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AWKWARD ENCOUNTERS  1009

In the summer of 1907 Spanish pianist and composer Manuel de Falla piled up his meager savings and went to Paris in the hope of breaking into the international music scene. He was in for some setbacks.

The jobs he had arranged fell through, and after playing piano with a traveling pantomime company, he scraped by in Paris by teaching piano and harmony students. “I’m more and more glad that I decided to leave Madrid,” he wrote a friend. “There was no future for me there.”

He set about introducing himself to the city’s major musical figures, but summer was a bad time for it because many of them were out of town, although Frenchman Paul Dukas went out of his way to be helpful and introduced him to the influential Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz.

Getting to know the celebrated Claude Debussy would not go so smoothly.

Fall finally met him in October, played the piano score of his opera “La vida breve” for him, and found the Frenchman’s sarcasm a little intimidating.

A little later, Falla’s shyness made for an even more awkward encounter.

Falla came to visit Debussy, was told that he was out, and was ushered by a servant to a dark alcove off the dining room, a storage space filled with grotesque Chinese masks. After a while Falla heard Debussy, his wife Emma, and composer Erik Satie come into the dining room and begin lunch. Falla was too timid to enter the dining room unannounced and sat there in the dark alcove, faint from hunger, staring at the weird and ghoulish faces of the masks.

When the chatting and clatter of lunch seemed loud enough to cover his retreat, he slipped into a dim hallway and hastened toward the egress, only to bump headfirst into Debussy’s wife, who screamed.

Even though everybody encouraged Falla to join them for lunch, he was so rattled by the encounter that he made his apologies and departed.

VERSATILE ENOUGH                    

The string quartet is a curiosity, a series of short dances for three violins and cello to be played on open strings. It’s attributed to Benjamin Franklin and since he was so versatile, it’s tempting to assume that Franklin would also turn his attention to composing music.

Franklin played the harp, the guitar and something called the glass dulcimer, but his best known contribution to music was his improvement of the so-called musical glasses. The instrument had become popular in Europe by 1746, when Christoph Willibald Gluck performed in London a “concerto on 26 drinking glasses tuned with spring water”, accompanied by an entire orchestra.

In 1762, during a sojourn in London, Franklin described in a letter his improvement of the musical glasses by fitting glass bowls concentrically on a horizontal rod, which was turned by a crank attached to a pedal. The turning of the bowls kept them moist by passing them through water, and enabled the performer to stroke their rims with a minimum of motions. Franklin’s new instrument, which he called the armonica, was fairly popular in America, but quite the rage in Europe.

A few years later, in a letter to a friend in Edinburgh, Franklin wrote a short treatise on music theory, setting down his ideas about the nature of melody and harmony, and in a letter to his brother Peter he favored clarity and simplicity in vocal music and took issue with the relatively intricate arias of recent operas and oratorios in the Italian style.

The intriguing string quartet attributed to Franklin probably says a lot less about his musical tastes. The manuscript, with Franklin’s name on it, was discovered in Paris in the 1940s, but since then, copies have turned up in Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere, each attributed to a different prominent composer of the time. It’s quite possible that the scientist, statesman, and inventor was simply too busy to write music.

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YOU ARE PLAYING THAT WRONG

Pianist Harold Bauer had never heard of the young woman dancing at the home of an acquaintance and took no notice of her name. But he watched with fascination as she gestured and posed to the sound of familiar classical music. He had never seen a performance quite like it. Her gestures seemed to illustrate the dynamics of the music, and he hit upon the idea of letting his gestures at the piano bring forth corresponding dynamics in the music.

His first efforts to bring tone out of gesture were ridiculous, but he persisted and eventually used the approach whenever he played. 

Thirty years later, after he had given a recital in Los Angeles, his friend, violinist and composer Eugene Ysaye greeted him in the artists’ room by introducing a companion. “Of course you know Isadora”, he said. 

“Isadora who?” Bauer asked.

“Isadora Duncan,” said Ysaye.

When Bauer realized that she was the dancer from all those years ago, he told her how greatly she had influenced his method of performing, and before long, the two of them planned to give a concert together.

It was to be entirely pieces by Chopin, and while rehearsing the Etude in A-flat, Opus 25 No. 1, they had a falling out.

