Jan DeGaetani (1933-1989)
-- from the Center for American Music Library Web page "Stephen Foster Lyrics"
With Gilbert Kalish, piano. From the Nonesuch CD Songs of America, recorded Dec. 21-23, 1987
by Ken
No, this isn't the song we "need to hear Jan sing." No. It's just the song I usually think of first when I think of her. (No, to be clear, I didn't know her. I just call her "Jan" because, well, I think she might feel less formal, more comfortable that way.) I promised, in one of several earlier attempts at writing some sort of post, that we were going to hear this "uniquely cherishable" singer in "a perfect recording," and explained later that I couldn't say exactly what I meant by "a perfect recording" -- but that if you listen to this breathtakingly beautiful performance of a song that Jan caused me to think of as astonishingly beautiful, as recorded with longtime friend and colleague (and, oh yes, excellent pianist) Gil Kalish, I invite you to tell me that this isn't a perfect recording.
"Beautiful Child of Song" comes from this CD recital, and pretty much all of these Songs of America are a heap more sophisticated than our little Stephen Foster ditty. But my goodness . . . well, you heard, right?
SO WHAT'S THE SONG WE NEED TO HEAR JAN SING?
It comes from the last recording she made, under almost unimaginably difficult circumstances, circumstances that caused her husband, the oboist Philip West (and chamber-orchestra arranger of all the Mahler and Berlioz songs on the record), to refer to this as -- as we're going to learn in a moment -- their "little miracle."
I think maybe we should listen to the song we need to hear before we hear from the producer of the record, David Starobin, because after we hear from her we may not be in any condition to hear. Or possibly that'll be a good time to hear it again.
MAHLER: "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I have lost track of the world") (arr. for chamber orchestra by Philip West)
Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Eastman Chamber Ensemble, David Effron, cond. Bridge, recorded May 17-21, 1989
NOW IS A GOOD TIME FOR US TO LEARN
MORE ABOUT THE MAKING OF THIS RECORD
The following note appears, without title or introduction, on the inside front cover of the CD booklet:
Though I have always regarded the record producer's role as purely musical, the extraordinary circumstances that surround this recording require written documentation.
Jan DeGaetani called me in the winter of 1988, asking if Bridge would be interested in recording her in Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été and ten Mahler songs, in chamber orchestra arrangements made by her husband, Philip West. We were extremely honored to be asked. The news of Jan's leukemia had already reached me, and the urgency of moving toward a rapid realization of the project was apparent. Meetings followed with Robert Freeman, the Director of the Eastman School of Music. Eastman's collaboration enabled us to schedule sessions for May of 1989.
During the ensuing months Jan required hospitalization and major surgery. In conversations with her friends and associates I was warned not to hold any high expectations that the sessions would take place. I also learned that Jan -- scores at her bedside -- maintained a burning desire to make this recording.
After six weeks of hospitalization, Jan was able finally to return home, some seven weeks before the scheduled sessions. It was at this time that her manager, Norma Hurlburt, called to tell me of Jan's first attempts at singing again, and about the task of rebuilding her physical and vocal stamina.
* * * * * * * *
I write this note some 48 hours after Jan's passing. The memory of those late spring sessions is still vivid. I will never forget Jan's courage, and the tears and exhilaration that marked those hours.
In the days before her death Jan and Phil referred to this recording as their "little miracle." That the recording took place was, perhaps, a miracle -- but of course, the real miracle has always been Jan. To the end, she sought deeper meaning and solutions, ultimately revealing to us a glimpse of the limitless potential of human endeavor.
David Starobin
September 18, 1989
WAIT, WHY DID WE NEED TO HEAR THIS SONG?
Because we're going to be listening some more to "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" as part of a follow-up to last week's post, "Hokey-smoke, it's like we're actually in Berlin (well, sort of) for Easter week," about the four-episode Easter Festival the Berlin Philharmonic live-streamed to us from its now-darkened home, the Phiharmonie, via its excellent Digital Concert Hall, scheduled for the time when the orchestra would have been playing its annual Easter Festival in Baden-Baden, if not for the current crisis in which performers all over the world are unable to perform for live audiences.
Back then I promised a follow-up where we would essentially re-create the orchestral portion of the all-Mahler program of Episode 2, which consisted of performances, mostly of individual Mahler symphonic movements drawn from the vast DCH video archive. At the time this seemed a simple matter of piecing together audio versions of the same musical morsels from the Sunday Classics archive's substantial Mahler repository.
