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4334	dbpedia	1	16	http://swampland.com/articles/view/title:jimmy_martin	en	Swampland:Jimmy Martin	http://swampland.com/favicon.ico	http://swampland.com/favicon.ico	[ "http://swampland.com/img/frontpage/search_header.gif", "http://swampland.com/img/sectionLogo/gritz_sm.gif", "http://swampland.com/img/sectionLogo/tribalfever_sm.gif", "http://swampland.com/img/sectionLogo/mysteryandmanners_sm.gif", "http://swampland.com/img/sectionLogo/spf_sm.gif", "http://swampland.com/...	[ "http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%253A%252F%252F&layout=button_count&show_faces=true&width=80&action=like&font&colorscheme=light&height=21" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			/favicon.ico		null	Jimmy Martin Jimmy Martin--Mr. Good N’ Country, the King Of Bluegrass By Derek Halsey June 2005 Jimmy Martin died on May 14, 2005 of bladder cancer at the age of 77. Almost a year before that he was kind enough to have granted us at GRITZ a lively, historic, and wonderful interview. It was as much a hold-on-to-your-horses interview as we have ever done, and we thank him for a pourin’ it on us. And now, the interview with the King Of Bluegrass as it appeared in Gritz magazine in 2004. Jimmy Martin is one of the most important and influential people to ever play bluegrass music. He is a man that was there when bluegrass music was beginning, and growing, and evolving as a brand new sound. He was a part of history, as a member of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, and he has made musical history on his own. And, he is also a bit of a rebel who never fails to speak his mind. One thing is for sure when you talk with Jimmy Martin, and that is you are going to get the full dose of what his thoughts on things are. He is not one to hold anything back, and he doesn’t here in this exclusive Gritz interview. From the late 1930’s until 1945, Bill Monroe was searching for a new sound in music. In my opinion, Mr. Monroe had all the pieces put together but one, and when a young Earl Scruggs joined his Bluegrass Boys in 1945 the final part of the bluegrass puzzle was in place. But then, a few years later, Earl and band mate Lester Flatt left to form Flatt and Scruggs. Soon after those two left his band a young man approached Bill Monroe one night at the Grand Ole Opry and asked for an audition. That man was a 22-year old Jimmy Martin. Martin grew up living a hardscrabble life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee in a small town called Sneedville. His father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried. His stepfather worked the young Jimmy Martin hard on the farm. But even as a kid he knew what he wanted to do with his life, and that was to play music. So, after playing for him on that night in 1949, Bill Monroe hired him on the spot. After a few very successful years with Bill Monroe in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, Jimmy also left the Father of Bluegrass to strike out on his own. Soon Jimmy’s albums, with the very young Osborne Brothers rounding out the band, were making their way up the charts. In the middle of the 1950’s Jimmy and the Osborne’s split up and he reformed his band with Paul Williams and the soon to be legendary JD Crowe, who was only a kid at the time. Jimmy would take his band to whatever town wanted him on a regular basis. He spent many months in Middletown, Ohio working at WPFB radio station, spent a couple of years in Detroit working on both radio and television, and spent an important year playing the Louisiana Hayride down in Shreveport. From there he moved to the very popular Wheeling Jamboree radio show in Wheeling, West Virginia and stayed there from 1959 to 1962. He had hit albums, like Widow Maker and Hit Parade Of Love, and eventually moved back to Tennessee to Nashville. Buy King of Bluegrass: The Life and Times of Jimmy Martin at AMAZON.COM But, Jimmy Martin has ruffled more than a few feathers along the way with his opinions and thoughts, and still does. There is an excellent documentary movie about him out now called The Life And Times Of Jimmy Martin. A part of the movie delves into why the folks at the Grand Ole Opry have shunned him over the years and refused to make him a member. The Opry situation has become a recurring theme in is life, as he will discuss here. But, there is a good side to all of this attitude as well. As Marty Stuart says in the movie, “Jimmy was always too much of a rebel. He was too strong, he was too pure, he was too real. He didn’t have enough sense to tone it down, Thank God!” Marty calls him “a stone-cold musical genius.” As I speak with Mr. Jimmy Martin in the spring of 2004 he has learned that he has cancer, and he is in the process of fighting it. And, while Jimmy does speak his mind in this interview, you also know that deep down he has a big and good heart, and that this boy from Sneedville, Tennessee with a third grade education has gone out into the big world and made good. So, hold on to your horses, as we hear the story of a true American music legend. Were you nervous the first time you approached Bill Monroe and asked to play with him? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I was nervous. I was real nervous. He was my idol. He always was my idol. I still call him my idol. The only thing that started Bill Monroe shunning me, and not speaking to me, doing things against me, was when my records got hot. I have always thought, concerning Mr. Monroe, that he finally got the sound and group together that he always wanted, and then was hurt when musicians like you left the band. He wasn’t happy when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs left him either. He did that with everybody. He did that with Chubby Wise, too. He loved them, and the reason why he did things against them was because it was tearing his heart out because they were so damn good. They were good singers and good pickers. He didn’t have nobody to show music to when he had Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Chubby Wise, and Cedric Rainwater. They all knew as much about it as he did. He just had to hang in there. You see, they changed his style when they went with him. There is no use in me talking and running my mouth. All bluegrass pickers that got ears and know music know that Bill Monroe, when he took a band in 1938 and went until 1946, his band changed 80 to 90 percent when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs went with him. It changed to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ style, is what it did. It brought Bill in there to a different timing, and a different sound completely. And you don’t have to take Jimmy Martin a blabbing his mouth, you can just get the records and listen to it. And, I knew that much about it because I studied music since I was a little boy. I sung in quartets with my stepfather in churches and funerals. I learned all the parts of the quartets. I tried to get me a guitar, and he tried to keep me from getting one because he knew I was going to leave him because I wanted to play on the radio. And, the main job that I always wanted from the time I started until I finished, was I wanted a job with Bill Monroe. It wasn’t too long after Lester and Earl left him that I went down there to the Grand Ole Opry and tried out with him. Not knowing at any time that I would get a job with him, but I had his songs learned, and I knew how they went. I know about all of his songs. And, when I sung with him that night, Roy Acuff helped me a lot. I sang a song with Bill and told him how good I liked his music. I sung two songs with him and played a fiddle tune with Chubby Wise. Roy Acuff stuck his head in the hall, in the room, and said, "Bill, is that boy any kin to you?" Bill said, "No, why Roy?" He said, "He sure blends good with you.” What happened next? He liked my singing and he took me off to the side and said to go with him that week and see how hard it was. He said, "It’s hard traveling." I went with him a week and we encored big, two or three times a night on the show. He had Mac Wiseman with him, and he really didn’t need a guitar player and a singer. But, it seemed like the people enjoyed us real good. And, we got out of the bus and he asked me "how did I like it." I said, "Pretty good." He said, "Do you think you can stand this hard traveling?" The bus broke down two or three times and we had to push it that week. I said, "It’s a lot better than digging ditches, and shoveling mud out of them, and plowing corn with one horse, and sawing wood with a crosscut saw." Growing up, we never had a truck, never had a car, we had two horses and a sled when I was home. I said, "I think I can do the job. I think I like it better than hauling hay to the barn, and hauling manure from it.” So, when you were growing up you always had to plow with a horse? Yeah, plowed corn one row at a time. Plowed two to turn the whole ground up with a turning plow. And, I plowed the whole farm up many a time just by myself. My Dad died when I was four years old. My mother married my stepfather and he liked to work the heck out of me. My folks are from West Virginia….. I used to play with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers when me and Bob Osborne first went together. We played all around Gilbert, and Bluefield, West Virginia. There was a radio station there. We played all around in them hills up through there, and them coal miners really love that good music. My kin on my Dad’s side are from