Tale of Two Sandy's

            With film of devastation still a regular part of the news in New York, The Arts feel less essential somehow, something to put off until life returns to a place of normalcy.   Actors and make-up and costumes won’t fix crunched homes, or restore electricity, or secure hot water for more than an hour every once in a while.    Not that they’re trying to.    That isn’t the job of art, necessarily.    I believe art is a requisite part of the human condition, so I’m not suggesting we should abandon it.   Far from it.    Surely Bread and Puppets has such a strong idea that it has survived for decades:  art is cheap, art is food, art is politics, art is for (and occasionally by) everyone.    So perhaps I'm just conflicted.    Still, Broadway is the wealthiest business in the city, (losses occurring for the majority of shows that open notwithstanding.)   Millions of dollars flow through the theater district every week, hurricane or no hurricane, though all the shows were closed for two days.    Millions.   And now, in sharp contrast to reality, Annie has come back around.    And her dog Sandy sprints out for the closing scene, as always, reassuring that pluck and determination will conquer everything, even the Depression…not to mention a washed-out lush of a villainess, that gets her comeuppance for daring to dislike little girls.  That they coincided—the storm and the show—is just coincidence, but the similarities seem prescient if harsh.    Annie is the ghost that haunts the wreckage of Sandy, as the wreckage is the ghost that haunts the musical.

            An admission: I have not seen the new production.   I would never pay to watch a show I find to be slightly repulsive in its overkill of optimism.    Sure, there’s a Depression, even a song about it from supposedly down and out people, but just as telling, a song of the joys of NYC refutes it.    (If you’re being taken care of by a millionaire.)     From reviews, I assume James Lapine has tried to darken the tone a bit, here and there, but he can’t get away from the urchin belting out Tomorrow…which is only a day away.   This is not a revisionist Annie.   Who would produce that?   No one has rewritten the book, all the songs are there, roughly in the same order, mostly sung by the same characters.    Miss Hannigan never has a chance.   Her plot is easily foiled.    Her nemesis’ glorious tomorrow still comes, just in time.   "Good old-fashioned family entertainment, just what’s needed in this economy."    Little Orphan Annie joins her male counterparts in Newsies, male urchins surviving a tough life (unrealistically softened for maximum consumption) on the ‘mean streets’ through pluck and determination.     They also bring down a straw puppet of a villain, dancing and singing their way to success and happiness.    Cartoons.     $150 cartoons.

As an aside, Forbidden Broadway really has their number.   The skewering for both of these shows is funny in a loving/mean/dismissive kind of way.    In fact, you laugh so hard, you might miss the pin puncturing the inflated rhetoric Broadway thrives on.    When Annie was just a painful, nay, awful memory to many theater lovers, FB had an aging adult in the red dress and the curly wig smoking a cigarette, sure that the show would return and she’d have a job again.   I didn’t think they would find a way to top it.    They did.   I won’t give it away.   To me, the rejuvenated Forbidden Broadway is the best new show in town.     Nothing is sacred.   But it’s all hilarious and lovingly lethal.    Yes, creator/writer Gerard Alessandrini truly loves the Broadway his show skewers.   But it takes no prisoners.   And it has the cast to pull it off.   And tickets are off-Broadway.    And often at TKTS.   Go if you are able.    Can’t wait for the new cast recording.

I’m not suggesting Broadway should be shut down.    No, it is an art form, bloated though it sometimes may be.    I saw a few shows (at vastly reduced prices) for my recent birthday celebrations.   I was not hurt by Sandy.    I was extremely lucky.   And I don't feel I need to eat beans and rice as solidarity.    But just how many of those people watching Annie or Newsies has given one dollar or one hour toward helping the real Annies, who have lost everything and have no illusions that a millionaire will jump in to save them before everything disintegrates in front of, and around, them?    If everyone in a seat gave even $1, think how much help that could bring?    To its credit, Broadway has a yearly donation drive to help those living with AIDS.    It has raised millions.    Completely worthy.   But the nationwide drive to help those Sandy victims still in bad need has not generated as much funds as are necessary.   Or enough of it hasn't trickled down to the person living in the tents or the dented houses.   Yes,so many people have given up so much to help these dispossessed families.    They will receive nothing from it beyond the knowledge they helped how they could.   Just yesterday, food trucks from all over NYC drove into destroyed neighborhoods and fed everyone who lined up.   Donations had paid for the food so these vendors could make the trek.   And they came in droves.   The sight couldn't help but bring a tear or two.     This was seeing how money helps directly.   This was New York helping its own.  Every one of these men and women deserve the World’s praise.     But help is still necessary.    We need a Daddy Warbucks.    (Trump and Bloomberg haven't stepped up to the plate as of yet.)

