"It's a gift" (cont.): Intermezzo

We finally listen again to those four Brahms slow movements and are led in surprising directions

As surprising as the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana, familiar in shortened form from Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980)

Here's the edited Intermezzo over a pastiche of the film


And here are some musical thoughts from Mr. Scorsese

I want to say a word about the Mascagni music in the film. We would hear it all the time on the radio when I was growing up, and I'm not sure that we ever even identified it with any particular composer -- it was simply there, a part of our lives. Somehow, I felt that the pieces we used in Raging Bull -- from Cavalleria rusticana, Silvano and Guglielmo Ratcliff -- help to express the poignance of some of Jake [La Motta]'s existence, the desire for redemption buried beneath so many layers of violence and suffering.

-- from the terrific booklet essay he wrote for the two-CD Raging
Bull soundtrack album finally issued 25 years after the film

From Raging Bull: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, released by Capitol Records in 2005:

MASCAGNI: Cavalleria rusticana (1890): Intermezzo

MASCAGNI: Guglielmo Ratcliff (1894): Intermezzo

MASCAGNI: Silvano (1895): Barcarolle

Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale, Bologna (aka "Orchestra of Bologna Municop Thetra"), Arturo Basile, cond. Licensed from RCA Italiana

[Album producer Robbie Robertson became a fixture in the Scorsese brain trust during their collaboration on The Last Waltz (1976), the film that documented the final concert of The Band, for which Robbie tells us Scorsese was "my first and only choice" as director after he watched Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and saw the way he'd used music there. Scorsese in turn turned to Robbie to produce the music for Raging Bull, which should have included a soundtrack recording when the film was released in 1980, but the necessary rights clearances hadn't been obtained. Robbie was still on the job producing the soundtrack recording when it finally happened, in 2005. In his terrific CD booklet essay he tells us that the tape with the Basile Mascagni performances which was finally supplied by RCA Italiana required major technical massaging.]

by Ken

You're probably wondering why we're suddenly intermezzo-happy, and we'll get to that, and we'll even consult some sources to help us pin down what exactly an intermezzo is. But before we proceed, we should probably go back to the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana, which we've so far heard only in shortened form, lopping off the opening minute based on the sublime "Regina coeli" chorus, thereby getting us closer to the slashing entry of the big tune, a moment that, by the way, is distinguishe in the scored only by the somewhat enigmatic marking "raseggiando."

I don't think we want to think of the piece as some filler stuff that leads us at long last to the big tune. So probably we should fix this, which we can do easily enough.


HERE'S THE FULL CAVALLERIA INTERMEZZO

It was no accident that for Raging Bull Mr. Scorsese settled on the Bolognese performances we've heard. Both he and Robbie Robertson talk in their soundtrack CD essays about the qualities he was looking for. Robbie R. explains: "There are numerous grand versions of the Pietro Mascagni pieces that are used in Raging Bull -- some by major conductors and renowned symphony orchestras. But Marty was partial to this version by an orchestra from Bologna, Italy. It cries out in an emotionally uninhibited, straight-from-the-street kind-of-way."

Mr. S., by the way, who writes at length and in remarkable depth both about the world he was trying to re-create in Raging Bull and the way music fit into that, and specifically notes the Sicilian-accented sounds of the streets where he grew up among. Mascagni wasn't Sicilian, of course, but Cavalleria sure is, and I think we can easily hear in the Basile performances of all three Mascagni selections the Sicilian throb Mr. S. was listening for.

For our first performance I couldn't resist going in the near-opposite direction. Herbert von Karajan's 1965 La Scala Cav-Pag recording has been controversial from the get-go for the gorgeousness of the orchestral playing, which is often considered too refined for these raw verismo of these operas. I get it, and certainly wouldn't want this to be the only way I get to hear these pieces. But my goodness, every time I return to these performances I'm reravished by the magnificently sculpted playing Karajan drew from Italy's best orchestra.

I have, however, supplemented it with the more "street"-sounding Erede-Maggio Musicale performance, from what by sheerest chance happens to have been my first Cav recording and is probably still my favorite -- it doesn't hurt that its trio of principals (Jussi Bjoerling, Renata Tebaldi, Ettore Bastianini) hasn't been matched. Finally, we hear the composer himself conducting, from the complete Cav he recorded a half-century after he wrote the thing, with such audaciously broad tempos that it often used to be taken as an article of faith that the 76-year-old composer had simply lost it. It took me awhile to warm to the performance, but I came to love it, and in the course of the decades a growing number of conductors in "revisionist" mode have followed in his path.

MASCAGNI: Cavalleria rusticana: Intermezzo


Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala (Milan), Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded at La Scala, Sept.-Oct. 1965

Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Alberto Erede, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded in the Teatro Comunale, Florence, Sept. 1-7, 1957

Members of the Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala (Milan), Pietro Mascagni, cond. EMI, recorded April 1940

As our intermezzo inquiry continues we'll be hearing a good deal more of the Cav Intermezzo, and also the Intermezzo from its usual double-bill-mate, Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci, but that'll have to wait for a follow-up post.


SO WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT INTERMEZZOS?

It all goes back to a post from last month: "It's a gift: This week we have a Brahms 'Rückblick' ('Lookback') -- yup, still Brahms, but this time all (or mostly) in slow(er) motion" (June 20), wherein we listened to "four Brahms slow movements -- two we've heard before and two we haven't."

