Monday Afternoon Pleasures

Well, it was a day that set off to be easy, since I woke up knowing what I was going to write about—no casting about, looking under stones, poking into the odd corners of the Internet (let’s see, any other metaphors here to mix?)

I was going to tell you, you see, about the weird fact that while Joseph Haydn had written some 400 songs based on Scottish folk songs, nobody had bothered to publish them until something like 2004. OK—my journalist father, grumbling down from his celestial newsroom, forced me to look up the citation:

The reason why the song arrangements have so far remained in the shadow of the other late works and only very few of them have been performed, is largely because only a very small number of them was available in new editions. Only since the year 2005 the song arrangements are available in the complete edition of Haydn’s works, Joseph Haydn Werke, edited by the Joseph Haydn Institut in Cologne and published by G. Henle in Munich.

What! Boys, boys—Haydn died in 1809, after busily having composed over a hundred symphonies, a zillion string quartets, umpteen masses, two MAJOR oratorios, as well as troubling himself to invent the symphony and champion the string quartet. In fact, in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee, Haydn had composed something and gone off to compose something else. And then you guys take almost TWO centuries to get about publishing his stuff? There’s a word for this—criminal neglect!

Well, I had come upon these things because, in a self-satisfied moment on Monday (self-satisfied because I was getting through it), I had decided to listen to Jean Redpath, and whatever she cannot do for a Scottish song doesn’t need to be done. And since the news on the island is horrendous and rapidly getting worse (today’s headline in El Vocero is Bomba de Tiempo, and yes, that does mean “Time Bomb”), it was decidedly time to jump islands and centuries. And since I had met the Redpath briefly, and found her funny and self-deprecating—she recounted how she had met a fellow Scot at an intermission, and he had told her he was liking the concert, so far—it was time to wander off to Wikipedia, to get the dope on Jean. And that’s where I found: among all of the recordings, Redpath had recorded the Haydn Scottish Songs.

Hunh?

Wikipedia to YouTube, YouTube to Wikipedia: that’s my life these days. OK—so I clicked on the clip, and was treated to a minute or so of elegant, rococo Haydn. And then? Auld Lang Syne!

The worst thing?

Nobody, absolutely nobody pays the least attention anymore to Marc in his corner, giggling to himself.

Oh well, at least they know I’m harmless….

The cool thing about these arrangements is that they’re for piano, violin and cello—a piano trio—as well as voice, of course. And why was that?

There was a time, Dear Reader, before our degenerate age of Internet and television, when everybody—well, mostbody—could play an instrument. Oh, and read music. And so what did people do, of an evening, to whittle away the hours before bed? They sat down to the piano, and played an air or tune. Think Jane Austen!

So, from the sound of the arrangements, they’re not all that technically challenging, which means that, for a musician, they’d be totally fun to play. And an added benefit? The music comes from the first years of the 19^th century, when Haydn was in his prime.

Right—so that was interesting, as was the news that Beethoven had gotten into the act, and had written—well, back to the same source:

What is probably the most striking aspect of these folk song settings is that Beethoven wrote far more of these than any other type of composition, having composed an astounding 179 folk song arrangements spanning a period of eleven years from 1809 to 1820. 

1809 to 1820? Given the fact that Beethoven died in 1827, this puts these works respectably into the middle and late periods. And Beethoven follows the practice of using a piano trio as accompaniment. The cool thing? The violin and cello are optional—adding to the richness, but not necessary.

So Monday had passed happily, listening to music I had never imagined existed! Every musician’s dream!

Tuesday?

Stay tuned!

And for a seriously beautiful, almost haunting, song, click below:

Honey, Pass the Kleenex

Well, I heard the statement that 90% of people surveyed had been moved to tears by a piece of music, but only 5% or so reported having wept at the sight of a painting or cathedral. For poetry, interestingly, it appears to go up to about 50 or 60%. So then I wondered—what about me? Have I ever wept on seeing a painting?

I’d like to say yes, but then, what would I say when asked, “what painting?” So it’s better to tell the truth, even if it makes me a Philistine. In my defense, however, I can say that some places have a history and a grandeur that almost spurs the lachrymal glands into action. There’s St. John the Divine in New York City, and there—for entirely different reasons, was the battlefield of Gettysburg. And a month or two ago, I felt something akin to awe by just being in Carnegie Hall.

