Unanswered Question: February 2010 Archives

Of the distinguished refugee composers chased to the US by Hitler, two - Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg - so memorably responded to Pearl Harbor that one is tempted to surmise that no American-born composer could have reacted with such exigent fervor to the Japanese attack.

The two works in question are Weill's Walt Whitman Songs and Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon. I have now had three occasions to present them in tandem (most recently at Pacific Symphony's American Composers Festival earlier this month). That neither piece is well known or much performed is a frustration.

In America, Weill became an American (his wife Lotte Lenya once corrected me when I pronounced her husband's name with the "v" sound of the German "w"). An artist at all times attuned to his collaborators and to his audience, he gravitated to Broadway. He shunned the Eurocentric Metropolitan Opera and also his fellow German immigrants. "Americans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here," he told Time in 1945; "I'm not."

Of Weill's four Walt Whitman songs, three - "Beat! Beat! Drums!","Oh Captain! My Captain!," and "Dirge for Two Veterans" - were a 1942 response to the December 7, 1941, attack; he set a fourth Whitman Civil War poem - "Come Up from the Fields, Father" - in 1947. His early death, in 1950, pre-empted further such Whitman settings. As the Weill scholar Kim Kowalke has long maintained, the four extant songs form a felicitous cycle. They're tuneful, they're touching, and they fascinatingly mediate between Broadway and the concert hall - as if Weill were propounding a distinctive New World art-song genre. The most beautiful of them is the "Dirge" (Thomas Hampson has recorded it with piano). The most startling is "O Captain!", set as a breezy Broadway or cabaret ballade that at first seems unsettlingly casual. (Is this a Brechtian "alienation" strategy left over from Berlin? If so, it purposefully commands attention from both heart and brain.)

The four songs were first set for voice and piano. Weill orchestrated the accompaniments for three of them. Carlos Surinach orchestrated "Come up from the Fields" after Weill died. As a cycle with orchestra, the Whitman songs have to my knowledge been given only twice in the US - by Post-Classical Ensemble on the East Coast and by Pacific Symphony on the West. They should be widely known in this version, not least because "Beat! Beat! Drums!" is, it seems to me, far more effective with orchestra.

Schoenberg, a truculent, irremediably highbrow artistic personality, remained ever German in Los Angeles notwithstanding his substantial effectiveness as a teacher (at UCLA) and influence (on American composers, if not American listeners). Though he expressed "disgust" with American popular culture and was alienated by Hollywood, his private students included Hollywood's leading film composers. And he was as prone to gusts of patriotism as to fusillades of disparagement. He once described himself as "driven into paradise," where "my head can be erect." For his children, he prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into animal shapes.

Three presentations of Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon have not quenched my thirst to encounter this music - to my knowledge, the most impassioned, most compelling World War II piece composed in the US -- in live performance. Pearl Harbor here singularly ignites the composer's astounding capacity for rage and exaltation. Only Schoenberg would think to set in its entirety (for speaker, string quartet, and piano) a poem as dated and prolix as Byron's ode. But Byron's excoriation of Napoleon, and his closing apostrophe to George Washington, translate for Schoenberg into such scorching contempt for Hitler, and grateful reverence for FDR, that the poem's obscurities are forgiven. Among Schoenberg's serial compositions, this is a work with such emphatic tonal tendencies (it closes refulgently in E-flat major: the key of the Eroica Symphony), such absorbing motivic interplay, such hypnotic mood-pictures that any audience properly prepared (I urge that the poem be read during intermission) cannot resist a compelling performance. As I write in Artists in Exile: "The work's British, American, and Germanic resonances remain unblended and mutually incongruous. That even at his most 'American' Schoenberg (so unlike Weill) is proudly and incorrigibly German makes this patriotic gesture the more touching."

The featured pianists in Post-Classical Ensemble's two-day "Interpreting Liszt" festival, in collaboration with Georgetown University, were Mykola Suk and Kumaran Arul. Suk's performances are all about risk - interpretively, emotionally, his art is one of inspired brinkmanship. He embodies a spirit of improvisation. Arul actually improvises.

