I am starting out of order. The above video from YouTube is from a guitarist named Estas Tonne. I discovered his music in 2016, by chance...it popped up on my suggestion list on YouTube. It has a transcendental quality to it. At the time, I was going through some physical challenges with my back that made my other passion, running, very difficult. This music became part of my therapy...everyday I would listen to it while I did my physical therapy. It was holistic.
I don't know where I would be...what I would do...who I would be...if I didn't have music in my life. I feel it, use it, breathe it. There is music for every occasion. It comes from everywhere.
I may take it to extremes. But one person who knows how I feel is the great Yo-Yo Ma. My friend Webb Chiles, the greatest sailor on the planet, shared this article with me...I thank him. Webb knows what I mean about music...it means as much to him too. For Ma, when asked "What is music for" he has the perfect answer; "It is to help me through life." Ditto.
I was reading some letters by Hector Berlioz. He was good friends with the great violinist-guitarist Nicolo Paganini. Turns out that Paganini loaned Berlioz a lot of money in 1838.
December 18, 1838
"My dear friend, Beethoven dead, none but Berlioz could restore him to life; and I, who have tasted your divine compositions, worthy of a genius such as yours, consider it my duty to beg you to accept, in token of my homage, 20,000 francs which will be paid to you by Baron de Rothschild on presentation of the enclosed. Believe me always, your affectionate Nicolo Paganini."
Berlioz wrote back: "Noble and great artist. How can I express my gratitude to you? I am not rich, but, believe me, the good opinion of a man of genius, such as you are, touches me a thousand times more nearly than the regal generosity of your gift. Words fail me, but I shall hasten to embrace you as soon as I can leave my bed, to which I am still confined." -H. Berlioz.
I will share another piece of music that is deeply ingrained in me....this is from the 1972 film The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Quincy Jones wrote the score for the film. This tune is called Free. The great Toots Thielemans plays the harmonica. I lived in Austin, TX when this film was released. This scene was filmed on the San Marcos river not far from Austin, and I spent some fun times there floating on tubes in the hot Texas sun. This music, for reasons I can't explain, means a lot to me. I come back to it often.
Cheryl and I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody last night. It's the story of Freddie Mercury and the band Queen. Overall, I thought it was a great movie. Rami Malek gives an wonderful performance as Freddie Mercury. So what's the point? Several.
I was alive and well aware of Queen at their peak in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I watched their performance at Live Aid on TV in 1985 as it happened. This Live Aid performance is the peak moment of the movie....the band giving a performance for the ages. And as presented in the movie, it is breathtaking. But in 1985....meh......
I was not a fan. I was like the critics who excoriated Queen albums for being pompous...overbearing...pretentious. To me, Freddie Mercury seemed more like a Liberace-type front man than other great front men like Robert Plant or Mick Jagger. I just didn't get it.
Man, was I wrong..
Freddie Mercury was a truly awesome performer. And so were the rest of the musicians in the band (Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Brian May). This movie touched me a great deal. My relationship to the music and story of Freddie Mercury and Queen is not unlike so many other stories of creative people whose work is not appreciated when it is first presented, at least critically. But after the passage of time, the true genius emerges.
More than any other aspect of their career and this movie, I was touched most by Freddie Mercury's ability to connect with a stadium of 100,000 people. He had a gift for making every individual feel like they were important...part of the show. That is a very special gift. You can see it here in the Live Aid performance from 1985:
There are a number of creative liberties the filmmakers took with the true history of the band. One big one for me was the idea that Queen had been idle for several years prior to Live Aid, and they were terrified of facing such a huge audience not having played together for years. This was not actually the case. Queen released an album in 1984 called The Works, which features the songs Radio Ga Ga and Hammer to Fall, both of which they performed at Live Aid. The band had been on tour throughout 1984 and 1985 in support of this album. They were not rusty, and their laser-like performance shows just how locked in they were.
The other topic that the movie addressed in a tasteful way was Freddie Mercury's reckless lifestyle. He dove headfirst into a hedonistic pursuit of sex-drugs-rock n roll that ultimately led to his contraction of AIDS. I read a pretty graphic tell-all a few years ago about his lifestyle in the early 1980's. It left me feeling very cold and empty. The people he surrounded himself with were not concerned about his best interests. It is sad to see someone with so much talent and amazing gifts fall into the abyss.
