Showing papers in "Nineteenth-century music review in 2010"

Music, Letters and National Identity: Reading the 1890s' Italian Music Press

Abstract: Much ink was spilled on the subject of music in fin-de-siecle Italy. With the rapid expansion of the bourgeoisie during the last decades of the nineteenth century, opera-going in Italy was at its apogee, and as opera attendance surged so too did the demand for gossip about singers, titbits about the lives of composers and reviews of the latest works. This was a moment at which the booming Italian opera and journalism industries converged, particularly in the large northern cities, to produce an explosion of periodicals devoted to opera, encompassing a range of critical methods. The 1890s, however, also saw the development in Italy of a new branch of criticism devoted to more ‘serious’ types of music, penned by writers explicitly hostile to opera's domination of Italian musical life, who looked to the north as their cultural spiritual home.

Herder's Nineteenth Century

Abstract: I begin this essay epigrammatically with song, with a single song that came to tell an historical tale of the nineteenth century (Fig. 1, p. 3). We know this single song in many versions, though it is perhaps the second version that most musicians and scholars of the nineteenth century, more accustomed to playing or hearing the keyboard music of Johannes Brahms than singing Child ballads, know best (Ex. 1). In the Brahms setting, the first of his op. 10 Balladen for solo piano, it may perhaps no longer be a song at all, for its narrative has been stripped of words.

‘Repatriating’ Falstaff : Boito, Verdi and Shakespeare (in Translation)

Abstract: In 1946, W.H. Auden began a series of weekly lectures on Shakespeare's plays at New York's New School for Social Research. Arriving at The Merry Wives of Windsor, he pronounced it ‘a very dull play indeed’. Nevertheless, he allowed, ‘We can be grateful for its having been written, because it provided the occasion of Verdi's Falstaff, a very great operatic masterpiece’. Having nothing to say about The Merry Wives, he played a recording of the opera for the duration of the class.

Japan's Early Twentieth-Century Violin Boom

Abstract: ‘Invasion from the Orient’; ‘Young Violinists from Asia Gain Major Place on American Musical Scene’; ‘Suzuki's Pupils Learn Music First’: in the 1960s, headlines such as these drew attention to how successfully Asians had made Western art music their own; violinists from Japan were among the first. Observers have speculated on the reasons, but few know enough about Japanese history to realize that the phenomenon had its roots in developments during the Meiji period (1868–1912).

From Byron's The Corsair to Verdi's Il corsaro: Poetry Made Music1

Abstract: At the crux of Byron's epic poem The Corsair lies a moral dilemma for its imprisoned hero, Conrad. Should he kill his sleeping enemy, Seyd, and thus evade impending torture and execution the next morning? Or should he accept death as the just recompense for his crimes? His decision is swift. He resolutely refuses the path of the ‘secret knife’; in contrast, Seyd's favorite slave and concubine, Gulnare, declares her readiness to do the deed instead. When Conrad, pursuing her through the winding passages of the high tower, sees her again, he at first thinks that her ‘softening heart’ had spared Seyd's life.

Behind the Police Chief's Closed Doors: The Unofficial Censors of Verdi in Rome

Abstract: A certain Filippo Nardoni, upon completing his review of the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Alvaro (the Roman version of La forza del destino), wrote to the director of the police: ‘I have marked in pencil the proposed corrections, which I have thought advisable for the wretched subject of the opera. If you don't like them, they can be easily erased with sandarac’. It seems strange that an ostensible censor would correct a libretto and then not mind seeing his corrections erased; censors were, after all, gatekeepers of morality and political propriety, and no libretto was supposed to be permitted without their approval. As it turns out, Nardoni was not an official Roman censor, and yet, he and other prominent personalities were more important in censoring Verdi's operas than their official colleagues. They were not only more rigorous when it came to identifying potentially dangerous passages but also worked as a team, passing the libretto around among themselves until an acceptable alternative was found.

Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel: A Note on the Structural Role of the Thematic Recollections in Songs 4 and 9

Abstract: To begin with two observations: (1) of the nine songs that eventually came to comprise Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, two – Nos 4 (‘Youth and Love’) and 9 (‘I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope’) – quote material from earlier songs; and (2) in an article published in 1897, Vaughan Williams criticized some of his predecessors for lacking a ‘nice sense of proportion’ in their music, surely implying, therefore, that he valued it in his own music. And it is with the interaction of those recollections and that ‘nice sense of proportion’ in songs 4 and 9 that we will be concerned.

Siegwart Reichwald, ed., Mendelssohn in Performance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). x + 272pp. $39.95

Abstract: from the middle period to support Beethoven’s interest in restoring the secondhalf repeat to sonata form: in the first movement of the ‘Waldstein’ (1803–04), where the autograph originally called for both halves to be repeated; in the finale of op. 54 (1804), where the seconda parte dwarfs the prima by a factor of 7, and where both repeats are prescribed (and normally observed); and in the finale of the ‘Appassionata’ (1805), where the repeat of the seconda parte (but not the prima) perfectly sets up the racy danse russe in the coda.5 Both books are handsomely produced. The music examples in Unfinished Music enable the reader to follow all of Kramer’s arguments to their final, indispensable details, and readers will be especially grateful for the generous number of illustrations from the relatively inaccessible keyboard works of Emanuel Bach. For the definitive versions of the three movements that form the focus of Inside Beethoven’s Quartets, the Juilliard marked the scores with bowings, additional dynamics, and all their premeditated tempo fluctuations and pauses. (As a bonus, we get a few viola and cello fingerings for op. 18, no. 1.) There are a handful of typographical errors in each, but only one factual slip (in the quartet book) that merits comment. It is not quite true to say that, when the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata was sent to London, Beethoven told his publishers that they ‘could just publish two movements if they wanted to, and publish the other two movements as a separate piece’ (p. 228). In the event, and in conformity with the composer’s preferred option, the London edition appeared as a two-volume set comprising (1) a ‘Sonata’ made up of the first movement, slow movement, and scherzo as finale, and (2) an ‘Introduction and Fugue’. This makes the kinship between the ‘Hammerklavier’ and op. 130 especially close as, in both cases, it was the fugue that became detached from the rest of the work.

The Medieval Leper Plagues Modern Paris: Sylvio Lazzari's La Lépreuse

Abstract: February 1912: The curtain of the Opera-Comique rises to reveal medieval Brittany. Washerwomen gossip about lepers who walk among the healthy, in defiance of the law. The women hint to Maria that her son, Ervoanik, is in love with the beautiful Aliette, who, it is rumoured, is one of these freely roaming lepers. Ervoanik does love Aliette, and when he informs his parents of his decision to marry her, his father explodes in rage. Doesn't he know that she is the daughter of a leper? Ervoanik refuses to believe it. The hideous appearance of Aliette's mother, Old Tili, betrays her own leprosy as she attempts to lure young children with her singing to eat her infected breads. When Aliette and Ervoanik stop at Old Tili's cottage to rest before making a holy pilgrimage, Tili assumes that Aliette intends to infect him, just as she has infected so many others. When she realizes that Aliette truly loves Ervoanik and plans to live with him chastely, Tili lies, telling her that he already has a wife and children. Aliette confronts Ervoanik, and he claims it is true, as a joke. She immediately touches her lips to a cup of wine and offers it to him. He drinks. In the third act, Ervoanik, now a leper, awaits the procession of the dead, which leads him to his house of exile. Aliette joins him.

Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). xix + 421pp. $99.00

Abstract: Berio’s own intervening connecting passages. The haunting effect of the process makes Rendering a particularly effective tombeau for Schubert. Judged as a whole, The Unknown Schubert presents a good cross-section of modern Schubert scholarship and its concerns. The collection’s emphasis on lesser-known works of the composer is refreshing and allows the reader to become acquainted with some interesting pieces. Admittedly the collection is uneven in quality, but the best contributions are worthwhile studies that contribute to a deeper understanding of Schubert’s work.

