Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“Behind the jokes, I try to talk about life in a serious way. I don’t look at cartooning as just an entertainment. It’s a rare privilege to be able to talk to hundreds of millions of people on a given day, and I don’t want to squander that privilege with mindless chatter. There is an opportunity here to talk about real issues of life with sensitivity, warmth and humor.”
Bill Watterson (quoted in Lee Nordling, Your Career in the Comics)
The obituaries for André Previn, who died last Thursday at the age of eighty-nine, were respectful, even admiring, in a way that they wouldn’t have been had he died a quarter-century ago. It took a very long time for Previn to be fully accepted by the classical-music establishment, which for decades looked askance at a conductor who’d gotten his start in the Hollywood studios, and I confess to being a bit surprised by how lavish a sendoff he received from such official organs of respectability as, say, the New York Times.
Perhaps it’s simply that Previn survived into a world in which the ability to move freely among stylistic genres had long since become not merely acceptable but downright fashionable. What’s more, the Brits went even further in their posthumous praise. Witness, for example, the Guardian’s sendoff: “The conductor, composer and pianist André Previn…was not only among the most charismatic performers of his day, but also enjoyed one of the greatest classical-music lives since Berlioz and Liszt—and one that did not grow less eventful with old age.”
My own view of Previn, if far from jaundiced, is nonetheless somewhat cooler. Admire him though I did, I thought of him as a prodigally gifted artist who did more things well—but nothing better—than anyone else. To compare him to Leonard Bernstein, as many have done in recent days, is to make the point with unintentionally cruel honesty. Like Previn, Bernstein was widely criticized for having spread himself too thin. Yet he still managed to leave behind On the Town, Candide, and West Side Story, as well as a stack of recordings that are, if rarely definitive, almost always remarkable. Not so Previn: I can’t think of even one of his classical recordings that I prefer to all its competitors, nor are any of his compositions especially memorable, in part because he lacked the priceless gift of melody. As a result, only two of his film scores, for Bad Day at Black Rock and Elmer Gantry, are distinguished, and only one of his pop songs, “You’re Gonna Hear From Me,” came remotely close to becoming a standard.
As for Previn’s classical pieces, what I wrote in Time about his 1998 operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire could be said of any of them:
Previn’s well-bred score barely hints at the dark crosscurrents of obsession and desperation that made Tennessee Williams’ play so naggingly memorable. This slow-moving Streetcar is tonal but tuneless, sometimes violent but never sexy. Even the bluesy bits are oddly polite—an unexpected letdown from a composer-conductor who plays first-rate jazz piano on the side.
Two decades after the fact, I can also admit that I was being just as polite about his jazz piano playing, which was immaculately finished and unfailingly agreeable but almost entirely faceless. I can’t imagine anyone being able to pick Previn out of an auditory lineup, no doubt because he started out as an imitator—he could “do” Art Tatum without flaw—and never fully succeeded in becoming his own stylistic man.
It strikes me in retrospect that Previn’s greatest gift may well have been his formidable ability as a popularizer. He talked about music wonderfully well in his TV appearances, and he was an impeccably competent interpreter of pretty much anything at which he tried his hand. For all these reasons, he was probably at his best during his eight-year tenure as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, a good orchestra that he turned into a very good one, simultaneously putting it in the national limelight by hosting Previn and the Pittsburgh on PBS for three deservedly successful years. He was made for that job, and never found another one as well suited to his talents: it says everything about Previn that he seems never to have been seriously considered to run any of the world’s top-tier orchestras, which went elsewhere when looking for new maestros. (The Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he led to famously unhappy effect from 1985 to 1989, did not yet fill that bill.)
I wonder how Previn felt about that, just as I wonder whether he was truly fulfilled by his career, extraordinary in so many ways as it was. You can’t read No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood, his witty 1991 memoir, without realizing that he had a first-rate mind, as well as a great deal of personal insight. Rarely has any famous conductor told a story about himself that is as revealing—not to mention self-deprecating—as this tale that Previn told about his conducting teacher, Pierre Monteux:
He liked cloaking his advice with indirection and irony. A few years later he saw me conduct a concert with a provincial orchestra. He came backstage after the performance. He paid me some compliments and then asked, “In the last movement of the Haydn symphony, my dear, did you think the orchestra was playing well?” My mind whipped through the movement; had there been a mishap, had something gone wrong? Finally, and fearing the worst, I said that yes, I thought the orchestra had indeed played very well. Monteux leaned toward me conspiratorially and smiled. “So did I,” he said. “Next time, don’t interfere!”