I've been meaning ever since to re-present those four movements, this time --

(a) properly identifying them and explaining why we're listening to this particular group of movements, and also --

(b) asking the musical question:

DOES ONE OF THE FOUR STAND OUT FROM THE REST?

This time, before we listen, I'll explain this grouping of four. Some of you were on hand when we heard, in reverse chronological order, the gorgeous slow movements of the Brahms First Symphony (1862-77, first performed in 1876) and First Piano Concerto (1856-58, first performed in 1859), the link being that the concerto was a mid-course repurposing of a work-in-progress, itself already repurposed from an in-progress sonata for two pianos, that the 20-something Brahms thought would establish him as the rising composer of his time -- something he thought would require the production of a symphony, something that, as we've just noted, wouldn't happen for him for another two decades.

So what's the link to the F minor Piano Sonata, Op. 5? We did some rooting around among Brahms's creative activities in the time that led up to the composition of the First Piano Concerto, and the work we kept stumbling into was none other than the F minor Piano Sonata, the last of three piano sonatas he composed in the short space of 1852-53, all of which he thought highly enough to allow to be published. In pretty much everyone's estimation, the F minor Sonata was Brahms's breakthrough composition: his first large-scale masterpiece. And it's of interest to us now that the two slow movements, the Andante espressivo and the Intermezzo, were the first two movements composed, both apparently written before the composer set out on the life-changing travels he undertook in 1853.

We're going to be coming back to this intriguing point in Brahms's creative evolution. But I think this is as much as we need to know in order to proceed with --

OUR REHEARING OF OUR FOUR BRAHMS SLOW MOVEMENTS

BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1876):
ii. Andante sostenuto


Staatskapelle Dresden, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Eurodisc, recorded in the Lukaskirche, 1971

New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec, recorded live in Avery Fisher Hall, May 1994

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Oct. 7, 1966

BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 (1858):
ii. Adagio


Clifford Curzon, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Decca, recorded in Kingsway Hall, May 1962

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA, recorded in Symphony Hall, Apr. 21-22, 1964

BRAHMS: Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5 (1853):
ii. Andante espressivo


Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, December 17, 1959

Clifford Curzon, piano. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, December 1962

iv. Intermezzo (Rückblick [Lookback]): Andante molto


Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, December 17, 1959

Clifford Curzon, piano. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, December 1962


YOU'VE NO DOUBT GUESSED WHICH MOVEMENT
I LISTENED TO WITH PARTICULAR FASCINATION

It is of course, the littlest and seemingly least consequential of them: the Intermezzo of the F minor Piano Sonata. Even in context, it's the easiest of the sonata's five movements to listen through or around.

You've noticed, by the way, that business of "the sonata's five movements." Brahms's first two piano sonatas, which he published in reverse order as his Opp. 1 and 2 (for quite deliverate reasons, as we'll see when we finally zerio in on the three piano sonatas), were pretty conventional four-movement affairs, and yet even in the early stages of the composition of Op. 5, Brahms seems to have had at least a five-movement sonata in mind. The Intermezzo, after all, was by definition thought of as an "in-between" movement, and surely wasn't imagined to immediately follow the Andante espressivo. It's hard to imagine that Brahms could have thought of it as anything but an "extra" movement, and yet to have been created at this early stage of composition suggests that he didn't think of it as an incidental slip-in.

At this point you might want to take another listen to the remarkably different but equally wonderful performances of the Intermezzo from Op. 5 by Arthur Rubinstein and Clifford Curzon. On second thought, why don't we rehear the Rubinstein and Curzon performances and add to them a couple more. Don't they almost sound like four different pieces?

BRAHMS: Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5:
iv. Intermezzo (Rückblick [Lookback]): Andante molto

This isn't the start, it's the whole of the Intermezzo from Op. 5.

Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, December 17, 1959

Clifford Curzon, piano. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, December 1962

Julius Katchen, piano. Decca, recorded in Decca Studio No. 3, West Hampstead, London, 1964

Anatol Ugorski, piano. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin, June 1995


CLEARLY OUR NEXT STEP IS TO CONTINUE PURSUING
THIS QUESTION OF WHAT EXACTLY AN INTERMEZZO IS

For which we're going to consult some authorities to see if they can help us nail this down.

This will involve us in hearing a variety of intermezzos, and seeing if we can hear much in common among them beyond their sheer "inter"-ness. As noted above, this will also involve us in more hearing of the Cavalleria rusticana Intermezzo from Mascagni's and also a generous sampling of the Intermezzo from I Pagliacci. While these both significantly postdate Brahms's Op. 5, it may be worth noting that they were both written and performed in Brahms's lifetime (1833-1897) -- Cav in 1890, Pag in 1892.

I'm actually hopeful of getting this next part posted in the next day or two, and the part that follows it within another day or two.

UPDATE: Here's what's actually happening

As of late Wednesday afternoon, "'It's a gift' (cont.): A bit more about operatic intermezzos, and a lot more about 19th-century-style instrumental ones" is posted. We don't get to Cav 'n' Pag this time out, but we sample the intermezzos of Richard Strauss's Intermezzo in addition to pondering what Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms might have thought of the intermezzo as a compositional form.

#