Another Activity of My Life

[2] Classical Music

   I discovered music around the time I was thirteen.  I listened to WQXR (“the classical music station”) while doing my homework; this was facilitated by the fact many of my homework tasks were mechanical drawings required by Brooklyn Tech classes. But early on, I went to live musical events, notably a Ring des Nibelungen at the Met with Melchior, Traubel, and Lotte Lehmann in her last Sieglinde. I persuaded my father to buy a war bond from WQXR to gain admission to a quartet concert at their studio, I got into a Bruno Walter Mozart rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic and still remember his staying, in a voice that seemed very sad, “Let’s go again from letter F, Frederick.”

   I also recall going to concerts at Town Hall, for which discount coupons were available in school. Two come to mind. One was an all-Schumann piano recital; but I can’t come up with the name of the pianist. But I do remember two things about the concert. A little boy (maybe ten) sitting with his mother near me beaming when selections from the Kinderszenen were being  played and Vladimir Horowitz sitting by himself in a kind of box at the front of the balcony. The second was a concert of Jewish music in which a well known cantor from Brooklyn participated. That was the tenor, Richard Tucker of whom I then said, “he ought to be at the Met,” which is where he was a year or so later.

   If I went on giving an account of all the concerts I attended—and remember!—this piece would be very long and surely boring. But I cannot resist telling about a selection of them. I heard Schnabel play Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto which he had rescued from obscurity; I went as regularly as I was able to get a ticket to hear chamber music at the Frick museum. A memorable one was the Budapest Quartet, with my sitting close enough to be able to follow the music, sort of, over the shoulder of Mischa Schneider, its cellist.

   When I was at Vassar, I subscribed to the Philharmonic, driving down to New York on Thursdays, killing two birds with one stone by first having dinner with my parents. That subscription was prompted by a concert I heard Boulez conduct with the BBC Symphony, including an uncannily transparent Petrushka. When Boulez was then appointed in New York, I subscribed, writing to them that I was subscribing because of the Boulez appointment, unlike many of their subscribers who gave that as the reason for bailing out. Boulez was famous for doing contemporary music, while the NY Phil audience, like that of most orchestras, preferred hearing what they had already heard before. (See, on this blog, my post of June 28, 2014, “Art that is Heard is Not like Art that is Seen.”)

   When we lived in Evanston, we subscribed to the Chicago Symphony, where before every Thursday concert the two of us had dinner at the Berghoff with the Garry Willses and the Larry Lipkings. Many splendid concerts during those Solti years, though the concert everyone who attended will never forget was Abbado conducting a semi-staged Wozzeck. He stood in front of the orchestra and conducted without a score, giving cues with elegant gestures, evoking an outstanding performance of that masterpiece. More generally, the Chicago programming was fairly interesting if not exactly adventurous. Their playing was consistently superb.

  Before I turn to the last orchestra to which we subscribed, a paragraph about my attendance at various operas. I never became a Feinschmecker of voices, so bel canto was not my thing. When asked, I would say that I was not an opera-lover, but a  I music-lover, with Mozart, the later Wagner, and such “contemporary” operas as Moses and Aron (of which I saw two splendid performances) at the center.  Two more Rings (one of them in Bayreuth) and lots of Mozart, but never a Magic Flute quite like my earliest record purchase, the Beecham Berlin recording of the early thirties.

   That brings me to the last orchestra with which I was involved: the Pittsburgh Symphony. There I was not only a subscriber, but a member or the board of directors and a member of the chorus that sang at its concerts. I’ll take these associations in order. As a subscriber, I always enjoyed their playing—which was truly first class. At the same time, I was disappointed by their conservative—stodgy, “safe” programming. They remained a provincial outfit. That was driven home to me during my decade on its board. I went to an endless number of meetings of the board and, more importantly, of a variety of board committees. I made many suggestions, I wrote a large number of memos (it was a big pile that I threw out when I “dissolved” our house.) But nothing that I ever put forward, mostly mild stuff, was ever adopted. I was not at all bitter, just—big sigh—disappointed.

    My other relationship to the orchestra was vastly more gratifying. As a member of the Mendelssohn Choir, I sang in many of PSO concerts of a variety of choral works, mostly when Mariss Jansons was its conductor. He took our Mozart Requiem to Carnegie Hall. I was placed in the top row smack in the center. When Mariss and I ran into each other in the hotel lobby after the afternoon rehearsal, he came over to me, grinning, “I heard you, I heard you.” All I could say was “I hope not.” The hardest piece—for me—that I sang in was the wonderful Symphony of Psalms. No intuitive intervals, at least for the basses, or at least this one. I “engaged” a pianist friend to help pound it into my head. The cost: a large bottle of gin.

   Briefly, how did I get to sing in the Mendelssohn choir? It started with my membership in the chorus at Brooklyn Tech, while I also sang in (and actually conducted) the Friday night choir of the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights. The singing continued in the chorus of a zillion at Great Lakes while in boot camp. After an hiatus of some years, I became the only administrator in the Northwestern and then Pittsburgh choruses. A lot of rehearsals and a lot of concerts. When Frank Miller conducted us in the Verdi Requiem with the so-so Evanston Symphony, he made a very short speech at our first rehearsal together. “I’m sure that you are well prepared; I will not call for anything special. We’ll just do it the way we did it under Toscanini. Sure. Before becoming principal cellist in Chicago Miller had been principal cellist of the NBC Symphony (conducted alternately by Stokowski and Toscanini). You see that singing in a chorus was how my unschooled musicality would find active expression.