Of course, the harshest reality of all is that the people who most need some optimism, who should laugh for a couple of hours, smile at the kids, applaud the canine Sandy…are the ones sitting in shells of their former homes, despondent.   Their tomorrow has not come.   And having little food or necessities, dependent on charity to survive, cold and all but broken, they could never afford a ticket.

Loss of a Legend

         103 and composing until the end, iconic 20^th Century composer, Elliott Carter, has died, a week after Hans Werner Henze.   (Carter's work has been studied and analyzed and argued in many books, dissertations, articles.   Even Wikipedia has a nice overview with some of the major works discussed.   Try some other place than here to understand more fully who he was and what he wrote.)  They could not be more different.    Henze was beloved.    Carter was studied.     Most music history books discuss / dissect Carter and his atonal, non-serialized, complex multiplicity, most of it incomprehensible to even seasoned audiences.    But that was part of the appeal.    He was asking listeners to use every ounce of concentration they possessed, and to move forward with myriad quick changes, even while the last notes have had time to resonate.    He wrote what he found interesting in a way he found interesting.    You either followed as best you could or didn’t.     You had to learn how to listen.     You had to want to understand it.    For two generations, he was the apex of difficulty and super brilliance, even while the larger audiences moved back to a simpler, (mostly) tonal ‘eclecticism’…but the adventurous stayed with him.

            As a student, still learning my way around tonality, I was puzzled and frustrated by my lack of comprehension.    Most people would have given up, I suppose, but I was stubborn and refused to let it rest.     I found some his less complex pieces and slid in the back door that way.      The piano solo, Night Fantasies, a piece I love, was one.   The song cycle, A Mirror On Which To Dwell, a treasured piece, was another.     They were anything but simple, but eventually, I could follow them.    And then I slowly added the String Quartets, the Piano Concerto (a bitch of a piece), and finally, the most difficult piece of music I have ever heard, the monstrous Double Concerto for Harpsichord, Piano, and Two Chamber Orchestras.    With this last work, I was impressed rather than enthralled, and have remained so.     Other pieces of his that I have not heard may be more complex, but I can’t see (hear?) how.     But no one bats 1000.

But there are rewards beyond ‘following’ what he is doing.   (Or perhaps a path among many through his difficult mazes.)    Once you can comprehend his style, you derive a sense of pleasure, as your mind becomes engaged.     It’s similar to a video game in a sense: you have myriad possibilities to follow, and once you do, you have myriad more choices, until the level is finished.    But the more straight forward pieces, and he has several, require less work to negotiate and appreciate.    Many of these were written in his later decades.    He became more direct, less stratified.    His Clarinet Concerto is quite accessible…to his initiates.    His solo piano pieces are quite engaging.     As the recordings roll out, a more complete picture of his skills comes into focus.    He wrote many great pieces, even past the age of 100!     His music has travelled the world, major musicians have learned and championed it.   Some pieces have become standards, (if you measure by repeat performances), at least for now.    Everyone who has a wide knowledge of the entire spectrum of important Classical music has kept his music in front of audiences.    Much of it is so rewarding, the trouble it causes shrinks as you ‘learn’ it.    It bears multiple listens.

But…and I have one.    And it is the reason I have found it difficult to appraise him and the tardiness of this post.   To me, a fan, nothing by him is emotionally powerful.    Moody perhaps, but not sad, happy, heartbroken, angry, passionate.   Melancholy, yes, sometimes.    Ruminative—as in A Mirror—certainly.     Emotionally conflicted, you could make an argument for it.   But nothing that hits me on an emotional level.   Perhaps it is my short coming, but I am more drawn to music that engages my heart as well as my mind.   I don’t believe he was attempting to do any such thing.    I’m not sure he thought music did that.   He has his own rewards and they are not superficial.     I do not listen to his recordings regularly.   I have never heard any of his music live.    Until three years ago, I had not listened to anything by him for more than a decade.    Then I embarked on a Carter festival, and listened to several.   I was taken by what I heard.   In his honor, I will hear most of the big works I have on CD.     Just not all at once, or even one per day.    I gorged on Henze when he died.    I love Henze with, you’ll forgive me, a ‘passion.’    I admire and sometimes enjoy Carter.     Henze should find immortality sooner or later—his music is too rich and emotional to disappear.   I fear Carter will probably be heard until this generation has gone.     And then he will go as well.    Hopefully, a few pieces might stick around.    Night Fantasies seems a probability.    But the time and money and skill required to perform something like the Piano Concerto will make it obsolete.    I will be long gone before the world will discard or re-embrace him.   Who knows what will happen in 50 years.   But I believe my prophesies seem all too probable.    An important stopping point for anyone studying the music of the last century, unquestionably.    But not one of the present.

