The Symphonies of Anton Bruckner are appropriate for today's political climate

The New York Times doesn’t like Hillary Clinton, nor Anton Bruckner. The Staatskapelle Berlin came to New York with conductor Daniel Baremboim to play the nine numbered Symphonies of the Austrian composer in eleven days, a major landmark in American musical life. The New York Times covered it.

Covered it, alright. With great condescension, apparent from the very first paragraph. Nine “sprawling” compositions, and the Times couldn’t be bothered to send one critic to all nine concerts, instead sending two different critics, each for a “healthy chunk” of the series (“healthy” as in broccoli).

John Berky, who runs the website ABruckner.com, wrote this about the Times article in a newsletter:

After the cycle was over, the New York Times published an inane interview by two music critics who never understood Bruckner and still don't. The article entitled, “When a Composer Just Doesn’t Do It for You (No Matter How Much You Listen)” could easily been replaced by an article written by me explaining why I don't understand Hip-Hop.

I’m going to go several steps further and assert that not only is the article asinine, it is morally wrong. So. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim and Zachary Woolfe, you don’t like Bruckner? That’s fine. But you’re actively trying to dissuade anyone else from checking out his music. That is wrong.

Maybe the two critics didn’t come up with that unfairly insulting headline (the headline for the print article was different but also insulting). But they are responsible for the rest of the content. Except of course the photo of the orchestra with Baremboim.

Hey, by the way, notice in the photo how the cellos seem to be almost in the middle of the orchestra? Looks like the first violins are to the conductor’s left, and the second violins to his right. That’s the sort of detail that a halfway impartial critic would have at least mentioned in passing.

Instead, the two very biased critics treat us to dismissive references to Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. But the worst part is how they try to link Bruckner to nationalism and racism.

So the Nazis wanted a great composer to hold up as an example of being Aryan. The choices were Paul Hindemith, who was alive, and Anton Bruckner, who was dead. It was an easy choice. Actually, there were a few more choices than that, but you get the point.

Da Fonseca-Wollheim writes that “Bruckner the star of [the Nazis’] weekly classical broadcasts in the latter years of World War II,” which sounds correct but is a bit misleading.

A Furtwängler recording of Bruckner was played for the announcement of Hitler’s death. But even in death, Bruckner resisted the Nazi appropriation. You can only suppress his church music so much, and the Nazis wanted Hitler seen as a deity.

Bruckner’s veneration of Jesus and the Virgin Mary did not fit the narrative the Nazis made up for him. As World War II went on, Bruckner did lose favor with the Nazis, and after the war, his music was not banned in Israel like Wagner’s was.

What I find the most offensive in the Times article, however, is Woolfe’s attempt to compare Bruckner to Donald Trump: “White, male, mocked by urban elites for his provincial manners and dress — sound familiar?”

Look, Bruckner dressed in a manner that was appropriate for his social standing in rural Austria. When he moved to Vienna, he was not able to afford the latest and greatest in fashion, at least not at first anyway (his fiscal prudence did eventually make him wealthier than he realized).

Trump is supposedly a billionaire. What is his excuse for his fake hair, ridiculous tan, and tying his tie so it hangs below his belt? Vanity and insecurity seem to be the only plausible explanations.

Or maybe Woolfe was trying to compare Bruckner to Hitler, but the basis there seems to be thin, perhaps limited to the Hitler mustache, which, in any case, I would prefer to think of as a Chaplin mustache. In any case, Bruckner seems to have not ever let it grow too much.

The Times critics do talk a little bit about the actual music itself, but then they get bogged down in a discussion of whether or not Bruckner is too personal or not personal enough. Da Fonseca-Wollheim writes:

My experience in the hall was inevitably colored by what has happened in the world, beginning with a presidential inauguration that was heavy on nationalist rhetoric. Perhaps my biggest gripe about Bruckner has been how perfectly suited his music is to communal veneration. A lot of people who love Mahler also love Bruckner, and there are similarities. But Mahler always puts the individual — the doubting, neurotic individual — at the center. In Bruckner, the triumphant hero of too many movements seems to be a “we.”

As in a mob “we,” not a Stronger Together “we” (not that the Times considers Clinton to be news anymore, after all they did trying to invent a Clinton Foundation scandal).

Da Fonseca-Wollheim goes on to write that Bruckner’s music is “not sufficiently embodied: a kind of sexless protagonist grappling with abstract demons.” I guess she would rather listen to porn scores by Walter Murphy or Ron Jones.

Did the critics have anything to say about how the Staatskapelle Berlin played? A little bit, just a little bit. Da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote that “the level of playing was uniformly impressive” and Woolfe wrote that “This orchestra made as good a case for the music as I’ve ever heard live. Mr. Barenboim kept it vital, flowing: He didn’t linger either on the bombast or the Adagio exhalations. The playing had power and transparency, a real sense of layers.”

Overall, it is a terrible article, and I will not dignify it with even a target=”_blank” link. I’d sooner link an Eduard Hanslick review. The article did not provide at least a fleeting overview of each of the Symphonies, which is what I will do now.

Overview of the Bruckner Symphonies

Fans of Robert Schumann would do well to check out Bruckner’s Study Symphony in F minor. Bruckner wrote it while he was studying orchestration with Otto Kitzler and considered it nothing more than a school exercise. For his part, Kitzler considered it competent but unoriginal. However, it has more than a few hints of Bruckner’s later greatness. (This Symphony was not included in the Staatskapelle Berlin cycle).

The first version of the Symphony No. 1 in C minor is not so much tragic, as the key of C minor would suggest, but more heroic, and with youthful vitality. This is also true of a version of just a few years after the original.

