Grave Encounters – Diaghilev and Stravinsky

The 100th anniversary of the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, May 29 1913,  is fast approaching, with performances worldwide to mark it. The ballet was first performed in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, which also premiered Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrushka. Pictured together are Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their collaborative work, they are buried in the same cemetery. Surprisingly, though, that cemetery is in Venice, on the island of San Michele. A vaporetto will take you there, then a map will guide you to the Orthodox area.

Diaghilev’s grave is quite strikingly unusual, and it is adorned not only with flowers, but with offerings of ballet shoes. To the right in the photograph are the dancers Serge Lifar and Bronislava Nijinska beside the grave in 1970 (photograph from the Library of Congress); to the left is a more recent view.

An excerpt from a 1913 review of The Rite of Spring in The Observer made me smile:

‘… If there is a redeeming feature, it is an amazing exposition of the possibilities of rhythm, without which, of course, the dancers would have been hopelessly entangled … Beyond this there is nothing in the music that might not have been better obtained by placing several German street bands together and bidding them do their worst with the juxtaposition of any old tunes they liked. The score is not even cleverly descriptive. It is sheerly and wilfully impertinent…’

Here is Stravinsky talking about the Rite -

Stravinsky’s tombstone lies flat on the ground, next to that of Vera, his second wife, and again there are flowers on it, but also pebbles, stones, pine cones, gravel – anything to hand which can be placed as a mark of respect, a token of appreciation, of wonder, of overwhelming, incredulous amazement at being in the presence of the mortal remains of one of music’s towering figures. Well anyway, that’s how I felt, as I stood alone before that grave on a chilly, grey November morning last year.

Stravinsky had a special relationship with Venice; his Piano Sonata had been performed there in 1925, his Cappricio was performed there in 1934, and he conducted the premiere of The Rake’s Progress at La Fenice in 1951. The Canticum Sacrum was commissioned by the Venice Biennale, and dedicated to Venice’s patron saint, St Mark; its first performance was in 1955 in St Mark’s Cathedral.  

I’ll let Bernstein, pictured right with Stravinsky, have the final word about  The Rite of Spring:  

‘ …it’s also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name.”

And here is Bernstein in rehearsal -

Verdi200 – Rigoletto – Verdi’s opera, and Liszt’s Rigoletto Paraphrase

It is said that one picture is worth ten thousand words; in the picture above, the body language says it all, really. On one side of a wall in a well-lit room is an amorous couple: he, richly and flamboyantly attired, with an arm about her waist; she, dressed provocatively, looking flirtatiously over her shoulder. On the other side of the wall,  beneath a menacing night sky and an inn sign, a lady spies on them, and listens intently with one hand raised in distress, the other arm held or even pulled by an older man. In the background there is a bridge over a river. This is the famous quartet scene from the final act in Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, which premiered at La Fenice in 1851. Liszt chose this scene as the basis of his Rigoletto Paraphrase. Hear the original below, with Placido Domingo as Rigoletto:

How interesting that Liszt didn’t choose to feature ‘La Donna e Mobile‘, that famous, catchy melody which was only revealed to the tenor two days before the premiere. Instead, Liszt wisely chose the dramatic heart of the opera, involving four characters: the denouement scene where Rigoletto takes his daughter, Gilda, to overhear the Duke of Mantua flirting with Maddalena. Gilda is forced to face the reality of the Duke’s licentiousness, and all four characters express their different emotions in a masterly aria.

Liszt’s paraphrase is no less masterly. It opens with a mini-overture, using brief references to the main musical ideas associated with Maddalena – lively octaves –  and Gilda – impassioned, sighing octaves and cries of pain.

