This Week in Classical Music: October 17, 2022.  Liszt, Solti and more.  Of all the composers and musicians born this week, Franz Liszt is by far the most important.  A great composer and, judging by the numerous ecstatic reviews left by his contemporaries, an even greater pianist, Liszt was born on October 22^nd of 1811 in a small Hungarian village next to the border with Austria, both countries back then part of the Austrian Empire.  We’ve written about Liszt many time and also published short articles on his piano cycle, Années de pèlerinage: Year One, Switzerland (Première année: Suisse), here, and Year Two, Italy (Deuxième année: Italie) here and Year Three, named just Troisième Année, here.  Our library has about 250 different performances of Liszt’s works, many by young talented musicians, you can browse it here.  Listen, for example, how 18-year-old Daniil Trifonov plays, live in concert, Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s song Die Forelle.

Luca Marenzio, a fine composer of late Renaissance, was born on October 18^th of 1553 or thereabouts in a village near Brescia.  He served in courts of many notables – first, Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo; then, for a long time, Cardinal Luigi d’Este, son of Ercole II d'Este, Duke of Modena and Ferrara; then Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII; and finally, Ferdinando I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.  You can read more about Marenzio here.  He was one of the finest madrigalists of his time; listen, for example, to this madrigal for four voices, Madonna, sua mercé, performed by the Mirandola Ensemble

Another Italian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, was also born on October 18^th but a century and a half later, in 1706.  During his lifetime he was famous for comic operas, which he wrote to the librettos by Carlo Goldoni.  A Venetian, he spent time in European capitals, Vienna, St. Petersburg and London.  One of his piano sonatas (no. 5 in C Major), which is often played in music schools, was made famous by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.  He also wrote a fine mass, Messa di San Marco.  Here’s the section Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris (Thou who sits at the right hand of the Father) performed by the Vocal Concert Dresden.

Finally, a round date: Georg Solti was born as György Stern into a Hungarian Jewish family on October 21^st of 1912, 110 years ago, in Buda.  One of the greatest symphonic and opera conductors of the 20^th century, he led the Chicago Symphony from 1967 to 1991.  Even though we have many samples of his art in our library, we’ve never written about him at length.  We’ll do it soon, in the meantime, here’s Solti conducting Liszt: Le Preludes, in the 1992 live recoding from Salzburg, with the Chicago Symphony.

This Week in Classical Music: October 10, 2022.  Catching up.  For most of the last month we’ve been preoccupied with Arnold Schoenberg and we’re glad we were while he may not have been the greatest creative genius in the history of classical music, few, if any, composers affected it so much and in the process changed the listeners’ perception of what music is and how to listen to it.  While we were engaged with Schoenberg and the genesis of atonal music, we missed a lot of interesting dates, so today we’ll look back at the month since Schoenberg’s birthday.  Girolamo Frescobaldi, one of the most important composers of keyboard music of the late Renaissance, was born on the same day as Schoenberg but three centuries earlier, on September 13^th of 1583.  Jean-Philippe Rameau, the great French composer of the Baroque, was born on September 25^th of 1683, one hundred years after Frescobaldi.  Rameau was famous for his operas, but the ultimate opera composer was, no doubt, Giuseppe Verdi who was born on October 9^th of 1813.  And Dmitry Shostakovich, one of the most important Russian-Soviet composers was born in St.Petersburg on the same day as Rameau, September 25^th, in 1906.

Several more names: Heinrich Schütz of the early Baroque era, considered by many as the most important German composer before Bach, was born on October 8^th of 1585.  Camille Saint-Saëns was born a day and two and a half centuries later, on October 9^th of 1835.  And then there were several composer who were very important to their particular nations if not necessarily on the same level as some of the names we’ve just mentioned: Komitas, the national Armenian composer; Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who occupied a similar place in Lithuanian culture; the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik; and the American, George Gershwin, born on September 26^th of 1898.  And finally, Alexander von Zemlinsky, who played such an important part in the life of Schoenberg – and also was a very interesting composer -- was born on October 14^th of 1871.

Several eminent pianists were born during the same period, among them the American William Kapell, whose 100^th anniversary was on September 20^th, (he tragically died in a plane crash in 1953, at just 31 years old); Glenn Gould, who also had a round anniversary (90^th), on September 25^th.  And Vladimir Horowitz was born on October 1^st of 1903.  We certainly should mention the strings: the violinist Jacques Thibaud (9/27/1880), David Oistrakh (9/30/1908) and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who turned 67 on October 7^th.  We’ll mention just one conductor, Charles Munch, born on September 26^th of 1891.  We’ve mentioned him several times in the past but failed to write about him at any length; we should correct this lapse - he was one of the best interpreters of French music and led the Boston Symphony for 13 years.  And finally, several singers: Anna Netrebko, who’s been in the media quite a bit lately, not because of her singing – she hasn’t been doing much of that, being temporarily banned from the Met and several European stages – but because of her perceived closeness to Vladimir Putin who is conducting a murderous war in Ukraine; she turned 51 on September 18^th.  And two of our all-time favorite (and very different) tenors, the German Fritz Wunderlich, who excelled in Mozart and Schubert, born on September 26^th of 1930, and Luciano Pavarotti, on October 12^th of 1935.

