The Brahms song heard 'round the world

A group of us are sitting here tonight obsessed with this one Brahms song, "Die Schwestern" ("the sisters"). It is a video on YouTube by Barbara Bonney and Angelika Kirchschlager.

My colleague Doug Turner posted it on Facebook. I am privileged to say my colleague because actually he is our Washington columnist which puts him over me. But anyway, he posted "Die Schwestern" and I watched it.

I wrote to Doug on Facebook that I love the song and the moment it goes sour, when you can tell there's trouble. That happens when the two sisters, who have always been buddy-buddy, suddenly love the same guy.

Not fun!  And there is that affectionately mocking Brahms piano accompaniment.

But anyway. Meanwhile Howard reads what I wrote to Doug, about the moment it goes sour. And Howard gets curious and watches the song himself.

And he is disappointed!

He said, "From what you wrote to Doug I thought one of them was going to fall off the stage or something."

Hahaha! No such luck.

But a good song all the same.

I love the idea that Howard watched it all the way through, being that he is not normally a Brahms song person. Even if he watched it thinking someone was going to fall off the stage, so what.

His life is the richer for it!

Crowning glory

I like everything about this video. I love the energy. I love how Friedrich Gulda is wearing that jazz-musician kind of headgear and how he conducts from the keyboard and how he plays along with the opening tutti. I like Gulda's assertive playing.

So cool! All of it!

And such a cool concerto. It is funny how the "Coronation" Concerto gets kvetched about. People see it is second rate. I love it. Other people do not. On the other hand it is neat that a composition from 200 years ago is argued about. It is great that people look at it and debate it.

Leonard Pennario, whom I am writing my book about, he loved to play this concerto. I have a recording of him playing it with an orchestra in Toronto and when my book is out, you had better believe I am going to drop that recording by helicopter all over the Western Hemisphere. Because it is that great.

Although there is only one Pennario, Friedrich Gulda is pretty good too. Martha Argerich was one of his students, which is interesting. And he had jazz musician friends, hence the headdress. I love some of the comments on this video. I have to say this: I am addicted to YouTube comments. I love seeing what people write.

One person writes, in a nod to Gulda's fashion sense:

"I didn't know Qaddafi was playing the piano until now."

Hahahaha!

Another comment I like:

"I can't believe that the received wisdom maintains that Mozart was having an off day when he wrote this wonderful concerto. What sh-t people think and talk!"

Well, it is good that people argue. It keeps us pure.

Warning: The video above cuts off at a heartbreaking point. You will have to search around YouTube for Part 2 of the first movement.

Meanwhile here is the slow movement. Mozart does so much with so little. I like Gulda's modest embellishments.



And the third movement. I have always gotten from this a kind of mocking tone. There is this triumph about it that I love. A kind of nyaah-nyaah quality. But that might all be in my imagination.



In any case a heck of a concerto.

And a heck of a performance.

'Furtwangler's Love'

Forever, it seems, I have been wanting to watch this DVD kicking around called  "Furtwangler's Love."

Is that a catchy title or what? It is about the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler and Elisabeth, his wife. I am sorry. I love people's private lives, I just do. I cannot help it.

The documentary interviews his wife, who is aged and looking back. It is kind of cool when she talks about how she met Maestro Wilhelm. Her husband had died in the war and she was wearing black all the time and her sister Maria finally tells her, "Put on these blue slacks and colorful top and come downstairs." Something like that. I am paraphrasing. But blue slacks figured in the picture.

Elisabeth put on the blue slacks and Furtwangler hit on her and the rest, shall we say, is history.

It is a good story but a few things take away from it.

For one thing, it kind of changes things that Furtwangler had a first wife from whom he was separated and meanwhile he fathered something like five illegitimate children. I had not known that! And I mean, to me, that takes away something from this supposedly amazing romance.