   Now I go to concerts in Mexico City, especially to those of the Sinfonica Nacional of which my daughter Eleanor has been principal clarinet for more than two decades. It’s a very decent orchestra with programs more interesting than most to be found in the US. I know of no other orchestra that would program all fifteen Shostakovich symphonies in a single season!

When Music in America Became American Music

This is one of my favorite Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op eds. I hope to be forgiven for posting it again.

The Next Page: The sound of American music

Sunday, September 23, 2007

By Rudolph H. Weingartner

American music: What is it? Who made it? Where did it come from?

It's a sprawling, contentious question. But I am talking about the decades that began around the first World War, when it became meaningful to speak of distinctively American music.

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Rudolph H. Weingartner (rudywein@pitt.edu), a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is a former board member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. His most recent book is "A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education" (Hamilton/Rowman & Littlefield).

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Of course, the music that was written then built on its American and European forebears. But the changes introduced were so powerful that they dominated American music for quite some time. More correctly, I should say American musics, in the plural, since there is hardly a single strain.

I leave out the rich world of jazz, since it would call for more extensive treatment than there is room here. Instead, I want to focus on three other genres. Going from the bottom up -- speaking as a snooty member of the cultural elite -- there are what are most simply called popular songs; then there are the musicals of Broadway; and, finally, the kind of music played by symphony orchestras, recitalists and ensembles in the likes of Carnegie Hall, all known by the misleading term of "classical music."

I've been listening to music for most of my life -- actually listening, not just hearing. And sometimes I even think about what I heard. Thinking about these genres, I came to a mildly startling conclusion, though the facts have been plain to see all my life: Three giants who dominated the American musical landscape were Jews from Eastern Europe, one actually born there, the other two in Brooklyn not long after their parents' passage through Ellis Island.

God bless Irving Berlin

Starting at the "bottom," it is hard to trump Irving Berlin, although that was not the name he was born with, in 1888, in the town of Tyumen, just east of the Ural Mountains, arriving here when he was 5. (Other sources name different towns.) The son of a cantor, he was then Israel Isadore Baline (that last name an immigration official's transcription of Beilin), the youngest of a large Yiddish-speaking family.

While I found no record just when Israel became Irving, the move to Berlin came about through a mistake. In 1906, the 18-year-old wrote the lyrics for "Marie of Sunny Italy" to a melody by a fellow entertainer at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. But when the song was published, the printer put "I. Berlin" on the cover. It would have brought bad luck to the author not to keep the name that gave him his first broader recognition.

Most of us know much of the greater accomplishments that would follow. What we might not know is that at the beginning of his long career, Irving Berlin succeeded as a wordsmith, and only when he was prodded did he compose the melody of his next song.

That prod lasted. From "Alexander's Ragtime Band," Berlin's first big-time success, to "Always," "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better," "How Deep Is the Ocean" and "White Christmas" (and many, many more), Irving Berlin wrote both words and music.

It is often noted that Berlin never learned to read notes and that a special piano was built for him that allowed him to play melodies in keys that he otherwise couldn't play since he could play in only one key. But I like to observe another fact: the lyrics and melodies he wrote could not be more distant from the Yiddish he spoke as a child and the cantorial and Eastern European tunes on which he was brought up.

For me, the highlight is Berlin's hymn-like "God Bless America." I empathize with those who want to make that song our national anthem, as more singable and less belligerent than our current one. Were that ever to happen, it would be the zenith of the story of Israel Isadore Beilin that began somewhere in Russia or Belarus.

 

The rhapsody on George Gershwin

Our second innovator who influenced the course of American music managed to steer an unprecedented course between pops and "classical" music and between musical and opera. Jacob Gershowitz was born in 1898 in Brooklyn, but his father, who had emigrated from Russia, soon changed his name to Gershwin; the transformation of Jacob into George somehow followed.

Like Berlin, George Gershwin got an early start, writing a commercially successful song when he was 19 and making his first big hit with "Swanee" when he was 21. The words were by his brother Ira -- who came to write the words to much of George's lyrical output -- and the song's success benefited greatly from being sung by superstar Al Jolson (born in Lithuania as Asa Yoelson).

Gershwin, who died at 38, was prolific, with a large output of works for the stage and the concert hall. As exemplified by the work everyone knows, "Rhapsody in Blue" (of 1924), Gershwin was the first to combine -- perhaps interweave is a better term -- classical compositional techniques with jazz and pop.

Again, no trace of an Eastern European heritage in that unique Gershwin mix. An anecdote is told about the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg, whom Gershwin was said to have asked for lessons in composition. "I would only make you a second-rate Schoenberg, and you are such a good Gershwin already." (The anecdote is also told with Gershwin seeking instruction from the French composer Maurice Ravel and receiving the same complimentary refusal. Take your pick.)

It is worth mentioning that the jazz -- which is, after all, perhaps the most American of musics -- on which Gershwin leaned had also been changing. It became much freer and improvisational than it had been when still closer to the band music, ragtime, spirituals and religious music from which it had sprung.

