An extraordinary recording, one of John Eliot Gardiner's finest.
Wagnerism
David Elliott tribute on WHRB
Today I've been listening raptly to WHRB's David Elliott Memorial Orgy, a tribute to Harvard radio's spiritus rector, who died last month at the age of seventy-eight. It was a melancholy joy to hear again David's mellifluous, unpretentious, effortlessly knowledgeable voice. Was there was ever a finer announcer of classical-music radio? I know of none. But he was a great deal more than that; he was an educator of rare ability, a mentor of unstinting generosity, one of the most selfless people I have ever met. In a segment aired toward the end of the program, I tried to convey my gratitude to and for David, without whom I would probably have never become a music critic. Here's the audio I sent to Allison Pao and Xilin Zhou, two Harvard undergraduates who managed the brilliant feat of putting together the program and sending it out remotely:
Many more memories came to mind as I listened to dozens of alumni, performers, listeners, and friends extol David. What he created at the station was an atmosphere of dedication, seriousness, and thoroughness, which applied not only to classical music, his primary interest, but also to folk, jazz, rock, and R&B. Each department had a particular identity, a sense of mission, and whether or not David liked the music in question — he blanched at the ruder eruptions of post-punk rock and hip-hop — he appreciated anyone with an assiduous streak. When, for example, my friend Jason Shure went to superhuman lengths to pay tribute to Captain Beefheart, he earned David's respect, if not his comprehension. Obsession was the rule during the winter and spring "Orgy" periods — orgies being multi-hour or in some cases multi-day explorations of a composer, artist, band, ensemble, genre, or period. Orgies are said to have begun when a student expressed relief at having finished his exams by playing all nine Beethoven symphonies in a row. Thanks primarily to David's influence, such stunt-like escapades became ambitious undertakings of research and explication. Shortly before I arrived at WHRB, the station aired a complete traversal of the works of J. S. Bach, with Prof. Christoph Wolff serving as scholarly adviser. Nothing quite like it had taken place anywhere; David and Michael Rosenberg, who produced the program, were able to make use of Hänssler Classics recordings of cantatas that had just been issued.
My somewhat maladjusted post-adolescent temperament was immediately drawn to these exercises in exhaustiveness. David recognized me at once as someone who would join him in his quest to uncover little-known composers, neglected performers, and obscure oddities of all kinds. Although he loved the core repertory as much as anyone, he refused to let WHRB become the sort of easy-listening classical station that would play snippets of Vivaldi and greatest hits of Mozart. Indeed, there was a list of "warhorses" that were more or less forbidden, although they were allowed to run rampant on a semi-annual Warhorse Orgy. I inherited from David a wide-open conception of the repertory, running from Alkan to Zelenka. There was never the one perfect recording. Whenever I fastened on to a favorite — say, Karajan's Mahler Ninth — he would say, "Have you heard Bruno Walter live from Vienna?" I might have stuck with my Karajan, for the time being, but the interplay of alternatives was all important. As historically informed performances of Baroque music came to the fore, he retained a charming fondness for the likes of Alfred Cortot's Brandenburgs, Malcolm Sargent's Messiah, and Klemperer's St. Matthew Passion. I have a distinct memory of him listening in awe when the Passion came on the air. As I was bustling on to some pressing task, he said, "Just listen!"
During my time at WHRB, I presented two weekly shows, the Twentieth-Century Symphony and Music Since 1900, and hosted a procession of orgies, including complete surveys of Britten, Shostakovich, Brahms, and Nielsen, as well as a multi-genre program called the Avant-Garde of the 70s and 80s, with sections on jazz and experimental rock curated by Mike Pahre and Mike Vazquez. David's vast record collection would fill in many missing gaps in these programs: only he could have supplied Shostakovich's Moscow, Cheremushki or Britten's Paul Bunyan (yet to be commercially recorded, but David had an off-the-air tape). The orgies would include historical-performance sections, for which David usually served as guest announcer. (We could not, of course, announce for 50 or 60 hours straight, though we'd stretch the limits of what was possible.) For my final WHRB project, Mahler and the Fin de Siècle, David contributed an impeccable segment on Mahler's Singers, playing rare discs of Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Leopold Demuth, Selma Kurz, Leo Slezak, and Richard Mayr. I spent so many hours chatting with David, looking over Schwann record catalogues, browsing the Harvard Music Library catalogue, plotting how to obtain the seemingly unobtainable. It was in David's spirit that I ended up writing to György Ligeti in the hope of locating a recording of the Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes. Ligeti duly told me how to find one — a letter that I subsequently lost, to my eternal regret.
