Unanswered Question: January 2011 Archives

THE GERSHWIN MOMENT (CONTINUED)

As readers of this blog are aware, I have for some time been proclaiming a "new Gershwin" - in, e.g., the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement. In Classical Music in America (2005), he ranks with Ives as our most important concert composer (my view of Copland, in that book, irked some reviewers). My book-in-progress is a study of Gershwin and Rouben Mamoulian, the theatrical genius who directed Porgy and Bess. And my latest Gershwin rant takes the form of a review of Larry Starr's superb new George Gershwin (Yale University Press), in the current Times Literary Supplement. Gershwin is no longer patronized as a "pops" composer, as an inspired dilettante. "The new Gershwin is versatile, protean, universal," I write. Here's the full review:

When George Gershwin died in 1937, Arnold Schoenberg eulogized him as a "great composer." Jascha Heifetz felt the need to admonish his colleagues: "We should be ashamed that we didn't appreciate this man more when he was here in our midst"; Heifetz ingeniously transcribed and unforgettably recorded half a dozen numbers from Porgy and Bess; he had hoped for a Gershwin violin concerto. Fritz Reiner had Robert Russell Bennett compose a Porgy and Bess symphonic synthesis -- and left a 1945 recording of it, with the Pittsburgh Symphony, that remains an exemplar of virtuosic and affecting Gershwin conducting. Schoenberg, Heifetz, and Reiner were of course not American-born -- and neither was Maurice Ravel, who when he told Nadia Boulanger he would not presume to teach Gershwin wrote one of the most moving tributes ever paid one composer by another. The significance of these vignettes is that no American-born classical musician contemporary with Gershwin ever had such nice things to say about him. Instead, the tone was set by the critic Paul Rosenfeld, whose causes included Aaron Copland and Roy Harris, and who in 1933 detected in Gershwin the Russian Jew "a weakness of spirit, possibly as a consequence of the circumstance that he new world attracted the less stable types." Here is Copland in 1937, when asked to compare his music with "Mr. Gershwin's jazz": "Gershwin is serious up to a point," Copland replied. "My idea was to intensify it. Not what you get in the dance hall but to use it cubistically - to make it more exciting than ordinary jazz." Virgil Thomson, reviewing the premiere of Porgy and Bess in 1935, found it "crooked folklore and halfway opera." (Dmitri Shostakovich, encountering Porgy in Moscow in 1945, called it "magnificent" and compared Gershwin to Mussorgsky.) As recently as 1980, an American contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians dismissed Gershwin in fewer than two pages; the tone of the entry was Copland's or Thomson's: "limited experience in developing musical material," "serious works are structurally defective," etc.

With the passing of modernism, a new musical topography is today upon us -- and the notion that Gershwin is not a "real" composer is no longer credible. American music historians are flocking to Gershwin studies. David Schiff's 100-page Rhapsody in Blue handbook (1992) set a new standard for acute Gershwin discourse. Howard Pollack's 800-page Gershwin biography (2006) contributed a sprawling information compendium. In this fresh company, Larry Starr's new Gershwin book constitutes a succinct manifesto for the "new Gershwin." His comprehensive title notwithstanding, Starr's essential topic (writing for Yale's "Broadway Masters" series) is Gershwin the song composer. And his essential theme is that Gershwin's songs are not only stirring by subtly sophisticated.

Starr's analysis of "The Man I Love" is a tour de force, shrewd and heart-felt in equal measure. As he shows, the diatonic simplicity with which the verse begins, matched by Ira Gershwin's seemingly banal lyrics ("When the mellow moon begins to beam"), evolves toward mature chromatics and sentiments: a calibrated prelude to the refrain ("Some day he'll come along"). The result: "nothing less than the metamorphosis of childhood fantasy into adult . . . sexual longing." Starr comparably stresses the organic relationship of songs to shows -- an emphasis culminating in a chapter-long treatment of Of Thee I Sing as a species of integrated musical theater far preceding the Rodgers & Hammerstein landmarks. Starr reminds us that this longest-running book musical of the 1930s, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for drama, begins with an overture dispensing with the "traditional curtain-raising musical gesture leading quickly into a memorable tune." Instead, Gershwin supplies "aggressive fragmentary ideas." This overture-analysis sets the stage for further analysis: the show's "short, straightforward, easily remembered musical motifs," some of which are deliberate clichés, suit its characters, situations and language, even its "open-ended, unconventional formal structuring."

