J.S. Bach                           Johannes Brahms

     Plus a Ludwig, two Richards (pronounced Rick-hard) and a Gustav.  No, they’re not a catalog of my ex-lovers, but lately, they’re the composers I seem to be listening to most often. For the sake of brevity, this list is far from complete. To identify them more fully, I refer to Johan Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. (Now really, what self-respecting twenty-first century woman would go out with a collection of guys whose first names are this funky?)  Maybe it’s the cold weather that makes me turn toward these composers in the same way I crave a rich beef stew on a winter night. Or maybe I just like composers who know what to do with a full orchestra and the human voice. Possibly I just like lots of instruments making a lot of wonderful sounds the same way I like rich, beefy gravy.

            The American composer Charles Ives, once asked  “Are my ears on wrong?” Given my musical tastes I often wondered the same thing during my High School years. I seemed to have purchased my nineteenth century-tuned ears at some quaint antique shop in a side street in Vienna, that musical Mecca of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  While my peers loved David Bowie, the Grateful Dead, Boy George, The Who, the Police, raggae, punk rock, MTV and The Teenaged Huns for all I knew, I simply wasn’t interested. I was not consciously trying to be a snob, nor was I isolated from contemporary rock or folk music at home. But being a typical teenager trying not to invite peer ridicule, I kept very quiet about my musical taste at school. Okay, there were Cold War-era state secrets that were less zealously guarded.  Did I think the cool kids had me under surveillance, or something? When I was in High School I’d go home after school  and listen to Italian operas in my bedroom at low volume, utterly convinced I was weird. I reveled in Bel Canto, but wasn’t about to reveal it, being a typical teenaged collection of raw nerve endings. I did rather blow my cover one morning while waiting for  first period French class; when a classmate struck up a conversation with me about the Grateful Dead, I looked blank and asked “Jerry who?” I can only say I’m not at my best before eight a.m.

 Bach

            Who can resist a man who can write a fugue? As someone who would be hard pressed to compose variations on Mary Had a Little Lamb and found Music Theory class even more bewildering than Algebra, I am in awe of Johan Sebastian Bach’s ability to fit all the parts of  his intricate musical compositions together so neatly. But Bach could do more than write a good tune. He had real heart; I remember being emotionally blown away the first time I heard Bach’s complete Saint Matthew Passion performed live at the Carmel Bach Festival in 1992. Even sitting in a cramped, stuffy church sanctuary auditorium on that glorious summer day, I didn’t want it to end.  Even now the alto aria, Erbarme Dich by itself is almost enough to make a Christian of me:

            When I simply want some pleasant, non-vocal  background music, I often find myself reaching for my recording of the Brandenburg Concertos with Pablo Casals, or else Yo-Yo Ma’s first Simply Baroque album which features Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,  Sheep May Safely Graze, and an instrumental arrangement of Erbarme Dich. If you don’t happen to have an alto around the house, Yo Yo Ma and his cello make an admirable substitute.

        In my  college music history courses, my professors always described Ludwig van Beethoven as the bridge between the classical era of Haydn and Mozart and as the first nineteenth century Romantic composer in his own right.  Beethoven probably never thought of himself in those terms, but his personality does come roaring out of his music.  He couldn’t even write his pastoral Sixth Symphony without putting a thunderstorm in it.  For me, the music of Franz Josef Haydn is rather like an 18^th century Viennese palace, every room of which is decorated in white and gold. It’s all lovely, but I don’t find any of it very memorable.   Haydn composed prolifically, and spent many years of his long life serving his patron, Prince Esterházy, to whom he was a specialized, high-functioning sort of servant. He lived either in Vienna or on the prince’s Hungarian country estate, freed from most practical survival worries, which may have been the best deal Haydn expected from a world where it was hard for composers to survive without a wealthy patron. As Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the former famous child prodigy learned the hard way. After his brief, mutually unhappy period of service to the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart, another prolific composer, bucked the patronage tradition, but paid for his creative freedom with poverty and ill-health, ending up buried in a pauper’s unmarked grave by age thirty-five. Freed from this hardscrabble poverty, Mozart might have lived longer and composed more.

