tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41283133508962086892024-03-13T12:52:22.798-07:00Jack Gibbons BlogThe pursuit of happinessJack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-74123314346531811972022-02-14T05:39:00.000-08:002022-02-14T05:39:29.265-08:00A Mozart valentineOn 4 August 1782 Mozart married Constanze Weber, despite serious opposition to the union from his father. On 3 April 1783 Mozart wrote to his father Leopold:<br /><br />
"<i>The two portraits will follow; – I only wish that you will be pleased with them. I think they are both good likenesses and all who have seen them are of the same opinion.</i>"<br /><br />
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<small><center>[The portraits of Mozart and his new wife Constanze, which Mozart likely sent to his father in the spring of 1783. They were painted by Joseph Lange, the husband of Constanze's sister Aloysia, in late 1782 or early 1783. Both portraits were later expanded, though the Mozart expanded version was never finished.]</small></center><br />
On 17 June 1783 the Mozarts' first child Raimund Leopold was born. Mozart wrote to this father:<br /><br />
“<i>Congratulations, you are a grandpapa! Yesterday, the 17th, in the morning at 6:30 my dear wife successfully gave birth to a large, strong and round-as-a-ball baby boy.</i>”<br /><br />
On 21 June 1783 Mozart wrote:<br /><br />
“<i>The child is quite cheerful and healthy, and has a dreadful amount of business, which consists of drinking, sleeping, crying, peeing, pooping, dribbling, etc.</i>”<br /><br />
On 5 July 1783 Mozart wrote to his father:<br /><br />
“<i>Raimundl looks so much like me that all people say the same; it is as if he were cut from my face, which gives my dear wife the greatest pleasure, since this is what she had always wished. Next Tuesday he will be three weeks old, and he has grown a surprising amount</i>"<br /><br />
Following pressure from Mozart's father (who had yet to meet Constanze) the Mozarts travelled from Vienna to Salzburg at the end of July 1783, leaving their precious baby in the charge of a foster-nurse.<br /><br />
Earlier, in a letter to his father written on 4 January 1783, Mozart had mentioned a promise to write a mass to be performed on the first visit the newly weds would make to Salzburg. Constanze gave more specific details of this promise when she met Vincent Novello during his visit to Mozart's widow in 1829. Apparently, Mozart initially intended the work to be a votive mass for the safe delivery of their first baby. Novello carefully recorded Constanze's description in his diary:<br /><br />
"<i>The 'Davidde penitente', </i>[K.469]<i> originally a grand Mass </i>[K.427]<i> which he wrote in consequence of a vow that he had made to do so, on her safe recovery after the birth of their first child — relative to whom he had been particularly anxious. This Mass was performed in the Cathedral at Salzburg and Madame Mozart herself sang all the principal solos. Mozart thought so highly of this production that he afterwards made several additions and adapted new words to make it a complete Cantata, or rather Oratorio, for the former is too modest a title for so elevated, elaborate and masterly a work.</i>"<br /><br />
The writing of the original Mass came to an abrupt end in 1783, and the reason for this is obvious. While in Salzburg Wolfgang and Constanze would have received the tragic news from Vienna that their baby Raimund had died on 19 August 1783, at the age of just 2 months. Correspondence from this period is missing or non-existent, but a few months later, on 10 December 1783, there is a note from Mozart, now back in Vienna, to his father in Salzburg, in which he writes: “<i>Regarding our poor, big, fat, dear little boy we are both really suffering.</i>”<br /><br />
On the eve of their return to Vienna, at the conclusion of their fated Salzburg visit, the grieving Wolfgang and Constanze took part in the long promised performance of the incomplete <i>Mass in C minor</i> K.427, on 26 October 1783 at Salzburg's St Peter's Abbey. It must have taken Constanze all the strength she had to sing this music in such circumstances, music written so specifially for the safe delivery of their first child, including the heart-breakingly beautiful aria <i>Et incarnatus est</i>. A finer work of art inspired by love could not be conceived. Mozart's devotion to his wife fills his correspondence to her. In July 1791, when Constanze was ill during her sixth pregnancy and on a rest cure in Baden, Mozart wrote to her from Vienna: "<i>you cannot imagine how slowly time goes when you are not with me. There is a sense of emptiness, which hurts, a certain longing which cannot be satisfied. When I remember how childishly merry we were in Baden </i>[in June 1791 Mozart visited Constanze in Baden, and while there wrote his Ave Verum Corpus]<i>, and what mournful, tedious hours I pass here, my work gives me no pleasure because it is not possible as was my want to chat a few words with you when stopping for a moment. If I go to the clavier and sing something from the opera </i>[the Magic Flute, on which he was working]<i> I must stop at once because of my emotions</i>". Ten years earlier, in December 1781, writing to his father, Mozart justified his reasons for wanting to marry Constanze in the simplest terms: "<i>She has the kindest heart in the world. I love her and she loves me with all her heart.</i>"<br /><br />
On 24 August 1788, six years into their marriage, the Mozarts were visited by the Danish musician Joachim Daniel Preisler, who wrote afterwards:<br /><br />
"<i>There I had the happiest hour of music that has ever fallen to my lot. This small man and great master twice extemporized on a pedal pianoforte, so wonderfully! so wonderfully! that I quite lost myself. He intertwined the most difficult passages with the most lovely themes. His wife cut quillpens for the copyist, a pupil composed, a little boy aged four</i> [presumably the Mozarts' son Carl Thomas] <i>walked about in the garden and sang recitatives — in short, everything that surrounded this splendid man was musical!</i>"<br /><br />
The video below features the wonderful American soprano Arleen Augér singing the <i>Et incarnatus est</i> Mozart specifically wrote for his wife Constanze to sing as part of the C minor Mass. Arleen Augér was an incomparable interpreter of Mozart who enjoyed a brilliant career in Europe, though her home country of the United States was slow to wake up to her remarkable talent. In this beautiful live performance (filmed in Germany in 1990 under the direction of Humphrey Burton) Augér's singing is so sublime it actually moves her conductor, Leonard Bernstein, to tears after her last note is sung. The video is particularly poignant for other reasons too: a year after this performance Arleen Augér developed the symptoms of a brain tumour to which she eventually succumbed in 1993, dying at the age of just 53 [1993 was a sad year for sopranos as we also lost the wonderful Lucia Popp, also from a brain tumour, and at almost the same age as Augér]. This video is also a recording of one of Leonard Bernstein's last performances, the conductor and composer dying 6 months later, in October 1990, at the age of 72. Above all, it's a sobering thought to think that the creator of this sublime music died before even reaching his 36th birthday. If there's a lesson here it's that we should cherish every moment, and celebrate the fact that all these remarkable people live on in our hearts long after they no longer walk on this earth.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Mozart's <i>Et incarnatus est</i> from the Credo of his Mass In C Minor, K.427, sung by Arleen Auger (soprano) with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein, recorded live at the Abbey Church of Waldsassen, Germany, in April 1990.]</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-46315216462445623642022-01-31T16:59:00.005-08:002022-02-07T07:19:02.853-08:00A Mozart pilgrimage<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIY_E7aO2YqluZfS8ViNFMeGA-B0f_2bNpOGT2qdfvBdPSN7phtt2Uu-2ybnseKwVlIyMpi0Oi02mD_Ke7G3eZyFB4CPNnZT0Pueb8NL0p6FMNm5mOVpS-S9lJEWPO-H42Udu-agClCFBU6O_bGfjfRO1VdGxfaLez56XjRx534GqYQj0C4jnpSF8H=s1738" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1738" data-original-width="1440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIY_E7aO2YqluZfS8ViNFMeGA-B0f_2bNpOGT2qdfvBdPSN7phtt2Uu-2ybnseKwVlIyMpi0Oi02mD_Ke7G3eZyFB4CPNnZT0Pueb8NL0p6FMNm5mOVpS-S9lJEWPO-H42Udu-agClCFBU6O_bGfjfRO1VdGxfaLez56XjRx534GqYQj0C4jnpSF8H=s320"/></a></div>
<small><center>[Ivory miniature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his older sister Maria Anna Mozart (Nannerl) by Eusebius Johann Alphen c.1765]</small></center><br />
It's a fascinating and mouthwatering glimpse into the past reading about Vincent and Mary Novello's visit to Salzburg in 1829, twenty-eight years after Mozart's death, to visit two people intimately connected with their musical idol: Mozart's sister, Nannerl, and Mozart's widow, Constanze. The sensation of reading Vincent Novello's diary feels strangely contemporary, as if their Mozart quest could have taken place just yesterday. In truth the Novellos are barely any closer to our age than the Mozarts were, yet it doesn't stop me boggling at the thought that Vincent and Mary Novello were meeting the two most important women in Mozart's life as late as the dawning era of Chopin and Liszt and so called <i>romanticism</i>! It's a sad reflection on the paucity of our own artistic age that so much remarkable creativity took place within such a short time span: barely 50 years is needed to cover the period from mature Mozart, through all significant Beethoven, the entire lives of Schubert and Chopin, to the dawning era of Brahms. In today's age that same time span would only take us as far back as 1970. Perhaps I'm also fascinated by the Novellos' idol-seeking quest because I've done similar things myself: in 1992 I travelled from London to New York for the sole purpose of meeting Gershwin's sister Frankie and Gershwin's girlfriend Kay Swift, as part of my own hero worship of Gershwin (who like Mozart also died tragically young) and my search for anyone with a close connection to the composer.<br /><br />
But the Novellos only just made their trip in time. Mozart's sister, Nannerl, now 77, was dangerously ill and close to death. Since 1819 Nannerl and Mozart's widow Constanze had been close neighbours, though their relationship in the past had been quite strained. Constanze and her second husband Georg Nikolaus von Nissen had moved to Salzburg from Copenhagen to facilitate the writing of the first authoritative biography of Mozart. Sadly Nissen died before the project could be completed, but the biography was eventually published, under Constanze's watchful eye, a year before the Novellos' 1829 visit.<br /><br />
Coincidentally, at the exact same time as the Novellos' visit to Salzburg, Chopin was making his way to Vienna, his first ever visit to the city. Two weeks after his arrival at the end of the July, he made his Vienna debut, on 11 August 1829 at the Royal and Imperial Opera House. Before returning to the Novellos' Mozart quest I think it's interesting to briefly pause for this contemporaneous event in nearby Vienna. Chopin has left us a detailed account of the trials leading up to his Viennese debut in this letter to his close friend Titus Woyciechowski:<br /><br />
"<i>The orchestra kept scowling at me during rehearsal, the main cause being that, having scarcely arrived, I had the nerve to play my own compositions. Well, I began the rehearsal with your Variations which were to be preceded at the concert by the Krakowiak Rondo. They went well, but I had to begin the Rondo a couple of times and the orchestra got frightfully mixed up and blamed my bad writing. The cause of the confusion was that the rests were written differently above and below the stave, but it was agreed that only the top ones should count. It was partly my fault, but I had expected that they would understand. All the same this inaccuracy infuriated them, for these gentlemen are themselves virtuosi and composers. Anyhow they made such cutting remarks about me that I felt almost like falling ill in preparation for the evening's performance. However, Baron Demmar, the director, noticing this little prejudice on the orchestra's part (by the way, Würfel insisted on conducting and they don't like him — I don't know why) proposed that instead of the Rondo I should improvise. When he said THAT, the orchestra opened their eyes very wide. I was so worked up that in despair I accepted, and who knows but what my bad temper and the risk I was running did not spur me on to a better performance in the evening. Anyway, the sight of the Viennese public did not put me out in the least, and as it is the custom for the orchestra to stay in their usual places</i> [down below] <i>instead of being on the stage, I sat down, pale, with a young man wearing rouge to turn over the pages (he boasted that he had done the same for Moscheles, Hummel, Herz, etc., when they were in Vienna), in front of a superb instrument, perhaps the finest then in Vienna, made by Graff. Believe me, I played out of sheer desperation. The Variations produced such an effect that although they applauded after each one I had to come out and take another bow at the end. In between, Mlle Veltheim sang; she is Kammersängerin to the King of Saxony. At last the moment came for me to improvise. I don't know how it all happened, but it went so well that the orchestra began to clap and I was again called back to the stage. So ended my first concert.</i>" [Chopin, letter to Titus Woyciechowski, Vienna, 12 September 1829]<br /><br />
The Novellos visited Vienna as well as Salzburg during their Mozart pilgrimage in that summer of 1829, but sadly I haven't come across any record of them hearing the 19-year-old Chopin. And how sad to think that Mozart's widow and sister could potentially have heard Chopin that night. Mozart's sister would have been too infirm to make the almost 200 mile journey, but Constanze could have been up for it, and after all, she knew Vienna well, home to her and her sisters Aloysia and Sophie before and after she married Mozart. All three sisters were now widowed, and all three were now living close to one another in Salzburg. Had they even been aware of Chopin, and attended his Vienna debut, one work on the programme, which Chopin was premiering that very night, would have sounded very familiar to them: his <i>Variations on Là ci darem la mano</i> from Mozart's <i>Don Giovanni</i>!<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Pencil drawing of (1829), by Princess Elisa Radziwiłł]</small></center><br />
Meanwhile, back in Salzburg, the Novellos were charmed by Constanze Mozart Nissen, who always referred to her first husband as "<i>her Mozart</i>" and "<i>her one true love</i>". She told the Novellos that one particular portrait she had on display (by Joseph Lange) was the best likeness of her husband.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Unfinished portrait of Mozart at the piano (1789), by Joseph Lange]</small></center><br />
The Novellos also remarked on the touching portrait of the Mozart children, Karl Thomas and Franz Xaver, hand in hand. Mozart had proudly taken his 7-year-old son Karl Thomas with him to the first performances of <i>The Magic Flute</i> in 1791 ("<i>My taking Carl to the opera caused him no small joy</i>" Mozart wrote to Constanze on 14 October 1791). Franz Xaver was only a 5 month old baby when Mozart died so sadly would have had no memories of his father.<br><br>
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<small><center>[Portrait of the two surviving children of Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart, Franz Xaver and Karl Thomas (1798), by Hans Hansen]</small></center><br />
Constanze also shared other intimate details of the Mozarts' homelife with the Novellos. She told them that Mozart was always composing, irrespective of place or circumstances. She told them that his <i>Quartet in D minor</i> K.421 was written when she was at the height of labour, giving birth to their first child Raimund Leopold (who tragically died 2 months later). Constanze said that the baby's unrest and her own cries can be heard in several passages of the music, particularly in the minuet [its trio]. Constanze even sang some of the passages to the Novellos to demonstrate!<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Minuet & trio from Mozart's Quartet in D minor K.421, played by the Alban Berg Quartett]</small></center><br /><br />
For the Novellos in 1829 it must have felt that they were so close, yet still tantalisingly distant, from their musical hero. Vincent Novello kept an autograph album and on his travels in 1829 invited Mozart's widow to sign it, which she happily did with the following inscription:<br /><br />
<i>La misère des pauvres, le bonheur des riches,<br>
La gloire des héros, la Majesté des Rois—<br>
Tout finit par: Ci-gît<br><br>
Salzburg ce 15 Juillet 1829<br>
Souvenez vous Monsieur et Madame de votre très humble Servante Constance de Nissen Veuve Mozart</i><br /><br />
Constanze also presented the Novellos with a number of gifts, including a sample of Mozart's handwriting cut from an envelope Mozart had addressed to his father, and some manuscript fragments including Mozart's keyboard reduction of two of his minuets from K.176.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Minuet no.3 in E flat K.176 performed by the Vienna Mozart Ensemble conducted by Willi Boskovsky, preceded by the composer's own reduction for keyboard, played by Martino Tirimo. The featured manuscript is Mozart's autograph, which his widow Constanze gave as a gift to Vincent Novello during his visit to Salzburg in 1829]</small></center><br /><br />
Constanze also presented Vincent Novello with a copy of the aria <i>Al desio di chi t'adora</i>, written as a replacement for <i>Deh vieni non tardar</i> for the August 1789 revival of <i>The Marriage of Figaro</i>. Mozart is said to have used this copy to accompanying his wife, and on the last page, under a vocal cadenza, Constanze has written the words:<br /><br />
"<i>Questa e la Scritura di mio defonto Marito Mozart chi ha fato per me e che il signor Novello aver la bonagrazie de prendere da mie, Constanze Nissen, Salisburgo il 3 Augusto 1829</i>"<br><br>
"<i>This is the writing of my deceased husband Mozart who created it for me and which Signor Novello has the good grace to take from me, Constanze Nissen, Salzburg, 3 August 1829</i>"<br /><br />
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<small><center>[The last page of <i>Al desio di chi t'adora</i> from the 1789 revival of <i>The Marriage of Figaro</i>, with an inscription by Mozart's wife, Constanze Nissen, under a cadenza written in Mozart's own hand]</small></center><br />
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<small><center>[Detail of Constanze's inscription to Vincent Novello on the last page of Mozart's aria <i>Al desio di chi t'adora</i>, pointing out the cadenza in Mozart's own hand]</small></center><br />
Mozart had previously written many arias for his wife's high soprano voice including, most notably, the <i>Et incarnatus est</i> from his C minor Mass K.427 of 1783. You can hear the complete <i>Al desio di chi t'adora</i> aria from <i>The Marriage of Figaro</i> here:<br /><br />
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<small><center>[<i>Al desio di chi t'adora</i> from the 1789 revival of Mozart's <i>The Marriage of Figaro</i>, sung by Cecilia Bartoli, with the Wiener Kammerorchester conducted by György Fischer]</small></center><br /><br />
Constanze not only had an influence on her husband's vocal writing but also played an important rôle in encouraging his interest in polyphony, according to the words of Mozart himself:<br /><br />
"<i>I composed the fugue</i> [of the Fantasy and Fugue, K. 394]<i> first and wrote it down while I was thinking out the prelude. I only hope that you will be able to read it, for it is written so very small; and I hope further that you will like it. Another time I shall send you something better for the clavier. My dear Constanze is really the cause of this fugue's coming into the world. Baron van Swieten, to whom I go every Sunday, gave me all the works of Händel and Sebastian Bach to take home with me (after I had played them to him). When Constanze heard the fugues, she absolutely fell in love with them. Now she will listen to nothing but fugues, and particularly (in this kind of composition) the works of Händel and Bach. Well, as she has often heard me play fugues out of my head, she asked me if I had ever written any down, and when I said I had not, she scolded me roundly for not recording some of my compositions in this most artistically beautiful of all musical forms and never ceased to entreat me until I wrote down a fugue for her.</i>" [Mozart, letter to his sister Nannerl, 20 April 1782]<br /><br />
When the Novellos arrived in Salzburg in July 1829 they also had with them a gift they wished to deliver to Mozart's sister, a sum of money (£63) raised from well-wishers in England for relief from poverty (in actual fact Mozart's sister was not as destitute as people thought, but the gesture was gratefully received nevertheless). It's worth quoting Vincent Novello's diary at length as he paints such a vivid portrait of his visit to both Mozart's sister and widow. His descriptions of Mozart's sister are very poignant, as she was clearly very close to death (she died just three months after the Novellos' visit, on 29 October 1829):<br /><br />
"<i>Monday, July 15th. — A still more delightful day, if possible, than yesterday — Mozart's son </i>[the Mozarts' youngest son Franz Xaver]<i> came to me at about 11 to conduct us to his aunt Sonnenberg</i> [Mozart's sister Nannerl] <i>— after a little chat we accompanied him to her house, which was within a few yards of where we resided. It seems that she had passed a very restless and sleepless night for fear we would not come to see her, and had repeatedly expressed her regret that we had not been admitted when we first called. On entering the room, the sister of Mozart was reclining placidly in bed — but blind, feeble, and nearly speechless. Her nephew kindly explained to her who we were, and she seemed to derive much gratification from the intelligence we conveyed to her. During the whole time, I held her poor thin hand in mine, and pressed it with the sincere cordiality of an old friend of her brother. She appeared particularly pleased that the little present we had brought her should have arrived on her own Saint's day (St. Ann, the 26th of the month). Her own birthday is on the 30th, on which day she will have completed her 78th year. Her voice is nearly extinct, and she appears to be fast approaching 'that bourn from whence no traveller returns'. Her face, though much changed by illness and drawn by age, still bears a strong resemblance to the portraits that have been engraved of her; but it was difficult to believe that the helpless and languid figure which was extended before us was formerly the little girl represented as standing by the side of her brother, and singing to his accompaniment. Near the bed was the original painting of which Madame Nissen</i> [Constanze, Mozart's widow] <i>has a small copy, and which has been engraved in the Biography, representing Mozart and his sister playing a duet on the piano, the likeness of Mozart's mother in a frame, and the father leaning on the piano with a violin in his hand</i>" [Johann Nepomuk della Croce's Mozart family portrait, c.1780].<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Mozart family portrait: Maria Anna ("Nannerl"), Wolfgang, Anna Maria (wall portrait, already deceased when the portrait was painted) and Leopold Mozart (c.1780) by Johann Nepomuk della Croce]</small></center><br />
"<i>In the adjoining apartment, over the sofa was the print which his son told me was generally considered the best likeness after that in Madame Nissen's possession (in which opinion he himself coincided). Around the room was hung a very numerous collection of portraits of the greatest painters, amongst whom I particularly noticed those of van Dyck and Rembrandt. In another part of the room was a miniature of herself; another of her son (who had some resemblance to Leigh Hunt); and another likeness in miniature of Mozart. In the middle of the room stood the instrument on which she had often played duets with her brother. It was a kind of clavichord — with black keys for the naturals and white ones for the sharps, like our old English Cathedral organs — the compass was from F1 to F6, and had evidently been constructed before the additional keys were invented. The tone was soft, and some of the bass notes, especially those of the lowest octave C3 to C2 were of a good quality; at the time it was made it was doubtless considered an excellent instrument. You may be sure that I touched the keys which had been pressed by Mozart's fingers, with great interest. Mozart's son also played a few chords upon it with evident pleasure; the key he chose was that of C minor; and what he did, though short, was quite sufficient to show the accomplished musician. On the desk were two pieces of music, the last which Mozart's sister had ever played, before she took to her bed, six months ago. They were the 'O cara Armonia' from her brother's opera of the Zauberflöte</i> ["Das klinget so herrlich" from the Magic Flute]<i>, and the Minuet in his Don Giovanni</i> [from the finale of Act I]<i>; — this, to me, was a most touching proof of her continued sisterly attachment to him to the last, and of her tasteful partiality for his inimitable productions. About two days before we arrived she had desired to be carried from her bed, and placed at the instrument. On trying to play she found that although she could still execute a few passages with her right hand, yet with her left hand she could no longer press down the keys, and it was but too evident that her powers on that side were entirely gone. On leaving this estimable and interesting lady, both Mary and myself could not refrain from kissing her weak and emaciated hand with tender respect, convinced as we were that we should never again behold her. I fear that she cannot continue much longer in her present exhausted state; but whenever that hour arrives which no one living can ultimately avoid, I can only hope that it will not be attended with the least suffering, and that she will calmly cease to breathe as if she were merely sinking into a tranquil sleep. I was particularly charmed by the respectful and kind cordiality with which Mozart's son behaved to her; calling her repeatedly "Meine leibe Tante," and exerting himself to the utmost to ascertain and fulfil all her wishes.</i>"<br /><br />
In a subsequent undated entry from the same July 1829 diary Vincent Novello also says more about Constanze:<br /><br />
"<i>After supper I had the gratification of seeing Mozart's widow and her sister safe home. They had brought their servant with them, to save my doing so, and would fain have persuaded me there was not the least necessity for my accompanying them home; but (as I told her) it was not every evening that I could enjoy the society of so rare a companion as one who had been the companion of Mozart, and she politely gave up the little friendly contest, and at once took my arm as cordially as if I had been her own brother. There was a beautiful moon shining on the distant mountains, and illuminating both the old Gothic church of the convent and the ancient fortress above. The interesting conversation which took place, and the enchanting beauty of the surrounding scenery, rendered this one of the most romantic and delightful walks I ever enjoyed. On our arrival at the house I was at last obliged to take my leave; when Madame Mozart once more shook hands with me most cordially, and assured me (after renewing her promise to write to me) that our visit altogether to Salzburg had been one of the most gratifying compliments which had been paid for several years both to herself and to the memory of "her Mozart". I need not say what a crowd of interesting associations, curious thoughts, and singular reflections, passed through my mind in the course of my solitary walk back to my Inn.</i>"<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Mozart's O cara Armonia ("Das klinget so herrlich") from The Magic Flute & Minuet from Don Giovanni (from the finale of Act I), the last two pieces of music Mozart's sister Nannerl ever played]</small></center><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Portrait of Constanze Mozart (1802) by Hans Hansen. Hansen met his future wife, Jørgine Henriette Liewhile, while painting this portrait, and when their first child was born they named him Constantin in honour of Constanze, who became the boy's godparent (Constantin, like his father, became a well-known Danish painter).]</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-4986377841373325792022-01-31T08:58:00.000-08:002022-01-31T08:58:10.510-08:00How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"<i>Practice, practice, practice</i>" comes the answer, in this well-known old joke. In the light of my own recent experience this adage needs to be amended. When I first played at Carnegie Hall many years ago I was proudly shown a letter by the hall administration from Gershwin, thanking Carnegie Hall for their help. Carnegie Hall had witnessed the premiere of <i>An American in Paris</i> in 1928 and in September 1935 Carnegie Hall was the location chosen for a private rehearsal of his opera <i>Porgy and Bess</i>, the first full orchestral run-through without cuts. Prior to its Boston and New York premieres this was the very first time the opera had ever been heard in its entirety, and aside from the performers the only others present in the vast auditorium were a few friends and family. Ira Gershwin described the occasion thus: "<i>Until then only George knew what it would sound like. I couldn't believe my ears. That wonderful orchestra and the full chorus on the stage. I never realized it would be like that. It was one of the great thrills of my life</i>". Ann Brown, who sang Bess in the opening production, has also left us an evocative description of that first Carnegie Hall run-through: "<i>When the echoes of the last chords of Porgy and Bess had disappeared into the nearly empty hall, we were – all of us – in tears. It had been so moving.</i>"<br /><br />