In my experience, Suk's readings of the B minor Sonata and Dante Sonata surpass in impact the Liszt performance of any other living pianist. His performance of Totentanz, at the DC festival, transcended kitsch to a degree I would not have thought possible. (You can hear his Liszt Sonata on the Post-Classical Ensemble website; you can hear his Dante Sonata on an amazing new Music&Arts CD.) Arul's festival repertoire included the two Liszt Legends - Preaching to thSt. Francis Walking on the Water, St Francis Preaching to the Birds - readings bristling with extemporaneous passages and also seamlessly fused by an extensive improvised transition. That is: for Arul, improvisation is not a parlor stunt (taking tunes from the audience and turning them into Beethoven or Chopin) or a tangential felicity ("preluding" in between pieces on a recital program). The following further thoughts on "interpreting Liszt' are excerpted from my program book essay:

Mykola Suk's performance of Apres d'une lecture du Dante is a profound act of interpretation. It is significant that no transcription of Suk's rendering of this "fantasia quasi sonata" would closely resemble Liszt's notes on the page. The notes, to be sure, are mainly there, but Suk's liberties - of tempo and rubato, of pedal, touch, and dynamics - are extreme. In fact, to follow the score, listening to Suk, is a confining and irrelevant experience.

What Suk's Dante Sonata makes obvious is that the spirit of this piece is improvisational - that it in fact doubtless arose from the act of improvisation, and is fundamentally un-notatable. Liszt did the best he could setting its singular textures down on paper. But surely the letter of the score is here a mere point of departure. The performer is challenged to produce something that, if not a picture of what Liszt actually sounded like (a picture unrecapturable), is at least a demonic excursion comparable in intensity, scale, and power of suggestion.

Suk has performed the Dante Sonata for more than three decades. He long ago absorbed the notes and put the score behind him. If he goes his own way, such Liszt instructions as "lamentoso" and "disperato" and "quasi improvisato" are honored as literally, as fearlessly, as is humanly possible. Where Liszt writes "lamentoso" and adds "tempo rubato e molto ritenuto," the smoldering fires Suk conjures speak of emotion benumbed, of tragedy spent.

If Suk's version of the Dante Sonata sounds improvisational, what about the role of actual improvisation in Liszt interpretation? In Liszt's day, keyboard improvisations were commonplace. No less than his contemporaries, Liszt would extemporaneously "prelude" before pieces, modulating to a new key, setting a new mood. And his recitals might climax with improvisations on themes supplied by the audience.

In fact, before 1900, nearly every pianist of consequence was also a composer and/or conductor. (Liszt excelled in all three capacities.) Many composer/pianists, blending the creative with the recreative, were improvisers. Even more were transcribers - adapting for the keyboard music by others intended for other media. The recently unearthed "Block cylinders" singularly document turn-of-the-century performance practice in Russia. Rendering a waltz and two mazurkas by Chopin on February 12, 1895, the pianist/composer Paul Pabst produces a trio of hybrids, half-Chopin, half-Pabst. Are they improvisations or transcriptions? It hardly matters - these are performances about personality and spontaneity.

In the case of Liszt, his huge output of transcriptions and paraphrases includes some of his most inspired compositions. The Reminiscences de "Don Juan" is no potpourri, but an incisive personal impression of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Liszt's Schubert and Wagner transcriptions - a labor of love - are poetic and virtuosic in equal measure.

In retrospect, the performance specialist was a twentieth century anomaly. Already, in our early twenty-first century, pianists and violinists are everywhere "crossing over" into conducting; and some are improvising and composing as in Liszt's day and before.