English Piano Works

Abstract: This attractive disk provides a snapshot of British piano music in the long nineteenth century, juxtaposing a variety of genres (sonata, polka, romanesca, an extended set of miniatures) composed within a 77-year period. The Piano Sonata op. 13 in F minor by William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875), written as a wedding present for Mendelssohn and Cécile Jeanrenaud, was completed in 1837 at the end of Bennett’s studies in Leipzig. Although not perhaps as well known as his later sonata ‘The Maid of Orleans’ op. 46 (1873), where the four movements are preceded by brief extracts from Schiller’s verse-drama, this is a beautiful work. Whilst some listeners may be conscious of the possible allusions to Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte as suggested by R.Larry Todd,1 or might even detect a Schumannesque quality in some of the obsessive rhythms, Bennett’s major–minor relationships, textural contrasts and variation of contour within his figuration suggest the development of a distinctive style and an early confidence in his writing for piano. It was Stanford who suggested that, with the exception of Mozart, Bennett’s piano music represented the most difficult challenge in performance, and that ‘He [Bennett] unconsciously lays traps for the performer at the most unexpected moments, which spell disaster to the unwary’. Callaghan negotiates any such traps with aplomb, providing a very engaging reading. In the first movement, Moderato espressivo, he brings out the local drama of the scalic runs and sequential passages beautifully, and highlights Bennett’s frequent use of the minor subdominant chord and the arresting move to C minor at the beginning of the development section with a subtle sense of pacing. Although bass notes might have been brought out a little more in places, the staccato chromatics from the inner texture are well projected, and Callaghan produces a beautiful

Laura Tunbridge, Schumann's Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ix + 246pp. £53.00

Abstract: text-music relation, this is surely the best attempt yet to accept and comprehend this extraordinary music on its own terms. Again, the original form is lost because Berlioz destroyed it after a thorough revision, making it harder to be sure about the connection with the play. Rodgers notes how Berlioz apparently recapitulates a phrase from the prologue ‘in the correct key, E major’ (p. 128). But the sequence of composition was the reverse: Berlioz inserted into the muchrevised prologue a direct anticipation of the love scene. Rodgers’s point that this ‘forges the closest connection’ of this theme with the person of Romeo is surely correct, but as the ‘recapitulation’ comes very near the end of the love-scene, as one of Berlioz’s characteristically delayed dominants, it cannot there refer to Romeo’s first declaration. But this is no criticism of a sensitive and insightful piece of analysis. More small points: perhaps literature surveys need not be rigorously chronological, but credit should go where it is due. Rodgers leads (p. 18) with a comment by D. Kern Holoman, and then adds that Cone ‘echoes Holoman’; but Cone’s wide-ranging, penetrating, and path-breaking study is by far the earlier. Holoman, writing in 1997, actually echoes Cone.6 Rodgers calls a section of the finale of Symphonie fantastique (his first music example) ‘the Dies Irae’ (sic: pp. 17, 20). But ‘the Dies Irae’ is the second movement of Berlioz’s Requiem, grandly built through intensified melodic rotation. I was surprised that Rodgers excludes any sonata-form element from Berlioz’s La Tempête, although – as with the symphony composed the same year, 1830 – sonata form is only part of the story. The book is excellently written, and its origins as a thesis need deter no one willing to take seriously the musical discussion of music. Readers should not neglect the notes, some of which are as important as the main text; it is a pity that they are relegated to the end since CUP has recently shown itself not unwilling to place them at the foot of the page. All in all, Rodgers’s scrutiny of Berlioz’s music is not only imaginative, and informed by generous reference to prior analysts, but – as is not invariable in Berlioz studies – it is also accurate (the missing  in the fifth chord of Ex. 4. 4, p. 79, is a misprint, and the analysis is correct). In every important respect, this is a most welcome development in the critical and analytical literature on this complex and eternally fascinating composer.

Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). xv + 304pp. £16.99

Abstract: Its author, himself a distinguished pianist and academic, has written an engaging account of nineteenth-century pianistic behaviour, and makes an impassioned case for the resurrection on the modern stage of certain performance traditions – traceable through recordings, anecdotes, diaries and old editions. But why might we be in need of any such resurrection? In contrast to the interactive freedom and variety of nineteenth-century concert life, Hamilton argues, the ‘extreme formality’ (p. 88) of present-day etiquette fostered by our ‘duller urtext-obsessed modern era’ (p. 180) is cold and inauthentic, or as he puts it candidly: ‘modern classical concerts can be glacial, tedious, and ridden with the historically unjustifiable snobbery commonly lauded as “serious listening”’ (p. 31). What is more, modern pianists are trained to be impervious toward the ‘vulgar multitude [of] ... unworthy auditors’ (p. vii) – that’s us, Hamilton implies ironically – whose customary, ‘profoundly unhistorical’ shroud of silence surrounding the performance of musical works could only have meant in Liszt’s day that ‘the piece [and performance] was a failure’ (p. 62). In this reading, Lisztian practice becomes a cipher for the pianistic success we lack today, offering us a way out of an age of modern boredom wherein the piano is no longer such ‘a vital part of the musical world’ (p. 256). Hamilton paints in dark hues, but are things really as bleak as this? The true extent of his protest is revealed in the final chapter:

Stephen Rodgers, Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). x + 189pp. £50.00

Abstract: extend his study to works translated after Mendelssohn’s death, thus reducing the total number of Mendelssohn’s English-language publications in Table 11.1. After Mendelssohn’s death, William Bartholomew, Mendelssohn’s primary English translator, continued to add works to this list, most notably Athalia, Oedipus at Colonos and the Christus fragments. Leaving the reader with an apt summary that might serve for the entire volume, Cooper exhorts performers ‘interested in a faithful rendering of [Mendelssohn’s] music ... to strive for that same cultural, linguistic, and musical comprehensiveness’. Mendelssohn in Performance makes a substantial contribution to furthering that goal, and should be on the shelf of every performer, scholar and devotee of Mendelssohn’s music. Various small mistakes do not substantially detract from the value of the volume, some of which have been cited above, but one final correction should be noted for the jacket illustration. It is not the ‘Wedge’ stage setup from Fig. 8.1 (p. 163) as identified on the back inside flap; rather, it is a title page reproduced in Fig. 1.1 (p. 4).

Introduction to the Special Issue on Ottocento Opera

Abstract: In the early 1960s a PhD candidate at Princeton University informed his professors that he wished to write a dissertation on the operas of Gioachino Rossini. He was pointedly discouraged from doing so and told that, if he wished to be taken seriously in musicology, he should focus on worthwhile repertory such as Renaissance music or works by nineteenth-century German composers. The student persisted in his purpose and, with his groundbreaking dissertation, set the study of ottocento opera on a solid trajectory. That student was Philip Gossett. Recently, at a gala event celebrating Philip's ‘retirement’, many of us who have focused our scholarship on this repertory were reminded about the evolution of the study of nineteenth-century Italian opera during the past 50 years.

Andreas Giger, Verdi and the French Aesthetic: Verse, Stanza, and Melody in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). x + 294pp. £52.00

Abstract: of audiences. He is right to alert readers to the assumptions built into terms such as ‘appropriation’, but given the unequal relations of cultural and economic capital that existed – and continue to exist – between, say, the vanished music of eighteenth-century Hungarian ‘gypsy’ musicians and Joseph Haydn’s ‘rondo in the gypsies’ style’, much about the term remains relevant. In a position familiar from arguments against censorship, Locke invites us to be more tolerant of musical images we find expressive of intolerance, to forgo dismissal of exotic masterworks on the basis of offended sensitivity, and to trust in listeners’ ability to reflect critically on the artwork before them. Such admonitions will probably not prove contentious in an Anglo-American context, given the book’s particular focus on images of the Muslim Middle-East and of Hungarian and Spanish ‘gypsies’, though one wonders if they would be so freely offered, or accepted, had the subject been representations of (say) African Americans or Jews. Why is there no entry for ‘race’ in the index to a book that seeks to lay out the cultural work of exoticism? And can the history of empire be so reassuringly contained within European culture before the Second World War? Locke’s tone of liberal neutrality, his reluctance to speak about power, and his lack of self-consciousness about contemporary relationships between his home country and the Middle-East render his book just as provocative as the ‘injudicious and extreme’ critiques against which he writes. Perhaps one day the dust will settle and we will achieve a balanced appraisal of exoticism. Until that time, Locke’s book will remain a valuable, but not impartial, contribution to the debate.