Preview: Down in the basement with Beethoven

In a state of grace, Claudio Arrau plays the first part of the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, with Riccardo Muti conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. (The rest of the movement is here.)

by Ken

Last night I related how Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto intruded on my musical consciousness, thanks to the inclusion of the concluding Rondo on RCA's Arthur Rubinstein compilation LP Heart of the Piano Concerto. It was by far my favorite of the six movements from favorite concertos featured. (One of these weeks we'll come back to the six concertos that were included.)

Today it's Beethoven's Fourth Concerto. How it happened that I hadn't been exposed to the Fourth Concerto despite my already-formed attachment to at least the Rondo of the Third Concerto, is a silly story for another time. It had to do with endlessly agonizingly weighing the economics of RCA's Rubinstein-Krips Beethoven concerto cycle on five LPs vs. Epic's Fleisher-Szell and London's Backhaus-Schmidt-Isserstedt ones on four, and American Decca's Kempff-van Kempen one in mono but on only three! I was paralyzed.


SIT BACK, FOLKS, IT'S TIME FOR AN ANCIENT FAMILY STORY

Preview: Beethoven and the "heart of the piano concerto"

Krystian Zimerman performs the first half of the Rondo finale of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. (The rest of the movement is here.)

by Ken

Before I began collecting classical records, the family LP collection included a handful (five that I recall), one of which was an RCA compilation called Heart of the Piano Concerto, consisting of single movements from Arthur Rubinstein's catalog recordings of six favorite piano concertos. I was especially fond of the side that, as I recall, ended with AR's biting, ebullient performance of the Rondo finale of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto.

Eventually I got to know and love the whole Third Concerto -- and its four companions -- in a way that's special even among Beethoven's output. Tomorrow night I'll recall my similarly idiosyncratic introduction to the Fourth Concerto, in preparation for some notes Sunday on the Beethoven piano concertos, including hearing Nos. 3 and 4 complete (in a specially concocted "all-Rubinstein" No. 3, an "all-Schnabel" No. 4, and "all-star" performances of both), and we'll celebrate the often-orphaned sixth family member, the wacky and wonderful Choral Fantasy for piano, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra (with not one, not two, but three recordings by the performer who for so long breathed so much life into it).


FOR NOW, HERE'S THAT RUBINSTEIN RECORDING OF THE
RONDO OF THE THIRD CONCERTO I LISTENED TO SO OFTEN

BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37:
iii. Rondo: Allegro


Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Symphony of the Air, Josef Krips, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded December 1956

In Verdi's "Don Carlos," all paths lead back to the tomb of Charles V

The scene at the tomb of the Emperor Charles V, where Prince Carlos, the emperor's grandson, will shortly come seeking "peace and forgetfulness" (as we'll hear in a while), opens the four-act version of Don Carlos performed by Riccardo Muti at La Scala in December 1992. The monk who will so unnervingly remind Carlos of his grandfather is bass Andrea Silvestrelli.

"At the monastery of San Yuste, where my grandfather
Charles V ended his life, tired of his grandeur,
I seek in vain peace and forgetfulness of the past.
Of the one who was stolen from me
the image wanders with me into this icy cloister."

-- Don Carlos, at his grandfather's tomb, in Verdi's Don Carlos

by Ken

As I mentioned in Friday night's preview focusing on Verdi's Don Carlos, the scene I really want to get at is the first scene in the cloister of the monastery at San Yuste, before the tomb of Emperor Charles V. (Last night, you'll recall, we looked back to Verdi's much earlier opera Ernani to see the young King Carlos undergo a remarkable transformation at the time of his election as Holy Roman Emperor.) It's Act II, Scene 1 in the opera's original five-act version, but when Verdi grudgingly created a more practical four-act version, by cutting the prologue-like Act I, it became the opera's opening scene. And it makes not just an unusual but a singularly powerful opening scene -- there's nothing quite like it. (There's something with a more than casual resemblance, though. I'm afraid we have much too much to do today, but we'll come back to it.)

To refresh your memory, let's reset the scene. It begins with the scene you get by combining our mystery excerpts "E" and "B" from Frida:, a brief orchestral prelude, hushed and mysterious, dominated by the horns, followed by a sepulchral chorus of monks -- also dominated by the horns -- whom we might expect to be

Scene: The tomb of Charles V in the monastery of San Yuste. A choir of monks is praying in the offstage chapel. Onstage, a kneeling monk prays before the tomb.