Near the end of his life, Bruckner revised it again, making it much more tragic and warlike. I’m not sure which version the Staatskapelle Berlin played in New York; it’s another one of those details the Times critics might have mentioned if they hadn’t spent so much ink berating Bruckner.

Music historians seem to agree that Symphony No. 0 in D minor was actually written after the First but before the Second. I won’t bore you with all the dates and such. I will just say that this is dramatic, exciting music, and an interesting precursor to the Third Symphony. And that it was not included in the Staatskapelle Berlin cycle either.

Even if Bruckner had written two C minor Symphonies in a row, Symphony No. 2 in C minor is vastly different, with more melancholy but also more sweetness. There’s something like four different versions to choose from with this one, but again, that’s a detail the Times critics failed to mention.

Maybe the best introduction to Bruckner is his Symphony No. 3 in D minor, the one with a trumpet theme that Wagner liked enough to accept the dedication. Spoiler alert: the trumpet theme comes back at the end in D major.

In whichever version you hear it, the Scherzo is music that would make for a good temp soundtrack in an aerial warfare scene of a war movie. But in what is sometimes called the 1877 version, the Scherzo has a special coda that ramps up the excitement even more, at the expense of making the finale a bit anti-climactic.

The most popular Bruckner Symphony is perhaps Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major, “Romantic.” Back in the 19th Century, some people considered it a requirement that music have a story in words to go along with it. Bruckner tried to oblige, writing about medieval castles, knights in the forest, hunts and such.

These days, it’s usually heard in the 1880 version, which includes the famous Hunting Scherzo.

By the way, in the 1870s, orchestras weren’t really interested in Bruckner’s music. His successes at the time came mostly from secular music for men’s chorus. A lesser man would have stopped writing those big Symphonies no one wants to hear, and see about monetizing his men’s chorus music.

Bruckner would have rated but a paragraph in Grove’s if he had done that. Still, when he started writing his monumental Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, he could not have known he would one day be regarded as one of the greatest symphonists of all time.

Almost a century before Vagn Holmboe, Bruckner was putting musical themes through metamorphosis. The Scherzo theme is masterfully derived with simplicity from the Adagio theme in a way that is far more apparent to the eye than the ear.

In the finale, Bruckner combines fugue and sonata form to make for exciting, powerful music. Cymbals, triangle, offstage band, included in an inauthentic version, are wholly unnecessary. Bruckner did not make any significant revisions to his Fifth, Sixth or Seventh Symphonies.

For a late work, Symphony No. 6 in A major is almost as obscure as the Study Symphony. And it is my favorite of Bruckner’s Symphonies. Concert idea: Bruckner's Sixth in the first half, excerpts from Superman by John Williams in the second half.

Has Bruckner’s Sixth ever been played in Detroit? Yes, it has, but I don’t think I’ve heard it live. I have this vague memory, but it could be a false memory. It has been definitely played in New York, and there is a memorable recording by Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic.

What’s more, it was played in New York last month not once but five times! Juanjo Mena conducted the New York Philharmonic in the Nowak edition of Bruckner’s Sixth in four concerts the last weekend of January. The program had Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major in the first half.

As he criticizes Mena's conducting, James R. Oestreich shows that he knows something about Bruckner in his New York Times review:

Mr. Mena, 50, and the chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic since 2011, is, in any case, no tyro, but he set himself a difficult assignment, taking on a Bruckner symphony — and a lesser-known one, the Sixth — as a guest. A lot of balancing is needed among Bruckner’s thickly layered textures to make everything speak: more than can comfortably be done in a couple of days of rehearsals, especially in acoustics as intransigent as those of David Geffen Hall.

And Mr. Mena did not entirely succeed by the time of the first performance, on Wednesday evening. The first movement was almost unrelentingly loud — assaultive, at times — and textures were muddy.

The other three movements offered relief, especially the second, where there were wonderfully lyrical moments and fine exchanges among solo woodwinds. (How often does applause break out after a slow movement, as it did here?)

Wait a minute! Why didn’t the New York Times assign the Staatskapelle Berlin concerts to Oestreich? That would have made a hell of a lot more sense.

Symphony No. 7 in E major brought Bruckner his first success in orchestral composition. It is luminous music throughout, even with the first appearance in Bruckner's music of the Wagner tubas, which really are horns with a darker, more trombone-like sound.

Musicologists and conductors continue to argue whether the cymbal clash in the Adagio was Bruckner’s idea or an inauthentic addition by someone else. Where does Baremboim stand on this issue? Corinne and Zach didn’t bother to take note.

With Symphony No. 8 in C minor we once again run into the issue of different versions. The 1887 version was good, despite an unconvincing first movement coda, a little too much repetition in the Scherzo, too many cymbal clashes in the Adagio and a somewhat plain finale coda.

But the narrative trajectory from darkness to light, more intense than Beethoven’s Fifth, it was already there in 1887. Hermann Levi, the first conductor to see the new score, didn’t get it. By 1890, Bruckner had produced a new version that was a vast improvement, but it wasn’t really tailored to be easier for Levi to understand.

However, some argue that if Bruckner hadn’t spent so much time revising the Eighth (and other works, too), he might have had time to finish the Symphony No. 9 in D minor. This music is almost apocalyptic, as in Book of Revelations apocalyptic. Da Fonseca-Wollheim writes:

And that unfinished Ninth finally produced the heart-in-your-throat emotional identification that I had been waiting for. The Adagio is built on a gesture of a minor ninth, a huge upward scooping interval that seems to express both hubris and hope.

Of course, this wasn’t supposed to be the last movement. But as it was, Barenboim’s epic Bruckner traversal ended with the horns holding a radiant but scarily fragile note for what seems like an eternity. For me, it was an appropriate question mark, left hanging over all the musical and political turbulence of the past two weeks.