The performance specialists preached "fidelity" to the score. This typically meant literal adherence to a scholarly "urtext." But their notion of the performer's function cannot be regarded as absolute. It arose in the early twentieth century in reaction to Romantic license. In Germany, textual fidelity took a particularly virulent form, infused with the dour Weimar aesthetics of "Neue Sachlichkeit" - "new objectivity." For a pianist like Rudolf Serkin (who became greatly influential in the United States as a pedagogue), improvisation and transcription were mutually anathema. Nor did Serkin compose cadenzas, after the fashion of some (a minority) of his contemporaries. It is no coincidence that a pianist so oriented should have shunned Liszt.

Previous generations of performers had prioritized their own music, or the music of their own time. The performance specialist prioritized the music of dead European masters. In this narrative, Liszt was exceptional. Few other pianists of his time (Liszt's dates are 1811 to 1886) were so linked to earlier composers. He performed sonatas by Scarlatti, suites by Handel, and Bach's Goldberg Variations. His Beethoven repertoire included the Diabelli Variations and at least nine piano sonatas, including the final four. He made Schubert's music a cause (albeit mainly in transcription). His concerto repertoire included Bach, Beethoven, Hummel, Moscheles, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Henselt, and Weber. It is tantalizing to speculate what these performances sounded like in terms of style. The twentieth century performance specialists were specialists in interpretation - they distinguished between Baroque, Classical, and Romantic; between French, German, and Russian. To what degree did Liszt? Here is Richard Wagner, in his famous essay "On Conducting" (1869), railing against the reticence and "fear of exaggeration" governing Mendelssohn's "Leipzig school":

"For a long time I earnestly wished to meet with someone who could play [Beethoven's] great Sonata in B-flat (Op. 109) [the Hammerklavier] as it should be played. At length my wish was gratified - but by a person who came from a camp wherein those [Leipzig] doctrines do not prevail. Franz Liszt also gratified my longing to hear Bach. No doubt Bach has been assiduously cultivated by Liszt's opponents; they esteem Bach for teaching purposes, since a smooth and mild manner of execution apparently accords better with his music than "modern effect," or Beethovenian strenuousness.

"I once asked one of the best-reputed older musicians . . . to play the eighth Prelude and Fugue from the first part of the Well-Tempered Klavier (E-flat minor), a piece which has always had a magical attraction for me. He very kindly complied, and I must confess that I have rarely been so much taken by surprise. Certainly, there was not trace here of somber German gothicism and all that old-fashioned stuff; under the hands of my friend, the piece ran along the keyboard with a degree of "Greek serenity" that left me at a loss whither to turn; . . . This singular performance still tingled in my ears, when at length I begged Liszt for once to cleanse my musical soul of the painful impression; he played the fourth Prelude and Fugue (C-sharp minor). Now, I knew what to expect from Liszt at the piano. But I had not expected anything like what I came to hear from Bach, though I had studied him well; I saw how study is eclipsed by genius."

Did Liszt add notes to Bach's prelude and fugue? Very likely. From Liszt's pupil Carl Lachmund, we know that Liszt played a Handel fugue "thundering the ending in octaves." From Liszt's pupil Alexander Siloti, we know Liszt's response to Siloti's alterations in the Fourteenth Hungarian Rhapsody:

"After I had played it he said: 'I not only acquiesce in, but thoroughly approve of what you have done, in proof whereof I give you my permission to make any alterations and omissions you wish - and this at any time, even after I am gone; for I know that what you consider necessary will not be detrimental to the music - indeed you may say in such cases that it is as I wished it.'"

We also know that Mendelssohn complained of Liszt's textural alternations, and that the violinist Joseph Joachim testified that in chamber music List would embellish the keyboard parts. And we know what kinds of Mozart and Beethoven performances Wagner preferred - he describes them in detail in "On Conducting." Wagner liked performances we might term "Wagnerian," or at the very least "Romantic."

The Wagnerian ethos of interpretation defined in "On Conducting" - seeking fidelity to the "spirit," not the letter - was in the twentieth century upheld by such artists as the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and the pianist Edwin Fischer. In their writings, they condemned a dessicated or pedantic literalism - an exaggerated obeisance to false notions of "tradition" and "style" -- much as Wagner did. Fischer's Mozart, seeking turbid depths, is fearlessly expressive; it eschews "perfection." Furtwängler's oceanic Beethoven's Ninth is "Wagnerian." It is no accident that these performers were not performance specialists. Both also composed. Furtwängler also played the piano. Fischer also conducted.