MONKS: Charles, the supreme emperor,
is no longer more than mute dust.
At the feet of his heavenly maker
his haughty soul now trembles.
A MONK: He wanted to rule over the world,
forgetting the one who in the sky
guides the stars on their faithful path.
His pride was immense;
his error was profound.
MONKS: Charles, the supreme emperor &c.
A MONK: Great is God alone, and if he wills it
he makes heaven and earth tremble.
Ah! Merciful God,
compassionate to the sinner,
you will grant
that peace and pardon
descend on him from heaven.
MONKS: Let your wrath not fall,
not fall on his soul.
ALL: Great is God alone.
He alone is great.

José van Dam (bs-b), the Monk; Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded Sept. 15-20, 1978


AT THIS POINT, YOUNG PRINCE CARLOS ENTERS

Gluck confronts the basic life principle that when you're dead, you're dead

And one last time: We hear Marilyn Horne sing "Divinités du Styx" from Gluck's Alceste again, in a performance I'd guess is about 20 years later than the early recording we heard in our Friday and Saturday previews. Some YouTube commenters natter about the downward transposition, apparently unaware that in Gluck's time it would have been done without hesitation. (The conductor, by the way, is Horne's longtime accompanist Martin Katz.)

"It would be frightful if the dead came back."

-- King Herod, in Richard Strauss's Salome
(text adapted from Oscar Wilde's play)

by Ken

We left Alceste last night more or less knocking at the gates of Hell, bound to trade her life for that of her husband, Admète, king of Thessaly.

Is it just a coincidence that two of Christoph Willibald von Gluck's three Vienna "reform" operas, Alceste and Orfeo ed Euridice, chronicled the two most famous breeches in Greek legend of the basic principle that once you're dead, you're dead? As noted, this principle was especially dear to King Herod, no doubt because he had personally moved so many people from the "not dead" to "dead" column.

from Richard Strauss's Salome:

JOCHANAAN (JOHN THE BAPTIST) [from the cistern in which he is imprisoned]: See, the day is at hand, the day of the Lord, and I hear in the mountains the footsteps of Him who will be the Redeemer of the World.
HEROD: What is that supposed to mean, the Redeemer of the World?
1st NAZARENE: The Messiah has come.
1st JEW [of Herod's five court Jews]: The Messiah has not come.
1st NAZARENE: He has come, and everywhere he is working miracles. At a wedding in Galilee he changed water into wine. He healed two lepers of Capernaum . . .
2nd NAZARENE: By simply touching them.
1st NAZARENE: He has also cured the blind. He has been seen on a mountain in conversation with angels.
HERODIAS: Oho! I don't believe in miracles. I have seen too many.
1st NAZARENE: The daughter of Jairus -- he awakened her from the dead.
HEROD: What? He awakens the dead?
1st and 2nd NAZARENES: Yes indeed, he awakens the dead.
HEROD: I forbid him to do that! It would be frightful if the dead came back. Where is the man at the moment?
1st NAZARENE: Sir, he is everywhere, but it's hard to find him.
HEROD: The man must be found.
2nd NAZARENE: It's said that he's in Samaria.
1st NAZARENE: He left Samaria a couple of days ago. I believe he's in the neighborhood of Jerusalem.
HEROD: Just listen: I forbid him to awaken the dead. It would be frightful if the dead came back.
VOICE OF JOCHANAAN: O, about this wanton woman, the daughter of Babylon, thus says the Lord our God . . .
HERODIAS: Order him to be quiet.


Bryn Terfel (b), Jochanaan (John the Baptist); Kenneth Riegel (t), Herod; Peter Rose (bs), 1st Nazarene; Uwe Peper (t), 1st Jew; Hanna Schwarz (ms), Herodias; Martin Gantner (b), 2nd Nazarene; Vienna Philharmonic, Christoph von Dohnányi, cond. Decca, recorded Apr. 11-18, 1994

I never knew I had any special relationship with the opening chorus of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice until I saw it trashed. A friend had invited me to the last New York City Opera production, in which the chorus was banished to the orchestra pit, leaving the job of trying to console Orfeo on the unimaginable and inconsolable loss of his adored wife Euridice to a bunch of dancers flitting mutely around the stage.

