The poem, apparently famous, was new to me and I was immediately drawn to its theme of the, now dead, beautiful love-lorn maiden leaning over the balcony of Heaven hoping that her lover will join her up there where they could continue their very physical relationship. It is a headily exotic piece of mystical eroticism, one of the Pre-Raphaelites classic themes. The young Rossetti is the bereaved young man witnessing what seems like an erotic and slightly irreligious dream of his lost love. This young man’s fantasy drew the piece to the testosterone-charged Claude Debussy who was in his mid-twenties when he wrote his music.   Here are two excepts from the poem to give you some idea of what I mean.

The Blessed Damozel

by Dante Gabriel RossettiThe blessed damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,The Blessed
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.

*

Around her, lovers, newly met
‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remember’d names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bow’d herself and stoop’d
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she lean’d on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

 

I was, of course,  pursuing my slightly obsessive journey through the history of classical music in chronological order from the year 1100 onwards (begun fifteen years ago) and now reaching the year 1887.  Listening to Debussy’s first musical masterpiece, La Damoiselle élue (1887/88), opened my ears to a new era and, maybe for the first time on this project, showed me the dawning of the 20th Century. I have tried over the years to block out memories of any music written after the date currently studied but now that I’m nearing the end of the line (I’m finishing in 1897 with the death of Johannes Brahms), I can’t help but hear how Debussy would flower into one of the early geniuses of ‘modern’ music. It was also a thrilling return to one of my favourite composers, long missed over the 15 years. If you want to see what I mean, you can hear an except from the piece at the bottom of this page,taken from the inspiring CD with Esa Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I can’t stop playing it. It’s true that you can hear the influence of Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883)  and, one of Debussy’s teachers, Cesar Franck (1822 – 1890), as well as sweetly sensuous echoes of music of Jules Massenet (1842 – 1912), especially his opera, Manon (1884), but the intangibly physical mysticism, and the pure sexiness of Debussy’s later work is already here. No wonder his conservatoire teachers warned him “He should be beware of this vague Impressionism which is one of the most dangerous enemies of artistic truth.” How right they were without realising it.

Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) as a young man

So I have reached the year 1887 and I can feel the earth shift beneath my feet. There are new kids on the block and there’s no denying that this new generation of composers, learning from the past, would change the future of music. Until now, I hadn’t realised that three composers, in particular, all born within a couple of years of each other, formed, almost single-handedly, the voice of the next great period of classical music. They were, of course, Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918), Gustav Mahler (1860  – 1911) and Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949). My listening list for 1887 – 1888 included not only Debussy’s first masterpiece but also Strauss’ first symphonic poem, the wonderfully confident Aus Italien, and Mahler’s exciting Symphony No. 1. Hang onto your seats, music lovers, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

 

Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911) as a young man

 

 

Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949) as a young man

So one young man’s poem led me to the work of three more young men but from a very different era – thank you Dante Gabriel Rossetti for your own work but also for inspiring this young French maverick to invent his own way forward. When still a student, he was rebuked for disregarding time honoured compositional traditions. ‘What rule do you follow?’ asked the bemused conservatoire Registrar. ‘My pleasure,’ young Claude replied. It has become our pleasure too. Here is the opening of La Damoiselle élue. Something for the weekend, I suggest.

The post Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel inspires the eroticism of a young Claude Debussy and a new era is born. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

There’s been a depressing cull of people that I’ve admired over the last week, Dave Brubeck and then Charles Rosen and as I write this I hear that the inspiring Indian musician Ravi Shankar has also died. We are the poorer for the departure of all three of these gents.

Charles Rosen (1927-2012) may have been less famous that the other two but then musicologists aren’t always headline news even though Charles Rosen, my favourite writer on classical music, had a much broader talent than that. He was, unusually for a musician, a genuinely broad-based intellectual –  a philosopher, a linguist, a talented cook and a wittily human man. He was also a virtuoso pianist taught by a student of Liszt – maybe not of the first rank but thrilling in Debussy and wonderfully clear in Bach and keyboard-informed when he wrote about any of the great composers whose works he understood not just with his brain but also with his fingers. Unusually too for a music pundit, he knew what he was talking about and he could say it memorably with an almost tabloid ability for catchy phrases in a field where many writers of music disappear into a convoluted and unwelcoming musicological version of the Arizona desert.

