About Last Night

I first heard the music of Benjamin Britten in 1975, a year before he died. I was a sophomore music major at William Jewell College, a school not far from Kansas City. Some long-forgotten magazine piece–probably a review in High Fidelity or Stereo Review, to both of which I subscribed–had made me curious about him, so I drove to a mall in Independence and bought an LP whose first side contained a performance of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings by Peter Pears, Barry Tuckwell, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Britten himself was the conductor. The recording was made in 1963, twenty years after the piece was written, and hearing it for the first time that evening was one of the most consequential musical encounters of my youth.

The Serenade starts off with a mysterious-sounding unaccompanied horn solo, followed by a setting of part of The Evening Quatrains, a lyric by Charles Cotton, a near-forgotten seventeenth-century English writer. Britten cut the poem in half and called his shortened version “Pastoral”:

The day’s grown old; the fainting sun

Has but a little way to run,

And yet his steeds, with all his skill,

Scarce lug the chariot down the hill.

The shadows now so long do grow,

That brambles like tall cedars show;

Mole hills seem mountains, and the ant

Appears a monstrous elephant.

A very little, little flock

Shades thrice the ground that it would stock;

Whilst the small stripling following them

Appears a mighty Polypheme.

And now on benches all are sat,

In the cool air to sit and chat,

Till Phoebus, dipping in the West,

Shall lead the world the way to rest.

Rarely in my life have I been so instantaneously overwhelmed as I was by “Pastoral,” though a few more years would go by before I attained sufficient musical sophistication to be able to fully understand why it had hit me so hard. It doesn’t look like much on the page, just a simple tune shared by the singer and horn player, accompanied by four-part string chords. Yet those deceptively uncomplicated-looking chords are anything but straightforward. Here as in his other middle-period masterpieces, Britten used tonal harmony with a piquant freshness and sense of surprise that were all his own.

“I need more chords,” Aaron Copland complained to Leonard Bernstein toward the end of his composing career. “I’ve run out of chords.” To listen to “Pastoral” is to realize that there will always be enough chords. All you have to do is know where to look.

These opening bars remind me of something that Britten said a year after he recorded the Serenade:

What is important in the arts is not the scientific part, the analyzable part of music, but the something which emerges from it but transcends it, which cannot be analyzed because it is not in it, but of it. It is the quality which cannot be acquired by simply the exercise of a technique or a system: it is something to do with personality, with gift, with spirit. I quite simply call it–magic: a quality which would appear to be by no means unacknowledged by scientists, and which I value more than any other part of music.

Back then I was still grabbing at classical music with both hands, and few weeks passed without my making a major discovery of some kind or other, most of which turned out before long to be…well, something less than major. But I was certain that my discovery of the magical “Pastoral” was more than just another passing fancy. It spoke to me, as did the rest of the Serenade, with a directness and immediacy not unlike the miraculous sensation of falling in love at first sight (something that had yet to happen to me). I knew beyond doubt that whoever Benjamin Britten was, his music would henceforth play an important part in my life–and so it did, and does.

Years later Britten’s 1963 recording of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings would become one of the very first compact discs that I bought. Not only do I still have that CD, but I played it for Mrs. T last night, and she was as thunderstruck by her first hearing of the Serenade as I was thirty-nine years ago.

“Why haven’t you played this for me until now?” she asked.

“I guess I just didn’t think to,” I replied with a touch of embarrassment. “But I’m glad I finally got around to it.”

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Ian Bostridge,
Radovan Vlatkovic, and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra perform the prologue and “Pastoral” from Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings:

From 2004:

I finished my breakfast and strolled over to the neighborhood Barnes & Noble to see whether A Terry Teachout Reader was on sale yet. It wasn’t in New Non-Fiction, so I climbed the stairs to the arts section in search of something to read. There I found three copies of the Teachout Reader shelved under Jazz/Blues, meaning that no one at Barnes & Noble had bothered to look at the contents of my book. Only a year ago, I was basking in the red-carpet treatment at that very same store, including an evening reading and deluxe placement for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Now I’m relegated to Jazz/Blues (though at least I got what booksellers call “face-out” placement, meaning that the front of the dust jacket is visible). As Robert Mitchum says in The Lusty Men, “Chicken today, feathers tomorrow.”…

Read the whole thing here.