In the late spring of 2019 I was deeply honored to be asked to play again at Carnegie Hall in the autumn of 2019 for an event that was described to me as celebrating 100 years of diplomatic relations between Poland and America (with in attendance a sea of specially invited guests from embassies, consulates, the UN and so forth). I had been asked to contribute the music of two composers who are central to my repertoire, Chopin and Gershwin, ending the evening with the latter’s <i>Rhapsody in Blue</i>. In addition I would be working with the soprano Angel Blue in extracts from <i>Porgy and Bess</i> (Angel Blue was about to open in the lead role of the New York Metropolitan Opera's first production of <i>Porgy and Bess</i> in 30 years). Also invited to take part was the Canadian pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin, and other distinguished artists, and in addition I would be working with soloists from the Polish National Ballet on a specially devised choreography of my own <i>authentic Gershwin</i> repertoire. It sounded like a dream concert and one I was only too happy to be a part of. The fact that I had yet to be told the name of the organisation behind the concert was odd, but in the light of the artists I would be working with it seemed unimportant at the time.<br /><br />
Fast forwarding a few months (and bear with me in this change of direction) at the end of July 2019 I was reading troubling reports from the BBC of a Polish weekly magazine called <i>Gazeta Polska</i>, who were offering printed stickers to their readers declaring LGBT-free zones using a chilling symbol of a black X superimposed on the rainbow flag [<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49122087">Poland court bans 'LGBT-free zone' sticker from sale</a>]. Further reading led to an equally chilling editorial from the Gazeta Polska's editor Tomasz Sakiewicz describing LGBT as "<i>an ideology that has all the features of a totalitarian one</i>", justifying the statement with nefarious comparisons with the tactics of the Communist and Nazi regimes.<br /><br />
Imagine my shock only minutes after reading these reports when I turned to the Carnegie Hall website and for the first time discovered that the concert I was due to take part in on October 24 was being "<i>presented by the Gazeta Polska Community of America</i>". I immediately requested clarification from my contact in Warsaw, as well as from friends in the Polish community, and it quickly became apparent that there was no disguising the close affiliation with the <i>Gazeta Polska</i> magazine in Poland. The Carnegie Hall event had been benignly billed as "<i>From Chopin to Gershwin</i>" and I imagined that without any media scrutiny most New Yorkers would probably remain unaware of the anti-LGBT propaganda that lay behind a concert soon to be promoted throughout the city.<br /><br />
Needless to say I had no choice but to withdraw from the concert after discovering the link. It was not a decision I took lightly, but I could not with good conscience take part in an event that had connections to an organization that expressed views that I regarded as abhorrent and which were in opposition to everything I stood for. I also felt it my duty to let the other performers involved know the nature of the organisation behind the concert. After contacting both Charles Richard-Hamelin and Angel Blue and informing them of the activities of <i>Gazeta Polska</i>, they both had no hesitation in withdrawing from the event as well. And thus it was that I found myself in the unhappy position of dismantling what had at first seemed like a dream concert at Carnegie Hall. I was glad to read on 25 August 2019 that the latest artist caught in the <i>Gazeta Polska</i> trap, the pianist Paul Bisaccia, has also wisely withdrawn from the event – not an easy thing to do given the allure of Carnegie Hall.<br /><br />
The sad aspect of all this is that music, more than any other art form, has the extraordinary ability to bring people together, to rise above prejudice, welcoming everyone, regardless of our differences, to its enchanting harmonies. On 26 July 2019, the day I withdrew from the Carnegie Hall concert after learning of the <i>Gazeta Polska</i> connection, I wrote a Facebook post on the remarkable Astolphe de Custine. Astolphe de Custine was one of Chopin's most ardent supporters and contained within his correspondence are some remarkable letters to Chopin, including an extraordinary one written after Chopin’s last public performance in Paris in 1848, containing these memorable lines: "<i>Art, as you understand it, is the only thing that can unite mankind divided by the hard realities of life. One may love and understand one's neighbour through Chopin.</i>" Astolphe de Custine had good reason to write such words, having been persecuted for his homosexuality, at one point beaten and left for dead, and subject to the most vile homophobic attacks in the press; his remarks could not be more apposite here.<br /><br />
So, to return to my opening remark, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Well apparently it helps if you DON'T use a moral compass.<br /><br />
<DIV ALIGN=CENTER>* * * * *</div><br /><br />
<strong>Further reading</strong><br /><br />
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/world/europe/gay-pride-march-poland-violence.html">Anti-Gay Brutality in a Polish Town Blamed on Poisonous Propaganda</a><br /><br />
For further reading, here is a harrowing personal account from a march in Białystok, Poland in July, translated by my dear friend Antonia Lloyd-Jones [warning, the account contains strong language that some may find offensive]: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/28/lgbt-gay-rights-poland-first-pride-march-bialystok-rage-violence">The struggle for LGBT equality: Pride meets prejudice in Poland</a><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Marian Anderson singing at Carnegie Hall on January 5th 1947]</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-77244823508294277582020-04-12T23:28:00.000-07:002020-04-12T23:39:12.344-07:00"La valse au petit chien": composers and their dogs<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBJw1CNxm1c4DRvB5d7aFP_6Cy0yAIghvaths9ajC6xvBkj35jtLCwG5q1ZnK8TqqCSCjC-edAiFhA7gpumwxY4ltI82a5dCPFo8ggQaRQSS6bbx-pjonrF2UvwNssZtH1w7Fk5g76_Mw/s1600/15740899_10155087280674384_3487521995174814778_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBJw1CNxm1c4DRvB5d7aFP_6Cy0yAIghvaths9ajC6xvBkj35jtLCwG5q1ZnK8TqqCSCjC-edAiFhA7gpumwxY4ltI82a5dCPFo8ggQaRQSS6bbx-pjonrF2UvwNssZtH1w7Fk5g76_Mw/s320/15740899_10155087280674384_3487521995174814778_n.jpg" width="320" height="256" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="600" /></a><br />
<br /><b>Chopin...</b><br /><br />
A year after their return to Paris following a trip to Majorca that had proved disastrous for Chopin's health, Chopin and Sand had, to all intents and purposes, become a settled couple, spending most of their time together when not working. George Sand had decided to rent a beautiful garden apartment behind Rue Pigalle and the couple's quiet existence was punctuated by a social life centred around the artists in their circle, including the painter Delacroix and the novelist Balzac. Their domestic setting was further enhanced when Chopin and Sand decided to adopt a stray dog that had followed Chopin home on the streets of Paris. George Sand described the incident in a letter to her son Maurice:<br /><br />
"<i>This morning we have acquired a delightful little puppy, no bigger than a fist, dark brown, with a white waistcoat, white stockings in front and white shoes on the hind legs. This gentleman followed Chopin in the street, and simply would not leave him. Then, oh miracle, Chopin took the little dog in adoration and has spent the whole day looking after it, even though it did its "something" in the drawing room and gave us all fleas. Chopin finds this charming, mainly because the dog is all over him and cannot stand Solange</i> [George Sand's 12-year-old daughter]. <i>Solange is fiercely jealous. At this moment the little thing is sleeping at my feet. It has been called Mops, which is, quite simply, the Polish for Pug.</i>" [George Sand: letter to Maurice Sand, Paris, 20 September 1840].<br /><br />
Though the Rue Pigalle apartments where they lived at this time no longer exist the novelist Balzac has given us a detailed description of the dwelling's exotic furnishings after paying Sand a visit early in 1840:<br /><br />
"<i>I have just returned from George Sand... She lives at number 16 rue Pigalle, at the end of a garden, and over the stables and coach house which belong to the house on the street. She has a dining-room in which the furniture is carved oak. Her little salon is café-au-lait coloured, and the salon in which she receives has many superb Chinese vases full of flowers. There is always a jardinière full of flowers. The furniture is green; there is a side table covered with curiosities; also pictures by Delacroix, and her own portrait by Calamatta...</i><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Luigi Calamatta: portrait of George Sand, 1837]</small></center><br />
<i>The piano is magnificent and upright, in rosewood. Chopin is always there. She smokes cigarettes, and never anything else. She rises at four o'clock; at four Chopin has finished giving his lessons. You reach her rooms by what is called a miller's staircase, steep and straight. Her bedroom is brown; her bed two mattresses on the floor, in the Turkish fashion. Ecco, contessa. She has the pretty, tiny little hands of a child. And finally, the portrait of </i>[Wojciech Grzymała] <i>as a Polish castellan, three-quarter length, hangs in the dining-room, and nothing would more strike a stranger's eye... What your brother is right about is the incredible influence of the atmosphere of Paris; literally, one drinks ideas. At all times, all hours, there is something new...</i>" [Honoré de Balzac: letter to Ewa Hańska, Paris, 15 March 1840]<br /><br />
In the mid 1840s Chopin and Sand moved to the fashionable Square d'Orleans in Paris and around that time George Sand acquired two dogs, named Marquis and Dib. In October 1846, during the last of Chopin's annual visits to Sand's Nohant country retreat (a chateau 100 miles south of Paris), he wrote to his family in Warsaw:<br /><br />
"<i>The little dog Marquis (you remember) is staying with me and is lying on my sofa. He is an extraordinary creature: he has a soft fluffy white coat which Mme Sand herself brushes every day, and he is as intelligent as can be. I can't begin to tell you all his original tricks. For example, he will neither eat nor drink from a gilt vessel: he pushes it away with his nose and upsets it if he can.</i>" [Chopin: letter to his family in Warsaw, Nohant, 11 October 1846]<br /><br />
A regular guest at Nohant between 1844 to 1856 was the young painter Louis-Eugène Lambert, a friend of George Sand's son Maurice, and like Maurice a student of Delacroix. Lambert later became well known for his paintings of cats and dogs and it's possible that his 1854 painting of a Bichon Frise is none other than a portrait of Marquis.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Louis-Eugène Lambert: Bichon Frise, 1854, possibly George Sand's dog Marquis]</small></center><br />
Lambert also painted some frescoes on the walls and ceilings at Nohant, and created various canvasses of Nohant life, including a romantic depiction of the Nohant kitchen.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Louis-Eugène Lambert: La cuisine de Nohant (c. 1850s)]</small></center><br />
Nohant, George Sand's country home, had become a valuable haven for Chopin, and in the seven summers he spent there he had composed some of his greatest music. At the beginning of November 1846 Chopin left Nohant, unaware that he would never return. He had just completed his last great piano masterpieces, the <i>Barcarolle</i>, <i>Polonaise-Fantaisie</i> and two <i>Nocturnes</i> Op.62, and travelled back to Paris to resume his teaching for the winter months. A few weeks after his return to Paris he ended a letter to George Sand, who was still at Nohant, with the following remark:<br /><br />
"<i>Please thank Marquis for missing me and for sniffing at my door.</i>" [Chopin: letter to George Sand, Paris, 25 November 1846]<br /><br />
In 1846 George Sand and her children had begun putting on plays at Nohant (having built a small stage with various pieces of painted scenery). Sand's son Maurice also began developing a puppet theatre. Chopin helped out by providing music, and a musical sketch by Chopin has survived entitled <i>Gallop Marquis</i>, a light-hearted bagatelle no doubt demonstrating the fun antics of Sand's dogs, it's second section containing the annotation "<i>partie Dib</i>".<br /><br />
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<small><center>[A portion of the manuscript of the little "Gallop Marquis" that Chopin sketched for the fun activities of Nohant during the summer and early autumn of 1846. The piece presumably depicts the antics of George Sand's two dogs Marquis and Dib (over the 13th and 14th measures Chopin has written "partie Dib")]</small></center><br />
Apparently George Sand's dogs enjoyed getting involved in Nohant's amateur theatrical productions:<br /><br />
"<i>Marquis is acting too. The costumes get him tremendously excited. He takes part in the action, jumps to the arms of people being murdered, weeps at the feet of those singing romances and at the end dances a 'pas de deux' with Lambert. He takes the play seriously and feels all the emotions of the audience.</i>" [George Sand: letter to Emanuel Arago, Nohant, 9 December 1846]<br /><br />
"<i>Did yesterday's pantomime induce Dib to dance?</i>" [Chopin: letter to George Sand, Paris, 15 December 1846]<br /><br />
"<i>I can well imagine the excitement of Marquis and Dib. Lucky spectators, simple-minded and untaught!</i>" [Chopin: letter to George Sand, Paris, 17 January 1847]<br /><br />
Chopin's famous <i>Waltz</i> in D flat, Op.64 no.1, was possibly first sketched during the autumn of 1846 at Nohant (it was first performed publicly by Chopin at his very last Paris concert, on 16 February 1848, his rendition leading one of those present to marvel at the suppleness of Chopin's playing). According to an unsubstantiated legend the waltz's creation was the result of a dare, when Sand challenged Chopin to set the movement of her dog Marquis chasing his tail to music. Whether the story of the waltz's inspiration is true or not, one of Chopin's most gifted pupils, Camille O'Meara, had no hesitation in her correspondence in referring to the waltz as "<i>la valse au petit chien</i>".<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="236" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jxOYkNQgyDQ?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<small><center>[Chopin's Waltz in D flat Op.64 no.1, followed by an explanation of the work's unusual subtitle, recorded live at the 2018 Oxford Summer Piano Series]</small></center><br /><br />
* * * * *<br /><br />
<b>Mozart...</b><br /><br />
Mozart owned several dogs over the years, the family dog when he was a child being named Bimperl, a fox terrier.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[A 1995 reconstruction by Ingrid Ramsauer of a Bölzlscheibe (shooting target) created by Leopold Mozart in December 1777, depicting Bimperl (the family's fox terrier) dancing on the piano while Mozart's sister Nannerl plays]</small></center><br />
The letters Mozart received from his father during his travels with his mother to Munich, Augsburg and Paris in 1777/78 are full of descriptions of the family dog's daily activities:<br /><br />
"<i>As the weather is fine, we take an early walk every day with our faithful Bimperl who is in splendid trim and only becomes very sad and obviously most anxious when we are both out of the house, for then she thinks that because she has lost you two, she is now going to lose us as well. So when we went to the ball and she saw us masked, she refused to leave Mitzerl, and, when we got home, she was so overjoyed that I thought she would choke. Moreover, when we were out, she would not stay on her bed in the room, but remained lying on the ground outside the porter's door. She would not sleep, but kept on moaning, wondering, I suppose, whether we should ever return.</i>" [Leopold Mozart, letter to his son, Salzburg, 12/13 October 1777]<br /><br />
Mozart's fondness for animals is obvious from his letters home, and his frequent greetings to the dog, the family canary, and so on. In 1780, during rehearsals for his opera Idomeneo in Munich, Mozart wrote long letters to his father in Salzburg, describing the frantic preparations for the opera's premiere, including Mozart's frustration with several of the singers:<br /><br />
"<i>I must teach the whole opera myself to Del Prato</i> [Vincenzo dal Prato, 1756–1828, an Italian castrato singer]. <i>He is incapable of singing even the introduction to any air of importance, and his voice is so uneven!... The day before yesterday Del Prato sang in the most disgraceful way at the concert. I would almost lay a wager that the man never manages to get through the rehearsals, far less the opera; he has some internal disease... When Del Prato comes I must sing to him, for I have to teach him his whole part like a child; his method is not worth a farthing</i>" [Mozart: letters to his father, Munich, 15 & 22 November 1780]<br /><br />
In the midst of this and other long rants, Mozart doesn't forget to send greetings to the family pet:<br /><br />
"<i>Give Bimperl a pinch of Spanish snuff, a good winesop, and three kisses.</i>" [Mozart: letter to his father, Munich, 22 November 1780]<br /><br />
In Vienna Mozart and his wife Constanze likely acquired at least two dogs (Goukerl and Katherl). An almost certainly apocryphal story tells of how Mozart's dog was the sole follower of its master's hearse as it made its way to St. Marx Cemetery on the outskirts of Vienna on 6 December 1791, and where Mozart would be given a third class burial, the exact location of his grave subsequently lost when the grave was reused.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Pierre-Roch Vigneron (1789-1872): "Le Convoi du Pauvre" c.1819, a coloured French copper engraving said to have been owned by Beethoven, who hung it on his wall as a constant reminder of Mozart's humble death]</small></center><br />
In addition to his love of dogs, Mozart also kept various other pets when he lived in Vienna, including a starling which he taught to sing the opening theme of the last movement of his Concerto K.453 and for whom, at its demise, the composer held an elaborate funeral in his back garden.<br /><br />
* * * * *<br /><br />
<b>Some other dog-loving composers, pictured with their beloved pets/companions:</b><br /><br />
<b>Schubert...</b><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Schubert with the painter Leopold Kupelwieser's dog Drago, Schloss Atzenbrugg, 1821 (detail from Kupelwieser's 1821 watercolour)].</small></center><br />
<b>Grieg...</b><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Grieg with his labrador, hiking on Løvstakken, Bergen, Norway, c.1900]</small></center><br />
<b>Elgar...</b><br /><br />
Elgar was particularly fond of dogs, and had two close dog companions at the end of his life, Marco (a spaniel) and Mina (a cairn terrier), and his very last composition is actually a short and beautiful orchestral piece named <i>Mina</i>. On his 70th birthday, 2 June 1927, Elgar conducted a concert of his music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on a national radio broadcast. At the conclusion of the broadcast Elgar spoke into the microphone to wish listeners goodnight, ending with "<i>and goodnight Marco</i>". Elgar had an accomplice, his niece Madge Grafton, stationed at his home with Marco to check the dog's reaction and apparently on hearing Elgar call out his name Marco became very excited and rushed around the room barking, looking for his master!<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Elgar with his spaniel, Marco, Worcester, September 1927]</small></center><br />
<b>Debussy...</b><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Debussy with his collie, Xanto, and fox terrier, Boy, outside his home, 1907]</small></center><br />
<b>Rachmaninoff...</b><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Rachmaninoff with his Newfoundland, Levko]</small></center><br />
<b>Gershwin...</b><br /><br />
Gershwin also owned several dogs over the years, including Bombo, Tinker, and most notably Tony, a wire-haired terrier who was notorious for getting lost in New York and having search parties sent out for him.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Stills of Gershwin's wire-haired terrier Tony as a puppy, taken by Gershwin himself]</small></center><br />
In 1936 Tony followed Gershwin from New York to California where the composer was about to start work on an RKO movie starring his old friend Fred Astaire. Gershwin flew to California on 10 August 1936 with his brother Ira and Ira's wife Lee, but Tony travelled by car. Unfortunately for Tony he suffered greatly from travel sickness during the 3000 mile car trip and his carer had to break the journey for a few days to allow Tony time to recover. Eventually he made it safely to Los Angeles and was able to join his dog loving owner at Gershwin's rented Roxbury Drive home.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Tony, Gershwin and Gershwin's mother Rose, Beverly Hills, California, USA, 1936]</small></center><br />
The movie Gershwin was working on when he first arrived in California in 1936 was <i>Shall We Dance</i> (released in May 1937) and it features a memorable scene with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers involving dogs of various shapes and sizes on board a transatlantic ocean liner, for which Gershwin created his delightful <i>Walking the Dog</i> incidental music. According to the movie's choreographer Hermes Pan, Gershwin improvised the music for this scene right on the set during rehearsals after the director Mark Sandrich asked Gershwin if he could add music to make the scene more comical. The original soundtrack score used for the movie has never been published, and in the 1950s Ira Gershwin, remembering the delightful <i>Walking the Dog</i> sequence but unable to track down his brother's original score, got in touch with Hal Borne, Fred Astaire's rehearsal pianist while at RKO, and asked if he could recreate the <i>Walking the Dog</i> music from memory. Despite the almost 20 year gap Hal Borne did his best to recall the incidental music, which was then published as a piano solo entitled <i>Promenade</i>. Not surprisingly, given the amount of time that had passed, Borne was not able to remember Gershwin's music exactly, so in the early 1990s I created my own piano version of the <i>Walking the Dog</i> scene, which I transcribed directly from the <i>Shall We Dance</i> film soundtrack, and which I recorded in 1997 on Volume 4 of my <i>Authentic George Gershwin</i> CD collection. Hearing the true harmonies of Gershwin's original <i>Walking the Dog</i> was a revelation, with so many echoes of the extraordinary harmonic language of Gershwin's opera <i>Porgy and Bess</i> which the composer had completed only a year earlier.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="236" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tYFLih_pD4I?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<small><center>[Gershwin transcribed Gibbons: <i>Walking The Dog</i> (coupled with the original Astaire/Rogers dog walking film sequence from the 1937 movie <i>Shall We Dance</i>.]</small></center><br />
<b>Britten...</b><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Britten holding his dachshund Clytie, 1954. The score is of his opera Gloriana (1953), written for the coronation of Elizabeth II. According to the photographer "<i>the dog demanded to become part of the picture. Britten swivelled on the piano seat to make room for his canine collaborator, who leaped into the safety of his arms, while yet casting a wary eye on me</i>".]</small></center><br />
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<small><center>[Britten, holding one of his dachshunds, talking with German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, 6th December 1965]</small></center><br />
<b>Gibbons...</b><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvah4R2A9WpYYBj4dS6HhG1C61oHY89ja5tPio-Dq8iEKqj_gsJmaP0o0nvc8-UWj768aEcBIe6EsUOvy_Xb_JBinr6e43v4WtvrE11mSRsg7xcaWiRbyR8oLOPlYCPuv7rQn_iT7Rdc/s1600/10806441_10153032527369384_1124676825619825157_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvah4R2A9WpYYBj4dS6HhG1C61oHY89ja5tPio-Dq8iEKqj_gsJmaP0o0nvc8-UWj768aEcBIe6EsUOvy_Xb_JBinr6e43v4WtvrE11mSRsg7xcaWiRbyR8oLOPlYCPuv7rQn_iT7Rdc/s320/10806441_10153032527369384_1124676825619825157_n.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="540" data-original-height="720" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Gibbons with his most severe critic, Georgia, a wheaten Scottish terrier]</small></center><br />
<b>Composers and their pets, accompanied by Elgar's Mina...</b><br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="236" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T-BCa3Ow4Ns?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<small><center>[A slide show (plus rare home movies of Elgar and Gershwin) accompanied by Elgar's last composition, Mina, composed 1932/33 and named after his cairn terrior Mina (played by the Northern Sinfonia of England conducted by Neville Marriner), plus a short postlude about Anna Magdalena Bach's love of songbirds]</small></center><br />
Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-8650681343883565322017-02-25T01:33:00.000-08:002017-03-05T12:07:12.483-08:00Is it Chopin? A look at authenticity claims for a newly discovered photographic imageOn 8th June 1847 Chopin wrote home from Paris to his family in Warsaw:
"<i>Winterhalter, too, has made a small pencil drawing for my old friend Planat de la Faye (I wrote to you about him once). It's a very good likeness. You have heard of Winterhalter, of course. He is a kind decent fellow and very talented.</i>"<br /><br />
In his lifetime Chopin had his portrait painted and drawn by a variety of professional and amateur artists, and judging by the discrepancy in physical characteristics many of these artists must have encountered some difficulty in capturing the composer’s likeness. Chopin had an expressive and extremely mobile face according to contemporary accounts, and could transform his appearance when entertaining friends with his brilliant impersonations. The pianist and composer Moscheles wrote of Chopin in 1839 (in a letter to his wife Charlotte):
"<i>He was lively, merry, and extremely comic in his mimicry of Pixis, Liszt, and a hunch-backed pianoforte amateur.</i>"
In his biography of Chopin, published in 1863, Liszt wrote:
"<i>He displayed a rich vein of drollery in pantomime </i>["il déployait dans la pantomime une verve drôlatique"]<i>. He often amused himself by reproducing the musical formulas and peculiar tricks of certain virtuosi, in the most burlesque and comic improvisations, in imitating their gestures, their movements, in counterfeiting their faces with a talent which instantaneously depicted their whole personality. His own features would then become scarcely recognizable, he could force the strangest metamorphoses upon them, but while mimicking the ugly and grotesque, he never lost his own native grace.</i>"
Chopin's skill at mimicry was so well known it even appeared in a Balzac novel; in his 1844 novel "<i>Un homme d'affaires</i>" Balzac wrote:
"<i>Gifted with the same talent for mimicking absurdities which Chopin the pianist possesses to so high a degree, he proceeded forthwith to represent the character with startling truth.</i>"<br /><br />
Descriptions of Chopin’s appearance by those who knew him, including his piano pupils who often saw him on a daily basis, are fascinating in their psychological observations, though they are often short on physical detail. Wilhelm von Lenz, a pupil of Chopin, wrote in 1872, describing his first meeting with Chopin in Paris in October 1842:
