Just a lost masterpiece

Well, it’s location, location, location.

And in this case, it’s clear that Jan Dismas Zelenka is living at the end of the last street on the wrong side of the tracks. Which is to say that any composer living up near Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven tends to get visited on the iPod a lot more than a composer whose name starts with “z.”

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know Zelenka—I didn’t know him either until I ran into him in a book by Oliver Sacks about music. So, since Sacks was blown away by Zelenka, he seemed worth a hear. And instantly, I was hooked.

How good is he? Well, Bach (whom Zelenka visited) thought highly of him, and copied out the amen section from Zelenka’s third Magnificat for use in a church service at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig.

Born in 1679, Zelenka was an almost exact contemporary of Bach, but he seems to have gotten around a bit more than Bach. Born south of Prague, he studied in Vienna, and knew Telemann and Pachelbel. As well, he may have gone to Venice: his music is clearly influenced by the Italian baroque.

Wikipedia will tell you that his music most closely resembles Bach, and that “his music is admired for its inventiveness and counterpoint.” What Marc will tell you is that the guy had to have been manic as well; it’s almost exhausting to listen to, at times.

Zelenka’s music is totally distinctive. There’s the manic quality, which often takes the form of rapid scales, unusual harmonic twists, dramatic changes. One commentator on a classical music forum speculates that that’s why Zelenka’s music is so unknown—it’s too weird. Another wonders if the problem was that his music was locked up in a library of the court of Dresden, kept under lock and key and never performed. Still another notes that there’s no image of him. In any case, he’s unjustly minor.

Is he as good as Bach? No, but who is? Do we ask that Telemann or Vivaldi be as good as Bach?

That said, the mass below comes close to the B Minor Mass of Bach. It has the scale, it’s inventive, it surprises and delights. It was written in 1739, late in Zelenka’s life, and after a serious illness.

“It’s nothing less than a lost masterpiece,” wrote one reviewer, of a CD of the work.

I agree.

Songs of Love and Death

Get ready—it might be a bumpy ride.

You will tell me you don’t like opera. You don’t understand it, you don’t think it’s “natural.” In fact, it sounds fake and phony to you. And it’s just for snobs, right?

Depends on time and place. Even now, the opera enjoys popular status in Italy, where one opera house, La Scala, is famous for its high standards and harsh catcalls and boos for anything less than the best. And in Mozart’s time, the general populace went about their business humming the latest arias of Mozart’s operas.

Is it fake or phony? Yes, but no. To me, the voice of Whitney Houston could reliably send me howling into the streets. What I heard was a voice that was utterly artificial, but was crudely honed to sound casual, natural. The operatic voice is, yes, trained to an extraordinary degree. Opera is to pop music as ballet is to hip-hop.

Nor does it begin to sound good initially. Here’s how it worked for me—it sounded bad until one extraordinary passage, which caught your heart and stopped your breath and left you wondering—how can a person do that? Consider the following aria, which did it for me…. 

Yes, it’s the opening scene from the movie Diva from the 1981. I was 25, a cellist, and not much interested in opera. The high, loud notes sounded like shrieks to me, but that moment when the soprano, in the middle of her range, soars up an octave and shimmers onto a soft, pure note, and vanishes it into heaven? I knew that was hard—I could barely imagine it on a cello—but that wasn’t the point. It gave me the chills.

So I was hooked—on that aria, at least. But there was still a lot of opera I didn’t like. Rossini, to me, sounded trite, and composers like Bellini and Verdi? Sorry—I didn’t get it.

Nor, I have to say, do I get them now. I do better, with Puccini—another composer who manages to achieve three-minute vocal orgasms. Check this out…. 

  

I live in Old San Juan, a blue-cobblestoned Colonial city--very picturesque and romantic. Once, late at night, I say a couple strolling down the streets. The man, darkly handsome, was holding his lithe companion's face caressingly in his hands, and dusting it with kisses under the street lamp. I did what I had to do, and wafted the aria above through the open doors and the bougainvillea-laden balcony down to them. Everybody gets to be in a movie once in a life. They kissed rapturously through the aria, then looked up and hailed us; we lifted our glasses. Young love must be saluted.

So I am limited in my love for opera. Perhaps it's fair to say that it's an unexplored world for me. Which is why I approached the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss with trepidation.

It's personal, I admit. I've played tone poems of Strauss, and my feeling is generally that they're a lot of work for very little pleasure. I hear you out there, saying, "tone poem?" A tone poem is a single piece of music that evokes or illustrates an idea, a landscape, even a novel. And you know the most famous of the Strauss tone poems. Here's the opening:




This clip is ten minutes, and it's one of four. And however cool the opening is, for the next forty minutes, you'll be bombarded with more notes than you can imagine an orchestra playing. Which is why the every audition for a professional orchestra includes an excerpt from a Strauss tone poem. Which is unfortunate--one professional cellist matter-of-factly told me that page six of Don Juan was "unplayable." Fortunately, enough else is occurring on the stage that you can play "Yankee Doodle" until things simmer down and no one will know the difference.

But what I didn't now is that early Strauss is heartbreakeningly (I think it's a word, the computer disapproves--you choose) beautiful. And Strauss returned to the style at the very end of his life, in 1948 when the composer was 84.

The first song, entitled "Frühling' or Spring. Sung in German, it's a rapturous love song.