The kind of fidelity espoused by a Fischer or Furtwängler trusted subjective impressions. Such impressions might be physical or programmatic. Nineteenth century composers had them all the time. So did nineteenth century performers - even those as "sober" and intellectual" as Hans von Bülow (who studied with Liszt and became his son-in-law). Bülow had a program for each of Chopin's 24 Preludes. Here he is, for instance, on No. 10 in C-sharp minor:

"A night moth is flying around the room - there! It has suddenly hidden itself (the sustained G-sharp); only its wings twitch a little. In a moment it takes flight anew an again settles down in darkness - its wings flutter (trill in the left hand). This happens several times, but at the last, just as the wings begin to quiver again, the busybody who lives in the room aims a stroke at the poor insect. It twitches once . . . and dies."

It mattered not to Bülow, surely, whether Chopin had a night-moth in mind when he composed his C-sharp minor Prelude; Bülow's act of interpretation was vitally supported by an act of imagination.

In the case of Liszt, it is obviously worth inquiring to what degree his music may be experienced as programmatic. According to Claudio Arrau, "it was taken for granted by Liszt's pupils" - including Arrau's teacher Krause - that the B minor Sonata embodied a Faustian scenario, with Faust, Mephistopheles, and Gretchen all playing their parts. Arrau also testified that it was "well-known in Liszt's circle" that Liszt's B minor Ballade told the story of Hero and Leander. In the latter case, the narrative references Arrau adduced are so plausibly detailed as to be indisputable. (Cf. my AConversations with Arrau.)

I can remember a time - the 1960s - when the Liszt Sonata as not often played or recorded, and Liszt was held in far lower repute than today. By the late 1970s (when I regularly attended piano recitals as a New York Times critic), Liszt's sonata was played as frequently as anything by Beethoven or Chopin (I tallied the repertoire at New York's major halls), but little else by Liszt was regularly heard. In particular, the transcriptions were shunned. Today, transcriptions are back in fashion - pianists both play and compose them.

The complete musician in Liszt was and is a harbinger.

With the waning of modernism, and of the high value once placed on conspicuous complexity and originality, the topography of twentieth century music is rapidly changing. One of the chief American beneficiaries is certain to be Bernard Herrmann.

Everyone appreciates Herrmann for his singular achievements as a film composer. Without him, there would be no Psycho, North by Northwest, or Vertigo, and Citizen Kane would be a lesser film. But Herrmann also produced a substantial catalogue of concert works in the same style. Though he clung to tonality, he created a palette of mood and sonority that is instantly recognizable and wholly his own. I would unhesitatingly rank his accomplishments above those of, say, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, or William Schuman -- all of whom once far eclipsed him in reputation because they did not bear the taint of Hollywood. (Of Herrmann's scores for Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Vertigo, and Psycho, Alex Ross writes in The Rest is Noise that they "contain some of the century's most piercingly effective dramatic music.")

Herrmann's concert music has figured in the last two installments of Pacific Symphony's American Composers Festival -- itself a singular enterprise. We have had occasion to offer three West Coast Herrmann premieres: of his "experimental" radio melodrama City of Brass; of his World War II elegy For the Fallen; and of Souvenirs de Voyage, a 30-minute quintet for clarinet and strings. Herrmann's concert output also includes a symphony, an oratorio, a string quartet, and an opera.