Also, it got so I preferred the character of Maria to Elisabeth. Apparently Furtwangler first wanted to marry Maria but Maria put him off. Maria sounded like a real woman about town. Elisabeth says at the start that Maria called her and said, "I'm falling in love with Furtwangler." But apparently not enough to marry him.

Could they make a documentary about just Maria?

It would probably be more interesting than this one. This one, I hate to say it, but it turned into a bore. I love Furtwangler as a conductor, I do. I will have to tell why one of these days. But this video bogged down and I have to say, I gave it the hook about half an hour into it.

One thing I did love: the repeated shots of Elisabeth's villa in Switzerland. The bright blue sky, the green grass, the birds singing. You should see this snowy windy, wet weather we are having in Buffalo. I just wanted to beam myself to that villa.

Can I have a video of just that?

Also there is this tremendous aside about how to Elisabeth and Maria and whoever else, "Fu" was Furtwangler and "Kna" was Hans Knappertsbusch. Who knew that? It was a kind of shorthand because their names were so long.

Ladies and gentlemen, Fu ...

... and Kna.

I will never be able to say their full names again!

Fu fighter

Yesterday I said I would say what I like about Wilhelm Furtwangler as a conductor.

For one thing there is the snotty "shut up" gesture he makes at the start of this film.



For another there was this thing that happened to me when I was, I want to say 12.

My father played me this record he had of Furtwangler conducting Mozart's 39th Symphony. He knew I liked Mozart and so he sat me down and said, you should hear this.

And I loved it. And I decided I wanted to hear it every day. But my dad was possessive about his records and so I needed one of my own. So I went out and I still remember the recording I bought: Istvan Kertesz conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. It was on London's budget label and I could afford it.

So I was happy and I went home and opened the record -- remember how it felt and smelled when you opened a brand-new record? -- and I listened to it.

But it was not the same as my dad's record.

My dad's record was better. It just was. I listened to my acquisition again and then I went downstairs and surreptitiously grabbed my dad's record, just to make sure. I tried to deny the difference. But it was there.

I liked Furtwangler's energy. I liked the drive he gave the music. Another thing I remember was the minuet movement. Kertesz truncated those top notes -- they were cut and dry, and I didn't like that as much as Furtwangler's more lush sound. You could disagree with me. There's a case to be made for either side. The point is, Wilhelm Furtwangler was the reason I learned that not all conductors were equal, not all performances were the same. I am affectionate toward him because of that.

Wow, just now I looked on YouTube and there is Furtwangler, conducting the mighty 39th. Is this one of the great symphonies of world civilization or what?All my life I have thrilled to this music. And I have to say, I still agree with my 12-year-old self. I love Furtwangler's take on this piece.

In the first movement listen to how slowly and luxuriantly the slow introduction melts into the main theme. You hear that from about 2:20 to, yikes, 2:55. Would anyone do it like that now? What bold and wonderful music making.



Here is the minuet movement of the 39th symphony in Wilhelm Furtwangler's hands.



I still feel the way I did when I was 12.

I want to listen to this every day!

Springtime in Paris

My friend Professor G posted this beautiful link on my Facebook page. It is of a Mass in a church in Paris.

The video is so beautiful. As the choir sings you see the children in the congregation. A baby sleeping in her crib. So pretty. At the Tridentine Mass people do not whisper and chitchat the way they do in modern Masses. That is one thing I like about it. I used to chitchat back in the day but as soon as I walked in to my first Tridentine Mass I knew right away not to.

They sing the same Kyrie we sing at St. Anthony of Padua Church here in Buffalo. 9 a.m. Sundays, folks. Come and sing that beautiful Kyrie with us!

They also sing the same Gloria. That is the Gloria of St. Gregory the Great that the great Ottorino Respighi works into his sparkling  "Church Windows." Listen to the end and you will hear that Gloria ring out. Isn't that marvelous over-the-top music? I know it well because the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it.



I love how in the top video, the choir and congregation alternate in the Gloria to make it a kind of call and response. Prof. G pointed out that they do that.

