Marlboro Music, the venerable chamber-music retreat in the foothills of Vermont, recently lost two of its mainstays. The violinist and conductor Blanche Honegger Moyse, who died on Feb. 10 at the grand age of one hundred one, was one of Marlboro's co-founders; she is fondly remembered in the Brattleboro Reformer. And the violinist and violist Philipp Naegele, who was present for the first Marlboro gathering in 1950 and spent more than fifty summers there, passed away on Jan. 31 at the age of eighty-three; Marlboro's own website memorializes him. When I visited Marlboro in 20o8, I didn't have a chance to meet Madame Moyse, but I did get to know Philipp. The youngest son of the German painter Reinhold Nägele, a beneficiary of the Kindertransport in 1939, he was an extraordinarily learned and thoughtful man whose passion for music animated almost every sentence he spoke. He was especially devoted to Shostakovich and had long campaigned for the Shostakovich quartets to be brought into the mainstream chamber repertory. (The Russians were the only truly musical people, he told me.) He also had an intense and idiocyncratic appreciation for the Austro-German late-Romantics — Mahler, Strauss, Schreker, and others. I remember him arguing, late one night at the Marlboro coffee shop, that Salome was in fact a feminist opera, although the youthful din made it hard for me to make out all the particulars of the thesis. When I last saw him, at Marlboro last summer, he spoke of a profound experience he'd had listening to Mahler's Seventh Symphony while recovering from heart surgery. He heard it as a "quasi return to life," its convulsions and mysteries giving away to "visions of transcendent joy and vitality," as he wrote in a subsequent e-mail. Whenever I hear the piece in the future, I will think of Philipp alone in his hospital room in the dead of night, listening to Mahler and coming back to life.