Another thing the movie changed from real life was the timing of his sickness. In the movie, he tells the band he has AIDS shortly before they perform at Live Aid in 1985. In reality, he was not diagnosed with AIDS until late 1987. He passed away in 1991.
Brian May is a terrific guitarist. What I admire most about his playing is his sound and his control of it. Sure, he is a great player technically speaking, but his use of high octave chords with max distortion created a sound unlike any other guitarist. He also switches between lead playing and chord playing effortlessly...seamlessly. And, Brian May also loves classical music! Here is a segment from an interview he gave on June 3, 2017 with Charlotte Green from ClassicFM:
BRIAN: Ah, I love Holst, “Planets”. I think he was divinely inspired. He was a schoolteacher. How amazing, you know, and suddenly he’s written this incredible cosmic music. I’ve always loved it from when I was a kid and I was only about 10 years old I think when I wrote a little soliloquy, which I read into a microphone with the accompaniment of ‘Saturn’, and nobody’s ever heard that. Maybe they will one day. But it was designed to be a soundtrack for a Planetarium show – that was the idea – so maybe one day I’ll do that but I’ve always loved it. To me it’s absolutely evocative and as I say it is something completely out of this world. I can’t imagine how, I can’t imagine how it was imagined to be honest. You know it’s, it’s not constructed intellectually as far as I can see. It’s one of these things which some somehow he instinctively plucked out of the air. There’s so much unusual stuff in Holst’s pieces, you know. There’s a lot of dissonance, which wasn’t very prevalent at that time but it wasn’t dissonance for its own sake as it perhaps became later- well this is my theory anyway. Everything that’s in there seems to kind of jolt you into, into being out there in the cosmos. I can’t say enough about it really. It’s the most wonderful piece of music all of it you know the whole suite is brilliant. Interesting that he didn’t do Pluto and, of course, Pluto is now not regarded as a planet anyway so there’s no need to put Pluto in there. I got bit upset when somebody did that. I went to the Albert Hall and saw it all and at the end of it they played this Pluto piece, which I thought was completely inappropriate. Sorry guys, but I just thought it doesn’t work. Get it out of here. So I don’t think anyone’s going to do that anymore,.
It's the day before Thanksgiving as I write this. We just said good-bye to our dog Shadow. She was just a puppy when we got her twelve-plus years ago. It went too fast. She was a faithful, loving creature....always following me around...or laying at my feet. You may be aware that I listen to a lot of music...most of it classical. She heard quite a bit of it over the years. She seemed to like it too... at least she never complained about it.
Her kidneys were failing. She stopped eating and walking. She waited until Jack and Ethan came home from school this week. She hung on as long as she could and gave us a chance to face this as a family....to say good-bye to her. We all went to the clinic with her this morning. They ushered us into a room right away and had a soft blanket on the floor for her. It was very hard, but it was the right thing. She is in heaven now.
Afterward, the four of us had a family hug outside of the clinic. A long hug.
When we got home, Cheryl and I took a walk. Shadow loved her daily walks, and since she was a puppy, she carried her leash in her mouth. When we actually had her on the leash, she would constantly turn around and try to take it out of our hands and carry it herself. I finally bundled the leash up so it was manageable and that's how its been ever since. She never wanted to run away or stray from the path (I always had another leash in my pocket just in case though...but I never needed it.) So this morning, we carried her yellow leash with us on a walk in her honor.
She brought us so much joy and gave us so much love. She will be missed.
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Christmas commercials are running non-stop now....here's one that uses the music of Beethoven to great effect. This is from his Symphony no. 6 (1808).
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Three things came together for me the other day, just by chance I'm sure. I have been reading A Tale of Two Cities for quite awhile now. I'm almost done with it, and once the French Revolution really got going, I found that the reading got easier too. After storming the Bastille and unleashing the revolution, the movement itself became known as The Terror. I read a few pages one morning before work and then went about my day. After work, my wife and I met with her financial advisor as part of her annual review of her retirement fund. This nice young man works for a local investment firm that is a subsidiary of a much larger company called AXA. I had not heard of AXA before. So later that evening, I was doing some reading and research. I stumbled on a detailed history of the Erard piano company. Sebastian Erard started making pianos in 1777 and then harps as well shortly after that. His pianos were played by the likes of Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner and Mendelssohn. But all of this almost didn't happen; The Terror came calling:
"September 9, 1793.