Can a giant hand pick me up and put me down in Paris so I can go to this Mass?

And after that I could hit a nice little place on the Left Bank. ...

Well, I am sure God would not mind.

For Mozart fans, a trip back in time

Luckily I did not give up surfing the Internet for Lent. Because I found something really cool.

It is the Mozart Society of America!

You can join it for $40 a year. I am so there. And here is another thing. You do not have to join the Mozart Society to take advantage of some of its amenities.

There are Mozart Resources Online.

And this is really great: You can tap into all these ancient biographies of Mozart! They are there, in their entirety, awaiting your perusal! Click on this link and then look on the right. There is this column with all these old books and papers listed. Click on any one and it will be there all written out for you.

I loved the name Thomas Busby so I clicked on his "Life of Mozart" (London, 1798).

Fascinating! You have to love the old language.


ANECDOTES OF EMINENT PERSONS
Life of Mozart,
The celebrated German Musician.
Among the illustrious individuals, who by their superior abilities have ornamented and improved the
world, how few have dared to defy the obstacles which envy, arrogance, and contending meanness
opposed to their progress! or indignantly to break the shackles which indigence imposes, and dart through
that obscurity too well calculated to scatter and quench the rays of genius!


And the ending:


Thus have I traced with a faithful though faint pencil, the prominent features of this eminent
musician. And the picture of a mind so highly qualified to ornament and delight society; a mind rich in
talent, cultivated by study, and recommended by a heart, amiable, liberal, and just, cannot fail to impress
the reader with an adequate idea of the exalted merits of Mozart. Drawing his attention with sage
indifference from the emptiness of superficial grandeur, and fixing his eye on real greatness, he will be
filled with those sentiments of respect and admiration ever due to such rare and shining productions of
nature.
China-terrace,   Vauxhall-road                                                                                 THOMAS BUSBY.


In between, such lines as:

"His mind was by no means unlettered..."

"But let me ask: had not the active and penetrating Joseph the ability better and less tardily to
appreciate the merits of a man so distinguished in genius and in science?" Busby is blaming Joseph II, the Kaiser, for not having made Mozart's life easier.

And I love this: "His auditors at all times listened to him with admiration: but whenever he played extempore, and indulged the spontaneous and uninterrupted sallies of his fancy, which he sometimes would for more than half an hour, every one was seized with the most enthusiastic raptures, and acknowledged the unrivalled resources of his imagination."

I cannot wait to work my way through these and see what I can find out that I did not know. It would be interesting for starters to see what they say about Mozart's death, what rumors were flying around then. Also it is interesting to see how that era viewed Mozart in contrast to Haydn, say, or Beethoven. Also to see how they viewed Mozart's Catholicism, and Freemasonry, things like that.

Things are referred to differently. In Busby's book "The Magic Flute" is "Le Flutte Enchantee." "The Abduction from the Seraglio" is "L'enlévement du Serail." Mozart himself is identified frequently in these early books as "Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart." Especially in the German books. A few of the books are in German.

I love to look at things through the windows of a different era.

What a resource!

Don't stop the Carnaval

Thinking about Mardi Gras today I got thinking of Carnaval, about the old tradition from back when most people really did do Lent and had to deprive themselves. The Carnaval -- literally carna-vale, goodbye to meat -- was your last hurrah before the lights went out.

Which made me think of Schumann's "Carnaval." A piece I have played!

There is this terrible story about how Schumann was suffering one of his bouts of insanity and his family had to go looking for him while the Carnaval was in progress. Imagine, all these people in masks and he was out there among them in his pajamas. His "dressing gown" as they put it in the biography I read. It is like something out of a strange movie.

On a brighter note there is this cool video up of a dozen great pianists playing "Paganini," the real finger-busting section of "Carnaval."

Enjoy!



And there is more! "Carnaval" will be coming out of your ears.



Which is at it should be.

Because tomorrow the fun is over.

Catholicism ... it ain't no good life, but it's my life...