I think it might have been fun to know such a man, just as it says a great deal about Previn that he was close friends with both Mike Nichols and Tom Stoppard. Alas, I never met him, but I shared an elevator with him at Lincoln Center last year: I was there to review Stoppard’s The Hard Problem, and just before the doors closed, Previn was wheeled into the elevator by an attendant, all but invisible beneath the brutal marks of age, though I had no trouble recognizing him. I was tempted to introduce myself, but thought better of it. What could I possibly have said that would have been of any interest to him? Instead, I looked discreetly away and left him to his reflections.
For what it’s worth, my guess is that Previn was far too smart and self-knowing not to be perfectly aware that for all his great success, he didn’t quite manage to hit the high C as an artist, least of all in the way that Bernstein did. That is a very dark thought, and while I hope he was content to be what he was and do all that he did—as well he should have been—I have my doubts.
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André Previn and Oscar Peterson talk about Art Tatum on the BBC in 1974:
The main-title cue from Previn’s score for Bad Day at Black Rock, performed by Previn and the MGM Studio Orchestra:
Previn and the Philharmonia perform excerpts from William Walton’s “Orb and Sceptre,” Violin Concerto, and Belshazzar’s Feast at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1982. (The soloist in the concerto is Kyung-Wha Chung.) This concert was given in honor of the eightieth birthday of Walton, who was present in the audience:
A Hallmark Hall of Fame telecast of The Lark, Lillian Hellman’s English-language adaptation of L’Alouette, Jean Anouilh’s 1952 play about Joan of Arc. This abridged version stars Julie Harris and Boris Karloff, who created their roles in the original 1955 Broadway production. The cast also includes Denholm Elliott, Basil Rathbone, Eli Wallach, and Jack Warden. The teleplay is by James Costigan and the production was directed for TV by George Schaefer. The uncredited incidental music (also heard in the Broadway production) is by Leonard Bernstein. This rare kinescope includes commercials from the telecast, which aired on NBC on February 10, 1957:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.”
Simone Weil, “The Iliad or The Poem of Force” (trans. Mary McCarthy)
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If you know Lynn Nottage from “Intimate Apparel” and “Sweat,” her most frequently produced plays, you might well make the mistake of supposing that she’s a dead-serious kitchen-sink realistic playwright. That’s part of why her Signature Theatre “residency,” in the course of which the deservedly admired off-Broadway company will revive two of Ms. Nottage’s earlier plays and give the premiere of a new one later this season, is so important an event: The plays that she has picked for production are nothing like the ones for which she is now best known. First came “Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine,” her 2004 satire about the black bourgeoisie, which Signature staged in December to riotous effect. Now the company is mounting “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” an even more original play that was first produced eight years ago by Second Stage Theatre. It is, like “Fabulation,” a comedy with a sharp satirical kick, but one that is at bottom commandingly serious. It’s also one of the smartest plays, by Ms. Nottage or anyone else, to open in New York in recent years….
“Vera Stark” dramatizes an episode from black history, one of which little is known today save to film scholars: Ms. Nottage’s eponymous heroine (played by Jessica Frances Dukes) is a fictionalized amalgam of Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen and the other black actors who became second-tier movie stars in the ’30s and ’40s by playing maids, butlers, valets and chauffeurs.
In the first act, set in 1933, we watch Vera land her first part, that of a maid in a 10-hankie weeper called “The Belle of New Orleans” that is clearly modeled on “Imitation of Life,” the 1934 movie in which Fredi Washington, a light-skinned black actor, played a mulatto passing for white. The twist in the tail is that Vera is also the real-life maid of Gloria Mitchell (Jenni Barber), the white actor who is the star of “The Belle of New Orleans.”…
That would be more than funny enough, but Ms. Nottage then ups the ante by flashing forward to 2003 and an academic colloquium called “Rediscovering Vera Stark: The Legacy of ‘The Belle of New Orleans’” in which three pompous professors (Warner Miller, Carra Patterson and Heather Alicia Simms) show a clip from “The Belle of New Orleans,” then pick over Vera’s bones. Nor is this the last dramatic rabbit to come hopping out of Ms. Nottage’s hat: We also see another “clip,” this one an excerpt from a cheesy 1973 TV talk show (performed live) in which Vera and Gloria share a stage for the first time in decades. To reveal any more would be to risk giving away the biggest surprise of all…
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Read the whole thing here.The trailer for By the Way, Meet Vera Stark:
Ray Bolger and Ann Miller perform Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” on “Music of the Movies,” a 1966 episode of The Bell Telephone Hour originally telecast by NBC on March 13, 1966:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Journalists follow authority as sharks do a liner, hoping to feed off the waste it discharges, with perhaps someone occasionally falling overboard to make a meal, and once in a way the whole ship going down and providing a positive feasts.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time
“It is always easy to talk to someone with whom one is going to become intimate; the future casts its shadow backwards, and there is no explaining to be sone, even though there is everything to explain.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time