Douglas McLennan, the proprietor of ArtsJournal, has set up an Arts Blogger Challenge, in conjunction with the next edition of Spring for Music, in May. The initiative has stirred up some opposition, notably from Lisa Hirsch; Doug defends himself from the charge that he is failing to take seriously a discipline that he helped to invent. The deadline for entering is today. (No, I will not be participating.)... Blue Heron, the superb Boston-based Renaissance vocal ensemble, sings at the Cloisters on Sunday.... The St. Louis Symphony's campaign to Save Powell Hall is not quite what it appears to be.... The American Mavericks blitz begins this weekend, with William Basinski and Tristan Perich at the Kitchen, Mary Halvorson and music of the late Arthur Russell at same, Lisa Moore in Queens, and the JACK Quartet. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Phil is presenting their Brooklyn Village project on Saturday and Sunday.... I caught City Opera's Così fan tutte last night. Christopher Alden's staging starts well, with Sunday-in-the-park, Belle Époque imagery edging into surrealism, but action in the second act slows literally to a crawl. The young British tenor Allan Clayton is the standout in the cast. All told, it's an improvement on the anonymous Traviata last month.... Sarah Baird Knight asks critics, "How do you approach music that draws from multiple traditions, or that falls between genre lines?" An excellent question, worth pondering. Almost all critics are rooted most strongly in one genre or another, and will feel at least a touch unsure when confronted with a hybrid. I wrote about my own insecurities outside the classical zone here. As far as I can judge, there is only one critic actively working who writes about pop and classical music with equal — and great — authority. That is Steve Smith. The New York Times ought to feel lucky to have him.
Wagnerism
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Premiere
More or less all I've done in Austin this week has been to serve as chauffeur for the brilliant and gorgeous cast of Gayby, but I'll try to muster comment on a smattering of music events in the next day or two. This weekend there's a contemporary classical showcase at SXSW.
Checking into the Hotel Elefant
A New York contemporary-music ensemble has sprung up with the intriguing name Hotel Elefant; it will make its debut on March 15, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, with a concert featuring works of David T. Little, Chinary Ung, Peter Bussigel, Leaha Maria Villarreal, and Mary Kouyoumdjian. I took notice when the name showed up in a press release, because it reminded me of a singular scene that I describe in the opening pages of The Rest Is Noise: a meeting of Strauss, Mahler, Puccini, and Schoenberg at the Hotel Elefant in Graz, following the Austrian premiere of Strauss's Salome at the Graz Opera, on May 16, 1906. The composers talked well into the night, although, alas, only a few scraps of their conversation were recorded. The following day, Strauss wrote to his wife mainly about himself: “It is raining, and I am sitting on the garden terrace of my hotel, in order to report to you that Salome went well, gigantic success, people applauding for ten minutes until the fire curtain came down, etc., etc.”
As it happens, when I was working on The Rest Is Noise, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to track down information about the Hotel Elefant — the kind of obsessive pursuit of the tangential yet somehow essential detail that often overtakes authors of books. The debut of the Hotel Elefant ensemble is surely the only occasion I will ever have to disgorge this small store of trivia. There are various old hotels and inns called Elefant in Germany and Austria; the name was apparently inspired by an Indian elephant that Emperor Maximilian had brought to Vienna in 1552, its appearance causing great excitement along the way. Graz's Elefant had existed for centuries, and took on the status of a grand hotel when Eduard List opened a large new structure in 1889. (List's grandson Hans was an authority on internal-combustion engines, as his memoirs attest.) After the Anschluss, the hotel was taken over by the Wehrmacht. At the end of 1938, an Elefant waiter named Adolf Stengl, horrified by Kristallnacht, attempted to warn foreign observers of the scale of the pogrom against Jews; for this action he was arrested, and was not heard from again. The hotel closed in 1945. It has made one notable appearance in fiction: in Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day, two characters meet in the hotel's garden, against the backdrop of the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-09.
In 2001, as I was beginning to write my book, I stopped for a night in Graz. Turandot was playing at the opera house, in a bizarre production set in a futuristic pop-culture world of ultraviolent football games and striptease cheerleaders. The next morning, I went looking for the Elefant, clinging to the idea that I might be able to find an old hotel ledger in which all those famous names could still be read. But the Elefant was now the site of the local offices of the Austrian Trade Union Federation, and the ledger had disappeared. “Ja, there was a hotel here,” an elderly desk clerk told me. “Eighteenth century. Nineteenth century. Long time ago.” Standing in the parking lot where the garden used to be, I struggled to picture that rainy morning in 1906, when Richard Strauss said good-bye to Gustav Mahler, and sat contentedly on the terrace for a while.