"<i>Chopin soon came out to me, the card in his hand; a young man of middle height,</i> [Chopin was around 5 foot 7 inches in height]<i>, slim </i>[Chopin weighed around 88 pounds, i.e. a little over 6 stone]<i>, haggard, with a sad, though very expressive countenance, and elegant Parisian bearing — stood before me. I have seldom, if ever, met with an apparition so entirely engaging.</i>"
Zofia Zaleska née Rosengardt, another pupil of Chopin, described Chopin in her diary in 1843:
"<i>Such noble features so full of expression but so pale, wan and thin that it seemed the smallest breath of wind would topple him over.</i>”
The newspaper The Scotsman offered the following description in an anonymous review published 10 October 1848 of Chopin's Edinburgh concert given on 4 October 1848:
“<i>The infinite delicacy and finish of his playing, combined with great occasional energy never overdone, is very striking when we contemplate the man — a slender and delicate-looking person, with a marked profile, indicating much intellectual energy.</i>”
Georges Mathias, one of Chopin's most gifted pupils, wrote this beautiful description of Chopin in a letter to his pupil Isidor Philipp on 12 February 1897:
"<i>I see Chopin resting his back against a chimney place mantelpiece. I see his face, delicate clear cut features, his not very big eyes sparkling, radiant and shimmering, his smile of unspeakable charm... It does not seem that there has ever existed such harmony between the author and his work.</i>"<br /><br />
Thankfully three images exist that have preserved for posterity Chopin’s true physical likeness: they are the photographic copies of two now lost daguerreotypes (from c.1845 and c.1847) and a death mask molded by Auguste Clésinger [according to anecdotal evidence it took Clésinger two attempts to obtain an accurate death mask, his first attempt likely failing due to inexperience with the process and undue haste in its creation; the second attempt was successful in as much as its accuracy appears to be confirmed when compared with the photographic images].<br /><br />
On 16 January 2017 the Polish Institute of Paris issued a press release announcing the existence of a possible unpublished photograph of Chopin, recently discovered by "<i>a fine connoisseur of Frédéric Chopin</i>", M. Alain Kohler, a Swiss physicist who in 2015 through a detailed search of Pleyel's archives had been able to track down a Pleyel piano that had once been belonged to Chopin. Given the scarcity of photographic images of Chopin the thought that a third photographic image might exist was very exciting news. However, it is always wise to greet such dramatic announcements with caution and a certain amount of skepticism: in July 2006 a gullible music world was taken in by premature announcements in the press hailing as authentic a photograph said to show the 78-year-old Constanze Mozart. Having long outlived her composer husband, dying in 1842, it was not unreasonable to presume that a photograph of Constanze Mozart could exist, but scholars quickly proved that the image in question (which first appeared with its unusual claim in 1958) could not have been taken until after her death.<br /><br />
Having lived in close proximity to two reproductions of Chopin’s death mask for many years, as well as good reproductions of the 1845 and 1847 daguerreotype copies, all of which adorn my music studio, I was extremely surprised when I first saw the image purported to be of Chopin, announced by the Polish Institute of Paris in January 2017. In my initial reaction I felt it bore little resemblance to the known authentic images of the composer with which I was so familiar (in particular I felt the new image lacked Chopin’s distinctive oval face). At the same time I could clearly see that the image did bear a strong similarity to stereotypical images of the composer, produced in numerous portraits (and in movies) over the years. I could also see an affinity with both the famous unfinished 1838 Delacroix painting of Chopin and with certain details of the c.1847 Louis-Auguste Bisson daguerreotype image of Chopin.<br /><br />
Since an announcement from the Polish Institute of Paris had to be taken seriously, I spent a great deal of time examining the new image, despite my misgivings, carefully comparing it to the Clésinger death mask. To begin with I made careful comparisons between the Clésinger death mask and the previously known c.1845 and c.1847 daguerreotype images, as a sort of control. The match up between the Clésinger death mask and these two images was easily accomplished and extraordinarily convincing: without doubt the c.1845 and c.1847 daguerreotype images and the Clésinger death mask all represent the same person in my view (and an important validation for the c.1845 daguerreotype copy whose authenticity some people still question).<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyQavJxw1w4E5gET08wgk6RGUCeyQ19ThSl7jllPbDBtDaKd4FCXmUJVfuht7hri3evdqscuoAMCE4WcE0VcHSaLsNXKnXyM5_STLgJKvFH0O0xLaC9YQ86iV1fc6tPxWAr5_sX-lsMc4/s1600/Picture1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyQavJxw1w4E5gET08wgk6RGUCeyQ19ThSl7jllPbDBtDaKd4FCXmUJVfuht7hri3evdqscuoAMCE4WcE0VcHSaLsNXKnXyM5_STLgJKvFH0O0xLaC9YQ86iV1fc6tPxWAr5_sX-lsMc4/s400/Picture1.jpg" width="400" height="183" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Chopin's death mask, modelled by Clésinger, compared to a copy of a daguerreotype acquired by the Polish government from the Chopin archives of Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig in 1936, the original daguerreotype (now lost) likely to have been created after 1843 and before 1847]</small></center><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0f8MEc7EbPZReeM2JbhJokRg6wIkaArtWk3N8xLgZe9-T2M-GiZeKzk4f3CAb5BeQS6I7aVjxE74kyEW5Dy2YeHvReBu6Cy7REPWaXoGGQUqbus9gcsQKbbDZcuHObVD4fSkc5-EJrM4/s1600/Picture2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0f8MEc7EbPZReeM2JbhJokRg6wIkaArtWk3N8xLgZe9-T2M-GiZeKzk4f3CAb5BeQS6I7aVjxE74kyEW5Dy2YeHvReBu6Cy7REPWaXoGGQUqbus9gcsQKbbDZcuHObVD4fSkc5-EJrM4/s400/Picture2.jpg" width="400" height="184" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Chopin's death mask, modelled by Clésinger, compared to a copy of a daguerreotype acquired by the Polish government from the Chopin archives of Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig in 1936, the original daguerreotype (now lost) was likely taken at the Paris studios of Louis-Auguste Bisson at 65 rue Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois no later than the end of 1847]</small></center><br />
Using the same method, I then compared the Clésinger death mask with the image recently unearthed by Alain Kohler. I made many attempts but could not get the features to match up. It was clear to me that the new image and the death mask had too many differences for them to be representations of the same person.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BqklzbLrTrYK6QPmgJOIkF-gChBp0bHNUiawGPIReJ6zWYqAMU3MecbCNoR9Aq5_TYDVxVGKH8WVHd2q-XgwLx9ibte2tHDd9KWakfz4RDFDBGkf-1pOLjDZBJykgTHQ6EgkQcd68Xo/s1600/Picture4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BqklzbLrTrYK6QPmgJOIkF-gChBp0bHNUiawGPIReJ6zWYqAMU3MecbCNoR9Aq5_TYDVxVGKH8WVHd2q-XgwLx9ibte2tHDd9KWakfz4RDFDBGkf-1pOLjDZBJykgTHQ6EgkQcd68Xo/s400/Picture4.jpg" width="400" height="181" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Chopin's death mask, modelled by Clésinger, compared to a photographic image of an unnamed person, recently discovered by Alain Kohler]</small></center><br />
Out of curiosity I also compared the Clésinger death mask to the 1847 Winterhalter drawing mentioned by Chopin, and the match up was very close, validating Chopin’s own assessment that the Winterhalter drawing was "<i>a very good likeness</i>".<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN0Yr2QlhliLkIVMnE3aREAeyyn12rcRznW4AEqFaWB-luO6t-IBj_dBVDFNCasT0zO8jt7ZHerodPNz9j-Zt88PaDOVBYv-9fY2_vdcAPsxCsieyoA2FXhpcYsWvjAyEr-TeX5PG6sso/s1600/Picture3a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN0Yr2QlhliLkIVMnE3aREAeyyn12rcRznW4AEqFaWB-luO6t-IBj_dBVDFNCasT0zO8jt7ZHerodPNz9j-Zt88PaDOVBYv-9fY2_vdcAPsxCsieyoA2FXhpcYsWvjAyEr-TeX5PG6sso/s400/Picture3a.jpg" width="400" height="185" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Chopin's death mask, modelled by Clésinger, compared to a pencil drawing of Chopin, dated 1847, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Winterhalter made a number of drawings of Chopin, one of which Chopin described in a letter to his family dated 8 June 1847 as "<i>a very good likeness</i>"]</small></center><br />
You can also see the comparisons between all these images in this video.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="236" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lQNhkLTXtdU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />
So what is the significance of the similarities between the newly discovered image and the 1838 Delacroix portrait and with certain details in the c.1847 L.A. Bisson daguerreotype image?<br /><br />
The image discovered by Alain Kohler and the 1838 Delacroix portrait match up very closely indeed: the head is positioned at exactly the same angle in both images and when the two images are overlapped the facial features line up almost perfectly. This is strange for two reasons: firstly, we’re comparing a photographic image with a painting; secondly, though Delacroix’s portrait is a fine representation of the passion and nobility of Chopin’s spirit it is more an idealized image of the composer rather than an accurate portrait of the composer’s physical appearance.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWnCNoG889F7iHBcY6Wur-fvDi4Jm6ZRaSw1f2o8T3dja1dPiB9P5tm-HOtINIHXPAI28xdum_oo8Cy0D2KZYr-qf_SHsfyTPbUCS5CqS0UoUZ_5lpDjwx5RRQkNTCvcGAzYGjhTFBCgM/s1600/Picture5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWnCNoG889F7iHBcY6Wur-fvDi4Jm6ZRaSw1f2o8T3dja1dPiB9P5tm-HOtINIHXPAI28xdum_oo8Cy0D2KZYr-qf_SHsfyTPbUCS5CqS0UoUZ_5lpDjwx5RRQkNTCvcGAzYGjhTFBCgM/s400/Picture5.jpg" width="400" height="183" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Eugène Delacroix's unfinished 1838 painting of Chopin, compared to a photographic image of an unnamed person, recently discovered by Alain Kohler]</small></center><br />
Delacroix’s 1849 pencil sketch of Chopin as Dante gives a slightly different representation of Chopin’s physical appearance, which may or may not be closer to reality (certainly this 1849 sketch held great significance to Delacroix, who kept the drawing in his bedroom for the remainder of his life, writing the words "Cher Chopin" beneath the image):<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz-gQMAXhgr7I2h1OxvVDsB3Jek5UdNsrBnfgUFf1MzfrN_0cDUqnjbQLSXe4AQcXeYajthPTmW4I3Pum9ctPsC6P8-W4UEVbm9V1N1WZ2ki5VsKp5JgIqfVO0hzz_B8WRAtL2LSwbnd4/s1600/10380271_10152933692769384_1777850004935906730_n+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz-gQMAXhgr7I2h1OxvVDsB3Jek5UdNsrBnfgUFf1MzfrN_0cDUqnjbQLSXe4AQcXeYajthPTmW4I3Pum9ctPsC6P8-W4UEVbm9V1N1WZ2ki5VsKp5JgIqfVO0hzz_B8WRAtL2LSwbnd4/s400/10380271_10152933692769384_1777850004935906730_n+%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" height="368" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Eugène Delacroix: drawing of Chopin as Dante c.31 October 1849, inscribed "Cher Chopin"]</small></center><br />
Comparing the newly discovered image with the c.1847 L.A. Bisson daguerreotype image of Chopin, the following similarities stand out:<br />
- both sitters appear to be wearing similar or identical collars and ties<br />
- the hairstyle of both is almost identical, even down to a small curl on the bottom left of the image<br />
- both sitters wear a slightly frowned expression, and with slightly hooded eyelids<br />
- there is a similar wood trim detail in the background of both images<br /><br />
Given these similarities it’s easy to understand why some might be convinced the newly discovered image is a photographic portrait of Chopin, possibly taken by L.A. Bisson in the same session at his Paris studio at 65 rue Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois that produced the famous Chopin daguerreotype image. But to come to this conclusion one would have to ignore the differences in the physical features of the two sitters. It’s also important to bear in mind that in the L.A. Bisson daguerreotype image Chopin is looking at the camera face on, and so it isn’t possible to assess the true shape of his forehead or nose; without that information the newly discovered image does appear closer in likeness than it actually is.<br /><br />
So what could be the explanation for these similar details? Could this new image perhaps have been created as an “hommage” to Chopin, or perhaps even a deliberate attempt at forgery? I certainly believe it's possible, but I should point out that the Polish Institute's original press release stated that Alain Kohler and his team had examined this possibility and ruled it out, without providing specific details in the press release to substantiate their position. It seems less likely that the similarities are merely coincidences, since certain features of Chopin, such as his hairstyle, are fairly unique to him, so for now there are still many puzzles that have yet to be resolved.<br /><br />
Some other queries regarding the image also need to be addressed. The newly discovered picture appears to have been cropped, which is odd. If it has, what has become of the uncropped image and why would this have been done? Alain Kohler has raised this same concern himself. To date few details have been released regarding the current ownership of the image, the condition and age of the print (e.g. the kind of paper the image is printed on, any information written on the reverse side, etc.), the image's known history and how it came into its present ownership. It would be important to know if the image has ever previously been made public. With a lack of provenance all we are left with in assessing the picture’s authenticity is its appearance, which as I have outlined above, leaves a lot to be desired. In my opinion it is unfortunate that the Polish Institute in Paris issued their press release concerning the image before more efforts at verifying the image's authenticity had been made. In the rumour mill that is today’s internet a mere suggestion that the picture might be Chopin, and might have been taken by L.A. Bisson in 1847, is quickly transformed from suggestion to fact. All such statements regarding the history of the image are at this stage, pure conjecture. It is for this reason that I felt it important to issue my own statement on the image.<br /><br />
In conclusion, based on my own painstaking comparisons between the image discovered by Alain Kohler and announced to the world by the Polish Institute of Paris on 16 January 2017 and the known authentic images of the composer, there is little doubt in my mind that the newly discovered image is NOT an authentic photographic portrait of Chopin. Meanwhile I will eagerly await with great interest any new information that is released regarding the image, and how it came into existence.
Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-52857932527232592992016-03-02T20:49:00.002-08:002016-03-02T20:49:53.886-08:00A random collection of music for my birthdayIn celebration of my birthday today here is a random collection of pieces I have written, chosen for no special reason, though it goes without saying that I am fond of all of them!<br /><br />
<b>Cradle Song, Op.64</b><br /><br />
<i>"Be still, my sweet sweeting, no longer do crye, Sing lullaby, lullaby, lullaby baby"</i> are the opening words of the lullaby a nurse sings to the child in her care in John Phillip's 1566 play <i>The Commodye of Pacient and Meeke Grissill</i>. Phillip's play is based on the folklore of Grissill (or Griselda), in which a cruel husband tests the loyalty of his spouse with a series of dreadful scenarios. According to some scholars Phillip's 1566 play was possibly intended as a thinly disguised attack on the recently deceased tyrannical king Henry VIII, in order to help restore the reputation of the out of favour Anne Boleyn, mother of the newly crowned queen Elizabeth I — since her execution, Anne Boleyn had been a <i>persona non grata</i> in England. My setting of the nurse's cradle song was written in June 2005 and exists in three different versions: the original version for one voice, a duet arrangement for two sopranos (the version presented here, sung by Hillary Barlow and Danielle Riggins) and an arrangement for two soprano voices with added descant for children's choir. This video also features the poignant photographs of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 — 1879).<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G528wPW6NQE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />
<b>Siciliano, Op.70b</b><br /><br />
This work has great personal significance, composed on Christmas Eve of 2005. Five years later, on October 14 2010, just after I had begun my artist-in-residency at Davis & Elkins College in the beautiful Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, USA, flautist Elizabeth Brightbill and cellist Andrew Gabbert gave the first performance (at Davis & Elkins College) of a new arrangement I made for them of the piece. Here is a recording of their performance at the college (the video shows the wonderful fall foliage of that autumn, as viewed from the windows of one of the college buildings).<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TROJzeIsxAw?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />
<b>Sleep Not, Op.19</b><br /><br />
When I returned to composing at the end of 2000/beginning of 2001, after an absence of 25 years, I was particularly interested in writing songs, and was therefore constantly searching for words that inspired me. It wasn't long before I realised that Emily Brontë's poems gave me more inspiration than most writers, and in the first few months of 2001 I set four of her poems, including this one.<br /><br />
Emily's older sister Charlotte wrote in 1850 that Emily was <i>"a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove"</i> in her appreciation of the wild beauty of Yorkshire's moors where they lived in northern England. She described how inconsolable Emily became when taken away from the moors to attend Roe Head School 18 miles away, where Charlotte taught (today Roe Head School is part of the <a href="http://www.hollybanktrust.com/">Hollybank School</a> for children with special needs):<br /><br />
<i>"My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side, her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength, threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on."</i><br /><br />
In this video the soprano Ann Mackay sings <i>Sleep Not</i>, a live recording from a concert given in August 2003. The video also contains some rare images connected with the Brontës, including the earliest photographs taken of the parsonage in Haworth were the family lived. Sadly there are no photographs of Emily, Charlotte or Anne Brontë (to the best of our knowledge) though there are several photographic images of their father Patrick. The earliest known photograph connected with the Brontës appears to have been taken in January 1857, when John Stewart visited the parsonage and took several photographs for Elizabeth Gaskell's forthcoming book <i>The Life of Charlotte Brontë</i>, including one of the parsonage from the top of the church tower. At this point in time all Patrick Brontë's family (his wife and children) had died, though he himself was still living there when the pictures were taken. These early photographs show the bleakness of the setting, before there were any trees in the surrounding graveyard, and before the gable wing had been added on the side of the parsonage. From their front door the Brontës had immediate access to the wild moors which Emily adored.<br /><br />
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<b>The Bourne, Op.27</b><br /><br />
In March 1863 Macmillan's Magazine published a short poem by Christina Rossetti entitled <i>The Bourne</i> (originally part of a much longer twelve stanza poem written 9 years earlier, on 17 February 1854, entitled <i>There remaineth therefore a res</i>t). In June 2001 I set Rossetti's poignant words to music, and since then the song has had a small life of its own. It was first sung by Ann Mackay in England in July 2002, and by Charlene Aruta Taub in New York in August 2002. Since then it has been sung or recorded by a number of singers including Ann Mackay, Mary Plazas, Leona Mitchell, Christine Brewer, Suzanne Fleming-Atwood and others. The attached video includes a live recording of a performance given by Ann Mackay in August 2003, accompanied by the beautiful photographs of the northern English countryside taken by the blogger Heather of <a href="http://uphilldowndale.wordpress.com/">Uphilldowndale</a><br /><br />
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<b>O Magnum Mysterium, Op.105</b><br /><br />
The final offering in this birthday selection is one of my most recent compositions, a carol I wrote for the choir of Davis & Elkins College for their most recent Christmas carol service, composed in October and first performed on 6 December 2015. The video features a recording made at that carol service, with members of Davis & Elkins College choir, with myself playing the lovely Casavant Frères organ of Davis Memorial Church in Elkins, West Virginia.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="236" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ltsGSmEwOM4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-80310148149911452992016-02-10T14:56:00.001-08:002016-02-10T17:18:37.523-08:00A matinée musicaleThere's nothing like the intimacy of live music-making in the company of a small group of friends, an environment that's so different to the formal atmosphere of public concerts (and more focused than the often distracted environment that comes with listening to recorded music). A few days ago, on a cold but bright February afternoon, I gave a private soirée at home in honour of a special birthday of one of our party. Coincidentally a day later, while reading some correspondence connected with Chopin, I came across a reference to a private soirée Chopin held at his apartment for a similarly small number of friends, likewise on a cold February afternoon (in 1844) at the very same time of day (4PM), to honour a member of his party. We know that Chopin preferred these intimate music-making occasions to more impersonal public concerts. Before the invention of recording devices live music-making was a common occurrence in the home, whether you were lucky enough to have Chopin himself playing for you, or perhaps just a gifted family member, as was the case in the Brontë family for example. Lacking the connections that would have attracted an artist of Chopin's calibre to their isolated Yorkshire parsonage, the Brontës instead made their own music at home. Emily Brontë in particular was said to be a gifted pianist who <i>"played with precision and brilliancy when she did play — which was not often if others than the family circle were within hearing"</i> (family friend Ellen Nussey recalled). Emily's music collections included pieces by Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, Rossini, Mendelssohn and others, as well as the songs of Robert Burns. She was particularly fond of playing Beethoven, judging by the markings in her 8-volume collection <i>The Musical Library</i> (published by Charles Knight), which she purchased in 1844, the same year that Chopin held his February afternoon soirée. It's an intriguing thought to think of Emily Brontë, after walking for hours on the moors she loved so much with her beloved dog <i>Keeper</i>, in the evenings sitting at the piano playing through the well-thumbed pages of Beethoven's sonatas or the transcriptions from his Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. She may not have been a Chopin, but ask yourself this: given the choice, would you rather play music from your electronic device, or hear Emily Brontë play something for you herself?<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Inside Chopin’s apartment at 9 Square d’Orléans, Paris. The picture on the wall, beyond the Pleyel grand piano, depicted the pyramids of Egypt, while the firescreen was a gift from one of his pupils. Also visible is a chaise longue on the right, where Chopin sometimes lay while giving his lessons, when not feeling well]</small></center><br />
Below is a selection (with brief introductory notes) of recordings of some of the works I played at my February 7th <i>matinée musicale</i>, the full programme of which was as follows:<br /><br />
J.S. Bach: Aria from Goldberg Variations<br />
J.S. Bach: Gigue from French Suite no.5 in G major<br />
J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in C# minor (<i>Well-Tempered Clavier I</i>)<br />
Gibbons: Prelude in A flat, Op.37<br />
Gibbons: Folk song, Op.99<br />
Chopin: Etude in F minor (no.1 of <i>Trois Nouvelle Etudes</i>)<br />
Chopin: Fantaisie-Impromptu<br />
Chopin: Etude in E major, Op.10 no.3<br />
Chopin: Polonaise in A flat, Op.53<br />
Gibbons: Waltz for a musical box, Op.77<br />
Gibbons: Melody in F sharp, Op.80<br />
Gershwin (transcribed Gibbons): I Got Rhythm<br />
Gershwin (transcribed Gibbons): Sweet and low down<br />
Gershwin (transcribed Gibbons): Rhapsody in Blue<br /><br />
<b>1. J.S. Bach: Aria from Goldberg Variations</b><br /><br />
In 1722 Johann Sebastian Bach presented his new wife Anna Magdalena with a notebook of his own keyboard pieces, which Anna Magdalena titled on the front page <i>"Clavier-Büchlein vor Anna Magdalena Bachin"</i>. The volume likely served as both an aid to Anna Magdalena's keyboard studies and an album of favourite pieces. The couple were married in December 1721; a few years later Bach described his growing family in a letter to his childhood friend George Erdmann, one of the few letters of a more personal nature written by Bach that has survived: <i>"Now I must add a little about my domestic situation. I am married for the second time, my late wife having died in Cöthen. From the first marriage I have three sons and one daughter living, whom Your Honor will graciously remember having seen in Weimar. From the second marriage I have one son and two daughters living... The children of my second marriage are still small, the eldest, a boy, being six years old. But they are all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already form both a vocal and instrumental ensemble within my family, particularly since my present wife sings a good clear soprano, and my eldest daughter, too, joins in not badly"</i> [letter from Johann Sebastian Bach to George Erdmann, 28 October 1730]. Elsewhere Anna Magdalena was described as <i>"an outstanding soprano"</i>; before her marriage she was employed as a singer at the court of Cöthen, and it's clear from the way she and her husband worked together that Johann Sebastian valued her musicianship highly. A second <i>Anna Magdalena Notebook</i> of musical pieces was started in 1725, most of the entries being added by Anna Magdalena herself, including items composed both by her husband and other composers, as well as pieces written by the Bach children. The album also includes a number of songs transposed to the soprano range, presumably which Anna Magdalena would have sung herself. In 1741, on two blank pages in the notebook, Anna Magdalena copied out the aria from her husband's <i>Goldberg Variations</i>. Clearly the theme must have been well loved, and no doubt would have been often played by Anna Magdalena herself, or perhaps their children. In the following video can be seen images of the Bachs' home in Leipzig (an apartment in the St. Thomas School, where Bach was employed) including Bach's <i>Componir-Stube</i> (composing room). Sadly the building was demolished in 1902, the photographs of the interior being taken shortly before the demolition. Other images seen in the video include Anna Magdalena's own handwritten copy of the <i>Goldberg Variations</i> aria, and a few short excerpts from the 1968 biographical movie <i>"The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach"</i>, including a scene of Anna Magdalena with her beloved songbirds: in 1740, around the time Bach was working on his <i>Goldberg Variations</i>, the composer gave his wife a special gift of linnets, whose song must have become a regular accompaniment to all activities in the Bach home.<br /><br />
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<b>2. Gibbons: Prelude in A flat, Op.37</b><br /><br />
I began my own compositional efforts as a young child, one of my earliest pieces being a short Sonata written around the age of 9. By the time I was 14 I had a small collection of pieces to my credit including a concerto for piano and orchestra. However I then convinced myself (with all the self-consciousness of a teenager) that my creative efforts were in vain, destroyed many of these early pieces, and instead began concentrating fully on my ambition to become a concert pianist. Twenty-five years later, during an enforced break from performing while recovering from a very serious car accident, I finally had the opportunity to return to composing in a serious way and during the first year of this musical <i>renaissance</i> began writing many songs (settings of poems by Rossetti, Shelley, Brontë and others) before returning to the medium of solo piano. My short piano <i>Prelude Op.37</i>, composed in 2002, was a favourite of Edward Jablonski, the author and Gershwin biographer; the performance in this video was filmed at a special birthday concert held in his honour in New York in 2003. <br /><br />
