Category: music

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BOTD: Fanny Mendelssohn

(BOTD: Born On This Date. An idea I’m brazenly and openly stealing from Sheila O’Malley, who is the master of these kinds of posts.)

Today is the birthdate of Fanny Mendelssohn. She was a pianist and composer, but her own work was supplanted in her time by virtue of her being a woman and her younger brother, Felix, being one of the great musicians of her day. Fanny’s skill as a performer was substantial, but apparently she rarely performed for anyone outside her own familial circle, and adding insult to injury, a number of her compositions were credited to Felix, with modern scholarship only correcting that record in the last several decades. As with Clara Schumann, a musician whose gifts were also mostly in thrall to those of a better-known man, I wonder how music history would shine all the brighter if we’d been able to really harness all of the musical talent that existed, instead of just half of it.

Fanny does leave a lasting mark on music, though, and not just through her own compositions. She and Felix had a warm and collaborative relationship, and Felix took her constructive criticisms very seriously. Apparently at one point Fanny and Felix were discussing creating an opera based on the legends of the Nibelungs, which would have predated Richard Wagner’s titanic quadrilogy had they ever got the project off the ground. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn both died the same year, 1847, with neither being very long-lived: Fanny died at 41, and Felix went less than six months later at 38. Fortunately both Mendelssohn siblings left behind their voluminous correspondence. Here is an example of such, Fanny congratulating her brother on being appointed to a prestigious position in Berlin:

If one is a member of the people walking in darkness who don’t know when they will see you, the Great Light, in person, then one probably had best proceed with the help of quill, ink, and paper, standard accouterments of absence, in extending one’s thanks and congratulations. I had actually thought that it wouldn’t be necessary to write for a while, but that isn’t the case yet. I therefore congratulate you, Herr Music Director, upon attaining the highest human office next to Privy Councillor and Pope. Kapellmeister is a proper title, insofar as it shows what sort of a person one is, whereas Doctor could just as easily refer to a tooth puller or midwife, God be with us!

There we have it: Privy Councillor, Pope, and Kapellmeister. The pinnacles of human achievement! You can practically hear Fanny’s laughter as she is writing this.

Here’s a good article on Fanny Mendelssohn’s life and times, and here is a piano trio of hers. It’s a good work, indicative of a clear and logical musical mind. Mendelssohn composed this trio in her last year of life, and it was published posthumously. I have always been rather behind in my chamber music listening, but this work seems to me an excellent example of the chamber music of the mid-Romantic era, in the tradition of Fanny’s younger brother, Robert Schumann, and an early Johannes Brahms. Would that she had been as encouraged and allowed to flourish as her brother was!

 

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Something for Thursday

Singer Jay Black of Jay and the Americans died several weeks ago at the age of 82. Jay and the Americans were a 60s rock band who had a number of hits, of which this one is most familiar to me, owing to its prominent use during a comedy-action sequence in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I like this song’s faux-“South of the Border” sound (the little punctuation chords by the brass after each verse are an especially nice touch), though I suppose you really couldn’t get away with this sort of thing these days–appropriation and all–but there is sometimes charm to be found in that sort of thing.

Here is “Come a Little Bit Closer”.

Thank you for the music, Jay Black and bandmates!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

I’ve featured the Romanian Rhapsody #1 by Georges Enescu in this space several times, because it’s just such a lovable showpiece or orchestral magic, with its collection of drinking songs and folk dances creating such a brilliant bit of youthful energy. But obviously the existence of a Romanian Rhapsody #1 implies the existence of a Romanian Rhapsody #2, does it not?

The second of Enescu’s two Romanian Rhapsodies is a more lyrical, songlike work. There is not nearly as much dance energy in this work, but it’s still a gorgeous listen that I honestly find hard to believe I’ve never much engaged before. The work even ends on a quiet, peaceful feel, rather than the final burst of energy that closes out the Rhapsody #1.

