Here’s a suite of Max Steiner’s music from Casablanca, one of the most accidentally-great works of art ever made. The movie went into production without a finished script, the ending was only determined as the need to film it came near, and even then the ending was almost undone by editing mistakes. Also, the film’s score had to revolve around a song called “As Time Goes By”, which composer Max Steiner hated and wanted to replace with a song of his own. Only the fact that Ingrid Bergman had moved on to her next movie, and cut her hair to do it, made the reshoots that would have been necessary to change the song impossible.
That’s one of my favorite “Golden Age of Hollywood” anecdotes. The Casablanca score really demonstrates the professionalism of those great composers: Max Steiner wrote one of the great movie scores of all time, centered on a tune he didn’t like and didn’t want to use.
Anyway, here’s the suite. Note the conductor’s dress coat; he looks like a monk.
Sticking with my new discovery, Russian-Jewish composer Alfred Schnittke, I’ve already learned that he composed music for films…including a version of Kipling’s mongoose story, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. This prospect initially excited me, because an animated version of that story used to show up on television once in a while, and I remember liking it a great deal as a kid. Digging farther, it turns out that Schnittke’s version was not the animated version I recall fondly (and rightly so, it was made by Chuck Jones), but rather a Russian live-action version. And there was an earlier animated version, also Russian–so what was with all this Rikki-Tikki-Tavi content in the mid-70s? I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll read the story and find out.
Meanwhile, here’s a suite of Schnittke’s music for that live-action version of the story It’s melodic and very dramatic (there are some unfortunate sound drops in the later few minutes), and highly compelling. Battle music indeed, for a mongoose battling a cobra to the death!
Sticking with Alfred Schnittke, to whom I introduced myself last week, we have extracts from a film score of his. The Story of an Unknown Actor is a Soviet film from 1977 for which Schnittke provided the music. I have turned up very little information about the film at this point, save its year and its director, one Aleksandr Zarkhi. I’m wondering if the film isn’t best known now precisely for its score by Schnittke, which has shown up on several recordings.
The score is mainly monothematic, as far as I can tell, but the arrangement here into a series of extracts casts it as a theme-and-variations work, and it ends up being a fairly interesting listen, particularly when Schnittke does different things with his orchestrations. Even in an obscure score to a very obscure film from a nation that no longer exists, Schnittke is an interesting composer.
One of the eternal questions in relating to art is how to separate one’s feeling for the art from one’s feelings for the artist. This is not the least bit new; it’s a problem that is probably as old as art itself. There have been so very many artists whose own lives and statements fall well short of the art they produce. I find myself thinking anew, as one of the oldest and yet most irritatingly persistent of hatreds, anti-Semitism, just keeps arising again like the very worst of pennies, of Richard Wagner.
You can barely read a biography of Wagner that covers the man’s life in any depth beyond “He was born in 1813, died in 1883, and wrote operas” without confronting what a staggering boor he was, a fact which…
…[shit]…
You know what, to hell with that. I love Wagner’s music, but I don’t want to write about Wagner right now, not when my country’s discourse is once again mainstreaming awful crap about the Jews again.
Let’s talk about Jewish composers instead. We’ll start with Alfred Schnittke.
Schnittke, of whose music I am mostly ignorant, was a Russian composer of Jewish and German ancestry. I’m sure that particular blend of ethnicities and nationalities made for some strife in his life. He was born in 1934 in Russia, and started his musical education in 1946, after the war and after the Holocaust. Not long after, he moved along with the rest of his family back to Russia, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Thus he had to toil in the air of state control that was the artistic scene in Soviet Russia, until he finally left for good in 1990. Schnittke died in 1998.
His music–and I am going on reference here, rather than my own personal insight–is influenced early on by the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, but later on in his life, as great artists do, he developed his own sound and voice. It’s a voice I know little about. So many voices to hear, so little time!
This work is a ballet called Sketches. In a sequence of twenty-two short pieces, Schnittke puts on display a great deal of sardonic wit, seemingly poking fun at the entire proceedings. He even goes so far as to quote or reference other classical composers along the way, and his use of rhythm and color are infectiously amusing. One of the segments even utilizes a spoken-voice part, which threw me off the first time I heard it; at first I thought one of my other open tabs had stumbled upon a voice recording.
I know I’ve been doing “autumnal” music this year instead of “spooky” or “scary” music, but this one really does fall into both categories, and it’s one that I post every year this month anyway, so here we are: that wonderfully brooding The Isle of the Dead, by Sergei Rachmaninoff. This piece is so wonderfully magical in Rachmaninoff’s downbeat way, starting from the very opening when the 5-4 time feels like the oars rising and falling awkwardly. Then the rocking of the waves starts…and the work’s real drama and emotion kick in, leavened with Rachmaninoff’s trademark lyricism and the way he can make musical passages yearn and yearn and yearn before they finally reach a kind of resolution, not unlike the mustering of the sea before the waves break upon the cold sand.
