Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto Number 2

In my previous entry, I ended up talking about how rich cultural life was at the turn of the 20th century and how poor ours seemed by comparison. Of course, writers for thousands of years have decried the decadence of their own era and pined for the "Golden Age," that is some time in the remote past when everyone was a philosopher, ate ambrosia, and created great works of art. We think of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Florentines in Renaissance Italy, the French in the age of enlightenment, and in our own era, the fin de siecle. But a look at a few of the musicians whose lives overlapped in the last decade of the 19th Century and the first of the 20th--Puccini, Faure, Mahler, Verdi, Toscanini, Milhaud, Tchaikowsky, Brahms, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky--does point to a golden age.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D18AujwrQb4]
Often, I suspect the people who bemoan the sad state of the arts in their time are more often than not critics, not creators, of the arts. There's a poem by E.A. Robinson called "Miniver Cheevy" that sums up these souls. Here are a few stanzas from it:
Miniver Cheevy Child of Scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.Minver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
The fact of the matter is that great works of art and philosophy that survives and from which we think we know the past was created by an educated minority. Right now over five of the Earth's six billion people live in abject poverty and have pathetically short life spans. Think of how much higher the mortality rates must have been just a hundred years ago. Would any of us who yearn for those great minds of yesteryear swap places with anyone back then?
Woody Allen recently explored this idea again, in Midnight In Paris, in which the main character, at the ringing of a bell at midnight, is transported back to the 20s, where he meets Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and Picasso.  He falls in love with one of Picasso's models and together they travel back in tim to the the previous generation of Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Gaugin and Offenbach.  She longs for that golden age and cannot see the greatness of the artists around her, just as the Woody Allen character longs for the times of the Lost Generation.
Our problem today, methinks, is glut. We're supersaturated with information. With radio, television, high literacy rates, and now the Internet, we suffer from so much information that we find it hard to separate the gold from the dross.
I am heartened though, when I look everywhere and see people in their everyday lives trying to create works of art and beauty. A friend of mine from grade school, Jayne Holsinger, has been living in New York since 1978, where she's supported herself as a waitress and graphic designer and is now exhibiting her paintings in galleries. Another friend from high school, Doug Gottberg, has been composing and playing music with his group, Kino, in Paris since the early 1980s.  A while back, at my 25th high school reunion, I met an old friend named Ralph Scutchfield, who's played bluegrass banjo since he was a boy and was then learning how to play the violin in a Suzuki class with his daughter. The hamstrung intellectuals will tell you that the arts are in bad shape, but not if you're willing to go out and do them yourself.
What does this have to do with Brahm's Piano Concerto Number Two? For a number of years, I went through my own Minver Cheevy phase. My drug, as I've said before, was music. Shy and lacking in self-confidence, I would sit in my room for hours listening to great works of music, letting my emotions flow out, feeling sorry for myself, feeling victimized. Brahm's music was particularly affecting, and this concerto became one of my favorite pieces during that time period.
Unlike other concertos it has four movements, and it really is a breathtakingly grand work. When I think of it, it seems almost like a symphony with piano, so skillfully is the piano integrated with the orchestra. One critic of the time even labeled it as a "symphony with a piano obligato," but the piano is used so expressively that comment seems like a cheap shot. Make no mistakes about it, Brahms was an incredible genius and a master of the instrument. He chose to express his genius through heart-rendingly beautiful melodies, that often brought tears to my eyes.
A high school friend--Paul Mankowsk--once told me a story that illustrates the composer's gifts. Once Brahms went into a beer hall and was asked to play a tune on the piano. While warming up, he discovered the instrument to be excruciatingly out of tune. Brahms played a few scales and memorized which notes were off. He then transposed the notes of his piece correctly as he played it so that no one could hear that the piano was bad.
I particularly love the first movement, which starts with horns playing the Romantic melody.  The piano then picks the theme up in an almost angelic manner. The second movement, an allegro, is the extra movement, and is full of passion. The third reminds me a bit of Brahm's violin concerto and often served to set me off self-wallowing sadness. Fortunately, Brahms finishes the work with a lively and upbeat Rondo, which never failed to lift me out of my doldrums.
So do I still grouse about the philistinism around me? Do I still feel like Miniver Cheevy? You tell me. What helped, I think, was taking violin lessons with my own daughter, when she started when she was around nine year old. Sure, anyone can complain about the work of others. But it is immensely humbling--and liberating--to try some creative endeavor. Should more people do so, the end of the Millenium jitters would quickly evaporate, and we'd all see, that truly, we create our own "Golden Age."

• Brahms Biography
• Buy on Amazon
• Download MP3s from Amazon

Gioacchino Rossini: "Largo al Factotum" from The Barber of Seville

I'm going to shift gears from writing about the passionate and romantic piano concertos that formed the subject of most of my several previous entries. Maybe this change results from a comment that my friend John Kim made, when I told him about all the gushing Romantic pieces that I listened to in high school. He said, "weren't there any fun things you listened to?" In fact there was--The Barber of Seville. So this week, I'm going to write about several arias from this opera.

A while back, here, I wrote about its overture, which I first heard used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. For some reason I was able to memorize it, and I would use it to break the monotony of the hundreds of laps we had to swim each day on the swim team. I used to be able to whistle it as well. I learned to whistle from my father, who always seemed to have a tune on his lips. I wonder if this is genetic: my daughter when she was in middle school was often reprimanded for whistling tunes in the hall and sometimes during class at school.

The Barber of Seville probably ranks as one of the most well known and popular of all operas. Rossini actually composed 36 operas from the age of 18 until 37, many of the overtures to which also get considerable airplay. (And which have been pirated--remember the theme from the Lone Ranger? It's actually from the overture to his opera William Tell.) But theBarber which Rossini composed at the age of 24, was his ne plus ultra. Had he composed only this one piece, his reputation probably would the same.

Rossini started out as a cellist and composer, and was especially influenced by Mozart. He had a great ear for melody, of course, but he also understood the human voice. Nowhere does this show than in the The Barber of Seville in which the arias and grouping of the vocalists--duos, trios, quartets--are so masterfully composed that they soar and amaze.
What the Barber also shows is that Rossini additionally possessed a superb sense of humor coupled with a zest for life. Much of this comes out in his characters, but particularly in the pieces given to the role of Figaro, that is the barber of this work.

The aria Largo al Factotum introduces Figaro's entrance on the stage. Figaro is a "fixer," who by the end of the opera will help Count Almaviva, his old employer (from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro), capture the heart of the maiden, Rosina. We don't know of the connection between the Figaro and the Count, who has just finished paying off some musician when the barber arrives. Figaro appears singing a perky, boasting aria in which he talks about how much he loves his job as a barber and go-between. The job keeps him hopping-he shaves the faces of the rich young bloods, prepares wigs for them and for the rich young ladies and bleeds everyone-but it has its perks, especially among the young ladies, "la, la, la, la!"

The words are funny, true, but what makes it so incredible is that the baritone must sing it faster and faster as he nears the end. You normally think of the deep bass voice as being serious, but at one point, he sings in falsetto, imitating the ladies calling him for his services. And of course, there is the familiar: "Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!" which, even if you know nothing about opera, you probably have sung once in your life.

My high school friend, Paul Mankowski, whose family introduced me to many works of classical music, told me that the Barber of Seville was a good place to start listening to opera. He was the one who told me that this aria by Figaro was calledLargo al Factotum, which means "make way for the jack-of-all-trades." He also recommended a recording of it, which, since it costs a whopping $15.99 in 1972, I persuaded my parents to buy it for me as a birthday present that year. They were puzzled, but complied.

Around the time I received my copy of it, Paul told me he had recently heard the Barber on a Saturday broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera, sponsored by Texaco. During Largo al Factotum aria, the soloist actually started singing lines in English that made fun of the other singers. That caught my attention. It showed me that this serious stuff called "classical music" actually had some humorous soul who practiced it.