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<b>3. Gibbons: Folk song, Op.99</b><br /><br />
My piano composition <i>Folk song Op.99</i> was completed on 4 April 2014, and first performed five days later at a concert in Oxford, England. This video contains a recording of that performance, accompanied by a slide show of images of rural northern England, including the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, famous for its dry stone walls and undulating hills.<br /><br />
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<b>4. Chopin: Etude in F minor, no.1 of Trois nouvelles études</b><br /><br />
Chopin's <i>"Trois nouvelles études"</i> were written in 1839 as a contribution to the pedagogical volume <i>Méthode des méthodes de piano</i>, compiled by François-Joseph Fétis and Ignaz Moscheles. The publication, which appeared in Paris in 1840, with an English edition appearing in 1841 under the title <i>The Complete System of Instruction</i>, included instructional essays on the history and art of piano playing, as well as specially composed pieces by Heller, Mendelssohn, Henselt, Liszt, Moscheles, Thalberg, Chopin and others. The title page also boasted that the volume contained <i>"works specially composed for the Piano Classes at the Brussels Conservatory and for the Schools of Music of Belgium by F. J. Fétis, Master of the Chapel of the King of Belgium and Director of the Brussels Conservatory of Music"</i>. One of the piano pupils at the Brussels Conservatory while Fétis was the director was none other than Emily Brontë, who during her brief 9 months in Brussels, in 1842, could well have heard Fétis conducting Beethoven symphonies at the conservatoire (she might even have heard Liszt and Berlioz, both of whom performed in Brussels while Emily and Charlotte Brontë were staying in the city!). In the first of the three studies he contributed to the Fétis <i>Méthode des méthodes de piano</i> Chopin chose to explore the rhythmical task of playing groups of fours (in the left hand) against groups of threes (in the right hand). Needless to say the end result is work of great beauty that far surpasses any dry technical exercise!<br /><br />
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<b>5. Chopin: Etude in E major, no.10 no.3</b><br /><br />
1832 was the year in which Victor Hugo set his famous novel <i>Les Misérables</i>. It was a pretty momentous year, not least from a musical point of view. Much of the action of <i>Les Misérables</i> is based on real events that Hugo witnessed himself in Paris, including the June revolution of June 5 and 6 1832. Though Hugo ennobled the actions of the students who tried, unsuccessfully, to start an uprising against the French king Louis-Phillipe, other contemporaries took a less favourable view of the rioters. Louis-Phillipe was more a constitutional monarch than a dictator: appointed by the elected government his powers were limited and his liberal leanings (influenced by his 3 year stay in the United States) had initially made him a popular figure, hence his nickname <i>Citizen King</i>. Nor did the rebelling students help their cause when they briefly kidnapped the American and French revolutionary hero Lafayette! Chopin's father took a dim view of the student riots when he wrote to his son on 28 June 1832: <i>"I am glad to see from your letter of 6 June that you were lucky enough not to be involved in the riot which occurred and which was instigated by rascals. Some papers say that Poles took part and thus abused the hospitality they enjoy: have they not had their fill of such nonsense? They have caused enough trouble here. I am sure their numbers were small, for who would be so mad as to share their destructive ideas?"</i>. Chopin had only been living in the city for a few months. Having arrived late in 1831 he gave his Paris debut on 25 February 1832 at the Salle Pleyel. A few months later he wrote one his most famous melodies, the manuscript of his <i>Etude in E major, Op.10 no.3</i> being dated 25 August 1832. If reports are true of Chopin's emotional reaction after hearing his pupil Adolphe Gutmann play the work during a lesson, it was a piece filled with nostalgia for his distant homeland of Poland.<br /><br />
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<b>6. Chopin: Polonaise in A flat, Op.53</b><br /><br />
The polonaise is a stately processional dance from Poland, made famous by Chopin's extraordinary compositions. One of Chopin's finest examples of the form is this, his passionate Polonaise in A flat, Op.53. The work was composed in 1842, and is often referred to as the <i>Heroic</i>, though not by Chopin, who strongly disliked descriptive or emotive titles. Though there is no speed indication or metronome mark on the work, only the description <i>maestoso</i> (majestically), we know that Chopin hated the piece to be played too fast. His pupil Charles Hallé (later founder of the Hallé Orchestra) wrote in his autobiography: <i>"Any deliberate misreading of his compositions he resented sharply. I remember how, on one occasion, in his gentle way he laid his hand upon my shoulder, saying how unhappy he felt, because he had heard his 'Grande Polonaise', in A flat, jouée vite</i> [played fast]<i>, thereby destroying all the grandeur, the majesty, of this noble inspiration".</i> To avoid playing polonaises too fast Chopin suggested to his pupils that they should be able to count out 6 beats in every bar, even though the tempo marking is 3 beats to the bar. It's likely that it was the Polonaise in A flat that Chopin performed at the February 1844 soirée mentioned at the beginning of this blog. The Polish poet Zaleski, in whose honour Chopin gave the soirée, wrote in his diary for 2 February 1844: <i>"It was snowing - just like one of our winter days </i>[in Poland]<i>. At 4PM I went to Chopin's </i>[at 9 Square d'Orleans]<i>, where I found Witwicki … Chopin entered unexpectedly, pale, tired, but in good spirits and in an inspired mood. He greeted me affectionately and sat down at the piano. It's impossible to describe the form and subject of his playing. For the first time in my life the beauty of the music moved me so vividly that I could not hold back my tears. All the nuances, all the musician's emotions, I could grasp, and I remember in the most exact way the motives and the feelings I had while listening to each piece. First he played a magnificent Prelude, then the Berceuse, then a Mazurka, again the Berceuse — of which Mme Hoffman </i>[one of the other guests]<i> said that the angels in Bethlehem must have sung like that. There followed a splendid Polonaise, and finally, in my honour, an improvisation in which he evoked all the sweet and sorrowful voices of the past. Chopin sang the tears of the dumkas and finished with the national anthem, 'Poland is not dead', in a whole gamut of different forms and voices, from that of the warrior to those of children and angels."</i><br /><br />
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<b>7. Gibbons: Waltz for a musical box, Op.77</b><br /><br />
On 11 December 2007 I wrote my <i>Waltz for a Musical Box Op.77</i>. Two weeks later I played it for the first time to a group of friends at an intimate New Year's Eve gathering. Here is a video of that first private performance.<br /><br />
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<b>8. Gibbons: Melody in F sharp, Op.80</b><br /><br />
My <i>Melody in F sharp Op.80</i> was composed on 12 January 2008. The video below is of the performance I gave two months later, in March 2008, at a special memorial concert for my childhood piano teacher, Elizabeth Brazell, who tragically had died the previous summer, at the age of 63. When I was around 12 years old Elizabeth Brazell mentioned at the end of one lesson that I seemed to enjoy performing and <i>"rising to the occasion"</i> and perhaps I should consider becoming a concert pianist. Needless to say I was immensely thrilled by the confidence she placed in me; in fact I was so excited that I remember skipping all the way home after the lesson singing to myself over and over again <i>"I'm going to be a concert pianist..."</i>. Many years later, as I was about to walk out onto the stage to make my Lincoln Center debut in New York, I suddenly thought of that scene, of 12-year-old me skipping home from my lesson in such excitement. Dedicating my <i>Melody in F sharp</i> to the memory of my early, and much missed, teacher is the very least I can do to honour her.<br /><br />
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<b>9. Gershwin transcribed Gibbons: Sweet and low down</b><br /><br />
The piano was at the centre of George Gershwin’s musical life, and he never tired of performing, whether to an audience of one or thousands. According to the film director Rouben Mamoulian, who also directed the premiere production of Porgy & Bess,<i> “George loved playing the piano for people and would do so at the slightest provocation... I am sure that most of his friends, in thinking of George at his best, think of him at the piano. I’ve heard many pianists and composers play for informal gatherings, but I know of no one who did it with such genuine delight and verve. George at the piano was George happy.”</i> Gershwin loved creating elaborate improvisations on his songs, and during the 1920s he recorded a number of these song variations on 78 discs. Beginning in the late 1980s I began reconstructing Gershwin's recorded improvisations, note-for-note, from his 78 discs, recorded radio broadcasts, and piano-rolls. What began as a fun project soon changed the direction of my career as I embarked on an annual series of Gershwin concerts at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, along with a series of recordings entitled <i>The authentic George Gershwin</i>. At the same time I was invited to the United States for the first time, to meet Gershwin's sister Frankie and eventually to make my US debut as a pianist. Now based in the United States, 25 years after my first visit to the country, it would not be an overstatement to say that Gershwin's music has <i>"changed my life"</i>. <i>Sweet and low down</i> was the first song improvisation of Gershwin's that I transcribed, and the performance on this video comes from my studio recording made in 1992 (the video also features rare footage of Gershwin himself, courtesy of Edward Jablonski).<br /><br />
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<b>10. Gershwin transcribed Gibbons: Rhapsody in Blue</b><br /><br />
The final item in this <i>matinée musicale</i> selection, and the music with which I concluded my intimate soirée a few days ago, is Gershwin's concert work <i>Rhapsody in Blue</i> (in my transcription based on the composer's own 1925 piano-roll recording). Gershwin once said <i>“I'd like my music to keep people - all kinds of people - awake when they should be sleeping. I'd like my compositions to be so vital that I'd be required by law to dispense sedatives with each score sold”</i>. The vitality of Gershwin’s music is one of it’s greatest hallmarks. S.N. Behrman put it perfectly when he wrote, in his ‘People in a Diary’: <i>“I felt on the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor - above all, the rush of the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it.”</i> When the guest of honour at our birthday soirée was asked if he had a special wish for his 80th birthday, he answered without hesitation: <i>"to live for ever"</i>. Here's to Gershwin's <i>oxygenated vitality</i> making that wish come true for all of us!<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_hzG8XpLRck?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-65827415270807809962016-01-29T07:35:00.012-08:002023-09-03T01:20:51.819-07:00On the ancient art of consolationThe poets of ancient Greece loved to remind everyone of the levelling effect of death, <i>"the sleep that is due to all"</i> (Callimachus), the destiny that <i>"no man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun"</i> (Homer's Iliad), <i>"let him remember that the limbs he clothes are mortal and that in the end he will put on a garment of earth"</i> (Pindar). In a world of so many unknowns death was a stark certainty. Nor did the poets hold back in expressing their grief at such an unwelcome visitor:<br /><br />
<i>So he spoke, and a black cloud of grief covered Achilles;<br />
with both hands he gathered up the sooty dust and<br />
poured it over his head, disfiguring his handsome face,<br />
and the black ashes settled all over his fragrant tunic.<br />
Mightily in his might, he lay stretched out in the dust,<br />
and with his own hands tore and disfigured his hair.<br />
The maidservants captured by Achilles and Patroclus<br />
cried aloud in agony of heart and all rushed out of doors<br />
to stand around war-minded Achilles, and with their hands<br />
they beat their breasts, and each one’s limbs were loosened.<br />
On his other side Antilochus grieved, weeping tears and<br />
holding Achilles’ hands and groaning in his noble heart,<br />
terrified that he might cut his throat with the iron.<br />
Achilles gave a terrible cry, and his revered mother heard him,<br />
sitting in the depths of the salt sea near her father the ancient,<br />
and in turn screamed in grief, and the goddesses gathered round,<br />
all the daughters of Nereus who lived in the deeps of the sea</i>.<br />
<small>[from Homer's Iliad, translated Anthony Verity]</small><br /><br />
In actual fact, in the mid 6th century BCE, Solon, chief magistrate of Athens, was concerned enough about uncontrolled expressions of grief that he introduced regulations to restrict mourning practices he felt were getting out of hand: <i>"Laceration of the flesh by mourners, and the use of set lamentations, and the bewailing of any one at the funeral ceremonies of another, he forbade"</i> [Plutarch, Life of Solon].<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Terracotta funeral plaque from Attica, c.520-510 BCE (courtesy Metropolitan Musuem of Art, New York). Possibly used as a tomb decoration the plaque shows mourners gathered around the deceased, crying lamentations and tearing their hair out. The chariot race below is also highly symbolic, evoking the funeral games that honoured departed heroes (as depicted in Homer's Iliad).]</small></center><br />
With the rise of the Stoic philosophies of the 3rd century BCE self-control came to be seen as an asset in Greek, and later in Roman, culture. Consolatory orations became popular to ease bereavement. By the time of Cicero, in 1st century BCE Rome, the <i>consolatio</i> had become almost a form of medication for the treatment of grief (Cicero even wrote his own <i>consolatio</i> in the hope that it would quell his own grief following the death of his beloved daughter).<br /><br />
Regarded as a gift from the gods, music held a preeminent position in ancient Greek culture and naturally was called into service to provide lamentations and comfort at funerals. According to Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, <i>"the Pythagoreans used medicine to purify the body and music to purify the soul"</i>.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[A drawing on a drinking vessel from 480-470 BCE, found in a Delphi tomb (courtesy Delphi Archaeological Museum). The image shows Apollo (a god of music), wearing a laurel or myrtle wreath, holding a tortoise-shell lyre in his left hand, while pouring a libation with his right hand. The crow facing him possibly represents Coronis, one of Apollo's lovers (the word Coronis translates as crow or raven).]</small></center><br />
Plutarch described how <i>"during the early period the aulos </i>[a reeded wind instrument]<i> was drawn to mournings and performed on these occasions a public service — though neither a highly prized nor cheerful one"</i>. Sextus Empiricus, in the 2nd century CE, wrote <i>"in general, music is heard not only from people who are rejoicing, but also in hymns, feasts, and sacrifices to the gods. Because of this, it turns the heart toward the desire for good things. But it is also a consolation to those who are grief-stricken; for this reason, the auloi playing a melody for those who are mourning are the lighteners of their grief"</i>.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Images on an oval ceramic container from Greece, 460-450 BCE (courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The illustrations possibly depict the poet Archilochus being called to his art by the Muses, one of whom can be seen here playing a double aulos (a reeded wind instrument).]</small></center><br />
The Roman philosopher Boethius, born in the year that the Roman Empire finally collapsed (480 CE), was concerned that important aspects of Greek and Roman culture might be lost to future generations (which of course they were for several hundred years); in his <i>De Institutione Musica</i> Boethius wrote <i>"why is it that those mourning in tears express their lamentation through music?... Nothing is more consistent with human nature than to be soothed by sweet modes and disturbed by their opposites... there is no age at all that is not delighted by sweet song. Thus we can begin to understand that apt doctrine of Plato which holds that the soul of the universe is united by a musical concord. And someone who cannot sing particularly well will nevertheless sing to himself, not because it is pleasant for him to hear what he sings but because it is a delight to express certain inward pleasures which originate in the soul, regardless of the manner in which they are expressed... It appears beyond doubt that music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired."</i><br /><br />
Plato did indeed place music very highly in the overall scheme of things: <i>"Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful"</i> [Plato, <i>De Republica</i>, c.380 BCE]. These words were echoed 300 years later when Cicero wrote (in his <i>Tusculanae Disputationes</i> of c.45 BCE): <i>"Honour nourishes art, and glory is the spur with all to studies; while those studies are always neglected in every nation which are looked upon disparagingly. The Greeks held skill in vocal and instrumental music as a very important accomplishment, and therefore it is recorded of Epaminondas </i>[4th century BCE Theban statesman]<i>, who, in my opinion, was the greatest man among the Greeks, that he played excellently on the flute; and Themistocles </i>[5th century Athenian statesman]<i>, some years before, was deemed ignorant because at an entertainment he declined the lyre when it was offered to him. For this reason musicians flourished in Greece; music was a general study; and whoever was unacquainted with it was not considered as fully instructed in learning."</i><br /><br />
In another example of the extraordinary power that the ancient philosophers felt was vested in music Cicero, in his <i>De Re Publica</i>, creates an imaginary scene involving the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus dreaming that he can hear the <i>music of the spheres</i> (Pythagorus's <i>music of the spheres</i> theory was based on the idea that the movement of celestial bodies created an imperceptible sound measurable by mathematical formulae):<br /><br />
<i>As I looked at these things I was dumbfounded but when I recovered myself I asked: "What is this great and so alluring sound which fills my ears?" He replied: "It is the sound which is produced by the motion of the spheres themselves. They are separated by unequal intervals but they are arranged in an exact proportion and the treble is moderated by the bass to produce variable sounds equally. Movements cannot be performed in silence and nature brings it about that at one end of the universe they sound in the treble, at the other end in the bass. As a result the highest star-bearing circuit of Heaven whose movement is swifter moved with a treble, lively sound, the lowest, that is the lunar circuit, with the deepest bass... Learned men have imitated it on strings and in songs and thereby have opened a passage-way for their return to this place like those others who devoted during their human lives themselves and their intellectual genius to the study of the divine."</i><br />
<small>[from Cicero's <i>Somnium Scipionis</i> translated by Niall McCloskey]</small><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Marble statue of Atlas holding the celestial sphere, 2nd century CE Roman copy of a 2nd century BCE Greek sculpture (courtesy Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli). This is believed to be the oldest existing statue depicting the Greek god Atlas and the oldest representation of the celestial sphere (to which Pythagoras refers in his <i>music of the spheres</i> theory). It is believed that the statue's celestial sphere was based on the star catalogue or celestial globe of the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus, completed c.129 BCE, showing the constellations.]</small></center><br />
Cicero's <i>Dream of Scipio</i> even inspired a 15-year-old Mozart to write a mini opera, <i>Il sogno di Scipione</i>, K.126.</i><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Painting of 14-year-old Mozart by Saverio Dalla Rosa (private collection). The painting was created about a year before Mozart composed his mini opera <i>Il sogno di Scipione</i>, based on Cicero's <i>Somnium Scipionis</i>.]</small></center><br />
Though most of the music of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome has not survived (since the notating of music was still very much in its infancy), literary examples of consolation from the same period have survived. The <i>consolatio</i> orations of ancient Rome usually had a clearly defined form: according to Menander Rhetor (a 3rd century CE rhetorician) a typical consolation of the period might consist of several parts, portraying very different emotions, such as praise (<i>laudatio</i>) and lamentation (<i>lamentatio</i>) as well as consolation (<i>consolatio</i>) — the overall context being important to the effectiveness of the consoling: <i>"Having ampified the lamentation as far as possible, the speaker should approach the second part of his speech, which is the consolatory part"</i>. Sadly Cicero's <i>consolatio</i>, written for his own bereavement, has not survived, but we can get a sense of Cicero's struggles with his sorrow from his personal correspondence. Here is a note of consolation offered to Cicero by his friend the legal scholar Servius Sulpicius Rufus, followed by Cicero's response:<br /><br />
<i>When I received the news of your daughter Tullia’s death, I was indeed much grieved and distressed as I was bound to be, and looked upon it as a calamity in which I shared. For, if I had been at home, I should not have failed to be at your side, and should have made my sorrow plain to you face to face. That kind of consolation involves much distress and pain, because the relations and friends, whose part it is to offer it, are themselves overcome by an equal sorrow. They cannot attempt it without many tears, so that they seem to require consolation themselves rather than to be able to afford it to others....</i><br />
<small>[letter from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero, March, 45 BCE]</small><br /><br />
<i>Yes, indeed, my dear Servius, I would have wished — as you say — that you had been by my side at the time of my grievous loss. How much help your presence might have given me, both by consolation and by your taking an almost equal share in my sorrow, I can easily gather from the fact that after reading your letter I experienced a great feeling of relief. For not only was what you wrote calculated to soothe a mourner, but in offering me consolation you manifested no slight sorrow of heart yourself.</i><br />
<small>[letter from Cicero to Servius Sulpicius, April, 45 BCE]</small><br /><br />
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<small><center>[Marble bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE - 43 BCE), philosopher, lawyer, writer and politician, 1st century CE (courtesy of Museo Capitolino, Rome)]</small></center><br />
Cicero describes his grief in even more personal terms in his letters to his close friend Titus Pomponius Atticus:<br /><br />
<i>You are as kind as usual in wishing that I could get some relief from my grief; but you can bear witness that it is no fault of mine. For every word that has been written by anyone on the subject of assuaging grief I read at your house. But my sorrow is beyond any consolation. Why, I have done what no one has ever done before, tried to console myself by writing a book. I will send it to you as soon as it is copied out. I assure you no other consolation equals it. I write the whole day long, not that it does any good, but it acts as a temporary check: not very much of that, for the violence of my grief is too strong; but still I get some relief and try with all my might to attain some composure of countenance, if not of mind. In so doing sometimes I think I am doing wrong, and sometimes that I should be doing wrong if I were not to do it. Solitude helps a little, but it would have much more effect if you at any rate could be with me... However even the idea of seeing you upsets me: for now you can never feel the same towards me. I have lost all you used to love.</i><br />
<small>[letter from Cicero to Atticus, 8 March, 45 BCE]</small><br /><br />
<i>In this solitude I don't speak to a soul. In the morning I hide myself in a dense and wild wood, and I don't come out till the evening. After you I have not a greater friend than solitude. In it my only converse is with books, though tears interrupt it. I fight against them as much as I can: but as yet I am not equal to the struggle.</i><br />
<small>[letter from Cicero to Atticus, 9 March, 45 BCE]</small><br /><br />
<i>I have lost the one thing that bound me to life. Accordingly, I seek solitude</i><br />
<small>[Cicero to Atticus, 19 March, 45 BCE]</small><br /><br />
<center>* * * * *</center><br />
In a modern equivalent of Cicero's personal 'consolatio’, the writer C.S. Lewis wrote a deeply moving account of his own grief in the hope it would help him in his loss following the death of his wife Joy Davidman in 1960. Eventually published as "A Grief Observed", but under a false name, N.W. Clerk, the book was then recommended to C.S. Lewis by his concerned friends, who were unaware it was Lewis's own work. In this extract C.S. Lewis describes the fear that he might eventually replace the memory of his wife with his own version of her (Lewis uses H. in place of his wife's name):<br /><br />
<i>Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes — like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night — little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes — ten seconds — of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.</i><br /><br />
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<small><center>[C.S. Lewis with his wife Joy, photographed at their Oxford home, The Kilns.]</small></center><br />
<center>* * * * *</center><br />
At his residences at Tusculum, Antium, and on the Palatine in Rome, Cicero had extensive libraries of literature — when his library in Antium was being restored, in June 56 BCE, Cicero wrote to Atticus: <i>"Tyrannio has made a wonderful job of arranging my books... Now that Tyrannio has put my books straight, my house seems to have woken to life"</i>. Cicero’s libraries were well stocked with the works of his favourite Greek writers. And just as we today might look back 400 years to the glorious era of Shakespearian England, so too would Cicero have looked back 400 years, to the glorious days of Classical Greece and the era of Aeschylus, Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides, Pythagoras, Socrates, Cicero's beloved Plato and so many others earlier and later (Homer was as far removed in time from Cicero as Chaucer is from us today!). Today we have all the benefits of modern technology, not only printed books but now digitalized libraries on the internet from where we can access all this material at the touch of a screen. The complete surviving works of Cicero are freely available on the internet for all to read and enjoy. Cicero’s influence on history is of course immeasurable: he has been credited with introducing western Europe to Greek philosophy, being the main inspiration behind the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the birth of the United States, and the French Revolution! Yet spare a thought for those who helped to create Cicero’s libraries: every single parchment scroll would had to have been laboriously written out by hand.<br /><br />
As well being an admirer of the ancient Greek poets and philosophers, Cicero also had an appreciation of the art of Classical Greece, his homes were enthusiastically decorated with artifacts and pieces of sculpture, and in his writings he mentions the <i>“admirable sculptures”</i> of Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, Scopas and others, and the paintings of Apelles, Zeuxis, Parrhasius and many others.<br /><br />