That this music went unheard and unknown was a source of bitterness and frustration for the composer. A notoriously irascible and impatient man, he knew the dimensions of his talent. He once said: "Musically I count myself an individualist. I believe that only music which spring out of genuine personal emotion is alive and important. I hate all cults, fads, and circles." And also: "My feelings and yearnings of are those of a composer of the nineteenth century. I am completely out of step with the present." And (in 1948): "I will never do a movie again. . . . I now understand that it was the movies that exhausted me and sapped my strength. I sincerely hope that I will never see Hollywood as long as I live." His favorite composers -- an unfashionable twentieth century list -- included Debussy, Ravel, Elgar, Delius, Holst, and Ives. His distinctive compositional style was a direct suffusion of his morbid Romantic self. Among his musical signatures are nervous ostinatos, irresolute motivic scraps, and lurid colors.

The 1967 clarinet quintet we presented at Pacific Symphony's 2009 festival is a
stubbornly inward work, suffused with nostalgia and melancholy. The memorably disturbing love music from Vertigo is a pertinent frame of reference. Herrmann here eschews sonata form and all other generic molds. He also largely eschews contrast. Ever the film composer, he suggests pictures and narratives. (Steven Smith, in his indispensable Herrmann biography, cites an A.E. Housman poem and one of Turner's Venetian paintings as key influences.)

The intoxication of this score, and of its clarinet part, are not in question. Its possible weaknesses are two: is there variety enough to sustain a half-hour span? Is there structure enough to establish trajectory and shape? In California, we prefaced our performance with a Vertigo clip: the restaurant scene in which James Stewart first glimpses Kim Novak. The quintet followed seamlessly, without pause. For the musicians (and this is an orchestra whose principal string players are the equal of any), the Herrmann quintet was a revelation. The audience was hypnotized. I cannot think of a more seductive, more finished chamber work by an American.

George Gershwin is another twentieth century American whose taint (Hollywood plus Broadway) will fade, whose stock will rise. Some reviewers of my Classical Music in America (2005) treated my moderate enthusiasm for Aaron Copland as an obvious lapse in judgment. But what seems obvious to me is that Copland's reputation will ebb as Gershwin's greater genius is absorbed in classical music circles that once patronized him as a dilettante. It's already happening - witness the belated redesignation of An American in Paris and Concerto in F as mainstream subscription fare, rather than pops fodder, by such orchestras as Boston and Chicago.

And then there's George Chadwick and his divine Jubilee (1895).

We're all loosening up.

Worries that classical music isn't "visual" enough have produced concerts embellished with film, photographs, and video. Obviously, this form of enhancement risks shrinking the musical experience rather than expanding it. A symphony linked to a visualized story or motif is likely to mean less, not more.

To date, I have produced two "visual presentations" with the video artist Peter Bogdanoff: one for the Largo and Scherzo of Dvorak's New World Symphony (for the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1994 and subsequently seen in California and Berlin), and another for the third movement of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (for Pacific Symphony in 2007). The circumstances were singular, the goals specific.

For the New World Symphony, I wanted to experimentally recontextualize the work by citing the cultural vocabulary of its first audiences in New York and Brooklyn, for whom this energetic and elegiac music conveyed a potent American accent. So Dvorak's allusions to Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha were made explicit via text and illustration; and resonances with once iconic canvases by Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and George Catlin were explored.

In the case of the Stravinsky, I was obsessed with Stravinsky's amazing confession to Robert Craft that this symphony's vehement finale was inspired by certain World War II newsreels, beginning with goose-stepping Nazis for the opening march. Peter culled the appropriate clips -- and they fit uncannily.

I assumed I would have no further occasion to apply visuals to a symphony -- until I was invited by the New York Philharmonic to produce a series of multi-media "Inside the Music" shows resembling the concerts the Chicago Symphony calls "Beyond the Score." So Peter and I had wound up collaborating on "Inside the Music" presentations of the New World Symphony and Tchaikovsky's Pathetique.

Now, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, Orange County's Pacific Symphony -- a terrific southern California orchestra with a terrific conductor, Carl St. Clair -- has embarked on a three-year series of multi-media "Music Unwound" concerts. To my knowledge, Pacific Symphony this season becomes the first American orchestra to offer programming of this kind in multiple performances on the main subscription series.