Needless to say, this was one of the best birthday presents I ever received, and giving it a spin today to refresh my memory, I find that it still makes me smile.

• Rossini Biography
• Rossini: Barber of Seville (Highlights)

Brahms: Piano Concerto Number 2

In my previous entry, I ended up talking about how rich cultural life was at the turn of the 20th century and how poor ours seemed by comparison. Of course, writers for thousands of years have decried the decadence of their own era and pined for the "Golden Age," that is some time in the remote past when everyone was a philosopher, ate ambrosia, and created great works of art. We think of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Florentines in Renaissance Italy, the French in the age of enlightenment, and in our own era, the fin de siecle. But a look at a few of the musicians whose lives overlapped in the last decade of the 19th Century and the first of the 20th--Puccini, Faure, Mahler, Verdi, Toscanini, Milhaud, Tchaikowsky, Brahms, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky--does point to a golden age.

Often, I suspect the people who bemoan the sad state of the arts in their time are more often than not critics, not creators, of the arts. There's a poem by E.A. Robinson called "Miniver Cheevy" that sums up these souls. Here are a few stanzas from it:

Miniver Cheevy Child of Scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.Minver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

The fact of the matter is that great works of art and philosophy that survives and from which we think we know the past was created by an educated minority. Right now over five of the Earth's six billion people live in abject poverty and have pathetically short life spans. Think of how much higher the mortality rates must have been just a hundred years ago. Would any of us who yearn for those great minds of yesteryear swap places with anyone back then?

Woody Allen recently explored this idea again, in Midnight In Paris, in which the main character, at the ringing of a bell at midnight, is transported back to the 20s, where he meets Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and Picasso.  He falls in love with one of Picasso's models and together they travel back in tim to the the previous generation of Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Gaugin and Offenbach.  She longs for that golden age and cannot see the greatness of the artists around her, just as the Woody Allen character longs for the times of the Lost Generation.

Our problem today, methinks, is glut. We're supersaturated with information. With radio, television, high literacy rates, and now the Internet, we suffer from so much information that we find it hard to separate the gold from the dross.

I am heartened though, when I look everywhere and see people in their everyday lives trying to create works of art and beauty. A friend of mine from grade school, Jayne Holsinger, has been living in New York since 1978, where she's supported herself as a waitress and graphic designer and is now exhibiting her paintings in galleries. Another friend from high school, Doug Gottberg, has been composing and playing music with his group, Kino, in Paris since the early 1980s.  A while back, at my 25th high school reunion, I met an old friend named Ralph Scutchfield, who's played bluegrass banjo since he was a boy and was then learning how to play the violin in a Suzuki class with his daughter. The hamstrung intellectuals will tell you that the arts are in bad shape, but not if you're willing to go out and do them yourself.

What does this have to do with Brahm's Piano Concerto Number Two? For a number of years, I went through my own Minver Cheevy phase. My drug, as I've said before, was music. Shy and lacking in self-confidence, I would sit in my room for hours listening to great works of music, letting my emotions flow out, feeling sorry for myself, feeling victimized. Brahm's music was particularly affecting, and this concerto became one of my favorite pieces during that time period.

Unlike other concertos it has four movements, and it really is a breathtakingly grand work. When I think of it, it seems almost like a symphony with piano, so skillfully is the piano integrated with the orchestra. One critic of the time even labeled it as a "symphony with a piano obligato," but the piano is used so expressively that comment seems like a cheap shot. Make no mistakes about it, Brahms was an incredible genius and a master of the instrument. He chose to express his genius through heart-rendingly beautiful melodies, that often brought tears to my eyes.

A high school friend--Paul Mankowsk--once told me a story that illustrates the composer's gifts. Once Brahms went into a beer hall and was asked to play a tune on the piano. While warming up, he discovered the instrument to be excruciatingly out of tune. Brahms played a few scales and memorized which notes were off. He then transposed the notes of his piece correctly as he played it so that no one could hear that the piano was bad.

I particularly love the first movement, which starts with horns playing the Romantic melody.  The piano then picks the theme up in an almost angelic manner. The second movement, an allegro, is the extra movement, and is full of passion. The third reminds me a bit of Brahm's violin concerto and often served to set me off self-wallowing sadness. Fortunately, Brahms finishes the work with a lively and upbeat Rondo, which never failed to lift me out of my doldrums.

So do I still grouse about the philistinism around me? Do I still feel like Miniver Cheevy? You tell me. What helped, I think, was taking violin lessons with my own daughter, when she started when she was around nine year old. Sure, anyone can complain about the work of others. But it is immensely humbling--and liberating--to try some creative endeavor. Should more people do so, the end of the Millenium jitters would quickly evaporate, and we'd all see, that truly, we create our own "Golden Age."

• Brahms Biography
• Buy on Amazon

Edvard Grieg: Piano Concerto in A Minor

Musically, the 19th century went through amazing upheavals. It started out with Beethoven at the height of his powers reinventing the symphony. He changed it from the sweet pleasant "sounding together" of what in Handel's time was a sonata for orchestra, into a great momentous format for working out the turbulence of the times. Hot on his heels came Brahms ushering in the Romantic movement with the struggles of the passionate artist finding order and creating beauty out of this chaos. The idea of the Romantic artist, laboring alone in his garret, pouring out his soul seems to match the ascendancy of the concerto as a form for giving air to the creative process. By the end of the century, Europe was in the midst of such a cultural revolution--think of Wagner and Brahms, Monet and Van Gogh, Hardy and Tolstoy--the likes of which I dare say we might not see in a long while. They were humans imitating gods, while during our century we've been trying to get machines to do that for us.

Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor is one of those wonderfully gushingly Romantic works from the late 1800s. He wrote it when he was 25 and when he premiered it at one of his concerts, for he was a gifted pianist, it garnered him instant acclaim and established his reputation as a major composer. His output was modest--no symphonies, no operas and no other concertos. His best known work is Peer Gynt and this Holberg Suitegets a fair amount of air play. Maybe this was due to having to run his family's business after his father went bust trying to corner the lobster market.

Here is an interesting anecdote about Grieg and two other "noteworthy composers" that gives a little of the flavor of what the cultural life was like in fin de siecle Europe:

"At the home of Adolf Brodsky, who had launced his Violin Concerto five years earlier, Tchaikovsky inadvertently walked in on a rehearsal of Brahms's Piano Trio in C minor, with the great man himself at the piano. When Tchaikovsky grew 'uneasy', evidently reluctant to pay Brahms the compliments expected of him, their hostess feared 'a difficult scene' until the day was saved by the arrival of the short, frail figure of Edvard Grieg, to whom Tchaikovsky quickly warmed. At lunch Grieg's wife Nina, finding herself seated between Brahms and Tchaikovsky, sprang from her seat after only a few minutes, exclaiming: "I can't sit between these two. It makes me too nervous." "I have the courage," said Grieg, promptly taking her place. "So the three composers sat there together, all in high spirits," recalled Mrs Brodsky. "Brahms grabbed a dish of strawberry jam, insisting that he wanted to eat it all himself, and that no-one else could have any... It was more like a children's party than a gathering of great composers." (From Tchaikovsky,by Anthony Holden).

Who among our artists, composers, and writers would we place in the same Pantheon as those who were alive 100 years ago. Frankly I'm at a loss right now, so if anyone is out there with someone they'd like to nominate, please email me. Or even nominate yourself: you've probably got a lot more going for you than Lady Gaga.

• Biography
• Purchase

Peter Ilyich Tchaikowsky: Piano Concerto Number One in B Minor

It is hard to imagine a more accessible piece for anyone wandering where to start listening to classical music than Tchaikowsky's : Piano Concerto Number One. Tchaikowsky was Rachmaninov's teacher and this work gets almost as much airplay as any of Rachmaninov's piano concertos. The first movement is so romantic and passionate that it was pirated and turned into the popular song "Tonight We Love", and you also see it listed in those compilations hawked on television. You know the ones: "The Greatest Love Themes of All Times."