Despite the fact that music was more highly esteemed in Greek culture than any of the arts, Cicero never mentions any specific musicians (apart from a couple of poets who also wrote songs) though he refers to music often in his writings. The inability to record music for posterity prevented individual composers (who did exist in ancient Greece and Rome) from becoming as well known as their painter and sculptor colleagues, and most of the music particularly as far back as Classical and Archaic Greece can now only be reconstructed using careful scholarship and a fair amount of guess work, with varying degrees of success.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Fresco wall painting from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor Boscoreale (nr Pompeii), c.50-40 BCE (courtesy Metropolitan Musuem of Art, New York). Cicero valued music, and possibly kept slave musicians to provide music for his Rome households. In his famous defense speech <i>Pro Roscio Amerino</i> from 80 BCE, Cicero writes of the defendant Sextus Roscius: <i>"he has so many slaves to gratify his mind and ears, that the whole neighbourhood resounds with the daily music of voices, and stringed instruments, and flutes"</i>.]</small></center><br />
It's a mind-boggling thought to imagine how the odes of Pindar must have sounded when they were first performed (Pindar wrote them to be sung by a <i>"sweet-singing band of revellers"</i> as he put it). Pindar's odes were commissioned to celebrate the victories of athletes at the various games of ancient Greece, and one in particular has become very well known, the 8th <i>Pythian</i> ode, written to celebrate the victory of the wrestling athlete Aristomenes in the <i>Pythian</i> games of 446 BCE. In addition to praising his athlete, and weaving in heroic legends, Pindar makes several references to the ephemeral nature of mankind, the need for the athlete to step up and earn his place in destiny, and the importance of good fortune. The line <i>"man is the dream of a shadow"</i> was well known enough in 1547 to be quoted by a 14-year-old English princess, later Queen Elizabeth I, writing to her 9-year-old half-brother Edward VI, as she consoled him following his recovery from illness by reminding him of the frailty of human existence.<br /><br />
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<small><center>[Lady Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth I) painted in c.1546/7 possibly by William Scrots (courtesy Royal Collection Trust). The painting, first recorded in a 1547 inventory as <i>"the picture of the Ladye Elizabeth her grace with a booke in her hande her gowne like crymsen clothe"</i>, would have been created shortly before Elizabeth sent her 9-year-old half-brother Edward VI the letter quoting Pindar.]</small></center><br />
ἐν δ᾽ ὀλίγῳ βροτῶν<br />
τὸ τερπνὸν αὔξεται: οὕτω δὲ καὶ πίτνει χαμαί,<br />
ἀποτρόπῳ γνώμᾳ σεσεισμένον.<br />
ἐπάμεροι: τί δέ τις; τί δ᾽ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ<br />
ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ,<br />
λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών<br /><br />
<i>Men's pleasure swells in a brief space of time,<br />
and likewise falls to the ground,<br />
shaken by an adverse judgement.<br />
Creatures of a day. What is man? What is he not?<br />
He is the dream of a shadow.<br />
Yet when Zeus-sent brightness comes<br />
a brilliant light shines on mankind and their life is serene</i><br />
<small>[from Pindar’s Pythian 8, translated by Anthony Verity]</small><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwEtCqU5Yl_YSlE40N9_TWnTS6-fSl4qMhIQ2APruMTh_rl9iisKf3hDXsUggwFbSaVfrPyNaud8bnQ9gHEcx9eJZaUklTmNQcqPrVkqgfY8yAfrpYSjr45JG26oMgzK2qiEHYYrZya74/s1600/11.+Discobolus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwEtCqU5Yl_YSlE40N9_TWnTS6-fSl4qMhIQ2APruMTh_rl9iisKf3hDXsUggwFbSaVfrPyNaud8bnQ9gHEcx9eJZaUklTmNQcqPrVkqgfY8yAfrpYSjr45JG26oMgzK2qiEHYYrZya74/s400/11.+Discobolus.jpg" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Discobolus (Discus Thrower). 1st century CE copy of c. 460-450 BCE original by Myron (courtesy Museo Nazionale Romano).]</small></center><br />
The American classics scholar Gregory Nagy offers a rather different interpretation of <i>"man is the dream of a shadow"</i> to the one the young princess Elizabeth offered her brother. In his book <i>Pindar's Homer</i> Nagy suggests that these words present an interconnection of the past, present and future: to Pindar the word <i>"shadow"</i> most likely would have meant the spirit of ancestors (the <i>"shades"</i> that occupy Hades) and the <i>"dream"</i> is possibly a vision, already alluded to earlier in the ode, presaging future victories, <i>"as if we the living were the realization of the dreams dreamt by our dead ancestors"</i>. To illustrate the point Gregory Nagy quotes a passage from Walt Whitman's poignant 1856 poem <i>Crossing Brooklyn Ferry</i>:<br /><br />
<i>I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,<br />
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,<br />
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,<br />
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,<br />
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried...<br />
<br />
I too many and many a time crossed the river of old...<br />
<br />
Closer yet I approach you,<br />
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,<br />
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born...<br />
<br />
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?</i><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDH3vfvklv136kXin_GerAKOUNkcZ4ptdzSo87k357v8BiAQsrvFowkO4LUr_ZPGG2QpG51zx2DUbWolVSsdQmwE9MWRtEQCPrIlZUhTfgy5UkjD4tRzMq8vnwHiCa7AyomNxr8ZVIKfY/s1600/12.+Walt_Whitman_%2526_Brooklyn_ferry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDH3vfvklv136kXin_GerAKOUNkcZ4ptdzSo87k357v8BiAQsrvFowkO4LUr_ZPGG2QpG51zx2DUbWolVSsdQmwE9MWRtEQCPrIlZUhTfgy5UkjD4tRzMq8vnwHiCa7AyomNxr8ZVIKfY/s400/12.+Walt_Whitman_%2526_Brooklyn_ferry.jpg" /></a></div>
<small><center>[Left: Walt Whitman photographed in 1891 by Thomas Eakins.<br />
Right: Fulton Ferry Boat (Brooklyn, New York), July 1890]</small></center><br />
<center>* * * * *</center><br />
Cicero offered a similar sentiment to Pindar when, in February 43 BCE, he requested a lasting memorial for his old school friend Servius Sulpicius Rufus (the same man who, two years earlier, had so kindly offered Cicero consolation on the death of his daughter):<br /><br />
<i>Vita enim mortuorum in memoria est posita vivorum<br />
[For the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living]</i><br /><br />
<center><iframe width="340" height="191" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CfmlDoWsBbk?rel=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>
<center><small>[Jack Gibbons performing his Consolation, Op.88, composed February 2011 (filmed Oxford, August 13 2021)].</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-50351205827745035612013-05-18T01:07:00.000-07:002013-05-18T01:07:39.978-07:00Britain’s forgotten geniusThanks to pressure from Edward Elgar the Three Choirs Festival of Britain offered Samuel Coleridge-Taylor his first commission in 1898, launching his career. The work produced by the 19-year-old in response to this opportunity was his Ballade for orchestra Op.33. It’s a youthful work, full of wonderful high-spirits, passion and warmth, and with tenderness and pathos too. Above all, the expression is genuine and the work is a harbinger of what might come, given time and opportunity. Prior to its first performance, following a rehearsal of the work in London’s Queen’s Hall on a very hot summer afternoon in 1898, with the composer himself conducting, Coleridge-Taylor was surprised and delighted when following sustained applause from the orchestral players he noticed two gentlemen coming forward to offer him a warm handshake for his achievement. They were Sir Arthur Sullivan and Sir Hubert Parry (at the time two of England’s most well known composers).<br /><br />
That same year, 1898, Coleridge-Taylor would write Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast, his most popular work, sealing his future. But today his legacy is still undefined, partly because the successful trilogy of Hiawatha cantatas has overshadowed the rest of his large output, and partly because his tragically early death robbed the music world of a still developing talent. Most importantly the seriousness of his musical expression seems to have been overshadowed by the exaggerated success of Hiawatha as an entertainment piece on the one hand, and the popularity of some of his lighter works on the other. Coleridge-Taylor is a composer in the tradition of Dvořák and Elgar, and his music is sincere and deeply emotional (and not as sentimental as it is sometimes played). The composer’s ‘ideal’ is as far removed as it is possible to get from the contemporary musical trends that were sweeping Europe in France (Debussy) and Germany (Schoenberg) as well as America (ragtime and early jazz) at the beginning of the 20th century. In his lifetime Coleridge-Taylor survived (and even triumphed against) the huge obstacle of being the only black classical composer in a white man's world. Today his legacy faces another massive challenge, this time for ‘idealistic’ reasons, because his music is not (by some critics) seen as fitting in to the expected pigeon holes of early 20th century composition. Coleridge-Taylor was brought up in the European tradition of classical symphonic form as represented by Schumann and Brahms, a great tradition in which he felt completely at home and fully able to express himself. Later in life he began to express a stronger desire to develop the African side of his heritage in his music (hoping to mirror Dvořák's interest in his Bohemian roots, or Grieg’s interest in Nordic culture) but it was still within the framework of his European upbringing. His published letters and essays on music demonstrate his profound thoughts on the state of music in the world, and confirm his idealistic musical approach:<br /><br />
"<i>...few recent compositions really move one - though many of them astonish. It seems as if the composers would wish to be classed with the flying man in his endeavours to 'go one better' than the last, somehow or other, and in many ways much of the music of the period reminds one of the automobile and the airship. It is daring, clever, complex, and utterly mechanical. The question is: should an imaginative Art follow such lines? Should it not rather come from the heart as well as the brain? Of course, a fine technical equipment is a very desirable thing, and nothing of worth can be accomplished without it; but should 'What do you think of my cleverness?' be stamped so aggressively over nearly every score that we hear? The lack of human passion in English music may be (personally I think IS) merely transitory. It is being pushed aside only while the big technical Dreadnought is in its most engrossing stage of development. Soon the builders will have the time to love again - when the turmoil is hushed somewhat - to give the world a few tender and personal touches amidst the strife, which will 'make us feel again also.' </i>"<br /><br />
<small>[Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: "Is Technique Strangling Beauty"<BR>published in the magazine 'The Etude', January, 1911]</small><br /><br />
Those words have even more meaning today than when they were written 100 years ago. What on earth would Coleridge-Taylor make of Stockhausen, Boulez, and others (talk about 'What do you think of my cleverness?'). Sadly Coleridge-Taylor's admirable optimism turned out to be misplaced.<br /><br />
Coleridge-Taylor’s early death at 37 has left the music world today unsure of how to estimate his talent. Do we judge it for what it was, or what it promised? And it promised a great deal. I am of the strong opinion that we have been robbed of a truly great composer by his early death (had Elgar died at the same age he would have been but a foot note in musical history). Listening to the early Ballade Op.33 it is not an exaggeration to say 19-year-old Coleridge-Taylor was showing more promise than Elgar at the same age (no wonder Elgar was so excited by Coleridge-Taylor's talent). It's also worth remembering, when Coleridge-Taylor's Ballade sounds 'Elgarian' in places, that Elgar had yet to fully develop his own style (having not yet penned the work that would put him on the musical map, the Enigma Variations, let alone works such as his Symphonies and Concertos).<br /><br />
Coleridge-Taylor once said “<i>I want to be nothing in the world except what I am – a musician</i>”. Nevertheless it's impossible to ignore the aspect of his race given the climate of the times he grew up in. Fortunately he encountered few obstacles in his career in England, where the establishment was by and large on his side and within his lifetime he achieved considerable fame and adulation. Of course it would have been a very different story in the United States, and his three visits to the US (in 1904, 1906 and 1910) helped to politicize him, as he witnessed the horrors of institutionalized racism first hand. Before visiting America for the first time in 1904 Coleridge-Taylor had prepared himself for the prejudice he expected to encounter, while at the same time telling his American hosts (the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, an all black choir founded in his honour) that if they could endure these things, so could he. But he insisted there should be an orchestra available for all his US concerts, which by necessity meant he would be conducting white musicians (something that had never been a problem in England, but in the States it was a different matter). When it came down to it only two white Americans walked out on him, letting it be known that it was beneath them to be conducted by a black man! Other examples of racism were encountered, such as the refusal of the New York printer to put his name in the programmes once it was discovered that Coleridge-Taylor was black! But none of this prevented the tour from being anything but a great success, and Coleridge-Taylor was feted by both black and white Americans, was treated as a star wherever he went and hailed as the 'black Mahler', was even invited to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt (who made a good impression on him in his attitude to race) and most importantly, he was embraced by the black community in America as a hero to be placed alongside Frederick Douglass. But Coleridge-Taylor was still shocked by what he saw in the States, particularly some of the conditions endured by black Americans (he describes in his letters the segregation south of Washington, the way people are thrown out of railway carriages, etc.). As a musician Coleridge-Taylor may have had his head in the clouds, but as a person of mixed race living in a predominately white environment he was not under any illusions politically, nor was he anything but proud of his African heritage, and happily joined forces with the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois (author of 'The Souls of Black Folk', a book Coleridge-Taylor devoured as soon as it was published in 1904) and the black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar who he had met in London in 1896. Coleridge-Taylor played an active role in the Pan African conference in London in 1900 (a conference aimed at demonstrating to European governments the evil of colonization and racism in Africa and the West Indies, promoting the cause of self-government in the colonies, and demanding political and civil rights for African Americans). Coleridge-Taylor was an avid reader, but away from politics he would much rather spend his time reading poetry, about which he was extremely knowledgeable. He also had a tremendous passion for the countryside and wildlife, and whenever he could he would take advantage of the beautiful country walks around where he lived south of London (it wasn't built up in those days and must have been exquisite). As with many composers his long walks seemed to help him find musical ideas. He would also write down (in his music note books) particular bird songs that fascinated him. It goes without saying that he was a devout family man, and many people commented on the particularly close relationship he enjoyed with his daughter Gwendolen [the video at the foot of this blog contains many beautiful photographs of his family].<br /><br />
It would be naïve to assume from all the above that all was idyllic in England and that Coleridge-Taylor didn't encounter racism in his native country; he did, and stories from his daughter make painful and distressing reading today. Most distressing for him was the fact that his (Caucasian) wife Jessie was also a target of abuse. Jessie was the love of his life, he having courted her against mild opposition from her family, finally winning her parents over and receiving their blessing for the union (they married in 1899). But daily life still contained many trials, even with his increasing success. His daughter Gwen records his response to the groups of local youths who would repeatedly shower him with insulting comments about the colour of his skin: “<i>When he saw them approaching along the street he held my hand more tightly, gripping it until it almost hurt</i>".<br /><br />
All that I have read about Coleridge-Taylor shows that not only was he a remarkable musician, he was also a remarkable human being, with not an ounce of malice or hatred to those who abused him. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have become more active in politics and civil rights. He tended to be shy in character, but he was confident of his musical abilities and he lived more than anything else for his music. Coleridge-Taylor had been a workaholic all his life, his wife saying that he couldn't bear inactivity. The thought of leaving this world while still so young was clearly a huge torment for him (judging from the desperate comments he said to Jessie in the last bed-ridden days of his life) not because of a fear of death, but because of the awareness that he still had so much to say. On the day he died, September 1st 1912, he insisted on looking through his recently completed Violin Concerto, checking the parts and trying to conduct portions of the piece before he finally collapsed. It's a sobering tale today, when so many people sit out half their lives in passive gaze at a television screen.<br /><br />
In the end Coleridge-Taylor's talents transcend both race and epoch: it's time that musicians looked anew at his familiar name and delved a little further beneath the surface of his music, and away from the 'light music' image that has unfairly dogged him for years. His reputation is beginning to grow again, particularly in the United States where the colour of his skin is now an inspiration to a whole new generation of musicians. But when all is said and done, in the words of Coleridge-Taylor scholar Dr Catherine Carr, "<i>the significance of his worth as a composer was over and above such elements as colour, race, gender etc.</i>”.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lG2OyyFPkbc?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Ballade for orchestra Op.33 (1898)<BR>played by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra<BR>conducted by Grant Llewellyn</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-30868189370189159742013-05-15T17:44:00.000-07:002013-05-15T17:44:32.477-07:00An English composer who burned out too soon...Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was one of England's most promising composers. Born in London in 1875 his remarkable musical talent emerged very quickly, the violin becoming his main instrument as a child. While a student at the Royal College of Music in London he began composing works that to this day are regarded as beautiful and skillful compositions. Having already caught the attention of composers such as Sullivan and Stanford his big break came when the composer Elgar began supporting his talent, convincing the Three Choirs Festival to commission the young composer. Coleridge-Taylor went on to achieve enormous popularity in the UK for his series of 3 cantatas, 'The Song of Hiawatha' (a setting of Longfellow's poem) while at the same time writing music for the concert hall and theater, and becoming a professor of composition at London's Trinity College of Music and Guildhall School of Music.<br /><br />
Yet he never had the chance to fully develop his remarkable talent. He died tragically young from pneumonia complicated by exhaustion from overwork, at the age of just 37. In the last months of his life he had completed a violin concerto which he never lived to hear, and which showed a new maturity and sense of expression in his style which was never fulfilled. His early death was a huge loss to the musical life of Great Britain, and a potentially important voice had been silenced at a crucial time in classical music as the philosophy of Schoenbergian theory, which would eventually destroy the careers of many composers with outlooks similar to Coleridge-Taylor's, was beginning to emerge.<br /><br />
Despite Coleridge-Taylor's enormous popularity in Britain (for many years hardly a school or college missed the opportunity of performing his Song of Hiawatha) his talent is still undervalued today, with many of his works still awaiting their first recordings. Coleridge-Taylor himself made very little money from his success, having sold the royalty of his Hiawatha trilogy to his publishers for a small one-off payment. The circumstances of his death, leaving behind an impoverished family (for whom King George V took the unusual step of awarding an annual pension) contributed greatly to the subsequent adoption of a system of royalties for composers in the UK.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FsYU8WfmIoA?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>A short tribute to the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) with contributions from his daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor (recorded in 1974), and excerpts from Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast, The Death of Minnehaha and the Violin Concerto, Op.80.</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-2021809234304425722013-01-27T16:03:00.000-08:002013-01-27T16:03:11.674-08:00Brain foodWolfgang Amadé Mozart was born this day, 27 January, 257 years ago. His incomparable music continues to inspire long after his short (and largely unappreciated) life ended.<br /><br />
Just over 231 years ago Mozart and Josepha von Auernhammer gave the first performance of Mozart's Sonata for 2 pianos K.448 in Vienna. In 1993 two less intelligent people at the University of California conducted an experiment that concluded that listening to this piece for 10 minutes was better for the brain than listening to a piece of rubbish, or nothing, for 10 minutes - duh! (and so began the craze for making babies listen to Mozart!). So go ahead, listen, and improve your IQ right now. And read on for a little bit more fun...<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/q6caazKcHYk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Mozart Sonata for two pianos K.448 (1st movement<br />played by Vladimir Ashkenazy and Malcolm Frager,<br />written and first performed in 1781 (1964 recording)]</small></center><br />
... below is Mozart's highly unflattering portrait of Josepha von Auernhammer (who apparently had a huge crush on the 25 year old Mozart):<br /><br />
22 August, 1781<br />
Vienna<br />
Dear Friend<br />
You may be surprised to know that I am getting married! Well let me tell you - when I walk down the street and hear this news - so am I! It seems that once again gossip is spreading across town. This time that I am to be married to one of my pupils - do you recall my student Fraulein Auernhammer? - and everywhere people are asking why would he take someone with a face like hers? Truly this is no idle comment... Michelangelo himself would have used her face as a model to portray the visage of hell in his Last Judgement! She is as fat as a farm pig and perspires so readily that it makes one quite sick to think about. To make matters worse, she dresses so scantily as to say plainly "look right here". True, there is plenty to see - but who would want to look! The sight is enough to strike one blind! One is truly punished if they let their eye wander! Let me assure you that there is no truth in the rumour - though it seems that the poor girl has fallen in love, longing, lust with me, and impresses herself on me at every occasion in an attempt to be attractive! She hogs my day and makes me squeeze next to her at the piano going over some tedious fingering. When I confronted her about these rumours she denied it with a laugh - but I know for a fact that she herself is responsible for spreading them. And I have it from a reliable source that she has even embellished our post wedding plans!!!!! Eventually I got mad at her and thus had to endure her tender reproaches. What is a poor composer to do? Though she has much promise as a pianist I will not be taken advantage of and I have resolved to see her less and less - so hopefully this thing will eventually die. All this after I have dedicated to her a set of sonatas and had Papa send from Salzburg some of my piano duets for us to play (though only ones written for 2 pianos for sure we could not play together on one!). Now I must rest. Relaying my trials exhausts me as much as if I had to endure them again in the flesh. Pray for me that I am not beset by nightmares. Good night dear friend - 1000 wishes to you and your family.<br />
W. Mozart
Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-55712867192484816892013-01-01T14:47:00.000-08:002013-01-01T14:47:55.626-08:00Memories of 2012<span style="font-style:italic;">A look back at some of the musical highlights of 2012 as posted on my <a href="http://www.facebook.com/JackGibbonsPiano">Facebook page</a></span><br /><br />
<b>January:</b></p>
Welcomed in 2012 with a performance of Rhapsody in Blue with the last chord of the work being struck on the first stroke of midnight at the beginning of the new year (thanks to friends in Ireland who first persuaded me to do this fun stunt many moons ago).<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_hzG8XpLRck?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, played by Jack Gibbons and transcribed by Gibbons from Gershwin's 1925 piano roll recording]</small></center><br />
<b>February:</b></p>
Finally fulfilled a long held promise to Edward Jablonski to set some of Edna St Vincent Millay's beautiful poems to music<br /><br />
<center>Immerse the dream.<br />
Drench the kiss.<br />
Dip the song in the stream.<br /><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiFMWcFvOITSCFhcN6ah2U4JVv0E4eTPPfJcO7b1wANP2oqfbNrfIsTpmugrWoYAAVxFvhtHe1MSwxlLuEI_TvRb_T6kyDl33aHXPOukJFL0lDLIEnnErbb2oj-V-GCrH626sXF1cgm38/s1600/Edna+St+Vincent+Millay%252C+Vassar+College+1914+%2528photo+by+Arnold+Genthe%2529+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="400" width="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiFMWcFvOITSCFhcN6ah2U4JVv0E4eTPPfJcO7b1wANP2oqfbNrfIsTpmugrWoYAAVxFvhtHe1MSwxlLuEI_TvRb_T6kyDl33aHXPOukJFL0lDLIEnnErbb2oj-V-GCrH626sXF1cgm38/s400/Edna+St+Vincent+Millay%252C+Vassar+College+1914+%2528photo+by+Arnold+Genthe%2529+2.jpg" /></center></a></a><small><center>[Edna St Vincent Millay, Vassar College 1914,<br />photo by Arnold Genthe]</small></center><br />
<b>March:</b></p>
Attempting to justify reaching the milestone age of 50 on March 2, I turned down all invitations to celebrate and instead spent a week in self-imposed isolation in order to complete this piece.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pIL9KI59dFk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Gibbons: Nocturne in B flat minor, Op.93,<br />completed 13 March 2012]</small></center><br />
<b>April:</b></p>
With a feeling of spring in the air this piano duet (with its deliberately easier top part for younger piano students) was finished in the early hours of the first day of the month.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pCHydJmexZ4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Gibbons: Song Prelude, Op.94, completed 31 March/1 April 2012]</small></center><br />
<b>May:</b></p>
Began a new series of pre-summer concerts ('Halliehurst Classics Piano Series') at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia which hopefully will become an annual event, the first concert being entitled "Beethoven - troubled genius".<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/q_hppTXsTWE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Beethoven: Moonlight sonata, opening movement, Adagio sostenuto, played by Jack Gibbons, recorded live, Oxford, England, 15 July 2007]</small></center><br />
<b>June:</b></p>
A visit to America's historic triangle (Jamestowne, Williamsburg and Yorktown), as well as Monticello, inspired me to become immersed in American history, find out a little more about the authentic music of that momentous period, and enjoy a rare opportunity to escape the bustle and 'noise pollution' of the 21st century.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/fvIStpj1ULE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Exploring America's historic triangle: authentic music from the era of America's founding and early history, accompanied by slides and video from Jamestowne, Williamsburg, Yorktown and Monticello.]</small></center><br />
<b>July:</b></p>
