The 40s: The Story of a Decade
Page 67
Simon remained on the beat until 1948, when he ceded his position to Hamburger, who, despite the fact that he had not studied music, turned out to be a keen, deft observer. (“Just listen and write,” Harold Ross sensibly told him.) After a year, Hamburger moved on to the brave new world of television, and Douglas Watt, best remembered for his theatre reviews, wrote the column for a few years. Winthrop Sargeant also contributed a few notices, and, in 1953, he took over for a two-decade stint at Musical Events. A professional violinist who had played under Toscanini in the New York Philharmonic, Sargeant knew the core repertory, but he showed little sympathy for contemporary music. Only with the arrival of the formidable London critic Andrew Porter, in 1972, did The New Yorker acquire a classical commentator comparable in influence to the likes of Edmund Wilson, Pauline Kael, and Whitney Balliett. Still, it’s permissible to feel a bit of nostalgia for the days when almost any generally cultured person on the staff seemed prepared to write the music page. It was a sign of the times.
ROBERT A. SIMON
OCTOBER 24, 1942
This Rodeo that the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo brought to the Metropolitan Opera House last week turned out to be a bright little offering that will please plenty of customers. The scenario, in the language of the program, “deals with the problem that has confronted every American woman, from earliest pioneer times, and which has never ceased to occupy them throughout the history of the building of our country: how to get a suitable man.” This is not presented abstractly, there being no spirit of woman struggling to reach the ideal man, or anything like that. There’s a cowgirl on a ranch competing with visitors from Kansas City for the attentions of the gents. You follow her adventures from a rodeo to a Saturday-night dance at the ranch house—and that’s the story. The rodeo, as a terpsichorean job, is pretty good, a square-dance interlude (without music) is better, and the Saturday-night dance is something of a triumph. The audience doted on the production, and even after the doting tendencies of ballet visitors are discounted, Rodeo goes into the books as a hit.
Miss Agnes de Mille devised the show and Aaron Copland wrote the music. At the première, Miss de Mille danced the suitable-man-seeking heroine charmingly, and her associates went along enthusiastically. There was some ironing-out left for future rehearsals and performances, but the show, taken all in all, was right. Mr. Copland’s music was good theatre and, like as not, will acquire considerable circulation when a concert suite is fashioned from it. The scenery and costumes, by Oliver Smith and Kermit Love, respectively, were excellent, and the orchestral playing, under the alert direction of Franz Allers, was properly energetic.
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Last week was a Shostakovich week, with performances of three of the composer’s symphonies in four days. The Philadelphia Orchestra played the fifth, the Philharmonic-Symphony the seventh, and the Ballet Russe the first, which is the music for Rouge et Noir. Of course, all this didn’t furnish so unified a view of the three works as the forthcoming performances by Artur Rodzinski and the Philharmonic-Symphony will. Eugene Ormandy’s version of the fifth, with the Philadelphia, was a beautifully polished performance, Arturo Toscanini’s of the seventh was persuasively intense, and the ballet presentation of the first, under the direction of Gregory Fittelberg, was orchestrally spotty, although Mr. Fittelberg conducted the music firmly and sympathetically.
There were various points of view in the conducting and a difference in the playing of the orchestras, but there still was the Shostakovich music, and it was obvious that all three symphonies, covering sixteen years of the composer’s career, had the same musical personality behind them. All three were written by a man who is a natural at writing for orchestra; all three contain power and many ingenuities set off against winning and restrained slow movements; all three—even the seventh, composed in a Leningrad at war—have touches of humor, which, in the fifth, range from amusing kidding to heavy waggishness; and all three demonstrate unevenness in ideas and mastery in workmanship. Naturally, this isn’t any attempt to analyze Shostakovich’s music as a whole. It’s simply one reaction to three symphonies, two of which have had many performances and the third of which probably will be heard frequently. By the way, I find that the first symphony has become more impressive since its first local hearings, and the fifth less so. Of course, other listeners may feel quite the other way.