In high school, shortly after I discovered the piece, I was pleased to see it used in a comedy movie called The Tiger Makes Out." This film (circa 1967) starred Eli Wallach who plays a self-proclaimed "Superman," having gorged himself on the ideas of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Sartre. He lives in a small basement apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, he believe he must perform some great act to prove his superiority. He conceives a plan for kidnapping a beautiful woman, who'll recognize his genius and become his love slave. The plan goes a bit wrong, however, when he throws a gunny sack a woman on the street. Back in his apartment, he unwraps her to find a middle-aged woman with marital problems. He screams: "What is this? Some kind of joke?" In a kind of O'Henry twist, she turns out much cleverer than he. Eventually, they fall in love and fall to the floor in a passionate embrace with Tchaikowsky's Piano Concerto Number Onewhizzing around on a portable record player next to them.

Not a bad scene, especially considering how passionate this piece is. It starts out with the horns giving a rousing blast followed by the piano that plays one-two-three chords repeatedly as the orchestra plays the melody. The piano then takes that melody and weaves lots of variations with it. The second movement starts with a single flute playing an achingly beautiful air, which the piano then takes up. The woodwinds take it back for a while and embellish it and give it back to the piano, which then does intricate wonders with it. A bash of the tympani jolt us out of our reverie in the final movement, which is marked "Con Fuoco" (with fire) which nicely sums up the energy and demanding piano work all the way through to the finale. Altogether, it is quite rousing.

I told a friend, John Kim, that after Rachmaninov, I intended to write about the other piano concertos that transfixed me during high school-those of Greig, Schumann, and Brahms. His reaction was: "Gee, you're really going right into the heart of the Romantic period then. Aren't you going to write about any light pieces?" I told him that my goal was to present the pieces in the order they came to me, and these all arrived in my late teens.

Perhaps I gravitated toward during this time period because they gave me solace amid the turbulence of those years. As I've said, I was wrestling with depression caused by and resulting in insecurity. Other people self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, sex and food. Listening to music was my way of expressing and experiencing my emotions in a controlled way.

Many of my high school friends were straight A students, gifted athletes, and the most popular kids in class. Yet when they got into drugs and alcohol, they went completely overboard. Some dropped out of school. The brother of another shattered his body in a horrible alcohol-related car wreck and lay in a coma for a month. Other got married too soon, ruining their chance of a professional career. Another went into the Navy to find the discipline could not impose on himself. Considering my personality, I don't know how I would have turned out had I not found music to assuage my growing pains.

You might say "What a bourgeois, spoiled waste of talent. Four fifths of the world's population don't have enough to eat and we in America kill ourselves with drugs." Perhaps this is true. Back then we didn't see it that way. We all thought we were supermen. We could do anything and thought we had enough good sense to pull ourselves back from the brink. Maybe our comfort gave us this false sense of security. Or maybe, having had all of our material comforts provided us, we felt we needed to take these risks to feel alive.

Seems like we could all be more efficient. Too bad "culture" gets such short shrift in our consumerist society. It used to be the glue that held society together and passed down the "lessons-learned" so you didn't have to reinvent the wheel with each generation. And it really wasn't stultifying to have to learn a discipline like music. Once you master what's gone before, you have good foundation on which to build. Just as Tchaikowsky learned from and built upon the work of Anton Rubenstein and Rimsky-Korsakov, so did his pupil, Rachmaninov, who carried on and went even further. Superman's myth--that you can leap-frog over buildings in a single bound--is decidedly false.

• Biography
• Youtube
• Recording

Sergei Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

There is something refreshing about the self-assuredness of youth. It's almost, indeed, a requirement. Evolutionarily, we were designed to reproduce young because the life span was only about 30 years. So only the strongest and most quick-witted reproduced. I think money and class were invented for everyone else. If you couldn’t compete in tests of physical prowess, you could always become so rich or politically powerful that babes would flock to you. How else can you explain the trophy wives of Henry Kissinger, Prince Charles, and Woody Allen?

I bring this up, because as the years seem to speed faster the older I get, it makes me muse on my own contributions and those of the youth of today. Recently, a study appeared in some journal of psychology stating that an active mental life plays almost as important, if not more important, role as physical exercise in keeping Alzheimer's and senility at bay. How many people though, once they hit a certain age or certain comfort level, actually work at keeping their brains active and challenged? Is it more than just a coincidence that the ascendancy of Alzheimer's has seemed to follow the rise of television?

So far this week I've written about four pieces by Rachmaninov that feature the piano. They span his life from the age of 18 when he wrote the First Piano Concerto to age 36, when he premiered his Third. He wrote the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini when he was 61, an age at which today--even with longer life--spans, many people are already sinking into stupor and senility. What's more, the Rhapsody is arguably Rachmaninov's most incredible work, technically and melodically, and that shows his powers were virtually undiminished, indeed, even grew more impressive with the passing years.

The Rhapsody contains 24 variations on a theme by the composer and violinist, Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840). Paganini was such a master of the violin that he was accused of having sold his soul to the devil to become so. He once wrote a solo piece in which the violinist has to play 3,000 notes in just over four minutes. And listening to Rachmaninov's variations on theme, you might think that he was similarly possessed.

The piece is as long as his piano concertos and like them contains lush melodies and incendiary keyboard work. What's intriguing is how he takes the theme and varies it so many different ways that you never get tired of it. He inverts it, plays it loud, plays it soft, speeds it up, slows it down, gives it to the orchestra and then back to the pianist. In the final variations, he gives it to the pianist again and again who each time plays it even faster. It becomes almost possessed and toward the end you detect a kind of Slavic or even oriental mode, which reminds me a bit of Mussorgsky. Whenever this piece comes on the radio, for it still enjoys wide popularity, I find myself stopping whatever occupied me and giving the Rhapsody my full attention. And every time I do, new things pop out that I'd missed before.

Perhaps we are like that a bit. The older I get the more I find things falling into place. What was a puzzle at 20 suddenly became clear in my forties. Check back in 20 years and I'll tell you whether my mind is still as spry as it feels today.

• Rachmaninov bio on Boosey & Hawkes site
• Youtube (Rubenstein on early TV)
• Buy recording

Sergei Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto Number 2 in C minor

The major task for all adolescents is to work out their own personality. I realize that nowadays, the nature-nurture researchers have pretty much proven that many personality traits we once thought of as learned are actually determined by the genes one inherits. From my own high school experiences, however, I don't find that to be the case.

Were I to choose a totem animal to represent my adolescent years, it would have to be the chameleon. I was exposed to so many different people in person and through books, classical music, and the popular media, that sometimes I didn't know who I really was. For example, when I went through my Russian author phase and read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich I made an aluminum spoon in my shop class, wrote the words, "Outer Mongolia" on it, and insisted on eating every meal with it. When I discovered James Joyce, I tried reading in poor light to destroy my eyesight so I could wear wire-rimmed glasses like him. When I saw Fellini's Roma, I carried my jacket over my shoulder in an attempt to look as cool as the young swell in the film.

Perhaps I was too influenced by the stronger personalities--usually the intellectuals--in my high school who became my role models. I say "too influenced," because though they knew a lot about books and music, they weren't always the wisest in the way of relationships and human emotions. Intellectuals for one thing don't always get the girls, and so have a lot of anger at the injustice of life (and at all those alpha male athletes who do score.) Intellectuals at this age also have another problem, they think that thinking can solve all the world's (and one's personal) problems. So they would not necessarily be sympathetic to, say, psychological counseling though they might desperately need it. Let me give you an example, which relates to today's piece.