“The true work of art does not need to wrap any veil of mystery about its external features. Indeed the very hallmark of great art is that only and above the complete clarity of its technical procedure do we feel the essential mystery of its creative power.”
Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition

Apropos of the off-Broadway transfer of Satchmo at the Waldorf, Laura Lippman recently said something that caught my eye: “I think you have to have such confidence to be a theatre critic and write a play. He’s really opened himself up.”

This reminds me of an oft-quoted passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

His tutor, Mr. Jorden, fellow of Pembroke, was not, it seems, a man of such abilities as we should conceive requisite for the instructor of Samuel Johnson, who gave me the following account of him. “He was a very worthy man, but a heavy man, and I did not profit much by his instructions. Indeed, I did not attend him much. The first day after I came to college I waited upon him, and then staid away four. On the sixth, Mr. Jorden asked me why I had not attended. I answered I had been sliding in Christ-Church meadow. And this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now talking to you. I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor.” BOSWELL: “That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.” JOHNSON: “No, Sir; stark insensibility.”

As it happens, I did give some thought to what Laura said in the weeks and months before The Letter, my first operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, opened in Santa Fe in 2009. In fact, I wrote a piece about it for the Los Angeles Times in which I pointed out that “I’m submitting myself for approval–not just from my fellow critics but from the people who read my reviews each week” and admitted to finding the experience “both terrifying and exhilarating. I’ve never set foot inside a casino, but I can’t help but think that this must be what it feels like to place a big bet.”

That, however, was strictly retrospective, at least as regards my colleagues. It simply didn’t occur to me to think about what the critics would say about The Letter while I was writing it, much less to suppose that it was somehow courageous of me to offer myself up to them as a potential target. Nor did I think about it at all with regard to Satchmo at the Waldorf before the show came to New York–and that was solely because I knew that the reviews of Satchmo would necessarily have an effect on the length of its run. Until that finally became an issue, I never thought about them at all.

The truth is that I rarely spend much time thinking about what other people think of me. Of course I want my friends to like me, and I try to conduct myself in such a way as to earn their liking and their trust. But when it comes to my work, my internal compass was set long ago, and whether or not it’s accurate, I don’t feel that I have much choice in middle age but to follow it. I think what I think, and I trust my eye and ear. Were it otherwise, I couldn’t function: I’d always be second-guessing myself.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t take the counsel of my collaborators on Satchmo at the Waldorf with the utmost seriousness, just as I take very seriously the suggestions of my editors at The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and elsewhere. When it came to Satchmo, I knew that I was doing something that was new to me, and that I’d be a fool not to listen closely to the experienced professionals with whom I had the good fortune to collaborate, and do what they suggested if it made sense to me (which it usually did).

When it comes to reviews, on the other hand, I try to take the advice that I give to others, which is the same advice given by André Previn in No Minor Chords: “It is perfectly correct to disregard all the bad reviews one gets, but only if at the same time, one disregards the good ones as well.” As Dr. Johnson told Boswell on another occasion, there’s an end on’t. Sure, I love getting good reviews, but I do my best not to take them to heart. As for the pans, of which I’ve gotten my share over the years, I ignore them. Either way, nobody has ever said anything about me in print, good or bad, that I can quote from memory. (You might be surprised to know how many artists can rattle off a perfectly remembered phrase from a bad review that came out a decade ago.)

David Mamet, I gather, takes his reviews way too seriously, though he’s capable (or was) of being funny about it. When New York held a “Best of Anything” contest back in the Eighties, he entered the following as “Best Review”: “I never understood the theater until this night. Please excuse everything I’ve ever written. When you read this, I’ll be dead. Signed, Clive Barnes.” That made me laugh out loud when I first read it, and it still makes me smile. Even so, I’ve never felt that way about a critic–not yet, anyway.

One last remark from the ever-relevant Dr. Johnson: “It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.” Anybody who gets reviewed should keep that wise counsel firmly in mind.