FEBRUARY 22, 1947 (ON BERNSTEIN, TOSCANINI, AND ARMSTRONG)
The first paragraph of music comment in the first issue of this magazine, twenty-two years ago, concerned a guest conductor—Igor Stravinsky, who was then directing the Philharmonic orchestra as a visiting maestro. Guest conductors have made first-paragraph items for me on many occasions since then, and this is another of them. The guest conductor under discussion is Leonard Bernstein, who was not quite seven years old in February, 1925. Mr. Bernstein appeared in Carnegie Hall as transient director of the Boston Symphony last week, when he conducted one of the most famous of that other guest conductor’s compositions, “Le Sacre du Printemps.” In the twenties, “Le Sacre” was still something of a chore for a good many listeners. Today, it’s an accepted and popular part of the standard orchestral repertory. It makes exacting demands on the instrumentalists and their leader (I doubt that “Le Sacre” ever will play the high-school-orchestra circuit), demands that were met brilliantly by the Boston orchestra and Mr. Bernstein. Everything was clear, logical, and cleanly rhythmic.
Before “Le Sacre,” Mr. Bernstein offered Schubert’s Seventh Symphony, sometimes known as “the symphony of heavenly length.” Actually, it is no longer than a good many other symphonies, and it probably would lose none of its heavenliness if it were shorter by a few measures. Mr. Bernstein led it with directness, crispness, and restraint. The directness and crispness were admirable, but a little less restraint would have benefited the more fanciful episodes of the charming music.
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In 1925, Berlioz’s dramatic symphony “Romeo and Juliet” was an item in the reference catalogues rather than a work for public performance, but it was subsequently brought to life, at least temporarily, by Arturo Toscanini. Recently, Mr. Toscanini revived it again, this time on two Sunday-afternoon broadcasts by the N.B.C. Symphony, a chorus, and vocal soloists. It’s a large composition and even now, more than a century since it was written, it is unconventional. In it, one hears music that is at various times exciting, eloquent, good theatre, and meandering. Mr. Toscanini’s powerful projection of the score was one of the many great achievements of his career, and his associates responded impressively. Among the attractions of “Romeo and Juliet” is a poetic mezzo-soprano solo, sung in this case by Gladys Swarthout. Not many Berlioz vocal excerpts are apt to be heard at concerts, but this is one that deserves more general circulation, especially when it’s sung with the vocal beauty and textual expressiveness that Miss Swarthout gave it.
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There was a deal of chatter about the propriety of jazz music in concert halls twenty-two years ago. Even the mild forms of symphonic and classical jazz were considered by some people as unfit for exhibition in any auditorium where you would expect to hear Beethoven. That’s all changed now, of course, and you’re likely to encounter jazz in any concert hall, not only at regular concert hours but around midnight as well. When Louis Armstrong brought his band to Carnegie Hall a couple of Saturdays ago, and alternated his remarkable vocals with his wonderful trumpet playing, the concert was regarded as an event to be debated on its own musical merits. In fact, the most serious and furious arguments about music nowadays all seem to involve jazz. The classic eighteenth-century imbroglios between the Handel and Buononcini factions and the Gluck and Piccini enthusiasts have a parallel in the current clashes between various brands of hepcat.