The logical climax of Starr's book is a final peroration on Gershwin and cultural fluidity. Gershwin contributed to "blurring, perhaps even collapsing, the distinction between American 'art music' and American 'popular music,'" Starr writes. And he crucially adds:

"As a composer, he never seriously evinced a divided allegiance. For this reason it is ultimately erroneous to speak of a rapprochement between cultivated and vernacular in Gershwin's art; his music tells us in the clearest possible way that, while the schism might be our perception, it is not his aesthetic reality . . . The efforts of [Leonard] Bernstein and others to bridge the gap -- or the abyss -- that separates 'classical' and 'popular' in American culture must command our admiration. Yet Gershwin set a singular benchmark in this area, and it is simply because he never believed in the validity of the schism to begin with. His oeuvre . . . proceeds from no fundamental position of illness or imbalance whatsoever. There is a terrific feeling of healthiness to Gershwin's art -- a healthiness in relation to aesthetic, cultural, racial and any number of other perplexing matters -- that may strike us as naïve. But this is our problem."

It was partly through "healthiness" -- his personal immunity to chronic American insecurities of cultural status -- that Gershwin blithely transcended the schisms of his day. Ira put it in a nutshell when he observed that "after writing the 'Great American Opera' George wrote some of the best hits he ever did in his life" for the Astaire-Rogers film Shall We Dance. For Gershwin, the road to the concert hall and opera house was no Stairway to Paradise; a model of sanity, he traversed level ground when moving serendipitously from Hollywood to Carnegie Hall and back.

If the old Gershwin was an inspired dilettante, the new Gershwin is versatile, protean, universal. Starr writes of Porgy and Bess: "It represented a truly radical stance to suggest that a small and highly individual community of impoverished black people in Charleston could serve to present humanity . . . writ large." It also represented a recapitulation of Dvorak's vision of "Negro melodies" fostering an inspirational and iconic American style, treating persons of color not as exotics but as a metaphor for humankind. Gershwin's first, decisive sampling of classical music was the Dvorak G-flat major Humoresque, performed at Public School 25 by Maxie Rosenzweig. Dvorak's New York pupil Rubin Goldmark later taught Gershwin (if perhaps not very much). With the new Gershwin in play, it is time to connect the dots.

If the old Gershwin was "unstable," impure, in limbo, betwixt and between, the new Gershwin is wholesome, ecumenical. He was the American composer who embraced Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood, Broadway and Yiddish theater, Paris and Vienna (who else among his American contemporaries so esteemed Alban Berg?). He died, age 38, poised to transfigure a fractured and stratified twentieth century cultural landscape. The Gershwin book that takes not of that fact is the Gershwin book that needs writing today.

It's nice to be noticed, so thank you to those who have complained about the paucity of recent filings in this space. Usually I write a blog when I'm excited or upset. I don't notice that I'm any less excited or upset than usual - just that the blog engine has been running down lately. So here is a list of things I should have been blogging about:

1.Some kind person has posted on youtube the greatest vocal recording of all time. This is Fyodor Chaliapin singing Anton Rubinstein's "Persian Love Song" in 1931 - when Chaliapin was already 58 years old. Arthur Rubinstein once remarked in appreciation of Chaliapin that his speaking voice and singing voice were the same. And so they are: he speaks this song, every word of it. Incredibly, this performance at the same time furnishes a bewildering lesson in vocal wizardry and finesse. It is impossible to say what is more to be admired: the projection of feeling, the perfection of technique.

Here is an artist - admired by Stanislavsky as an exemplary actor -- who transformed everything he touched. Richard Capell, in his treasurable 1928 survey of Schubert's songs, recalls Chaliapin's version of the famous Standchen: "How the song revives and flowers in Chaliapin's art! Not to be forgotten is his [rendering] of 'Komm,
beglucke mich' ['Come, delight me'] - wheedling, anticipative, irresistible." Henry Krehbiel, reviewing Chaliapin as Leporello at the Met in 1908, complained that he "conceived all his characters as if they had been dug out of the muck of Gorky's stories of Russian low life." In fact, the very notion of Chaliapin as Leporello is overwhelmingly potent.

To savor his Boris, forget the studio recordings. The version to hear is the one recorded live at Covent Garden in 1928. Last fall, lecturing for the NEA Music Critics Institute, I had occasion to compare Chaliapin (in Russian) and Hans Hotter (in German) as the dying tsar. We spent 15 or 20 minutes listening - repeatedly -- to these artists sing two lines: "Farewell my son, I am dying" and "Forgive me." Both readings - one as a crazed Slav, the other a noble Wotan -- beggared description. Hotter became an opera singer upon encountering Chaliapin in Prague. Singing actors.

