Cutting Room Floor: Mozart On Wheels

On the heels of our Mozart extravaganza, here's one last piece of related brilliance for you to enjoy. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for finding it...

(That's Mozart's Symphony No. 40, by the way. Dude has excellent rhythm.)

Cutting Room Floor: Mozartian Myths

One of the things we're going to be getting into briefly in this week's concerts is the wealth of misinformation that's been floating around about our featured composer ever since a movie called Amadeus came out back in 1984. I was 8 years old at the time, and good little violin-playing nerd that I was, I went to see the film on its first weekend in the theaters. (It should also be noted that I nearly left in tears after the opening scene, in which a decrepit and evil-looking Antonio Salieri attempts a grisly suicide. I didn't know who Salieri was, I only knew that this was a helluva lot more intense than the next-most-intense movie I'd seen at that point, The Fox & The Hound.)

Like a lot of other moviegoers, I erroneously assumed that, in writing and adapting Amadeus, playwright Peter Shaffer's motivation had been to tell Mozart's fascinating life story to a modern audience. This was not remotely the case: Shaffer, who also wrote the disturbing psycho-drama Equus, in which a naked Harry Potter blinds six horses on Broadway, had seen in Mozart the bare bones of a fascinating character, and created a world around him that, while based on a thin layer of history, was mainly fictional. Mozart's excesses, while legendary, probably never approached the garish and off-putting level of Shaffer's character. And despite the guilt-racked protestations of Shaffer's Salieri, there's little to no evidence that the composer had a hand in the real Mozart's premature death at age 35.

While Salieri was certainly a professional rival of Mozart's, there's not much evidence that he even harbored much resentment toward the young phenom, which is only natural, since the two composers achieved roughly equal success in their lifetimes. (Salieri has since faded from historical view, but he was as much a presence in 18th-century musical society as was Mozart, and the free conservatory he founded in Vienna counted Beethoven and Schubert among its alumni.)

Interestingly, the idea that Salieri was responsible for Mozart's death (most scholars guess that rheumatic fever was the real culprit) did not begin with Shaffer, and like so many conspiracy theories, it includes a grain of true history. Rumors that Mozart had been poisoned actually began shortly after the wunderkind's death in 1791, sparked by witness accounts that the body was swollen and bloated. And only five years after Salieri's death in 1825, the Russian literary giant Alexander Pushkin published a longform poem accusing the Italian of having killed off his Austrian rival, and composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov later used the poem as the libretto for an opera. Shaffer was playing off Pushkin as well when he wrote Amadeus, although he never went as far with the murder plot as did the original.

Mozart has always seemed to be a figure ripe for the taking of dramatic license, and plenty of authors have used the outlines of his biography as fodder for their own melodramatic ideas. One such novel, Dark Melody, imagines a heroine who time-travels back to Mozart's final year of life, and has a whirlwind affair with the dying genius. Another recasts Mozart as the leader of a coven of vampires. And no less an august author than Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, among many, many others) penned a hilarious and touching tribute to Mozart, set in Heaven, in which such notables as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner argue about Wolfgang's life, legacy, and music.

With all this Mozartian fantasy floating around, it's no wonder that we sometimes want to believe more than was true of such an outsized personality. Truth be told, there were a couple of points in my preparations for this week's show when I wrote something I believed to be true into the script, only to find out later that it was part of the myth. If only truth really were stranger than fiction...

Cutting room floor: The Other Mozart

It's been a busy couple of days of script-polishing; writing our "Inside the Classics" shows is a multi-month process that begins with an initial brainstorming meeting, goes on to choosing musical examples, and proceeds with drafting, redrafting and redrafting again. With our upcoming Mozart show, there was just so much to say (it's pretty difficult to reduce the essence of Mozart down to 45 minutes!) that inevitably a few really important points had to be left out.

I have to confess that I have a soft spot for Maria Anna "Nannerl" Mozart (as well as Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann). Nannerl was the older Mozart sibling and one half of the brother-sister act that toured the capitals of Europe to tremendous acclaim. History has it that she was a brilliant pianist, with a talent "scarcely inferior to her brother's"; in fact, as late as 1765 (when she was 14), she had top billing in their concert advertisements.

But all good things must come to an end, or at least they do for a young woman in polite 18th century society, where it would be improper for a girl of marriageable age to be performing in public. In 1769, at the age of 18, Nannerl was forbidden from further concertizing and remained in Salzburg as brother Wolfgang continued his triumphal trajectory. Leopold, ever the controlling father, rejected suitor after suitor; Nannerl did not marry until 33 and settled in St. Gilgen with her husband, children and step-children. Years later, after her husband's death, she returned to Salzburg to live modestly as a piano teacher.