Critics had not liked Rachmaninov First Symphony and he became depressed and went into a lethargic slump. He would not compose or perform. The Royal Philharmonic Society in London had commissioned him to write a piano concerto, but his mental state kept him from doing so. His relatives became so concerned that they persuaded him to seek the help of a noted psychologist named Dr. Nikolay Dahl. Dr. Dahl used hypnotism and the power of suggestion to restore Rachmaninov's self-confidence. During their sessions, the doctor would repeat to Rachmaninov: "You will begin to write your concerto.. you will work with great facility…the concerto will be of excellent quality." Rachmaninov stated that the good doctor's cure worked and by 1900 he had started working on the Second Piano Concerto. It remains the most popular of the four concertos that he wrote.

In high school, I had another friend named Eric Tollar who also loved Rachmaninov's work. He originally told me this story about Rachmaninov's cure. When I said it was neat, he said something like "No, it's not. It's stupid!" I think his point was that if Rachmaninov needed someone to repeat mindless phrases to him over and over again, he wasn't really a genius, and his work probably wasn't that great after all.

Unfortunately, that tended to color my own attitude toward depression, which had grave consequences for me. When I became depressed in high school and college, I believed it would be a sign of weakness to seek treatment. If I couldn't work it out for myself, then I was weak and certainly no intellectual. As I later learned reading Listening to Prozac if one doesn't seek external treatment for depression, one usually ends up self-medicating-either through drugs, alcohol or addictive behaviors. Thus, I spent the next 20 years battling depression.

According to the research presented in that book, there is a kindling effect associated with depression. The emotion of depression are associated with certain chemical imbalances in the brain. If you repeatedly get depressed and don't get treatment eventually your brain chemistry changes so that you become even more susceptible to it--like dry kindling is to fire. Eventually, I tried therapy, which helped a great deal for about a year, but then I fell back into depression.  After reading the book, I sought treatment from a psychiatrist who prescribed Prozac. Prozac, it's said, has the ability to somehow reset the brain chemistry back to the state before the depression started. Now I feel more productive than ever before in my life.

Fortunately--maybe because of my own experience with depression--I never thought less of Rachmaninov because of his treatment and therefore still enjoy his works. Every time I hear the Piano Concerto Number 2 it perks me up. It starts out with a beautiful romantic melody with a Slavic feel to it. The piano and the orchestra go back and forth for about half of the movement and then the piano takes off and plays some of the most incredibly fast passages probably every written. Near the end, the piano leads the way through several mysterious sounding key changes, which still give me chills. The second movement has one of the most beautiful melodies ever written, which some minimally talented singer stole back in the 1970s and incorporated into his pop song, "All by Myself." Sheer dreck.

The last movement starts out with a little march that then picks up, sounding a bit like Tchaikowsky (under whom Rachmaninov studied). Then the strings play one of the most heart-rendingly beautiful melody of all times, which the piano then picks up. The movement then unfolds into dialogs, solos, contrasts, harmonies, explosions, and tenderness. It really is one of the great works of all times.

Isolated, airy, dry intellect is certainly alluring. Sometimes we poke fun of the "ivory tower" intellectual, divorced and removed from the world. What shame is there in asking for help when one truly needs it? Didn't someone once say "Pride goeth before the fall?" Imagine what would have happened had Rachmaninov not gone to the good Dr. Dahl? We all would have been deprived of this wonderful work.

Rachmaninov Bio

Youtube (Van Cliburn Performing in 1958 in Moscow)

Recording by Van Cliburn

Sergei Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto Number 3

Casting my mind back to my discovery of Rachmaninov in my high school days, for some reason I seem to draw almost a complete blank when it comes to his Third Piano Concerto. It's certain that I listened to it a lot, because I instantly recognized it, despite not having sat down to listen to it for nearly 20 years, when the movie, Shine came out. The "Rach Three" supposedly was the piece that the young pianist--completely dominated and then disowned by his father--became obsessed with mastering. Immediately after performing it for the first time in concert, he collapsed and went into a psychotic episode that lasted a good number of years.

In college, I took a course in abnormal psychology. Back then, the reigning theory of its etiology stated that psychotics are born with the genes that predispose them to psychosis. Should they be born into a normal family, they end up normal. Should their family turn out to be severely dysfunctional, in which the child has no emotional anchors or points of reference of sanity, they descend into the hell of psychosis.

In the movie Shine, the boy chose the concerto against his father's wishes to prove he could stand on his own. It painted the father as a sick, domineering man. In one scene you note a number tattooed on the old man's arm. Maybe he was a concentration camp survivor. Having lost all his family in the war, perhaps he felt he had to hold onto his own children--in an unnaturally controlling way--to keep from losing them. Another insidious legacy of the Nazis.

The Piano Concerto Number 3 is supposed to be one of the most difficult pieces to play. In Shine, the boy's piano teacher shows him a plaster cast of Rachmaninov's hands. They were gargantuan and that made the piece incredibly difficult to play as few pianist have that kind of span. What's more, Rachmaninov, who made his living as a concert pianist--to make up for all he lost in leaving Russia after the Revolution--wrote the piece to showcase his own virtuosity at the keyboard. The piece is so difficult that the pianist to whom Rachmaninov dedicated the work, (a Joseph Hoffman) could not even perform it. And finally, Rachmaninov wrote even more difficult passages for himself than the ones found in the published score.

Rachmaninov premiered this piece in November of 1909 in the U.S. at the age of 36. He performed it again in January the following year with the New York Symphony Society with no other titan of music as Gustav Mahler conducting. He was at the height of his powers, just past the midpoint of this life.

The first movement starts out with a beautiful, brooding, Slavic theme in the D minor key. The incredibly fluid runs of the second movement stuck in my mind where they played over and over again during the countless laps I swam while practicing on my swim team. The final movement starts with a bang and then runs off full of life and energy until the orchestra kicks in with a lush melody. The piano then takes this theme and weaves it around in intricate curlicues, fast but playful and pretty. The orchestra swells up, which slows the pianist down for a while, but it eventually finds ways of bursting out with joy and energy. Toward the end, it starts to sound a bit like Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture and the Slavic feeling comes back rushing in to carry us along in a troika to the glorious ending.

Here is a cute story about Rachmaninov, from Today in the World, December 15, 1992:

Sergey Rachmaninoff was once honored at a dinner hosted by fellow pianist Arthur Rubinstein. During the course of the evening, Rachmaninoff said he thought the Grieg piano concerto the greatest ever written. When Rubinstein said he had just recorded it, Rachmaninoff insisted on hearing it then and there. During coffee, Rubinstein put on the proofs of the record and Rachmaninoff, closing his eyes, settled down to listen. He listened right through without saying a word. At the end of the concerto he opened his eyes and said, "Piano out of tune."

It seems like in the past, every so often, a god would come down and walk among us poor mortals. I think of Albert Schweitzer, the good doctor, Bach scholar and interpreter. Or Ghandi, who practiced non-violence to move an empire. Rachmaninov surely sits on Mount Olympus now with his peers, not for having performed great feats of altruism, but for being such a genius who didn't keep it to himself and gave us some of the most wonderful, exciting, life affirming music, despite his brush with mental illness. I wonder how long our current "cult of the victim" is going to last, and when the next Rachmaninov is going to arrive. I hope he or she shows up soon.

• Rachmaninov Bio
• Watch on Youtube
• Recording With Horowitz (supposedly the best

Sergei Rachmaninov: Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op.3 No.2

In high school, when I told my friend Paul Mankowski, whose family seemed to know everything about classical music, that I really liked Rachmaninov, he told me I had to listen to the Prelude in C-sharp minor. Never had I heard anything like this piece. It sounded to me like pure madness-wrestled with, captured, and channeled into music. This piece so impressed me that I decided that I had to learn how to play it on the piano.