the mountains near Mullens, West Virginia. Did you play down in there? Oh Yeah. Played all over up in there. When you toured with Bill Monroe, were you a part of that traveling baseball game and concert show he had for a while? Oh yeah, he had a college baseball team called the Bluegrass All Stars. We usually would sing and play on the pitching mound, with a lone microphone. And, when we’d a get through playing we would take it all down and start playing ball. We’d play every team a town had that we played music in. We didn’t ride in the bus, but we had a bus for the ball players. They rode in a bus while we rode four and five in a car with a bass tied on top. And our pillow was each other’s shoulder. I’ve gone as high as five, six nights and never see a bed. Finally, when the ball games were over he took a bus that still had seats in it and we’d try to sit by the heaters with quilts over us to try and stay warm. We didn’t have a big old station wagon, we had a Plymouth station wagon. The smallest that you can get. It was all he could afford. Jimmy and Bill Monroe playing The Opry JD Crowe said that you taught him how to sing baritone. Did that come from your ability to sing all the parts of a quartet when you were a kid? Yeah. I taught Sonny Osborne baritone, too. I learned all the parts. I told Bill Monroe, when he took me, that I could sing baritone, lead, and tenor. But, I couldn’t sing tenor as good as him, but I could sing tenor. When he hired a new man I would help him learn the baritone and then teach them Bill’s tunes. When Bill was off, why we’d stay in a two-lane hotel, me and Rudy Lyle, and learn the new man all the tunes before Bill even got there. And usually we’d ride along in the car and a baritone part that Bill would have, or the new man couldn’t get to it, or bass, I’d hum it to him and show him how it’s done. And, Bill would say, "Just get it like Jimmy’s a showing you and it’ll work just right." People didn’t know that. They never have learned that. It’s never been out. A lot of the songs that I recorded with Bill I helped him write the lyrics to them. Such as "Uncle Pen," "When The Golden Leaves Begin To Fall," "On My Way Back to the Old Home," and "I’ll Meet You In Church Sunday Morning." "Up Along The Ohio River (On the Old Kentucky Shore)", just about every song I helped him record. Miss Lee would write them down on a tablet in the car with a pencil and an eraser. And, when we’d write a new line and it sounded stronger, why we’d erase it out. So you would write while you traveled? Oh yeah. And, while we’d sit in the back of theaters. We played a show every night, drive about 200 or 300 miles on up the road and play another one, then drive back within 50 miles and play another town, and do it all the time. Times were real hard back then. I stayed with Bill a long time, and try and be a big help to him. A lot of time we’d play at little theaters and schools and I was getting 60 dollars a week, and he’d just say, "I didn’t do too good this week, how much can you get by on?" And he’d let you have the least you could get by on. It wasn’t easy. A lot of the time we didn’t get paid all the money, but I stayed with him anyhow, and was good to him. People don’t know that. But, I did. When did you leave Mr. Monroe? I left him when Decca Records, that he recorded for, and Columbia Records and RCA Victor, all offered to record an album with me singing. When I sung "Poison Love" with him and things like that, and they heard my voice and they wanted to record me, they said they would record me and I could stay on with him. So, I asked him about it and he was paying me and didn’t want me to record for anyone else, because I think my albums would have sold real well because everybody wanted to hear me, you know. I’d always front the show and sing a song before I came out with Bill, and they always liked what I sang. So did Bill, like it. Do you remember the day that you told him you were leaving the band? Oh yeah, I remember it as well as it was tomorrow. I just come up and told him that I wanted to lay in my notice. He said, "Well, what have I done." I said, "You ain’t done nothing, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you." You see, he didn’t want me to record. So, I wanted to record, and I was barely living, just making it by paying my hotel bills, wasn’t getting ahead with no money or nothing, so I decided to leave and worked my two weeks notice out. He said he still didn’t have nobody, so I worked another week, and he said he didn’t have nobody, and I think I worked six or seven weeks, trying to wait until he got somebody. Finally, he told me he wasn’t ever going to get nobody to take my place. And when it come time I said, "Well, I got to go. I got places where I’m going to try and