Seiji Ozawa (1935-2024)Part 2a: Thinking big musically doesn't preclude making every moment fully alive

MAHLER: Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children):
No. 4, "Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgeganen!"
("Often I think they've only gone out!")

Jessye Norman, soprano; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded live in the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, December 1988

MAHLER: Symphony No. 8 in E-flat:
Part I, Allegro impetuoso, "Veni, Creator Spiritus"

Faye Robinson, Judith Blegen (and Deborah Sasson?), sopranos; Florence Quivar, mezzo-sorano; Lorna Myers, contralto; Kenneth Riegel, tenor; Benjamin Luxon, baritone; Gwynne Howell, bass; Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded live in Symphony Hall, Oct.-Nov. 1980
[SOPRANO NOTE: A third soprano is called for in Part II but not Part I. However, I can't swear that there's been no redistribution of parts in Part I.]

by Ken

If you've visited the previous installment of this series, "Seiji Ozawa (1935-2024), Part 1: Being the preface to a probably-inappropriately-impressionistic (at least at the start) musical remembrance" (Feb. 11), you know that this isn't where we expected to be beginning Part 2. We had, by gosh, a formal agenda! And we'll be coming back to it, though I'm afraid not completing it in this installment.

That plan changed, or at least got rejiggered, as I pondered the possibilities suggested by the presence, among the large volume of Ozawa holdings in the SC Archive, of the complete Part I of his BSO recording of Mahler's grandest symphony, the Eighth, his setting of the old Latin hymn "Veni, Creator Spiritus" -- one of his most extraordinary, and extraordinarily dense, musical concoctions, unlike anything else I know in the musical literature, definitely including Part II of the Eighth, his cherry-picked rendering of Part II of Goethe's Faust, which is as discursive and, er, spaced out (in more ways than one) as Part I is concentrated and compact.

Then, since the content list for this musical talking point already included Nos. 3 and 4 of the Mahler Kindertotenlieder (settings of, altogether, five of Friedrich Rückert's poems on the death of children) in the powerful live recording Seiji and the BSO made with Jessye Norman on tour in Frankfurt, I slipping one of them in here, partly to hear Jessye and Seiji -- whom we've heard collaborating so splendidly in Gurre-Lieder Part I -- together again, but more to illustrate both Mahler's and Seiji's complete comfort with the formally simple and wildly complex musical structures.


WE'll RETURN TO THE "PART 2 TALKING POINTS," BUT FOR READERS GRIPPED BY "VENI, CREATOR SPIRITUS" MANIA --

Gundula Janowitz had a way offooling us with music it didn't seem she ought to be singing

SUNDAY BONUS UPDATE: I thought we might add one more of Tove's Gurre songs -- see below. -- Ken

THIS, CLEARLY, IS SOMETHING G.J. WAS BORN TO SING --

"Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebet, und dass er erscheint am letzten Tage dieser Erd'. Wenn Verwesung mir gleich drohet, wird dies mein Auge Gott doch sehn." -- Hib 19:25-26
"Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebet: Denn Christ ist erstanden von dem Tod, der Erstling derer, die schlafen." -- I Korinther 15:20

"I know that my redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And tho' worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." -- Job 19:25-26
"I know that my Redeemer liveth: For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep." -- I Corinthians 15:20

Gundula Janowitz, soprano; Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, cond. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, June 12-28, 1964

by Ken

Further to last week's post ("Before we take our closer look at Gurre-Lieder, I want to think about two performers who make one performance a special case"): Yes, I suppose the above is essentially the first aural image that comes to mind when I think of Gundula Janowitz: purity of expression in a lyric soprano of narrow tonal range but almost unearthly beauty.

For those unfamiliar with Karl Richter's German-language Messiah recording, which DG emphatically did not put out on its "authentic" early-music "Archiv" label, I've always loved it. I know Richter is regarded almost as an enemy by latter-day Pure-Authentic Baroquians. For me, however, what he was was a great musician, whose greatness not surprisingly reached its peak, just as the Baroque era did, in the music of Bach and Handel. Richter made a later Messiah recording in English -- in London, in 1972 -- which DG didn't put out on Archiv either. I like that version too, but Richter's Messias with his Munich Bach cohorts remains special for me, not least for its solo quartet, which we might think of as simply a DG "house cast": in addition to Janowitz, Marga Höffgen, Ernst Häfliger, and Franz Crass. But in the grand scheme of things, goodness, what a lineup!

If the Janowitz of "Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebet" might be thought of as her "essential" vocal self, we already heard it represented in last week's short version of the rapt moment she made -- in a live Vienna State Opera performance, remember -- of the minuscule but highly exposed (to put it mildly; it's unaccompanied!) role of the Young Shepherd in Act I of Wagner's Tannhäuser, at the moment of the scene change from the fleshly pleasures of the Venusberg to the late-spring radiance of the Wartburg valley.