This Week in Classical Music: October 2, 2022.  Schoenberg, Part IV, In America.  This is the fourth, and – we promise – last installment of our notes on the great Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.  He arrived in the United States on October 31^st of 1933 and spent the first year in Boston.  He probably would’ve stayed longer but Boston’s weather made his asthma worse, and in September of 1934 Schoenberg moved to Los Angeles.  He wrote to his friend, the conductor Fritz Stiedry, who was then working in the Soviet Union: "We are going to California for the climate and because it is cheaper (sic!)".  He eventually settled in Brentwood and lived there for the rest of his life.  To support himself, he gave private lessons (Oscar Levant was one of his students), but soon was invited to lecture at the University of Southern California.  In 1936 he was made a professor at the UCLA.  Otto Klemperer, who emigrated from Germany in 1933, was at the time the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  He performed several of his pieces (to very good reviews) and offered Schoenberg to guest-conduct a concert.  That didn’t go too well, and after another attempt (and scathing reviews) Schoenberg gave up on the LA Philharmonic, whose musicians were openly hostile to him and his music.  Klemperer, who left for the East Coast in 1936 was one of many eminent German refugees living around LA.  Many of them settled in the Pacific Palisades, not far from Brentwood.  One of their meeting places was Villa Aurora, the house of the writer Lion Feuchtwanger.  Here are some of the German refugees living in Pacific Palisades at the time: writers Tomas Mann and his brother Heinrich, Franz Werfel and Alfred Döblin; the playwright Bertolt Brecht; philosophers Theodor Adorno, Ludwig Marcuse and Max Horkheimer; Schoenberg’s pupil composer Hanns Eisler; F. W. Murnau, the filmmaker and Albert Einstein.  Schoenberg knew most of them but was not necessarily friendly with all.  He developed a difficult relationship with Tomas Mann who wrote Doctor Faustus, a book about the fictitious German composer Adrian Leverkühn who invents a new musical technique, a 12-tone system.  Schoenberg was outraged, accusing Mann of “stealing” from him.  Mann, who did talk to Schoenberg about his music, was helped mostly by Adorno.  Schoenberg’s relationship with Adorno was also strained as he felt that the latter didn’t quite understand the creative process behind his method.  Here is an interesting quote from Schoenberg himself on the way he composed: “All I want to do is to express my thought and get the most possible content in the least possible space.... I write what I feel in my heart... “

On the other hand, he became close with Hanns Eisler, who became quite successful writing film music.  Eisler worshiped Schoenberg and tried to help him financially, with Schoenberg often refusing the offers.  (Eisler, a life-long Marxist, was one of the targets of the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation.  He had to leave the US in 1948, settled in East Germany and composed the national anthem of the country).

Even though Schoenberg lived in America for the last 18 years of his life, he never became quite comfortable there and often thought of emigrating to Europe.  That didn’t happen.  In 1944 he was diagnosed with diabetes; his health was deteriorating, and he had to give up his UCLA professorship.  He was 70 but had to support himself, as his pension was too small, so he reverted to giving private lessons and occasional lectures.  In 1946 he had a heart attack which almost killed him, but he lived another five years, mostly in seclusion.  Schoenberg died on July 13^th of 1951.

During the American period of his life, Schoenberg composed several important works, among them two concertos, one for the violin (“unplayable” in Heifetz’s opinion) and one for the piano; one of the few tonal works of the period, Kol Nidre, for chorus and orchestra; and A Survivor from Warsaw, dedicated to survivals of the Holocaust.  Here’s Kol Nidre; Riccardo Muti conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

This Week in Classical Music: September 26, 2022.  Schoenberg, Part III, from WWI to Nazism.  We ended our previous entry on the life of Arnold Schoenbergas the world was inexorably descending into the madness of war.  Schoenberg was 40 and not very healthy, as he had been suffering from asthma for years.  As the war started in August of 1914, his teaching income evaporated.  A patron (one Frau Lieser) offered him free board in Vienna (as it turned out, for a rather short period), where he moved later in 1914.  Much of the European intelligentsia went mad with national and military fervor, denouncing the enemy and expecting their side’s win in a matter of months if not weeks.  Schoenberg, unfortunately, wasn’t an exception: he supported the war against France and in a letter to Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, wrote: “Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers” (referring to the music of Stravinsky, who then lived in France, Ravel and, for some reason Bizet) “into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.” 

