My most beloved of composers, Hector Berlioz, was born 217 years ago today. While he is often noted (and mocked) for his use of bombast, he was actually very tasteful and strategic in his use of big sounds: Berlioz loved contrast, and he could (and did) write music of surprising delicacy and intimacy. A lot of that can be heard in his oratorio L’Enfance du Christ, which tells the story of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus’s flight into Egypt after the Nativity. While Berlioz’s music was often met with hostility from the composer’s native Parisian audiences, L’Enfance du Christ was embraced from the start and for many years was one of the few works by Berlioz to receive regular performances at all, before the great reassessment of his genius took place in the middle of the 20th century, ninety-plus years too late for Berlioz himself to have enjoyed it.
The Shepherd’s Chorus from this work is a common excerpt heard this time of year, but Berlioz is so much more engrossing when one listens to the entire piece, so here it is.
One reason that film music often struggles to get mainstream acceptance as music worthy of interest on its own is the fact that film music is always dependent on the film for its inspiration and genesis. Film composers don’t tend to have a great deal of freedom in their work, and they have to compose their scores to accommodate the timing and rhythm of the film given them to score. Obviously some of these composers are masters in their own right and create great works even with these constraints, but the constraints are still there.
Music as an aid to storytelling is best seen, prior to the movies and even after them, in the world of opera, but there is a smaller arena where the great composers of the 19th century often found themselves dealing with at least some of the same constraints that film composers would later confront. I’m talking about incidental music for plays.
Some incidental music has gone on to be quite famous indeed, seen as masterpieces on their own. Felix Mendelssohn’s work for A Miidsummer Night’s Dream is one of the enduring classics, and one of its melodies has even become a traditional recessional in modern weddings. Hector Berlioz also wrote incidental music, as did Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Bizet, and Grieg.
And so did Ludwig van Beethoven.
What’s interesting about a lot of incidental music is that, Mendelssohn’s work for Shakespeare excepted, the music has outlived the plays in nearly every case. Schubert’s music for Rosamunde is well known (and in that case, mainly for the overture alone), but the play is almost completely forgotten. Likewise with Beethoven’s fine music for a play called The Ruins of Athens. This play was written by August von Kotzebue for performance at a new theater in Pest, and if it’s been performed anywhere in the last hundred years, I’d be shocked. But because one of music’s greatest of all masters wrote incidental music for it, the play isn’t completely forgotten.
Beethoven’s suite of incidental music is one of his more pleasing works, even if even this group of pieces is rarely heard except for the Turkish March movement. The suite is not purely instrumental, featuring movements for voices and orchestra. It’s all suitably dramatic but also very much Beethovenian. For all his anticipation of Romanticism, Beethoven was even at his most ostentatious always grounded in classical proportion and form. This suite, with its drama and genial melodies, doesn’t so much seem to anticipate Wagner as look back at (and, in so doing, extend the reach of) Mozart, and it does so with the geniality of the Beethoven who wrote the Pastoral Symphony.
I’ve long maintained that one need not necessarily have seen a film to appreciate its score on a separate listen, and when people question me on this point, all I need do is point to music like Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite or Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens and ask, “Do you really need to see a forgotten play to appreciate this music?”
In honor of the passing of Chuck Yeager (with a typically wonderful memorial by post by Sheila O’Malley), here is a suite of music by Bill Conti from the film The Right Stuff, which adapted the Tom Wolfe book that told the story of the early years of the American space program, with interesting focus on Mr. Yeager himself.
Forty years ago tomorrow, I got up to get ready for school. My mother had Good Morning America or Today or one of those on in the living room, which is when I learned of what happened forty years ago today. John Lennon, shot dead in New York City.
It would be many years before I would finally warm up to the Beatles’ music and the enormity of the act of cultural assault that Mark David Chapman committed that day.
One area of classical music I always tell myself I would like to explore, and yet never quite do, is the operas of Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov. NRK was a brilliant orchestrator, a musical colorist who also had a fine gift of melody. His music teems with the sense of exotic color and adventure and emotion; his Scheherazade is one of the enduring works of orchestral magic.