Forgive her for not knowing about the participation of the Wagner tubas in those final measures of the Adagio.

Bruckner wanted to write an actual finale, and he did get very far. He might have even written down a bare bones sketch for the coda. Trouble was that the executor of his will failed to properly secure the estate. Souvenir hunters helped themselves to pages of the emerging score.

Some of the pages have been recovered, and musicologists have, despite the gaps, been able to put together a pretty good realization of what Bruckner had at the time he died.

It’s not the finale that he would have written if he had had more time and health, but it is much closer to Bruckner's intention than ending with the Adagio, or even continuing with the Te Deum, a makeshift solution Bruckner himself suggested.

By the way, this is a time as good as any to call out conductor Kent Nagano for his hypocrisy (it’s not just Republicans who can be hypocrites). A couple of years ago, Nagano recorded a video message in which he said that it’s not right to perform any musicologist’s completion of the Bruckner Ninth and that it is fine as it is in three movements, because it’s not pure Bruckner.

But in that same video, Nagano admitted he once stuck Schoenberg’s Erwartung into Bruckner’s Ninth. So it’s wrong to play what musicologists have painstakingly put together from Bruckner’s own sketches and score, but it’s okay to insert a completely different composition by someone else into the Ninth? Absurd! Ridiculous!

Though not as absurd and ridiculous as the Fonseca-Wollheim and Woolfe tirade against Bruckner in the Times. Yesterday I wrote about how the music of Vagn Holmboe is not quite appropriate for the political climate today (that was originally posted on Daily Kos, and this post was also originally posted on Daily Kos).

I think that the music of Anton Bruckner, on the other hand, is appropriate for the political climate today. Not because of a “question mark” produced by a performance tradition that has mostly ignored the finale of Bruckner’s Ninth due to an accident of circumstance, but because Bruckner’s music, even in the most desperate or harrowing moments of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, always has the hope of a triumph in a major key at the end.

And we need that hope, as we face the possible destruction of this great nation at the hands of people who don’t care about the principles and ideals it was founded on.

The Symphonies of Vagn Holmboe, not quite for our time

According to the New York Times music critics, some music is not always appropriate for the current political climate. Presumably, the overplayed compositions of the core repertoire are always appropriate.

Maybe Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture would be ironically appropriate for this year’s Independence Day festivities. After all, the Russians triumphed over the French in 1812 and over the Americans in 2016.

Here is an idea for American orchestras’ Fourth of July concerts: an all-Russian program. Start with Balakirev’s Overture on Three Russian Songs, then Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, intermission, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

And the orchestral version of Balakirev’s Islamey… oops, no, scratch that one. Pad out the time to the fireworks and the 1812 Overture with assorted Russian marches. But I digress.

Too many music critics fall for the notion that the best music just naturally rises to the top, but the truth is that luck has a lot to do with it. How else can you explain that Johann Sebastian Bach was essentially forgotten for a century and a half, and that Michael Haydn is only now being brought out of obscurity?

Nor do I have any faith in composition contests to name worthy winners, even though there is in the history books one example of just such a thing happening: in Denmark, almost a century ago.

As so often happens, the contest committee had advanced a lot of bland, boring choices to the second round. Fortunately for Vagn Holmboe, and for us, the conductor Egisto Tango, chairman of the committee, had been absent for the first round.

When Tango returned, he rescued the committee from their shortsightedness and stupidity. Unsatisfied by the second round picks, he asked to see the scores eliminated in the first round. When he came upon the score of Holmboe’s Second Symphony, he knew he had a winner.

Maybe it was just an accident of timing that I really started to get to know the Symphonies of Vagn Holmboe during President Obama’s two terms. I had been aware of Holmboe, world famous in Denmark like Nielsen, since President Bill Clinton’s first term.

I had a subscription to CD Review, a magazine that went out of print at some point prior to 1996. I don’t remember where I left those magazines, nor do I remember which Holmboe recordings they reviewed, but I do remember getting the impression that Holmboe's music is consistently grim, fierce and bleak. Which is a lot better than many 20th Century composers, whose music is bleak and dull.

It wasn’t until some time after 2006 that I realized I had access to the Naxos Music Library, and not until 2009 that it occurred to me to look Holmboe up in there. I think it was the Eighth Symphony that I heard first. The ferocious intensity of the first movement had me hooked, even though the rest of the Symphony did not make much of an impression on me at the time.

Overview of the Holmboe Symphonies

Symphony No. 1, Opus 4. Holmboe's shortest Symphony, and it is such a delight that it feels like it's way too short. If there is any hesitation to try it out, one criticism of it, "sounds more like a dance suite," should overcome that hesitance.  

Symphony No. 2, Opus 15. An important step on Holmboe's way to his mature style and his concept of "metamorphosis." Much more serious than the First, longer, not as tuneful, the Second is an absorbing narrative from start to finish.

Symphony No. 3, Opus 25, "Sinfonia Rustica." Here we hear the more cheerful side of Holmboe. Would you have guessed that it was written during the Nazi occupation of Denmark?

The cheerful opening Allegro non troppo could be seen as a gesture of defiance towards the Nazi occupiers. The lengthy, slow middle movement recalls Nielsen's take on the melancholy temperament, but without that same sense of resigned passiveness, and there is central episode with an almost combative mood that is more what is expected from Holmboe. The closing Vivace gradually builds back up to the exultation that began the Symphony.

Symphony No. 4, Opus 29, "Sinfonia Sacra." God exists but He doesn't care about people. This is a good explanation not only for the suffering of so many innocent people but also the comfortable lives of evil, wealthy people. Holmboe believed in God, but not a God who cares all that much about us.

Vagn Holmboe's brother died in a concentration camp, and he wrote this Symphony to his memory, his only choral Symphony. The Gloria (fifth of six movements) seems to me to have no trace of irony, though it does remind me of the Rustic Symphony which Holmboe wrote during the war.