get me a group and record, Bill." He still held to my hand for a long time and kept squeezing it. I said, "I hope you get somebody good to take my place to help you." And he told me, "I’ll never will get nobody to take your place, Jimmy. I’d rather have you than anybody. If you get out there and can’t make it and you want you a job back just call me collect. I’ll send you the ticket to come back home." He said he’d rather sing with me than anybody he ever sung with, and he liked my rhythm, he liked my guitar playing. Me and him would sit down a lot of times in busses and rooms and just pick by ourselves and do different licks on the mandolin. You see, that’s how he done them little extra licks. He used to just stand straight and play the mandolin. When I got with him he kind of got on his tip-toes and jumped up and down a little bit. But he couldn’t stand that jumping beside of him. I was doing it too. (laughing) Did Mr. Monroe make you guys practice a lot? More than anybody. I did the same amount of practicing with him as I did with Sonny and Bobby, the Osborne Brothers. We used to rehearse about one o’clock until three or four every Tuesday and every Thursday when we were in Detroit, to get our records down like we recorded on RCA Victor. If you’ll ever listen to the records that me and the Osborne Brothers made you’ll say that there ain’t no better records made in bluegrass. The harmony was there, and the music was there. We all recorded on one mic. Me and Bob and Sonny, and Red Taylor, and Cedric Rainwater was on another one. Only had four of us. Me and Bob and Sonny sung in the same mic, and picked our banjo and guitar in the same mic. We had practiced and got ‘em down where Bob and Sonny knew every lick I was doing on the guitar, and I knew every lick they were doing on the mandolin and banjo. And, we knew how loud to hit it, and we knew how soft to hit it when we sang it. They couldn’t turn Bob, they couldn’t turn Sonny, and they couldn’t turn me up. Now, me and Paul Williams and JD Crowe made some records like that. Then, we all ended up getting on a mic. I remember what they said the first session that we cut with JD Crowe. I got him a real good, loud Mastertone banjo. He picked real weak, he was weak on his picking, and I’d always get onto him. And he said, "I’m just going to quit ‘cause I ain’t big and strong like Sonny Osborne. I can’t play that strong." I said, "You stay with me and I’ll have you playing it stronger." Because I helped Sonny too, you know. And, he stayed with me and he got a lot stronger. And, when we came in to record, they’d have him on another mic. And he was playing right up with my guitar, you see, as loud as I was playing. So was Paul Williams. He’d get the same loudness on this mandolin, on that F-4. And the producer would holler, "Hey, we’re going to have to do something about that banjo. It’s coming through every mic we got down there. Jimmy, can you get him to hold it down?" I said, "Yeah, I can get him to hold it down." And, I’d ease over to JD’s ears and say, "Keep pouring it to it, JD, so they can hear you." (laughing) If he had got scared and nervous it wouldn’t have come out as good. JD was just a kid when all of that happened, if I remember right. A teenager. Yeah, just like Sonny. Sonny and him both were young when they come with me. About 15. I’ve always loved to help anybody pick. And I think I know when the bass is in there in the right timing with me. I think I know the mandolin playing, and the fiddle playing, and the banjo playing, drummers, but it’s hard to get ‘em in there. You can’t hardly find them in bluegrass right now. It has to work you to death, rehearse you to death, to get ‘em down there. That’s the only thing I got to say about bluegrass music today. I love them all, hope they all make good money. But, I hear this in my ear; A guy comes and plays with me now, tries out, and I had a guy to tell me, "Get your guitar Jimmy, and help me out a little bit. I’ve won a lot of championships on my mandolin." I said, "No, I just want to hear you." And, he gets his mandolin out and he gets ready, and I said, "Kick me off on ‘Sunny Side Of The Mountain’ there." He said, "What key are you doing that in." I said, "Well, you might as well put your mandolin back in the case. You don’t even know what I’m doing." Then he’ll say, "Well, if you give me the job I’ll learn it." I said, "I’m going to ask you a question; if you’ll learn my songs and can pick them then I’ll hire you." Then he said, "Well, if I get a job with you Jimmy, how would you want me to play the mandolin with you? Would you want me to play kindly like what’s on your records?" I said, "No, I want you to play what’s on everybody else’s records, and I’ll have the damndest group you ever seen." He just