That Gershwin was able to elevate the musical to new heights is exemplified in two quite different ways. "Of Thee I Sing," reviewed by Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times as "a taut and lethal satire ... funnier than the government, and not nearly so dangerous," was, in 1932, the very first musical comedy to win the Pulitzer Prize for best American play. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the august Pulitzer board at Columbia University debated whether or not to take this radical step toward popular taste.

But "Porgy and Bess" is Gershwin's crowning achievement. It is the only opera by an American composer that has received worldwide acclaim. That is not a trivial distinction: a "selected" list of operas by American composers posted on the US Opera Web site comes to 359, if I counted correctly. Nor is "Porgy and Bess" a standard opera, whatever that might be. Gershwin called it a Folk Opera. It makes copious use of jazzy passages; its cast of characters, almost entirely African American, consists of ordinary people and not larger-than-life operatic heroes. American verismo.

The plot moves briskly and the hit tunes tumble one after the other; if they were sung in Italian, they would be called arias. An international group of collectors of recordings of "Summertime" claims to know of at least 20,142 public performances of that song, of which 13,842 are said to have been recorded.

 

Fanfare for the uncommon Aaron Copland

A young man, Morris (probably ne Moishe) Kaplan was in England, on the way from Lithuania to America, when he anglicized his name to Copland. Some years later, in 1900, his fifth child, Aaron, was born in Brooklyn and came to grow up to become the most American of American composers, a goal he aimed at almost self-consciously.

His music is American, not simply because he incorporated into it both jazz and blues, making use, as well, of older American tunes -- though he did all that. Nor is his music American because so much of it is devoted to American themes: "Appalachian Spring," "Billy the Kid," "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson," the opera "Tender Land." But even though Copland wrote many works that derive from European sources, including atonal music, the core of his output evinces a tonal world that became a kind of paradigm of American "classical" music, strongly influencing a subsequent generation.

While numerous technical analyses have been put forward of this Copland-American style, I will confine myself to a few general characteristics. The themes or melodies Copland invents are relatively simple and concise and when they are more extensive, they are likely to be made up of smaller units. Copland's rhythms are often distinctly declamatory and predominantly unhurried.

Perhaps most notably, Copland's harmony is derived from French rather than German music, most probably by virtue of the fact that he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the first American composer to do so. And finally, Copland makes a self-conscious effort to orchestrate with great clarity, letting each voice be heard with little or no doubling, making for a more open, less "sophisticated" but also less fuzzy texture.

Arguably, Copland's "Third Symphony" is the greatest American work in that genre. The first movement makes copious use of themes of the popular "Fanfare for the Common Man." Throughout its course, it steadfastly maintains its ability to keep the listener fastened to the orchestral progression.

The symphony is only one of a great many of Copland's works -- from chamber music to ballet to operas to scores for Hollywood films. But it serves as good evidence for the claim that Aaron Copland was the greatest American composer of the last century-- a century he spanned, since he died in 1990.

 

What is the moral of this story about the modern "origin" of American music?

Early on I said that I was mildly surprised that a most important trio of American masters consisted of three Eastern European Jews. Surprised, because that's not what you would expect when considering American music.

But only mildly surprised, because, after all, it is a fundamental truth of American history, and one that is in danger of being forgotten: Our open society liberated the newly arrived and first-generation Americans, and they harnessed their native talents and energies to advance the themes and tasks of their new homeland.

A recent study, "What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution" (for which I filled out a questionnaire), makes that point. But read the obituary pages of The New York Times, peruse the list of American recipients of the Nobel Prize or just listen to the accents of the professors who teach the science courses in our universities or to those of the physicians that treat our ailments. These are sufficient reminders of what the United States can accomplish when it honors its birthright as the land of the free.

First published on September 23, 2007 at 12:00 am

Copyright ©1997 - 2007 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Vacationtime

From the Blog Too

   Yesterday, Friday, June 24, Ramon drove Ellie and the Salazar kids and me to Queretaro, where we checked in at a hacienda we had already been familiar with. The purpose of the trip, however, was to hear a concert by the Orquesta Filarmonica of Queretaro, of which Miguel Salazar is the principal oboe. That evening, however, Miguel was going beyond his usual role and was the soloist in a performance of Mozart’s Oboe concerto.

   Miguel was splendid and was well supported by the Mozart-sized orchestra, conducted by the Queretaro's music director, Jose Guadalupe Flores. The response of a very decent audience was enthusiastic.

   After the intermission, Flores conducted a fine performance of what is probably Shostakovich’s most popular symphony, his Fifth. That it is popular is no accident. Shostakovich deliberately wrote this “accessible” work to get back into Stalin’s the good graces.
   Sunday, June 26, back to Mexico City, ending vacationtime.

Two Splendid Concerts

   Last Friday and Saturday I went to two outstanding concerts that could not have been different from each other. The first was by the Sinfonica Nacional in its home of Bellas Artes, the second was a recital for clarinet and piano in the Capilla Gótica of the Teatro Helénico.

   The Sinfonica’s was an all-Mozart concert, performed by a much-reduced orchestra (of course) that had taken its place in front of the great Tiffany curtain of the hall. The recital took place in a space I speculate as having been created as a monastery, with both architectural features and paintings on the walls testifying to that effect. The audience in both houses was very respectable in size, even if it did not fill the space to capacity.