Idea for a concert: video game composer Nobuo Uematsu in the first half, making sure to include “One-Winged Angel” from one of the Final Fantasy games.

Symphony No. 5, Opus 35. Aside from its col legno beginning, the first movement might on first hearing seem like more of the same old Holmboe: gritty, serious, driven. But this is music that repays repeated hearings; the pentatonic leanings of the first movement are likely to be more apparent the second or third time one listens.

The Andante affetuoso shows Holmboe's typical objective lyricism, here more or less dominated by the oboes. It is the concluding Vivace that really sets this Symphony apart from Holmboe's later works, with an upbeat mood that is almost as cheerful as in the Third Symphony.

I recommend starting a concert with John Williams’s Cowboys Overture (I have musical reasons for this suggestion), then Mozart’s Piano Concerto in B-flat major, K. 595 (more for historical than musical reasons), intermission, then this Holmboe Symphony.

However, if you’re afraid of people leaving at intermission, put Holmboe in the first half, and then Williams and Mozart in the second half. Though maybe Mozart might come across kind of boring and anti-climactic after Williams and Holmboe.

Symphony No. 6, Opus 43. This one is just in two movements. Not much seems to happen in the first movement, but it really held my interest throughout. In the second movement, Holmboe uses what he could not have known would become a stereotypical rap rhythm (as in rap prior to hip-hop).

Symphony No. 7, Opus 50. Not as combative as the Eighth, but very intense. The structure is significantly less traditional than that of the Eighth: we could say that the Seventh consists of the traditional four movements but with three interludes inserted between them, each called "Intermedio" and marked Andantino, each lasting a tiny bit more than a minute.

Perhaps Holmboe felt the unusual structure was necessary to highlight his now overt aesthetic principle of continuous thematic metamorphosis (a principle wholly compatible with a more traditional structure, as the Eighth shows us).

Chamber Symphony No. 1, Opus 53. There are timpani right off the bat. I guess “chamber” means no unpitched percussion, and probably no trombones or tuba either. Though about the same length as the “full orchestra” First Symphony, the First Chamber Symphony is definitely middle period Holmboe, driven and serious.

The idea of Holmboe writing a Sinfonietta seems ludicrous. If you shop online, be sure to hear a 30-second sample from the energetic finale.

Symphony No. 8, Opus 56. This Symphony is the perfect expression of our modern lives: constant struggle, with the relaxing moments being only brief respites before the next crisis. There is practically no lyricism, but the intense narrative is so well crafted that the attention doesn't wander even in the quieter moments.

The "molto intensivo" marking for the opening Allegro is more for the benefit of the performers than the listeners. Although the rest of the Symphony doesn't exhibit quite the same level of intensity, the unflinching quality persists to the bitter end. This is one of the top ten Symphonies of the 20th Century.

Consciously or subconsciously, John Williams continued the thematic metamorphosis of Holmboe’s Eighth Symphony in his Catch Me If You Can soundtrack.

Sinfonia in Memoriam, Opus 65. Originally billed as the Ninth Symphony despite the composer’s objection, the Sinfonia in Memoriam should technically not be included in this list. However, it is included in the boxed set of Holmboe’s Symphonies on the Bis label.

The middle Allegro vivace shows Holmboe really knew how to write for the strings col legno. It is music that crackles with great energy. The rest of it has not yet made much of an impression on me, but eventually will.

Symphony No. 9, Opus 95. Many years passed with Danes waiting for their greatest living composer to write his Ninth Symphony. Seems neither they nor he believed in the curse of the Ninth, it’s just that he had inspiration for other things.

I still think Holmboe’s Ninth is just plain weird. Very interesting, but weird, and somehow much less accessible than either the earlier or later Symphonies.

Superficially, it’s like the Seventh, but there’s just three “full” movements, though the two Intermezzos are longer than the Intermedios of the Seventh, and you have to turn up the volume much higher to be able to hear them. But the content of the Ninth is full of specters and shadows.

Chamber Symphony No. 2, Opus 100, “Elegy.” I’m not quite sure what to make of that “Elegy” subtitle. My first impression is that it is a weightier follow-up to the First Chamber Symphony.

Chamber Symphony No. 3, Opus 103a, “Frise.” Though in six movements rather than four, the Third Chamber Symphony seems to be much in the same spirit of the first two. It hasn’t yet grown on me like the other two.

A discographical note: as far as I’m aware, the only available recording of the Chamber Symphonies is by the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds.

Symphony No. 10, Opus 105. Would you believe that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra premiered something by Vagn Holmboe? That was back in 1972 when the Detroit Symphony was a world-class orchestra, not a “community-supported orchestra” in which the musicians make a sacrifice in their paycheck but management doesn’t.

The Detroit Symphony will continue to perform world premieres, but revisit past premieres like Holmboe’s Tenth? No way. This coming season, they’re playing Beethoven’s Ninth, Rachmaninoff’s Second and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth all over again, three works that they have probably played in several consecutive seasons.

Though maybe Holmboe’s Tenth might not be the best choice for the orchestra to play Holmboe again. It’s music that holds the interest, it has something to do with Walt Whitman’s eidolons, and it is cited in Robert Layton’s A Guide to the Symphony.

For now, none of it really stands out, but I’m sure that with repeated listenings that will change. After all, it took a while for Martinů’s Third Symphony to stand out in my mind from his first two.

Symphony No. 11, Opus 144. There is something Olympic, as in competitive, about the first movement, that suggests to me athletic striving. But there is also this specific percussion sound (at 3:59 in the Aarhus recording) that suggests the sea to me for some reason.