I think maybe it sneaked up on me, because one of life's inevitabilities is that you grow older, you more often find yourself in this position -- trying to provide some sort of consolation to people close to you who are grieving, when you have no consolation to offer, only sympathy and the knowledge that you're there for them. None of that helps, of course, at least with the grief, but the psyche has a separate chamber where those expressions of sympathy and communality are stored up for the time when they can be drawn on for the necessary psychical reconstruction project.

And here in this infuriatingly pretentious and misbegotten production, listening to the hidden-away chorus do the heavy lifting in this scene, I suddenly grasped the Gluck had been through this territory, charting a path for those of us destined to follow. The scene, I suddenly understood, is about two impossibilities: the impossibility of Orfeo dealing with his grief, and the impossibility of his friends, feeling the loss of Eurdice intensely personally themselves, and feeling so much of Orfeo's pain, to reach across that barrier of loss.

Well, this hack director had certainly made it literally impossible for the chorus to reach out to Orfeo. Unfortunately, because he apparently doesn't know much about human beings, he had cut Orfeo's friends off in the one way they're not separated from him: physical closeness. Anyway, here are some distinctly different-sounding versions of the opening of the scene:

GLUCK: Orphée et Eurydice: Act I, "Ah! Dans ce bois tranquille"

The translation is of the French version. (The Italian is similar.)

ORPHÉE periodically punctuates the chorus with cries of "Eurydice!"

NYMPHS AND SHEPHERDS: Ah, in this tranquil and somber wood,
Eurydice, if your spirit hears us,
be moved by our alarms,
See our sufferings, see our tears
That are shed for you.
Ah, take pity on the unhappy Orphée!
He sighs, he moans, he laments his fate.
The loving turtledove,
always tender, always faithful,
thus sighs and dies of sorrow.

In Italian: Risë Stevens, mezzo-soprano; Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded June 15-26, 1957

In French: Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano; Monteverdi Choir, Orchestra of the Opéra du Lyon, John Eliot Gardiner, cond. EMI, recorded Jan. 29-Feb. 2, 1989

In French: Richard Croft, tenor; Chorus of Les Musiciens du Louvre, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski, cond. [pitch: A = 403] Archiv, recorded June 2002

The gods having heard Orpheus's pleas, in Act II he descends into the Underworld to retrieve Euridice. There he encounters first the Furies and then the gathering of Blessed Spirits, for both of which Gluck added appropriate dance music in the expanded Paris version of Orfeo.

GLUCK: Orphée et Eurydice: Act II, Dance of the Furies


Rome Opera Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded June 15-26, 1957

Orchestra of the Opéra du Lyon, John Eliot Gardiner, cond. EMI, recorded Jan. 29-Feb. 2, 1989

GLUCK: Orphée et Eurydice: Act II, Dance of the Blessed Spirits


Rome Opera Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded June 15-26, 1957

Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski, cond. [pitch: A = 403] Archiv, recorded live June 2002

Orfeo finally finds Euridice but has strict instructions not to look back at her until he has led her safely out of Hades, or else! Of course he also can't explain why he won't look at her, and she assumes he has abandoned her. Finally he is unable to resist glancing back, and promptly she dies -- again. Horrified by what he has done, he sings the aria that is probably the best-known music Gluck wrote: "Che farò senza Euridice?" ("What will I do without Euridice?") in the original Italian, "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" ("I have lost my Eurydice") in the French translation.

We hear first the original Italian version, sung by a female (rather than castrated male) alto, then the revised French version for tenor, and finally -- I couldn't resist -- the young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sailing through (basically) the Italian version taken down an octave, though the German translation he sings ("Ach, ich habe sie verloren") appears based on the French text.

GLUCK: Orfeo ed Euridice: Act III, "Che farò senza Euridice?"

The translation is of the French text. (The Italian is similar.)

ORPHEUS: I have lost my Eurydice.
Nothing equals my unhappiness.
Cruel fate! What severity!
Nothing equals my unhappiness.
I succumb to my sorrow.