I can never listen to the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven without thinking of Charles Rosen and, if you haven’t yet discovered the glories of Haydn’s String Quartets or Mozart’s String Quintets then after reading his The Classical Style (1971/2005 Faber & Faber), you’ll soon see why they should be essential listening to anyone who loves music. He is terrific too on that old bug-bear taught mostly so boringly, if at all, Sonata Form, the basic blueprint of the Classical style. For me, like those mathematical tables, the elements of Sonata form were drummed into me at school: Exposition, Development and Recapitulation with all the appropriate harmonic changes essential to the language. It was Charles Rosen though who said what should have been obvious, that Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven had never heard of the term and for them it was merely a living set of techniques that freed them to express themselves as they wished…”not a definite form like a minuet, a da capo aria, or a French overture; it is, like the fugue, a way of writing, a feeling for proportion, direction, and texture rather than a pattern.”

He devotes another of his books to a full development of his thoughts on this often arid idea of sonata form – its importance to the great classical composers but also its destructive influence on the struggling composers that tried to carry on the “tradition” –  Sonata Forms (1988, W. W. Norton & Company)

I was similarly inspired by using his book Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas (2002, Yale) as my guide through these formidable works even the ones that I thought I knew well after learning to play them at school and music college.

His wittily acerbic opinion about playing the Beethoven sonatas on instruments from Beethoven’s own era is typical of the man and instructive about the profound nature of the struggle within the sonatas themselves:

“More than any other composer before him, Beethoven understood the pathos of the gap between idea and realisation, and the sense of strain put on the listener’s imagination is essential here. The best argument for using the pianos of Beethoven’s time in place of the modern grand piano is not the aptness of the old instruments but their greater inadequacy for realising such an effect, and consequently the more dramatic effort required of the listener. The modern piano, however, is sufficiently inadequate to convey Beethoven’s intentions.”

As some of this blogsite’s readers might remember, I have been on a self-propelled journey through the history of classical music, listening to it in strict chronological order starting some twelve years ago in the year 1100 and currently reaching 1877. I was not alone during the early 19th. Century though because, as through the classical period,  I had Mr Rosen as my guide – The Romantic Generation (1998, Harvard University Press) – his book on the great Romantic composers Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Bellini, Liszt, and Berlioz. He opened my eyes to the greatness of Chopin that lies underneath the most easily appreciated aspects of his most beautiful music. I now hear the complexity of his counterpoint and the originality of his harmony and appreciate Chopin as one of the very greatest masters, with Schumann, of the post Schubert period. He allowed me to struggle less with Schumann’s later music too after years of trying to tell myself that it was as inspired as the great piano suites and song cycles from earlier in his life. Charles Rosen puts the earlier music at the peak of 19th Century achievement but takes a sterner view of the symphonies and concertos that suffer from the composer’s willful use of, yes, sonata form. He is a fan of one of my favourite opera composers too – the limpidly gorgeous vocal lines written by Vincenzo Bellini. He is tough on Mendelssohn after that composer’s glorious early bloom. He made me feel much less guilty about being bored by Mendelssohn’s oratorios too: “Mendelssohn is the inventor of religious kitsch in music which does not comfort, but only makes us comfortable.” Charles Rosen sees through the insecurities and confusion that these composers faced living after Beethoven and his favourite music from the Romantic era avoids comparison with the great man when it tries to do different things like Schumann’s miniaturism in song, his and Chopin’s piano music and early Liszt too: “Liszt’s late works are admirable and minor; the early works are vulgar and great.” Yet again, Charles Rosen made me feel better about myself as I had always been admirer of those barn-stormingly vulgar piano showpieces that made Liszt the creator of the modern piano. I feel freer to continue thinking that vulgarity is much underestimated in art but Rosen sees through some of Berlioz’ accesses and draws our attention to his essence, the poignantly sensitive composer of introspection: “It is not Berlioz’s oddity, but his normality, his ordinariness, that make him great.” 

The post My long-term companion in music, Charles Rosen dies. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

It was raining here in Lewes, UK, this morning and the sky was angry and dark. Great I thought, I can stay in and do indoor things, weekend, lazy, self-indulgent things. My gym schedule rules that I shouldn’t do any exercise this weekend and the weather is telling me to do what I wanted to do anyway. I have plans for a musical weekend in the company of Johannes Brahms and Rufus Wainwright.

Brahms Symphony No. 1 is my current study piece as it is the jewel in the crown of the year 1876 on my long journey through the history of music and, thanks to a friend, I have now got the recording made by james Levine with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s. I loved this on LP but haven’t heard it for twenty years until now as it is unavailable in the UK. I’m loving it just as I did then but a little bit more maybe coming to it in chronological order.

I’m amazed i hadn’t come across Rufus Wainwright’s double album Want before. I know some of his songs and admire him as a songwriter so getting to know Want is going to be the other side of my indulgent weekend. Annoyingly though, the sun has just come out.