At times, this pursuit of the elusive became absurd. Not until WHRB's 75th-anniversary celebration in 2015 did I discover that David had recorded a delirious moment from my Nielsen Orgy of January 1990. He proceeded to play that tape to the anniversary gathering, sending me into a vertiginous state of pride and embarrassment blended. What happened was that I had listed in the program guide a recording of Nielsen's final finished work, the 30-second-long Piano Piece in C, Fog-Schousboe 159. It was supposed to appear on Hyperion's two-CD set of Nielsen piano music, with Mina Miller at the keyboard. But when I got out the discs I was bewildered to find that tiny piece was not there. I made this discovery just before the the final section of the program, which presented legendary symphonic performances by Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen. David, observing how crestfallen I was by the absence of FS 159, came up with a crazy plan: why not find the score at the Harvard Music Library and make an instant recording? I was no great shakes as a pianist, but the music was brief enough, and simple enough, for me to tackle. During Grøndahl's Second Symphony, I ran to the library to check out the score, and during Tuxen's Fifth I ventured with David to the Adams House Junior Common Room to make the recording. This is what ensued on air:
It's doubtful that anyone would have cared if the Piano Piece in C had failed to appear, but at that moment it mattered to me immensely. David took obvious delight when the students were seized by manias of this kind, which set WHRB apart from every other station. I thank him for having cultivated my obsessive drives, directed them, put them to constructive use. What he did for me is what all great teachers do. And, although he had no official role in the money-devouring monster that is Harvard University, he was one of the two best teachers I encountered there — one of the best teachers I ever had.
Year in writing
I wrote four longer pieces for The New Yorker this year: an article about the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, in January; an essay about the German-speaking emigration in L.A. in the 1930s and 40s, in March; a profile of the pianist Igor Levit, in May; and an essay on white supremacy in classical music, in September. I also fashioned a piece on Wagner in Hollywood from the final two chapters of my book Wagnerism, which appeared in September. My Musical Events columns touched on Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony, the LA Phil's Weimar Republic festival, The Flying Dutchman and Agrippina at the Met, Yuval Sharon's Sweet Land in L.A., CDs by Víkungur Ólafsson and Liza Lim, online marathons by the Met and Bang on a Can, new music after George Floyd, Poulenc's songs, the LA Phil at the Bowl, Jennifer Walshe, Sharon's Twilight: Gods, and virtual orchestral seasons. My online contributions included a year-end list, a piece on Hitler in the bunker, short notes about Nick Neely's Alta California and Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, a look at the Spektral and JACK Quartets, a meditation on Billy Budd and Beau Travail, an examination of the ecological cost of recording, an interview with John Williams, a piece on Willa Cather's One of Ours, and a musical memorial for my mother, who died in February. Deep thanks to all who found time to read my work in this horrendous year, and still deeper thanks to The New Yorker for giving me the space and time to write.
Dawn in Panamint Valley
As a reward for the end of the long haul with Wagnerism, I spent a week in the area of Death Valley, my favorite place on earth. Based in the lovely town of Shoshone, I passed several lazy days reading Don Quixote, watching Antonioni movies, and observing the play of color on the Resting Spring Range. My major expedition involved renting a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon from Farabee's and driving up to Urehebe Crater, where I went on to the Racetrack road. I hadn't seen the Racetrack playa, with its famous sliding rocks, and Teakettle Junction (I performed the obligatory teakettle exchange). I then followed the White Top Mountain Road and hiked a bit at the top of Bighorn Gorge before going back south on the Hunter Mountain Road. I camped on Lake Hill Road in Panamint Valley — a new moon enabled the most extraordinary night sky I've seen since I was in Djibouti in 1999 — and began the second day driving down the Trona-Wildrose Road (photo above). I went off pavement at Ballarat and made my way over to the Goler Wash, driving behind mining trucks that sent up photogenic plumes of dust in the dawn sun. At the top of Goler Wash I made the inevitable stop at Barker Ranch and then ascended to Mengel Pass, trusting my Farabee's beast to handle an alleged road that consisted mostly of piles of rock. It did not fail. Butte Valley was the reward on the other side, with the geological wonder of the Striped Butte at its heart. I went down Warm Springs Canyon and got on the West Road. With an hour or so remaining before sunset, I branched off on the Trail Canyon Road and briefly explored one of the canyons at the top. Back in Shoshone, I resumed inactivity, though I spent one day hiking the gorgeous trails of China Ranch and driving in the Nopah Range wilderness. This was my tenth trip to Death Valley, but there's still so much more to see. My next goal will be the far north part of the park. Deepest thanks as ever to Darrel Cowan.