During the war, Schoenberg was conscripted several times, usually being released soon after because of his ill asthma.  He was composing very little; one piece he was working on for years (and never finished) was the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder), the libretto for which he completed in 1915.  Here’s Grand Symphonic Interlude from Die Jakobsleiter, performed by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Kent Nagano conducting,

In Berlin, the Schoenbergs were struggling financially, and, once Frau Lieser’s generosity was over, the family had to move to cheap boarding rooms.  Still, Schoenberg managed to establish a music seminar, which gained some prominence, and in time, after the war was over, the seminar grew into the Society for Private Musical Performances.  The Society existed till the end of 1921, when the post-war hyperinflation wiped out much of the donor’s money.  It was an amazing undertaking, which could’ve never existed today.  The music, selected by Schoenberg himself, but usually not his own, was from the period “from Mahler to the present” and included, among other, works by Bartók, Busoni, Debussy, Korngold, Mahler, Ravel, Reger, Satie, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg’s students, Berg and Webern.  Each work was rehearsed and often repeated in different performances; difficult pieces were sometimes repeated during the same concert.  Only paying members of the Society were admitted to the concerts, but the payment was voluntary, as much as one could afford.  The Society gave 117 concerts, playing 154 different works in 353 performances (so the music was repeated twice on average).

With peace in Europe, Schoenberg’s fame (and notoriety) grew.  He was made president of the International Mahler League in Amsterdam and conducted many concerts across Europe.  Also, in 1923 his wife Mathilde died.  Even though the marriage never recovered after her 1908 romance with Richard Gerstl, Schoenberg was deeply pained.   Soon after, though, he married Gertrud Kolisch, the sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch (Kolisch performed at the Society’s concerts, and later, once the Society was dissolved, he founded a quartet which often played the music of Schoenberg and his students).

 In 1926 Schoenberg was offered a position at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, previously occupied by the recently deceased Busoni, and he moved to Berlin for the third time.  This was also a time of active artistic development, as Schoenberg transitioned from atonal music to the newly invented 12-tone system, sometimes called “serialism” (we’ll write about this another time).  Here’s one of the pieces from that period, the first large-scale serial work, Variations for Orchestra, op. 31.  Daniel Barenboim conducts the Chicago Symphony.

Even though the third Berlin period was mostly comfortable financially, the rising antisemitism was affecting the lives of all German Jews, Schoenberg’s included.  In 1933 he resigned from the Academy of Arts, left Berlin, moved to France and soon after to the United States.

This Week in Classical Music: September 19, 2022.  Schoenberg, Part II, 1905 to WWI.  We ended our first entry about Arnold Schoenberg  around 1905.  It a the time of great flourishing of the Austro-Jewish culture – think of Gustav Mahler, Zemlinsky and Erich Korngold, the writers Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and numerous other scientists, artists and intellectuals – but parallel to that, also a time of rising antisemitism: Karl Luger, for example, was the mayor of Vienna, a famous antisemite and the founder of the Christian Social Party, often viewed as a proto-Nazi organization.  Schoenberg would not be able to avoid it.

Schoenberg was struggling financially, as his teaching classes were bringing in very little money.  Mahler, a staunch supporter, lent him some money, and his student, Alban Berg, collected funds on Schoenberg’s behalf.  All along, his music was developing in more dissonant ways, away from tonality, and, not surprisingly, with every premiere ending in a scandal.  Mahler, by the way, who believed in his talent, confessed that he didn’t understand much of Schoenberg’s music.  In 1907 Mahler lost his position as the music director of the Hofoper (Vienna Imperial Opera) and that indirectly affected Schoenberg, as the influence of his supporter had waned.  Here’s one of the important pieces written by Schoenberg during that period, his String Quartet no. 2 (1908).  It’s performed by the young musicians of the Steans Institute.  The quartet was dedicated to his wife, Mathilde, who at that time was having an affair with their friend and neighbor, artist Richard Gerstl (later that year Gerstl committed suicide; you can read more about this sordid story here).  During that time Schoenberg became very interested in painting and Gerstl gave him several lessons; Schoenberg also befriended Oscar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky.   Schoenberg’s paintings were even displayed at exhibitions held by Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group founded by Kandinsky.  Schoenberg’s infatuation with painting didn’t last long, even though he painted, occasionally, in his later years.