There's a quiet tragedy in Nannerl's story - but I always wonder if I see it as such through 21st century lenses. After all, in Nannerl's world, it was all that could be expected. It was probably extraordinary enough that she lived the childhood of a traveling musical prodigy (and that's certainly what she was). Who knows how her talents would have developed if she had been allowed to continue her musical career?

It all touches home for me. I've written several posts on my take on being a woman in my particular field; it's hard enough navigating the minefields of gender in the 21st century, much less the 18th. Change comes slowly; I'm reminded of the fact that women did not have the right to vote until 1920 - only a (long) lifetime ago.

And I think of the writings of Rousseau:

"The Education of women should always be relative to men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young and to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable--these are the duties of women at all time and what they should be taught in their infancy."

And:

"Women, in general, possess no artistic sensibility...nor genius. They can acquire a knowledge...of anything through hard work. But the celestial fire that emblazens and ignites the soul, the inspiration that consumes and devours...,these sublime ecstasies that reside in the depths of the heart are always lacking in [women's artistic endeavors]."

Nannerl would have been fighting a losing battle.

Cutting Room Floor: From The Minds of Babes

As we draw within a few days of our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season, Sarah and I are in our usual mode of painstakingly cutting material from the show that we desperately want to get to, but simply won't have the time for. And as we did last season, we'll be using the blog as a way of giving you access to some of these extra bits and pieces. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries that fall into this category.)

Later this weekend, Sarah will be writing about Mozart's largely ignored sister, who by all accounts was nearly as talented a musician as Wolfgang, but who was expected at a certain point to give up her music and settle down to raise a family. (All three of the "Young Wonders" we're featuring on this year's concerts actually had or have similarly talented siblings, so this is a subject we'll definitely be returning to throughout the year.)

But for today, I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about just what defines a prodigy in the neurobiological sense. What was so different about Mozart's 5-year-old brain as compared with yours or mine at that age, and how do the extraordinary minds among us develop differently than those with more average intellects? To that end, I've sought out an expert in this particular field to help us out - an expert, it should be said, to whom I have a deeply personal connection. Listen in below...

Cutting Room Floor: Validation & Legacy

Some musical works that we think of as masterpieces today were given a decidedly rocky reception on their first performance. (As we demonstrated in dramatic fashion at our January Inside the Classics concerts, Tchaikovsky's violin concerto was one such piece.) But Copland's Appalachian Spring was not only an instant hit on the concert stage, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945. Which got me wondering what else had won the Pulitzer during the musically tumultuous 20th century.

The music Pulitzer was awarded for the first time only two years before Copland won it, and William Schumann was the first recipient. (Schumann's music is not frequently performed these days, but he was extremely popular with orchestral audiences in the mid-20th century.) In 1944, it was Howard Hanson (another too frequently forgotten composer) taking the prize for his fourth symphony. (Hanson's best known symphony was his second, which the Minnesota Orchestra will coincidentally be performing next season.) Other familiar names capturing honors in the Pulitzer's first decade included Charles Ives, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Walter Piston.

If the initial ten or fifteen winners have anything in common, it's that the majority of them fell outside the musical avant garde that was fast overtaking concert music at the time. Germany's Arnold Schoenberg, whom we'll be discussing at next week's Inside the Classics concerts, had thrown down the atonal gantlet with his system of 12-tone composition decades before, and by the 1950s, composers had well and truly splintered into multiple movements, some of which clung to traditional models of tonality even as others disdained anything that average audience members might actually enjoy listening to.

The avant garde may have been fighting their way to the fore of the compositional profession as early as the 1940s (or even earlier, if you count such luminaries as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Berg as members,) but it took the Pulitzers a while to catch up. The first significant work of seriously atonal music that I see on the list is from 1960, when Elliott Carter won for his second string quartet. (In general, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the atonal music that was written mid-century, but Carter's string quartets, like Bartok's, are truly masterworks, and did a lot to advance both composition and performance of chamber music.) Interestingly, the 1962 award went to Robert Ward, who rejected 12-tone and atonal music as "boring," for his operatic version of The Crucible, which is still regularly performed by companies the world over. And while the Pulitzer committee toyed with the avant garde a bit in the '60s (Leslie Barrett won in 1967, George Crumb in '68,) it stayed largely away from the most "out there" compositions of the era.