Symphony No. 12, Opus 175. How to connect movements of a Symphony so that each seems to start from where the previous one ended? The Twelfth has one answer: notice how the middle Andante sereno echoes the end of the preceding Allegro con forza; you might need headphones to notice this, though.

Not that I have much of a basis for this, but if I had to give a nickname to this Symphony, it would be “Prospero’s Island.” Antony Hodgson did once say that Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 81 in G major could benefit from a colorful if irrelevant nickname.

Symphony No. 13, Opus 192. When Owain Arwel Hughes was planning a complete set of Holmboe’s Symphonies (excluding the Chamber Symphonies), he noticed the last CD of the set would be barely a little more than 40 minutes with just the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies. So Holmboe wrote one more, a 20-minute work that brings the CD up to the more satisfying duration of 63:31.

Don’t think of it being in any way valedictory, despite it being his last, and certainly don’t expect a triumphant peroration at the end. Had Holmboe lived longer, he might have written a Fourteenth Symphony along similar lines.

Conclusion, for now

It takes time to really get to know a composer, and Holmboe is certainly worth knowing. Some of what I’ve written above comes from my eBook 104 Great Symphonies You Haven’t Heard Yet (Daily Kos readers get it for 75% off with coupon code QV73B, valid only on Smashwords until March 23). And some of what I’ve written above will find its way into a later version of that book.

Although I strongly recommend Holmboe’s music, his objectivity does not quite seem the ticket in these troubled times in which the world might fall apart completely, in my opinion.

With President Obama and the possibility that we were on our way to a fairer society in which the economy benefits everyone, not just the top tenth of one percent, a healthy dose of realism was appropriate.

But now, I find myself wanting music of great optimism, and perhaps reassurance. Rued Langgaard, that other composer world-famous in Denmark, is just too syrupy, however. Anton Rubinstein maybe? Or another Anton…

Consider this post ended not with a I chord, but a V7 chord, with the seventh of the chord trilled.

This was originally posted on Daily Kos yesterday.

Remembering Paul Hindemith

Years ago, when I was just starting to show my musical compositions to other people, two or three of them remarked that I must have been influenced by Paul Hindemith.

I had heard the name, but I was actually not really familiar with his music. And I must admit, that after all these years, my appreciation of his music has not really progressed beyond his greatest hits, like the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber.

If someone noticed the influence of Carl Nielsen or Vagn Holmboe in my music, I would be very impressed; I am more familiar with those Danes, “world famous in Denmark” both of them, than I am with Hindemith.

But I’ve been thinking about Hindemith a lot lately, mostly because of the dreaded upcoming presidential inauguration of popular vote loser and Putin puppet Donald Trump.

You see, Hindemith, born in 1895, was already a renowned composer when Hitler came to power. Although he was not Jewish, Hindemith had cause for concern, and eventually he would find himself exiled like many Jewish musicians.

In the 1920s, Hindemith had been criticized for not being German enough in his music, and he self-consciously began to emphasize his existing interest in German folk music.

It was not enough. His opera Mathis der Maler was banned by the Nazis, and it took intense lobbying from conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler to get the ban overturned.

Despite signing an oath to loyalty to Hitler in 1936, life for Hindemith in Nazi Germany was not easy. But on the plus side, he had a much easier time than Furtwängler repairing his reputation after the war.

Hindemith tried to live with the Nazis for the rest of the decade, but by 1940 he had had enough, and they had had enough of him. First he went to Switzerland and then to America.

It was very soon after arriving in America that Hindemith started working on the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, though at first it was going to be ballet music.

Howard Posner wrote for the Los Angeles Philharmonic the most informative programme notes I’ve ever read for this composition:

The surprising thing is that Hindemith’s end product, while staying so close to Weber, sounds so little like the original. For example, in the first movement, based on the fourth of eight piano duets, Op. 60, there are few hints of the 19th century aside from the middle-section theme given to the oboe. ...

The second movement is based on Weber’s incidental music to Schiller’s adaptation of Turandot, the same Carlo Gozzi fantasy about China that Puccini used for his 1926 opera. Weber took his melody from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1767 Dictionaire de Musique. ... It was ... as close as Weber was going to get to a real Chinese melody, and he used it almost exclusively in five of the six numbers he wrote for the play. It is the only tune that Hindemith alters significantly, but his insistent repetition of the tune is modeled on Weber’s Turandot overture. ...

The third movement retains most of the substance, and the ABA structure, of Weber’s Andantino con moto from Six Pièces for two pianos, Op. 10, No. 2. The dancing flute solo in the last third of the piece is solely Hindemith’s. The march finale is again from the Op. 60 duets, much expanded. The horn calls implicit in Weber’s trio section are made explicit in Hindemith’s version, and become the basis of the requisite big finish.

I would add that the Metamorphosis is perhaps Hindemith’s most ebullient, effervescent and varied composition. And his take on Turandot is more convincingly Oriental than Weber’s. Perhaps Hindemith could have done something very interesting with Michael Haydn’s Turkish March...

I find some of HIndemith's other music much too uniform throughout. And I’m not alone: his depiction of the Four Temperaments, for example, was once panned as “the One Temperament.”

But this is most certainly a function of my still limited familiarity. After all, there was a time when I thought all Martinů’s Symphonies were scarcely different from one another, but I’m starting to know better than that.

And I was kind of surprised when iTunes pulled up the Pittsburgh Symphony as one of Hindemith’s compositions. It comes from a Rozhdestvensky album that I bought for the “Vienna” version of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor.

Now that I listen more to music from MP3s through iTunes rather than from the CDs, which I now very rarely take out of their cases, it becomes easier for me to forget details such as these.

As you might have guessed or already know, Hindemith wrote the PIttsburgh Symphony at the request of the Pittsurgh Symphony Orchestra's director William Steinberg, a Jewish exile from Germany.