 

Do you believe in The Arts or not?

         As in all elections, reasons for voting one way or another complicate a final decision.   But if you are in The Arts, the choice is simple: President Obama supports funding for them and Mitt Romney does not.    Silencing PBS for the pittance of money spent on it is an act of repression and aggression.    Minority opinions are expressed in some of its programs and suppressing them is an act of despotism, however cloaked the reasons for doing so may be.   He doesn't approve of minority voices.    Listen to his speeches, it's there in black and white.   Artists are minorities.   And lest we forget, the Eastern Seaboard would be financially decimated if Romney's policies were enacted: until Sandy, he publicly stated his belief that the city or state of a disaster area should be held responsible for its costs.    How many lives are worth 'creating new jobs'?    Should they come from people who are no longer around to do them?    (A joke, but not so far from his 'message' as you might think.     Shipping Mexicans back to their original country to 'open up' jobs is not so far from it.    And it's preposterous and untrue.)    So if anyone who has yet to decide reads this, vote for the man who has supported minority voices, lives, freedom.    (He's a minority himself of course)   Though I am not the first to say, I believe it to be true: a culture--and a country--is only as strong as its art.

Back from hibernation - in memoriam Hans Werner Henze

Hans Werner Henze, one of the great composers of the Twentieth Century, has died at the age of 86.    The New York Times has a fairly good biography.    He wrote an autobiography as well: Bohemian Fifths.    The only statement that need to be made concerning either is that his involvement in left-wing politics was more philosophy than practice.    He tried to support what he considered to be worthy causes, but he never saw them in black or white, and he viewed his work as an attempt at making art not politics.   He thought the student revolts of the ‘60’s to be a sign that change was happening, but he never pretended to know how or why or when.     He wrote some overzealous articles about the problems of the ‘bourgeoisie’, though his view of it and others view of were (often) radically different.     Mostly, he just hated the idea of rote acceptance of social behavior, destructive though the ideas may be to the very people holding them.    And as any belief ‘system’ will prove, truth can be found in them, just not the whole truth.   To state simplistically complex beliefs: in the ‘left-wing’ ideas of the time, society was three-fold: the upper classes, (i.e. the leaders of the Nazi Party) who held power through wealth and ‘position’ and rhetoric; the bourgeoisie, (i.e. the German ‘middle’ class) who blindly followed them, who looked the other way while atrocities were accelerating all around them, and accepted without question any long-held beliefs that corresponded to the safety and structure of the status quo; and the poor,(i.e. the actual soldiers) who had no power and were continually squashed down and forced to fight and starve and die.    He had lived through the Nazis.    He had witnessed the death of millions of people, mostly poor.    He had real reasons to view blind allegiance as violation of humanity.    He believed that the World could not sustain this paradigm and a ‘revolution’ would take place to relieve the suffering of the disenfranchised.     Reading his autobiography spells this out quite clearly.    Alas, many people who seemed to agree with him at first would turn out to be as despotic as the power brokers he despised.     He was often broken by these betrayals.   But you don’t have to agree with his complex view of politics to understand his work.     Verdi himself supported a rebellion against what he and many others viewed as tyranny (famously, in Nabucco.)     And Wagner was, among other things, a white supremacist, though far more complex in his work than any beliefs that simplistic.