     The only often-played Mozart work was the Symphony Number 39 in E-flat major, after the intermission. Symphony Number 27 opened the concert, a quite early one, followed by the 27^th piano concerto, a fairly late work. The pianist and conductor was the Israeli-born, David Greilsammer who, some years earlier, had demonstrated his mastery of Mozart by performing all of his piano concerti in an incredible marathon and all of his piano sonatas on another such occasion.

   Listeners could not have doubted that this conductor-pianist knew what Mozart was all about, because he felicitously refrained from “interpretations” (those are what are called scare quotes) and let Wolfgang Amadeus speak for himself. That sounds much easier than it is: when playing Mozart, there is no place to hide; you hear everything all the time, whether well performed or, as is often the case, just so-so. Greilsammer succeeded, both as conductor and pianist.

   And as conductor he got his Mozart-sized orchestra to play really well. It was a pleasure to hear such clean and musical performing; I surmise that they were masterfully drilled by their guest leader.

   As an encore, the bunch played what I surmised was the middle movement of an earlier piano concerto that turned out to be of the not-so-early 21^st.

  All and all, a very satisfying concert. Nor was I the only one who thought that. The applause was enthusiastic and was accompanied by shouts of approval. It was gratifying to hear that for a composer who died in 1791 and not just for Romantic giants like Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.

   The next day, in that quasi-Romanesque hall, I heard very different music, in a recital for clarinet and piano. The opening after the intermission was the only item born in the same universe more or less as Mozart: transcriptions for clarinet of three Schubert songs, concluding with the moving “Meine Ruh ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer . . . .” from Goethe’s Faust.

   All the other works on the program were written in the 20^th century, with the opening a duo concertante by Milhaud and the major piece before the intermission a significant and quite wonderful sonata for the two instruments by Francis Poulenc.

   The venue after the intermission (and its Schubert opening) was further East: a multi-movement suite by the Polish composer, Witold Lutoslawski and four Hungarian dances by Kokai Rezso. A (you guessed it) Hungarian composer of the first half of the 20^th century. I suspect, though I most certainly don’t know this, that both these composers wrote for clarinetist acquaintances of theirs, since both works are very virtuosic. That suggests that both had some guidance from clarinet pros as to what that instrument was capable of and had some assurance that their pieces would get some exposure. Mind you all that is speculation on my part.

     The concert was very well received, here also with shouts of approval and a call for an encore. A really good evening! The pianist was a splendid pianist and friend from way back, Alberto Cruzprieto and the clarinetist was Eleanor Weingartner, my daughter. I much enjoyed listening to them from the first row.

   

Shostakovich

   I first discovered Shostakovich’s music when the Music Appreciation Club of Brooklyn Technical High School went to hear Toscanini perform the Leningrad Symphony, the Seventh, with the NBC Symphony. While I found out decades later that the composer strongly disapproved of that rendition, I was quite smitten. Many years later, I remember driving along on a highway, I don’t remember where, and hearing his Fifth on the car radio of what sounded like a particularly vital performance; the conductor turned out to be Bernstein. Since those days I have acquired recordings of all the symphonies, conducted by Mariss Jansons with quite an array of different orchestras. I have CDs of all the quartets and I have the scores for them. I got those scores when I asked the big wig of the Russian department at Northwestern—who frequently went to visit the Soviet Union—to bring me a copy of the quartet scores, thinking of inexpensive miniature scores of the kind I had quite a few. What I received instead were two large hard cover volumes, pulled out from the set of Shostakovich’s Complete Works that he talked some acquaintance to give up. I was embarrassed and reciprocated, guided by my colleague. A wonderful work I only discovered more recently, Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues for piano: Bach brought up to date.

   I haven’t read much about the composer beyond Solomon Vokov’s Testimony, but now I have just finished Julian Barnes’  The Noise of Time. He calls it a novel and I suppose that is what it is, but in effect it is wholly biographical, based on the best available sources, without the de rigueur scholarly trappings. He says nothing that does not reflect what I know and a great deal more that is utterly plausible. There are numerous reviews of this Barnes oeuvre to be found on the internet.

   There is no sign that Shostakovich was ever less than confident about his compositions or concerned about their appeal to audiences, but that was not enough in the days of Stalin. Shostakovich was subjected to severe criticism by Stalin (the great musical expert) for his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsenks and ever since worried that he might be eliminated, Stalin-style. Fearfulness was his way of life during those years, though throughout it, he was busy composing, about which Barnes doesn’t say very much. In effect, the book tells the story of Shostakovich as a citizen—though that’s not quite the right word—rather than of the composer.

   Under Khrushchev’s reign he was honored and dragooned to join the party. In a variety of ways, he was always on the outs with the country of his birth. I know of no other composer, certainly not of Shostakovich’s stature, who had to cope with what amounts to a hostile political environment, at times fiercely so.
   I suppose that as a composer, Shosti is most plausibly compared with Gustav Mahler. He probably comes in second between those two, certainly in appearance on the world’s concert programs. But unlike Mahler, he is remarkably versatile, with scores for ballets and films (Gebrauchsmusik?), several concertos, most of which are played, two operas, one of which, The Nose, (written when the composer was twenty-two years old) was recently—and flamboyantly—staged by the Met, fifteen symphonies, to fifteen string quartets, some of which are currently played.  I don’t know a twentieth century composer with as large and versatile an output. Certainly not one who can write music that is truly sardonic.