To the Citizen Minister of Justice.
Citizen Laurent has the honour of denouncing to you an emigrant who left fifteen months ago to go and find the other emigrants in London. Had he not taken his paintings with him you would find in his home at least three hundred thousand livres worth of paintings. He has two houses, one where he lives and another one. In the one where he lives, he has had at least two hundred thousand Francs of repairs done in the past two years. This individual lives on the rue de Mail, he is a native of Germany, his name is on the sign Herard [sic] musical maker.(Herard means Erard of course)"
Erard was able to prove that he was not an enemy of the State but he was very fortunate that the search of his office happened when it did. Nine days later, on September 17, 1793, the Law of Suspects was passed. This law unleashed the full Terror on the nation and Erard may not have been spared. As it was, Erard and his company were spared. But the company was not spared of economic demise. By the mid 1900's the company folded.
"But after the company closed its doors in the middle of the twentieth century, they were all but forgotten...a heap of old archives and objects in a storeroom in the basement Salle Gaveau in Paris. After the sales of the brand names of Gavaeu, Erard , and Pleyel, as well as the Salle Gaveau itself, these archives became property of the AXA insurance. Thanks to the perseverance of a handful of Erard devotees-both musicologists and AXA managers, the archives were finally saved from destruction."
AXA, Erard and A Tale of Two Cities all came together for me in one interesting day. Life can be amazing like that.
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I don't listen to music when I run anymore. I used to. But the hassle of earphones, my declining eyesight, and maintaining playlists etc made it a chore. So I just stopped. I much prefer the quiet of the moment...the sound of my breathing...the sound of my shoes hitting the road. AND, the music that seems to play in my head. It can be anything, and yes, most of the time it's a classical piece that I seem to having playing in my brain, and sometimes I end up humming or singing along with it. So in this respect, I do still run with music.
My playlist is pretty wide and varied, but yesterday, the music that I ended up hearing for my run was a very odd selection....it was the Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. It is a great piece, but not one that I would probably put on a running playlist! But it was there...in my head...and it felt good.
I have not been sleeping much the past couple of days. Shadow was not able to get up in time to go to the bathroom, and she had given up trying. So we had her resting on her doggie-bed in the living room by the fireplace. We were spending a lot of time trying to keep her clean and comfortable, and of course we knew what was coming....and it was very hard emotionally. Maybe this experience brought the Unanswered Question into my mind? I don't know....but it may express the conflicting feelings I had while sorting through questions about life and death...and coming to grips with having to good-bye to her.
I saw a very funny Doritos commercial this week. It also used classical music!
The music is the Flower Duet by French composer Leo Delibes (1883).
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The Coat Story
True story. A couple of years ago now, my son Ethan needed a new outfit to wear to prom...he didn't have any nice dress clothes. This was in March. Ethan hates shopping, especially for clothes! So Cheryl and I knew this was not going to be a fun outing. And sure enough, it was not. After trying several stores, we ended up at J C Penny. Ethan is very frustrating to shop for. "Ethan, do you like this shirt?..."I don't care." "Ethan, what color pants do you want?....I don't care." That is the pattern. So after a couple of frustrating hours, facing his indifference and the noise and crowds, we were all at the ends of our rope. I noticed a rack of winter coats in the Men's section, so I took a break from Ethan and went to look at it. I found a coat that I really liked and I tried it on. It fit great, but it was too expensive. Plus it was already warm by now...Spring was in bloom. So I hung the coat up and went back to Ethan. We did battle awhile longer until we finally found what he needed. By now, we were all exhausted and mad at each other and the world in general. As we were paying for his clothes, I was ready to get the hell out of there and go home. But at least Ethan was going to look good for prom! When we got home, we all relaxed and peace was restored. And we did get a great deal on the clothes. The only negatives were our heightened tempers and the loss of a pair of glasses that I had somehow misplaced in one of the stores we visited.