A novel way of advertising my 25th annual Oxford Summer Piano Series.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EOWAuFkLN-E?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[The Beast with Ten Fingers: trailer for Gibbons' 25th annual Oxford Summer Piano Series, 2012.]</small></center><br />
<b>August:</b></p>
Celebrated Debussy's 150th birthday (and my 50th) on August 22 in a joint Debussy/Gibbons concert during my 25th annual Oxford Summer Piano Series.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/blZOHS-w-rU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Debussy: Prelude 'La cathédrale engloutie', played by Jack Gibbons, recorded live, Oxford, England, 22 August 2012.]</small></center><br />
<b>September:</b></p>
Performed on Gershwin's birthday, September 26, at the Lincoln Center, Washington DC, on behalf of Davis & Elkins College, including in the concert the world premiere of my transcription of this recently discovered Gershwin performance recorded in 1934.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/clkYQ-fn4R0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Gershwin plays My Cousin in Milwaukee: rare recording, recently discovered and preserved by Peter Mintun, of Gershwin's April 9 1934 'Music by Gershwin' radio broadcast, recorded off the air thanks to jazz harpist Casper Reardon, who appears with Gershwin in this broadcast.]</small></center><br />
<b>October:</b></p>
Discovered this recording of Brahms playing Josef Strauss's Polka-Mazurka 'Die Libelle' ('The Dragonfly'). On 2 December 1889 Brahms recorded two pieces on an Edison cylinder: a short version of his Hungarian Dance no.1 and an extract from Josef Strauss's Polka-Mazurka 'Die Libelle' Op.204. The voices of both Brahms and the engineer, Theo Wangeman, can be heard at the beginning of these remarkable historic recordings (as later documented by the son of Dr Fellinger, at whose Viennese house the recording session took place). The following video contains 4 versions of each piece of music, to help decipher the sound on what are now extremely deteriorated, though remarkable, recordings.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/H31q7Qrjjo0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[An audio aid to deciphering the famous 1889 Brahms recordings.]</small></center><br />
<b>November:</b></p>
Just a few days after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy I came across this unpublished recording from my archives of the soprano Ann Mackay singing one of my songs composed in 2002 to words by Christina Rossetti.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RIsKb4xM8bg?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Gibbons: 'Oh What Comes Over The Sea', Op.32, composed in 2002, sung by Ann Mackay, accompanied by the composer, recorded London, November 2003.]</small></center><br />
<b>December:</b></p>
First performance of my new Romance, Op.96, written as a thank you gift for Davis & Elkins College, where I am artist-in-residence. The music in the following video is accompanied by a slide show of beautiful photographs of Derbyshire, England from the excellent blog <a href="http://uphilldowndale.wordpress.com">Uphilldowndale</a><br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/qCZzp429bVY?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Gibbons: Romance, Op.96, composed at the end of November 2012 and first performed by the composer at Davis & Elkins College, West Virginia, USA, on 3 December 2012) .]</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-91348038186347754752012-09-13T03:26:00.000-07:002012-09-13T03:59:43.788-07:00Paris Sonata, Solar Eclipse and Revolution<span style="font-style:italic;">An alignment of events on different continents...</span><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ve3xMMOvU5roiY2Xn5U0S6GOyskQUNWiuqTzuzGkpuN3tQiqt27ExOe6dahpMOBTQHpB7WkMrzGxtdQq_3VVq1_we4IEmzrNqUYx9ylS-FSU6kjciGRLlIsJJv6k6qEA8aqY5LavBk8/s1600/Declaration_independence_draft_presentation_Trumbull.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="263" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ve3xMMOvU5roiY2Xn5U0S6GOyskQUNWiuqTzuzGkpuN3tQiqt27ExOe6dahpMOBTQHpB7WkMrzGxtdQq_3VVq1_we4IEmzrNqUYx9ylS-FSU6kjciGRLlIsJJv6k6qEA8aqY5LavBk8/s400/Declaration_independence_draft_presentation_Trumbull.jpg" /></a><small><center>[John Trumbull: Presentation of the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress]</small></center><br />Towards the beginning of the American Revolutionary War, almost 15 months after the Continental Congress had courageously declared their independence from the British Crown, the British attempted to deal a fatal blow to the rebels' cause by taking their capital Philadelphia on September 26 1777.<br /><br />Three days earlier, on a different continent, a 21-year-old Mozart, having resigned from his employment in Salzburg, had boldly set out, accompanied by his mother, on an extended European trip in the hope of securing musical and financial success in Paris and other European cities (an endeavour that ended in tragedy and failure).<br /><br /> In March 1778, while tensions between America and Britain escalated to a new level following the decision by France to take the American side, the Mozarts arrived in Paris. Mozart's mother Anna Maria noted with interest in her letter to her husband on 29 May 1778 the tense political situation (with the likelihood of war between France and Britain). Following France's support of the United States the British were forced to change tactics, evacuating Philadelphia on June 18 1778 in favour of defending New York from the French.<br/><br/><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDJqvw4uXDrnh73KiLYWCa__q-hFGMb6_QFgjPgmRUS0LwPGkByJzPTMM98sO4RFSg-Q3Syr5WVioCBBQve5eKQns_W_iegMZw4btoymWZehIszimfgw5vsKplug365_VMomQMKF0Nb2Y/s1600/24+June+1778+Solar+Eclipse+by+Antonio+de+Ulloa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="397" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDJqvw4uXDrnh73KiLYWCa__q-hFGMb6_QFgjPgmRUS0LwPGkByJzPTMM98sO4RFSg-Q3Syr5WVioCBBQve5eKQns_W_iegMZw4btoymWZehIszimfgw5vsKplug365_VMomQMKF0Nb2Y/s400/24+June+1778+Solar+Eclipse+by+Antonio+de+Ulloa.jpg" /></a><small><center>[24 June 1778 Solar Eclipse by Antonio de Ulloa]</small></center><br />Six days later, another dramatic event took place with the first ever recorded total solar eclipse in the US on June 24 1778. The event was keenly anticipated by none other than Thomas Jefferson, whose astronomical enthusiasm was only curtailed by the weather, as he wrote to his astronomer friend David Rittenhouse (while congratulating him on the recovery of Philadelphia): <span style="font-style:italic;">"We were much disappointed in Virginia generally on the day of the great eclipse, which proved to be cloudy. In Williamsburgh, where it was total, I understand only the beginning was seen...".</span><br /><br />Back in France the young Mozart had more pressing concerns with the sudden and unexpected decline in his mother's health. Anna Maria Mozart had only reluctantly agreed to accompany her son on this extended European trip while Mozart's father, Leopold, and sister, Nannerl, stayed behind in Salzburg. Exhausted after the long journey to Paris, and living in poor accommodation in order to save money, Anna Maria Mozart's health became dramatically worse in June 1778. On June 19, the day after the British evacuation from Philadelphia, she became bedridden and within days was given last rites, dying on July 3 and leaving her son to convey the dreadful news to his father back home in Salzburg. The Paris trip had been so unsuccessful financially that Mozart was forced to use his mother's precious amethyst ring to pay for the nursing expenses. The dysfunctionality of Mozart's relationship with his father is typified by the way Leopold, for the rest of his life, blamed his son for Anna Maria's tragic death.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizXyGAmmnCWgoRDXstyHKM9RHcLrSLm91dkFeo4iN4co4iXbXgv4VQoozNBBAqv92gof3aXHmmpWQ1sA_hWFf_YiEjciiDxdogWjhEf6iI86o2E7cuJXf0JMlTziMy9LYPcv16_bXKhBo/s1600/Mozart+family+by+Croce+c.1780.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="298" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizXyGAmmnCWgoRDXstyHKM9RHcLrSLm91dkFeo4iN4co4iXbXgv4VQoozNBBAqv92gof3aXHmmpWQ1sA_hWFf_YiEjciiDxdogWjhEf6iI86o2E7cuJXf0JMlTziMy9LYPcv16_bXKhBo/s400/Mozart+family+by+Croce+c.1780.jpg" /></a><small><center>[Johann Nepomuk della Croce: the Mozart family c.1780, showing Mozart and his sister Nannerl at the keyboard, with his father Leopold holding a violin, and his deceased mother Anna Maria represented in the portrait on the wall.]</small></center><br />Mozart's Sonata in A minor K.310 was written during the bleak summer of 1778 and has long been thought to be a reflection of the composer's dark mood during those terrible weeks. Music was such a dominant force in Mozart's life that it's also very likely he sought refuge in it, becoming more focused than ever on his art, as the music clearly shows.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DN7orwT0pvE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Mozart Sonata in A minor K.310 (1/3: Allegro maestoso),<BR>Jack Gibbons (piano), recorded live in concert, July 1989]</small></center><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uk3zzapi-Mw?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Mozart Sonata in A minor K.310 (2/3: Andante cantabile),<BR>Jack Gibbons (piano), recorded live in concert, July 1989]</small></center><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/riageXEYb9k?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><center><small>[Mozart Sonata in A minor K.310 (3/3: Presto),<BR>Jack Gibbons (piano), recorded live in concert, July 1989]</small></center><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-84758300088342357142012-03-29T15:56:00.041-07:002012-03-29T19:04:21.513-07:00"Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!"<br><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmZsAA1VsEaIUfg3l9hY1vyOiLfHvDE5LU7xHvmxqu70FcNQ_Z1QDBZNCH1g7BsP_mzjD_GJI_P34KebGzfIecTTLC5fPQ3b8ISTkfy5NiC5Hh9kDW0ZFN7jcnKRSHYt4dgw-LofFMyxg/s1600/Elgar+%2528photographed+by+Grindrod+1903%2529.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmZsAA1VsEaIUfg3l9hY1vyOiLfHvDE5LU7xHvmxqu70FcNQ_Z1QDBZNCH1g7BsP_mzjD_GJI_P34KebGzfIecTTLC5fPQ3b8ISTkfy5NiC5Hh9kDW0ZFN7jcnKRSHYt4dgw-LofFMyxg/s400/Elgar+%2528photographed+by+Grindrod+1903%2529.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5725480619799464066" /></a><small><center>[Edward Elgar (1857-1934) photographed by Charles Grindrod in 1903, the year of the first sketches of the 2nd Symphony.]</small></center><br />The Symphony no.2 Op.63 of Edward Elgar, completed on 28 February 1911, is one of his of greatest works. To his close friend Alice Stuart-Wortley (nicknamed '<span style="font-style:italic;">Windflower</span>' in his correspondence) Elgar wrote: <span style="font-style:italic;">"I have written out my soul in the concerto, Symphony No. 2 and the Ode and you know it ... in these three works I have shewn myself"</span>. At the heart of the 2nd symphony is an epic slow movement, sometimes described as a funeral march, a deeply moving piece filled with so many amazing moments too numerous to mention in this short post. Like the whole symphony it's a piece of music that repays constant relistening. In today's world of short sound bites I worry about people's ability to appreciate and enjoy something of this length and complexity, though the music and emotion is so direct and heartfelt I would be amazed if after a few listenings anyone new to this work was not drawn in to Elgar's wonderful world. The form of the movement is fairly straightforward, a kind of <span style="font-style:italic;">sonata form</span> where the '<span style="font-style:italic;">march</span>' forms the main theme and a more lyrical and impassioned melody forms the second big theme and which leads to two big climaxes, the second even bigger than the first. In between these themes there are many magical episodes. The return of the funeral march (before the movement reaches it's second big climax) is hauntingly transformed by a meandering solo oboe lament played above the march (at 7:26 in the video below) with a pulsating string accompaniment. In the video Elgar's work receives a truly inspired performance from the the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli (recorded in 1964).<br /><br /><center><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/r3CB5Pbzy3M?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><center><small>[The slow movement (Larghetto) from Elgar's Symphony no.2 Op.63, with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli (recorded 1964) with rare video of Elgar conducting at the Empire (later Wembley) Stadium, London on April 23 1924 and at the opening of the Abbey Road Studios, London, on November 12 1931, as well as other home movies of the composer.]</small></center><br />The video also includes various rare films of Elgar. You can see Elgar conducting at the opening of the Abbey Road studios in 1931 <small>[for the whole unedited sound recording of this occasion see the video at the foot of this blog]</small>. Also seen are excerpts from various home movies featuring Elgar, Vera Hockman, his daughter Carice and her Cairn terrier, and his own two dogs Marco (a spaniel) and Mina (a Cairn terrier). Rarer still is the brief movie shown at the beginning of the video, of Elgar conducting at the opening of the British Empire Exhibition in London on 23 April 1924. This was not a happy occasion for Elgar who detested all the jingoistic ceremony and military displays (coming only a few years after the appalling slaughter of the First World War). He was conducting his <span style="font-style:italic;">Pomp and Circumstance March no.1</span> and his arrangement of Parry's <span style="font-style:italic;">Jerusalem</span>. When he arrived at the rehearsal the choir that was present <span style="font-style:italic;">"cheered the veteran conductor as he mounted the steps"</span> though he seemed a <span style="font-style:italic;">"lonely figure in black poised in his lofty pulpit"</span>. Afterwards Elgar wrote to Alice Stuart-Wortley describing the event as having <span style="font-style:italic;">"no soul & no romance & no imagination"</span>.<br /><br />Over the top of the score of the 2nd Symphony Elgar has quoted the first two lines of an 1821 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley: '<span style="font-style:italic;">Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!</span>' <small>[you can read the full poem below]</small>. The '<span style="font-style:italic;">Spirit of Delight</span>' theme is presumed to be the first movement's passionate opening E flat theme. It makes a beautiful and hushed re-appearance towards the end of the slow movement (at 12.10 in this video). Knowing of Elgar's constant battle with depression this is a very moving and deeply personal moment. Back in the 1980s I and the composer Lionel Sainsbury were able to spend a whole afternoon with the original manuscript of Elgar's 2nd symphony (unsupervised!) at the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Worcestershire. We didn't tear out any pages (alla Mr Bean, see <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwOrp6Q7kCE">Mr Bean - Library destruction</a>), but handled it as the precious artefact it is. And just to show that Elgar didn't always take himself so seriously, on the very top of the first page of his manuscript, underneath the '<span style="font-style:italic;">Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!</span>' quote, Elgar had drawn one of his characteristic doodles: a gleeful little man in the form of a treble clef (the '<span style="font-style:italic;">Spirit of Delight</span>'), cycling along the staves with great panache!<br /><br /><DIV ALIGN=CENTER>* * * * *</div><br /><strong>Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822):<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou </span>(1821)</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6BOn4SlP9SZDwig3Jnwkqu8NWQLE4wMB856_OGtj1AYA92d6NkipiTbpHRiiiknSfSJexqWNC7KuL9MLzF0Vy5iBu6HWBVEo6y_YY9klEROgXsq_hzZc_mtc73G5p619UqKKILge5EgY/s1600/Portrait_of_Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_by_Amelia+Curran_Rome_1819.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 385px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6BOn4SlP9SZDwig3Jnwkqu8NWQLE4wMB856_OGtj1AYA92d6NkipiTbpHRiiiknSfSJexqWNC7KuL9MLzF0Vy5iBu6HWBVEo6y_YY9klEROgXsq_hzZc_mtc73G5p619UqKKILge5EgY/s400/Portrait_of_Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_by_Amelia+Curran_Rome_1819.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5725499304034574146" /></a><small><center>[Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Amelia Curran, Rome, 1819.]</small></center><br />Rarely, rarely, comest thou,<br />Spirit of Delight!<br />Wherefore hast thou left me now<br />Many a day and night?<br />Many a weary night and day<br />'Tis since thou art fled away.<br /><br />How shall ever one like me<br />Win thee back again?<br />With the joyous and the free<br />Thou wilt scoff at pain.<br />Spirit false! thou hast forgot<br />All but those who need thee not.<br /><br />As a lizard with the shade<br />Of a trembling leaf,<br />Thou with sorrow art dismayed;<br />Even the sighs of grief<br />Reproach thee, that thou art not near,<br />And reproach thou wilt not hear.<br /><br />Let me set my mournful ditty<br />To a merry measure;<br />Thou wilt never come for pity,<br />Thou wilt come for pleasure;<br />Pity then will cut away<br />Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.<br /><br />I love all that thou lovest,<br />Spirit of Delight!<br />The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed,<br />And the starry night;<br />Autumn evening, and the morn<br />When the golden mists are born.<br /><br />I love snow, and all the forms<br />Of the radiant frost;<br />I love waves, and winds, and storms,<br />Everything almost<br />Which is Nature's, and may be<br />Untainted by man's misery.<br /><br />I love tranquil solitude,<br />And such society<br />As is quiet, wise, and good<br />Between thee and me<br />What difference? but thou dost possess<br />The things I seek, not love them less.<br /><br />I love Love—though he has wings,<br />And like light can flee,<br />But above all other things,<br />Spirit, I love thee—<br />Thou art love and life! Oh, come,<br />Make once more my heart thy home.<br /><br /><DIV ALIGN=CENTER>* * * * *</div><br /><strong>Elgar conducts Pomp and Circumstance March no.1</strong><br /><br />Below is a video of Edward Elgar conducting the trio of his Pomp and Circumstance March no.1 at the opening of the Abbey Road Studios, London, on November 12 1931. His words, spoken to the orchestra at the beginning of this short film clip, are as follows: <span style="font-style:italic;">"Good morning gentlemen. Glad to see you all. Very light programme this morning. Please play this tune as though you've never heard it before"</span>.<br /><br /><center><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UrzApHZUUF0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-14188143083515102192012-03-01T07:40:00.146-08:002015-03-02T03:17:59.975-08:00Dreams of a composer<span style="font-style:italic;">Some self-indulgent reflection inspired by my 50th birthday</span><br /><br />From a very early age I have had a huge passion for music, greatly encouraged by my parents who created an environment where I and all my brothers and sisters were involved in making music in one way or another. It must have been quite a noisy household as all 5 of us would compete to get time on the piano; I being the 2nd youngest had to fight for my place against my older sisters who were already accomplished pianists. At the age of 8 or 9 my mother took my older brother and I to the local music shop and picked out two scores for us: '<span style="font-style:italic;">First Year Handel</span>' and '<span style="font-style:italic;">First Year Haydn</span>'. It was quite random who got which book but to my delight I was given the Handel. Handel quickly became my favourite composer as I pounded my way through arrangements of the Messiah, and his famous Largo. As long as I can remember I would get completely absorbed by music, whether listening or playing, and often at the cost of those around me! To illustrate the point: when I was 10 a close school friend of mine was returning to the States with his family, they having spent a sabbatical year in my home town of Oxford England. On the eve of their departure my friend invited me to walk back with him to his house one last time, but I turned down the invitation because I was itching to play the piano. After a few minutes at the instrument, with my friend walking the mile back to his house for the last time, alone, the callousness of my action suddenly hit me and I rushed out of the house after him, but it was too late, he had long gone. The next time I saw him was nearly 20 years later.<br /><br />Around the same time I was singing regularly in various church choirs, including the choir of Pembroke College Oxford. It was there, at the age of 9, that I first discovered the music of Bach, when we sang his beautiful chorale from the St Matthew Passion, ‘<span style="font-style:italic;">Oh sacred head, sore wounded</span>’. It made a very deep impression on me.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbmJkVAxNagbCBZHKNVk-R0R2-gt_dqfcu2ubPwi9LkNM7LjHiRLT3o5p7kZIR0nJT5eP6_JbcieqRO5lCIBWjqekrPjzmcf8JC7azx0JK4x1M0LgSM4lSpy9byek5Wi_NxSJOF5KhVc0/s1600/Pembroke_College%252C_Oxford.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbmJkVAxNagbCBZHKNVk-R0R2-gt_dqfcu2ubPwi9LkNM7LjHiRLT3o5p7kZIR0nJT5eP6_JbcieqRO5lCIBWjqekrPjzmcf8JC7azx0JK4x1M0LgSM4lSpy9byek5Wi_NxSJOF5KhVc0/s400/Pembroke_College%252C_Oxford.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714961563662434354" /></a><center><small>[Pembroke College Chapel Oxford, where I was first introduced to the music of Bach:]</small></center><br /><br /><center><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ed0Df-Nmm00" width="420"></iframe></center><center><small>[J.S. Bach: <span style="font-style:italic;">O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded</span>, Kings College Choir Cambridge, David Willcocks, 1973]</small></center><br />At the same time I anxiously showed off my own composition to the Pembroke College organ scholar; it was a Sonata in C for piano, one of my earliest pieces, written when I was 9, the manuscript destroyed, I'm sorry to say, by my own hand a few years later!<br /><br />I continued with both my singing and my composing and at the age of 11 wrote my first choral work, a setting of Christina Rossetti's Christmas carol ‘<span style="font-style:italic;">Before the paling of the stars</span>’. I still have the manuscript – for some reason this piece did NOT get destroyed! It was first performed by the choir of St Aldates in Oxford and I also incorporated the carol into a lengthy semi-improvised composition for choir and organ which was also performed on the same occasion.<br /><br />Around that time my piano skills were dramatically improving and at the ripe old age of 12 my piano teacher suggested I might consider becoming a concert pianist, such was my enthusiasm for performing even then. I was so excited by her confidence in me that I remember skipping all the way home after the lesson singing to myself <span style="font-style:italic;">"I'm going to be a concert pianist, I'm going to be a concert pianist"</span>. For the next few years I continued composing mainly piano pieces, most of which tended to me of a virtuoso nature, culminating in a 30 minute three movement piano concerto (which I also orchestrated). Though these are obviously juvenile works when I look at them today I can see they showed promise. Below is an early (undated) recording of my improvisation on themes from my Piano Concerto (one has to feel sorry for my sister whose bedroom was directly above the piano room - in those days most of my composing and playing was done early in the morning before I went to school, beginning at 5.30AM!).<br /><br /><center><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/L0hFOleMx_o?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center><center><small>[Gibbons: Improvisation on themes from Piano Concerto (1976) (undated early recording)]</small></center><br />Unfortunately my psyche at the age of 13, when I wrote my piano concerto, was not what it is today. After I completed it I decided it was all rubbish. At the same time I was becoming aware of some of the less savoury trends in 20th century classical music, including the work of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, and I became very self-consciously aware that the music I was trying to write would not be considered acceptable (the brain-washing had already begun). Consequently I experimented very briefly by writing a couple of semi-atonal pieces. Thankfully the experiment was unsuccessful, but the psychological damage of this new self-conscious awareness would have far-reaching and very negative consequences.<br /><br />Finally, at the age of 14, I made a ridiculously dogmatic decision to completely stop writing music. I decided my skills lay in performing, not composing, and that I should devote 100% of my energies to improving my piano playing.<br /><br />By the time I went to music college at 15 these views were even more cemented in my mind. Though I studied composition as well as piano at college I didn’t take my composing seriously anymore. My own sense of self-deprecation was reinforced by my composition professor who, upon examining my youthful piano concerto, declared it to be completely worthless (<span style="font-style:italic;">"what gets me is why you bothered to finish it"</span> were his actual words, forever burned into my memory as he flicked through the pages). So that was that, the decision I had made at 14 to stop composing was given the stamp of approval at college. But here’s a strange thing: notwithstanding my self-doubts, when I played the music written by my contemporaries at college I felt sure that had I stayed with my composing I would have written something better myself, yet oddly this still wasn't enough to push me back into composing. I was in a hyper-critical phase (composers such as Beethoven and Mozart didn't escape my criticism either!). I now realize how wrong I was to make that ridiculous decision at 14, how bad the advice was I received from my professor, and how badly let down I was by all my music teachers at the time. If I could return as my own composition professor it would be so easy to offer the advice and encouragement I so badly needed then. It would be so simple to point out what was good and what was bad in my music, and to show myself how I could fix things and develop what was good – my enthusiasm for music would have made me an excellent pupil. How I would have enjoyed studying carefully the works of the composers I loved (as opposed to the ones I didn't), and I might have been surprised to realize that even the greatest of them had serious doubts about their own abilities.<br /><br />In my teens and early 20s my prospects as a concert pianist continued to improve with each new success, but all the while, as I grew older, I felt something important was missing. I continued to reassure myself that I just didn't have the talent for writing music. Even so, I started to write down and record any musical ideas I had – what I intended to do with them who knows, for they were just shoved all the way to the back of a cupboard. But one day all that changed: facing a serious identity crisis, I took the plunge and started writing a song. It was my first serious attempt at composition since my 1976 piano concerto 25 years earlier. I took a Christina Rossetti poem ‘<span style="font-style:italic;">Remember Me</span>’ and started trying to fit the words to one of the ideas I had scribbled down and pushed to the back of my cupboard but which always seemed to be in my head. While writing this song something dramatic happened which struck me like a lightening bolt: the more I got into the poem the more I felt I could express the words in my music. I began abandoning my initial idea and just started freely composing. In particular, at the passage that begins at 5:44 on the video below, I suddenly had this extraordinary feeling that the sky was the limit, that I could write ANYTHING. It was just like Elgar had said: <span style="font-style:italic;">“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require”</span>. This was the trigger that changed my life forever.<br /><br /><center><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/S3o1KUteUGQ?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center><center><small>[Gibbons: <span style="font-style:italic;">Remember Me</span> Op.12, first performance, February 2001]</small></center><br />But then another momentous event happened. Shortly after completing this piece I was very nearly killed in a serious car accident (in March 2001). If I had died, ironically, this one song of mine would have made a perfect epitaph!<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCkrcedxjMTlcYt_BJbAf7-MfYJ0Z47mEedWmxH9ubRXFnFqYYyt4j1mhFC1GG4uKxEiO7rlHaZSeoMEND-0TVaWrIsbkIhU_teP1O3Bl4Tj3aGWRKcJgLCkQ-xr_R27dv9vtDROE1zCA/s1600/Jack+Oxford+Mail+March+14+2001.