It just so happens that I also made a clip of a fuller version of this prime Wagnerian scene-change coup de théâtre -- which will now encompass the entire role of the Shepherd.

Before we take our closer look at Gurre-Lieder, I want to think about two performers who make one performance a special case

The ruins of Gurre Castle (as of 2007), in the far northeast of Denmark (on the map Gurre looks like a stone's throw across the water from Sweden) where King Valdemar I is supposed to have tucked away his beautiful, dearly beloved mistress Tove -- until, well, thereupon hangs a tale.

Which we'll get to. Just maybe not right away.

So it begins --


Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded live in the Kongress-Saal of the Deutsches Museum, Munich, March 9-12, 1965

Staatskapelle Dresden, Giuseppe Sinopoli, cond. Teldec, recorded live in the Semper Oper, August 1995

Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton, cond. Live performance from Grieg Hall, in the Bergen International Festival, June 4, 2008

Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, in the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 10, 1969

In time, these Gurre-Lieder, or Songs of Gurre, come to Tove's declaration, "Nun sag' ich dir zum ersten Mal, 'König Volmer, ich liebe dich'" (replaying the performances we've already heard) --

Now I say to you for the first time, "King Volmer, I love you."
Now I kiss you for the first time, and fling my arms around you.
And if you were to say I had earlier said it
and ever given you my kiss,
then I say, "The king is a fool,
who recalls vague rubbish."
And if you say, "Indeed I am such a fool,"
then I'll say, "The king is right."
But if you say, "No, I'm not that,"
Then I'll say, "The king is bad."
For I have kissed all my roses to death,
all the while I was thinking of you.

Gundula Janowitz (s), Tove; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, in the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 10, 1969

Jessye Norman (s), Tove; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded live in Symphony Hall, April 1979

by Ken

Believe it or not, we're making progress, even if it's of a kind of sidewise sort. I remember there was a plan to illustrate the special qualities I hear in the conducting of Josef Krips (1902-1974), which at the time seemed to require nothing more than plucking an abundance of for-instances out of the Sunday Classics Archive. I'm not so good at just-plucking-out, however, and as soon as I started, the project began to grow and shift, especially when I found myself taking a better listen than I have before to a performance I've owned for ages: Krips's 1969 Vienna Festival rendering of Arnold Schoenberg's monumental cantata-oratorio-or-whatever (I'm not aware of a term that begins to cover it), Gurre-Lieder.

At that point it seemed necessary to pause the Krips quick-tour and spend a jot of time with Gurre-Lieder, one of the most arresting and astonishing musical creations I know. No sooner had I set out on that tack (well, maybe many, many hours of toil after I set out on that tack), I realized that before we got to that, it might be useful for me to explain why that particular performance exerted such a fascination for me. Which meant a closer look at conductor Krips and the singer who incarnated King Waldemar's inamorata Tove, which is to say the soprano Gundula Janowitz (born 1937).

Again, I first thought this could be accomplished easily and painlessly by a simple raid of the archives. And probably it could have. But again, my mind doesn't work that way. Soon enough I was back at work crafting whole new sets of audio clips and puzzling out a navigable path through them. And in just a moment we're going to partake of a teasing taste of G.J.


BUT FIRST, BACK TO THE BEGINNING -- OF GURRE-LIEDER

After-post: As promised, here's a proper quick-sampling of the three Brahms piano quartets

TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: New! New! New! Now comes with a box at the end: "THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"

TUESDAY NIGHT UPDATE: Now that I can hear the audio clips in place, I've added some notes on the First Quartet performances

One-stop shopping: I love the Borodin Trio, and I really love this set, so much so that we're going to dip into it twice. For openers, here's the Borodin playing the dramatic first-movement Allegro of the Brahms First Piano Quartet (in G minor, Op. 25):


Borodin Trio (Luba Edlina, piano; Rostislav Dubinsky, violin; Yuli Turovsky, cello); with Rivka Golani, viola. Chandos, recorded in Layer Marney Church, Colchester (England), July 14-16, 1988

by Ken

In Sunday's post, "Even if Brahms's new work-in-progress was going to be a piano concerto rather than a symphony, he still had to create forms for it," you may recall that I flirted with the idea of expanding my tiny-clip offering of the opening of the Brahms A major Piano Quartet, Op. 26, to include a corresponding sliver of the opening of its vastly different fraternal twin, the G minor Piano Quartet, Op. 25. For once, though, I exercised restraint, and remained steadfast even when I was tempted to shoehorn in additional mini-clips as an update.

The idea wouldn't quit me, however. And since the subject we're exploring is the way Brahms, despite his habitual use of existing musical forms, tended to reinvent them pretty much every time he worked in them, it quickly occurred to me that it would actually be easier -- far less labor-intensive -- to plunk in whole movements rather than do the grindingly picky work of making mini-clips, and to do so for all three of the piano quartets.