PHILIP HAMBURGER
AUGUST 13, 1949 (ON TANGLEWOOD)
I went up to Tanglewood last week, to the Berkshire Festival, to listen to the music. The music was consistently pretty wonderful, often quite exalted, but music wa
s not, by a long shot, the only feature of the festival. I am convinced that future historians of the phenomenon of Tanglewood will devote as much attention to its non-musical as to its musical aspects. Take, for instance, cameras. Everybody seems to be carrying a camera. The throngs that attend these concerts are music lovers, no doubt, but they are camera-happy, too. They appear desperately, almost poignantly, anxious not only to absorb the music in a flamboyantly emotional manner but to record on film every instant of their experience there. They wander up, down, and across the spacious grounds snapping pictures. They snap everything and anything. They take pictures of the gracious postcard scenery, with its rolling lawns, formal gardens, and made-to-order backdrop of lake and misty mountains. They take pictures of their families and friends. They take pictures of total strangers and they ask total strangers to take pictures of them. Mostly, though, they take pictures of Dr. Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
I attended a public rehearsal of the orchestra last Saturday morning in the big music shed, and I do not see how Dr. Koussevitzky and his men got through it. An audience of some four thousand persons turned up, everybody having contributed one dollar to the orchestra’s pension fund for the privilege. Four-fifths of the audience carried cameras, or so it seemed to me, and they spent four-fifths of their time standing on their seats or ducking in and out of the aisles clicking their shutters. In the moments when they were not taking pictures, they were engaged in the second most evident non-musical aspect of the festival—hero worship. Around Tanglewood, Dr. Koussevitzky has become a legend in his lifetime. The other morning, he could not make a move on the podium, he could not lift or drop his baton, he could not signal to an oboe player or whistle at a flutist without evoking a chorus of “Oh”s and “Ah”s from the audience. Every ordinary, workmanlike gesture was greeted with adulation and open-eyed surprise. I must confess that I found this slightly frightening, and I would wager that Dr. Koussevitzky—who has every right to expect any honor—is a bit disturbed, too. The tangent down which these audiences now seem to be racing is leading in a distinctly non-musical direction. One can well imagine their ohing and ahing with equal fervor at a crooner or some Hollywood celebrity.
Dr. Koussevitzky is, of course, an iron man, and he continues to present programs of the highest merit. The program of a week ago Thursday evening was of magnificent stature. Jascha Heifetz was on hand for a flawless rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. He played with incredible skill and a controlled passion that was quite overwhelming. On Saturday evening, Dr. Koussevitzky, who—for me, at least—is always somewhat inspired, was more inspired than usual. He gave us first a delightful reading of Roussel’s Suite in F, and then Milhaud’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra No. 1, with Gregor Piatigorsky as soloist. The Milhaud is at once twinkly and profound, and in the hands of Piatigorsky it became a prize of lasting beauty. Dr. Koussevitzky closed the program with a truly monumental presentation of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.” Nothing that Mahler wished to say in this musical poem of life and death was left unsaid by the orchestra or by David Lloyd, the tenor, or by Janice Moudry, the contralto. Miss Moudry’s voice that evening was a voice possessed, and there was in it an unforgettable quality of time past and time to come. Even the camera fiends listened to her, and held off taking their pictures until she was finished.
AUGUST 20, 1949 (ON BENJAMIN BRITTEN)
As it happens, I do not hold a membership card in the Benjamin Britten cult, but I am about to apply for one as a result of hearing Britten’s opera Albert Herring, presented for the first time in this country a week ago Monday by the Opera Department of the Berkshire Music Center, at Tanglewood. Britten and his librettist, Eric Crozier, deserve some sort of words-and-music Croix de Guerre. For one thing, we are confronted with a believable story, involving believable people. There isn’t an entombed and lovesick Egyptian princess, a tubercular bohemian, or a down-at-the-heels and hairy demigod on the premises. The story, as simple and lovely as a nursery tale, takes place in the East Suffolk village of Loxford at the turn of the century. Loxford has always been a happy, easygoing place, where the boys go out with the girls and occasionally get home a little late and slightly rumpled, but in the eyes of the town’s better element—the local aristocratic dowager, the mayor, the vicar, the leading merchant, the superintendent of police—it is rapidly becoming more wicked than Sodom, Gomorrah, Marseille, and Los Angeles combined. “Something must be done!” cries the mayor. “Strong measures are essential now!” shouts the vicar. “Shocking business! I won’t have it!” shrieks the dowager. The town worthies, who are about to choose a May Queen, find themselves completely stumped. No local girl is considered sufficiently pure. For example, one candidate, Winifred Brown, “went with her cousin from Kent for a trip in a dogcart one Sunday in Lent.” Edith Chase? “Much too flighty. When the postman called one day, she opened the door in her nightie!” And so it goes, through every girl in town. In desperation, the committee decides to choose a May King, and for this dubious honor they select one Albert Herring, a twenty-two-year-old sissy greengrocer, who works for his mama, minds his parsnips, and never, never goes out with the girls. The committee offers him twenty-five pounds, a banquet, and a wreath of orange blossoms. Albert has natural misgivings, but Mama, a harridan, is thrilled beyond calculation and forces him to accept the role. To make a short story even shorter (Crozier, by the way, adapted his plot from de Maupassant’s “Le Rosier de Mme. Husson”), Albert gets quietly potted at the banquet when a rakish butcher puts rum in his lemonade, and subsequently disappears on a stolen bicycle, headed for nearby pubs. Next morning, his orange-blossom wreath is found on the road, covered with mud and crushed, apparently by a cart. It is generally assumed that the dear boy has passed to his virtuous reward, and there is wide-spread lamentation. Albert turns up, of course, quite hung over and uncommonly surly, and tells his mother off. He has become, in the common phrase, a man.