Previously: Desert Bloom
Apex 2020
Off the 15, somewhere between Barstow and Baker.
At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2020.
The Rest Is Noise Person of the Year is Yuval Sharon.
Some notable music books of 2020: Philip Kennicott's Counterpoint (Norton), Laura Tunbridge's Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Yale UP), Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi's The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (Cambridge UP), John Luther Adams's Silences So Deep (FSG), Kyle Devine's Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press), Richard Taruskin's Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices (California), Maryanne Amacher's Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini (Blank Forms), Jan Caeyers's Beethoven: A Life (University of California Press), Philip Clark's Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time (Da Capo), Roger Nichols's Poulenc: A Biography (Yale UP), Graham Johnson's Poulenc: A Life in the Songs (Norton).
Outside of music, I read with great enjoyment Garth Greenwell's Cleanness (FSG), Jordan Kisner's Thin Places (FSG), Adrian Daub's What Tech Calls Thinking (FSG), Hari Kunzru's Red Pill (Knopf), Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings (University of Virginia Press), Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's Set the Night on Fire (Verso), Rick Perlstein's Reaganland (Simon and Schuster), Ed Caesar's The Moth and the Mountain (Avid Reader), Nick Neely's Alta California (Counterpoint), Steven Johnson's Enemy of All Mankind (Riverhead) and, a year late, Robert Macfarlane's astounding Underland (Norton).
Warning: fin-de-siècle Wagner deepfake
The image above has been attached to several (generally very kind) articles about my book Wagnerism. It is advertised as an authentic Wagner photo on popular photo-farming services. Getty Images labels it "c. 1875." Alamy places it back in 1843. It dates, in fact, from some time after 1900, when Wagner had been dead for quite a while. It seems to derive from a series of staged photographs produced by the S. Blueh Wien Rotophot company — Rotophot being a popular consortium of postcard publishers. I would guess that it appeared around the time of the Wagner centenary in 1913. Here is another pose from the same series, marked "Erinnerung an Richard Wagner" ("Souvenir of Richard Wagner"). One can also see the Meister brooding at the keyboard as scenes from Act III of Tristan float through his head. The model bears a certain resemblance to Wagner, although Giuseppe Becce caught him better in the 1913 film The Life and Works of Richard Wagner. Thanks to Patrick Swanson and Andrew Newman for soliciting my opinion of the image, thereby sending me on one last Wagner Detour.
Sunrise hike
My younger self would have been aghast at the idea of a hike at sunrise. Until I was thirty or so, I routinely stayed up well past midnight, writing or drinking, and rose in the late morning, sometimes the early afternoon. I now regret all those hours spent sleeping through the light.
For David Elliott
David Elliott, the longtime mainstay of WHRB, the Harvard radio station, died yesterday at the age of seventy-eight, after a two-year struggle with ALS. For decades, David had been a pillar of the Boston classical-music scene, conducting countless interviews on his Monday-night program. His devotion to WHRB as an institution was absolute and selfless. At several crucial moments, he acted to save the station at a time when the Harvard administration was not particularly concerned about its fate. Under his guidance, WHRB became a place of musical discovery for generation after generation of undergraduates. So it was for me. My career and life would have been completely different without David's intervention.