The Pittsburgh Symphony seems a little closer in spirit to the Metamorphosis than most of the other music by Hindemith that I have listened to, and it is short enough that you can put it on one CD with an entire Bruckner Symphony.

Another important American commission was Benny Goodman’s for the Clarinet Concerto. The most recent recording is perhaps Eddy Vanoosthuyse’s with the Central Aichi Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergio Rosales, on the Naxos label.

Hindemith was a prolific composer, and even limiting myself to his orchestral music I still have a lot of great music of his to get to know.

Granted that orchestral music is not as important here in America today as it was in Germany in the 1930s. Trump probably doesn’t care what composer John Adams thinks of him, but it’s still possible Adams might find himself exiled to Canada.

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A major omission on my part: my eBook Repertoire Tips for Classical Music Radio Stations mentions Hindemith, but only in connection to Sir William Walton and Carl Maria von Weber; the former wrote some variations on a theme of Hindemith's, and the latter, well, you already know.

I will be adding a few paragraphs specifically on Hindemith’s music to that book very soon. If you get it now it’s free, and if you get it again after I’ve added more information on Hindemith, it will still be free.

This was originally posted on Daily Kos yesterday.

What to do about the scarcity of women conductors?

Last week, The Guardian published an editorial complaining that very few of the conductors at the BBC Proms so far this season are women.

Nor is it just the Proms. London has five permanent symphony orchestras, all full of female players. Yet of the 20 conducting posts at these orchestras, just one is held by a woman – and the temporary post held by the London Symphony’s assistant conductor Elim Chan ends this season. It wouldn’t be acceptable in other professions. It isn’t acceptable here either.

One of the very first commenters complained that the editorial presents no solutions. If we agree that this is a problem in England, then it’s also a problem in America. Can a solution for British orchestras also work for American orchestras? Maybe.

There is some similarity to the problem of too few women judges. Before you can have women judges, you need women lawyers. Of course that’s simplistic, since with judges you also have to deal with the problem of politics.

Petula Dvorak writing for the Washington Post gives the example of Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-Virginia), who chose Justice Jane Marum Roush to temporarily fill a vacancy on the state’s Supreme Court last year.

The Republicans in the House of Delegates refused to make Roush’s appointment permanent, without even feeling the need to give a half-baked excuse, like the Republicans at the federal level with President Obama’s nominee.

After considering two other judges, both men, both declining (one tacitly, the other explicitly), they settled earlier this year on Stephen R. McCullough after a 20-minute interview (the columnist makes sure to emphasize the duration).

Dvorak gets an explanation from former Tennessee State Supreme Court Justice Penny J. White, who now teaches law: it’s because judges are chosen in backroom deals, and it’s mostly men there.

If it’s also backroom deals deciding conductors of orchestras, then it’s also simplistic to say that it’s a simple matter of getting more women to play in orchestras and more women to write music for orchestra. There already are lots of women in American orchestras, and lots of women composers.

As a matter of fact, a lot of women composers seem to be married to conductors, e.g., Cindy McTee and Detroit Symphony conductor Leonard Slatkin, Elisabetta Brusa and Gilberto Serembe in Italy. I can’t picture Igor Stravinsky telling a young woman composer to go into conducting, like he advised Harold Shapero.

Well, I guess that like The Guardian, I don’t have the answer either. I do have one suggestion: vote with your wallets. Simone Young is working on an excellent cycle of Bruckner Symphonies with the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg. See for example Blair Sanderson’s 5-star review of her recording of Bruckner’s Sixth:

Simone Young's recordings of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner on Oehms Classics are valued for her use of original versions, as well as for their exceptional super audio sound, so they have attracted considerable attention from collectors. ... The Sixth is one of his most enigmatic and challenging symphonies, paving the way for the late masterpieces. Young and the Hamburg Philharmonic deliver an impassioned and visionary performance that compels the listener to explore the piece in one sitting, and the experience is highly rewarding.

By the way, yesterday would have been Anton Bruckner’s 192nd birthday. This was originally posted on Daily Kos yesterday.

6 of 9 out of 104: Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 6 in A major

To celebrate my new Smashwords book 104 Great Symphonies You Haven't Heard Yet, in which I list 104 great Symphonies outside the core repertoire of overplayed works and describe them in 104 words or less, I will be presenting in this blog a write-up on each of the first 9 Symphonies listed in the book with far more detail, and oriented more for musicologists and performers than for listeners. Today's installment is #6 in the list of 104, but it also gives me an opportunity to plug another book of mine, The 20 Crucial Compositions of Anton Bruckner, and in fact, the following write-up is taken almost verbatim from that book.

Symphony No. 6 in A major, WAB 106

Repertoire formation is a funny business. Musical merit is one factor, certainly, but often not the only factor or even the most important one. With any composer, there are pieces which are rarely heard, yet when they are heard, people wonder why they have never heard it before, since they are such good pieces of music. And so, with Bruckner, it is somewhat of a puzzlement that the Sixth Symphony is so rarely heard despite being so well-done and so fascinating, whereas the Fourth Symphony, with its various flaws and problems, is one of Bruckner's most popular.

Various reasons are given for this, such as that Bruckner was trying too hard to pare down his conception to a smaller scale, or the predominance of the Bruckner rhythm (2 + 3 or 3 + 2 in the time-space of 2 + 2) in the first movement in overlapping triplets of different note values. The violins use this rhythm for the accompaniment figure high up in their range, while the cellos intone their foreboding theme. The presence (and at other times, absence) of the Bruckner rhythm accompaniment figure helps to create both unity and variety quite seamlessly, almost unnoticed. The overall atmosphere of the work is heroic, and with quite a bit of optimism in the first movement. In fact, the coda of this first movement is the most optimistic music Bruckner ever wrote.