The "Tchaikovsky Portrait" Peter and I created for Pacific Symphony last month began with a clip from Ken Russell's subversive Tchaikovsky film The Music Lovers -- accompanied by live music. There followed a biographical portrait of the composer: an impersonation by a stage actor, Nick Ullett, with visual accompaniment, hosted by Alan Chapman. By bringing to life Tchaikovsky the man, and his pertinent travails, we aimed to provoke a fresh intensity of personal engagement with the symphony, as performed on part two of the program. At each of four performances, more than 200 people stayed for 45 minutes to share their Tchaikovsky experience. Nothing like this had happened before at a Pacific Symphony concert. We also surveyed our audience, and discovered that 88 per cent felt "better equipped to appreciate classical music in the future."

We raised the screen for the Pathetique Symphony performance Carl conducted. But this month's Pacific Symphony American Composers Festival program kept the screen in play for the entire first half of a program celebrating "The Greatest Generation" -- the New Deal and World War II. For Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, we projected "Friends and Family of Common Men and Women Who Accepted an Uncommon Call to Duty" -- photographs of local war veterans submitted by subscribers. For Bernard Herrmann's For the Fallen (commemorating the war dead), Jeff Sells of the symphony's artistic staff assembled photographs of military cemeteries and ceremonies. For Kurt Weill's Walt Whitman songs -- his exceptional response to Pearl Harbor, setting "O Captain, My Captain" and three other Civil War poems -- we projected the poems, and also four Matthew Brady photographs. The idea was to consolidate a sense of occasion.

I remain wary of visuals in the concert hall. I would not inflict them on, say, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (though I can imagine incorporating readings of Berlioz's program), or on a Strauss tone poem (though super-titles for the Alpine Symphony seem to me a good idea).

The elephant in the room, of course, is the recession. Many orchestras, perhaps most, feel the need to retrench. For some, however, the exigencies of the present will impel artistic innovation: new roles for musicians (cf my Jan. 29 blog on the Memphis Symphony), new concert formats. It will happen. It is already happening.

In a recent New York Times dance column (Jan. 15), Alastair Macaulay takes Christopher Wheeldon to task for the obtuse choreography he has inflicted on the Met's new Carmen. As Macauley truly observes, Wheeldon's decision to cast the act three entr'acte -- a fragrant flute and harp piece, one of Bizet's most beloved miniatures -- as an erotic pas de deux defies understanding.

Bizet, of course, intended this music to be played with the curtain down. Wheeldon is far from the first person to attempt performing it with the curtain up. In fact, a film version of Carmen -- planned but never made by Rouben Mamoulian -- memorably reconsiders the "action" of Bizet's sublime entr'acte.

Mamoulian (1897-1987) is a forgotten hero of American musical theater. His Broadway credits include DuBose and Dorothy Heyward's Porgy (1922), Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), and Carousel (1945) -- and these shows would have played far differently without him. His roots were in Russian experimental theater - and Mamoulian, in his American heyday, was a relentless experimenter.

Writing a book about immigrants in the performance arts (Artists in Exile, 2008), I experienced my Mamoulian epiphany upon discovering his greatest of all movie musicals: Love Me Tonight (1932) with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. A subversive tour de force, it binds music and action in ways never before imagined. The film begins with a daybreak sequence using Parisian street sounds as a precise accompaniment to pantomime; the rhythmic ingredients, added one at a time, include chimes, a sledgehammer, snoring, sweeping, and a radio whose music becomes a synchronized symphonic soundtrack to the growing din.

Mamoulian invented his first daybreak "symphony of noises" for Porgy, and created a second for Porgy and Bess. Rummaging through the Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, I came across the script for the Porgy and Bess sequence, laid out in fastidious detail. The "occupational sounds" change meter from 4/4 to 2/4 en route to matching tempo with Gershwin's score. (Rarely heard today, this "occupational humoresque" is restored on a Decca Porgy and Bess recording conducted by John Mauceri.)