Concert Audiences in Mexico City and Pittsburgh

Concert Audiences in Mexico City

   Recently, a friend and I went to hear the Orquesta Filamamónica de la UNAM. But while that abbreviation stands for National Autonomous University of Mexico, the orchestra is not a student ensemble but a full-size symphony orchestra made up of professional musicians. They perform regularly in the Sala Nezahuacóyotl on the university’s campus, a large modern concert hall with excellent aoustics, seating listeners not only on a sizeable bank of rows sloping down to the stage, but also in substantial rows rising upwards from the entering level on the left and right and center, plus a substantial bank quite high behind the orchestra. While on a previous visit to the hall, that last set of seats was filled by the chorus that sang Schoenberg’s Gurre Lieder, this time those rows were fully occupied by audience, as were all the seats in all directions, making a large house sold out, as far as I could tell. Not that this enriched the university, since the tickets cost between $5.50 and $13, not to mention those of us who had free passes secured from a friend who is a member of the orchestra. 

   It was a nice program, if not a particularly adventurous one, opening with the Brahms Haydn variations, followed by Rachmaninoff’s take on that Paganini caprice, competently played by a Korean pianist. The work after the intermission was Dvorak’s New World Symphony, now numbered ninth, though in my younger years it was just number 5. But while that numbering change acknowledges the existence of earlier works, alas, that recognition is about all that the composer gets out of this change. None of those earlier works seem to get performed. Some of us who agitate now and then to have orchestras perform works by composers that tend to be neglected altogether, might also put in a word for music that is rarely, if ever, to be found on concert programs, while other works by their composers are played again and again. The fact is that vastly more worthwhile music has been written than can be programmed on any finite set of concerts.

   My friends at the Pittsburgh Symphony would turn green with envy if they saw the packed houses at Mexico City’s orchestras. Yes, the plural is correct: there are three additional ones, all putting on regular seasons. I’ve attended concerts of two of the others, and frequently that of the Orquesta Sinfònica Nacional (OSN) of which my daughter Eleanor has been principal clarinet since 1990. The orchestra plays in the Palacio des Bellas Artes, a French-inspired edifice built in fits and starts early-ish in the 20^th century. If the envy were focused on the number of concert goers, it would of course be misplaced, given that Mexico City at nine million is about thirty times more populous than the city where, at more than five hundred feet, the Cathedral of Learning harbors a significant chunk of the University of Pittsburgh.

   What they would—or should—envy is the composition of that audience. They don’t look like the audiences we see in the States: they are not the oldies without whose patronage most American orchestras would have to fold. Rather, they are of all ages, indeed, more younger than older. While they clearly care about their appearance—a mark of this capital city—that does not call for formality in dress, even less for men than for women.

   I asked my friend and companion, what accounts for this broad participation as audience. I did not expect the answer I was given. No, it was not music education in the public schools—about which he was not very enthusiastic. Rather, was  his answer, it is that kids from a young age on are simply exposed to music, by having a variety of groups perform mini-concerts with students of all ages being the audience.

   For me that was quite a revelation. I had never separated in my mind education and exposure, mostly by focusing on the tasks of education and taking exposure for granted. But when you think of it, there is quite a difference between the two.  One can learn a great deal about music—and I would spell out some of that except I am afraid of boring my readers—without ever being “exposed” (there is that word again) to particular works. And even when you are brought to listen (via recordings) to a selected set of works of music, it may well be, in this “educational” context, that the point of listening is to be able to identify important compositions in the repertory: that’s the Eroica, now comes the Jupiter and this is the Symphonie fantastique. Nothing at all wrong with doing that; but it’s work of sorts that has a goal beyond just listening; it is not the same as “exposure” that merely asks you to listen and, one hopes, to enjoy what is to be heard.

   I can easily see that if kids are in this way “exposed” to music, repeatedly and from early on, that they come to think of the experience as part of their lives—at least for a healthy fraction of those listeners—a role they will want to continue to enjoy, beyond their schooling. One way they can do that is by attending, often or now and then, concerts by one of the several orchestras readily accessible in their city. It’s a plausible story.

   There is very little difference between this Filarmonica de la Unam experience and my frequent attendance of concerts by the OSN in Bellas Artes, a building that is a splendid take-off of a major French concert hall.  The atmosphere there is a bit more formal, but not by much.  Groups of late adolescents in jeans come every time; super well-behaved! As for the rest of the audience, I’ll simply say that I see more men wearing ties, but not as many as on half of them in the audience.

   As far as I can tell, the audiences I have observed here seem truly representative, in their age distribution, of the general population. In that way they differ quite sharply from American concert audiences which are notably skewed toward the older portion of the population. I’ll hesitantly account for that by citing three traits to be found in Mexico and to a much lesser degree, if at all, in the US. First, attending concerts in this city is vastly cheaper than it is north of the border—a situation that depends in turn on the fact that in Mexico most of the musical organizations are funded by one arm or another of the state, while their American counterparts largely depend on private funding. As a result, almost anyone—certainly any member of the middle class—can afford to attend. Second, the apparently wide-spread practice of exposing impressionable youngsters to repeated experiences of classical music inculcates in a fraction of them the desire to listen to such music in their lives after school. Third and most important is the belief, widespread though far from universal, that an appreciation of music is a component of living a civilized life. That this cultural trait distinguishes Mexico from the United States, at least in degree and why that should be so is a topic for another time.