Austin bound
I'm heading to the great town of Austin, Texas, for the sprawling South by Southwest festival. Aside from an appearance at a panel discussion — They Used to Call It Classical, on March 16 — my duties will be mainly of a spousal nature, as Gayby, the feature-film directorial debut of my husband, Jonathan Lisecki, is having its premiere at SXSW, screening in the narrative competition. Needless to say, we're tremendously excited by this turn of events; the film has already received some flattering attention from Indiewire, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Austin Chronicle. There will be several off-topic posts as the week proceeds, but I'll try to bend an ear to some of the purely musical events. I want to hear the fascinating Nicolas Jaar at the Pitchfork Showcase, for example, not to mention the keynote address by Bruce Springsteen, who, I hear, will examine twelve-tone octatonicism in the music of Foghat.
CD of the Week: Florian Boesch's Winterreise
"Frühlingstraum" from Winterreise, with Florian Boesch, baritone, and Malcolm Martineau, piano; Onyx Classics 4077.
Straussiaen*
I've been happy to see a couple of positive reviews, in Opera News and The Musical Times, of Charles Youmans's Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, to which I contributed an essay entitled "Strauss's Place in the Twentieth Century." Both reviews took notice of my claim of a possible connection between Strauss and Messiaen, the common thread being Messiaen's teacher Paul Dukas, who admired Strauss and was admired by him in turn. Above are two musical examples, from the Presentation of the Silver Rose in Der Rosenkavalier and from Messiaen's youthful piano prelude "Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu." They don't sound alike as much as they look alike, but the resemblance is striking all the same.
*Title courtesy of Chris Walton.
Maerzellany
This year's MaerzMusik festival in Berlin, which begins on March 12, takes as its theme "Cage and Consequences," dwelling on the likes of James Tenney, George Brecht, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Joan La Barbara, Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela will make what might turn out to be their final European appearance. There's also a concert devoted to Annie Gosfield, currently in residence at the American Academy in Berlin.... Judith Weir's latest opera, Miss Fortune, arrives at Covent Garden on March 12, having made its debut at Bregenz last summer.... The far-thinking Bay Area pianist Sarah Cahill will play twice in New York this week. On Tuesday she gives a mystical recital at Poisson Rouge, summoning Satie (Sonnerie de la Rose + Croix), Scriabin, Rudhyar, Cowell, and Ruth Crawford; on Thursday she goes to Roulette for an Interpretations concert celebrating female composers, with works by Bun-Ching Lam, Frances White, and Pauline Oliveros.... Who knew? Kid Rock will perform at a benefit for the Detroit Symphony, aiming to raise $1 million for the formerly beleaguered, now recovering orchestra. "There will be matters of balances and sound level," Leonard Slatkin tells Detroit critic Mark Stryker.... On March 18, Leon Botstein and the American Symphony venture Franz Schmidt's Notre Dame, his adaptation of the Victor Hugo tale. Portraying the Archdeacon is Stephen Powell, a strong-voiced, psychologically layered Germont in City Opera's Traviata last month.... The same day, the young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor makes his New York debut, at the Frick. I found his Decca CD technically dazzling but a bit chilly and mannered, particularly in the almost perversely fast Chopin Scherzo No. 1. He does show a distinct personality, though, unlike so many of the young virtuoso being touted by Decca and DG these days. Charles Downey has a review of his recent DC appearance.
Viele, father and son
I'm not sure if it's a good or bad sign that certain of the volumes I am examining for my next book, Wagnerism, give scant evidence of having been cracked open since the end of the silent-movie era. Having no realistic alternative, I am forced to assume that it augurs well. The above is from a gently disintegrating library copy of Joies, a collection of poems by the American-born French poet Francis Vielé-Griffin, author of Swanhilde and Wieland le forgeron, earnest disciple of Verlaine and Mallarmé. "Je suis l'ombre et l'écho d'un soir d'épitalame," etc. Alas, Vielé-Griffin was fated to be overshadowed in the eyes of posterity by his formidable father, Egbert Ludovicus Viele, who served as a brigadier general in the Civil War — his memories of Lincoln are not without interest — and who exerted considerable influence as a civil engineer and parks planner in New York City, preparing the famous Viele Map. The elder Viele is buried at West Point, in a tomb that is more Verdi than Wagner. According to West Point literature, Viele had a buzzer installed inside his sarcophagus, so that he could signal the caretaker if he awoke. It was evidently disconnected after too many cadets rang it for fun in the middle of the night.