2.My son Bernie, who sometimes appears in this space in the role of Vladimir Horowitz idolator, has apprised me of another recent addition to the youtube repertoire: films of the young Van Cliburn in Moscow. It is now possible to see as well as hear his incomparably affecting reading of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, incomparably accompanied by Kiril Kondrashin. Even more remarkable: you can see Cliburn and Kondrashin in the second Rachmaninoff concerto - a work Cliburn disappointingly recorded for RCA. The Cliburn Rach 2 is majestic, ardent, and original. And the sight of this young artist, the greatest American piano talent of his generation, living his implausible dream of Russia, sharing the clairvoyant sureness of his innocence, is never to be forgotten.

3.Post-Classical Ensemble, the chamber orchestra which I co-founded with Angel Gil-Ordonez in DC eight years ago, has just been awarded $200,000 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Our announcement also announces two seasons of thematic festivals linking the Music Center at Strathmore (a major DC/Baltimore presenter) with Georgetown University and the Film Department of the National Gallery. The humanities template we pursue marries music, film, theater, dance, and academia. The forthcoming festivals are "The Stravinsky Project," "Celebrating Ives," "Falla/Stravinsky," "Schubert Uncorked," "Interpreting Shostakovich," and "Mexican Revolution." The participating artists include the pianists Jeremy Denk and Alexander Toradze, the bass trombonist David Taylor, the Spanish cantaora Esperanza Fernandez, the Israeli/American choreographer Igal Perry, and the Shostakovich scholar Solomon Volkov. We'll undertake a major Shostakovich film retrospective, a new Schubert trombone concerto, and our third Naxos DVD.

4.I should find something more to write about in the coming weeks. January 22-23-24, the National Symphony Orchestra will premiere "Ted Sorensen Remembers JFK," a film I co-created with the video artist Peter Bogdanoff (my frequent collaborator) as part of a subscription program celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy inauguration. I then head for Pittsburgh, where I've helped to curate a Pittsburgh Symphony Tchaikovsky festival presenting 19 events in the span of 12 days (February 2 to 13); it incorporates film and theater; it links to four universities and half a dozen high schools. Thence to Pennsylvania, where two Philadelphia-area elementary schools celebrate Black History Month with a themed Dvorak program stemming from last summer's NEH "Dvorak and America" Teacher Training Institute. Then Southern California, where the latest Pacific Symphony "Music Unwound" production will use actors, visuals, lighting design, and organist Paul Jacobs to introduce unsuspecting Orange County audiences to Bruckner's Ninth Symphony (February 24-25-26). Then back to DC, for Post-Classical Ensemble's Lou Harrison festival (Feb. 26; March 4-5), followed by the National Symphony's performances of the Turangalila Symphony (March 10-11-12), which I'll attempt to contextualize with lighting, super-titles, and some additional Messiaen.

Post-Classical Ensemble's successful application to the Mellon Foundation began and ended as follows:

"Though orchestras are sometimes debunked for behaving 'like museums,' any number of American museums are in certain respects more forward-thinking than any number of American orchestras. Museums program thematically. They have scholars on staff. They produce distinguished publications. These are policies that promote audience engagement, institutional and educational linkage, and alignment with the contemporary moment. More than museums, orchestras can seem stranded, insular, anachronistic. Typically, their 'educational' activities are satellite enterprises, disconnected from the subscription agenda; frequently, they narrowly focus on elementary and middle schools. What Virgil Thomson notoriously said of the New York Philharmonic in 1940 -- that he understood why it was 'not a part of . . . intellectual life' -- by and large remains anomalously true of orchestras, if they are to be counted as cultural institutions. . . .

"The conductor Theodore Thomas, who inspirationally propagated symphonic culture throughout the US in the late nineteenth century, preached: 'A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community.' In many communities, large and small, Thomas's prophecy proved true. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many American orchestras lost influence - in the community; in the culture at large. Post-Classical Ensemble is conceived in the conviction that if orchestras are to regain impact as agents
of cultural identity, a broader humanities mandate would vitally enhance both their mission and their capacity."

Writing the other day to Andrew Druckenbrod of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the Pittsburgh Symphony's Tchaikovsky festival, I found myself saying:

"Ultimately, what most excites me about this festival is its communal scope. With the [2009] Rachmaninoff festival behind us, we've acquired solid festival partnerships with the collaborating universities (we are drawing both on faculty and student participants). And we've added high school partnerships. This is a challenging moment for America's orchestras. Everyone knows that. How can orchestras amplify cultural service to the community? This festival attempts a lot of answers."

Stay tuned.