acted like I was crazy, you know, because he was asking me did I want him to play like my records. Would you ask a guy that? "Oh no, play like everybody then we’ll have a good band." Your band has to play together. It has to come together just like a ballgame. You have to match your music just like you match your singing. I’ll tell you one man that could tell you that right quick, and that’d be Earl Scruggs. They kept their act together and everyone knew when to take a break and when not to. Not on account of Lester, but on account of Earl Scruggs. He was the boss over there. And there can’t be five guys go together and say "I’ll get to play like I want to." That’s the reason why I play in this group. You take five men playing what they want to, and they don’t want to play what the other one is playing, then how is your band going to sound? You got to be a team. And there’s got to be somebody that knows how to sound in there. And now today, most all the mandolin, most all the fiddles, and most all of the guitar breaks, are playing the same thing. All the flattop leads are trying to play the same thing. Some will be just a little bit better, but not that too much better. It’s sounding all alike. That’s the reason why, when you play my records, you know its Jimmy Martin. When they play Ralph Stanley’s records, they know it’s Ralph Stanley. When they play Mac Wiseman, they know it’s Mac Wiseman. When they play the Osborne Brothers, they know it’s the Osborne Brothers. When they play Don Reno and Red Smiley, they know it’s them. Now, you throw the rest of them in a barrel and they come out and you don’t know which one’s out. Go and play your records, its not there. The good old hard feeling of playing the tune of a song is out. And, what is there in a song, but the tune. It’s what you’re supposed to play. That tells the rights of a song. Not to get in there and try and make a mockery out of them. You do speak your mind, and that has made some people mad over the years. What are your thoughts on that? The Osbornes don’t come up and speak to me now. That just shows me there’s pure jealousy in bluegrass, and not only bluegrass, there’s jealousy in country music, too. I’m proud that I bother them that much that they don’t hardly want to speak to me. Sure don’t owe them nothing. I’m proud that my name is called and I’m a bad guy amongst all of them. But, I love everybody. I want to be good to everybody that will let me be good. But I don’t like for somebody to run over me. I speak my mind and I’m going to still speak it ‘till I die. Tell me about your time living and playing in Detroit in the 1950’s. I stayed in Detroit for about two years. We had a radio show daily, and then we had one every Saturday night, two hours on a 50,000-watt station, WJR. Then we had a TV show in Canada, the biggest local TV show, for an hour on Friday night. And, when me and the Osborne Brothers went up there, there were about a 150 people. We encored so big that they hired us, started us off at a hundred dollars a Saturday night. There were thirty dollars to spend between me and Bob and Sonny. We went up there a few nights and the crowds started getting so big that they raised us to seventy five dollars a piece for Saturday night. I made more than when Bill Monroe paid me when I worked with him at the Grand Ole Opry. It was one of the biggest TV shows up there. By the time me and the Osborne Brothers got ‘20/20 Vision’ and ‘Save It, Save It’ out on record the seats were a capacity of 2300. There were 2300 seats filled every Saturday night, and some were standing just to hear me and the Osborne Brothers. We were on every jukebox with the biggest selling record in Detroit. We were really hot. We were number five of the best selling country records. It wasn’t called bluegrass then. The number five selling country record for RCA Victor. Did you enjoy playing the Louisiana Hayride a few years later? Oh yeah. I enjoyed it very much. It got my name out because when I went down there they paid me more than anybody down there. I was paying JD Crowe or Paul Williams more than Johnny Horton or any of the other stars was a getting. We got a flat rate. They got only 18 dollars a show. That was staff pay. They paid me more than anyone had ever been paid down there. And, I don’t care to tell you what I paid Paul and JD. I raised them up to 25 dollars. That’s a little better than 18, ain’t it? It was the same way in Wheeling, at the Jamboree. They only paid eleven dollars for a man up there, and I paid them 25 up there, too. Louisiana Hayride, the reason that I got in the charts pretty high there was I was on a network show. You see, that show was on two 50,000-watt stations as big as the Grand Ole Opry. I was on both KTHS in Little Rock, Arkansas, and it was