Paging Dr. Klemperer

My Pennario research touches on Otto Klemperer because Klemperer conducted when Pennario first performed, as a teenager, with the Los Angeles Symphony.

Anyway. Long story short, I found this from a tribute to Klemperer by Harold Schonberg:

..If the German tradition was paramount in Klemperer's approach, his intellectual background was wide enough to encompass the entire ethic of the Western world. The late Wieland Wagner once summed up Klemperer:

"Classical Greece, Jewish tradition, medieval Christendom, German Romanticism, the realism of our own time, make Klemperer the conductor a unique artistic phenomenon."

Well, yeah, I guess that just about covers it.

You have all that stuff down, I guess as a conductor you are just about set!

Apparently Klemperer as a conductor was very exacting. Schonberg tells the story of how William Steinberg recalled momentarily forgetting a couple of the tempos from Wagner's "Lohengrin," after which Klemperer held him in contempt for months. Klemperer had these extremely high standards. It is no wonder he liked Pennario.

Above is a picture of young man Klemperer. There are a bunch of them out there like that, in which he looks kind of like Gustav Mahler. Cute, you know? You are used to pictures of old man Klemperer, thus.

And thus:

No photo page of Klemperer would be complete without a shot of his son, Werner, as Colonel Klink.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau told a tremendous story about Otto Klemperer in his memoir "Reverberations." God, it was funny. It was about how the singers had a complaint about Klemperer's tempo in Bach. I think it was the St. Matthew Passion. And Fischer-Dieskau drew the short straw and had to bring up this delicate matter with Klemperer.

And Fischer-Dieskau had it in his head, because he was young and you do dumb things when you are young, to tell Klemperer he had dreamed that he asked God some things about the tempo. It was something like that. I will have to look it up.

In any case Klemperer snarled to him that he, too, had had a dream about God.

"And God said, 'Tell me, Dr. Klemperer, who is this Fischer?"

The greatest thing about that story is of course that God addressed Klemperer as Dr. Klemperer.

I think in heaven He is doing that now.

For the Feast of St. Patrick...

 ... we give you the No. 1 hit of 1917, the great Irish tenor John McCormack singing "The Star-Spangled Banner."

His Irish accent is adorable. Listen to the flourish he gives to "perilous" in "Through the perilous flight."

There must have been a lot of patriotic fervor in the air because of regrettable World War I. The war must have been tough on a singer like McCormack who surely had a lot of German friends and colleagues.

He would live to see another war. Here is a rarity: McCormack in 1941, at London's Abbey Road studios, singing Bach with the great accompanist Gerald Moore. It was one of the tenor's last records.



Again, that beautiful accent. The word to listen for is "impassioned." He gives it that twirl.

A great Irish artist, on the feast day of a great saint.

Sing it, Mr. McCormack!

Bach's beautiful lullaby

Because the, ahem, Music Critic Web log ignores popular culture completely, we will skip over Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the Super Bowl (the fact that it stars Renee Fleming notwithstanding), and proceed directly to the Feast of the Purification, which is another name for Candlemas, which is today.

At Candlemas they remind you of the story of Simeon in the temple. Simeon was an old man who adored the infant Jesus and said that now that he had seen the Messiah that had been promised to him all these years, he could die happy. That is a painting of the incident above by Rembrandt. I never saw it before. There is something about it that gets you, you know?.

All I could think hearing the story of Simeon this morning at Mass was of this beautiful aria by Bach, "Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen." It means "Fall asleep, you weary eyes." It is  from the cantata  "Ich Habe Genug" (which I like to translate loosely as "I've Had Enough"), that tells the story of Simeon.

This aria is incredible. I first heard it when I was a teenager and found a record of "Ich Habe Genug" on Seraphim. I knew nothing about Bach cantatas but I bought it because it starred Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whom I loved. Then I took it home and played it and was just kind of standing there with my mouth open. That was the strategy behind Seraphim. EMI would put irresistible music on these cut-rate records, performed by their best artists, to get you hopelessly hooked so you would go on and buy their more expensive records. They put Leonard Pennario's Rachmaninoff Third on Seraphim for instance. They knew what they were doing.

Here is the song I heard. It sounds every bit as ravishing today to me as it did then. The ecstatic melody. The way the music falls at the word "fall." "Fallet sanft und selig zu." "Fall softly and peacefully shut."

The beautiful moment when the song ends and you hear those three notes on the organ.

Oh what the heck, words are superfluous. Here it is.

Simeon in the synagogue.

Johann Sebastian Bach.

'Please, I don't want to be happy'

There is this charming new video I found with David Dubal talking. We have gotten to like David Dubal on this Web log whether or not we agree with him on every little thing. Most of the important things we agree on.

There is nothing like Dubal giving you a pep talk.

"Go buy that piano! Don't whine and say, I'm too old. And if you need to because everything is so instant, well, I would say take one year to learn one page of a Two-Part Invention. Then why not take a year for the second? Take a third year to put it together."

Then his voice drops as he imitates a complainer.

"What, three years to do one minute of music?"