A filigree cadenza, almost harp-like in its delicacy, precedes the entry of The Tenor; here is the melody sung by Duke of Mantua, in the rich key of D flat: ‘Bella figlia dell’amore’, heard in the middle register of the piano. Lightly strummed chords accompany, as they do in the opera. Then the ladies are heard; Maddalena’s empty chatter and Gilda’s anguished responses, leading to a climax, fff, and some interlocking 6ths in a descending chromatic scale – hmm…

Liszt follows Verdi’s harmonies, but when the second verse of the aria is reached, the RH and LH share the melodic material, while taking turns to wreath the phrases in pianistic decoration. Arpeggios sweep the length of the keyboard, chromatic arabesques swirl like curlicues, with dazzling, effortless nonchalance. And all pp – una corda, including the RH chromatic thirds…

Following the original aria, the texture now changes. LH accompanies the new RH octave melody - it is Gilda’s voice we can hear, and even the operatic dynamics are closely followed, with a sudden pp as the phrase descends. The material is repeated, but now the melody notes are doubled and quadrupled. [Note to self - relax the wrist ...]

The piece draws to a close as the voices combine in rich harmonies beneath a chromatic halo. And finally – a brisk stampede of Lisztian octaves to finish. Exhilarating!

Here is Cziffra, and the score -

Britten100 – a First Class Stamp for a First Class Composer

A new set of stamps issued today by the Royal Mail includes one honouring Benjamin Britten, whose centenary is being celebrated this year.

How very appropriate for the composer who set W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’ to music, for use in a 1936 documentary film of the same name.

It’s an irresistible poem, a rhythmic tongue-twister which captures the era of steam-trains and the excitement that getting a letter brings; Britten’s score suggests the clanking engines, the strain of the uphill climb, the speed of the downhill descent.

Email replaces so much letter-writing now, but I still feel a frisson of pleasure when a hand-written missive drops through the front door.  So later I will write a letter to a musical friend, go to the post office, and send it first class, bearing Britten’s stamp.

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

The Postcards, the Painting, and the Bolognese Sauce.

Italiano: BO Bologna piazza Nettuno e via Indipendenza (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It all started with the Postcards; six or seven of them, dated from 1st to the 19th October, 1945, showing black and white views of Bologna, similar to these ones found on Wikipedia. The ink of the handwriting on the back is faded but still legible, as my late father-in-law, stationed in Northern Italy after WWII, jotted brief notes to his fiancée – later his wife – back in England.

‘…This is the main square of the town…’ and so on, until we come to ‘…Here is a picture showing a closer view of the two towers in the centre of Bologna. I don’t know what they are for, but they make a good landmark for aeroplanes!…’ 

Mozart and his father would also have seen the towers on their two visits to the city, in the 1770s.

And then there was the Painting; Raphael’s The Ecstasy of St Cecilia, seen by Liszt during a visit to Bologna in 1838. He wrote an open letter to Joseph d’Ortigue, published in the Gazette Musicale of 14 April, 1839: ‘ … As soon as I arrived in Bologna, I sped off to the museum [pictured]. I hurried right through three galleries… as I was very anxious to see the Saint Cecilia. It would be difficult, even impossible, for me to make you understand everything I felt when I suddenly found myself in the presence of that magnificent canvas where Raphael’s genius appears to us in all its splendour…’*

So with the tantalising incentives of the views on the Postcards and the Painting, it seemed a good idea to visit Bologna to see them for ourselves. And we did, finding it fascinating to compare the postcard scenes then and now, and to follow the footsteps of a 25-year-old serviceman in 1945, and the footsteps of the 27-year-old Liszt in 1838.

As for the painting, Marie d’Agoult was dismissive: ‘Nice day. Arrival in Bologna. First impression, disappointment. Town badly built, poorly paved, ugly arcades, very choice art Gallery. Saint Cecilia less admirable than I had expected. I am beginning to think that Raphael’s reputation is somewhat overrated…’**

So why did it captivate Liszt? I think there are three reasons.

Firstly, he had a vested interest. St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians and of church music, has been celebrated for centuries by churches named in her honour, and in the arts. Poems by Dryden and Pope, and works by composers including Charpentier and Handel, and more recently Parry, Britten and Howells, extol her virtues. Britten, cleverly, was born on St Cecilia’s day, November 22nd, in 1913. Bologna has an Oratory of Santa Cecilia (right), with frescoes showing views of her life, situated in the Via Zamboni; one passes it on the way to the Pinacoteca Nazionale in the Via Bell’Arti, where Raphael’s painting of her hangs.