Eurydice! Eurydice!
Answer! What torture!
Answer me. It's your faithful spouse.
Hear my voice that's calling you.

I have lost my Eurydice. etc.

Eurydice! Eurydice!

Fatal silence!
Vain hope!
What suffering!
What torments tear at my heart!

I have lost my Eurydice. etc.

In Italian: Vesselina Kasarova, mezzo-soprano; Munich Radio Orchestra, Friedrich Haider, cond. BMG, recorded Sept. 11-16, 1996

In French: Richard Croft, tenor; Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski, cond. [pitch: A = 403] Archiv, recorded live June 2002

In German: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ferenc Fricsay, cond. DG, recorded Sept. 8-12, 1956


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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The case of Franz Schubert -- how did so much music of such beauty come from one mind, and in such a tragically short time?

Post rehabilitated (with UPDATEs), July 2018 [including the
addition of audio clips of "Musik ist eine heilige Kunst"]


Is this the most beautiful music ever written? In the 2018 rehab of this post, we have the sublime second-movement Adagio of Schubert's C major String Quintet played by the Camerata Quartet (violinists Wlodzimierz Prominski and Andrzej Kordykiewicz, violist Piotr Reichert, and cellist Roman Hoffmann; with guest cellist Marta Kordykiewicz), in place of the no-longer-available clip of the Alban Berg Quartet with longtime cellist pal Heinrich Schiff, video-recorded a quarter-century after their still-glowing 1982 EMI recording.


Sena Jurinac (s), Composer; Vienna Philharmonic, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded 1958

Teresa Zylis-Gara (s), Composer; Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI, recorded June-July 1968 \

"Music is a holy art, to gather all sorts of daring like cherubim around a shining throne, and that is why it is the holiest of the arts! Holy music!"

-- the Composer, at the end of his comically heroic trials
in the Prologue to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard
Strauss's revised version of their opera Ariadne on Naxos

by Ken

In the Prologue to Ariadne, Richard Strauss of course had the luxury of irony. I don't doubt that he shared all of his idealistic young Composer's beliefs about the sacredness of music and art, but he would have been much too clear-headed to just come out and say so. With the delicious layer of irony afforded him by the Composer's youthful naivete, he managed to make this both a richly comic and a deeply felt moment. Franz Schubert, however, had had the courage to express such sentiments without any distancing filters.

As I wrote yesterday, you can't really provide a rational answer for a question like "Who was the world's greatest melody-writer?" And as I also said, if I kick the question around a little, the answer seems obvious. Yesterday I was talking about Puccini, and he certainly rates consideration, as does Richard Strauss, and you could throw in "the other" Strauss, the principal subject of last week's classical music post, Johann II. Mozart has to be in the mix, and maybe Verdi, and perhaps Rossini.

But in the end, it seems to me that there's no one quite in a league with Schubert.

Just consider the above clip. I kept going back and forth between the first and second movements of Schubert's glorious String Quintet in C. They're almost identical in length, in the 13-minute range. I finally settled on the first movement, if only for the lyrical second subject, first sung by the paired cellos. Maybe I was thinking it was just unfair to enter the uniquely sublime slow movement in such a competition. But I had already copied the embed code for the start of the second movement, and I was too lazy to change it. Besides, how do you turn your back on this ethereal movement?

(I don't know the date of this performance by the Alban Berg Quartet, but it has to fall in the window between 2005, when Isabel Charisius replaced violist Thomas Kakuska, and 2008, when this great quartet -- the one great string quartet of the last several decades, I think -- called it quits after a run of some 37 years. The Berg's 1982-ish EMI recording, also with Schiff, was my first CD version of the Quintet, and it might still be my first pick.)

We think often of the incalculable tragedy of the death of Mozart before his 36th birthday. We don't always remember that Schubert (1797-1828) didn't make it to 32. So it's even more grotesque to speak of Schubert's "late" works, and yet there's no question that, as with Mozart, Schubert in his final years was developing in such amazing ways as to leave one grasping blindly to imagine what he might have achieved with just a few extra years. There's no denying that in the last year or two of his life his art was growing in extraordinarily audacious directions, as reflected not just in our sublime String Quintet but in the giant 9th Symphony (known as the "Great C major," to distinguish it from the "Little C major Symphony," No. 6 -- the word "gross" meaning both "big" and "great"), the last string quartet (No. 15 in G), the last three piano sonatas, and the harrowing song cycle Winterreise ("Winter Journey").

