasures, sorted by sales rank.  (3) There are 'Free ¡Tunes Downloads'--a huge list thereof, all of which sound perfectly nauseous, and which to hear require the downloading of a player, which I would have to quit Safari and suspend blogging for a moment--so, for the moment, I'll postpone the interesting sortie into what the World is pleased to imagine these days to be 'Music.'  No doubt I could download some Schönberg and Webern while I'm at it.