But my most remarkable discovery, at the Library of Congress, was a complete 1953 script for a film version of Carmen, co-written by Mamoulian and Maxwell Anderson, and aligned with the piano/vocal score. The flute-and-harp entr'acte is repositioned and made to accompany the death of Don Jose's mother, witnessed by her son (in pantomime). It leads directly to the act four entr'acte, during which Escamillo and Carmen (in separate rooms) dress for the impending bullfight. The resulting interpolated sequence potently ignites the final trajectory ending in Carmen's death.

Mamoulian's staging of the opera's Prelude is startling. Carmen gallops toward Seville, late for work. At the "fate" motif (Wheeldon here introduces a predictable and superfluous dance number for Carmen and Jose), Mamoulian pans the interior of Carmen's destination: a cigarette factory: "It is a large hall, with many windows, filled with rows of long, narrow tables at which the factory girls are sitting, making cigars. Some of them smoke while they work. Because of the heat, the girls are in various states of undress." The unlikely juxtaposition of Bizet's sinuous melody, snaking towards climax, and the bustle of the smoky workplace is jarring and provocative: a music/theater dialectic. It is pure Mamoulian.

The saga of Mamoulian and opera is ultimately frustrating. In his twenties, at Rochester's Eastman Theater, he created an American Opera Company whose productions included Maeterlinck's Sister Beatrice (appropriated by Meyerhold for one of his signature productions) with choreography by Martha Graham and music by Otto Luening; in later life, he considered this his most inspired creation. Porgy and Bess, on Broadway, was doubtless the most detailed operatic staging New York had ever seen; Mamoulian separately directed every member of the chorus. Production photographs preserve the indelible stage pictures he painstakingly created for Robbins's murder and the second act hurricane. Oklahoma! and Carousel came after that. Rudolf Bing tried to lure Mamoulian to the Met; having just embarked on a Huckleberry Finn with Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, Mamoulian said no.

Why was Mamoulian's Carmen never filmed? It was self-evidently a labor of love (his wife presented him with a leather-bound typescript as a 66th birthday present). Bing was aware of Mamoulian's project and wanted him to use his Met Carmen, Rise Stevens. Mamoulian wanted a more demonic singing actress. No evidence has come to light that Mamoulian found a Carmen for his movie.

In truth, the Mamoulian/Anderson Carmen script is for the most part disappointingly tame -- nothing like the brave Hollywood Mamoulian of the 1930s. Its flashes of genius are fated to survive in the imagination alone. I could think of nothing else upon encountering Carmen at the Met last week.

About a year ago, my son Bernie (now 22 years old) produced a self-described "Oedipal Tirade" titled "Horowitz on Horowitz on Horowitz," the three Horowitzes being Bernie, myself, and Vladimir.

Far away at college, liberated from parental guidance, Bernie had acquired a consuming passion for the recordings of Vladimir Horowitz. At Bernie's age, I, too, succumbed to the thundering octaves and all-purpose intensity. Decades later, looking back, I produced a diatribe of my own: "The Transformations of Vladimir Horowitz," for The Musical Quarterly (later reprinted in my 1995 essay collection The Post-Classical Predicament. My ripened perspective certified: "Horowitz was less immersed in music than he was aware of himself in relation to his necessary audience. . . . His feats, his abilities, his eagerness to please impelled a complex mating ritual - Horowitz eyeing and ignoring, stroking and rebuffing his public - bypassing music. . . . If he serves as a model , it is of the performer circumscribed and overshadowed by his own celebrity."

I also wrote: "Horowitz typically excelled in lesser music: brains-in-the-fingers cameos by minor Romantics. . . The lightning swells and diminuendos, the sudden dabs of color, the vanishing-act codas - these and others sleights of hand prove magically self-sufficient. . . . Horowitz sounds happiest, most completely himself, in this type of music. Employing his clairvoyant aural imagination, his prankster's sense of fun, he empties his full bag of tricks. Depth, decorum, fidelity are unnecessary, even out of place; a superior sort of pandering is the very raison d'etre."