“You are playing that wrong,” Isadora said. She explained that the crescendo had to continue to the very end of the phrase and be softened later.

With some annoyance, Bauer said that he was playing the piece the way it was printed on the page.

Isadora didn’t care. She said that the music had to build to a climax at the end of the phrase or else she’d have nothing to with her arms. “Anyway,” she insisted, “you are quite mistaken.”

After a long discussion, Bauer gave in for the sake of allowing her the indispensable dramatic gesture.

Afterward, when he had a look at Chopin’s original manuscript of the piece, he found that it had the precise dynamics the dancer had instinctively required, and he played it that way ever after.

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SWEET REWARD

Twenty-first century neurologists have determined that the pleasure a musician derives from playing the climax of a composition compares with the enjoyment of eating chocolate. If they’re right, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf had a double reason to remember a reward he received as a young violinist.

In 1761 Dittersdorf was accompanying the famous composer Christoph Willibald Gluck to Bologna, one of the music capitals of Europe. Years later, when Dittersdorf dictated his autobiography, he recalled an occasion when his playing brought him a particularly sweet return.

A distinguished musician of the day, Giovanni Battista Martini asked the young violinist to play a concerto in his church during an upcoming service. He asked if Dittersdorf would be satisfied with the usual fee of twelve double ducats. Dittersdorf replied that he would play only on condition that he was not paid.

“What I prized beyond money,” he said, “was the honor of being chosen to play by the Father of Music.”

During the three-day festival Dittersdorf and Gluck went to church to hear Vespers, which featured music by Martini. Dittersdorf thought it was magnificent. In one Psalm Martini had written the Amen in the form of an eight-part fugue- all the more glorious since the orchestra consisted of 160 people  and the chorus was 80 strong.

The next morning Gluck and Dittersdorf went to see Martini, who invited them to drink chocolate with him.

“I think it likely,” Martini said, “that yesterday’s Vespers and today’s High Mass will be my Swan Song, because I am already aware that my powers, physical and mental, are beginning to fail.”

After Dittersdorf had played his concerto, he and Gluck went home and sat down to dinner, after which the landlord came in and said, “Padre Martini sends you both a few pounds of chocolate.”

In a shaky hand, the old priest had written on the packet: “12 pounds for my dear friend Cavalier Gluck and 12 pounds for my dear son Signor Carl Ditters.”

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TENUOUS ENCOUNTERS

The two composers would be major forces in late nineteenth-century music and great friends, but not before some preliminary missteps.

In 1857 Camille Saint-Saens began seeing small notices announcing Paris performances by an unknown Russian named Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein was unknown in Paris for a very good reason – he avoided press coverage. His Paris debut took place in an elegant hall – without a single paying listener in attendance.

With power and artistry, Rubinstein wowed his first audience, and for his next performance the hall was, as Saint-Saens put it, “crammed to suffocation”. In his memoirs, Saint-Saens gushed, “I was bowled over, chained to the chariot of the conqueror!”

Despite his admiration, Saint-Saens avoided meeting the great pianist. The twenty-two-year-old was terrified at the prospect, despite Rubinstein’s reputation for kindness and gentility. For a year, mutual friends continued to invite Saint-Saens to meet Rubinstein, but Saint-Saens turned them down. The following year, though, during Rubinstein’s next visit to Paris, Saint-Saens finally got up his courage for an introduction and the two hit it off at once.

They got together often to play flamboyant piano duets. Saint-Saens was taken not only with Rubinstein’s artistry, but also with his lack of jealousy when it came to his fellow musicians. Rubinstein planned to solo in performances of some of his works for piano and orchestra and invited Saint-Saens to conduct. Again reluctant, Saint-Saens eventually agreed, and found the experience to be his primary education as a conductor.

It was a baptism by fire because Rubinstein paid no attention to the orchestra and sometimes drowned them out, forcing Saint-Saens to follow him by watching his hands. And Rubinstein provided scores that were marked up beyond comprehension because he found it amusing to see Saint-Saens conduct his way into and out of trouble.

During later Paris visits, the bold, broad-shouldered Anton Rubinstein and the shy, delicate Camille Saint-Saens became almost inseperable friends.

ENTANGLING ALLIANCES       0801

Richard Strauss admired the music of Richard Wagner, and so he felt honored in 1839 when he received an invitation from Wagner’s widow Cosima to conduct during the consummate Wagnerian event, the Bayreuth Festival.