One of the largest compositions that Schoenberg wrote during that period was the one-act opera Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17.  Even though it was completed in 1909, it wasn’t premiered till 1924.  In 1910 Schonberg was hired as a lecturer at the Akademie für Musik, Vienna’s largest conservatory.  He hoped for a professorship, but instead was hounded out by the end of the first year by antisemitic colleagues and politicians (the Akademie was then an imperial institution and important positions were discussed in the parliament).  Disappointed, Schoenberg decided to move to Berlin, which he did in the autumn of 1911.

In Berlin he returned to teaching at the Stern Conservatory, a place where he had worked eight years earlier during his first sojourn to Berlin.  Many conservative music critics disapproved of his latest pieces, but, rather surprisingly, Schoenberg proved to be interesting for the public, probably due to his international notoriety; also, his earlier, Romantic music was accessible, and his new music was curious.  In 1912 he composed and later that year presented Pierrot lunaire, a setting of 21 poems scored for the voice (usually soprano), flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano (you can listen to it here, it's performed by Lucy Shelton and Da Capo Chamber Players).  Even though it was atonal, Pierrot was unexpectedly successful, and performed in eleven cities in Austria and Germany.  His music even enjoyed some, rather limited, success in Vienna.  In the meantime, Schoenberg came up with a new way to earn some money: even though he was never trained as a conductor, he took several lessons from Zemlinsky and went on a European tour with his own music.  That was in 1914 and WWI was just days away.

This Week in Classical Music: September 12, 2022.  Schoenberg, Part I, the Early Years.  Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most consequential composers of the 20^th century, was born on September 13th in 1874.  It has been some time since we last attempted to write about him, and clearly, it’s impossible to describe the life and music of such a complex figure in one entry.  We’ll try to sketch part of it here and will continue at a later date.

Schoenberg was born in Leopoldstadt, a heavily Jewish district of Vienna.  His family was lower middle class, the father a shoe-shopkeeper, the mother a piano teacher.  Musically, Schoenberg was mostly self-taught: he learned to play the cello himself, and the only lessons he took were from Alexander von Zemlinsky, a friend in whose amateur orchestra Schoenberg played, while working full time as a bank clerk.  Even though Zemlinksy was by then an established composer, writing in a late-Romantic style, it’s not clear how much help he provided to his student: Zemlinksy said that they mostly exchanged scores and commented on each other’s work.  In 1897 Schoenberg’s quartet, edited according to Zemlinksy’s suggestions, was performed in Vienna and was well received.  The following piece, the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), submitted by Schoenberg in 1899, was rejected by the Vienna Music Society and premiered only three years later.  The piece was tonal but heavily chromatic and wondering away from the home key (you can listen to it here, played by the young students of the Steans Institute).  The performance created a scandal, which would become a constant in practically all premieres of Schoenberg’s work from that point on.  In the meantime, he was earning a living conducting choral societies and orchestrating operettas, a popular entertainment in Germany and Austria-Hungary.  He was also composing and in 1901 completed a large cantata, Gurre-Lieder.  That same year he married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde; later that year the couple moved to Berlin.  For a while Schoenberg worked as the music director of Überbrettl, a fashionable cabaret frequented by the literati and musicians.  That job ended a year later but in a lucky break, Schoenberg met Richard Strauss and showed him two pieces, Gurre-Lieder and the new symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande.  Strauss was impressed and helped Schoenberg to obtain a stipend at the Stern Conservatory, a prestigious private school which is now part of Berlin University of the Arts.  He returned to Vienna in 1903.

In Vienna Schoenberg joined Zemlinky in teaching several private music classes.  Some of the attendees were students of one Guido Adler.  Adler is now half-forgotten, but his role in the Austro-German music world is interesting.  Adler, Jewish, like Schoenberg and Zemlinksy (and Mahler), was Mahler’s friend and Bruckner’s pupil at the Vienna Conservatory.  Adler practically created musicology as the scientific field we know today.  He taught at the University of Vienna and the German University of Prague.  One of his students was Anton Webern, who joined Schoenberg’s class.  Another young composer, Alban Berg soon also joined the group.  The relationship between Schoenberg and his two students, Webern and Berg, is legendary, and became central in Schoenberg’s life, as of course it was for the younger composers.

Private teaching and composing weren’t bringing much money, so, to get some funding, Schoenberg, together with Zemlinsky, managed to create a music society.  Moreover, they succeeded in appointing Mahler their honorary president (Mahler had heard Verklärte Nacht a year earlier and was very impressed).  The society survived for one year only but managed to present, among other piece of new music, Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande.  Here it is, in the performance by the Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim conducting.