Fast forward about five months. It was now the end of August. I went back to J C Penny to look for some dress shirts. While I was there, I noticed in the back of the Men's section there was a small rack of winter coats...the same coats I had tried on in March. And this time, they were marked down to $50...they had been close to $300 when I had tried them on in the Spring. But there were only a few coats left on the rack. I looked through them and there was only one coat that was my size. I tried it on and it fit great. This coat was going to be mine. Before I took it off, I put my hands in the pocket and felt something...hmmm....what is this? It was my glasses...the pair I had lost in March. The one and only coat that remained in my size was the same coat I had tried on while we were shopping for Ethan in March. Small world.
I had the Bach Cello Suites on my "must listen" list this week. I got around to it this past weekend, and the cellist I listened to was Pablo Casals (1876-1973). Casals is regarded as the first true pioneer of this beautiful instrument. He had a long and distinguished career...he even played at the White House for JFK. And he was the first cellist to record the Bach Cello Suites.
And this is where the story gets truly fascinating. On November 1, 2018, I was listening to Pablo Casals' recording of the Bach Cello Suites. The sound is surprisingly good for such an old recording. As I read the liner notes, I learned that he recorded two of these at Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles recorded most of their music in the 1960's. (I walked across this same crosswalk when I was in London in 1987).
Anyway, as I am listening to Casals' recording and reading about him, (and loving the music) I discovered that he played a concert in my hometown of Kansas City, MO in 1916. I also learned that on November 23, 1936, the same day he recorded two of the Cello Suites, another legendary musician was also making a recording that would change the world...the SAME day. On that day, Robert Johnson was in a small hotel room in San Antonio recording songs that would later inspire just about everyone...the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, etc etc....
Here is a great article I found that tells the story about two very different men and music who none-the-less changed history.
Pablo Casala played a recital in Kansas City on February 8, 1916. He shared the program with a famous tenor named Paul Reimers. Here is the review I found in the Kansas City Times from the next day. Seems like Mr. Reimers stole the show!
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THE CASALS-REIMERS RECITAL
A Great Cellist and a Charming Tenor for the Fifth Fritschy Event
It was not the expected beauty of Pablo Casals' playing yesterday afternoon at the Schubert Theater that gave the audience its most obvious pleasure, but the unexpected qualities in the singing of Paul Reimers, the German Tenor, who was associated with the famed cellist in joint recital. Reimers is that rare type of artist-a singer who places interpretation first.
The concert, fifth in the Fritschy series, offered a succession of surprises. First was the attractive stage setting for which the packed stage of Mme. Homer's concert and the bleak and battered drop that Paderewski made his audience forget, failed to prepare those present. A gasp of surprise and pleasure greeted the pretty scene with its cleverly arranged lights and then the audience settled back to luxuriate in the Casals tone.
With that excellent artist, Maurice Eisner, at the piano, the Handel sonata was profoundly beautiful. The clear song of the slow movement disclosed limpid depth of tone, resonance, warmth, and carrying power. Mr. Casals enjoys the reputation of being the greatest cellist of his day, and his work throughout the program bore out this rating.
But the apt and elegant Saint-Saens does not compare with the fine, high beauty of Handel. The concerto seemed superficial, full of bright passage work for the violincello, but lacking in character. If it proved anything yesterday, it was that the old music is Handel is still more vital than the new music of Frenchmen, whose artifice and dexterity cannot compete with inspiration. Still, the skill demanded was something to excite admiration. At times, the voice of the cello, warm and human, matching its timbre with that of the piano, drew fanciful figures against a rich tonal background. Again, the voices mingled in bewildering fantasy.But in nothing was there the transparency of tone disclosed by the Handel music until the last group of numbers, introduced by an aria of Bach and including three lighter pieces. These awakened almost as much applause as that accorded the tenor, and the cellist had to return many times to bow his thanks. But he gave only one encore.