Secondly, Liszt was particularly smitten with the works of art he saw in his Italian travels where he found parallels in music, and was directly inspired to compose Sposalizio and Il Penseroso in his Année de Pèlerinage II - Italie by works of art by Raphael and Michelangelo. His open letter to Joseph d’Ortigue describes each of the personae in the St Cecilia painting as they listen to heavenly music, writing that ‘ …they epitomize the essential elements of music  and the different effects it has on the heart of man…’  

Finally, the painting is – quite simply – stunning. Curiously, I found myself in the same situation as Liszt, hurrying through the arcades of Bologna because of time constraints – retracing his footsteps along the Via Bell’Arti to the gallery, quickly going inside, through various rooms whose contents there was no time to admire, following the pointed directions of attendants as I queried ‘Santa Cecilia?’ at each turn, until, at the end of a long corridor, through a doorway and on the far wall … ah.  There she is.

And, just like Liszt, how impossible to describe the effect …  Percy B. Shelley wrote wonderfully about it. No reproduction online can really do the painting justice. The colours are so vivid – and it is so – well – beautiful, and no two people will see it alike. But what struck me were the details of the musical instruments: a fretted viol with five pegs but just one broken, curling string, tambourines, one with bells as well as jingles, a triangle, cymbals, a flute, and small drums with broken skins. St Cecilia holds a portative organ, as she does in many images, but as her concentration is focused on a vision, so the organ is upside down and forgotten, its inverted keyboard with keys at different heights, some of the small pipes beginning to slip out as gravity takes it toll. And the vision which she sees and hears – angels, singing from large part-books. The two on the right made me smile, as one is pointing at the copy, as if to say, ‘We’re at that bar, THERE!‘

Mission accomplished, it was time to go back out into the sunlight, along the arcades of the Via Zamboni amidst groups of chattering students from Bologna’s university, past the Oratory of Saint Cecilia, and past the Teatro Comunale, which happily is presenting performances of Britten’s opera, The Turn of the Screw, on several dates in November 2013 – but sadly not on St Cecilia’s day, his centenary.

Oh – I nearly forgot. The Bolognese Sauce. Now who could go to Bologna and not try some Spaghetti Bolognese? Correction; it’s supposed to be eaten with tagliatelle, not spaghetti. And that’s how we had it. Here’s the recipe. Just in case Bologna and its Pinacoteca Nazionale are not on your list of must-visit places…

*******

 

* Liszt’s writings on St Cecilia are published in ‘An Artist’s Journey’, translated and annotated by Charles Suttoni, published by The University of Chicago Press.

** from d’Agoult -Memoirs

My Heart Will Go On – ‘Titanic’ violin authenticated

Walking along the subway near South Kensington tube this afternoon, I heard a busking violinist play the Celine Dion hit ‘My Heart Will Go On’ from the 1997 film, Titanic. The choice of repertoire was very appropriate; it has recently been announced that a violin thought to belong to Wallace Hartley, band leader on the ill-fated ship, has been authenticated. Not that he would have been playing that song in 1912.

The story of Hartley’s band playing till the end has often been told. What intrigues me are conflicting reports: newspapers of 1912 reported that the violin, in a suitcase, was discovered strapped to his body, found some days after the ship sank. Other reports state that the inventory of his belongings, made after the discovery of the body, does not mention the violin. The violin authenticated as Hartley’s bears corrosion marks indicative of immersion in salt water.

If this violin was on the ship, the image of Hartley finishing the final piece, putting his violin in the suitcase, and strapping the case to his body leaving his hands free to cope as best he could with the shipwreck, is remarkable. Here was a man facing likely death, fulfilling his professional obligations in extraordinary circumstances. But was he also looking at the slim chance of survival, and looking with hope towards a future, equipped with the instrument with which he made his living.

The violin has suffered damage, but I hope that someone, somewhere, restrings it and plays ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ in memory of Wallace Hartley and the brave musicians who perished with him. RIP.