Now, of course you realize, I did not know how to play the piano. But being young and naïve, I thought that if I bought the sheet music and found a willing teacher, they could just teach me that one piece. I wasn't actually asking for that much, I reasoned. It wasn't like I wanted to learn how to play every piece of music on the piano. Just this one piece. So I went out in search of the music and a teacher.

I already had a piano. "Wait," you might say. "Didn't he once write that his parents had made him play the clarinet?" Yes, they did, but we also had an old upright piano that we bought for $25 from the elementary school across the street from my house, when they upgraded their pianos. This was back in the late 1960s and my mother was into crafts and furniture refinishing at the time. She painted it a light, dusty green and then started to "antique" by rubbing on some kind of strange stain. She lost steam somewhere during the project and never did finish it. It ended up in our TV room in our old farm-house, where it remained silent for the most part, yielding up "chopsticks" from time to time when we had visitors.

I only heard a real song played on our piano twice. The first time was right after it arrived. My parents hired a piano tuner to come and give it the once over. I watched with great interest as he lifted the lid and with a special crank and tuning fork proceed turn transform it from a tinny toy piano into a beautiful instrument. He sat down afterwards and played a short tune for me.

The second time took place on a visit to our house that my father's sister, Aunt Julia, and her husband John paid us. John was a thin man with a pencil mustache, emphysema, and a gentle nature. They had met in New York and he had a Bronx accent, I think. When he saw the piano, he became nostalgic and said he had played piano in a speak-easy when he was a young man (maybe 30 or 40 years before the time this happened.) He sat down and started to play a piece that he said was a kind of honky-tonk song. It saddened me to watch his performance. His hands moved in a rhythmic way, it looked as if there was some purpose behind the keys he aimed at. But the result w unrecognizable as music. I marveled at how he could have forgotten. "Surely," I thought, "it had to be like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you never forget."

The local music store ordered the sheet music for me. I smirked at the cashier--a girl from my high school--when I paid for it. She didn't say anything about the Prelude in C-sharp minoror my good taste in purchasing it, so I knew she was unfamiliar with it. "How could they hire someone to work in a music store, who didn't know about Rachmaninov?" I asked my self.

It was easy to find a piano teacher. Almost every other girl in my school took piano lessons, an one of them, a cute little blonde named Jeanie, sat next to me in French class. I told her of my plan to play the preludeand asked if she could teach me. "I don't know the piece," but she said she'd look at the sheet music and then tell me. She seemed to avoid me for a while after that, and when I finally got a chance to ask her about it, she said: "I can't teach you that. It's too hard. I can't even play it. You'd need to have studied piano for years." I was crushed but fortunately didn't become bitter about it, and continued to love Rachmaninov's with just as much intensity for years.

• Rachmaninov bio on Wikipedia
• Youtube Performance
• Recording

Johann Sebastian Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3

Many years ago, my daughter's violin teacher, Mark Pfannschmidt, gave us a call. He wanted to know whether we could make use of some free tickets to a performance of the National Chamber Orchestra, with which he sometimes plays. Since the tickets ranged in price from $17 to $34, we jumped at the chance. The concert took place at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Center for the Performing Arts in Rockville, Maryland, which town--for some strange reason--is the final resting place for that writer and his wife, Zelda.

The National Chamber Orchestra which has since become The National Philharmonic is under the direction of Piotr Gajewski, who is also on the musical faculty at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Gajewski also worked with a local youth orchestra that my daughter played with. I was pleasantly surprised to see the program featured two works by Bach, the Piano Concerto No. 4 in A and the third Brandenburg Concerto. My knowledge of the latter goes back to before high school, for I think it also appears on "Switched-On Bach." But, I really fell in love with it when, on a visit to my friend Paul Mankowski's house, I heard a recording of it conducted by Pablo Casals.

Bach wrote six concertos for the Margrave, Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg (Bavaria) in 1721. Supposedly he dedicated them to the Margrave in the hopes of gaining employment in Berlin with the Margrave's orchestras, which was one of the finest in Europe at that time period. Unfortunately, the Margrave had asked him to compose them two years earlier, and by the time Bach presented them, his request for employment was ignored. Interesting to know that way back then they already used to say: "We'll let you know."

The term "concerto" originally meant a group of instruments playing together, but by Bach's time it had evolved into a group of instruments playing in combination or alternating with a larger orchestra. It eventually came to be applied to a form with three movements for a single instrument, like a piano or violin, playing "against" an orchestra. In the third Brandenburg Concerto, Bach gives the focus to three groups--the violins, violas and cello--and puts a bass and harpsichord continuo behind them.

Though I've listened to this piece countless times, that night was the first time I'd ever seen it performed live. It adds such a dimension to see how a melody will start with one group of instruments, move to a second, and finally end up in the third. In a way Bach pioneered this technique and it gave rise to new forms-trios, quartets, quintets, and other chamber arrangements.

Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number 3 has just two real movements. There is a brief interlude, called adagio between the two allegro movements, but it only consists of two notes. On some recordings, you will hear that expanded with an improvisational piece given to the harpsichord. That was the case on my old Casals recording.

The first and last movements of the Brandenburg Concerto Number 3 live up to the "happy" label. (Allegro means happy in Italian.) Both also have strong beats, which (and I'm not sure if this is "cultured" behavior) make me tap my feet along with them.

The reason Bach wanted to get a job with the Margrave's orchestra, had to do with his dissatisfaction composing liturgical music, which he had to do as a choir master. At the age of 36, when he composed them, perhaps he was having a midlife crisis, and wanted to follow his bliss. The Third Brandenbug Concerto, therefore, is that much more remarkable because it has none of the whining, self-pitying tone of the modern, balding men stuck in dead-end jobs. It soars! And how much more fun we would all have if we did, too

• Bach Bio
• Youtube
• Buy Recording

Sergei Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto Numbr 1 in F-sharp minor

Today, I begin writing about a composer who became my favorite in high school--Sergei Rachmaninov. His music, primarily the pieces he wrote for piano and orchestra, galvanized me. Not only were these full of compositional fireworks, they also seemed to be bursting with emotion. Lush romantic swells, demonic flights of intricate keyboard work, mysterious key changes, angst-filled phrases, and joyous, explosive finishes. In short, for me they provided the perfect soundtrack for the emotional state of an adolescent Midwestern boy trying to make sense of love and life.

Sergei Rachmaninov was born in Russia in 1873. He fled his homeland after the Russian revolution and eventually settled in the US, where he died in California in 1943. He was a gifted pianist, who was in high demand, and performing became his means of living during his exile. He felt some anguish over this since it meant that he couldn't devote as much time to composition, but at the same time, it probably made his music more popular through exposure.

Among the cache of used classical records I bought once at a garage sale was a recording of his first and fourth piano concertos performed by Philippe Entremont with the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Eugene Ormandy. Rachmaninov composed the first piano concerto at the age of 18, while still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. Though he won a gold medal from the Conservatory for composition because of the piece, Rachmaninov was not satisfied with it and 25 years later reworked the score. Supposedly little was left from the origninal work save its major themes.

The work starts out with a brief statement by the horns (which sound a bit like the beginning of Tchaikowski's Sixth Symphony), followed by an explosive entry from the piano. The movement is marked vivace and it alternates between rapid, demanding piano fireworks and lush melodies played by the strings. This concerto quickly became one of my favorites and I became so fascinated with the piano's flights and runs of notes that I listened to it again and again. I mentioned earlier that I was on my high school's swim team, and this was another piece that I would try to "hear" in my head while I swam the monotonous laps back and forth during practice. As I worked through all of his piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini I found myself less and less bothered by those hours of swimming.

The last movement is an allegro vivace, fast and happy, and contains more exciting sections by the piano. For a long time though I liked it very much, it sounded a bit "Hollywood-like." By that I mean the kind of lush, romantic music used back in the 30s. Maybe it was because around this time I was watching films from that era--especially the Marx Brothers, where they'd always have some musical number with Harpo or Chico backed up by a full orchestra. Hollywood may indeed have been influenced by Rachmaninov, who ended up living in California, where he died in 1943. It's a bit anachronistic, to think of his music that way, since he premiered this piece in 1919 in the States. So we really should think of Hollywood music from the 30s and 40s as "Rachmaninov-like."