Mr. Reimers is the sort of lieder singer who, in times of peace, remain in Germany. It is understood they find a full and complete appreciation only in their own land. But Americans are learning appreciation, too-as witness the success of Wuellner a few years ago, and of Julia Culp and others. Reimers is not like any other. He has a good tenor voice, which he can make, upon occasion, sounds just about as he pleases, express much or little, humor or sadness. He commands tones sweet as honey, but never sweet except for purposes of musical wooing or hoodwinking, or some other chicanery in which he takes delight.
It was most thoughtful of him to recognize the audience's non-German limitations, and tell in his captivating English the little stories in the songs. Some of these were French, some American and one was a fine old Russian hymn. There were many encores-four or five and even then the audience was not satisfied perhaps because Mr. Reimers had been rather a surprise and his singing has a piquancy and flavor rarely encountered.
Every seat was filled and there were a few standees.
My newest listening challenge: to listen to the 17 string quartets by one of my favorite composers, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). VL wrote his first string quartet in 1915, his last in 1957. The general consensus amongst music scholars appears to be they are groundbreaking works, though at times inconsistent or wandering. (I got this from Lionel Salter of Gramophone Magazine) But they are always original and demonstrate a wide range of tones, melodies, textures and musical ideas.
Here is a great chord that appears very early in his String Quartet no. 1.
The second measure is the chord. My friend and music theory expert, Dr. Reynold Simpson, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, says this of the chord:
"That's simply a G9 chord (the A in the second violin is a major 9th above the root in the cello.) The 9 is simply an extension of the stack of thirds that creates a 7 chord (1-3-5-7-9).
It may be simple, but it packs an emotional punch.
Take a listen The chord appears at the 1:07 mark.
I will report back when I have made it though all 17 string quartets.
I'll start with my obsession for classical guitar music. OK...there you have it... I am obsessed. Not quite to the level of piano my enthusiasm, but oh so very close. I love the sound of classical guitars, and no one means more to this form of music than Andres Segovia. He almost single-handedly developed and championed music for this instrument in the twentieth century. An instrument that just about every composer had ignored or forsaken for much of history, Segovia mounted a campaign to prove that there was a market for this sound. He convinced composers to write new pieces that he toured the world performing. He legitimized the guitar as a solo instrument.
Andres Segovia performed in Kansas City, my birthplace, on February 10, 1959. I want to share the review of that performance from the Kansas City Times with you:
EXPLORE NEW PATHS IN FIELD OF MUSIC
Segovia plays his guitar to resounding Applause with the Philharmonic
THE ORCHESTRA SINGS OUT
Schubert and Tchaikovsky Pieces Are Enjoyed by Sellout Audience
By Clyde Neibarger
(The Star's Music Editor)
Some effective crusading for musical causes was accomplished at the Philharmonic subscription concert at the Music Hall last night. Andres Segovia, master guitarist, gave a convincing demonstration of the guitar as a legitimate concert instrument. The sellout audience approved heartily.
The orchestra, likewise in the role of demonstrator, helped Hans Schwieger, conductor, explore neglected paths in the literature, with a clean-cut performance of the little-heard Tchaikovsky Thrd Symphony, a worthy predecessor of the Russian composer's later and better known Fourth and Fifth and Sixth.
Soloist Steals Show
Tossed in for good measure was a Franz Schubert gem, the convivial, song-like "Rosamunde" overture, which gave the orchestra opportunity to engross the listeners, from the very beginning of this eighth program in the subscription series. It was well paced, crisply articulated by the orchestra.
The tall, courtly, balding, and gray Segovia definitely was a show stealer. A low bench, a chair, a footrest, and his prized Spanish guitar were his equipment.
With a small orchestra of 34 as his capable collaborator, Segovia charmed and completely captivated his rapt listeners with his playing of the Guitar Concerto in D Major composed especially for him by the Italian, Mario Castelnuevo-Tedesco.
Orchestra Matches Mood
For most in the audience, this was a unique experience. The concerto itself is a rather fragile, dainty work of art. Segovia played it that way. His interpretation was aristocratic. The tones were not big but they were beautiful, resonant, and carried far. Schwieger and the orchestra matched his moods marvelously
The cadenza passages, all too brief, exploited the guitar's plaintive charm and the artist's magic in plucking six strings.