Paul Hindemith conducts the Chicago Symphony in a 1963 performance of Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture:

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

“If we cannot, in the flash of a single moment, see a composition in its absolute entirety, with every pertinent detail in its proper place, we are not genuine creators.”
Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two New York openings, Bullets Over Broadway and The Heir Apparent. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
How good can a jukebox musical be? As good as “Bullets Over Broadway,” Woody Allen’s new stage version of his 1994 film, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman (“The Producers”). The book is funny, the staging inventive, the cast outstanding, the sets and costumes satisfyingly slick. All that’s missing is a purpose-written score, in place of which we get period-true arrangements of pop songs of the ’20s and ’30s. Does that matter? It did to me–a lot–but I doubt that many other people will boggle over the absence of original songs from “Bullets Over Broadway.” Except for a flabby finale, it has the sweet scent of a box-office smash….
Ms. Stroman hasn’t rung the bell on Broadway since “Young Frankenstein,” but she remains peerless when it comes to comic choreography, and “Bullets” overflows with clever dances, including a feature for Heléne Yorke set to a 1927 double-entendre ditty called “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll” that’s as naughty as you’d expect. Here and elsewhere, the gorgeously brassy Ms. Yorke steals the show from her better-known colleagues, but she has plenty of competition…
What about the score? Glen Kelly has written additional lyrics whose purpose is to integrate the musical sequences more smoothly into the plot, but the dramatic fit is never tight, and it doesn’t help that so many of the songs, in particular “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” and “Up a Lazy River,” are so very familiar in their own right. Because of this, the momentum falters whenever the actors start to sing, though Ms. Stroman usually manages to get things moving again in reasonably short order….
“The Heir Apparent,” David Ives’ English-language version of Jean-François Regnard’s “Le Légataire universel,” is the latest of his brilliant “translaptations” (his word) of classic French verse comedies, in which Mr. Ives recasts the original text in briskly contemporary iambic pentameter and tinkers with the plot at will. It’s as elegantly wrought as its predecessors, “The Liar” (after Pierre Corneille’s “Le Menteur”) and “The School for Lies” (after Moliére’s “The Misanthrope”). Classic Stage Company, which brought “The School for Lies” to New York three years ago, has now done the same thing with “The Heir Apparent,” in which M. Regnard and his translaptator tell the cautionary tale of Geronte (Paxton Whitehead), a miser whose impecunious nephew (Dave Quay) endeavors by any means necessary to become his sole legatee, aided and abetted by Geronte’s scruple-free manservant (Carson Elrod). Mr. Ives’ couplets glitter with close-packed virtuosity: “That pillar of the church, that foe of whoredom,/That undisputed lord of bedroom boredom.” The cast is perfect, and John Rando’s staging is a slapsticky riot….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
A scene from the original 2011 production of The Heir Apparent by the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C.:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I take note of an important cultural anniversary. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Twenty years ago next Monday, Turner Classic Movies went on the air, and the lives of film buffs were instantly improved almost beyond recognition. TCM is a basic cable channel owned by the Turner Broadcasting System that shows old movies, most of them released prior to 1970, around the clock. Some are familiar, others obscure, but all are uncut, uncolorized, uninterrupted by commercials and otherwise unaltered. No other enterprise has done more to make such films widely accessible to the general public….
I doubt I’m the only viewer who routinely flicks through the coming month’s fare and earmarks a half-dozen films at a time for future recording. I am, in short, an ardent fan–but I wonder what the future holds in store for the channel that made Robert Osborne, TCM’s host-in-chief, a star. Will it continue to prosper? Or is TCM’s business model flawed in ways that could lead to its decline and fall?
To answer these questions, it’s necessary to reflect on the way in which TCM transformed the culture of film in America. By 1994 the VCR had made it possible for most Americans to view movies in their living rooms, but few video stores carried a wide-ranging inventory of older films, nor were they shown other than sporadically on television. If you wanted to see or study the great films of the past, you usually had to buy your own copies. Then TCM came along and changed everything, quickly became indispensable to movie lovers everywhere.
That’s still true. Most of the old movies that I watch in any given week come from TCM. But the rise of on-demand TV is changing the viewing habits of film buffs. Why wait for TCM to show “Grand Hotel” next Thursday when Amazon Instant Video will stream it to your iPad right now for $1.99?…
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Read the whole thing here.