HERE AT SUNDAY CLASSICS WE'VE PONDERED THE
BRAHMS PIANO QUARTETS ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS

Sunday Classics' Great Moments in Music History: Arnold Schoenberg, the movie mogul, and the mogul's "boys"

Schoenberg, seen in a 1910 self-portrait
(Yes, he was also a painter)

by Ken

Or we could call this installment of Great Moments in Music History: "The Day Arnold Schoenberg's career as a Hollywood film composer began and ended."

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading the second part of Arthur Rubinstein's autobiography, My Many Years. And as I also mentioned, Rubinstein seems to have known just about everybody in the world of the arts (not just music) through most of his career.

In October 1939, with Poland already fallen to the German Blitzkrieg that set off World War II, placing Rubinstein, his wife Nela and their children (just two at the time) in a dangerous status as Polish nationals, and with France already taking on an alarmingly anti-Semitic tone, the family advanced by several weeks their planned departure from their home in Paris for a U.S. tour. At Nela's urging, Arthur pulled strings to secure very limited space aboard a U.S. ship sent as "a rescue boat for their citizens in France."

In the course of their New World stay, which came to include a South American tour and then one in Mexico, the Rubinsteins watched with mounting horror as events in Europe unfolded and they knew that returning home would be impossible for at least the duration of the war. The family wound up settling in Los Angeles, where of course large numbers of European émigrés had found their way, many of whom were already acquaintances if not friends of the pianist.

Rubinstein takes note of the plight of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had been living in L.A. since 1934, for both political and health reasons. Schoenberg, Rubinstein notes, "gave us musicians quite a lot of trouble."

He was left without money after his dismissal from the University of California, simply because of his age. I joined a group of musicians who decided to help him. The best way was to obtain a commission for him to compose music for films. We were lucky to persuade one of the moguls of the cinema to receive the great composer and offer him a contract. Schönberg was not only willing to do it but became interested in the project. It became common knowledge how the interview ran:

The mogul says: "Professor, I have a film right up your alley. You will write the best music of your life for it."

Schoenberg says quietly: "I would like to settle the financial question first. I need fifty thousand dollars for my music."

The mogul raises both hands in the air. "But, Professor, we've never paid more than ten thousand to our composers.,"

Schoenberg protests: "It takes me a year to composer my music and this is the least I can ask for it."

"But, Professor," laughs the mogul, "why a year? You can write a few tunes and my boys will arrange it for the orchestras and they will do whatever you want."

"Your sons?" asks Schönberg.

"No. We have, at the studio, fellows who finish up the music overnight, arrange it for orchestra or other things. They know what they're doing."

The two men separated without understanding each other. His worried friends were of the opinion that he should have accepted the ten thousand, but the master made this sublime reply: "I cannot commit suicide by making a living on ten thousand dollars."

The moment I dearly wish there'd been cameras there to record is the one when, at least in Schoenberg's mind, the mogul's sons enter the discussion. I'm having more fun than I can tell imagining the "professor" asking, "Your sons?"


HERE ARE SOME TUNES SCHOENBERG COULD
HAVE TURNED OVER TO THE MOGUL'S "BOYS"


The first of the Two Piano Pieces, Op. 33 (1938-41)


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

Uh, dunno, not sure. Most of the ideas percolating would require quantities of either work or thinking (or, heaven help me, both), commodities that have been in short supply for me for, oh, I dunno, the last couple of decades?

But I'm thinking maybe we could ease into a closer look at the poor comédienne Nedda in Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci (which we've looked at parts of pretty closely, notably the baritone's remarkable Prologue, in the February 2010 post "The Prolgoue to Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci entreats, 'Consider our souls' "), the victim half of one of the theatrical literature's more explosive relationships. It's her successive scenes with the opera's two baritone characters which I want to get to, and that's one of those deals that's going to require abundant work and thought. Still, we might be able to ease into it, maybe by setting up the relationship with her theater-troupe director husband, Canio.

Or . . . my friend Conrad L. Osborne has latterly published a piece in Opera News about Enrico Caruso, unlike anything you've read about Caruso, even if you've read everything there is, or was, to read about Caruso. I had this idea that we could poach some of that and interlace it with the actual recordings he cites as a sort of value-added enrichment. This takes care of a lot of the "thinking" problem, since C.L.O. has done most of that (all I'd have to figure out is how to poach it), but doing the audio clips and assembling texts and whatnot . . . I get tired just thinking about it. Meanwhile, as of now you can still read the piece -- which combines meaningful description of how that amazing voice worked and how its workings varied over time with a powerfully personal appreciation of the artistry that technique was put at the service of -- for free on the magazine's website.

UPDATE: It's Pagliacci!

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