Big applause brought Segovia back for several acknowledgements before he graciously assented to what the audience wanted-more guitar music. So there were three encores for unaccompanied guitar. They were the familiar Gavotte by Bach, the Villa-Lobos "Study," and a Spanish folk song.
Opportunity for Strings
There was a near ovation too, for Schwieger and the orchestra as a well-earned reward for for their performance of the 45 minute Symphony No. 3, the "Polish," by Tchaikovsky. It built up from an unassuming beginning to emotion packed episodes, in which the woodwinds shone and the strings finally had their chance to sing out. The music reflected a younger Tchaikovsky, though we has 35 when he wrote it, in 1875. True, his later symphonies overshadow it. Granted that, it is over-longish and occasionally tedious, it is a refreshing slant on the famed composer.
Talk about a long concert.....when Mahler's Symphony No. 4 was given it's first performance in Amsterdam on October 23, 1904, it was played twice. Here is the explanation given by Alma Mahler;
"Mahler wrote me a detailed account. He had to go on to Amsterdam where he stayed with Mengelberg, and felt increasingly at home. He conducted the Second and the Fourth. It was the first performance of the fourth in Amsterdam and Mengelberg put it twice in the same program: Fourth Symphony. Intermission. Fourth Symphony. Mahler conducted for the first time, Mengelberg the second, with Mahler sitting comfortably in the stalls to hear his own work played to him. Mengelberg, he said when he came home, had grasped his meaning so perfectly that it was just as if he had been conducting himself."
My friend Byl Strother suggested a new composer for me to explore...Alfredo Casella. First off...I have never actually met Byl. We are friends on Facebook through another cool dude named Patrick Neas, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing for this online journal. Both men are classical music Ninjas. But I feel like I know Byl, and I welcome his thoughts about all kforms of music. Anyway, Byl shared recently that he likes the music of Alfredo Casella, an Italian composer with whom I was not familiar. So I instantly jumped into action and explored Casella's music. Wow. Amazing music. <y first dive was his Symphony No. 1. I heard Mahler, Strauss and Brahms...and maybe some Holst. Turns out that Casella was a contemporary of Mahler, and he championed Mahler's work in France where he lived and had studied with the likes of Maurice Ravel. He was also acquainted with Debussy and Stravinsky. I found a great article by David Gallagher that includes this great passage about Casella's connection to Gustav Mahler:
"The expense of performing Mahler’s huge work could only be covered by financial backing from two different musical societies; but they hated each other. It took Casella over a year to charm them into collaborating—and afterwards it was brickbats as usual: the concert’s main underwriter, the immensely rich president of the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales, Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe (Marcel Proust’s model for his Duchesse de Guermantes), complained that the rival Société des Amis de la Musique had ‘behaved like crooks’. At the end of the symphony the Paris public cheered Mahler to the rafters; Debussy walked out halfway through. Mahler’s heart-on-sleeve musical aesthetic was anathema to many in the early twentieth-century Parisian musical establishment, who amused themselves by punning on the similarity of his surname to the French word for ‘misfortune’. As leader of the small group of diehards who championed Mahler’s music, Casella—tall, thin, long-nosed—was dubbed ‘l’oiseau de Malhe[u]r’, ‘the bird of ill-omen’.
Probably no composer ever affected Casella so profoundly as Mahler did for almost a decade at this time. ‘Discovering Mahler’s symphonies (‘the greatest work of musical genius since Wagner’s Parsifal’) was the crucial event of my artistic education,’ he said, recalling that ‘Mahler was sincerely moved when he discovered I knew them practically by heart’. Casella wrote a stream of enthusiastic articles, not least as the only French or Italian critic who travelled to Munich for the première, later in 1910, of Mahler’s Eighth (the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’)—the supreme triumph of Mahler’s life. His sudden death the following year was a professional as well as personal shock for Casella: Mahler was planning not only to conduct Casella’s rhapsody Italia, Op. 11, and Suite in C major, Op. 13, but to engage the Italian as his assistant when he returned to the Vienna Opera. ‘I have a great liking for the young man,’ Mahler told another of his supporters in France, William Ritter, ‘and I have high hopes of him’. When French publishers rejected Italia and the Suite, Mahler convinced his own publisher Universal Edition to issue them, negotiating, Casella recalled, ‘a deal I could never have dreamed of’; he commissioned Casella to arrange his Seventh Symphony for piano duet; he presented ‘my great friend’, ‘pioneer’ Casella with signed scores and photographs. A giant photo of Mahler, ‘this man of extraordinary goodness, warmth and generosity, sincerity and altruism’, took pride of place on Casella’s wall for the rest of his life.