Richard Wagner on Music by Jews

Richard Wagner, “Das Judentum in der Musik”

   Richard Wagner wrote the essay with the above title, which the English translator renders as “Jewishness in Music,” but might also be translated as “Judaism in Music.” I had read it eons ago without remembering much of it. So I conjured it into my Kindle and reread it, if not exactly carefully, and was immensely disappointed in a way I will make clear below; however, I can say up front that the piece—mercifully short—is not very interesting, so feel free to stop right here reading my account.           

   But first let me say  that I think that Wagner has created a series of masterpieces which deserve to be ranked with the operas of Mozart—my idea of the zenith of the genre—however different they are from them.  When I was in high school, molti anni fa, I became an aficionado of the Zauberflöte and the Ring and  saw both at the Met (then on 38^th Street) when I was a sophomore or junior, in 1942 or ‘43. I’ve seen quite a few other Wagner performances in a number of different houses, most notably several additional Ring cycles, of which the Bayreuth set was not the best.

   Wagner was a great composer. That he was a mediocre poet, as revealed in the texts that he wrote for all of his operas—somehow, one hesitates to call them librettos. If I am right about that, it is not of the utmost importance, since in the real world of performances the audience gets to understand only a fraction of the words that are being sung.

   My admiration for Wagner as composer, especially of his later works, is unqualified. That high regard does not spill over into my assessment of Wagner’s person as reflected in his opinions and writings. Not a nice man! He is not alone among great artists who combined outstanding creativity in their domains with personal characteristics that are far from sterling. Benvenuto Cellini was a murderer, Voltaire was a fervent anti-Semite, and Dostoevsky was no angel, to pull out a few names from my not very well-stocked memory. So with Wagner who had dubious relationships with a quite large cast of characters, even, as an older man, he turned with fury on his wife Cosima whom he had wooed away from her first husband, Hans von Bülow, who nevertheless remained a faithful conductor of Wagner’s music, most notably conducting the first performance of Tristan und Isolde.

   Wagner was also what today we call an intellectual and wrote an immense amount of stuff, short pieces and quite long ones; if you are interested, look at this impressive list: http://users.utu.fi/hansalmi/appen.html. That makes his Judentum essay particularly disappointing.  I expected a clever account of how music written by Jews differed from music by gentiles. However perverse, that might really have been interesting. But not so. There are brief bits about Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, of whose Paris success he was envious and whose name Wagner never actually mentions, plus a coda on Heinrich Heine. But most of the piece is generic 19^th century anti-Semitic talk.

   The language is, to put it succinctly, vile. Wagner never says Jewish this or that, but speaks incessantly about The Jew, a kind of generic figure of his (and his fellow anti-Semites’) construction. He divides this personage into two sub-types, the (in his view) uneducated Yiddish speaking Shtetl Jew and the cultured, educated, presumably German Jew. Though for Wagner, the latter doesn’t really get beyond his presumed origin. As for music, the Jew does not transcend his synagogue music, and is incapable of understanding “our” music.

   Since this is all generic talk, the fact never comes up that perhaps Wagner’s most trusted conductor, who among other duties conducted the first performance of Parsifal, was Hermann Levi, the son of a rabbi.

   As for Mendelssohn, he acknowledges his great natural gifts, but notes that his oratorios lack the “content” of Bach’s. He is clearly not in the class of the Germans, Mozart and Beethoven. What else is new? He does not mention,of course, that he, Richard Wagner doesn’t quite make  it into that class either. The brief paragraphs on Meyerbeer of whose success in Paris he was probably jealous) accuses him of catering to popular taste and in a couple of paragraphs we find out that Heinrich Heine does not measure up to Goethe and Schiller. Surprise.

   Rereading that essay was not edifying, but what was particularly disappointing is that Wagner the great composer, has really nothing to say about what makes the music composed by The Jew, Jewish music.

What is Being a Genius: the Example of Mozart

I am grateful to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for publishing so long and highbrow a piece.

