Archives for 2017

I take music for granted—not because I don’t love it passionately, but because it has always been as much a part of my life as the air around me. To be sure, there have been times when I paid less attention to music, but sooner or later it has taken hold of me again. It is my second language, one learned in childhood, meaning that I “speak” it without an accent and as easily and naturally as I speak English. To come at it from the other direction, I experience a piece of instrumental music in much the same way that I experience a short story or an essay: it talks to me.

I remember being overwhelmed by my first encounter with something that Felix Mendelssohn said in an 1842 letter to a friend: “The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite. ” I also remember reading the following passage in a biography of Donald Francis Tovey and thinking, I know just what he meant:

I have (this sounds like fantastic nonsense, but it isn’t) frequently caught myself positively solving some problem (of a more or less philosophical nature) in, say, the key of A minor, where I had utterly failed to reason it out in words.

If music has this strong an effect on you, then there will be times when you feel an overpowering, almost physical urge to listen to a specific piece of it. Such a feeling came over me last night: I felt that if I couldn’t listen to the first movement of Charles Ives’ Third Symphony right away, I would be reduced to abject despair. Therein lies the supreme spiritual utility of the digital technology that has brought about what is without question the most radical transformation of daily life to take place in my lifetime: I screwed in my earbuds and clicked a few keys on my MacBook, and all at once my head was full of Ives.

Why, though, was it this particular piece that I craved? I’m sure it was because I’d spent an hour talking to my brother on the phone on Tuesday night. A year has gone by since I saw David, and it’s been nearly two years to the day since my last visit to the small town in southeast Missouri where we grew up and where he still lives. Having lived in New York for thirty years, I can’t pretend to be anything other than a city dweller now, but I’m still a small-town boy at heart, and Ives’ Third Symphony, whose subtitle is “The Camp Meeting” and whose first movement is called “Old Folks Gatherin’,” overflows with the hymn tunes and homespun harmonies of Ives’ youth, which I, too, heard in church on Sunday mornings back in Smalltown, U.S.A. No sooner did I start listening to it than I was swept back in time, and when the music ended, I felt serene and secure, more so than I’ve felt for quite some time.

Not surprisingly, listening to “Old Folks Gatherin’” also made me long to see my brother. Alas, we won’t be together again until the first week in December, when he and his wife will be in West Palm Beach for the premiere of my new play. But we are always together in my heart, and that’ll have to do for now.

As I typed that last sentence, I found myself thinking of a sentence uttered by Abraham Lincoln a century and a half ago: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” So far as I know, Lincoln didn’t much care for music, classical or otherwise, but anyone capable of penning a phrase like “mystic chords of memory” must surely have had some inkling of its ineffable power. Music is for me what the madeleine was for Proust: it opens the door to memory. Last night its mystic chords also bridged the thousand-mile gap between New York City and Smalltown, U.S.A., and put my beloved brother in the room with me for a few precious minutes. Of such little blessings is the life of a music lover made.

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Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic perform Charles Ives’ Third Symphony:

My latest appearance on CUNY-TV’s Theater Talk, the second part of a discussion of the second half of the Broadway season just past, can now be viewed online. The hosts are Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel and the other panelists are Peter Marks of Washington Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Times and The New Yorker, and Linda Winer of Newsday. (The first part of the discussion can be viewed here.) The episode also includes an interview with Joel Grey:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Groundhog Day (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, closes August 20, reviewed here)

IN LENOX, MASS.:
• 4000 Miles (drama, PG-13/R, closes July 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

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

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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…

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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:

Lauritz 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)

“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)

Mrs. T and I love the art of Milton Avery and are the proud owners of handsome impressions of two of his most striking prints, a 1948 drypoint and a 1963 lithograph. For some time now we’ve also been longing to own a copy of one of Avery’s twenty-one hand-printed color woodcuts, a medium that he used with particular charm and imagination and to which he devoted a significant part of his dwindling physical energies in his later years, after a heart attack made it harder for him to paint on a large scale.

Mrs. T has a special liking for Dawn, the first of Avery’s woodcuts, a fanciful, almost childlike 1952 study of a flying seabird that Avery printed in two editions, one in yellow and black ink and one in black only. A very fine artist’s proof of the yellow-and-black 1953 edition of “Dawn” came up for auction in Manhattan a couple of months ago, and we decided to bid for it, not expecting to have any luck. To our amazement and delight, we placed the high bid, and now it is ours.

Alan Fern wrote well about Avery’s printmaking technique in his “technical note” to Milton Avery: Prints 1933-1955, the standard catalogue of Avery’s prints:

Avery preferred working in the most direct media of printing: drypoint and woodcut. In these, the actions of hand and tool are translated directly into a visible image, with no chemical intervention (as in etching) or elaborate preparation (as in lithography) before a proof can be taken. This was partly because his health was not always equal to the labor of printing, and partly because the process of printing identical impressions scarcely interested him, once the image had been created. In contrast, the woodblocks had to be printed individually, and he rejoiced in the subtle differences in value and color that could be introduced in the printing process….

All of the woodblocks were printed by rubbing, not in a press, and this enabled the artist to vary the background tone of each impression as he printed….To a great extent, each woodblock print is an individual experience; it is rare to find two of Avery’s woodcuts that are exactly the same, and it would be exceedingly difficult to make prints from the blocks today that would reflect Avery’s intention with any accuracy.

This homely, one-of-a-kind quality is an important part of what makes Avery’s woodcuts so appealing. In addition, the necessary simplifications of printmaking were very much in tune with his growing inclination to pare his work down to the bare essentials (as was also the case with Fairfield Porter, another of my favorite painters and a printmaker of like distinction).

Hilton Kramer described this tendency with characteristic astuteness when he wrote about Avery’s late work in a 1982 essay:

The late Avery looks like the quintessential Avery to this observer. There is a lyric intensity in the landscape and seascape images unlike anything else in the art of our time. As in late Turner and late Cézanne, many of these images are characterized by an awesome concision. The canvas is divided into fewer and fewer formal components, and yet each strikes the eye with a compelling eloquence.

In its quieter way, “Dawn” partakes of this same eloquence and spare, pared-down simplicity.

Because Mrs. T loves it so much, we’ve decided to hang “Dawn” not in our New York apartment, where we keep the bulk of our collection, but in the farmhouse in rural Connecticut where she spends most of her time. Whenever I’m in New York or reviewing shows elsewhere in America, I’ll imagine her looking at it with pleasure, and smile at the thought.

UPDATE: I brought “Dawn” to our New York apartment after Mrs. T became too sick to continue living in Connecticut. It now hangs in the hall outside her bedroom.