But then, in 1970, the committee decided to jump headfirst into the new, and gave the award to Charles Wuorinen, for his synthesizer symphony, Time's Encomium. There are those in the music business who will tell you that this was the moment when concert music in America truly went off the rails and lost popular audiences forever. (I may not disagree - I generally despise Wuorinen's music, and most of what he stands for as a composer.) There are others who would insist that it was only when Wuorinen was legitimized in the eyes of the musical establishment that those of us in the hidebound, old-fashioned orchestra world finally began paying attention to the important changes underway in our profession.

For most of the 1970s, the Pulitzer would go to an avant garde composer; not a surprise, given what was going on in America's larger culture during that decade of experimentation and rebellion. (One of the exceptions to the rule was Minnesota's own Dominick Argento, a staunch melodist who won in 1975 for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, a song cycle premiered at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.) But in the '80s, things throttled back a bit as composers began to emerge from decades of intense pressure to reject any idea that reeked of the past. By 1987, when John Harbison won the Pulitzer for The Flight Into Egypt, it seemed that tonality and atonality were on their way to a reconciliation.

The last couple of decades have firmed up that idea, at least as far as the Pulitzers are concerned. A new generation of American composers, from Aaron Jay Kernis to John Corigliano, won the award for compositions that embraced traditional melody and harmony without sacrificing intellectual content. Some composers who had never gone away during the decades of experimentation (John Adams, for instance, who won in 2003 for a symphony inspired by the 9/11 attacks) experienced career resurgences. And in 2007, there was an even more positive sign: a jazz score, Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar, won the Pulitzer for the very first time. (Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis had won the award in 1997, but it was for a classical composition.)

A lot gets made these days about the collapse of traditional barriers between musical genres, and certainly, embracing jazz in 2007 doesn't exactly make the Pulitzer committee a risk-taking bunch. But just as orchestras (the biggest, costliest, and most unwieldy ensembles of the music world) are generally an important bellwether of which trends are truly here to stay in the classical world, the Pulitzers tell us a lot about which composers may (and I stress may) stand the test of time. The full list of winners is here if you want to peruse it yourself, and I'd love to hear about any winners that leapt out at you, or any you find incomprehensible...

Cutting Room Floor: Behind Every Great Composer...

The music world is full of behind-the-scenes figures without whom none of us on stage would have a prayer of making a living at what we do. These devoted music fans contribute the money that keeps us going, and some of them contribute countless hours of their time, as well. Some are board members of orchestras big and small; some devote their free time to helping keep organizations like Minnesota's Schubert Club aloft; and a select few go their own way, commissioning new works, finding and paying musicians to play them, and generally carving out a small niche in the music world that would otherwise not exist.

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was one of this last group. Born in Chicago in 1864, she would become one of the most influential figures in the then-developing American music scene, and while her name wouldn't ring a bell with the vast majority of musicians and music fans today, composers and musicians across the 20th century musical landscape (including Aaron Copland) owe her a debt of gratitude.

That such a prominent patron of the arts in the early 20th century could have been a woman might seem surprising, given the societal restrictions of the period. But a quick glance back through Western musical history reveals that an inordinately large number of patrons of the arts have been women, and this remains the case today. (Just off the top of my head, I could name nine or ten women who are major powers on the Minnesota Orchestra's board. I'm refraining because many of them are famously averse to public recognition for their charitable works, wanting only the music and an occasional conversation with Osmo in return for their tireless efforts.)

Sprague Coolidge's contributions to music were many, but she may be best remembered for having started the rural summer festival in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts that would later become known as Tanglewood. The Boston Symphony's idyllic summer home, to which listeners from around the world flock each July and August to hear grand symphonies while lying on a vast lawn sipping wine, began as an outgrowth of Sprague Coolidge's Berkshire Music Festival.

She was most passionate about chamber music, that connoisseur's genre so often ignored by the general public, and in her adult life, she commissioned some of the great works of the era: Bartok's 5th string quartet, Anton Webern's lone quartet, two quartets by Arnold Schoenberg, and (you knew this was coming) Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. (While our Inside the Classics concerts next week will be focusing on the orchestral version of Copland's masterpiece, remember that it began its life as a ballet score, to be played by just 13 musicians in an orchestra pit. At it's core, Appalachian Spring is a work of chamber music.)