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 383px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCkrcedxjMTlcYt_BJbAf7-MfYJ0Z47mEedWmxH9ubRXFnFqYYyt4j1mhFC1GG4uKxEiO7rlHaZSeoMEND-0TVaWrIsbkIhU_teP1O3Bl4Tj3aGWRKcJgLCkQ-xr_R27dv9vtDROE1zCA/s400/Jack+Oxford+Mail+March+14+2001.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714974636862141282" /></a><center><small>[Newspaper cutting, Oxford Mail, March 2001]</small></center><br />During the long recovery process, when I was unable to play the piano, I became consumed with the urge to continue composing. I launched into song after song and many of my songs from Opp. 15-29 stem from this time, the summer of 2001, including this one.<br /><br /><center><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OwSKoI18YKM?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center><center><small>[Gibbons: <span style="font-style:italic;">The Bourne</span> Op.27, composed June 2001]</small></center><br />Once I recovered from my injuries I resumed my performing career. I was extremely fortunate to be able to return to piano playing considering the severity of my injuries (thanks to the superb treatment I received from the doctors and nurses of the British National Health Service). But now I had a new obsession and a constant desire to get back to composing. I was aware it was a bold, even foolhardy, thing to harbour the thought of abandoning a successful performing career in favour a very uncertain composing career. It didn't help that I still felt very much a novice when it came to composing, with 25 year lost years of not honing my craft! Now my stubbornness, which had been so destructive to my creativity at the age of 14, was working in my favour, as I was determined to write music whatever the cost. And ‘cost’ was certainly something I was forced to consider, as I happily let my earnings disappear in favour of my new found dream. But with every new composition I gained increased confidence, and more and more felt I was making the right decision and moving in a direction that I should have been in 25 years ago.<br /><br />A few years later another very fortunate turn of events played a big rôle in the direction of my music. While visiting Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia in May 2010, performing an all-Gershwin concert on behalf of a Highlands Scholarship initiative at D&E, part-financed by philanthropist Doris Buffett, I had a series of conversations with the staff of the college. I talked about my ambitions to stay in one place and devote more time to writing music, and to my astonishment the president of D&E, Buck Smith, asked on the 2nd day of my visit if I would consider becoming the college's artist-in-residence. Taking the position would mean an even bigger change of direction in my life: now, in addition to my performing, I would also be expected to write music, which is a very different kettle of fish to writing music when you 'feel like it' (the president had been very taken with some of my own pieces which I had included in my concert at D&E, and was anxious to provide me with an environment that would inspire me to write).<br /><br />So here I am now, sitting in my study in Elkins, West Virginia, with a beautiful view of the Appalachian mountains from my window, just down a lovely tree-lined road from Davis & Elkins College, which itself has a most scenic and inspiring campus, set in the hills and woods of Appalachia.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Ctq3JdDziXahac-ioFIimiBxAs51W_JzcPjq-YchlL-5JjvqzCBeuOnPm-9NqBM-6BdeWikGbJlESOMzP9t8OWp4MzuMTV2iX8QBnISW4xkkJO6A-yxRJpRy-7uVYuWkT0eJeADIuFA/s1600/D%2526E+montage+1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Ctq3JdDziXahac-ioFIimiBxAs51W_JzcPjq-YchlL-5JjvqzCBeuOnPm-9NqBM-6BdeWikGbJlESOMzP9t8OWp4MzuMTV2iX8QBnISW4xkkJO6A-yxRJpRy-7uVYuWkT0eJeADIuFA/s400/D%2526E+montage+1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714993902872105394" /></a><center><small>[The campus of Davis & Elkins College, Elkins, West Virginia]</small></center><br />In front of me on my desk are page after page of musical ideas I have been accumulating for the composition of a mass, which I very much hope the D&E choir can one day sing. Unfortunately also in front of me is my waste paper basket, filled to the brim with rejected music sheets. Right now I am staring at an ominously blank page of manuscript paper, and finding other things to do to distract me, such as writing this blog! But it's a great privilege I find myself in now, and one I am determined to make the most of with the production of good music. Only time will tell whether I have justified all the faith that has been placed in me, but I am gradually building a portfolio of compositions, many of which would not exist but for the faith and optimism shown me by the D&E College president Buck Smith. Below is one of those pieces: my <span style="font-style:italic;">Ave Verum Corpus</span> Op.90, written for the 2011 West Virginia <span style="font-style:italic;">Governor’s School for the Arts</span>, an important annual event for encouraging the arts in the youth of West Virginia, which is being held at Davis & Elkins College for the three years 2011, 2012 and 2013.<br /><br /><center><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mwncMTKg50g?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center><center><small>[Gibbons: <span style="font-style:italic;">Ave Verum Corpus</span> Op.90, West Virginia GSA Choir, first performance, July 2011]</small></center><br />I still feel I have a lot to do to catch up, with all the lost years when I wasn’t writing music. My inexperience seems daunting at times. I often think I need to recalculate my age in terms of years spent writing music, which would make me a young and inexperienced 25 year old composer, rather than an aging 50 year old! Of course I know that nothing worth having or achieving in life is free or comes easily, and the things one works at the most have a wonderful way of rewarding one the most. Reading constantly about composers as I do (I have been enthralled by the lives of the great composers ever since I read my first book on the life of Mozart when I was 11) one thing that I come across again and again is description of just how hard they all worked, even to the point perhaps (in Mozart's case) of working themselves into their graves. Johann Sebastian Bach is quoted as saying: <span style="font-style:italic;">"I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well"</span> (quoted in the earliest biography of Bach, written by Forkel). Chopin’s addiction to work is mockingly described by George Sand in one of her letters when she talks of Chopin not feeling he is working enough unless his back is breaking. Elgar's daughter Carice, writing about her father's life, emphasized just how hard her father worked, a point that she felt many people did not fully appreciate. I truly believe that the difference between the output of people like Bach, Chopin and Elgar and the rest of us is not the result of some magical inspiration from the ether, but largely a matter of perseverance, dedication, and hard work. One only needs to study Chopin’s sketches, those that survived his massive censorship, to see how a seemingly crude or unpromising idea could be gradually transformed into something of great beauty (just as a rough piece of unformed marble is gradually transformed by the wonderful hand of Michelangelo into a breathtaking <span style="font-style:italic;">Pietà</span>). Studying Chopin’s drafts and seeing how he was able to transform his first sketches into great masterpieces has taught me more about composition than anything else I have ever done. It's about not accepting anything you’re not happy with, and never giving up. Of course there is a negative side to this method: if one is not careful one might never finish a single piece of music. Bach and Mozart lived in a different age where people were much less concerned with posterity. Mozart in particular had a <span style="font-style:italic;">laissez-faire</span> attitude and if a piece of music did somehow escape his critical eye he wasn’t one to agonize over it once it was written – he simply moved on to the next piece. That's also something I am trying to learn from, as I pull music sheets out of my waste paper bin and wonder if I should have thrown them away so quickly!<br /><br /><center><small>[A playlist of some of my compositions (in reverse chronological order)]</small></center><small><br /><center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PL1260B64463CB3846&hl=en_US" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center><br /></small><center><small><a href="http://www.dewv.edu/">Visit the website of Davis & Elkins College, Elkins, West Virginia</a></small></center>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-85941240776213617722012-02-29T15:45:00.010-08:002012-02-29T16:20:14.222-08:00Happy birthday Rossini<span style="font-style:italic;">On Rossini, and his encounters with Beethoven and Chopin...<br /></span><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn22QnCrlwu3ylQcZ8PuavH10R7FyRSv1OTsDSdOilvxzRJLsMc0d_Iedup_5xC-TydsFCJRMJlyO5CEid9nmRjPsOL1Dy9C8Wbt4NQ2vVLQkwPGkF9TOimF83AhdtiVMaCucEEWWzcME/s1600/Rossini_by_Nadar_1856.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 289px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn22QnCrlwu3ylQcZ8PuavH10R7FyRSv1OTsDSdOilvxzRJLsMc0d_Iedup_5xC-TydsFCJRMJlyO5CEid9nmRjPsOL1Dy9C8Wbt4NQ2vVLQkwPGkF9TOimF83AhdtiVMaCucEEWWzcME/s400/Rossini_by_Nadar_1856.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714708578416815186" /></a><br />Today we get to celebrate something we don't often have the chance to: Gioachino Rossini's birthday, born February 29 1792. Rossini had an extraordinary career. During his lifetime he was the most famous opera composer of them all, his heyday being the 1820s. Rossini took early retirement from the operatic world in 1829 at the age of 37, and spent the latter half of his life in both France and Italy.<br /><br />In April 1822, while visiting Vienna at the height of his fame, Rossini had the opportunity of meeting Beethoven. Rossini was profoundly moved by this encounter and by the impoverished conditions in which the composer was living, which he vividly described: <span style="font-style:italic;">"Ascending the stairs that led to the miserable dwelling which the great man inhabited, it was certainly hard work to control my emotion. When the door was opened, I found myself in a kind of dirty and frightfully disorderly attic. I remember above all that the ceiling, immediately under the roof, was covered from great cracks through which the rain must have poured in. The portraits of Beethoven which we all know entirely reproduce his appearance faithfully enough. But something that none have ever known how to express is the indefinable sadness that emanates from his face, while under the thick eyebrows, in deep caverns, the eyes, though small, seemed transfixed. His voice was sweet and a little veiled."</span> Beethoven (already profoundly deaf) then said (translated from German by Rossini's companion): <span style="font-style:italic;">“Ah, Rossini. So you’re the composer of The Barber of Seville. I congratulate you."</span> (The Barber of Seville was at that time a good deal more succesful than Beethoven's own opera Fidelio!). At other times Beethoven had not been so complimentary about Rossini, writing in one conversation book (in 1825): <span style="font-style:italic;">"This rascal Rossini, who is not respected by a single master of his art!"</span> and in another: <span style="font-style:italic;">"Rossini! If Dame Fortune had not given him a pretty talent and amiable melodies by the bushel, what he learned at school would have brought him nothing but potatoes for his big belly."</span><br /><br />Several years later Rossini, now retired and living in Paris, met the composer Chopin. Chopin had grown up with Rossini's operas in Warsaw, where they were all the rage in the 1820s. In 1830 Chopin specifically mentions the aria <span style="font-style:italic;">'Giusto Ciel'</span> when the woman with whom he was madly in love at the time, Konstancja Gładkowska, interpolated it into a performance of the opera <span style="font-style:italic;">La Gazza Ladra</span> (The Thieving Magpie).<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/fde7Pk_vUX0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />After his move to Paris Chopin heard many of the world's leading singers, including La Malibran, Lablache and Rubini, in Rossini's operas; Chopin's letters are filled with references to such operas as <span style="font-style:italic;">L'Italiana in Algeri, La Cenerentola, Mosè, Semiramide, Le Comte Ory, Il Turco in Italia, Guillaume Tell, La Gazza Ladra, Maometto II, La Donna del Lago, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Otello,</span> etc.. After Chopin's death, in October 1849, his close friend Wojciech Grzymała movingly described the scene at Chopin's deathbed: <span style="font-style:italic;">"A few hours before he died he</span> [Chopin] <span style="font-style:italic;">asked Mme Potocka to sing three airs by Bellini and Rossini. These she sang, accompanying herself and sobbing, while he listened to them with sobs, and deep emotion, as the last sounds he would hear in this world".</span><br /><br />In Rossini's long years of retirement he still composed a little, including the beautiful <span style="font-style:italic;">Petite Messe Solennelle</span> in 1863, written 34 years after his 'retirement' as an operatic composer. With typical humour Rossini wrote on its completion: <span style="font-style:italic;">"Dear Lord – this poor little Mass is finished, Here it is. Have I written sacred music or desecrated music? I was born for opera buffa, as Thou well knowest. A little knowledge, a little heart; that is all. Be therefore blessed and grant me heaven."</span> Of course Rossini was also going directly against Beethoven's advice, who also said to Rossini at their 1822 meeting: <span style="font-style:italic;">"Never try to write anything else but opera buffa</span> [comic opera]<span style="font-style:italic;">; any other style would do violence to your nature.</span>"<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/qqRCZK_11T8?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Rossini's later years were also famous for the musical soirées he held at his Paris home at which he also demonstrated his famous culinary skills, his sharp wit, and his fondness for his pets, including his dog Nini and his parrot Peruche (Peruche's death was commemorated by Charles-Valentin Alkan's witty Rossini parady <span style="font-style:italic;">'Marcia funèbre, sulla morte d'un Pappagallo'</span> - sometimes translated as 'Funeral March for a Dead Parrot'!).<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AQcmBUc0OQc?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Rossini died in France in 1868. In his 76 years he had witnessed an extraordinary period in the history of music: born the year after Mozart's death he had outlived not only Beethoven but many composers younger than himself including Schubert and Chopin. It seems extraordinary to think that in 1822 he was still close enough to Mozart's era for Beethoven to specifically ask if Mozart's operas were still being sung in Italy, while the year of Rossini's death saw the first performance of Brahms' Requiem and the first compositions of a 9-year-old Elgar, whose godson I have actually met! Rossini also lived into the era of photography, and there are several fine photographic portraits of the composer, which make fascinating comparison with the many oil paintings done of him before the invention of photography. One thing all the photographic portraits of Rossini reveal is what Beethoven sarcastically described as Rossini’s <span style="font-style:italic;">"big belly"</span>!<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7zMoGxAQdPhh4djgjbDD3pUbHFXEixWm7Kh-40jeaF1D8VNK9yUJAI2irkDJVykvwnI9RNP8grktsv_wy2efZrLyncgtKO2mxpGkkInppjiFXf7lWY578Qh4G75_-1IEVe0WR6uBMDvk/s1600/Composer_Rossini_G_1865_by_Carjat.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 318px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7zMoGxAQdPhh4djgjbDD3pUbHFXEixWm7Kh-40jeaF1D8VNK9yUJAI2irkDJVykvwnI9RNP8grktsv_wy2efZrLyncgtKO2mxpGkkInppjiFXf7lWY578Qh4G75_-1IEVe0WR6uBMDvk/s400/Composer_Rossini_G_1865_by_Carjat.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714711357943137618" /></a>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-28731151925984946182012-01-27T13:47:00.000-08:002012-02-09T13:22:55.462-08:00In praise of Bach (7)<BR><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDI-xoLKPkdLf4gQw9ju2OIg0tirnxJ3VkRXbt7FZECWyV_arkIfKjvxibn5HaMsP_au8Iex1MMj32NQ69GuC_wWOa63ISUrEfxbzUSOgtn9dlhm8WcyyaPAO2eXSWjuEuclpEU3udNCE/s1600/Bach_Haussmann_1746+%2528reduced%2529.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 332px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDI-xoLKPkdLf4gQw9ju2OIg0tirnxJ3VkRXbt7FZECWyV_arkIfKjvxibn5HaMsP_au8Iex1MMj32NQ69GuC_wWOa63ISUrEfxbzUSOgtn9dlhm8WcyyaPAO2eXSWjuEuclpEU3udNCE/s400/Bach_Haussmann_1746+%2528reduced%2529.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702432023751844034" /></a><br />When posting my 6 previous blogs 'in praise of Bach' I was struck yet again by the frequency of over-the-top phrases spoken through history in praise of the music of this one man:<br /><br />"<i>one of the most influential works in the history of western classical music</i>"<br />"<i>a pinnacle of the solo violin repertoire</i>"<br />"<i>one of the greatest achievements of any man in history</i>"<br />"<i>one of the most important examples of variation form in music</i>"<br />"<i>there are many great composers, and then there is J. S. Bach</i>"<br />"<i>Bach pierces to the heart like no other</i>"<br />"<i>the greatest artwork of all times and all people</i>"<br />"<i>some music is so good it needs no introduction</i>"<br /><br />How can one describe Bach to those who don't know his work? His position in the music world is easy to describe: Bach is frequently compared to Shakespeare in literature. Isaac Newton in science, Michelangelo in art <SMALL>[see the foot of this blog for a recording of one of Bach's most moving choruses (from the St. John passion) combined with a slide show of Michelangelo's incomparable Pietàs]</SMALL>. Revered by all the greatest composers that came after him, even music critics whose daily published opinions reveal their ignorance feel obliged to genuflect in front of Johann Sebastian (if only out of peer pressure). Bach's position in musical history is unassailable, unarguable. I remember, when I was too young to appreciate just who Bach was, a teacher at my school being asked who they thought was the greatest composer of all. A ridiculous question needless to say, but the teacher's answer was immediate: "<i>Bach of course</i>". As a small child I didn't forget that answer because of the confidence of the teacher's response. But how is it that one man could have been so gifted, had so much wisdom and sense of humanity - that's much harder to explain. Listening to the inferior quality of the music written by his own children (some of whom became more famous than their father as composers during their lifetimes) or the poverty of the music by the long line of Bach ancestors who came before him (music was a family business for the Bach's stretching back centuries) doesn't strengthen the argument that it can all be explained by genetics. The composer Walton once quipped that you have to have something truly appalling happen to you in order to write music. Certainly Bach's personal life story is filled with sad events that surely must have deeply affected him: the loss of 11 of his children and the unexpected death, in his absence, of his youthful first wife Maria Barbara. But not every one who has suffered similar tragedies starts writing the most beautiful music of all time. If I could travel in time I would so love to go back 300 years to meet Johann Sebastian - just glimpsing him walking out of his building and perhaps through the neighbouring 'Little Thomas Gate" would leave me in a state of euphoria, let alone hearing him speak, watching him conduct, or best of all being a fly on the wall in his <i>Componierstube</i> (his Composing Study, from where he had views over ornamental gardens and the surrounding countryside) when he was creating his immortal masterpieces! To others who don't understand my passion this might seem as exciting as watching paint dry. To me it's the meaning of life!<br /><br />Sadly there is only one authenticated picture of the composer (painted in 1746, see above), and one that really doesn't give much away (apart from the bags under his eyes that clearly show a lack of sleep). The description of Bach left by its painter, Elias Gottlob Haussmann, writing of how Bach was in a tremendous hurry and did not want to sit too long for the portrait, says more about Bach than the portrait itself. But there are other written descriptions of Bach that help to shape a clearer portrait of the man, from his children and from his friends, all of whom describe his wonderful humanity, his love for his family, his gregariousness (his son said his house was like a beehive so constantly filled with visitors, and that his presence was always "<i>edifying</i>"), his kindness to those he taught (one pupil writing that he could not adequately describe his excitement when the hands of the composer overlapped with his when being shown a passage on the keyboard), Bach's sense of fun (digging his son in the ribs when listening to a new composer's music and suggesting in a whisper what the piece should do next if the composer was any good), Bach's down-to-earthness (telling someone that his success was due to his industriousness, something anyone else who worked as hard could also achieve). Bach was a stubborn man too, someone who had little patience with unreasoning authority - this attitude frequently got him into trouble from the ignorant and petty-minded officials who had authority over him, and who probably wanted more than anything to take him down a peg or two. Yet for all those ignoramuses there were just as many kind, intelligent and thoughtful friends who loved and appreciated Bach. One ex-pupil recalled years after Bach's death how he had a portrait of Bach on the wall in his house, and how a friend called by and, on seeing the portrait, said words to the effect of "<i>that old bore Bach</i>", this distressing Bach's ex-pupil so much that ever afterwards he always hung the picture facing the wall to prevent anyone else saying an unkind word about a man he clearly adored and of whom he had nothing but the fondest memories.<br /><br />Perhaps the last words of this short eulogy to J.S. Bach should be left to Johannes Brahms, a man not known for giving empty praise, who wrote the following words to Clara Schumann describing Bach's Chaconne for solo violin: "<i>On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind</i>".<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TiUGOvXsxBE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>J.S.Bach's deeply moving final chorus from the St John Passion, conducted by Karl Richter, accompanied in this video by photographs of the Pietàs, drawings and buildings of Michelangelo (1475 - 1564). Pietàs shown include the Pietà from St Peter's Basilica in Rome (1499), the Florentine Pietà (1547 - 1555), Palestrina Pietà (1555, unfinished) and the Rondanini Pietà (1564, his last work, unfinished), as well as the Madonna of Bruges (1501 - 1504).<br /><br />Pietà from St Peter's, Rome (1499):<br /><br />Michelangelo was in his early twenties when he completed his most famous Pietà of St Peter's Rome. According to legend he overheard someone praising the work as by another artist so returned to the sculpture and carved his name on it - the only work of his on which he carved his name.<br /><br />Florentine Pietà (1547 - 1555):<br /><br />Michelangelo began the Florentine Pietà (also known as 'The Deposition') in his 70s and was originally intending it for his own tomb. Unfortunately the marble he used was faulty, unknown to Michelangelo when he began the sculpture, and it often drew off sparks as he worked. Finally the left leg of Christ broke off while he was working on it. Michelangelo was so furious he attempted to destroy the whole sculpture, beginning with Christ's left forearm and hand and right forearm, but was prevented by his pupils from completing the destruction. It was later repaired and completed by his pupil Tiberio Calcagni - the inferior quality of Tiberio's work is obvious in the finishing of the figure of Mary Magdalene; fortunately Tiberio Calcagni didn't attempt to 'finish' the remaining figures. The tall figure of Joseph of Arimathea (also credited as Nicodemus) is according to legend supposedly a self portrait of Michelangelo himself.<br /><br />Palestrina Pietà (1555):<br /><br />The unfinished Palestrina Pietà has no documented history in Michelangelo's lifetime. However it was added to the Michelangelo collection in Florence in 1939. Most likely Michelangelo began the work, and possibly one or more of his pupils attempted more work on it, though it remained incomplete.<br /><br />Rondanini Pietà (1564):<br /><br />Michelangelo was apparently working on his last Pietà, the unfinished Rondanini Pietà, only days before he died in 1564, at the age of 89.<br /><br />Before his death Michelangelo attempted to have all his drawings burnt, regarding them as inferior work, drawn purely for the purpose of preparation for his sculptures and paintings. Fortunately for us Michelangelo was unable to complete the destruction and many of his beautiful drawings (many done in red chalk) have survived.</SMALL>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-14802356776107719252012-01-24T01:36:00.000-08:002012-01-24T17:18:58.796-08:00In praise of Johann Sebastian Bach (6)The joy of his keyboard music<br /><br />Since my teens I have had a deep love of Bach's music, and as a pianist have enjoyed playing much of his work, such as the Preludes and Fugues, Partitas and Suites, and the Goldberg Variations. As a young teenager I was also very passionate about the organ and even considered the idea of becoming a professional organist for a while, so naturally I played a large number of Bach's organ works, some of which I have since arranged for the piano. It would have been unthinkable for me not to include the music of Bach in my Queen Elizabeth Hall debut recital in London in 1984, when I played Bach's Goldberg Variations alongside music by Chopin (Funeral March Sonata) and Ravel (Gaspard de la nuit).<br /><br />Here is a series recordings from my own archives, beginning with the earliest recording I have of my Bach playing. As those of you who have attended my concerts will know, I enjoy talking about music as well as playing it, and in the penultimate video below I give a brief spoken introduction to Bach's Goldberg Variations, followed by an excerpt from the work recorded live at one of my concerts.<br /><br /><i>J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor, BWV 853</i><br /><br />Here is Johann Sebastian Bach's incomparable Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor, BWV 853, no.8 from Book One of '<i>The Well-Tempered Clavier</i>'. This ground-breaking first set of 24 Preludes and Fugues in all the major and minor keys was completed in 1722 and written, in Bach's own words, '<i>for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.</i>' Unusually the fugue of this work is written out in D-sharp minor, the enharmonic key of E-flat minor.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CGI4s4Fd0Zc?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>J.S.Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor, BWV 853, played by Jack Gibbons, recorded live in concert, July 1980, Oxford England</SMALL><br /><br /><i>J.S. Bach: Gigue from Partita no.4 BWV 828</i><br /><br />Bach wrote six Partitas for keyboard, published from 1726 to 1730 (the 4th Partita, the largest of the six, was published in 1728). All six were then published as a set in 1731 under the title <i>Clavier-Übung</i> (or Keyboard Exercise). Eventually Bach would produce four such collections. The title page of the first Clavier-Übung bears the following words of encouragement: ‘<i>Keyboard practice, consisting of Preludes, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gigues, Menuets, and other Galanteries, composed for the agreeable diversion of enthusiasts by Johann Sebastian Bach</i>'.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VVPmz-fIbQk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Gigue from J.S.Bach's Partita no.4 BWV 828, played by Jack Gibbons, recorded live in concert, September 1981, Oxford England</SMALL><br /><br /><i>J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue No.18 in G sharp minor BWV 887</i><br /><br />Bach wrote two sets of Preludes and Fugues in all the major and minor keys. They are known collectively as the '<i>Well-Tempered Clavier</i>', a title Bach used because of the need for a new and more careful tuning system in order for the pieces to work in all 24 keys. This iconic collection is regarded as "<i>one of the most influential works in the history of Western classical music</i>". Many composers, including Beethoven and Chopin, were brought up on the Well-Tempered Clavier, and it is as beloved today as the day the first volume appeared in 1722.