Oh, you noticed that famous last word "seemed"? As in "this seemed [emphasis added] a simple matter of piecing together" blahblahblah. At first I just dug happily into prowling through the SC Mahler holdings, and then started pondering what new audio clips I might want to make. The more I worked at turning the seemingly straightforward task into actuality, the less clear it seemed to me how to proceed. So I just kept thinking of more audio clips to make.
But wait, you say again --
This is all well and good, at least for the sake of argument, but what does any of it have to do with "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"? Sure, it's a great song, and one of Mahler's best-known, but it wasn't heard in the Berlin EasterFest.
And right you are! No, it wasn't! The reason we were going to need to hear this haunting song is because, as the late Mahler sage Deryck Cooke put it in a liner note that appeared in the IMP CD edition of Wyn Morris's recording of the Mahler Fifth Symphony: "[T]he Adagietto [of Mahler 5] has much in common with Mahler's great song 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen' ('I am lost to the world'), which ends with the words 'I am alone, in my own heaven, in my love, in my music.' "
But wait, you say yet again --
For cripes' sake, the Adagietto of Mahler 5 wasn't heard in the EasterFest Mahler event either! Um, no. No, it wasn't. But as Deryck Cooke goes on to point out, in a fuller version of the quote we read earlier:
The third part of the symphony consists of the last two movements. First comes the famous Adagietto for strings and harp only, which is a quiet haven of peace in F major, after the strenuous activity of the D major Scherzo, and before the equally strenuous activity of the D major finale. Pervaded by the familiar romantic mood of withdrawal from the hurly-burly of life into the quietude of the inner self, not untouched with sadness, the Adagietto has much in common with Mahler's great song "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I am lost to the world"), which ends with the words "I am alone, in my own heaven, in my love, in my music."So you see, we really can't make much sense of the Rondo-Finale of Mahler 5 without first hearing the Adagietto, which flows directly into it.
IT STILL TOOK AWHLE, BUT I FINALLY REALIZED . . .
. . . that the real purpose of retracing the EasterFest Mahler program wouldn't be to "re-create" what was heard but to hear it again with enough context to help make sense of it -- in effect, to fill in some of what wasn't there.
Understand that I'm not taking issue with the EasterFest planners, who in fact provided I think they put together a stimulating and entertaining Mahler sampler, and even provided some context of their own, in the narration and with some interview clips. What's more, in the case of works that were excerpted, the complete symphonies of course are all in the Digital Concert Hall archive, and especially while music lovers can get those free 30 minutes, it's an easy enough matter to track down the complete performances, and those performances will come with interviews, probably with the conductors, to enrich the viewer's perspective with theirs, informed by the work they'd been doing preparing for and rehearsing the concert performances.
What I'm suggesting, though, is that we can take the process some additional steps further, because with Mahler, context matters hugely. From the very opening of the EasterFest Mahler program, I felt kind of antsy. Starting with the Rondo-Finale of Mahler 5, in a 2018 performance conducted by the energetic Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel (now music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), got us off to an upbeat, extroverted start. Here are a distinctly different pair of performances:
MAHLER: Symphony No. 5:But it left me feeling oddly, er, dangly. Obviously the finale of the symphony was intended to be just that: a finale, a culmination for the four movements that precede it. Still, it felt like more than that. I wondered if the performance had been in some way incomplete, and I can certainly imagine a fuller imagining of the movement.
v. Rondo-Finale: Allegro
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA, recorded November 1963
Symphonica of London, Wyn Morris, cond. IMP-Collins, recorded January 1973
And then, while continuing to make more audio clips (more clips, more clips) I stumbled across that Mahler 5 liner note of Deryck Cooke's, and it hit me: Of course the finale of Mahler 5 feels incomplete. As DC points out in his breakdown of the symphony's three-part structure, it's the first half of a structural unit that begins with the beautiful, peaceful Adagietto, which happens to be a Mahler symphonic movement that has in fact led an independent life of its own, notably as a serene elegy for beloved personages who have passed on to the other side, which is to say something like this (again, though our two performances time out pretty close, they're distinctly different: Leinsdorf, while actually a tad broader here than Morris, more buoyant and flowing; Morris darker, richer, more intense):
MAHLER: Symphony No. 5:You might want to scroll back and listen again to Jan DeGaetani sing "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" -- do you hear the connection? We will be doing this again in more fully considered form. Or, better, why don't we slip it in here, along with a pair of lovely performances using Mahler's own orchestration of the song?