            Ludwig van Beethoven bucked the patronage tradition somewhat more successfully, although he was never wealthy. A musically gifted boy, Beethoven was often forced to practice his piano late into the night by his drunkard father who hoped to exploit his child prodigy as “a second Mozart.”  All that practicing paid off when the teenaged Beethoven first arrived in Vienna in 1787 where he rapidly earned fame as a piano virtuoso and composed on the side.  His musicianship made up for his temper and lack of social graces; all Vienna wanted to know Beethoven.

            But it’s impossible to imagine Beethoven contentedly taking musical orders from aristocrats. He was always outspoken about his republican political views. His friendship with the Emperor’s brother, Archduke Rudolph,  protected Beethoven from the displeasure of the Austrian Emperor made nervous by the French Revolution. Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, celebrates the courage of Leonore, who has disguised herself as the youth Fidelio, to free her husband from his unjust imprisonment caused by the corrupt official, Don Pizzaro.  Although he originally dedicated his Third Symphony, the Eroica, to Napoleon Bonaparte, Beethoven became so disillusioned by Napoleon’s military aggression that he famously crossed out the original dedication with such violence that his pen tore the paper.

             At the onset of the nineteenth century, Beethoven’s performing career was ruined by his deafness. He fell back on his composing to make his living, which is difficult enough when one can hear.   Considering that Beethoven wrote entire symphonies by slowly grafting together the short melodies he could still hear in his brain, his output was amazing.   If  Haydn’s music recalls salons full of elegant, fragile furniture, Beethoven’s is like a slightly  messy,  very  lived-in  sitting room  where one can wear a bathrobe and slippers, fling oneself down on a nice, sturdy sofa, put ones  feet up, laugh, lose ones temper and even throw things.  Of his symphonies, my particular favorites are the Third, the Sixth and the Ninth, and I have great fondness for the Fourth and Fifth as well. For all his dark moods, nobody can sound more joyful or triumphant as Beethoven does in a good mood as the final choral movement of his ninth symphony attests:

Brahms 

            Although Beethoven wrote only nine symphonies, he was considered the master of the symphonic form long after his death.  For the unfortunate composers who followed him it was not unlike being a playwrite after Shakespeare; comparisons were inevitable and unsparing and it was nearly impossible to be judged on one’s own merits. Not entirely to his liking, Johannes Brahms’ First Symphony was nicknamed “Beethoven’s Tenth” after its premiere in 1876. Brahms himself revered Beethoven and was so in awe of him, it had taken him sixteen years to complete that first symphony.  It premiered at Karlsruhe rather than in Vienna as Brahms feared the fierce Viennese music critics if the work was a failure. 

            Brahms was not at his most confident when composing full orchestral works, although this is not obvious to the listener. He began piano lessons at age seven and the piano remained his life-long love. He wrote reams of solo piano works and songs for solo and mixed voices to piano accompaniments. The piano is also featured in most of his chamber music compositions. By contrast,  Brahms wrote just four symphonies, two piano concertos, a violin concerto, the German Requiem, the Alto Rhapsody and a number of shorter orchestral works, including the Tragic and Academic Festival overtures. Of the Brahms Symphonies, my favorite and the one I know best is his Third.

              If Beethoven’s musical appeal is his strong personality, I’m attracted to Brahms for the lushness and beauty of his music. The first Brahms piece I fell in love with at age 14 was his Piano Concerto no. 2 in B-flat major.  I love almost every piano concerto I’ve ever heard, but none more than that one. Brahms’ Piano Concerto no. 1 in D-minor, completed in 1858, is also wonderful, but almost crude when compared to the aural richness of the Second, completed in 1881. The First concerto bangs tragically along like a teenaged drama queen, while the Second flows with natural adult grandeur.