I tried out for WHRB in spring 1987, at the suggestion of my freshman roommate Jon Lehrich, who, as it happens, has succeeded David as the chair of the station's board of trustees. David immediately noticed me as someone who was unusually interested in new music, music history, and recordings, and encouraged me at every turn. I remember his delight when I organized a chronological survey of the complete works of Benjamin Britten; many of the recordings came from his vast personal collection. In 1988, he had the idea of adding record reviews to the WHRB Program Guide. I now realize that he was opening a path for me even without my knowing it. On a more personal level, I was then a rather troubled kid, as the photograph above hints, and David was one of two adults on campus — the other was Robert Kiely — who gave me wise and gentle guidance. I owe him an incalculable debt, and mourn his loss alongside innumerable others.
A Harvard Gazette article from last year tells more of David's life and achievement. And Jeremy Eichler has written a beautiful obituary for the Boston Globe.
More young-adult Wagner
I received a wonderful book-finishing gift from my colleague and friend Will Robin: a short illustrated version of Wagner's Ring, published in 1964, with illustrations by Warren Chappell and text by none other than John Updike. A section of Wagnerism is devoted to the curious spate of children's and young-adult Wagner books that came out around 1900, often with creatively bowdlerized treatments of the plots. The titles include Anna Alice Chapin's Wonder Tales from Wagner and The Story of the Rhinegold, Grace Edson Barber's Wagner Opera Stories, Florence Akin's Opera Stories from Wagner, Constance Maud's Wagner’s Heroes and Wagner’s Heroines, William Henry Frost’s The Wagner Story Book, and J. Walker McSpadden's Stories from Wagner. (McSpadden also wrote Famous Dogs in Fiction and Ohio: A Romantic Story for Young People.) In these retellings, fewer mishaps befall the characters: Akin allows both Siegfried and Brünnhilde to survive. My favorite evasion of Wagnerian difficulty comes from Chapin, describing Siegmund and Sieglinde: “They loved each other as much as though they had been really brother and sister.”
Siegfried fighting Fafner, by Warren Chappell
Updike, who evidently wrote his story for the benefit of his sons David and Michael (so the dedication suggests), makes his own adjustments to the tragic plot of the Ring. Although he does not hide the incestuous relationship between the twins, he passes over the story quite hastily: "Their life was unhappy, but before they died, they had a son, Siegfried, who has been raised in the deep forest by a kind and clever dwarf." When Siegfried takes the Ring from Fafner, he does not kill Mime but simply walks away: "So small do greedy people seem to a man filled with the music of love." And the entire action of Götterdämmerung is confined to a couple of extremely vague sentences at the end: "Siegfried and Brunhilda knew joy in one another, but did not live happily ever after. No human beings do. In time they died, and in dying returned the Ring to the mermaids of the Rhine, where to this day the gold may be seen glittering — though people say it is just the sun mixing with the water."
Yuval Sharon's Twilight: Gods
Garage Band. The New Yorker, Oct. 26, 2020.
Nightafternight playlist
New and recent releases of interest.
Ash Fure, Something to Hunt; International Contemporary Ensemble, Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra, Nate Wooley, Rebekah Heller, Brandon Lopez (Sound American)
Clara Iannotta, Earthing; JACK Quartet (Wergo)
Sarah Hennies, Spectral Malsconcities, Unsettle; Bearthoven, Bent Duo (New World)
Du Yun, A Cockroach's Tarantella; Du Yun, JACK Quartet (Modern Sky)
Experiments in Living: Music of Brahms, Schoenberg, Crawford Seeger, Pluta, Cheung, Charmaine Lee, George Lewis; Spektral Quartet, with Claire Chase (New Focus)
Bára Gísladóttir, HĪBER (Dacapo)
Sarah Davachi, Cantus, Descant (Late Music)
Jürg Frey, l'air, l'instant; Reinier van Houdt, Dante Boon (Elsewhere)
Ives, Symphonies Nos. 1–4; Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic (DG)
Encounter: Music of Bach/Busoni, Brahms/Reger, Reger/Becker, Morton Feldman; Igor Levit (Sony)
Silver Age: Music of Scriabin, Prokofiev, Stravinsky; Daniil Trifonov, Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra (DG)
Voices of the Wilderess: Music of the Ephrata Cloister; Elizabeth Bates, Clifton Massey, Nils Neubert, Steven Hrycelak, Christopher Dylan Herbert directing (Bright Shiny Things; out Nov. 20)
