Composers and cats

Because of our new cat I am wondering what musicians in history had cats. It is hard to think of any specifically. Richard Wagner had a big Newfoundland dog, at least for a while, named Robber. He had Robber at the time he wrote "The Flying Dutchman." Mozart had a dog and a bird.

Howard says we do not hear about musicians having cats because probably they all did. Cats used to be part of the landscape because they roamed free and you needed them for the mice that were and are around. Everyone had them! That is what we figure anyway.

Now I am looking for more details.

Ah! Alexander Borodin had a lot of cats. And one of them, Ryborov, could go ice fishing. He could fish through holes in the ice.

I bet our cat could do that if we were Russian!

Borodin is on a list of famous cat lovers including Pope Benedict XVI and Edward Lear, two of the greatest gentlemen who ever lived. Edward Lear had a tabby cat and, speaking of music, it was named Foss. I interviewed Lukas Foss once! I wish I could have mentioned that.

You might guess that Maurice Ravel loved cats and you would be right. He had Siamese cats, so says this list. That is Ravel up above with a cat! Here is another picture.

John and Cynthia Lennon had up to 10 cats. No word on how many cats he owned with Yoko.

Pope St. Gregory the Great had only one possession, so says the list, and it was a cat. He would pet the cat while meditating. 

And perhaps while creating his famous Gregorian chant.

An old song re-sung

 One reason I go to the Mass that I do is that we tend to sing old hymns and not new hymns. Here is something I learned recently: The only time you sing in the vernacular is at the end of the Mass! Before that it is all in Latin.

Today our closing hymn was the old German hymn "Maria zu lieben." In English it was "I Love Thee, O Mary," something like that. The English words kind of went off the rails as the song continued, as these old hymn lyrics often do. One line ended "when tempests draw nigh." That kind of thing.

But still, you get to sing that great melody! It is like a Christmas carol. I don't know where exactly I know it from. I think when I used to play the organ at church as a kid, I found it in an old hymnal and I used to play it. It is not as if I grew up with it.

It seems to be an old folk song because I found it in this folk song archive.

On YouTube it is hard to find a decent recording. May I take a moment to kvetch: It is very hard to find a decent recording of any Marian hymn. Over the last few decades the Catholic Church fell out of the kitschy tree and hit every branch on the way down. Hahaa... that is a phrase I copped from my old housemate Daryle who would say that something fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. In this case it is apt!

With which, the version above was the best I could do.

Catholics around the world should demand that it be sung at their Masses.

You can say it's a folk mass!

An opera that is better heard than seen

Today while I was running dumb but necessary errands I caught the end of the San Francisco Opera's production of Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman."

That last scene!

It made me think of that time I was driving and had to pull over to hear the end of "Die Walkure." I turned off the car in the parking lot of PetSmart and I gave myself over to this last scene. I had not really listened to this opera in years. But I used to love it as a teenager. And I was surprised at how vividly the lines came back to me. I started saying them to myself before the singers sang them.

The Dutchman: "Segal auf!" Calling for the sail, then the anchor.

"Sag Lebewohl zum Ewigkeit den Landen!" I don't know if I have my endings and whatnot right but it is chilling: "Say farewell forever to land!"

And the orchestra, rising and crashing like the waves. Imagine it. Imagine the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship. Catching bits and pieces of the opera beforehand it was as if I could see it. Imagine being the Norwegian sailors, you have heard about the Flying Dutchman, it's this legend, and all of a sudden ... it appears one night. No, it can't be. Yes, it is. It is.

This terrible ghostly gray ship!

I love those choruses, the sailors trying to act as if everything is all right. But it is not! This is a very good ghost story, you know. It is really frightening. I will have to link to this essay I read about how Wagner was in a shipwreck, how he learned what it was like. He put that all into that music.



 Then at the end, Senta the captain's daughter, giving herself up to save the Dutchman. I had never seen the opera when I was a teenager. But I saw it in my head and it was better than any production. The daughter, this beautiful young woman, standing at the edge of the sea, in a white gown, her hair blowing. Like something out of Charlotte Bronte.

"Preis seinen Engel und sein Gebot!" Again I apologize if my endings are wrong, but it means "Praise your angel and his pronouncement!" And she says: "Here I am, true until death!" And she jumps.

What a scene! What a situation! You love it as a teenager. And as I listened to it today I saw it as I saw it then. It is all over in a flash then and the Dutchman is redeemed and you hear that ghostly call of the ship and then the music changes, it becomes magical and tender. You hear that music at the end of the overture too.. You see the sky clearing, the curse of the Dutchman evaporating, the mists rising, the stars coming out. The angels looking down. That is how I saw it as a kid and I saw it that way today too.

I am sure whatever the San Francisco Opera came up with was not as good as what was in my head. Let me check and see.