The Adagio, representing the only time Bruckner ever used sonata form for a slow middle movement, feels like a much warmer version of the melancholic Adagio of the Fifth Symphony. Just a few bars in, there is a melancholy oboe theme of profound sadness (a theme that will recur in the finale in a different guise), followed later by some more consoling music for strings. The third subject group feels quite like a funeral march, and in it some commentators, like Erwin Doernberg, hear an anticipation of Mahler.

The Scherzo is somewhat Mendelssohnian in its more fleet-footed moments, but wholly Brucknerian overall, especially in the louder outbursts. (At least to Hans Ferdinand Redlich's ears, this music references the Rhine maidens from Wagner's Götterdämmerung, an assertion Doernberg dismisses as "absurd"). The Trio has some unexpected references to the Fifth Symphony, which quite a few different people do hear.

The finale is broadly heroic with warmly memorable lyric moments, but there is something tentative to the provisional feel of the triumphant coda—perhaps this is another mysterious element that has made Audiences slow to appreciate this particular Symphony. Or perhaps listeners feel that the finale does not deliver on the promise of the first movement.

It seems that the Upper Austrian Jazz Orchestra had similar thoughts about the Sixth Symphony. The sixth track in their Deference to Anton Bruckner album, Der Anton aus Triol, begins with themes from the Adagio, moves on to the finale but concludes with a rendering of the first movement coda.

Given how popular the Fourth Symphony is, with its tragic conclusion coming out of the blue, the "tentative Finale" explanation for the neglect of the Sixth Symphony is quite unsatisfactory. Despite these facts of its reception, with the consequence that the Sixth would probably never be included in a collection of Bruckner's greatest hits, it must nevertheless count as one of his crucial works for its significance in Bruckner's development and for the fact that he remained fond of this piece to his dying day. And also for the fact that it contains one of the best examples of Bruckner's harmonic puns, in the first movement, as the timpanist singlehandedly occasions the return of the tonic (though this last item will be more appreciated by those with perfect pitch and those looking at the score, as they will notice the repeating A-flats suddenly become G-sharp with the timpani's entry—this was mentioned in the Introduction as an example of the smooth, seamless transitions Bruckner hardly ever gets credit for).

There was a wider gap between work on the Fifth and work on the Sixth, but this is because Bruckner also worked on his only significant chamber composition, the String Quintet in F major, after finishing the Fifth. Work on the Sixth was delayed by a revision of the Fourth Symphony (the version more usually heard today of that work), and when he was almost done with the Sixth, he started working on the Te Deum, and soon after the Seventh Symphony.

Whereas Bruckner's Fifth is usually thought of as being too long and complex for those new to Bruckner, maybe the Sixth might serve as a better introduction to this composer. Not quite as long and austere as the Fifth Symphony, the Sixth is a wonderful precursor to the serene luminance of the Seventh, though perhaps without requiring quite the same level of concentration. And given the Sixth's more assured mastery of form, it should be considered a preferable introduction to Bruckner over the Third and Fourth Symphonies.

I have never heard the Sixth Symphony live in concert. Indeed it should come as no surprise that anyone who has heard the last three in concert has not heard the Sixth, but I have even managed to hear the First in concert. Bruckner himself at least got to hear Wilhelm Jahn conduct the middle movements. While a paucity of complete early performances can certainly hinder a work's acceptance into the core repertoire, the (relative) facility earlier Symphonies have enjoyed discredits that theory for the Sixth's rarity in concert.

You would be justified in assuming that in recordings, the Sixth is generally tackled by conductors who do complete cycles (notwithstanding whether the Zeroeth is included or not). Leonard Bernstein's recording with the New York Philharmonic is a surprising contradiction to that pattern, given that the only other Bruckner Symphony he's recorded is the Ninth (though not surprisingly, the Sixth just once but the Ninth four times).

Nevertheless, once again I am recommending Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic as the definitive recording. Sir Colin Davis with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Roger Norrington with the SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra are also worthwhile recordings, though with the latter beware that although it is on modern instruments, Norrington has the strings withhold their now expected vibrato, something that is not to everyone's taste. The New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer is another nice recording.

I am not bothering to distinguish between those conductors who choose the Nowak or Haas edition. Since Bruckner did not revise this Symphony (except possibly for some rather minor details), only performers who have used both editions and the most devoted Bruckner fans are really aware of the differences between the two editions. Karajan and Furtwängler both predictably use Haas, while younger conductors like Baremboim and Pletnev opt for Nowak, though there are a few older conductors who choose Nowak, such as Rafael Kubelik.

There is one potentially significant difference among editions: the musicians might see a repeat for the second part of the Trio, Jose Marques points out. Whether or not they take that repeat is another matter. If the repeat is ignored, listeners might not notice the changes in dynamics nor the slight re-orchestrations.
Most of these recordings, clocking in at about 60 minutes, though some as little as 50 minutes, leave enough room for filler, though it is generally for remastered recordings that this option is taken. For example, Horst Stein's recording with the Vienna Philharmonic also includes Weber's Overtures to Der Beherrscher der Geister and Abu Hassan. Depending on which remastering of Klemperer's recording you get, you might also get Gluck's Overture to Iphigénie en Aulide as arranged by Wagner, and Humperdinck's Overture to Hansel und Gretel.

The 1899 edition by Cyrill Hynais was recorded once in 1952 by Charles Adler and only once after, more recently, by Ira Levin in 2008. I have not heard either of these recordings so I will not comment any further on them. It is also worth mentioning that Erwin Horn recorded a transcription of the Adagio for organ in Nuremberg.