Henze was a singular force, never following one ‘school’ or another, making his way through a difficult time for Classical Music, where musical seriousness and exploration degraded into pandering to the lowest common denominator.     Like many of his age, he resisted both the (mostly useless) complexity of the post-Schoenberg total serialists, and the derivative ‘homespun’ tonality, with its easy solutions to age-old musical questions.     In fact, he would use his personal brand of serialism and his own version of tonality, straddling the two without falling into either camp.    He had several ideas, or sounds, that he worked with, in various forms, from piece to piece.    He explored a dark lyricism, similar to Mahler and (especially) Berg, long-limbed, beautiful music that could disturb, hurt.     He had a sharp satirical side, often tipping his hat at Stravinsky, where just below the surface, the music was edgy and castigating.  Pushed a bit farther, it degenerated into the grotesque, a useful tool when most of your libretti are far more poetic than realistic.     He loved Italian opera of the Nineteenth Century, and used some of its ideas in his own work.     Particularly, he found fruitful use of the older idea of ‘coloratura’, which he plied with various degrees of importance, even in his non-vocal work.     He would use short quotes from some of his favorite works from the past: some obvious, some unrecognizable without the score.    He would then transform them into his own ideas.   And he could unleash a violent streak: cruel, jagged, harsh, giving his listeners a dose of battering ugliness.     With these rich ingredients, no two pieces were alike: the ratio of one musical idea to the others always changed, especially noticeable in the longer works, in particular his operas.     Much of this was accompanied by a strong political / sociological conviction—frequently stated in some personal testament written for premieres—which often led to those endless complications and misunderstandings.     Truthfully, despite some of his written opinions, his concerns were for humanity and its struggles, not politics.   If you knew nothing about him, his work would still be valid, powerful, apposite.   If nothing else (and there is plenty else) he should be counted as a major creator of opera in the last century, though he continued to write them well into the present one.

            He looked for poets—past and present—for texts for all his vocal works.     His friendship with Ingeborg Bachmann produced many masterworks, even masterpieces.    (The operas The Prince of Homburg and The Young Lord are two.)     He never quite recovered from her suicide at a young age.    The only writers to compare, and exceed in many eyes, were W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, primarily known for the libretto of The Rake’s Progress of Stravinsky.     They wrote two libretti for him, and the operas produced are unquestionably masterpieces: Elegy For Young Lovers and The Bassarids.     They have been produced over and over since their premieres in the ‘60’s.   A small sampling: The Bassarids saw several productions in the mid-2000’s.   (One during a strike in Paris.)   A live performance of Elegy For Young Lovers was recorded and released as a CD in 2000.  English National Opera produced a very well-received production of Elegy in 2010.    Into the ‘70’s and beyond, he tried to find some writers who could give him words to which he could express deep emotions with his heavy arsenal of musical gifts.   Edward Bond gave him two very overtly political texts, We Come To The River and The English Cat, which were less successful than their predecessors.    In fact, the former has a poor libretto and produced his weakest opera musically, and the latter ‘comedy’ has some poor rhymes, a weak ending, and an overall lack of wit.    He seemed to want something along the lines of The Young Lord.    He didn’t get it.   After these, he chose German poets of lesser fame (but not lesser talent) to return to a more abstractly humanistic work.    And he wrote one of his own, a masterpiece as well: L’Upupa or the triumph of filial love.    The video of its premiere is an essential for anyone trying to know his work.   He wrote 17 operas (18, if you count the almost total reworking of Konig Hirsch into Il re cervo), all of value and craft, most wonderful…but none that make for easy listening.    (Or ‘difficult’ listening for someone who could follow, say, Lulu.)    

He has many fans the World over.   Dozens of his works have been recorded, some more than once.    He wrote for every ‘classical’ form, including: 10 symphonies which are highly regarded (as they should be); three violin concerti; two piano concerti; several ballets (including the great Undine, written for Margot Fonteyn); instrumental tone poems such as the recent, beautiful Sebastian im Traum, The New York Philharmonic one of its commissioners (though it was not the first piece played by them); chamber music of every stripe; vocal music, from oratorios for huge forces down to songs for voice and piano.    He prized the voice particularly.    He wrote in his biography that even his instrumental music sounded like wordless voices in his head.

Personally, he was an ‘ideal’ 20^th Century composer, like Stravinsky or Britten, who never stopped composing, never grew tired of trying to find that ‘something new’, ever curious, ever striving for something more than that which he had composed before.     My shelves are filled with recordings of his work.    My head, too, complex though his music can be.   I have performed some.   I am sad that no new pieces will spill from his pen.     I am happy that I know many that did.    May his work live forever.