Naturally, my son became obsessed with his father's disapproval. In particular, Bernie badgered me furiously for having written that "Horowitz was from the start a merchandiser's dream. Even his notorious unreliability was turned to his advantage. No film star played such tantalizing games of hide-and-seek. He retired at least three times." Revisiting my article recently, I discovered that Bernie had taken this passage - with its implication that Horowitz was consciously manipulating his doting admirers -- out of context, for I had added: "Had Horowitz's withdrawals seemed ploys, they would merely have irritated; instead, they seemed necessities. No other musician projected such electrifying insecurity. Horowitz exerted the fascination of a psychological and physical mechanism strung so taut that it had to careen out of control yet did not - usually."

Mainly, however, Bernie bombarded me with non-commercial recordings of Horowitz in concert - recordings I had never heard. I have endured this onslaught for nearly four years (Bernie is now a senior). In an attempt to extricate myself, I hereby recant and declare that yes, OK, Horowitz was a deeper artist than I had imagined.

Busily excavating five decades of obscure Horowitz recordings, Bernie finally produced a smoking gun: a performance of Liszt's B minor Ballade from a 1982 Pasadena recital (when Horowitz was 78 years old). Here (42:58 minutes into the program) is a piece I would have thought beyond Horowitz -- like the same composer's B minor Sonata and Dante Sonata, a damnation and redemption narrative demanding a lot more than fingers. Its supreme exponent, Claudio Arrau (listen to the live 1979 recording on Music & Arts CD-1205), testified that in Liszt's circle the B minor Ballade was known to tell the story of Hero and Leander. The surge and fall of the left-hand chromatic scales represents the Hellespont, which Leander swims to visit his beloved. Each night, the sea is stormier. The fourth night, Hero drowns. A disembodied reprise of Hero's theme signifies transfiguration. (Cf. my Conversations with Arrau, pp. 143-146.)

Though the spiritual elation of Arrau's Liszt is absent, Horowitz' terrifying performance does not skim the striving and rapture of this music. The Ballade's octaves are saturated with desperation and grief. Rendering the Verklaerung, he (for once) doesn't toy with the melodic filament; the lovers emerge dignified.

It is a point of some interest that Horowitz does not play broken octaves, as written by Liszt, but alternating octaves - which are easier and louder. Arrau, by comparison, religiously respects the text in this as in all music; the defining nobility of his Liszt performances is at one with this practice. But Liszt's frequent spirit of improvisation is lost on Arrau.

The B minor Ballade, I would say, doubtless arose from an act of improvisation, and is in fact fundamentally un-notatable. The letter of the score potentially becomes a mere point of departure. The performer is challenged to produce something that, if not a picture of what Liszt actually sounded like (a picture unrecapturable), is at least a demonic excursion comparable in intensity, scale, and power of suggestion. I have no problem with Horowitz's substitution of alternating octaves.

When I remember Arrau performing the Liszt Sonata in the final years of his career, I remember witnessing the real life drama of music as an elixir - of an aged body inhabited by the urgent and unsettling passions of a young man; veritably, Liszt turned Arrau into Faust. Horowitz is no Faust. But the B minor Ballade absorbs and amplifies his nervous tension with transformative results: this is a Horowitz performance that is not about the piano.

Where to find comparable Liszt playing today? My favorite present-day Liszt interpreter is little-known: Mykola Suk, whose capacity to inhabit the Dante and B minor Sonatas is a rare feat of courage and humility. You can hear these performances on the new Music & Arts CD-1234. And you can hear Suk playing both works at Georgetown University in D.C. this coming February as part of a two-day Post-Classical Ensemble "Interpreting Liszt" festival - at which the role of improvisation in Liszt performance will be tackled head-on. (The link in the previous sentence includes a Suk concert recording of the Liszt Sonata.)

(For the Horowitz Pasadena recital file, my thanks to Dr. John L. Duffy: johnduffy@dybb.com; 3211 Nolen Avenue, P.O. Box 261, Walker, Iowa 52352-0261.)