Sibelius famously remarked to his fellow composer Bengt von Törne: "Never pay any attention to what critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!" Not quite true. Commenters at Felsenmusick point out that the Canadian artist Joe Fafard made a statue of Clement Greenberg, and that there is a statue to the literary critic Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Also, I seem to remember seeing a statue of the Russian critic Vladimir Stasov — dedicatee of Pictures at an Exhibition, subject of several extraordinary portraits by Ilya Repin — in St. Petersburg. These, however, are obviously the exceptions that prove the rule. The way I see it, critics can play a useful cultural role, but composers should ignore what they say, even when it's positive. Praise can be as unnerving as criticism, as Sibelius learned after paying too much attention to Olin Downes.
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Conductor on the aisle
What will James Levine do on his forced vacation? To judge from this review [now corrected — 3/20] in the Financial Times, he's made a surprising choice — to take up music criticism. In his debut effort, he trains his experienced ears and eyes on the Metropolitan Opera itself, modeling his prose style on that of the sharp-tongued critic Martin Bernheimer. The third-person self-references are very sly.
The Jukebox strikes up
Mark Swed writes an excellent overview of musical minimalism for the LA Times. It's in preparation for the LA Philharmonic's Minimalist Jukebox festival, which looks on paper to be one of the best things an American orchestra has ever done, convening such classic works as Terry Riley's In C, Reich's Four Organs, Glass's Akhnaten, Andriessen's De Staat, Pärt's Tabula Rasa, and Adams's Harmonielehre, together with such latter-day phenomena as Glenn Branca's Hallucination City for 100 electric guitars (Branca is seeking players), Michael Gordon's film symphony Decasia, and a performance by The Orb. (I'd be covering all this, but after some agony I've decided that there is more news value in the Paris premiere of Kaija Saariaho's second opera, Adriana Mater, which is happening at the same time. Esa-Pekka Salonen is conducting, Peter Sellars directing: there is no escaping the LA domination.) Swed recounts a Berkeley professor's reaction to In C: "[Riley] betrayed Berkeley. He betrayed music. He betrayed Gedalge [author of Treatise on the Fugue]. He betrayed everything this department stands for. I will not allow that album to be brought into my classroom. This has nothing to do with Vietnam. It is about preserving civilization." Minimalism is civilization, dear sir. It is tradition made modern. Also, here is Alan Rich's minimalist paean, replete with memories of the infamous 1973 performance of Four Organs in Carnegie Hall, which caused the last great musical scandal of the twentieth century. By the way, if you want to see something very haunting, watch the video of the June, 2001 premiere of Hallucination City, in a place that no longer exists. (Photo above by Emily Watkins.)
Seems, madam?
Several readers have commented on Beethoven's decision to tie two eighth-notes together in the first soft statement of the theme at Allegro. The composer's practice of writing tied notes where a single note might have sufficed has long puzzled scholars and performers; Jonathan Del Mar recently wrote an entire article on the subject for the journal Early Music. Ian Hampton of the Langley Community Music School, in British Columbia, observes that a string player can "'suggest' these ligatures [slurs] even in the heat of battle in ways that the piano cannot." He also notes that the keyboard action of instruments in Beethoven's time would have allowed the player to hint at the breaks between notes. To answer Hampton's question, the slurred notes are indeed carried over into the piano arrangement. As I said in the column, Karl Holz twice asked Beethoven about the slurred notes in the Conversation Books. The first time was in early January 1826, when Opus 130 was being rehearsed. The second time was in April 1826, when the four-hand arrangement was in preparation. Evidently Beethoven's notation was as puzzling then as it is now. Incidentally, my copies of the Conversation Books once belonged to Claudio Arrau, as I relate here.
Finally, I'd like to mention two essays that offer rich ideas about the quasi-operatic aspects of Opus 130, especially the relationship of the Cavatina and "Overtura" of the Fugue. They are Lewis Lockwood's "On the Cavatina of Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130," in Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 60. Geburtstag (Tutzing, 1989) and Richard Kramer's "Between Cavatina and Ouverture: Opus 130 and the Voices of Nature," in Beethoven Forum 1 (University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Lockwood writes: "By taking so intense an operatic aria-type into the string quartet, Beethoven shows in the most palpable way that this late quartet is itself a transcendent composition of a new type...." Kramer writes of the dramatic G's: "The effect is [close] to some fantastical scene from the fictions of E. T. A. Hoffmann. The mock cavatina is shown to be just that: an act of fantasy, not really a cavatina. The repudiation is all the more painful because the music is in any case very real. The beauty of the thing is real, not simulated."
The Great Fugue returns
The Juilliard School announced this morning that the hedge-fund billionaire Bruce Kovner, who is chairman of the Juilliard Board, is donating a remarkable collection of one hundred thirty-nine musical manuscripts and materials to the school. I attended a press conference this morning at which details of the gift were announced. It includes the working draft of the four-hand piano arrangement of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge; Kovner, it turns out, was the unnamed person who bought the manuscript at Sotheby's in December. But that's hardly the most significant item in the collection. It also includes:
— The long-lost transposed continuo part of Bach's Cantata BWV 176, with markings by the composer
— First sketches for the ethereal opening of Beethoven's Ninth, together with the corrected copy of the symphony that was sent to the printer
— Corrected proofs of Brahms's Klavierstücke Op. 118 and 119
— Copland's Clarinet Concerto, inscribed to Benny Goodman
— Mozart's score for the wind, brass, and timpani in the final scene of The Marriage of Figaro (written out separately because there wasn't room in the main score)
— A draft of the ending of the first movement of Mahler's Ninth
— A draft of the opening scene of Puccini's Fanciulla del West
— A major trove of Schubert manuscripts and marked editions
— Sketches for an unknown Symphony in C minor by Schumann
— A large batch of manuscripts of Alfred Schnittke, including sketches for the opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten
— Stravinsky's earliest sketches for Petrushka
— The typescript of Joseph Gregor's libretto for Richard Strauss's Daphne, with notes by the composer in the margins
Many of these have never been examined by scholars; it will take a long time to absorb the information contained in them. Juilliard President Joseph Polisi, the school's chief librarian Jane Gottlieb, and scholars Christoph Wolff, Maynard Solomon, and Michael Griffel were on hand to make some preliminary observations, Wolff rightly acclaiming "the richness and the balance and the focus of this collection." Kovner himself stated that he no longer wished to hide the material under a "metaphorical mattress" and wanted it become part of life at Juilliard. A music enthusiast who once took night classes at the school and served briefly as music critic of Commentary, Kovner has apparently been buying the better part of everything musical that has been up for auction in recent years. Last year I noted that some fascinating items were up for grabs at Sotheby's; the Barber, Sibelius and, most happily, Strauss items all go to Juilliard. The collection will be available to scholars starting in 2009, in a climate-controlled reading room. There are also plans to make all the manuscripts available in digital images online. Kovner, a somewhat mysterious behind-the-scenes figure in high finance and right-wing politics, has declined to attach his name to the gift; it will be known as the Juilliard Manuscript Collection. The image at the top is the beginning of the Grosse Fuge arrangement, complete with the fortissimo G's that I described in my recent article. Here's a pdf of the complete listing of items. Some more images follow below.