 Here is the opening of the  third movement of the Brahms Second Piano Concerto as performed by Sergei  Edelman  and  Peter  Csaba  :

Plainly, Brahms had gained some confidence as an orchestral composer in the intervening years.  The Alto Rhapsody makes me wish I could be a mezzo long enough to learn and perform it.  Last spring, I heard the German Requiem superbly performed by the San Francisco Symphony during their Brahms Festival last spring. An experience to rival hearing that live performance of the complete Saint Matthew Passion.

    Richard Wagner, the preeminent German opera composer of the second half of the nineteenth century, belonged to the New German School with such colleagues as his eventual father-in-law, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz, while Brahms was part of the Viennese Old Guard.  There was no love lost between the sides in the “War of the Romantics”, and much sharp criticism and scorn were bandied back and forth. I find Wagner the man impossible to like.  He was demanding, egotistical, arrogant, a strident anti-Semite and hard on his friends and admirers.  I just consign him to history as the talented bastard he was. And yet, my life as an opera lover would be infinitely poorer without his music. So I listen while feeling glad that I need never meet the man himself.  Wagner’s musical gifts assured him admirers and benefactors, but he had a habit of biting the hands that fed him.  There are grounds for the belief that he had an affair with the poet Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of his friend and benefactor, Otto Wesendonck. 

      In 1859, Wagner’s most powerful admirer, King Ludwig of Bavaria, granted Wagner amnesty to return to Germany after revolutionary civil disobedience had got Wagner exiled to Switzerland in the late 1840’s.  Wagner, who had already divorced his neglected first wife, Minna Planer, scandalized King Ludgwig’s court with his public liason with Cosima von Bülow, née Liszt.  One thing Wagner was not was a social coward. He and Cosima loved one another, eventually married had a son, and were together until Wagner’s death in 1883, stifling conventional morality be damned.    

            Nor can Wagner be accused of professional laziness, whatever his  personal failings.  He not only composed the music, he wrote most of his own opera librettos, as well, which was and is still rare for composers.  Wagner accomplished two important things with his operas.  The first was that he elevated his opera orchestra  from the common  nineteenth century status as a mere accompaniment to the singing, and turned  it into a fully integrated dramatic element in the action, as important as anything going on onstage.   All his operas have overtures, and the later ones had extended orchestral passages in them that grew in sophistication as Wagner’s skill matured.

           The second accomplishment was that Wagner’s better nature shines through his music.  However unpleasant he may have been in person, he had to have had a deep and understanding well of both romantic and paternal love in his own soul, or it would have been impossible for him to express such feelings as sincerely in his music as he does. Other than Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, some of my favorite of Wagner’s operas are the four operas of the Ring of the Nibelung.  But the Ring by itself is meat for a blog entry all its’ own, so stay tuned. Baroque operas can make me yawn and twitch in the first half hour due to often  static stage action and florid vocal ornamentation, but I’ll happily sit through four hours of a good Wagnerian performance when plenty is happening onstage, and each melody flows organically into the next. As long as it is a good performance, I must emphasize. An evening of bad Wagnerian singing is a penitential experience and a very long one, at that.

 

                                          Richard Strauss

     If Beethoven was the first German Romantic composer, Richard Strauss might be described as the last.  When it comes to integrating the orchestra with the drama onstage, Strauss began where Wagner left off. He was another composer who loved a big orchestra, and he demanded as much or more from his singers than Wagner did.  Where Wagner wrote marathon operas based on Norse mythology, Strauss’ early one-act operas, Salome and Elektra, are short, sharp shocks, concerning the dysfunctional families of the ancient world. Each covers the events of a single night, and the title character in each case is a disturbed and disturbing young woman. Strauss' atmospheric scores leave the audience in no doubt that something terrible will take place before the night is out.  For Salome, who demands the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) from King Herod after Jokanaan rejects her, the issue is sex. For the implacable  Elektra, who relives her father Agamemnon’s murder each sunset, the issue is vengeance.  They each achieve their desire, but at the end of Salome, she is killed on King Herod's orders, after he watches her necrophiliac sexual ecstasy over Jokanaan’s severed head.  Sick, starved Elektra, evidently has nothing left to live for once Agamemnon is avenged, so she collapses and dies at the end of her triumphal dance in the closing moments of Elektra. 