Enescu himself was apparently less than enthusiastic about the way his two Rhapsodies became as beloved as they did: they were so popular that they drowned out a great deal of his other work. Enescu deserves to be heard more than for just the two Romanian Rhapsodies, that much is clear. But…sometimes we just have to listen to them anyway!

Here is the Romanian Rhapsody #2 by Georges Enescu.

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Something for Thursday

So I’m trying something new with this post.. I am actually dictating this into my phone’s keyboard app so we’ll see how this works.

I’ve noticed over the years that my favorite sports movies aren’t exactly about sports at all…at least, not in the way we usually think of sports movies. I’m not really into the “chasing the championship” kinds of movies, like Hoosiers; for me the best sports movies always illustrate the world of sports without necessarily pursuing a “quest for the trophy” story. I’m thinking movies like Field of Dreams or Bull Durham.

I missed Moneyball when it came out, but I was highly impressed when I finally watched it. It illustrates one baseball general manager’s work to overcome the unfair nature of Major League Baseball’s economic system, in which small-market teams with little TV revenue are trying, and often failing, to compete with the deep pockets of the New York Yankees. It’s a good movie that packs a lot of data and what should be boring talkiness into a compelling drama. (It’s co-written by Aaron Sorkin and Stephen Zaillian, which is one reason I think it works so well: the presence of another excellent writer helps put Sorkin’s good points on display while hiding his more annoying tendencies.)

Moneyball features a meditative score by Mychael Danna, but what always catches my ear in this movie is the title song, which I have just discovered isn’t even a part of Danna’s work, but a song by an instrumental rock band called This Will Destroy You. The song, called “The Mighty Rio Grande”, is long and dreamlike, meditative and rhythmic and driving. It fits well with the decidedly un-romantic nature of Moneyball‘s approach to baseball: there’s something slow and methodical about baseball, but a look at its use of numbers and statistics reveals a kind of industrial heart to what is generally seen as a pastoral game.

It’s fitting that Moneyball ends with Billy Beane, having turned down a rich offer to be GM of the Red Sox, driving through the drab industrial landscape of outer Oakland.

Here is “The Mighty Rio Grande” by This Will Destroy You.

(Oh, I stopped the dictation thing after the first paragraph. Nifty capability and I do plan to get better at it, but for now I got a bit too “um” and “er” and “uhhh” for my own good. Still, moving forward and all that!)

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Late today with this post! Anyway, I have several pieces that I’m in the process of writing about, but none of those are ready, so for now, here’s an overture from one of Richard Wagner’s early operas, Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman). This was Wagner’s first major success, paving the way for everything that came after. I’ve never listened to the entire opera, but the overture is evocative in that great Wagnerian way: thrilling and adventurous, and at times romantically lyrical.

 

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Something for Thursday

You probably didn’t realize you wanted to hear a suite of music from The Lord of the Rings arranged for solo piano, but thankfully, I realized that you needed to hear it!

Here you go:

This arrangement is really quite well done, and at points it really highlights some aspects of Howard Shore’s original orchestral work that’s easy to miss, such as the shift in the initial Shire music from the bouncy, Percy Grainger-esque folk sound to the more lyrical tone that follows as we get to know our Hobbit heroes better and get more acquainted with the deeper nature of their pastoral character. A fun listen!

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday (Halloween edition)

It’s Halloween week, and if you don’t think classical music can do “scary”, well then…you’ve never really listened much. Here are a couple of works that put the darkness of the universe on full display. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both these pieces are by Russian composers. I’m always wary of nationalistic stereotypes, but there’s just something about Russians when it comes to brooding fatalism. I genuinely think they do that better than anyone else.