Well, there’s the plot. I have laid stress upon it because Britten, in his most sardonic, witty, and felicitous manner, has laid stress upon it. His score is devotedly attached to the story. He has written, truly, an opera. He has created musically a strikingly engaging village, and he has musically delineated each character with astonishing clarity. In Albert Herring, words and music are as one, and the result is triumphant. The night I heard the opera (there were a number of different singers the following night), practically all hands seemed eminently suited to their parts. I was particularly impressed with David Lloyd, the Herring; Janet Southwick, a proper schoolteacher; Eleanor Davis, the dreadful mama; and James Pease, the vicar. Mr. Pease maintained throughout the evening an air of pained piety that was a complete delight, and his voice struck me as being nothing short of extraordinary. My only quarrel would be with Ellen Faull, as Lady Billows, the dowager; she demonstrated a tendency to overshadow her excellent singing with some rather poor acting. Boris Goldovsky conducted the orchestra and, with Sarah Caldwell, directed the enterprise, and he should be given several echoing cheers.
WINTHROP SARGEANT
DECEMBER 24, 1949
As a musical instrument, the violin has its limitations. To begin with, it is incomplete. Except in a handful of musical works, like the Bach solo-violin sonatas, it needs an orchestra or, at the very least, a piano to back it up. The number of great concertos written for it hardly exceeds a dozen, and the number of great sonatas in which it shares honors with the piano or the harpsichord is not very much bigger. It is, moreover, one of the most awkward of all musical instruments, in that its bow is an unevenly balanced affair that, unless firmly controlled, plays louder at the heel than it does at the point, and hence has a tendency to distort, with all sorts of inappropriate swoops and swells, the niceties of musical phrasing. A good violinist (and by this I mean a musical violinist) should be judged to a large extent, I believe, by the skill with which he defeats this tendency and forces his instrument to conform to the principles of fine melodic style. Unfortunately
, there are very few good violinists.
In general, our particular generation of violin playing has been dominated by what might be called the glamour violinist. I use this term because to me it conveys the quality of surface finish (comparable to the faultless makeup of the female movie star) that is characteristic of the type. Mr. Heifetz, Mr. Elman, and Mr. Milstein, for example, have developed luscious tone and accurate agility of the left hand to a point of perfection probably unmatched in the history of the instrument. Yet I do not find them interesting violinists. The reason is that, for all their cosmetic glitter, they almost never interpret music with a real understanding of its deeper dramatic and emotional content. They shine magnificently in showy concertos by such composers as Tchaikovsky and Glazunov, but the purity and subtlety of style required in a simple Mozart sonata seem to be beyond them. There exist, of course, plenty of unglamorous but musically sensitive violinists, many of whom are members of string quartets, concertmasters of symphony orchestras, and so on. The trouble with these men is that they lack the individuality, dash, and brilliance of the true virtuoso. In surveying the subject of contemporary performance on stringed instruments, one is led to the conclusion that the only entirely satisfying artist in the field is not a violinist but the cellist Pablo Casals.