More of Brahms’ First to come but, for now,  here’s Rufus Wainwright:

Meanwhile, I’m getting into gear for the imminent publication (in October)  of my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can already pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post I’m hoping for a rainy weekend with Johannes Brahms and Rufus Wainwright appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

On my self-imposed journey through the history of classical music where I have been listening to music chronologically from the year 1100 taking in most of the notable composers through the ages and reaching over the last weeks, the year 1874. This might be considered obsessive behaviour but it has been both fascinating and absorbing as well as putting the music into the kind of perspective where I can begin to see how things came about in the magnificent legacy of the Western World’s art music. As with most studies of complex things, the more you know the more you realize how little you know. The project is now in its thirteenth year and during that time I have grown to love composers that I had hardly known before, like Biber, Spohr and Raff for instance but also found some of my musical blocks reinforced too – even now I still find Telemann and Clementi boring and middle period Mendelssohn dull. I am still ambivalent about the so-called tone poem or programme music, preferring the grittier discipline of abstract “classicism” of the great symphonic composers to some of Liszt’s or, say Smetana’s adventures into orchestral story-telling (I am looking forward though to hearing again some of Richard Strauss’ exciting experiments in this form) and I have probably heard more than enough concertos for show-off virtuosi especially those tinkling arpeggio-stuck piano and violin concertos from the mid 19th. Century that are still being churned out by classical record labels looking for new sales to novelty-struck CD collectors and even though I love 19th Century Italian opera and have tried to discover new rare delights, I haven’t yet found an opera from this genre that I enjoyed that wasn’t written by old favourites, either Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Ponchielli, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Giordano or Puccini. Time and time again, I have been drawn back, in rough chronological order to Purcell, Monteverdi, Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Berlioz, composers I have loved and rated for most of my life but now I see them set against their contemporaries and in the long line of history and admire them all the more. Brahms, Mahler, Debussy, Stravinsky and Shostakovich lie ahead, beckoning me seductively but here in 1874, I am sitting here quietly in awe of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, Wagner’s Gotterdamerung, Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition and, strangely, in this period of personal bereavement, Verdi’s Requiem. A non-musicological term that comes to mind is Wow!

I have many recordings of the Verdi Requiem, one of my old favourites.  I have known the piece well since singing in the chorus as a music student in the Royal Albert Hall, London, under the baton of that great conductor Sir John Barbirolli. A cherished musical memory was the moment in the first orchestral rehearsal when I sang the Dies Irae with the magnificent, yes, overwhelming sound of Verdi’s brass- and percussion-laden orchestration. Very few musical experiences in my life have been so totally thrilling. Now, listening to it again so soon after attending a family funeral, the music retains its power – not though as religious music but more as a dramatic and disturbing depiction of fear and horror in the face of death. Verdi’s deeply-ingrained Catholic upbringing joined with his dislike of priests and distrust of religion to give us one of the most frightening images of mankind’s superstitious hysteria in the face of his own mortality. Nowhere more so than in the Dies Irae section, of course, but the ideas there, permeate the whole work. This is a piece about the nightmare that is the Catholic Church’s traditional teachings about Hell, damnation and the last Judgement. Verdi may not have believed in Hell but it sure scared the hell out of him – and us.

I could have chosen a modern digitally exciting recording of this piece, like, for instance Antonio Pappano’s thrilling new version, but, in the end, as with many pieces in the standard repertoire, you just have to go back to Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) who once played the cello in an orchestra conducted by Verdi himself. This was made with the NBC Orchestra in 1951, the sound is pretty terrible but the essence and blood of the music is here like nowhere else.

The words come from a 13th century Latin hymn with a magnificence of utterance that survives into our modern agnostic age helped on its way by Verdi’s colossal setting heard here with chorus aided by the stunned bass soloist (Cesare Siepi) who is meant to sound as if he has seen an operatic ghost and the mezzo-soprano, the gypsy woman (Fedora Barbieri) from Il Trovatore seeing damnation in the book of judgement. If you think the sentiments are tosh then you will still have to admit that it is powerful tosh.

The day of wrath, that day
Will dissolve the world in ashes
As foretold by David and the sibyl!

How much tremor there will be,
when the judge will come,
investigating everything strictly!

The trumpet, scattering a wondrous sound
through the sepulchres of the regions,
will summon all before the throne.

Bass solo:
Death and nature will marvel,
when the creature arises,
to respond to the Judge.

Mezzo soprano solo:
The written book will be brought forth,
in which all is contained,
from which the world shall be judged.

Dies iræ! Dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla!

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.

Bass solo:
Mors stupebit, et natura,
Cum resurget creatura,
Iudicanti responsura.

Mezzo-soprano solo:
Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus iudicetur.

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