       Salome is  based on Oscar Wilde’s equally scandalous play which premiered in Berlin after being banned in both London and Paris. Strauss saw the play there, and almost at once, started thinking of how to turn it into an opera.  The opera and Salome's frank sexuality  created a huge scandal at the opera's world premiere in 1905, and further performances of it were rare until after WWI.  Hugo von Hoffmansthal  who adapted the libretto for Elektra from his own play, was keenly interested in the work of his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. So it's not surprising that  he concentrated on her worship of her (probably idealized) father Agamemnon and her hatred for her mother and his murderer, Klytemnestra. Frightened and suspicious of everyone around them, Klytemnestra and her paramour, Aegisth, rule oppressively; Elektra and her sister are virtual slaves, and their brother, Orestes,  lives in exile. Klytemnestra, tormented by guilty nightmares, is a mess herself. When animal and human sacrifices (oddly) provide no relief for her nightmares, she’s desperate enough to turn to Elektra for advice. Elektra pretends to help, but turns on her mother and tells her her nightmares will only end with her death.

         Elektra premiered in 1909 in Dresden, less scandalously than Salome, as the sexuality is implied rather than explicit.  The violence in both stories is also implied.  Strauss relies on the audiences’ imagination to fill in the events of Jokanaan’s execution, and the executions of Klytemnestra and Aegisth, all of which happen offstage. He doesn’t allow any one to forget what’s happening, even if they can’t see it. When Herod’s executioner goes down to the cistern to behead Jokanaan, “sawing” chords sound in the strings before his head his handed up to Salome on its platter. In Elektra, the suspense is almost like a modern horror movie between the recently returned Orestes’ entering the palace, the moment when Klytemnestra finally screams as she is killed. I don’t know if it is true,  but I would not be surprised to hear that Bernard Hermann, who wrote the soundtrack for Hitchcock’s Psycho, was influenced by Strauss.  Strauss uses the low strings and the high woodwinds to create the tension onstage as Elektra waits, listening for the scream. Almost nothing else happens onstage during these minues, and nothing needs to happen.  

      Although Strauss was not an atonal composer he pushed tonality hard; he was not afraid of sounding harsh or discordant at need. At the same time, he wrote incredibly beautiful moments into each of these operas.   Both Salome and Elektra demand much from the singers who portray the title roles, as they’re rarely offstage in either opera. Strauss is no longer considered terribly Avante Garde, but at the turn of the twentieth century, his audience must have found his music very jarring.  Perhaps that’s why Strauss’ next opera, Der Rosenkavalier, is a bittersweet, nostalgic tribute to 18^th century Vienna and the triumph of young love over cynical arranged marriages.

            Gustav Mahler was a prominent opera conductor at the Vienna Hofoper at the turn of the twentieth century, but more of a symphonic composer, in his own right. Mahler wrote “The Symphony of a Thousand” demonstrating he was  not afraid of either size or length in his work. This is  also the man who wrote the intimate song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the death of children), making an art form out of profound grief and suffering. Not all of Mahler’s songs are so dark; he wrote Songs of the Wayfarer, and many stand-alone voice and piano songs.  As an operatic conductor Mahler includes vocal solos and choral passages into his symphonies more than Mozart, Haydn or Brahms. I turn to Mahler for many of the same reasons I turn to Brahms; for sheer beauty and lushness.  Mahler’s moods are frequently dark, but he makes melancholy sound so beautiful, who cares?