But then I stopped to wonder—have I truly been moved to tears by a piece of music? And if so, was it really the music, or was it the circumstances around myself at the time, or the memory of particularly emotional moments with which I had associated the music?

Because, let’s face it: there are times of great pain and loss—deaths, divorces, job loss—when you are crying at anything. When my father died, just looking at the garlic press hanging next to the little wire that he used to clean it (it was perhaps his least imaginative invention, but who else keeps a little wire next to their garlic press? Everybody else just scrubs harder….) was enough to trigger wails. And if I had taken the press and the wire to my brother? We would have been wailing in each other’s arms.

The problem? There’s nothing intrinsically sad about a garlic press.

Then there’s music that somehow has gotten associated, either in your or in everyone’s mind, with a particular event. For a lot of people, Barber’s Adagio for Strings is 9 / 11, punto. And that, of course, makes sense, because the music exactly defines the wrenching sorrow of the event. That’s—news flash, here—why they chose it.

All right, but what about the music that is genuinely sad, gut-wrenchingly sad, music that makes you reach for the razor blades? Has anyone ever compiled a list? Surely the Internet could fly in some pieces, since at the moment I can only think of five or six that I would absolutely include.

Fortunately, the Internet came through, and with some surprising choices. Oh, and I must say at the outset that two of the three lists I consulted had ten selections, the other one had only six.

OK—time to guess: what was the piece—and the only piece—that made all three lists?

“Dido’s Lament,” from the opera Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell.

In fact, it made my list as well, among other reasons because I cannot get through the piece, even if I’m manic, without sobbing.

Curiously, Dido is on all three lists, but not one piece of music is on any two lists, which is to say that there are no duplicates. And here, starting more or less from earliest to latest, is what there is:

Miserere, by Allegri—hmmm, absolutely beautiful, to be sure, but sad? Sad enough to move me to tears? In this period, I can think of wrenching music—an Amen, for example, from the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin by Monteverdi, or some of the William Byrd sacred music.

Bach, predictably, makes the lists, but different pieces. “Come, Sweet Death” is on one site—but the piece is for organ, and guess what? I neither like nor dislike organ music, it just doesn’t get in. So I skipped it, after a minute of listening. Then there was “Cum sancto spiritu” from the B Minor Mass, which posed an interesting question: are we to include music that is so joyful that it makes you weep? That’s what the site says, and I’m willing to buy in. But following that argument, I’d vote for “Et in terra pax,” also from the B Minor.

The rest were, if I may say so, outliers. OK—there was Albinoni’s Adagio, which is pretty sad. There was Mozart’s Requiem, as it was depicted in the movie Amadeus. Then, there was Adagio for Strings.

The rest was all over the map, from the lento movement of Shostakovich Fifth, to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs to the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Oh, and speaking of Tchaikovsky, his violin concerto—or at least the second movement—lands on another list. An interesting pick was Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for strings; confession—I didn’t know it, I tried three minutes of it, and decided that not knowing was the preferred option.

Orchestrally, what’s not there? What piece would you expect that is strangely out behind the building, taking a cigarette break? Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony.—I just started to listen to it, in order to make sure it was what I thought it was, and yes, there are tears on the keyboard.

And what about opera, surely good for a cry or two? Well, La bohème makes it on two of the lists, but on one it’s the first aria of Rudolfo, and on the other list it’s the last aria of Mimi. On another list, Verdi’s V’ho Ingannato from Rigoletto appears; Wagner turns up with the funeral music from Siegfried on the third list.

Chamber music? Well, there’s the second movement of the string quintet of Schubert, which yes, definitely would be on my list. Besides that, there surprisingly little chamber music.

There were pieces I didn’t know—most particularly “Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres,” from an astonishing poem by Neruda. Here, it’s sung by the composer’s wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died less than eight months after the recording.

Lastly, there was a song by George Butterworth based on the text of A. E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad.”  The song did nothing for me, but it did lead me to Vaughan Williams’s treatment of an old folksong, “Whither Must I Wander” And if you are dry-eyed at the end of it?

Check for a pulse!!

(P.S.—here are the links:

http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/10-classical-music-tear-jerkers/

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov/07/10-best-classical-tear-jerkers-fiona-maddocks

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2010/09/27/130157375/the-saddest-music-in-the-world-7-tunes-to-make-you-tear-up  )

A Norwegian Song Cycle

First scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Beethoven. What are your chances of guessing what we’ll hear?