Sprague Coolidge's role as a patron of the arts was a delicate one at times. In 1919, she famously held a competition for composers to create a new sonata for the viola, one of her favorite instruments (and mine, obviously.) Several prominent composers entered works, and eventually, the jury deadlocked between two distinctive pieces. One was by the eminent Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch (his Grand Suite for viola,); the other was by Sprague Coolidge's neighbor, a British-born composer and violist named Rebecca Clarke. Aching for her friend, but mindful of the necessity of not allowing her competition to be sullied by accusations of favoritism, Sprague Coolidge broke the tie in Bloch's favor. (Both the Clarke sonata and the Bloch suite have since become standard repertoire for violists.)

Many of those responsible for music's creation and preservation toil in obscurity, and as I said, many of them wouldn't have it any other way. (To be honest, it's likely I'd never have heard of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge were it not for the fact that my connections to Western Massachusetts run particularly deep.) So it's somewhat apropos that you won't be hearing anything about the woman who commissioned Aaron Copland to write a ballet for Martha Graham in our concerts next week. Her name doesn't appear on the score, and even hardcore Copland fans frequently assume that it was Graham herself who paid for Appalachian Spring to be written.

But without her, 20th century music would have been quite different. She understood the importance of encouraging innovation, even if she didn't always like what she heard. Her perspective on the importance of new music is one that all of us in the music world would do well to remember: "My plea for modern music is not that we should like it, nor necessarily that we should even understand it, but that we should exhibit it as a significant human document."

Cutting Room Floor: This Is A Dance, Isn't It?

As I mentioned in a previous post, finding enough material to fill the first halves of our Inside the Classics concerts is never a problem - the challenge comes in deciding what will have to be left out due to time constraints. In fact, after each of our first two concerts this season, Sarah and I have had several people ask, "Why didn't you talk more about...?", and the answer is always that we simply ran out of space in the show.

However, since we have no such limitations here on the blog, I thought I'd spend the next week or so offering up bits and pieces related to Appalachian Spring that we're not going to have time to explore in our upcoming concerts. These "cutting room floor" posts will have their own tag, so if you want to wait until after the concerts to read the extra material, you'll be able to click cutting room floor in our list of tags over in the right-hand column, and you'll get everything on one page.

The most glaring omission from the concerts is going to be any sort of prolonged focus on the fact that Appalachian Spring was originally composed not as a work of concert music, but as a ballet score written for the revolutionary 20th century choreographer Martha Graham and premiered in 1944. Those who attended our Firebird concerts last fall know that we spent a good chunk of time examining the interaction between Stravinsky's score and the dancing that it was written to accompany, but for various reasons, we decided not to do that for the Copland concerts. The major reason is simply that, while Stravinsky's ballets told a very definite story and managed to revolutionize the world of ballet as well as the world of music, Appalachian Spring is somewhat vague in its storyline and was more or less forgettable as a ballet. The piece took on a second life in the concert hall once Copland rewrote it for full orchestra in 1945, and it's that version that we'll be focusing on.

Still, anything choreographed by Martha Graham can't be dismissed entirely, and while the ballet version of Appalachian Spring is rarely performed these days, Graham's influence on both classical and modern dance is with us everywhere. Her signature style is unmistakable, whether accompanying Copland's wide-open scores or, as in this clip from "Night Journey," the sharp, angular sounds of William Schumann.



I find Graham's commentary on this clip fascinating. She talks about "the weight of the body against the floor" being emphasized, rather than minimized, as it would have been in an earlier era. Think about a 19th-century ballet like Swan Lake, in which all the dancers seem to be doing their best to convince you that they are, in fact, weightless, floating about the stage as easily as if they were on the moon. Weight is most decidedly the enemy in traditional ballet, and an almost ethereal style of movement is the goal. Graham turned that philosophy completely on its head, demanding that audiences embrace the raw humanity of her dancers, warts and all. People are heavy. Gravity weighs us down. Deal with it.

This, of course, is why Graham's choreography tends to make some viewers uncomfortable, just as attending a production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? makes us squirm in recognition of the everyday malevolence of people just like us. Rather than offer a vision of human movement that seems godlike and idealized, Graham gives us humanity as it is: endlessly complex, frequently awkward, but beautiful in a raw, earthy sort of way. To me, it's a fascinating contrast with Copland's idealized musical view of America, which we'll be getting into in depth at the Appalachian Spring concerts.

For more on Graham's technique (as well as a few musical clips from the original chamber version of Appalachian Spring,) check out this short clip from the Martha Graham Legacy Project. (They've disabled embedding on this clip, for some reason, so I can't include it on the blog.)