• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2017 / June / Archives for 28th

Archives for June 28, 2017

Virtuoso fireworks for the Fourth of July

June 28, 2017 by Terry Teachout

This week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is a tribute to two patriotic virtuoso piano showpieces. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Like all red-blooded Americans, I love fireworks, whether in the sky or on the stage. Anyone who isn’t thrilled by the high-wire theatricality of a virtuoso performer needs to have his hypothalamus examined. I also love the Fourth of July, the national holiday on which it’s customary to set off skyrockets of the non-musical kind. Alas, the classical musicians of today seem increasingly disinclined to display the heart-on-sleeve patriotism that led Van Cliburn to open his recitals with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and to play it with the utmost splendor and conviction….

This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why I’ve never heard a concert performance of either of the two most spectacular exercises in flag-flying pianistic patriotism that I know, Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “The Union” and Vladimir Horowitz’s transcription of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The other reason is that both pieces are monstrously, knuckle-crunchingly hard to play. But they make for irresistibly pleasurable listening…

Gottschalk’s French-sounding given names obscure the fact that he was America’s first important native-born composer. In “The Union,” composed in 1862, he proudly wore his nationality on his sleeve. The piece’s subtitle, “Concert Paraphrase on National Airs,” situates this seven-minute medley of three patriotic songs in its proper musical context: It’s an all-American version of a Liszt-style operatic fantasy, a showpiece in which familiar melodies are cleverly woven together, then festooned with fantastically complex technical stuntwork. In “The Union,” though, the melodies are not arias by Rossini or Verdi but “Hail, Columbia,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Yankee Doodle.” Gottschalk chose these songs because he wrote “The Union” as an act of musical homage to the Northern side in the Civil War….

Vladimir Horowitz brought off a comparable feat of patriotic prestidigitation when he transcribed “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the most famous and beloved of John Philip Sousa’s 137 marches for military band. Arturo Toscanini, Horowitz’s father-in-law, started performing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” with the NBC Symphony in 1943 as a wartime tribute to the U.S. armed forces. Horowitz, a refugee from Soviet Russia who became a naturalized U.S. citizen the following year, heard a Toscanini performance and decided to arrange the march as a gesture of gratitude to his new-found homeland. The results were an instant hit…

* * *

A slightly shorter version of this column appears in the print edition of today’s Journal. To read the complete online version, go here.

Leonard Pennario’s 1974 studio recording of “The Union”:

Vladimir Horowitz plays “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1945:

Snapshot: Lauritz Melchior sings Wagner’s Preislied

June 28, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERALauritz Melchior sings the Prize Song from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in Two Sisters from Boston, directed by Henry Koster and released in 1946. This scene, which also features June Allyson and Jimmy Durante, is a fictionalized but surprisingly accurate version of an acoustic recording session that predates the introduction in 1925 of the studio microphone:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: George Stevens on seeing the Nazi death camps

June 28, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“What kind of a world is this? What kind of creatures are we and how much management do we need to keep us from being ourselves?”

George Stevens (quoted in Five Came Back, a Netflix documentary written by Mark Harris)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

June 2017
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  
« May   Jul »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Simply splendid Sondheim
  • Almanac: Tennessee Williams on theatrical characters
  • What Patricia Highsmith wrought
  • Almanac: Samuel Butler on sickness
  • Snapshot: Lieber and Stoller appear on What’s My Line?

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in