Not very good, I’m afraid—besides the nine symphonies and the five piano concerti and the violin and triple concerti, there are roughly half a dozen other orchestral works, mainly overtures.

Second scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Grieg. And here, you’ll very likely be able to pin it down in the first three guesses. It’ll be the piano concerto, Peer Gynt, or possibly the Holberg Suite. Unless you’ve got a conductor willing to scrounge into the forgotten corners of Grieg’s repertoire, that’s all you’re likely to hear.

So Grieg falls into that enigmatic category—you might call it famous but not well known. He certainly has his place in the pantheon, but only for a handful of works. And given that he died at age 64, shouldn’t we know more music of his? He had to have been doing something other than writing merely three pieces in nearly half a century of creative life.

Yes and no. He wasn’t a very healthy man; a lung condition he picked up at age 17 plagued him most of his life. He was also a conductor, and worked for many years with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he served as music director from 1880 – 1882. But he was unusual for his time in not producing a symphony, except for an early work that he suppressed.

He was, said one commentator, a man of little works, almost a miniaturist. He struggled even to produce a string quartet, although he came up a creditable one—Debussy, not an easy man to please, thought highly of it.

He got around, this man from Norway who studied in Leipzig, disliked the rigidity of the system, and went back to his native land. He met Liszt, who was impressed with him (and sight-read the famous piano concerto and invented a reduction of the orchestral score—they were giants on the earth, some of those guys…). He also met Tchaikovsky, and was struck by how sad he was.

You could—perhaps fancifully—say that he met me this morning on the daily trot, when I was cruising my iPod for something new to listen to. It’s a discipline for me, now—how much new music can I listen to? For years, I was buying CDs of interesting music that I never found time to listen to. Well, now’s the time.

And so it had been with a CD of Grieg’s songs, as sung by Anne Sofie von Otter. And instantly I was struck by the rich harmonies, the deftness of the piano part, the freshness of the music.

What I didn’t know was that I was listening to a song cycle, indeed the only song cycle that Grieg ever wrote. And what, you ask, is a song cycle? A musical form that crops up with Beethoven and is still going on—a group of songs that are meant to be performed together, often because they are telling a story, or are thematically linked. And the 19^th century was a sort of golden age for the song cycle: Schubert with his Winterreise and  Die schöne Müllerin; Schumann with Liederkreis, Dichterliebe, Frauenenliebe und Leben.

Grieg wrote the song cycle Haugtussa over a three-year period, and mind you, the work only lasts 25 minutes. But it was worth it; Grieg later wrote that it was his best effort in song. Sadly, though, in the YouTube clip below, we’re missing the one crucial component of a song cycle—the lyrics themselves.

So here is what will have to suffice, a brief description of the work from Wikipedia:

Haugtussa opens and ends with the nature mysticism of "The Enticement" and "At the Brook". The second extended stage includes the two melancholic portraits "Veslemøy" and "Hurtful Day". Between them the climax is reached in the central love songs "The Tryst" and "Love", which have a cheerful, pastoral approach, and approached and transitioned from in, respectively, "Blueberry Slope" and "Kidlings' Dance". The main character, the Veslemøy, is a shepherd girl who has abilities that others do not have and therefore can not find a place for her personality in rural communities. She turns to nature for answers to her desires and questions. During the course of the text she falls in love with the boy Jon, and "Hurtful Day" describes her feelings when she is deceived by him. In the last song, "At the Brook", which is often compared with the last song of Franz Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin or Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe,[4] she seeks refuge by a mountain brook, musically represented by a rhythmic figure on the piano. From verse to verse, Grieg gradually changes this passage using different harmonizations.

What’s good about the clip? It has the wonderful Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter singing at her best, and that “best” is nearly unbeatable. And how fortunate we are that von Otter is Swedish, and can thus sing in a language most other singers wouldn’t tackle.

Which leads me, perhaps, to the last strike against Grieg—he’s Norwegian, he’s identified as a nationalist composer, and ever so slightly looked down on. However much the piano concerto gets played, among musical snobs—and you don’t have to be told that snobbery is rampant in classical music, do you?—Grieg isn’t considered in the absolute top drawer.

But listening to this song cycle, I think he is….