But the honor would come with strings attached.

Part of Cosima’s motive for the invitation came from the formation of a rival festival in nearby Munich. The director of the Munich festival put it into direct competition with Bayreuth by announcing a new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin, the same opera Bayreuth had presented on its season’s opening night.

The Munich director also invited Strauss to conduct two of their operas.

His willingness to work with the competition put Strauss at odds with Cosima’s increasingly resentful son Siegfried, a composer who also did some conducting. Strauss was not reluctant to voice his criticisms of Cosima and her family. He and Siegfried had a quarrel about artistic control that prompted Strauss to break off his associations with the Wagners. Cosima asked that Strauss not return to Bayreuth as a conductor.

In August 1896 he did return – as an audience member – to hear Siegfriend conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the first time, and he found the Wagners amiable, although he thought that Siegfried’s conducting was awful.

Siegfried rekindled the animosity by publishing a letter in which he stated that the ultimate authority in the theater at Bayreuth was the stage director, who got to give orders to the director. Strauss took the letter as a personal insult.

But despite his break with the Wagners and his condemnation of Bayreuth as “the ultimate pigsty”, Strauss remained steadfast in his admiration of Wagner’s music and saw the festival as its greatest safeguard, in fact, the consummate safeguard of all German art. And in 1933, after the deaths of Siegfried and Cosima, when the invitation came to conduct again at Bayreuth, neither the needs of his own music nor the grim Nazi politics of the times kept him from accepting it.

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NO EXCUSES  0718

English violist William Primrose made a policy of never making excuses for his performances, no matter how difficult the circumstances surrounding them.

While he was a member of the prestigious London String Quartet, the ensemble was scheduled to perform at New York’s Town Hall. The program included works that had particularly hard viola parts – the B-flat Quartet by Brahms and the Debussy quartet.

Before the concert, Primrose stepped outside to relax. While taking in the fresh spring air, he decided that a cigarette would be just the thing, so he lit a match. But he neglected to close the cover, and the whole book of matches went up like a torch, giving his left hand a severe burn.

He hurried to a drugstore to kill the pain and got some medicine that made the hand feel somewhat better, but the stuff was so sticky that when he played, the ball of his left thumb kept getting stuck to the viola. The process of getting his thumb stuck and unstuck was so noisy that Primrose could imagine everyone in the audience, back row critics included, squirming at the sound of it.

The friction against the burn between his first and second fingers caused him considerable suffering every time he played a half-step.

Nonetheless, at the post-concert reception, he received nothing but praise and congratulations for his execution of the difficult viola parts.

But cellist Warwick Evans took him to task for being rude, especially while talking to the ladies at the reception. “You’ve had your left hand stuck in your pocket all evening,” he said.

Primrose reminded him about the burn and explained that he wasn’t trying to hide it for appearance’s sake, but because he didn’t want people to think of it as an excuse and deduce that the performance wasn’t as good as it might have been under better circumstances.

Primrose tells the story in his 1978 memoir Walk on the North Side.

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DON’T EVER LEAVE IT       0311

Like many a great musician before him, Argentine composer Astor Piazolla went to Paris to take lessons from the celebrated Nadia Boulanger. Although his lessons with her went on for less than four months, long after they were over he would declare that he owed her “absolutely everything”.

He was born on March 11, 1921, and so was already thirty-three years old when he came to take his first lesson from Boulanger. She had tutored some of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, and she spoke of them without awe. She dismissed a package in the mail as the latest work by Stravinsky, who sent her a copy of every new work he wrote, and added, “I don’t have time to look at them all!”

Piazolla showed her a hefty stack of his own manuscripts, and as she sifted through them she concluded, “This music is well-written. Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartok, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can’t find Piazolla in this.”

She asked him what sort of music he played in Argentina.

Reluctantly, he admitted that he played tangos in nightclubs.

“I love that music!” she exclaimed. She asked him what instrument he played.

He confessed that he played a concertina-like instrument called the bandoneon. He had images of her throwing him out of her fourth floor window.

She had heard of the bandoneon. She convinced Piazolla to play one of his tangos on the piano.

