It’s seems somehow like a Monday thing—to consider all of
the works over which men and women have toiled, struggled, suffered over. And
the result? Obscurity, or worse, to be remembered as “charming” or “delightful”
or as the precursor of somebody or something great.
I think this way because of Jacques Offenbach, who has,
evidently, achieved enough pull that Microsoft word recognizes him. And you,
Educated Reader, will too—but how much have we heard of him? There are two or
three melodies—that damned cancan, and the barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman,
which I saw in a Metropolitan Opera Live Broadcast, and which prompts all this
speculation.
After all, whose interest could not be piqued by the
director’s statement that Offenbach had been a double outcast, since he had
been born the son of a Jewish Cantor in Prussia: Since he spent the majority of
his life in France, he fought for acceptance. His solution? Well, according to
the director, he tried sleeping his way through influential ladies. Reneé
Fleming—momentarily nonplussed—admitted that it was a time-honored strategy.
The article in Wikipedia on Offenbach’s life—which
takes as long for you to read as it did for Offenbach to live—mentions several
affairs, but also says that Offenbach’s marriage was a long and happy one. But
all throughout the article, there is an underlying melancholy, an ache that no
matter what artistic or financial success Offenbach achieved never stopped
hurting. What is it? Simply put, he was never quite top drawer.
And nothing is more painful than the fact that he was
trying, finally, to put aside the lighter works, the operettas, the opéra comique or the opera bouffe, and if you’re not familiar
with the terms? No worries, since they both refer to something not quite
serious, not intending to greatness. The are opera’s equivalent of a cold,
delicious Chablis drunk on a summer picnic, but not the clarets or the
cabernets accompanying a hearty meal.
So Offenbach, who composed nearly a hundred operas of this
sort, waited until the end of his life to set out to be something more serious,
something great. And that was the opera I saw last Saturday, The Tales of
Hoffman. So did it work, this one serious work that Offenbach never lived to
complete, much less to see?
To me, yes. The opera is long, but my interest never
flagged, and the music was in many parts ravishing. One critic, Tim Ashley, has this
to say:
"Stylistically, the opera reveals a remarkable
amalgam of French and German influences … Weberian
chorales preface Hoffmann's narrative. Olympia delivers a big coloratura aria straight
out of French grand opera, while Antonia sings herself to death to music
reminiscent of Schubert."[38]
Is
it just me, or does anyone else feel that critics, when they compare composers,
are subtly giving the message: This guy is derivative? Has anyone ever compared
Bach to his contemporaries Biber and Buxtehude? Of course not.
Even
more damning is this quote, again from the Wikipedia article on
Offenbach:
Debussy, Bizet, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov
loved Offenbach's operettas.[191] Debussy rated them higher than The Tales of Hoffmann:
"The one work in which [Offenbach] tried to be serious met with no
success."[n 28] A London critic wrote, on Offenbach's death:
I somewhere read that some of Offenbach's latest work
shows him to be capable of more ambitious work. I, for one, am glad he did what
he did, and only wish he had done more of the same.[195]
Ouch!
And so Offenbach remains a musical hung jury, which is,
perhaps, more than most composers attain. A hugely popular work of the 19th
century is…well, here’s a screen shot:
If the Internet hadn’t decided to take a lunch break, I
could have opened
the page with the citation that forty-two thousand people attended the
performance at the Crystal Palace of this memorable work, which had artificial
flames, though real firemen. Oh, and the collaborator on this endeavor? Guy
named Barnum….
So where is the great Jullien’s work? As you can see: Box
179, item 044. If Offenbach isn’t quite top drawer, at least he’s not in a box.
And so it was a melancholy Monday morning, since one thing
led to another: A fatal Internet tendency. There was Offenbach’s cello
concerto, the Grand “Concerto Militare,” about which I was suspicious, since
the cello can be many things, but military? But ever true to my bloggerly
obligations, I can tell you that it is perfect music to listen to while doing
something else, like ironing or washing the dishes. In fact, the Internet has
returned, rubbing its belly and burping surreptitiously, so I’m now
listening to the end of the first movement. Lovely in parts, but would I ever
learn it? Nah—it’s both too virtuosic and too light to make it worth it.
Well, in the mood I was in, could I resist the sidebar
luring me with “unpopular cello concerti?” If it had been “forgotten,” I might
have stayed away, but unpopular? As an adolescent, I was a scrawny, six-footed
creature that always sported a face always adorned with pimples, so
“unpopular?” Struck a chord….
So there I was with a concerto I might play, by
the—yes—forgotten-if-not-unpopular Joseph Joachim Raff, about which the
poster of the clip (and why do I suspect that this is lifted from Wikipedia?
Bad habit, guys!) has to say:
Joachim
was largely self-taught in music, studying the subject while working as a
schoolmaster in Schmerikon, Schwyz and Rapperswil. He sent some of his piano
compositions to Felix Mendelssohn who recommended them to Breitkopf &
Härtel for publication. They were published in 1844 and received a favourable
review in Robert Schumann's journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which
prompted Raff to go to Zürich and take up composition full-time.
And
then—this is the blogger’s life—came the real surprise, since it turned out
that Dvorak, whose concerto for cello is the Everest in the repertoire, had
written an earlier concerto for cello, though it exists only as a cello / piano
version, and the orchestration has been done by various people, and the
versions remain controversial. And so I was confronted with another version of
failure: The ugly duckling, or the homely girl who never gets taken to the
concert hall. Though various people have, most notably and recently the British
cellist Steven Isserlis. Here’s what David Smith
had to say in the British website prestoclassical:
The work’s
reputation has probably suffered from being compared to its sibling (whose
emotional punch it indeed cannot quite match), but considered as a work in its
own right it is a compelling musical experience in which Dvořák’s gift for
melody is abundantly evident.
Here, as I
write this, Carlos the pirate has transmogrified as Carlos the trompe l’oeil
specialist, since this is what he has spent most of five days creating:
Nice, isn’t it? And in a month’s time, Carlos will take it
down, and the work will be remembered by some, forgotten by most, and Carlos?
Well, he will have gone onto the next big project, and presumably be as happy
as he currently is. He’s humming now, as he works; he’ll be humming as he
dismantles what took hours to create.
And the rest of us? I suspect we’ll keep on fearing the
critic, the real voice of today or the imagined voice of tomorrow, the voice
that tells us that there is one tier, and one tier only that matters, and that
we—as much as we fight it, as much as we dispute it—well…
…we haven’t made it.
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