Still, it was evident early on that Schubert had an extraordinary melodic gift, and his subsequent career demonstrated that he had an apparently limitless supply. Without that, it's hard to imagine he could possibly have racked up his mind-boggling total of some 600 songs.

"An die Musik" ("To Music") is at once one of Schubert's least complicated songs and one of his most deeply felt and most searching. There are two recordings I usually press on people -- one obvious, one maybe not. Fritz Wunderlich (1930-1966) recorded his as part of the gorgeous Schubert mini-recital that occupied the fourth LP side of his still-unmatched DG recording of the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. The Russian baritone (well, ethnically Armenian, but in his lifetime he would have been thought of, at least to the outside world, as simply "a Soviet baritone") Pavel Lisitsian (1911-2004) offered a rollingly luscious account in the diverse '50s song recital once available here as an MK LP.

[2018 UPDATE: In place of the now-gone clip of "An die Musik" I described in 2009 as "a broad, dignified, and just plain beautiful performance" by the Canadian bass-baritone George London, we have this 1960s performance by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with pianist Gerald Moore. -- Ed.]

Thou lovely art, in how many gray hours,
where the wild circle of life ensnares me,
have you kindled my heart to warm love,
have transported me to a better world,
transported me to a better world?

Often has a sigh escaped from your harp,
a sweet, sacred chord of yours
has opened up to me the heaven of better times.
Thou lovely art, I thank thee for that.
Thou lovely art, I thank thee for that.

SOME SCHUBERT BASICS

ORCHESTRAL WORKS
Symphonies Nos. 8 (Unfinished) and 9. Vienna Philharmonic and London Symphony, Josef Krips, cond. (Decca)
Symphonies (complete). Vienna Philharmonic, Istvan Kertesz, cond. (Decca)

PIANO WORKS
Piano Sonatas, D. 958-60. Sviatoslav Richter (various labels); Richard Goode (Nonesuch); Murray Perahia (Sony)
Impromptus. Agustin Anievas, piano (EMI)

CHAMBER WORKS
Piano Trios (2). Borodin Trio (Chandos). Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Henryk Szeryng, violin; Pierre Fournier, cello (BMG, in various couplings).
String Quartets Nos. 13-15; Quartet Movement (No. 12); String Quintet in C. Brandis Quartet (Nimbus). Plus many fine recordings of the individual pieces.
Trout Quintet. Rudolf Serkin, piano; Marlboro Festival soloists (Sony). Mieczyslaw Horszowski, piano; Budapest Quartet members; Julius Levine, double bass (Sony). Nash Ensemble (IMP, with Felicity Lott singing "The Shepherd on the Rock").

SONGS
Die schoene Muellerin ("The Lovely Miller's Daughter," song cycle). Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Hubert Giesen, piano (DG)
Winterreise ("Winter Journey," song cycle). Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano (DG -- note, not the F-D/Moore/EMI or F-D/Demus/DG version). Jon Vickers, tenor; Peter Schaaf, piano (VAI).
Schwanengesang ("Swan Song," song collection). Wolfgang Holzmair, baritone; Imogen Cooper, piano (Philips). Olaf Baer, piano; Geoffrey Parsons, piano (EMI).
Songs. Renee Fleming, soprano; Christoph Eschenbach, piano (Decca). Janet Baker, mezzo; Gerald Moore, piano (EMI). Felicity Lott, soprano; Graham Johnson, piano (IMP).
And for the truly committed: Songs. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano (DG, 21 CDs).
F-D can substitute mere hamminess for real interpretive reach, especially when the vocal lie is uncomfortable for him, but how many singers could have produced a collection like this? And the piano playing of Gerald Moore is for me a constant source of wonder and delight.
Complete Songs. Many, many singers; Graham Johnson, artistic director and piano (and also annotator extraordinaire; Hyperion, 37 CDs).
Vocally uneven, not surprisingly, but a tour de force for Graham Johnson, a Schubert accompanist of almost Gerald Moore-ian stature and a wonderful tour guide in his really detailed song-by-song annotations. This series is a source of endless fascination.


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