Opinion     Previous Articles     Editorials     Letters     Perspectives     Columnists     Rob Rogers     Editorial FAQ	The Next Page: The Full Mozart Genius: What is it good for? Absolutely everything. Rudolph H. Weingartner has been immersing himself in the entire output of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth. He is more awestruck than ever ... Sunday, October 29, 2006 By Rudolph H. Weingartner I recently bought the box that holds 170 compact discs on which all the compact discs on which all the works that Mozart wrote are recorded. That is how I am celebrating this Mozart year, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The contents of that foot-long box are astonishing, mind-boggling. It contains more than 170 hours of music: over seven days' worth if you play them around the clock; more than 21 days of music if you listen daily for eight hours -- no break for lunch. Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Bob Dylan?Frank Gehry? Mozart did not have a great deal of time to perform this feat. He was just 35 when he died. Moreover, consider what's involved in composing music. Anthony Burgess put it bluntly. While he was a writer, best known for "A Clockwork Orange," he started out as a composer, a pursuit he never wholly abandoned. To write a minute's worth of music, he wryly noted, you have to write any number of separate lines: four for a string quartet, a dozen for a chamber orchestra, two dozen and more for a full-blown symphony or opera. To write a novel, you need to produce only a single line of prose. That's why, he says, he chose the more efficient metier as his main career. Note that those numerous hours of Mozart's music include 22 operas -- a few of which are really music for theatrical pieces and all of which are being performed this year at the Salzburg Festival; 41 symphonies -- the last three of which, arguably, the greatest, were written during less than seven weeks in 1788; and 27 concertos for piano and orchestra. Since this is no place to produce an endless list, I forgo mentioning the large number of every kind of works of chamber music, the many choral works, concert arias and much more. Mozart's last position was that of Kammermusicus at the court of Emperor Joseph II, requiring him to write dances for court balls -- a not very demanding job, leaving him free to write much else. The catalog of his work lists more than 626 compositions. Mozart, in short, was immensely prolific. But does that make him a genius? Other composers have been remarkably productive. Take Antonio Vivaldi from the early 18th century, for example. He wrote no fewer than 40 operas and, hold your hat, more than 450 concertos for a variety of solo instruments, one at a time, or several in combination -- all with orchestra, of course. Attending to Anthony Burgess' concern, each of these calls for quite a few lines of music, if not as many as Richard Strauss had to set down for one of his tone poems. And yet, pleasant though his music is, I would not call the very talented Vivaldi a genius. Indeed, I am somewhat sympathetic to the wag who maintained that rather than writing all these hundreds of concertos, Vivaldi wrote the same concerto several hundred times. If Vivaldi is not a genius, but Mozart is, what is the difference between them? Mozart is not primarily an innovator of musical forms. That is the role of his Vienna successor, Beethoven, who by the end of his career had broken practically every rule in the composition manual. That is why Robert Schauffler gave his Beethoven biography the subtitle "The Man Who Freed Music." Mozart, in contrast, mostly poured wine into old bottles, or into bottles the shape of which he had only tweaked. But what wine! It is in that nectar that we must locate Mozart's genius. Pursuing that theme courts the danger of becoming inarticulate, if not downright tongue-tied. Genius brings into the world something that is unprecedented -- not just novel, but significant and, using a common metaphor, something that is deep or, in the more respectable latinate, profound. urely that is true of the work of Albert Einstein, the most uncontroversial example of genius. In 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein published five papers that became the foundation of physics for the rest of the century and beyond. It was both of the physics of the very large (relativity theory) and very small (quantum mechanics). Much later, these achievements prompted Time magazine to honor Einstein as Man of the Century, while in 2005, the centenary of Einstein's "Miraculous Year" was widely celebrated. Both these recent events were, so to speak, obvious. By then, scientists fully understood what Einstein had put forth and were able to build on his work. And even ordinary folk had learned that his achievement had innumerable practical consequences -- from the building of the atom bomb to the invention of the transistor. But in 1905 and for some years after, not all that many were able to follow Einstein. What he put forward was radically new, overthrowing theories unquestioned since Newton set them down two centuries before. All the marks of genius are there. One of them, however, has so far remained unexpressed. Consider when we call someone's action or insight "a stroke of genius." Are we thereby conferring on the author of that stroke the mantle of "genius"? Other things being equal, I think not. One swallow does not make a summer. To be a genius, it is not enough to have performed an ingenious act or two. There must be the capacity to perform such acts so that, by virtue of being a genius, many actions and creations -- as was true of Einstein -- are characterized by that trait. That surely does not raise any problems for Mozart. He literally produced hundreds of works that bear the mark of genius. Although there are some uncertainties about precise timing, during Mozart's 26th year, to pick the counterpart of Einstein's annus mirabiles, he wrote three piano concertos (Nos. 11, 12 and 13), the "Haffner" Symphony, and the "Abduction from the Seraglio" (an opera radically different from one written about a year before, "Idomeneo") plus a bushel of wonderful chamber music. But nothing has been said about just what traits characterize Mozart's works as that of a genius. What is the new wine he poured into those bottles? I am tempted to say, as one is often driven when trying to talk about music: "For Pete's sake, just listen and if you have ears, you will hear!" I will try to do better, if, alas, by not much. To start with, in spite of those old bottles, Mozart is just about never predictable; compare that with Vivaldi. At every turn he surprises you, defying expectations. But when the surprise comes, the listener instantly believes that what was just heard was inevitable. Needless to say, melodies and harmony are always inventive, never just routine. Then, even more important, there is the emotional content of his music. Before the era of Sturm und Drang and without vast orchestral forces, Mozart is capable of investing in his music feelings of great complexity: happiness modified by worry, triumph that has an undercurrent of fear, love that is mixed with regret. These are not Mozart's emotions, as most of the "Pathetique" Symphony surely expresses Tchaikovsky's. They are the emotions of Figaro or the Count, or Blondchen or Tamina. When listening to Mozart operas, we have a good idea what protagonists think and feel without understanding the words. In instrumental music, these complex emotions are "simply" embedded in the texture of a symphony or piano concerto or in those sublime 50 minutes during which just three string instruments (in the Divertimento in E-flat, K. 563) reach our ears and minds and hearts. For such reasons and more, there is very little music by Mozart that a reasonably practiced listener will not recognize, almost instantly, as having been composed by Amadeus, beloved of God. his last long paragraph also holds the secret, I believe, why there are many decent and even good Mozart performances, but not many truly outstanding ones. There are surely more pianists who can brilliantly perform the very difficult Rachmaninoff concertos than there are those who can put across with real conviction the vastly "easier" works of Mozart. Numerous conductors, today, can make Mahler come alive, as they also successfully "manage" his gigantic orchestra. Yet far fewer can perform Mozart in a way that captures most of what he put into his compositions. (The greatest Mozartians, I believe, are no longer with us; among them are two Britons, the pianist Clifford Curzon and the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.) These shortcomings, where they exist, are not the kind that might have been overcome at the conservatory. They are not technical, strictly speaking; they are emotional. The true Mozartian will somehow grasp, intuit, the emotions embedded in Mozart's compositions -- in the notes that are on the paper in front of the performer -- and, having grasped, succeed in expressing them and in conveying them to the audience. That is harder than, and calls for abilities very different from, playing Lisztian double octaves at breakneck speed. Mozart, I hesitantly venture, is not a musical genius, but the musical genius -- hesitantly, because I really love a great variety of music. Still, if I were ever stranded on that desert island, I would want to have with me that 12-inch box of 170 compact discs by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But fortunately, I am still here, together with the readers of this piece. Mozart's genius enriches all of our lives, as do many others, from Shakespeare to Moliere to Eugene O'Neill, from Velasquez to Cezanne to Picasso. Geniuses such as these entertain us, in the sense that they give us pleasure as they hold our attention. They don't, however, merely entertain us, whiling our time away like a good detective story or a well-crafted Hollywood romance. They enlighten and even inspire as they entertain. They move us as they reveal aspects and corners of the worlds of mind and heart that we would not come to apprehend without the work of those who have the spark of genius. (Rudolph H. Weingartner, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is a former board member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (rudywein@pitt.edu). ) E-mail this story  Print this story
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The Chutzpah of an Eighteen-year Old