La Fenice – The Phoenix, Venice’s inflammable Opera House

 

The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Flight of the Phoenix, Dumbledore’s pet phoenix –  the phoenix, a mythical bird which rises from the ashes of its predecessor, has a special place in literature. But no Phoenix is more true to its mythical nature than the architectural one found in Venice: La Fenice, the opera house.

Above is La Fenice in 1837. In 1838, Liszt wrote: ‘La Fenice is one of the most attractive theatres in the world. Destroyed twice by fire, it has, like the bird whose name it bears, risen twice from the ashes.’ He attended a performance of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia there.

And yet La Fenice burned down again, in 1996, being set alight deliberately by two electricians. Once again, it was rebuilt.

If going to an opera at La Fenice is not an option when visiting Venice, you can still tour the building, hiring an audio-guide in the beautiful ground-floor foyer which is stunning, and the only part of the opera house which wasn’t burnt down.

Or have a look at the video below.

There are chamber music concerts in the gracious large room upstairs, which houses a Fazioli.  One of the foyers was the scene, in December 1882, of Cosima Wagner’s musical birthday treat from her husband, who assembled an orchestra to perform his Symphony in C Major. Liszt was there too, and Wagner persuaded him to give a performance on the piano to the assembled throng, something Liszt rarely did at that stage of his life, and almost never to order.

One of the foyers, Teatro La Fenice, Venezia, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

La Fenice has hosted premieres of works by Verdi, Britten and Lutoslawski, whose anniversaries we celebrate this year, and by Stravinsky, whose grave is in Venice. More anon …

 

I stood in Venice… Liszt’s Gondoliera

How different it was for Liszt when he first visited Venice as a young man many years before, aged twenty-seven.

‘Have you ever been to Venice? Have you ever glided on the sleepy waters in a black gondola down the length of the Grand Canal or along the banks of the Giudecca?… Have you seen the moon cast its pale rays on the leaden domes of old St Mark’s?…’

 Liszt wrote this in a public letter to Heine, published as an article in the Gazette Musicale, 8 July 1838. ‘I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs’  starts the letter, quoting from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which Byron completed in Venice. Arriving with Marie d’Agoult in late March 1838, Liszt was clearly captivated by the city, writing engagingly about it in articles which appeared in instalments in L’Artiste.

I am repeating myself; I wrote that introduction when discussing Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli in 2011. But the return to that post is intentional, as a prelude to a more detailed exploration of Gondoliera from that set of three pieces, comparing it to La Lugubre Gondola of Liszt’s final years.

Liszt’s descriptions of gondolas and their talented oarsmen are revealing: …’ a boat is passing beneath my windows just now. It carries musicians, and a man’s beautiful voice, accompanied by a chorus, is singing ‘La notte è bella.’… They are going to the Lido; I shout that we must follow them; we leap into my gondola…’  The song mentioned is by Perruchini, who wrote popular Venetian songs. It is his setting of ‘La Biondina in Gondoletta‘ which Liszt uses as the basis of Gondoliera. This video of the song ascribes it, however, to Mayr…

… but whoever wrote it captured the rhythmic rocking of the Barcarolle style; interestingly, Liszt casts this 1840 piece [it was published much later] in the same key as that most famous of pianistic gondolier ‘songs’ written in 1845/6, Chopin’s Barcarolle, also in F sharp major. The longer version of La Lugubre Gondola has a section in F sharp major too; and, as in La Lugubre Gondola, Gondoliera starts at a lower range, with an evocative introduction conveying the rhythm of the oars and the swell of the water; at the end there is a beautiful chordal sequence above a tolling bell.

The song is presented in different guises – as a melody in thirds, then up an octave, with differing LH accompaniments, and, at one point, above a trill played by thumb and second finger, before transferring to the LH while the RH pirouettes daintily above in arpeggio figures.

A lovely piece, and an effective contrast to Liszt’s 1883 gondola pieces. I look forward to performing them this year.

Liszt’s writings on Venice are published in ‘An Artist’s Journey’, translated and annotated by Charles Suttoni, published by The University of Chicago Press.