First up is Modest Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky lived an unusually tortured life as a composer, and when he died in 1881 at just 42 years old, he left behind great piles of manuscripts, his work in such disarray that definitive versions of his pieces have been the object of scholarly work ever since. The versions of his work that ushered his name into musical immortality came via the pen of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose “assistance” with preserving Mussorgsky’s work has come to be seen as almost outright tampering. David Dubal, in The Essential Canon of Classical Music, offers this summation of Mussorgsky:

Mussorgsky was severely self-destructive, and his early death was inevitable. His reliance on instinct was an aspect of his personality, as if technical knowledge would limit his search for “truth”. He was far more than an artist who merely lacked discipline: he was incapable of surviving for long in the real world of naked, shattering truth. Like Tolstoy, he was wracked by the violence and heartbreaking injustice inflicted on millions of Russian serfs. Unlike Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, and Borodin, he could not find refuge in Romantic nationalism. He saw strife and bitterness as few of his class did–he acknowledged and faced it. Nothing in Musorgsky’s art is personal; he dissolved his entire being into the agonized fate of the Russian people, and he saw no hope for the future.

Small wonder that a work so fundamentally terrifying as A Night on Bald Mountain sprang from his pen, then. It is a work of sadistic hedonism, a Bacchanalia of the profane and evil. A Night on Bald Mountain became famous via Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement/orchestration, and its most famous appearance in popular culture was as one of the selections in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, where it was paired with Schubert’s Ave Maria in closing the film’s program.

A different kind of Russian brooding comes from Sergei Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff yields to no one in brooding, a quality which would shine to wondrous effect in some of his greatest music.

Again, David Dubal:

During the war years [World War I], Rachmaninoff, always on the brink of depression, learned to control his black moods. To the poetess Marietta Shaginian, his chief confidante through these years, he wrote, “Here am I, spiritually sick…I am afraid of everything–mice, rats, beetles, oxen, murderers. I am frightened when a strong wind blows and howls…when I hear raindrops on the window pane; I am afraid of the darkness, etc. I don’t like old attics and I’m even willing to admit there are goblins around.”

Where A Night on Bald Mountain depicts a terrifying Witches’ Sabbath, with its demonic orgy, Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead depicts the long, slow, sad trip to the underworld, starting softly with the boat rocking against the current. Rachmaninoff uses a 5/8 time signature to great effect, using the not-quite-familiar 5-beat bar to suggest that there is something vaguely unfamiliar, something not-quite-right, about this slow trek across calm, black water. Through all this Rachmaninoff employs snatches of melody, including the Dies irae chant that haunted him throughout his life, that lead to some of the saddest sounding lyricism in his entire output. There is a section in the middle of this work that is as intensely lyrical as anything Rachmaninoff wrote, complete with the kind of ever-yearning-upward thing that Rachmaninoff was so good at. (If I ever write my Love Letter to Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, this will be a point to which I return frequently.) But here, when we reach the apex of that section a stormy section soon follows, and given the piece’s overall mood, it’s hard not to hear this as someone trying desperately to cling to life, only to be pulled back toward the inevitable long abyss.

This is not scary music in terms of Things That Bump In The Night, but it is unnerving in its depiction of the cold darkness that awaits everyone and how, in the end, all we will have is the slow rocking of that boat as it takes us to the Isle of the Dead.

 

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Something for Thursday

That certain night, the night we met
There was magic abroad in the air
There were angels dining at the Ritz
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square….

I have nothing much to add by way of discussion; sometimes it’s good to just get out of the music’s way. Here’s Tori Amos.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Jean Sibelius wrote The Bard in 1913, when he was entering the late period of his compositional life. The work has little by the way of orchestral fireworks; while there is power, this is no showpiece. It is instead a work of surprising introspective depth in its short running time (about seven minutes, give or take, depending on the conductor). The mood is hushed and meditative, and somehow manages to stay hushed and meditative, even when it does crescendo toward the end.

The inspiration for this work isn’t easy to tease out. Some think it was perhaps a movement from another larger work that Sibelius decided to hold back; some have suggested a particular poem as an inspiration, which apparently the composer himself denied. There does not seem to be any direct literary inspiration to The Bard, nor does the work suggest a pastoral inspiration from the natural landscapes of Sibelius’s beloved Finland.