iv. Adagietto. Sehr langsam (Very slow)
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA, recorded November 1963
Symphonica of London, Wyn Morris, cond. IMP-Collins, recorded January 1973
MAHLER: "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"But ripping the Adagietto out of context misrepresents it just as it happens with the Rondo-Finale. The Adagietto is meant, first, to carry the listener forward from the symphony's single-movement Part II, the Scherzo, its longest single movement, not to mention the two movements that precede it, and then to flow directly into the finale. For me there's no right or wrong here; I think they're both legitimate realizations of the content of the music. (I might add that the Morris performance, so rich and intense, is the outlier among performances of Mahler 5, and I really like it!)
("I have lost track of the world")
Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, piano. From the Nonesuch CD Songs of America, recorded Dec. 21-23, 1987
Yvonne Minton, mezzo-soprano; London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded May 1979
José van Dam, bass-baritone; Orchestre National de Lille, Jean-Claude Casadesus, cond. Forlane, recorded April 1986
This seems an appropriate place, before we hear the whole of "Part III" of the symphony, to have the benefit of Deryck Cooke's full comments (in this brief liner note) on this section:
The third part of the symphony consists of the last two movements. First comes the famous Adagietto for strings and harp only, which is a quiet haven of peace in F major, after the strenuous activity of the D major Scherzo, and before the equally strenuous activity of the D major finale. Pervaded by the familiar romantic mood of withdrawal from the hurly-burly of life into the quietude of the inner self, not untouched with sadness, the Adagietto has much in common with Mahler's great song "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I am lost to the world"), which ends with the words "I am alone, in my own heaven, in my love, in my music."Are you getting the feeling that just going back from the Rondo-Finale to the Adagietto isn't going back far enough? That really we need to go back, not just to "Part II," the third-movement Scherzo, but clear back to "Part I," the first two movements? Well, yes, we really do. The serenity and triumph we experience in the last two movements is hard won, marking an almost 180-degree turnabout from the state of mind of the early ones. We can't pursue that today, but I think the symphony's finale will make a whole lot more sense and provide a whole lot more musical satisfaction if we at least hear it as part of the complete Part III.
The finale, following straight away, opens magically with a single horn note, like a call to action, answered by a quiet echo on the violins which is in fact a repetition of their last, long-drawn, peaceful note in the Adagietto; then various fragments of folk-like tune are given out by woodwind instruments and horn, providing much of the main material of the movement. The mood is again joyful and exuberant, but this finale, like that in Beethoven's Eroica -- brings the symphony to a vital culmination which is not concerned so much with the expression of specific emotions as with the act of artistic creation, of building up a masterly symphonic structure. It thus follows naturally on the Adagietto, the haven of recuperation from life's turmoil, and this is further emphasised by the use of an actual theme from that movement, in speeded-up form, as the second subject.
Mahler's structure is a large one, combining sonata and rondo, and including a fugal exposition as part of the opening group of themes. The final climax, before the symphony races away to its wildly joyous conclusion, is a full and triumphant statement of the big brass choral conception introduced so fleetingly towards the end of Part I [i.e., the symphony's opening "Funeral March" and "Stormily turbulent" second movement]: this cross-reference between the most anguished movement in the first part of the symphony and the most joyful one in the final part is the main crossbeam which holds together the dangerously disparate elements of the darkness and light at either end of the work.
MAHLER: Symphony No. 5:
iv. Adagietto. Sehr langsam (Very slow)
v. Rondo-Finale: Allegro
[Rondo-Finale at 8:29] Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA, recorded November 1963
[Rondo-Finale at 8:13] Symphonica of London, Wyn Morris, cond. IMP-Collins, recorded January 1973
THIS IS A QUICK VERSION OF THE PROJECT
I'VE GOT IN MIND FOR US TO UNDERTAKE
And that, dear reader (if by chance there's anybody out there) is what we're going to do, I think. Probably we're going to want to start by doing a quick recap of the music that was heard, again hearing some obviously contrasting performances, and sketching how we mean to fill out their contexts, which we'll do with a broader selection of performances and some added goodies.
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