I have read that NRK’s operas constitute a treasure trove of storytelling and music, all based on the legends and fairy tales of Russia. The operas are not often staged, however, mainly because Russian is not one of the more popular languages for singers to learn, which is likely a pity. But we do have orchestral suites derived from NRK’s operas, like this one, from an opera called…Christmas Eve. A light romp, this is not; the story involves a plot by the Devil to steal the moon, and it proceeds from there in what I am sure is delightfully operatic fashion.
This is an orchestral suite derived from the score to Christmas Eve, and if it doesn’t make use of any traditional musical trappings of this season — no jingle bells here! — it nevertheless creates that wonderful sense of NRK’s grand orchestrations and music that is full of rhythmic excitement and emotion.
One thing that I have in common with Ludwig van Beethoven is that we both find creative rejuvenation in regular walks in the woods near our homes. I don’t know of any canine companionship that Beethoven might have enjoyed, but I have a dog with me at almost all times when I am walking through the forests of Chestnut Ridge Park, or Knox Farm, of Hunters Creek, or Sprague Brook, or Letchworth. Beethoven would escape almost daily to the woods around Vienna.
Even in Beethoven’s time, pollution was a problem in the city, and Beethoven likely felt it necessary to his physical health to get out of the city on a regular basis. I wonder how he applied those walks along forest trails to his musical life! Did he hum to himself, trying out musical ideas as he strolled? Did he take manuscript paper, quill, and ink with him so he could jot down ideas as they came? Or did he simply take a more meditative approach, using the walks to calm his often troubled soul so that when he returned to his chambers and his piano and his ink and paper, his mind was in a place to actually create?
It doesn’t precisely matter how Beethoven’s love of nature moved him to create; all that matters is that it did. His music abounds with examples of this inspiration, but the most famous and obvious is in his Symphony No. 6, the “Pastoral”, in which Beethoven uses five movements (not four!) to more suggest the emotions of walking in nature than musically depict it. This makes the Pastoral Symphony one of the earliest examples of “program music”, even if Beethoven’s desires were more impressionistic in nature. Nevertheless, in those five movements, Beethoven deftly creates a series of emotional moments–“melodic moments of feeling,” as Wagner would later say–that do suggest a natural setting.
The movements suggest the feelings of refreshment and delight upon arriving in the countryside, and then a scene by the side of a rushing brook. The third movement is a folk dance, followed by a storm and then by the feelings of rain-washed newness that follow a good summer storm. The entire symphony is lyrical and beautiful and at times even charming–note the folk dance in the third movement, which has a lively tune played off the beat by the oboe and a bassoon accompaniment that sounds like the bassoonist can only play three notes–and there’s real drama when the storm arrives, before peace settles again. The storm has been frightening, but also rejuvenating.
Here is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major, the Pastoral. Few works with more lyrical delight exist.
You know how sometimes a song will have a great tune and a great beat, but when you listen to the lyrics you’re kind of repulsed? For me one great example of this is the first of the 1980s pop music charity hits, “Do They Know It’s Christmastime”, by “Band-Aid”, a super-group made up of a whole lot of big names at the time. The song is basically asking if the starving Africans have any idea that it’s even Christmastime, so awful has their lot become. I’m always thinking, “Why wouldn’t they? They have calendars. Just because they’re dealing with a lot of shit doesn’t mean they don’t know what the date is.” And besides, there are a lot of Christians in Africa too. The whole song always bugs me (and not just for Bono’s lyric, “Well tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you!” Yikes.)
Anyway, yes, they know it’s Christmastime in Africa. Here’s some musical evidence.
So far this year we’ve had about an inch of snow altogether at Casa Jaquandor, and at the moment the grass is green and the woods are brown and everything is wet and muddy. Meteorologically, we just aren’t in the Christmas mood yet.
But anyway, here’s “Sleigh Ride”, in the original orchestral version and the Johnny Mathis version with words, because hey, it’s Buffalo! It’s gotta snow sometime, right? Six years ago we were still digging out from seven feet of the shit!
Anyway, here’s the music.
I wonder if Currier and Ives knew that this song was what would carry their names into the ages….
Oh heck, here’s another version, the short Roy Rogers and Dale Evans version that blends Sleigh Ride with Jingle Bells and if you listen to it you’ll walk around all day humming “Harses harses harses” to yourself. You may remember this version from Sleepless in Seattle, when Meg Ryan sings along with it while driving….