Biography  Youtube Buy the Recording

Sergei Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

There is something refreshing about the self-assuredness of youth. It's almost, indeed, a requirement. Evolutionarily, we were designed to reproduce young because the life span was only about 30 years. So only the strongest and most quick-witted reproduced. I think money and class were invented for everyone else. If you couldn’t compete in tests of physical prowess, you could always become so rich or politically powerful that babes would flock to you. How else can you explain the trophy wives of Henry Kissinger, Prince Charles, and Woody Allen?

I bring this up, because as the years seem to speed faster the older I get, it makes me muse on my own contributions and those of the youth of today. Recently, a study appeared in some journal of psychology stating that an active mental life plays almost as important, if not more important, role as physical exercise in keeping Alzheimer's and senility at bay. How many people though, once they hit a certain age or certain comfort level, actually work at keeping their brains active and challenged? Is it more than just a coincidence that the ascendancy of Alzheimer's has seemed to follow the rise of television?

So far this week I've written about four pieces by Rachmaninov that feature the piano. They span his life from the age of 18 when he wrote the First Piano Concerto to age 36, when he premiered his Third. He wrote the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini when he was 61, an age at which today--even with longer life--spans, many people are already sinking into stupor and senility. What's more, the Rhapsody is arguably Rachmaninov's most incredible work, technically and melodically, and that shows his powers were virtually undiminished, indeed, even grew more impressive with the passing years.

The Rhapsody contains 24 variations on a theme by the composer and violinist, Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840). Paganini was such a master of the violin that he was accused of having sold his soul to the devil to become so. He once wrote a solo piece in which the violinist has to play 3,000 notes in just over four minutes. And listening to Rachmaninov's variations on theme, you might think that he was similarly possessed.

The piece is as long as his piano concertos and like them contains lush melodies and incendiary keyboard work. What's intriguing is how he takes the theme and varies it so many different ways that you never get tired of it. He inverts it, plays it loud, plays it soft, speeds it up, slows it down, gives it to the orchestra and then back to the pianist. In the final variations, he gives it to the pianist again and again who each time plays it even faster. It becomes almost possessed and toward the end you detect a kind of Slavic or even oriental mode, which reminds me a bit of Mussorgsky. Whenever this piece comes on the radio, for it still enjoys wide popularity, I find myself stopping whatever occupied me and giving the Rhapsody my full attention. And every time I do, new things pop out that I'd missed before.

Perhaps we are like that a bit. The older I get the more I find things falling into place. What was a puzzle at 20 suddenly became clear in my forties. Check back in 20 years and I'll tell you whether my mind is still as spry as it feels today.

• Rachmaninov bio on Boosey & Hawkes site
• Youtube (Rubenstein on early TV)
• Buy recording

Ludwig Van Beethoven: Sonata Number C Minor, Opus 13 "Pathetique"

 Beethoven wrote the Pathetique sonata when he was twenty seven and it is only one of two that he gave a title to. He used the termPathetique in the ancient Greek sense of Pathos or "with feeling." He did not mean for it to sound sad pitiable as the term pathetic connotes nowadays.

Young artists often are full of bravado--and try to show feats of technical brilliance to capture attention and make their name. This does not seem the case with the Pathetique. Though supposedly quite complex and difficult to play, it sounds wonderfully lyrical and masterfully attained Beethoven's goal of being full of emotion.

My friend John Kim told me a while back, however, that Beethoven's music was so different and passionate from what was being written at the time, that it was branded as "obscene!" Supposedly, women upon hearing this shocking music, would become short of breath and swoon. So though when I listen to it today and find it almost prematurely mature in the depth of the feelings in this piece by a mere 27 year-old.   Perhaps Beethoven was just trying to turn himself into a "babe magnet" after all.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I took refuge in classical music during my adolescence, partly from shyness. Listening and getting caught up with the emotions in music was a way of channeling what raging hormones were causing me to experience. If I developed a crush on someone back then, it was much easier for me to go home and listen to a moving piece of music than it was to actually act upon it, ask the person for a date, and risk rejection.

"Youth," older people are fond of saying, "is wasted on the young." But thank god we're only young once. Some people, wracked with the pain of shyness and rejection, turn to drugs, alcohol, food or other addictive behaviors. Fortunately I discovered the more enduring--and infinitely more healthy--outlet of classical music.

The first movement of the Pathetique starts out slowly with dark sounding chords, that sound a bit sad and pensive. But it soon takes off on a faster more tuneful tack, which lifts the spirits. Eventually, it returns to recap the opening. This alternating between the slow and fast continues for the rest of the movement. The second movement is a slow and beautifully romantic melody that was used by Karl Haas on this public radio show, "Adventures in Good Music." The finale is a fast Rondo, which means of the form A,B,A,C,A,D,A, where the different letters stand for the melody in different keys or separate melodies altogether.

Beethoven grew up in a musical family and by the age of 13 had secured a position as court harpsichordist for the Elector of Bonn. Though invented in 1709, the piano forte did not gain popularity until the latter half of the century, which coincided with Beethoven's own rise. The piano combined the force and brilliance of a harpsichord, with the clavichord's ability to play crescendo and diminuendo. Beethoven wrote works for the solo piano all his life, pushing the envelope of the instrument as well as his own. Referring to his works for solo piano, Stravinsky called Beethoven the "master of the instrument." You can definitely hear why in the Pathetique.

•  Beethoven Bio
• Youtube
• Recording

Ludwig Van Beethoven: Sonata Number 14 in C Minor, Opus 27/2 "Moonlight"

The Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody, which I discussed in my previous post, caused me to become aware of another dimension of classical music. For the most part, before hearing it, I'd only listened to orchestral music. Now all of a sudden along comes a piece in which a solo instrument, the piano, played as important a role as the orchestra. From there, I went on to become fascinated by works for solo piano and piano concertos. Once you start down that road, it's a short step to becoming interested in other solo instruments, different performers and how they interpret the same piece.

Luckily for me, around the time I became interested in individual performers, some of the greatest ones were still alive. Many, like Rubenstein and Horowitz, were born early enough to have overlapped with the lives of the composers whose work they had become famous performing. Horowitz for example knew Scriabin and Rachmaninov, and Rubinstein was around 13 when Greig died.

I had the pleasure of seen Rubenstein on the Dick Cavett Show in the early 1970s. He struck me as a rather kind soul with a self-deprecating sense of humor. He must have been in his mid 80s at that time, and he laughed when he told the story of how his wife could hear him dropping notes when he played nowadays. I couldn't tell, and he became my favorite performer. I bought his recordings of Greig, Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven.

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata probably gets the most air play of the thirty two that he wrote over the course of his life. It dates from 1801, when he was 31, and it became an instant hit. Beethoven resented this popularity saying to a friend "Surely I have written better things." The name Moonlight Sonata was given to it by a critic after Beethoven died, when in one of those fanciful review of the age, the writer linked it to Lake Lucerne in the moonlight.

It begins with a simple, one-two-three rhythm in one hand which is joined by a slow, quiet, and thoughtful melody in the other. The second movement skips along quietly with a kind of syncopated tune jumping back and forth between the hands. The ending is starts out soft but fast with a low, galloping, melody that boils up, explodes and then shoots off in another direction with an intricate flurry of keys. This repeats with several variations until the end. The finish blows out all those sad cobwebs one wades through.

Incredible that after nearly 200 years, it remains a popular piece. Incredible, too, that after over 20 year, it still holds my interest.