Sure enough, judging from this picture of Greer Grimsley as the Dutchman, nope, it wasn't.

He looks like a guy in a biker bar at closing time! Ha, ha!

But in all fairness, in the opera pantheon, "The Flying Dutchman" is a tough one to get right.

How can it live up to your imagination?

Beethoven's brother

One of the great, great portraits in music history.

If you were going to come up with the opposite of Ludwig van Beethoven surely it would be Johann van Beethoven, pictured above.

What, me worry?

There is a book waiting to be written about great artists and their brothers and sisters. Because lightning does not often strike the same family twice.

An uncompromising portrait of Ludwig, so we may compare and contrast.

Sixtus and Sixtus

Today is the Feast of St. Sixtus. That is he pictured above! And if you think the name Sixtus is cool you should see it in Latin. He was an early pope who was martyred and his name appears in the Roman Canon heard in the Tridentine Mass I attend and it appears as Xysti.

Xystus!

In the objective case, is my guess. It has been a while since my high school Latin classes.

With the "X" version I have no problem but when I see it "Sixtus" with an "S,"  I am sorry, all I can think of is Sixtus Beckmesser from Wagner's "Die Meistersinger."

May we present a very cool clip featuring Sir Thomas Allen? He follows in the footsteps of great comic Sixtus Beckmessers including, I am proud to say, Erich Kunz. And our Walther von Stolzing, Ben Heppner, follows in the footsteps of great big Walther von Stolzings.

I love when Sachs is singing his song about Eve in Paradise, and Walther whispers to Eva: "Why is your name in his song?"

And she says: "I've heard it before. It's not about me."

Hahahaa.

And later the idea of Eve in Paradise will work its way into Walther's Prize Song.

Anyway. I hope St. Sixtus had a sense of humor and does not mind this. The fact that his name appears on a fine Trappist ale...

.... suggests that he can take a joke.

Take it, Sir Thomas:

A view of the Schubertiade

A nice anonymous person leaving a comment hipped me to a story in the Guardian about the Schubertiade. Remember, the Schubertiade, who got in touch under byzantine circumstances.

The story is by Alan Rusbridger. My favorite part (I will cut and paste):

I get to meet the figure who has run the Schubertiade since its earliest days, Gerd Nachbauer. A neat, shy, reserved man of few words, he speaks in German, translated by his press officer – called Schubert, of course. (Editor's note: Hahahahahahaaaaaa!)

It's evident that he feels he has a settled, successful formula and has no plans to change very much at all. The audiences – mainly German-speaking, but with a significant British contingent – keep coming back. He can attract more or less any musical luminary in the world. He has no subsidy, the sums add up. Schubert sells.

Contemporary music? It's not really to the audience's taste, he explains patiently: that's not why they come. Is there anyone he hasn't been able to draw to Schwarzenberg, or its twin centre in Hohenems? He silently searches his mental Rolodex for any large musical fish he's failed to land. Eventually one word: "Pollini."

Who needs Pollini. Also, good on the Schubertiade for sticking with Schubert and with tradition. I did read elsewhere in the story that "anything goes" as far as the music, other than contemporary, I like to think. They have Britten and Ives. Nothing against them but I say stick with Schubert. It is the Schubertiade. Everyone is always trying to get you to change things, you know?

You are not going to do better than a song like this tiny exquisite gem.



Rusbridger should not have brought his wife to the Schubertiade. All she wants to do is make him go on hikes. It is interesting though what he writes, that the Schubertiade has a lot of British fans. It is mostly German and British.

I also like the observation:

"Schubert sells!"

Mozart's wedding anniversary

Side-effect No. 1,468 that comes from being a classical music nerd is that you wake up on August 4 and think: Something happened today.

Ah! Mozart got married.

It is Mozart's wedding anniversary! And it was in 1782. I do not have to look it up! You may do the math and figure out what anniversary it is and if we should be giving him presents of tin, copper, aluminum, whatever.

Mozart and Constanze Weber were married Aug. 4, 1782 in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.

Mozart was so thankful that the wedding came about that he wrote his Mass in C Minor, known as "The Great."



 He did not entirely finish it but I can tell you, that is what happens when you are writing something for yourself and God and you do not have a deadline.

Constanze is often vilified because everyone is a little in love with Mozart but it is turning out that she was a good woman and a fine wife for Mozart, if you ask me. Heck, he seems to have loved her and there is no evidence that he ran around.

After he died she married the Danish ambassador, Georg Niklaus von Nissen.

We all know what Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart looked like. So above is a picture of them played by Stephen Haggard and Victoria Hopper in the 1935 movie "Whom the Gods Love." I read that book when I was a kid. It was in the library. I wish I had kept it. I do not think I will ever see it again.

Happy anniversary, Mozarts!