The highest purpose of art is to make the transcendent perceptible. Long after the artistic detritus of the twentieth-century has been swept away, people still will be listening to the music of English composer Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986), and wondering why we were complaining about the spiritual aridity of our times. By then, it will have … Read more
Four years ago this month, as I was paging my way through the morning paper, I happened to glance at the obituaries. The paper almost fell from my hands when I saw the name of my friend, composer Stephen Albert, dead at fifty-one, cut down in an auto accident. Steve and I had just had … Read more
The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote that “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God.” One might modify that insight and say that, since the first Christmas, the major poetic idea has been the Incarnation. Either way, one would think that this situation would have created an … Read more
In 1785, seven-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel went with his father to the Schikaneder Theater in Vienna, where his father was the conductor of the orchestra. There Mozart had occasion to hear young Johann play one of Mozart’s new piano concertos from memory. So impressed was Mozart, who had some personal experience with wunderkinder, that he … Read more
The distinguished English critic and specialist in Scandinavian music, Robert Layton calls Franz Berwald “the most commanding composer Sweden has thus far produced, and the leading Scandinavian symphonist before Sibelius.” This is the bicentennial of his birth in 1796, but few know his name. When Franz Liszt met the sixty-one-year old Franz Berwald in 1857, … Read more
Suppose you were Bach, and no one noticed? Welcome to the early eighteenth-century world of Jan Dismas Zelenka, a Catholic composer at the court of Dresden, who lived in relative obscurity from 1679 until his death in 1745. Buried on Christmas Eve in the Old Catholic Cemetery in Dresden, he suffered the same fate as … Read more
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died 205 years ago. In 1991, the bicentennial of his death was the occasion for massive Mozart festivals and grand recording projects, as well as reappraisals of his genius and meaning. Five years later, the reappraisals continue. Unfortunately, they tell us more about ourselves than they do about Mozart. Here is an … Read more
Have you ever looked up over the proscenium arches or along the upper walls of still-existing nineteenth-century concert halls and observed the medallion bas-reliefs of the composers considered immortal at the time? There you will recognize the visages of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. You will also most likely encounter the profile and name … Read more
Picture fin de siecle Vienna in the 1890s, a cosmopolitan capital of empire that was about to shake the world with its new ideas. Sigmund Freud was already in practice. Walter Gropius would soon launch his revolutionary architecture. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were splashing their canvases with images of angst. Gustav Mahler was directing … Read more
One of most compelling sights of Holy Week is that of Mary standing beneath the cross on which her son hangs dying. There were, after all, two innocents at Calvary—her son, innocence itself, nailed to the Cross; and Mary herself, innocently suffering from sin, her heart pierced. Yet Mary is our intercessor. She asks for … Read more
Some critics think composers should be seismic devices. Music should not only reflect its time, but foretell things to come. In fact, it should even help usher in the new age. However, both politically and artistically, the cultural revolution is now over, and so too should be this view of music as a revolutionary muse. … Read more
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was the greatest Catholic composer at the turn of the nineteenth century and the greatest English composer since Purcell some two hundred years earlier. Elgar’s mother, Ann, was a convert to Catholicism and, despite her husband’s objections, raised her children in the faith. Among the things she used to read them as … Read more
You probably missed the centenary of French composer Charles Gounod’s death in 1993. Not much attention was paid to this once phenomenally popular composer, who lived from 1818 to 1893. He is supposed to be completely passé, a relic of Victorian times; his saccharine tunes would send us moderns into insulin shock. Yet, even those … Read more
Everyone loves Christmas — even agnostics. The English tolerance for, if not cultivation of, eccentricity easily embraced Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), the agnostic composer of some of this century’s most beautiful religious music, including Hodie Christus Natus Est, finally available here in time for Christmas on a special EMI import CD (CDC 54128). This is … Read more
Fleeing the congestion and mayhem of New York City in the early summer of 1893, Antonin Dvorák, along with his wife and six children, alighted from a train in the little Bohemian settlement of Spillville, Iowa. Perhaps by then his worldwide fame had spread even there, but this quiet town in the middle of nowhere … Read more
Dialogues des Carmelites by Francis Poulenc is an opera for those who hate the French Revolution. I am among them. As I discovered during my journeys through France over the past thirty years, the destruction still most present to the modern-day traveler resulted from neither world war, nor from any of the calamities of the … Read more
Requiems are for the living. They shape our attitude toward death. What should we expect? Peace and serenity, or terror and judgment? Heaven or hell? It depends on the composer. In their Requiems, Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi frighten us with rafter-shaking, apocalyptic visions of the Dies Irae. Just as composing symphonies became a problem … Read more
English composer Edmund Rubbra [1901-1986] probably did not read The New York Times. At least, he did not respond to, nor was he guided by, the terms of the artistic dilemma propounded by the headline to a music review published in the early 1980s: “Beauty or the Pain of Truth?” The question is obviously loaded. … Read more
The older I grow the more I listen to Haydn. There is something measured in his pace that goes with daily life. The sturm und drang of youth is over and I can no longer bear the emotional excesses of Romanticism. Of course, there is always Mozart. But listening to him involves the pain of … Read more
The attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed. The patient is recovering, no thanks to the efforts of music’s Dr. Kevorkian, Arnold Schoenberg, whose cure, the imposition of a totalitarian atonality, was worse than the disease — the supposed exhaustion of the tonal resources of music. Schoenberg’s vaunted mission to “emancipate dissonance” by denying … Read more