All this changes in the last three songs, as the mood turns autumnal and death intrudes into the picture. Aptly so, for this song is called "September." And here, as much as the soprano, it's the French horn that gives it the haunting, eerie quality. Listen to the end of the second song--how superbly Strauss sets up the solo, and how ruminative the feeling is....



That ending gets me every time. And the third song, "Going to Sleep" depicts the physical and emotional fatigue of the weary. But wow--listen to what the violin solo can do, depicting the sweetness
 of sleep, of rest.



Well, from sleep, it's only a small step away from death, which is, in fact the last word of the great, monumental last song. And here, Strauss uses flutes to personify the sound of larks soaring at sunset (which is in fact the name of the song).

A word here about the majestic voice you've been hearing. For thirty odd years, Jessye Norman was the absolute queen of opera. She's what's known as a dramatic soprano, the voice is full and commanding. Yes, she did other parts (in Chicago, I saw her do Gluck, a German baroque composer) but her specialty was the heavier, dramatic, and often stately parts. And she owns--in my book--these songs.

But there's a problem. A soprano perhaps fully her equal had been the original intended performer of these songs. And though there is a clip of Kirsten Flagstad, the sound quality is lesser. What to do?

Easy. Here are both.

Concerti Grossi and Followers

All right—let’s get the players straight. In the clip below, you have three groups of people. On the left will be a baroque flute and violin—and they’re the soloists. Next up are the cello and the harpsichord. The cello is playing at times the basso continuo, which for any less complicated composer / thinker than Bach, would be simple chords that provided the harmonic structure. But here Bach has the cello constantly shifting back and forth from the traditional role to one of almost soloist status. The cellist who doesn’t itch to play these parts is dead.

The continuo, by the way, is often left unspecified by baroque composers—whatever bass instrument came along could be used. Nor was the part frequently written out; like jazz musicians today, there was a complicated notation of numbers denoting notes based on the bass note. Sounds complicated? Initially it is, but after a bit, it starts to feel natural. Here, by the way, is what it looks like….

The other part of the basso continuo is the harpsichord, or really, any other keyboard or strummed instrument (The theorbo makes a really good one). And in this concerto, the Brandenburg 5, the harpsichord is given what some have called the first modern cadenza. It’s the long, showy solo at the end of the first movement. The cadenza, designed to showcase the virtuosity of the soloist, is also meant to fool around with the main themes of the movement—it’s all a showy rehash.

And this cadenza is spectacular—I’ve heard knowledgeable folk argue that it shouldn’t be played on the harpsichord at all. It’s so far ahead of its time, the thinking goes, that the piano is better suited to bring out all the nuances. Bach was writing for an instrument that didn’t exist. (Don’t please, argue this point with anyone connected to what is now being called H.I.P—historically informed performance.)

OK—you have on the left two soloist; in the center is the harpsichord and the cellist, who are both soloists and basso continuo; so who’s on the right? Well, it’s a little group called the ripieno—yes, computer, there are words you don’t know—who join in and form an “orchestral” backdrop. In this case, you have a violin, viola, and bass.

Bach wrote this concerto in 1719, and dedicated it to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. Here, should you ever need an example of a dedication that goes from fulsome straight into brownnose, is the dedication:

As I had the good fortune a few years ago to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness's commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking Leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honour me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness's most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.[3][4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_concertos

All right—be fair. It was the style of the time.

And it also has to be said—this is a terrific piece of music. Yes, it may be a warhorse, a piece that is played so often it stops sounding new. Then, the curious thing happens—people shun the work because it seems trite, or overplayed. And then, of course, you go years without sitting down to listen to it again. And then when you hear it, you’re amazed—what were you doing all this time, listening to perfectly good though obscure music but neglecting a masterpiece?

Well, fortunately we have YouTube, which spies on me and then makes suggestions (I know, I should be upset and I’m not…). So when they suggested that I listen to the Croatian Baroque Ensemble playing the Brandenburg 5^th, I thought, ‘why not?’  Nor was I disappointed—they’re a knockout. 

   

I may have shot myself in the musical foot, by starting out with Bach—what else do you play after that?

Well, Corelli came to mind, and he wrote, in the good Baroque manner, a set of twelve of the little guys, written in the 1690’s but published in 1714—almost exactly at the time of Bach’s Brandenburgs. And they are as clean and fresh three hundred year later as the day Corelli wrote them. One of them gets trotted out regularly at Christmas—it even bears the name “Christmas Concerto.” The name was given by Corelli himself:  Fatto per la notte di Natale ("Made for the night of Christmas").

It’s serenic—all right, not a word, but you know what I mean—music punctuated by gleeful, almost manic, sections. And check the guy playing what looks like a weird guitar or lute; that’s a theorbo. 

Handel wrote two sets of concerti grossi—and composed them in 1739. Yes, they’re conventional—there’s nothing as thought-out as Bach, nor really as fresh as Correli. But still, Handel on an off day is still Handel.

After the baroque era, everybody went off to compose other things, until, in the twentieth century, the form was rediscovered. Ernst Bloch composed one in 1925 in Cleveland Ohio. To me, it’s bombastic and unpleasant music; but interesting to listen to. Stravinsky, more notably, composed Dumbarton Oaks in 1937—and the main theme of the first movement is a direct reference to the Third Brandenburg Concerto. Lastly, Vaughan Williams composed a concerto grosso in 1950. Here they all are….