<br /><br />The Prelude and Fugue BWV 887 featured here is from the second set, completed by Bach in 1742. The fugue is known as a double fugue because it has two fugue subjects which in the course of the piece are developed simultaneously (for the layman: it's almost like having two separate pieces which can then be laid on top of each other). As usual Bach's compositional 'sleight of hand' can easily go unnoticed in the general enjoyment of the piece!<br /><br />On the front page of the first set of Preludes and Fugues Bach wrote out a long and elaborate title, which in full reads: '<i>The Well-Tempered Clavier, or Preludes and Fugues through all the tones and semitones both as regards the tertia major or Ut Re Mi and as concerns the tertia minor or Re Mi Fa. For the Use and Profit of the Musical Youth Desirous of Learning as well as for the Pastime of those Already Skilled in this Study drawn up and written by Johann Sebastian Bach</i>'. For the second set Bach opted for the shorter title '<i>Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues</i>'! <br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/M82lqp5Tkwk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G sharp minor, from 'Das Wohltemperierte Klavier' ('The Well Tempered Clavier') Bk 2, no.18 (BWV 887), recorded live, June 1987, St John's Smith Square, London</SMALL><br /><br /><i>J.S. Bach: Gavotte from French Suite no.5 BWV 816</i><br /><br />The only manuscript that exists of the erroneously titled French Suites can be found in the <i>Clavierbüchlein</i> of Bach's second wife Anna Magdalena. Bach gave his wife this little instructional music book as a gift soon after their wedding in December 1721. The image of Bach coaching his much younger new bride with simple keyboard pieces (his first wife having died tragically young two years earlier) is a touching one. Listening to these pieces it is easy to imagine a new happiness in Bach's life, and romance that, like everything in Bach's life, revolved around music and his family.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/h51DgS2IrN4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays the Gavotte from Bach's French Suite no.5 BWV 816, recorded live, April 1988, Cheltenham England</SMALL><br /><br /><i>J.S. Bach arranged Ferruccio Busoni: Chaconne from Partita no.2 for solo violin BWV 1004</i><br /><br />This Chaconne, in its original form, is considered "<i>a pinnacle of the solo violin repertoire</i>" and "<i>one of the greatest achievements of any man in history</i>". Many composers have made arrangements of the work for piano, including Johannes Brahms who wrote of the piece, in a letter to Clara Schumann: "<i>On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind</i>". The Italian composer Busoni, a life-long champion of Bach's music, made his own beautiful arrangement of the work in 1893.<br /><br />It is thought by some Bach scholars that Bach may have written the work in 1720 as a memorial to his first wife Maria Barbara, who died tragically young at the age of 35. <br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/r85Zi5FzYPw?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays Busoni'a arrangement of the Chaconne from J.S.Bach's Partita no.2 for solo violin BWV 1004, recorded live, April 1988, Cheltenham England</SMALL><br /><br /><i>J.S. Bach: Partita no.1 BWV 825</i><br /><br />In 1726 Johann Sebastian Bach published his Opus 1, the Partita no.1 in B flat BWV 825. Bach dedicated the six movement partita to the new born Prince Emanuel Ludwig (born 12 September 1726), son of his former employer at Cöthen Prince Leopold. Bach clearly retained an affection for the prince and for the happy years spent at Cöthen. He further celebrated the arrival of the prince's new born heir by writing a dedicatory poem to accompany the Partita Opus 1:<br /><br /><i>Serene and Gracious Prince, though cradle cov’rings deck thee, <br />Yet doth thy Princely glance show thee more than full-grown. <br />Forgive me, pray, if I from slumber should awake thee <br />The while my playful page to thee doth homage own. <br />It is the first fruit of my strings in music sounding; <br />Thou the first son round whom thy Princess’s arms have curled. <br />It shall for thee and for thy honour be resounding, <br />Since thou art, like this page, a firstling in this world. <br />The wise men of our time affright us oft by saying <br />We come into this world with cries and wails of woe, <br />As if so soon we knew the bitterness of staying <br />E’en this short time in weary travail here below. <br />But this do I turn round about, instead proclaiming <br />That thy sweet childish cries are lovely, clear, and pure; <br />Thus shall thy whole life be with gladness teeming - <br />A harmony complete of joys and pleasures sure. <br />So may I, Prince of all our hopes, e’er entertain thee, <br />Though thy delights be multiplied a thousandfold, <br />But let, I pray, the feeling evermore sustain me <br />Of being, Serene Prince, Thy humblest servant, <br />BACH</i><br /><br /><i>1. Praeludium</i><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gcVSQQ2jHRU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays the Praeludium from J.S.Bach's Partita no.1, recorded live in concert, Oxford England, 23 March 2005.</SMALL><br /><br /><i>2. Allemande</i><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TtOC2RUZgAk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays the Allemande from J.S.Bach's Partita no.1, recorded live in concert, Oxford England, 23 March 2005.</SMALL><br /><br /><i>3. Courante</i><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/zd49c6hLzf4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays the Courante from J.S.Bach's Partita no.1, recorded live in concert, Oxford England, 23 March 2005.</SMALL><br /><br /><i>4. Sarabande</i><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ueGlDHLhe-k?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays the Sarabande from J.S.Bach's Partita no.1, recorded live in concert, Oxford England, 23 March 2005.</SMALL><br /><br /><i>5. Menuet I & II</i><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VbCODUEm0Vw?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays Menuet I & II from J.S.Bach's Partita no.1, recorded live in concert, Oxford England, 23 March 2005.</SMALL><br /><br /><i>6. Gigue</i><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/cgD9S4iK_6w?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays Gigue from J.S.Bach's Partita no.1, recorded live in concert, Oxford England, 23 March 2005.</SMALL><br /><br /><i>An introduction to J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations BWV 988</i><br /><br />A short lecture at the piano, recorded in concert, describing the many wonderful aspects of this work of Johann Sebastian Bach, first published in 1741, and which makes up Bach's fourth <i>Clavier-Übung</i> (or Keyboard Exercise).<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Wm2_0N488aQ?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons talks about Bach's Goldberg Variations before his performance of the work, recorded in concert, August 2007, Oxford England</SMALL><br /><br /><i>J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations part 1, BWV 988</i><br /><br />Considered one of the most important examples of variation form in music, Bach published his Goldberg Variations in 1741, under the long heading "<i>Keyboard exercise, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach, composer for the royal court of Poland and the Electoral court of Saxony, Kapellmeister and Director of Choral Music in Leipzig. Nuremberg, Balthasar Schmid, publisher</i>".<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hlxf-TaAMg4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, part 1 (Aria and Variations 1-15), recorded live in concert, July 1983</SMALL>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-86857188456649843962012-01-23T22:53:00.000-08:002012-01-24T01:04:37.358-08:00In praise of Johann Sebastian Bach (5)Two excerpts from J.S. Bach’s St John Passion<br /><br /><i>1. Chorale: ‘O große Lieb’ (‘O mighty love’)</i><br /><br />For Bach it was very important that the music expressed accurately the sentiment of the words that were set. In this short excerpt from the St John Passion (first performed 1724) we hear one of many chorales placed throughout the work that the congregation was possibly expected to join in singing. Bach's sensitivity to the words is very apparent; interestingly the music increases in pathos and anguish with the dissonance Bach uses to express the 'sins' of <i>pleasure</i> and <i>joy</i> but returns to a calmness (albeit of a resigned kind) in reference to the need to <i>suffer</i> for those sins - quite the opposite to how those words would likely be interpreted in music today!<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7M_MS7x4wKo?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>The chorale ‘O große Lieb’ (‘O mighty love’) from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion, performed by the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter (recorded 1964). Background images are of the Thomaskirche amd Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, where Bach’s Passions were first performed.</SMALL><br /><br /><i>2. Peter's Denial<br /><br />Recitative: 'Und Hannas..'<br />Chorus: 'Bist du nicht...'<br />Recitative: 'Er leugnete aber...'<br />Aria: '‘Ach, mein Sinn’</i><br /><br />In this second excerpt from the St John Passion we hear Bach's extraordinary sensitivity to the text, from the spitefulness of the rabble chorus ('Bist du nicht seiner Jünger einer?' - 'Aren't you one of his disciples?') to the torment of Peter's mind after his realization of what has just happened ('und weinete bitterlich' - 'and he wept bitterly'). The tremendous emotion of this last recitative passage acts as a spring board into the anguished aria ‘Ach, mein Sinn’ ('Ah, my soul'), one of Bach's noblest creations. The amazing expressiveness and sensitivity of the music in this aria clearly shows how Bach identified with Peter's condition.<br /><br />Bach later cut the aria ‘Ach, mein Sinn’ from the St John Passion, presumably because Christian Weise’s words related to text taken from the St Matthew Gospel - in strict Lutheran Leipzig it's inclusion was no doubt seen as a terrible faux pas. However he reinstated it in the work's third and final revision of 1749, the year before his death.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/z1D3CM2vmeA?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>From J.S.Bach's St John Passion: the recitative and chorus leading up to Peter's Denial, followed by the aria "Ah, mein Sinn", performed by Ernst Haefliger and the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter (recorded 1964). Background images are of the Thomaskirche amd Nikolaikirche in Leipzig (where Bach’s Passions were first performed) as well as a variety of famous paintings depicting Peter's Denial</SMALL>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-84635426450218852772012-01-23T22:09:00.000-08:002012-01-23T22:25:51.950-08:00In praise of Johann Sebastian Bach (4)"Bach pierces to the heart": it's a phrase that's regularly encountered describing the incomparable music of Johann Sebastian Bach. One can try to rationalise why this is so, presumably a product of his exceptional genes, and his own life experiences. Reading about Bach's life one is immediately aware that death was a regular occurrence in his immediate family. He outlived 11 of his 20 children, 10 of whom died in infancy:<br /><br />Johann Christoph (died 23 February 1713, aged 1 day)<br />Maria Sophia (twin of Johann Christoph, died 15 March 1713, aged 21 days)<br />Leopold Augustus (died 29 September 1719, aged 10 months and 14 days)<br />Christiana Sophia Henrietta (died 29 June 1726, aged 3 years)<br />Ernestus Andreas (died 1 November 1727, aged 2 days)<br />Christian Gottlieb (died 21 September 1728, aged 3 years)<br />Christiana Benedicta Louise (died 4 January 1730, aged 4 days)<br />Christiana Dorothea (died 31 August 1732, aged 1 year)<br />Regina Johanna (died 25 April 1733, aged 4 years)<br />Johann August Abraham (died 6 November 1733, aged 3 days)<br /><br />Another son, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, died at the age of only 24 (27 May 1739), and Bach's first wife Maria Barbara died unexpectedly aged only 35 (7 July 1720).<br /><br />Whether this terrible toll accounts for the incredible depth and pathos within Bach's music can only be a matter of conjecture, but someone of Bach's intelligence and sensitivity must have undoubtedly lived constantly with mental anguish and pain, out of which his music must surely have provided solace and direction. Karl Richter, the greatest Bach scholar of the 20th century bar none, here conducts Julia Hamari in one of Bach's most moving arias from the St Matthew Passion, the famous song of anguish following Peter's denial: "Erbarme dich" ("Have mercy").<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/aPAiH9XhTHc?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>'Erbarme dich' from J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion, sung by Julia Hamari with The Munich Bach Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter (recorded May 1971)</SMALL>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-29870128822646208562012-01-23T22:02:00.000-08:002012-01-23T22:08:37.420-08:00In praise of Johann Sebastian Bach (3)As someone recently said: "there are many great composers, and then there is J. S. Bach". Bach composed this beautiful aria, "Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust" ("Contented rest, beloved inner joy") in 1726. It opens his solo cantata BWV 170. Evidently he had an excellent alto soloist in his choir to be able to devote a whole cantata to one soloist (here it's sung by the incomparable Janet Baker). This poignant cantata was first performed in Leipzig on 28 July 1726, just 27 days after the death of his 3 year old daughter Christiana Sophia Henrietta. One can only imagine the emotions Johann Sebastian and his young wife Anna Magdalena must have been feeling at such a sad time as this wistful song rung out for the first time at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2B_4w62A5ss?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Janet Baker sings 'Vergnügte Ruh', beliebte Seelenlust' from the Cantata BWV 170 with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Neville Marriner (recorded in London, January 1966)</SMALL>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-57009196713285090202012-01-23T21:15:00.001-08:002012-01-23T21:58:41.516-08:00In praise of Johann Sebastian Bach (2)Bach's B minor mass (of which this Agnus Dei is a part) was hailed in the 19th century as "the greatest artwork of all times and all people". To this day it is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest monuments of western culture. The work was completed in 1749, a year before the composer's death, and is one of Bach's last works, though much of the music was written earlier or adapted from his other works. It was not performed in its entirety until over 100 years after Bach's death. In Beethoven's lifetime the work was already so legendary, despite not having yet received any performance, that Beethoven tried twice (unsuccessfully) to acquire a score. This performance, by Janet Baker, is for me one of the most moving.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/iZuAbs16uks?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>J.S. Bach's Agnus Dei from his B minor mass, sung by Janet Baker with the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer (recorded October 1967).</SMALL>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-29336532773122006772012-01-23T19:14:00.000-08:002012-01-23T19:57:36.607-08:00In praise of Johann Sebastian Bach (1)Having used my <a href="http://www.facebook.com/JackGibbonsPiano">Facebook music page</a> as a blog for the past year or so I have decided to copy some of those posts to this blog, to make it easier for people to look back over certain subjects, rather than having them lost in the Facebook ether. I will begin with a collection of posts on J.S. Bach, one of my great idols and a key figure in my 'pursuit of happiness'.<br /><br />Some music is so good it needs no introduction... pure beauty of accompaniment, pure nobility of melody in this extract from Johann Sebastian Bach's secular Cantata BWV 208, composed in 1713. Needless to say I choose my recordings with great care: in the following example we have a truly wonderful rendition by the soprano Gillian Fisher, whose beautiful voice can also be heard, along with that of her husband Brian Kay, on the soundtrack of the 1984 movie Amadeus (in the rôles of Papageno and Papagena).<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/STWtdOTmqus?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Johann Sebastian Bach's "Schafe können sicher weiden" (Sheep may safely graze) from his Cantata BWV 208 (composed 1713), sung by Gillian Fisher with the King's Consort conducted by Robert King (recorded 1987).</SMALL>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-66176716274937478672011-04-25T23:01:00.000-07:002017-03-05T22:46:13.909-08:00Scenes from childhood(Schumann awakens my love of music)<br /><br />From 1958 the BBC introduced a children's radio series featuring "The Lost Noises Office" (created by Desmond Leslie, and narrated by his wife Agnes Bernelle). This strange fictitious establishment kept 'noises' safe until they were claimed by their owners (from whistles, to musical boxes to all manner of curious sounds courtesy of the BBC's sound effects department). When the bossy owner of this store (called Mr Bosseyman) was away the office was the soul charge of a young character called Pickles. My parents had a children's 45 RPM record featuring young Pickles dealing with a visit from a bossy and rather temperamental "Grand Piano" who had lost one of his notes (his middle B). Eventually, after searching through many unrelated noises, young Pickles finds the missing note and as 'Grand Piano' leaves the store he reminds Pickles to tune in to the radio that evening and that if he listens carefully he will hear the piano. At the conclusion of this record Pickles tunes in to the radio in time to hear the closing minute of the Schumann Piano Concerto. I adored this record and without doubt those final bars of the Schumann Piano Concerto, which I listened to over and over again, were the first serious music I ever heard. So you can imagine how emotional I became when eventually, for the first time, I got to play that work as a young concert pianist in May 1983. When I reached that point at the conclusion of the concerto (as heard by Pickles in the Lost Noises Office) I thought of how I had dreamed this music since the age of 4 and now I was truly, and incredibly, living my dream. It's hard for me to remember experiencing a more elated feeling during one of my concerts. I still adore this work and find Schumann a deeply moving and inspiring composer. Interestingly Elgar (one of my musical heros) described Schumann as his ideal. Brahms (who of course had known Robert Schumann and who was very close to Schumann's widow Clara in the years following Schumann's tragic death) thought the same.<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="239" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y4V14UXmcX4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Jack Gibbons plays the 3rd movement of Schumann's Piano Concerto Op.54, recorded live in concert, London, May 1983.</SMALL><br /><br />It's well known that many composers lived unhappy lives, or had tragic ends, but I think Schumann's is surely, and sadly, one of the most wretched. Ravaged by mental illness he spent the last two and a half years of his life locked away (inititially at his own insistence) in a mental asylum in Endenich, seeing his beloved Clara only once the whole time he was incarcerated, two days before his death (it was considered at the time to be injurious to his recovery to have contact with his family). By the time Clara did see her husband he was so sick he barely recognised those around him, including the hospital staff (Schumann's suffering and the continual deterioration of his mental state while in hospital is meticulously recorded and preserved in the notes of Dr Franz Richarz, the hospital's director, and makes distressing reading today). At that final meeting, two days before his death, Clara offered her husband what had been his only nourishment for weeks - wine and jellied consommé - and for a very brief moment she received a look from him that told her he knew it was her. In her diary she wrote "<i>he took it </i>[his nourishment]<i> with the happiest expression. He licked the wine from my fingers</i>"<br /><br />Apart from my very early introduction to great music through Schumann's wonderful piano concerto, another seminal moment in my musical awakening took place when I was 12 or 13 years old. I decided to attend, on my own, a piano recital in my hometown of Oxford, England. The pianist (a lady whose name I haven't so far been able to trace) included in her recital Schumann's Kinderszenen. I had never heard these charming, nostalgic and magical pieces before, or any solo piano music of Schumann for that matter. The music had an immediate and powerful impact on me. I rushed out and bought a score and immediately began learning the pieces and in fact included the set in my first full length public solo recital a year later (March 1976) alongside Liszt's B minor Sonata, Beethoven's 32 Variations in C minor, and music by a little known French composer called Alkan. Later, while still a teenager, I fell in love with Schumann's incomparable songs, beginning with Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben. My love of his music and appreciation of his art only continues to grow with the passing years.<br /><br />Sadly, Clara Schumann had to endure a further occurence of mental illness in her family after her husband's death when her son Ludwig became sick. Ludwig's tragedy is another sad untold story in the history of mental illness. It's impossible to imagine the suffering poor Ludwig had to endure, in the days when even enlightened doctors had little understanding of his illness. Ludwig Schumann spent the last 29 years of his life incarcerated against his will in the asylum in Colditz (later famous as the German POW camp in WWII), and there are no records of any family visits for the last 23 years of his life. His sister Eugenie Schumann wrote of Ludwig in 1927: "<i>The shadows closed more and more around him, and at last he became, as my mother often said in deep distress, 'buried alive'</i>". Since Robert Schumann's large family is often overlooked I have put together a slide show of photographs of Robert and Clara's seven surviving children, together with the first of Schumann's Scenes from Childhood ("<i>Of Foreign Lands and Peoples</i>") played by the wonderful and much underrated French pianist Jacqueline Blancard, who has made some lovely and intensely musical recordings of Schumann's piano music.<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="239" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/m0d74qcrsBw?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Schumann's children: A slide show of photographs of Robert and Clara Schumann and their 7 surviving children (together with "Of Foreign Lands and Peoples" from Schumann's Kinderszenen played by Jacqueline Blancard): of their 8 children, one (Emil) died in infancy, while 3 others predeceased Clara along with her husband Robert. Most tragic of all is the case of Ludwig, who, like his father, was committed to a mental asylum (the famous Colditz castle) where he was kept against his will for 29 years, dying there in 1899.</SMALL><br /><br />Finally, here is a link to an interesting article from the New York Times, January 16 1921, going into detail on the fate of Schumann's children: <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40716FF3F5E10728DDDAF0994D9405B818EF1D3">The children of Schumann</a>. The article starts off on a very sad note, trying to raise money from the readers for two of Schumann's children (Marie and Eugenie) who were, at the very end of their lives, living in desperate poverty in Europe. Though their mother, Clara Schumann, had to cope with more than her fair share of grief in her lifetime she typically once said that she may not have been the best parent for her children because of her devotion to music, her frequent concert tours, and above all her devotion to Robert and the promotion of his music. On her death-bed the very last piece she heard, at her request, played to her by her grandson Ferdinand, was Robert Schumann's Romance in F# Major, Op.28 No.2.<br /><br />The 1921 New York Times article (a PDF copy of the original New York Times page) also lists concerts of the week, one of which, on January 18th 1921 at Carnegie Hall is a piano recital by Rachmaninoff!! N.B. this article was published one year after Gershwin's Swanee had become a hit and 3 years before the premiere of the Rhapsody in Blue!<br /><br />
<iframe width="425" height="239" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XEfrkB9qdrU?rel=0?ecver=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><SMALL>Schumann's Romance Op.28 no.2, composed 1839, was the last piece that Clara Schumann ever heard, played to her on her death-bed at her request by her grandson Ferdinand. It is played here by Arthur Rubinstein (recorded 2 April 1937).</SMALL><br /><br />Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4128313350896208689.post-21630453762277599312010-10-05T06:05:00.003-07:002020-08-18T00:18:06.090-07:00In praise of Wilhelm KempffAs a music student I didn't appreciate Wilhelm Kempff. I based my opinion on just a couple of his recordings, and on my own musical prejudices at the time. Also I only heard him live once, at his very last London recital at the Royal Festival Hall, when he was clearly infirm, and his playing was marked by a continuous slowing down of the tempo and difficulty in playing. Like many music students today (if the comments on YouTube are anything to go by) I measured pianists in those days as much by their technique as by their soul. Now I am ONLY interested in their soul.<br /><br />I remember the amazing ovation the audience gave Kempff at that concert at the Festival Hall in London and didn't fully appreciate at the time that that ovation was for his life's work, and not for that concert. Most of all what I didn't hear, because my ears were closed at the time (reference Oscar Wilde's comments in his wonderful 'De Profundis' on the importance of meekness in an audience in order to be moved), and what I now hear SO CLEARLY is the deep and extremely sincere warmth and honesty of Kempff's playing. His interpretations are about as far removed from the typical virtuoso as it is possible to get, characterized by the lack of any intention to 'show off' and instead filled by just a deep, a serious, and at times humble appreciation of the beauty of the music he is playing. It's a 'quiet' approach (not literally of course), and a different universe to the 'in your face' interpretations that so easily seem to capture the musical headlines (to any historian of music that should immediately recall contemporary descriptions of Chopin's performances). For what it is worth (which is not much) Kempff was never known for his technique, and in his occasional finger slips he shares a kinship with Edwin Fischer - another wonderful pianist whose recordings I admire so much- funny that! If only music students today (and the establishments that nurture them) would realise that while audiences may forgive a wrong note they can never forgive a cold heart.<br /><br />The Bach recording below is a perfect example of Kempff's warm heart. Today, for me, he is one of the very few pianists who move me and whose music making I always look forward to hearing. Thanks to the abundance of his recordings on the internet I can appreciate his art so much more now than sadly when I was lucky enough to have sat in his last London recital counting wrong notes instead of warm hearts. That's a thought to keep me humble...<br /><br />
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<br /><br />And for those who know how particular I am about the way pianists play Chopin (or I think the correct phrase is 'murder Chopin') then they may be surprised by my putting a Chopin performance here. In my opinion most pianists suffocate Chopin with completely misguided 'rubatos' (that huge Chopin misnomer) and terrible affectations, so out of place for a composer who was above all, totally honest in his musical expression. Above all, Chopin's music needs an 'honest' interpretation, the ability to let the music speak for itself. Listen to the completely unaffected, deeply serious and moving performance Kempff gives in this 1959 live recording with conductor Karel Ancerl of the slow movement of Chopin's Piano Concerto in F minor. Perhaps you'll agree with me that here Kempff is far closer to the composer's spirit than so many so-called 'Chopin specialists'!<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CGO4SGC2eow?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CGO4SGC2eow?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object>Jack Gibbonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10602761912626174216noreply@blogger.com6