Perhaps Sibelius meant the work to be mainly abstract, only giving it a name out of habit…or perhaps he meant it to be more of a work of feeling than to have any particularly strong connection to some extramusical source of meaning. I don’t know, but I do know that The Bard is mystically effective in suggesting the kind of wisdom that one would expect from the itinerant poets of old. It may take a few listens to penetrate into the heart of this work: it’s not a piece that leaves a particular tune or melody lingering in the ear, like Finlandia, but its mood is what lingers. And that is almost precisely Sibelius’s point.

Here is The Bard.

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Farewell, Paddy Moloney

Paddy Moloney, 1938-2021 (image: stereogum.com)
Paddy Moloney, 1938-2021 (image: stereogum.com)

Paddy Moloney, the great front-man for the Celtic band The Chieftains, has died. He was 83.

In my musical life, Paddy Moloney ranks very high. Very high. When I list musical figures who shaped my world and the way it sounds in my heart, Paddy Moloney is right up there with John Williams, Hector Berlioz, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leonard Bernstein, Annie Lennox, and Sam Cooke. I can tell you when I first heard each one of those artists, and I can tell you when I first heard Paddy Moloney and The Chieftains.

I don’t know why I remember this with such clarity, but remember it, I do. It was late in my high school career, maybe my senior year, or it was in my first college year, when I was home. We had taken a day trip like we often did to Erie, PA, and a shopping mall there. After the hours at the mall, there was another store in an outparcel that my parents wanted to visit, but I opted to sit in the car, reading and listening to Erie’s classical music station. At this time, living in Allegany, NY, classical music on the radio was a rare luxury that involved driving an hour in any direction. Before the Internet, before cell phones.

At this point in the day, there wasn’t actual classical music playing on that station. Instead there was a weekly program called Thistle and Shamrock, that featured something called “Celtic” music. I had no idea what this music was. I would later learn that it was a larger genre that included an artist whom I had discovered not long before, a singer named Enya (wait a minute! If this is post-Enya, then this is during my college years, because I remember with equal clarity when I first heard Enya: in the record store in a shopping mall in LaCrosse, WI, where we stopped on a college visiting trip. Thanks, memory!). But it took all of five minutes of listening to Thistle and Shamrock (hosted to this day by Fiona Ritchie) to realize that Celtic music was much, much, much more than the New Age-tinged dreaminess of Enya.

I would later buy a Chieftains CD as part of one of my orders to the BMG Classical CD Club (the less said about my experiences with fiscal insanity that were driven by my several memberships in BMG, the better). The CD was Celtic Wedding, and from that one disc sprang a love of Celtic music that has lasted me in all the days from that to this. This genre ranks just behind classical and film music in my heart, and I often find that a rough mood is soothed by listening to some wonderfully melodic and rhythmic Celtic music. All of this came from hearing The Chieftains, and Paddy Moloney.

Paddy Moloney, and by extension The Chieftains, were extremely versatile and dedicated to exploring every byway of Celtic music they could. Albums were coming out constantly, sometimes more than one a year, and the focus was always something new. There was a holiday album that nevertheless broke new ground, and there were duet albums with the likes of Van Morrison. Moloney and friends were not content to keep to the British Isles, either: they did albums with Canadian artists, and that Celtic Wedding album actually explored the Celtic music of Brittany. They did an album of Celtic-inspired music from the northern regions of Spain, and they did several albums with Country-Western stars, since a lot of the original settlers of the hills of Appalachia were actually descended from Scots and Celtic peoples, meaning that the folk music that eventually became a part of Country music in America sprang originally from older Celtic material. The Chieftains appeared in film scores

Paddy Moloney was a great ambassador for music, a constant force of admirable curiosity and of good cheer, and he was also a fantastic musician in his own right. The music world is poorer for his loss, but immeasurably richer for his having been here at all. As am I.

Thank you, Paddy Moloney. I hope ye were in Heaven a half hour ‘afore the Devil knew ye were dead!

And now, some music.

 

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