As with the Fourth, I will also be recommending film music to start off the concert. Specifically, the Superman March by John Williams. Then can follow some pieces from Schindler's List as a kind of violin concerto. And, with permission from John Williams, after the Bruckner Sixth,  the Superman March should be repeated with some of the rhythmic patterns changed to the Bruckner rhythm.

2 of 9 out of 104: Michael Haydn's Symphony No. 2 in C major

To celebrate my new Smashwords book 104 Great Symphonies You Haven't Heard Yet, in which I list 104 great Symphonies outside the core repertoire of overplayed works and describe them in 104 words or less, I will be presenting in this blog a write-up on each of the first 9 Symphonies listed in the book with far more detail, and oriented more for musicologists and performers than for listeners. Today's installment is #2 in the list of 104.

Symphony No. 2 in C major, “The Baroque,” MH 37, Perger 2, Sherman 2

Scored for 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, strings. Written in Großwardein in 1761.

This is the very first Symphony of Michael Haydn’s that I studied. In some ways it’s more Baroque than Classical. The score puts the bassoons, cellos, basses and continuo (left hand) all on the same bass clef staff. I made my own figured bass realization of it, though I wouldn’t call it original composition by any stretch. For the unison passages that occur in the first and last movements, I simply have the right hand play those passages in octaves.

The way this Symphony starts it could very well be a Concerto Grosso: all at once all the instruments start off with a bang, with the brass presenting a dotted rhythm, the violins with their emphatic triple stops and the bass instruments engaged in a motor rhythm in eighth notes. This headlong rush, without any loss of momentum is an introduction to the first real melody, at measure 8. After scale passages for the violins and high soloistic passages for the brass, at measure 15 we get what will be a characteristic feature in most of Haydn’s later Symphonies: a unison passage for all or most of the orchestra. Here the unison passage arpeggiates the tonic chord for two measures before settling on the note G, at which point the oboes by themselves (assuming no figured bass) harmonize the dominant triad and the orchestra comes to rest on the first significant cadence and pause, giving the music more of a Classical (rather than Baroque) flavor. Continuing in the Classical vein, a graceful arpeggiation of the dominant triad  soon leads to trouble with the suggestion of G minor. The augmented sixth chords at measures 25 – 26 (these should be realized by the harpsichordist as German sixth chords at each occurrence) leads to a hollow cadence on D (which the harpsichordist could realize as a V of G major chord) and so the transition from C major to G major has been executed. The second subject group begins with a mostly stepwise theme. Things gets excited with the violins playing patterns of sixteenths derived from measure 3. This has the character of a codetta, and at measures 45 and 47 the brass section gets another group solo, these times answered by a unison melody in the next measure for the rest of the orchestra. The exposition is then concluded and marked for repeat.

In those days, before the codification of sonata form, there was no prescription for the proportion of the development. Here in this first movement the development is just ten measures, scored for the violins alone, a bareness of texture unthinkable in a Baroque Concerto Grosso. The material those violins develop comes from the end of the exposition’s transition from the first subject group to the second subject group.  It makes for a strong contrast to mark the beginning of the recapitulation, when the rest of the orchestra suddenly comes back in all at once.

The odd thing about this recapitulation is how quickly it veers off to F major. This makes sense, however, given how short the development was and how little time has been allotted to keys besides C major and G major. C major is reasserted for the beginning of the transition, but even now the recapitulation is not going to be a verbatim transposition: measures 27 – 35 in the exposition are collapsed to just measure 106 in the recapitulation. But after recapitulating in modified form the last few measures of the exposition, the second subject group makes an unexpected appearance prior to the lively coda.

For the slow movement, the winds are dismissed entirely, but continuo is presumably still expected. Interestingly, the violas double the first violins at the octave, while the second violins are the ones to whom the running semiquaver figuration is given.

The Minuet starts on a downbeat and is full of regal pomp, and in the Trio the trumpets get a real chance to shine.

For the concluding Presto I recommend a somewhat faster tempo than you’ll hear in the Warchal recording. Other than this one particular case, I tend to choose slower tempos for Haydn’s music.
This one and nineteen other Symphonies are available on a boxed set of the Slovak Philharmonic conducted by Bodhan Warchal on the CPO label. Warchal observes the development-recap repeat and has a harpsichordist realize the figured bass. Pál Németh conducting the Savaria Baroque Orchestra also has a figured bass realization but he dispenses with the development-recap repeat. Németh, however, takes the slow movement slower than Warchal so their recordings clock in at about the same time.

1 of 9 out of 104: Salmanov's Symphony No. 1 in D minor

To celebrate my new Smashwords book 104 Great Symphonies You Haven't Heard Yet, in which I list 104 great Symphonies outside the core repertoire of overplayed works and describe them in 104 words or less, I will be presenting in this blog a write-up on each of the first 9 Symphonies listed in the book with far more detail, and oriented more for musicologists and performers than for listeners. Today's installment is #1 in the list of 104.

Vadim Salmanov, Symphony No. 1 in D minor

Salmanov wrote three more Symphonies after his first, of which the Second seems to have achieved at least a small degree of popularity at one point.
In the Soviet Union, there was an expectation on symphonists to deliver "social realism," though graduation pieces (such as First Symphonies), were exempt. It may not be too difficult to nevertheless read social realism into Salmanov's First Symphony.
To my mind, the beginning is a cold winter day in Russia. The mood is not so much tragedy nor Sturm und Drang as it is an almost elemental determination to survive. The slow movement is a kind of slow march. The finale arrives at a well done, triumphant but not over the top conclusion. Note the motivic integration throughout.
A concert ending with this Symphony would do well to start out with Antonio Salieri's Les Danaïdes Overture and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto in D minor, K. 466, in the first half. Or maybe Salmanov in the first half, Salieri and Mozart in the second half.