Casella’s own Symphony No. 2 in C minor is his most enduring—and deeply indebted—homage to Mahler. Though the Italian scholar Quirino Principe perhaps exaggerates in calling Casella’s first movement ‘almost pure Mahler’, its sources are palpable, above all a startlingly prominent direct quotation of a march theme from the finale of Mahler’s Second—here transposed and transformed into a lyrical melody. Casella revised this movement after the symphony’s première in 1910, but the manuscript of the first version is lost: was he making it more like Mahler or less? From the very opening notes, with their tolling bells, Casella’s symphony also saturates itself in the Mahlerian soundworld, its tensions between major and minor and its very timbres: Casella eulogised Mahler’s ‘miraculous ear, his incomparable gift for incessantly inventing new sonorities’, pinpointing instruments’ individual, contrasted qualities rather than blending them homogeneously. The slow third movement of Casella’s Second Symphony—the first part he completed (early in 1908)—is simply the central movement of his FirstSymphony, with a single bar added at its midpoint, and reorchestrated in a far more Mahler-like manner; it even keeps the original key of F sharp minor, a tritone away from the Second Symphony’s C. Curiously, the musical material sometimes seems ill at ease in its new clothes, the first version feeling a better fit—with the exception of the theme that Casella adopts to germinate the SecondSymphony’s ‘Epilogue’. Casella’s finale, albeit less monumental than the epic apotheosis of Mahler’s Second, traces a similar trajectory from darkness to triumphant C major light, marching through frequent reminiscences of Mahler’s later symphonies, the Third, Sixth and Seventh.
Only in the second movement does Casella step out of Mahler’s ‘imperious shadow’—as he admitted—into those of Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev. Casella had met both composers on his first visit to Russia in 1907: Rimsky gave him valuable advice in orchestration, while Casella’s orchestral version of Balakirev’s virtuoso piano piece Islamey attracted the admiration of its composer—among others: ‘a blond young man wearing enormous glasses approached me,’ Casella recollected, ‘saying timidly that he would love to study the score’. It was Igor Stravinsky: a year older than Casella, but then still unknown. The second movement of Casella’s Second is prophetic too, its driving percussive rhythms sometimes pre-echoing later Russian composers like Mossolov (Iron Foundry), Prokofiev or Shostakovich (another composer who learnt much from Mahler, and who is often brought to mind by Casella’s penchant for the xylophone); or indeed later Casella, of the 1920s and 1930s.
Another Mahlerian concordance is that Casella apparently conceived his Second in dramatic terms, but was ambivalent about publicising the fact. Casella wrote at the top of his first movement manuscript ‘Prologue to a tragedy’, and later released the piece alone under that title, mirroring Mahler’s reworking of his tone poem Todtenfeier (‘Funeral Ceremony’) as the first movement of his own Second Symphony; at the end of the ‘Epilogue’ Casella scribbled ‘Finis Comoedia’. If this world is a comedy to those that think and a tragedy to those that feel, Casella and Mahler are poles apart: Casella’s music conveys an objective quality, as if observing the drama dispassionately from outside; Mahler’s is quintessentially self-confessional, a living experience of emotional extremes—like two other darkness-to-light symphonies with (in their case quiet) C major endings: Asrael, another C minor Second, in which Josef Suk (Bohemian-born, as was Mahler) confronts the devastating deaths of first his teacher Dvořák and then his wife, Dvořák’s daughter Otilie; and the Third Symphony of Arnold Bax (a British composer also greatly influenced by the Russians), a final laying-to-rest of his personal inner demons."
It really is a small world. But we need to open our brains and hearts to explore it. So I've listened to all three of Casella's symphnies, some of his piano music and this...my favorite work so far...his Harp Sonata (1943).