• Beethoven Bio
• Rubinstein on Youtube
• Recording

Franz Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14 in F Minor

One of the first composers whose name I learned was Franz Liszt. That was a result of my Hungarian ancestry. My grandfather came to the United States in 1904, and my father, though born here, grew up speaking Hungarian. I had a friend named Nick Humphrey who calls me a hot-blooded Magyar, but in truth, in my youth, I was shy and part of that also had to do with my background.

My grandfather settled in northern Indiana after going through Ellis Island. My home town, South Bend, was a huge manufacturing center because of Studebaker's, which made Conestoga wagons in the previous century and had become a major automaker in the first half of the 20th. Huge numbers of Europeans migrated to South Bend and to the Gary, Indiana and Chicago area around the time my grandfather did. Our city had large Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Belgian and German communities. The Poles and "Hunkies" even had their own radio shows on Sunday afternoons on the local AM radio station, WSBT.

On Saturdays, we visited my Hungarian grandfather's house and on Sundays, my Belgian grandmother's. On both sides of the family, I had many aunts and uncles and countless cousins, so these visits in the early 60s were quite fun for me. Of course, I liked Christmas time the best, but especially at my Hungarian grandfather's house. My dad's sisters used to cook wonderful sweets: kifli--which were small buttery croissants of flaky pastry filled with ground walnuts, egg whites, and sugar--and kolach, a sweet yeasty bread roll filled with ground, moistened and sweetened poppy seeds.

My aunts and uncles used to talk about the culture of the Austro-Hungarian empire and particularly the composer Lizst. What's odd is that I don't remember ever hearing any of them play Lizst on visits to their house and none played any musical instruments that I know of. Even stranger still is that I somehow feel more of a connection to my Hungarian roots than my Belgian. Something about being Hungarian seemed to set me apart.

That feeling began to develop when my Hungarian grandfather died in 1964. My father had a younger brother named George, who at the age of 18 was crippled by arthritis, which bent his body into a 90 degree angle. Uncle George never married and lived with his parents. When grandpa died the task of caring for grandma fell to Uncle George. He was helped in that by his sister, my aunt Helen, who was married but didn't have any children. My father used to visit to help Uncle George fix things around the house, garden, or just relieve Helen who kept house during the week.

Often, I was left inside to watch grandma, who spent most of the next six years until she died in a trapezoidal area whose corners were formed by the television, her bed, the kitchen and the bathroom. Eventually, the poor circulation in her legs limited her range to the triangle of the bed, kitchen and bathroom. My job then was to help her, when she called to me, get out of bed and shuffle to the bathroom. She spoke one word of English: "Eat!" which she would tell me as we passed through the kitchen if Helen had left some treat out for me.

This was a confusing time for me as I spent hours sitting alone in the house as the shadows lengthened, trying to occupy myself as best I could. Usually, I sat in the parlor which had huge paintings. In one Our Lady of Lourdes appeared to the children, and in another, the sacred heart of Jesus--on fire and encircled with a ring of thorns--floated in front of a life size portrait of the saviour. Sometimes I read Reader's Digestand did the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" quizzes, or I would just watch television.

When my grandmother died in 1970, I had just turned 15 and I was nominated to be a pall bearer. For an adolescent, I can't think of anything more traumatic, but I tried to take my job seriously and act dignified. Making it more affecting was the fact that that was the first time I ever saw my father cry. I thought I had pulled it off fairly well, but then afterwards people started asking me, "Was it heavy?" which seemed to me kind of sacrilegious.

Around this time, I found Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14 in F Minorin a stack of used records at a garage sale in Nowheresville, Indiana. It quickly became one of my favorite pieces and not just because Liszt was Hungarian.

Supposedly Lizst was one of the first mega-stars of serious music. He toured quite a bit performing the works of Scarlatti, Chopin and himself.  He was kind of the Michael Jackson or Tom Jones of his day. Women flocked to his concert and would throw their long white gloves onstage while he played, just as women in the 1960s would throw their underwear at Tom Jones.

Because of this, Liszt has sometimes been dismissed as more of a showman than a really great composer. True, he made his own pieces increasingly showier and technically more challenging. My friend John Kim tells me that modern pianists can only play about 60 per cent of the piano music that Liszt wrote.

But listening to the Rhapsody No. 14, you hear much more profound feelings. It begins with a funeral march, and a short melody is is played in a stately manner. You think it's going to be a somber piece. But then Lizst starts improvising on the melody. He plays impossible chords and then these incredible glissandos at lightening speeds. They are so fluid that they always remind me of water. It finishes joyously and brings one out of any morose one might have had.

For a quiet, shy boy from Indiana born in an immigrant community, this music helped me find solace for my lonliness and gave me a glimpse of the glory to be found in art.

•  Liszt Bio
• Recording
• Youtube

 

Johann Sebastian Bach: Air on the G String

Before starting this, I hadn't realized the extent to which Wendy Carlos' album "Switched-On Bach" influenced my love of classical music. My friend Kerry Wade loaned me his copy of it shortly after I met him, and I must have played it scores of times. The ebullient energy of the inventions and the Sinfonia really captivated me. It made me realize that "serious" music could be light-hearted and entertaining.

In my last post, I wrote about how baroque music could even be funny. Hopefully that entry didn't sound like I was trivializing music from that time period. As promised, today I will write about a sublime work from that epoch, but before that, I want to suggest that composers of the baroque era might have had a sense of humor as well.

I have told you that Bach wrote a Mass for every day of the year in cantata form. Cantatas are kind of like mini-oratorios. Around the time that Bach was active, it just so happened that in Europe a new plague was sweeping over Europe. This scourge was not "The Black Death," and in truth, probably didn't really kill anyone. But the effects of it galvanized European culture, which it changed irreversibly.

I'm talking of course about coffee.

When coffee first arrived in Europe, it was like the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Dens of iniquity sprang up all over Europe. These were called "cafes" and the upper classes spent countless hours, wasting huge sums of money, in caffeine induced stupors. And they didn't even have "decaf iced mocha-frappucinos."

Public officials were outraged at this epidemic, which obviously tickled Bach. In 1732, he penned Cantata Number 211,called the "Coffee Cantata," to be performed in a café. One of the lines from it goes:

"Ah! How sweet the taste of coffee is, sweeter than thousands of kisses..."

In all truth, the baroque period covered a span of 150 years, and though the upbeat tends to get the spotlight, you don't have to go very far to find thoughtful, beautiful, and deeply emotive works. Today's piece, Air on the G Stringprobably is the most well-known and beloved piece in this category. Unfortunately, since it is so well-loved, it tends to get repackaged in every compilation of thoughtful, beautiful and deeply emotive works. If you look it up on the net, for example, you'll find it included on albums like "Classical/Quiet Nights," "Stress Busters - Music for a Stress-Less World", "Serene Journeys through Classical Music."

Still, it will transport you back to a time when Starbucks did not exist and few people ever died of stress-related diseases. Just the plague, religious wars, and from not knowing about germs.

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Peter Schickele: Cantata, Iphegenia In Brooklyn

I mentioned before that my friend Kerry Wade, had been a fan of Peter Schickele, who'd parodied baroque music under the nom de plume of P.D.Q Bach. Around the time of Switched-On Bach, Schickele released a comedy album, whose premise was a small classical public radio station (W.O.O.F.) at the "University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople."

Between farm commodity reports, the announcer ran a contest called "What's My Melodic Line?" Listeners were invited to send in the name of a piece by a baroque composer, which a panel of experts musicians then had to try to play off the top of their head. Should the listener succeed, they would be entered in a yearly competition. The grand prize was the complete works of Antonio Vivaldi recorded on "convenient 45 rpm records," which would be sent to the winner one a week "over the next 35 years." The composer of the day was described as " the prolific and least known of all the prolific and little known composers of the baroque period."

One of my favorite types of humor has always been parody, so Schickele's poking fun at baroque music really resonated with me. Serious musicians, however, tended to look down their nose at Schickele. I'm not sure why. That someone told jokes about music didn't stop me from listening to music.