He chose one called “Triumfal”. At the eighth bar she stopped him, took him by the hands, and told him in no uncertain terms, “That is Piazolla. Don’t ever leave it!”

It was a formative moment. “I took all of the music I had composed,” Piazolla said later, “ten years in my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.”

*    *   *

This story reminds me of a friend of mine who decided to go to the University of the Philippines College of Music, to pursue a degree of Masters in Music Composition.

At the first day of class, he and his classmates were excited to meet their composition professor, eagerly armed with each of their own stack of musical compositions. But, after asking the class to put out their compositions, the next thing the professor said was throw them all out. The stunned class waited for the explanation which was just that they should then simply forget about all they ever learned about composing music.

This composer-professor is well-known for his avant-garde compositions and bold dissonances – we had the “privilege’ of studying one of his choir composition, “Alamat”, and that was really nose bleed for me and my choir at that time.  He probably was thinking along the same lines as Nadia Boulanger on this and I’m not sure what sort of products has come out of his classes but it’s just good to know that if his premise is true, there is yet a composer in all of us after all.

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FUN WHILE IT LASTED  0609

As World War I spread through Europe, the famous Australian-born pianist and composer Percy Grainger described himself variously as a conscientious objector or a coward. He had arrived in New York from London as the United States was entering the war. Because of what friends considered his unpatriotic attitude, he couldn’t go back to England. So he took a perfectly logical next step.

He bought a saxophone.

On June 9, 1917, he walked to Fort Totten and enlisted as a bandsman in the U.S. Army. He was fitted for a uniform, his billowy hair was cut to military specifications, and the following day he was transferred to Fort Hamilton, South Brooklyn, where he became a member of the 15^th Band of Coast Artillery Corps.

The only catch: The virtuoso pianist couldn’t play the saxophone, And, as it was, the band already had plenty of saxophonists, so he was given an oboe, and got by well enough to be promoted to Bandsman 2^nd Class.

The brilliant but eccentric Grainger would later describe the first few weeks in the army as the happiest time of his life. He was paid $36 a month to study all kinds of brass and reed instruments and even get to conduct the band a few times. He was most pleased with the anonymity the army gave him and the freedom from the pressure of playing professional concerts.

The idyll was note to last though. Before long a reporter caught sight of him performing in one of the band concerts, and soon the New York papers revealed that one of the world’s great pianists was masquerading as a humble bandsman.

He was reassigned to be a star pianist for Red Cross benefit concerts and Liberty Loan and War Bond drives.

But at least his army experience helped him to make up his mind about one issue. Within three weeks of joining the band, Percy Grainger applied to become a U.S.citizen.

RESURRECTION        0509

In 1965, twelve years after his last stage appearance, virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz felt again the urge to “communicate directly” with the audience. He decided to perform at Carnegie Hall.

The sixty-one-year-old Horowitz worried about being physically up to resuming his concert career and feared that his memory would fail him during the performance. He selected a new Steinway, had it delivered to the hall, and practiced for a couple of months without committing himself to scheduling a concert. Finally he settled on Sunday, May 9.

He worried that not many young people would come to the recital, and he insisted that plenty of $3 student tickets be made available. He was astonished to hear that hundreds of people, many of them young music students, had waited four abreast through a cold rainy night to buy tickets. He arranged for the entire crowd to have coffee and received a grateful telegram from a hundred of them.

Horowitz chose a tough program – Robert Schumann’s Fantasie in C and Alexander Scribin’s Ninth Sonata, plus the Bach-Busoni Toccata and Fugue in C, with short pieces by Chopin, Debussy, and Schumann for encores. In his bedroom he practiced bowing. As the day for the recital approached, he diverted himself with mundane details. He chose a formal cutaway jacket with handkerchief, black pants with faint white stripes, white shirt, gray vest, and silk tie.

He walked onstage to a standing ovation and shrugged with upturned hands as if to say, “I haven’t even played yet”. In an emotional whirlwind, he played the Bach-Busoni piece too fast and hit wrong notes. Sweat in his eye made him miss notes in Schumann. During the Scriabin he aimed for grandeur and lyricism rather than speed, and by the end of the encores the response was deafening. The audience refused to leave until the stage lights were dimmed and the piano lid closed.

“I don’t know what to call it,” Vladimir Horowitz told a friend. “Resurrection, I think, is all right …”