"Yes, that's right, that what I ask, that's what I demand of you. Because I demand us to survive. I want us to survive. Let's take a look at the reality of the world. We are uncreative today but consciously, where we do live, that's where we do live, including that wonderfully unknown language which is so vital called the dream."

There is other stuff in here that made me laugh out loud. But I do not want to give it all away. For now, no Dubal video is complete without him running down modern technology and this one has a great sequence confronting that issue.

"There is no silence and every day they are inventing new machines to make us more anxious. We can't do without the computer or the iPhone." Then he goes on to add generously that  if used properly "they can be as helpful as any household appliance."

But then he attacks the notion that machines are always supposed to make us happy.

"Please, I don't want to be happy, I want to be Franz Schubert."

Hahahaa! I love that. I got to talk with David Dubal on the phone a few weeks ago, a startling episode in my life because I read all his books but just never imagined I would ever be talking with him. But that is a whole other story. Meanwhile, I keep thinking about what he said, what I wrote about that one time, about "Play the piano daily and stay sane."

I try my best to follow that advice!

Bach on fire

No Pentecost Sunday is complete without listening to Johann Sebastian Bach's "O Ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe." Oh everlasting fire, oh wellspring of love."

I am guessing at the "Ursprung" exact translation but you can sense it, you know? Ur = original, as in urtext. And "sprung."

Anyway, this cantata, I have loved it since I was a teenager. I got into Bach cantatas as a result of my love for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and this cantata jumped out at me immediately. Seriously, I remember how I put the needle on the record and then I just stood back! It is a great chorus, with its fanfares and unexpected blasts and then the chorus' melody rising and dipping and swirling like a roller coaster.

Then the aria that follows is beautiful too. It is almost like a beautiful folk song in parts.

It is funny, I was reflecting at Mass today, most Catholics say "Holy Spirit" and I guess that is the best translation you can have for "Spiritus Sanctus." However when I was growing up the old people said "Holy Ghost." Which I love because it is close to the German "Heiliger Geist."

Whether you prefer "Holy Spirit" or "Holy Ghost," you owe it to yourself to make time in your day for Bach.

O Ewiges Feuer!

O Ursprung der Liebe!

Music for the New Year

I started out the New Year by playing Bach on the piano. There is something about Bach that is clean and optimistic and bracing and new and quietly, over the years, I have established this tradition for myself. That is that I sit down at the piano on New Year's Day and I play this one Bach prelude and fugue. It is in E flat. I am trying to find it on YouTube but I keep finding the wrong E flat prelude and fugue.

Oh, wait! I found this gentleman playing it. Here he is.

I just like this prelude and fugue. I love the fugue theme. Years ago I read and reviewed a book by this author Eric Altschuler. Isn't it funny, I still remember his name. It must have been 10 or 15 years ago. Anyway, he had all kinds of fun with the Bach Well-Tempered Clavier and one thing I remember, he said that the theme of this E flat fugue is one of the greatest fugue melodies in the whole work. I think he had a Top 10 and he put it in that list. He would explain the pieces and analyze them as if they were baseball games. I remember that.

I wonder where Eric Altschuler is now. I wonder if he is still studying his Bach. He called me after the review I wrote and we talked. For quite a while, as I remember! That was unusual.

His book is still for sale on Amazon. I just looked. Here it is. It is called "Bachanalia" and that is the book pictured at left.

The E flat is my favorite prelude and fugue.

Perfect, to start out the new year.

Bach

This morning at Mass they sang the great Bach chorale "O Sacred Head Now Wounded." That is a chorale that breaks my heart. Here is a version on YouTube with beautiful religious images.

Here is a version where all they show is this shooting star and I like that too. The genius of Johann Sebastian Bach! There is a great statue of Bach pictured above. It is in Leipzig.

I love the "St. Matthew Passion."

But you know what I really love? The "St. John Passion."

I had a Seraphim box set when I was a kid and over the years I have just kept listening to this marvelous music. That is so often how things work. Something's cheap, you can afford it, you pick it up, you get to love it.

There is this aria "Ich folge dir gleichsam." I could lip-synch the whole thing. It has this beautiful flute part.

And the ending really gets me. "Ach, Herr, lass dein lieb' Engelein." "O, Lord, send your angels." This is the chorale that ends the whole St. John Passion. By that time you are just beat, and then this piece washes over you and soothes you and makes you cry. Catholics, like me, will be reminded of the beautiful last prayer of funerals, when the priest asks that the angels lead the deceased into paradise, that the martyrs come out to greet him and bear him to Abraham's side.

Here is that chorale that I love in the Cologne Cathedral.

There is often humor in the saddest situations and on this video, the guy who posts it is apologizing for misspelling "bosom," as in "bosom of Abraham." He spells it "bossom."

We should kick around Bach cantatas a little more than we have been doing. I have a whole host of them that I love and like all Bach fans, I am always mentally going over my list and adding to it.

True story: During Holy Week, radio stations love to play the Bach Passions. And once I walked into a bar -- it was the Italian Fisherman -- and they were playing the "St. John Passion." The TVs were muted but the place was noisy and over it all I heard "Ich folge dir gleichsam." With everyone drinking beer.

That was strange!