Maybe Schickele was actually making fun of serious musicians and composers of his own day. Only a fraction of Vivaldi's music, I recently heard, has ever been recorded. And he was prolific. Perhaps Schickele was saying, "how come today, there aren't any composers around like that?" Or perhaps, he was criticizing how people just keep going back and recording over and over again the same old familiar stuff. Every time I turn on the radio and hear Barber's Adiagio for Strings or Pachelbel's Canon again, I want to throw something at it.

Finally, maybe he was making fun of the bubbly baroque style. Sometimes it is just too upbeat and gets on your nerves. Also, because of its conventions, it seems too "happy" to convey serious themes. For example, Handel wrote an oratorio called Israel in Egypt. In one chorus, the text recounts how Moses called down the plagues on Egypt. It goes something like:

"He spake the work and all manner of flies and lice descended."

I still laugh whenever I think of that line. Schickele clearly had Handel in mind when he wrote : Cantata, Iphegenia In Brooklyn. Here is the complete text:

"ARIA: As Hyperion across the flaming sky his chariot did ride, Iphegenia herself in Brooklyn found.

RECITATIVE: And lo, she found herself within a market, and all around her fish were dying; and yet their stench did live on.

GROUND: Dying, and yet in death alive.

RECITATIVE: And in a vision Iphegenia saw her brother Orestes, who was being chased by the Amenities; and he cried out in anguish: "Oh ye gods, who knows what it is to be running? Only he who is running knows."

ARIA: Running knows."

Schickele scored the piece for double reeds. Normally that means oboes and English horns, but he had the musician just use the reeds, not the instruments. The result was a kind of musical Bronx cheer. In addition, the lead voice is a counter tenor, a part that requires a man with a bass voice to sing in falsetto, which imitates the castratto or male soprano which was popular back then. See what I mean by the conventions being kind of incongruous with the subject?

Obviously, the baroque era produced sublime works as well. Eventually, I will get around to discussing them. But, I want to reiterate that Schickele and the other popularization of the classics that took place in the 60s (such as "Switched-On Bach") probably did more to help the cause of classical music than it did harm. And I will love to the day I die that horrible pun of that last aria in the Cantata, Iphegenia In Brooklyn.

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Johann Sebastian Bach: Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29

Last post, I wrote about Wendy Carlos, who in 1967 released the record "Switched-On Bach," and her contribution to electronic music. She also helped give old Johann Sebastian Bach's career a shot in the arm as well. When I did a search on the name "Bach" on Amazon's website, I ended up with 0ver 25,000 recordings. I once read that Bach, Beethoven and Mozart are the hottest selling classical composers these days, which indicates great staying power as Ludwig has been dead over 181 years.

By using a very modern instrument, the synthesizer, to record very old music, Carlos managed to bring a bit of feeling into what had started out as a kind of cold genre: remember that great early '60 tinny hit, "Telstar," played on an electric organ? It caught the attention of the boomer generation, me included.

On Carlos' website, she attributes the choice of the tracks on the album to her producer. The genius of the choices lay in the length of each one. They were about the length of the average pop song of the era and that made them easy to digest for the younger listeners. In addition, the pieces for the most part were upbeat and "boppy," which helped with their success. Today's piece, for example, is a kind of fanfare, like the famous trumpets in Handel' Watermusic.

Bach must really have liked this little piece. He used it again to open his Partita III for Unaccompanied Violin in E Major. There is also a version for organ, which Virgil Fox played when I saw him in concert in the early 70s.

If you aren't a musicologist, as is my case, then you face the constant challenge of trying to put in words what's going on in a piece. One way is to describe the emotions it evokes in you. The downside is the danger of becoming kind trite or maudlin. Another way to approach it is to describe the characteristics of the sounds--fast, slow, loud, soft--which makes it sound dull. You can try combining the two to come up with phrases like ebullient, joyous, festive, happy, morose, or ominous to describe the feeling of the piece, but you soon find yourself running out of adjectives and having to recycle.

Stravinsky had similar complaints, and he was probably the biggest musical genius since Beethoven. In an interview entitled "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man," in his book Themes and Conclusions he says the following about the Adagio from Beethoven's Ninth:

I have been so deply moved by it lately, a confession that seem s to make me guilty of the Affective Fallacy. But in fact I have always tried to distinguish between the musical object and the emotion it induces, partly on the grounds that the object is active, the emotion reactive, hence a translation....My point was simply that your feelings and my feelings are much less interesting than Beethoven's art.

Still, I feel compelled to say something about how festive and soul-lifting I find Bach's Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29. It makes you sit up and take notice, dust off those cobwebs of self-pity. You listen to it and feel young and joyous and happy. Oops, I just recycled. But if Bach can recycle his melodies, I will allow myself to do the same with my adjectives.

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Johann Sebastian Bach: Two Part Invention in D Minor

I hadn't intended to write about Stanley Kubrick again today. I have to refer to him again, however, in passing because the person who did the music for his films, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, Walter Carlos, was responsible for today's piece. Carlos gets the spotlight today because of her album, released in 1967, Switched-On Bach.

Wait, you might say, didn't he just say "her" when referring to Walter Carlos. Yes, because several years ago Carlos granted an interview to Playboy Magazine to announce that he had undergone a sex change operation, and was now Wendy Carlos. This really has nothing to do with her music, but does raise hell with the pronouns. Carlos probably has done more to change the face of modern music than any other musician, and here's what's unique--she's done so both in the popular and classical realm.

Carlos studied composition at Columbia University and from early on was a proponent of computer music. She became friends and collaborator with the inventor, Robert Moog, who developed a keyboard controller for computers that generated music and thereby created the synthesizer.

Before that, creating computer music--which many of the up and coming late 20th century composers concentrated on--was insanely complicated and time consuming. For example, Peter Schickele once told the story of attending a workshop dedicated to computer music in the early 1960s. The class wrote a simple melody which they gave to the programmer. Several hours later the composers were called into the lab to hear the result. After all that work the product was a mere few seconds of sound.

Moog's first synthesizers had some rather unpleasant limitations--you could only play one note at a time. That pretty much ruled out chords. And to get different sounds, I believe you had to plug chords in and out of what looked like an antique telephone switch board.

Despite those limitations, a number of composers and performers foresaw interesting possibilities. The pianist, Dick Hyman, for example recorded an album called "The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman," which my brother bought and whose novel sounds completely captivated me.

In 1967 Carlos released her album, "Switched-On Bach," from which comes today's piece, the two part invention in D minor. I don't know if Carlos played two keyboards hooked to two separate computers or recorded each hand's part separately and then mixed them together. Either way, Carlos played each incredibly fast, which indicates her virtuosity at the keyboard. The result really shows Bach's almost mathematical and meticulous genius in weaving together two complex and rapid melodies at the same time.

"Switched-On Bach" contains a number of other memorable pieces by Bach as executed by Carlos. Critics lambasted the bastardization of Bach, but the album went platinum, so it obviously appealed to a lot of us "Philistines."

Carlos' collaboration of Moog also resulted in the creation of the Vocorder, which allowed the synthesizing of singing. She used this effectively as part of the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Interestingly enough, Carlos had composed a piece entitled Timesteps as an evocation her feelings upon reading A Clockwork Orange. By an odd concatenation of events she was introduced to Kubrick, who chose her to do the music for the film.

If Carlos had a dollar for every song that used a synthesizer and every electronic keyboard with a sound library and sampling capabilities, she probably could buy Bill Gates. Just contemplate her influence. In recording "Switched-On Bach," she really transformed the face of both classical and modern music. First, the album made baroque and serious music accessible to a new generation. Second, she gave respectability to the budding field of computer music. With the invention of the microchip, the price of creating music using these new tools fell and popular music still goes on strong. So let's hear if for radical transformations and three cheers for Wendy Carlos.

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