Here I announce without comment that I’m about to teach classes in music appreciation.

Dec. 1, 1945

Hello, youall!

   I was waiting for at least something to happen when I wrote again – so with great efforts, I made something happen.

   So listen:

      First of all – my permanent detail is now working in the Educational Services Office, telling boys to take courses help them fill out blanks & doing a little slow-speed typing. That is not however why the Lieutenant hired me. First of all: On Wednesday evening I teach my first class in Music Appreciation featuring especially Tristan & Ring – Liszt & Wagner) I will enjoy that. The chances are, that I get the course until I leave O.G.U. (The present teacher – a professional – leaves Tuesday.) Also the Lieuy is interested in German –  & I expect to do some work in that. Perhaps I’ll be temporarily assigned to him – but no one knows a thing yet. Of course the Music Job is what I really want & I’m afraid, that a regular musician might take charge. The course is outlined & is just up my alley – I could do it very well. Anyway it’s a nice change.

   Just now I finished developing my first film – can’t tell yet how they came out – but tomorrow I’ll print them. I’m at the Chicago S.M.C. [?] where the man in charge helped me a lot.

   I’ll have to stop now, but more tomorrow –

                        Solong 

                                    Rudy

   Today, seventy years later, I have only a smudgy recollection of my teaching music appreciation—Tristan and the Ring no less!—in my temporary Navy home, just before being shipped off to China. I am actually amazed by the tone of the letter that takes it utterly for granted that I have the ability to take on this pedagogic task, though I had zero experience in teaching anything, not to mention teaching a subject matter I had never studied. Yes, I was what is called a music lover, and a passionate one; yes, besides listening to music and singing in choruses all my life--my main encounters with that art—I did some reading about music while in high school, even dipping into Ernest Newman’s biography of Richard Wagner, though not remotely did I plow through its four volumes.

   I read more as time went on, but never systematically and sat in on a couple of summer session courses at Columbia. But finding the required Music Humanities course beneath my dignity (probably wrongly so), I took the test that let me skip it. I’ve also written some about music, most notably for cd liners, one of which was actually praised in a review of Ellie’s Mozart and Brahms quintets disc. Plus a great many miscellaneous pieces and numerous op eds on various music topics for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (My favorite: http://www.trumpetmaster.com/vb/f145/sound-american-music-36435.html) For a while I reviewed concerts for Pittsburgh's WQED, one review phoned in from Tel Aviv when I went with the Pittsburgh Symphony to Israel. 

   The biggest thing I have tackled is a major analytic piece on the multiple attractions of music, but it remains uncompleted somewhere in my computer. It is not yet finished, because, eschewing technical language, which both reveals and hides, I find writing about music immensely difficult. I note without elaboration that just our vocabulary is vastly richer about things seen than pertaining to what is heard.

   All my life I have been friends with musicians, hung out with them, and became more formally involved, such as holding various posts at Chamber Music Chicago and serving for a decade or so on the board of the Pittsburgh Symphony. I did not become a professional musician, but I certainly spent a lifetime nibbling at the edges of that world.  It will not surprise the reader that my computer also harbors various sketches toward an essay about what it is to be an amateur.