I love this piece. Here is The Isle of the Dead by Rachmaninoff.
Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg wrote a concert overture, inspired by the familiar landscapes he knew around this time of year, and he titled it simply, In Autumn. That’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? The piece is melodic and brooding in precisely the way we’d expect from the composer of one of the best piano concertos of the 19th century, or from the man who wrote “In the Hall of the Mountain King”.
In Autumn has definite rustic feel to it. Grieg seems to be writing about a more turbulent kind of fall than we usually picture when thinking of the season; but maybe he was on to something. As I write this, it’s a cold and windy day outside, and hillier locations south of where I live are reporting dustings of snow for the first time. Hmmmm.
Continuing a series of autumnal or autumnally-inspired works, we have quite an avant-garde work today. It’s amazing how new and striking this piece sounds in my ears, given that it is over 55 years old, having been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1967.
Toru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer who was very modern in his sound, and who incorporated many 20th century compositional techniques in addition to his Japanese aesthetic. Takemitsu also evolved greatly throughout his highly prolific career. I’ve only heard a small portion of Takemitsu’s work, never enough, for he was a fascinating musical voice.
November Steps is a work for traditional Japanese instruments and full orchestra. At this point in his career Takemitsu had not done much for traditional Japanese instruments, finding in such music stark reminders of the horror of World War II. He eventually relaxed this stance, but at first–with November Steps being one of the very first such works by him–he was convinced that the Japanese and the Western musical traditions were too starkly opposed to be truly integrated. Hence his juxtaposition of the Japanese and the Western in the pages of November Steps.
November Steps is not a warm work, but it is an introspective one suggestive of the kinds of cold winds that can slice through the November skies which are more gray than blue, once all but the most stubborn of the leaves have fallen and all that remains is the coming of the snow. It is also not a work where Western formalism is taken into account much at all. Takemitsu composes a kind of stream-of-consciousness work here, a sequence of moods more than a formal examination of musical ideas.
I suppose we’ll just go ahead and make “Autumnal Classical Music” the theme of the month here, since I’ve already done “Spooky or Scary Classical Music” in previous years. There will probably be a little overlap, but I’ll try to avoid it.
Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016) was a Finnish composer, likely the most prominent Finnish composer since Jean Sibelius. He was a prolific composer, writing many orchestral works, operas, chamber works, and other pieces, often in a “neo-romantic” style that at times borders on pure mysticism in a way that reminds me of Alan Hovhaness.
Today’s work, “Autumn Gardens”, is a three-movement work for orchestra that reflects Rautavaara’s passion for gardening and how he saw gardening as a metaphor for composing. In his words:
“I have often compared composing to gardening. In both processes, one observes and controls organic growth rather than constructing or assembling existing components and elements. I would also like to think that my compositions are rather like ‘English gardens’, freely growing and organic, as opposed to those that are pruned to geometric precision and severity”.
“The title is derived from a passage in the libretto of my opera ‘The House of the Sun’: ‘…like a butterfly in the garden of black autumn…’ The motif to which these words are sung is used as the theme for the variations of the first movement. It’s texture grows and becomes denser by degrees. The second slow movement, rhythmically and dynamically placid, follows without a pause. The third movement starts off vivacious and brisk, but autumn is a time of leaves falling, of colours, and death, and so soon becomes a solemn dance, perhaps a sarabande in honour of the dying splendour of summer, or as T.S. Eliot said, ‘late roses filled with early snow’.”
The piece is stormy at times, tranquil at others, sometimes warm and sometimes quite cold. Not unlike autumn itself.
Here is “Autumn Gardens” by Einojuhani Rautavaara.
Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is one of the great stalwart works of all classical music.
It’s also a work that…I just don’t like very much. At all. I’ve never warmed to it. It honestly does nothing for me. For years I concluded that I didn’t like Vivaldi, because I have never managed to turn myself around on The Four Seasons. Luckily, I eventually realized that Vivaldi wrote a lot of music that’s just fine and it’s just the one piece I didn’t much care for; this happens. (See Ravel and “Bolero”, for example…and even my favorite composers have works that don’t thrill me much, such as Berlioz’s Te Deum, which is…OK, I guess, if you like that sort of thing.)
But here’s the thing about The Four Seasons: it’s a concept that surely didn’t occur only to Vivaldi in 1718, right? Surely some composer in the three hundred years since has tried to address this concept.
Enter Argentine composer Astor Piazzola (1921-1992), who was known for his skill at composing for the national dance of Argentina, the Tango. Thus his suite of seasonal-based works consists of a set of tangos, as opposed to a set of baroque concertos, a la Vivaldi. (Also, Piazzola’s suite wasn’t even composed intentionally as a suite but was rather four different works gathered together into a suite. Many works of art come from a messy creation story!)
Still, this suite makes for a fascinatingly energetic and refreshing listen as you let Piazzola guide you through his dance-version of the four seasons of his Southern Hemisphere home. Here is The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, by Astor Piazzola.