coming over KWKH in Shreveport, at one time. Then, they had thirty minutes of CBS network going all over the world. And, I got to play three songs on that, a trio, a duet, and an instrumental with JD Crowe on the banjo. You talk about mailbox, tubs full of it. In fact, Paul Williams, my tenor singer, George Jones would be on there and would ask Paul to go out there and sing harmony with him. "The Race Is On," that kind of stuff. After your time in Louisiana you moved to Wheeling, West Virginia. The Wheeling Jamboree Show was broadcast on yet another 50,000-watt radio station, WWVA, and it was heard around the country. What was your time like there? I moved to Wheeling and I had two thirty-minute shows on the Jamboree. And, when I first went to Wheeling, why me and Paul and JD looked at about 130, to 175 people. After we were there about two months, there were that many standing on the streets trying to get in, whether there was snow on the streets or whatever, the whole time we were there. Another mailing list, a tub full a week. We’d set up to about one o’clock every night with postcards trying to answer the mail. That was the best move I ever made. I didn’t have a home, always rented apartments and everything, but in nine months I paid for me a home up there because Gene Johnson was the manager of the WWVA Jamboree and he was my manager. So when I got there he had me 23 shows already booked. He told me my records were hotter than the dickens and he wanted me up there. I got in his office one day and sat there and cried, because he was the only friend I’ve ever had that was nice to me, and didn’t tell me lies. Me and him worked good together. I got out of debt, had a lot of money in the bank to do things with when I left there, and had my home paid for. He’s dead now. He passed away, but back then he bought him a radio station and quit the Jamboree. So Barbara, my gal at the time, took all of his phone calls, his addresses, and started booking me. I think I played 63 fairs that year. And then, you made the move to Nashville… I never did play that much in Nashville. I would have never moved down to Nashville. I would have still stayed on. I didn’t think I could make it there in Wheeling without Gene Johnson. But, I always wanted to move back to Tennessee. Bob McNeal and the Wilhelm Agency, and the Wilburn Brothers and people up in Wheeling, they found out that Barbara had booked a lot of dates for me and I was making as many dates or more as anybody on the Grand Ole Opry. I was doing good. So Bob McNeal and the Wilburn Brothers wanted me to move down here and join their office, and let Barbara go to work as a booker in their office. So, they promised me that if I would move, they would keep me booked out. They said, "When we don’t have you booked out, we’ll get you as a guest on the Grand Ole Opry." I thought that would do me good too, you see. Anyway, I decided I’d do that with them. If it hadn’t been for that, I was doing too good in Wheeling to move here. One day I was talking to Ralph Emory on the radio from the Tulane Hotel, and said that I was going to move down here to Nashville. Well, Bill Monroe happened to be listening on the radio. He come in and he called Barbara off, and I seen them talking. Barbara came back and told me that Bill said, "Jimmy’s doing good in Wheeling. You better get him to stay up there. You let him move down here and I’ll do everything in my power I can against him." Now that made Barbara mad, and she said, "Well, you just a do everything that you can, boy, I’m a bookin’ him. I’ll book him out and get more booking that you’ll get, and make more money than you’ll make. You just try and hurt him all you can." That’s about as far as that went. So, I moved. Every time I was down there at the Opry I encored on my own songs. The last time I was down there I encored on "Tennessee" and "Sunny Side Of The Mountain." Stringbean and Ira Louvin came up to me and told me how good I sounded. Stringbean said, ‘Boy, you went over big. You tore ‘em up. You probably went over just a little too big. It might be a while before you’re ever back down here again.’ He used to be on there too, you know, and he hardly couldn’t get back on the Opry after he worked for Bill. Nevertheless, I’m just a telling you a little story that you can put in there and it be a true story. So, from then on Ott Devine was the manager of the Opry. Bob McNeal and the Wilhelm agency, The Wilburn Brothers, Doyle and Ted, all of them called up trying to get them to use me as a guest. Ott Devine said, "Don’t call my office and bother me. I don’t have time. We’re not a going to let Jimmy Martin do anymore guest spots on the Grand Ole Opry." So, I just closed it right out. They quit bothering them until Bud Wendell got on there and managed the Opry. Bud Wendell let me on there a few times. He used to go rabbit hunting with me. And I enjoyed it, and he’s even eat rabbit breakfast with me. He let me go on there and I encored so much then that he told me when I was over at Opryland that I would be a member of the Grand Ole Opry, that the Opry would just love the way I played and entertained bluegrass music. So, I asked him, when is he going to put me on there, and he said he had bluegrass running out of his nose. Earl Scruggs, Flatt and Scruggs, Jim and Jesse, and the Osborne Brothers, so I just let him go at that. He never did make me a member, so. I’m not going to raise no fuss about it. I think that I’ve done much better on account of not being a member of the Opry because the public aggravates me to death asking me "Why can’t I ever get to hear you on the Grand Ole Opry." All I say is, "I guess I never have got good enough." So, I feel like now, the Opry has helped me money wise. But, they’ve hurt my feelings for doing that. I think why they’ve done it, it is because of all kinds of jealousy of other musicians. So, I just feel proud that I bother them that much. Are you surprised that the grudge has lasted as long as it has? Well, the grudge has lasted because some of them down there is still grudged at me. I’ve always heard that if Mr. Monroe wasn’t in the mood to speak to you he’d walk right by and.... Yeah he would, turn his head and let on like he was trying to ignore you. Thinking somebody was going to jerk him by the coattail and pull him around and say, "Here, speak to me." But I’m telling you, he ignored the best friend he ever had and ever would have. You’re talking to the best friend that Bill Monroe ever had. And, I loved him more than anything. Loved to stand and look at him. But he couldn’t stand for me being popular. That was it. I loved him. He just didn’t speak to his best friends. That’s it right there. What do you think about Bill Monroe being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Let him get in all the hall of fame’s he can. Stand him right up there. Because I told him one time, I said, "Bill, you play rock and roll mandolin and you don’t know it." He said, "I don’t play that damn rock and roll." Be sure and put that in there, now. I said, "You don’t know that you play rock and roll mandolin? The way you chunka-chunk-chunka-chunka (making the sounds of a rocking mandolin rhythm)." I said, "Listen to rock and roll blues and then listen to ‘Brakemen’s Blues.' Why, you’re rocking on down the line, Bill. And when you kick off that ‘Muleskinner Blues,’ that’s a kick off of a rock and roll as I’ve ever heard." And he said, "I don’t play that damn rock and roll." I said, (laughing) "OK Bill." Yeah he did, and hooray for it. That’s the reason why he is different and nobody else can play it. He had it all. When they think they’re playing that mandolin like Bill Monroe they better let me get up there with my guitar and I’ll show them they're not. There ain’t nobody that can touch him. Just like there ain’t nobody that can touch the Osborne Brothers singing that harmony. Nobody can beat them because Bobby’s got that high tenor and Sonny’s got that good baritone. You won’t ever find a baritone singer any better than Sonny Osborne. And Bob can slur that tenor anyway you want him to. Are you doing any fishing these days? Oh yeah. I am getting over this cancer right now, trying to. Still, I go fishing. I’ve got two fishing friends, Jay Hunter, and one of the best that ever was; he’s a good fiddle player, good banjo player, good guitar player, he’s my friend Red Roberts. He lives about two miles from me here and I go out to see him very often. He taught me how to sit around and relax. I’m nervous, you know. He said, "Just come out and I’ll learn you how to sit here and take nap in a chair with me." We sit there and catfish and talk about bluegrass music more than anybody. He’s a retired electrician from Dupont. I’m semi-retired, I only work about 20 some dates a year. I like crappy fishing, but I like bream fishing better where you can catch you a great big bream. I also go to Richmond, Indiana, before it gets too cold, for about a week and take my squirrel dog and get about ten or fifteen squirrels every time we go. We rabbit hunt about one day, and coon hunt every night. I bought a coon dog up there called Tom T. Hall, and he barks about like ole Pete. My coon dogs are named Tom T. Hall, Patty Loveless, and Dolly Parton. I got one named George Jones, Little Tater Dickens, got one named Mel Tillis, a little bluetick, and I got one named Rhonda Vincent. Buy Jimmy Martin's Don't Cry To Me at AMAZON.COM This new album, the soundtrack to the Life And Times Of Jimmy Martin movie, is great. Oh yeah. It’s selling real good for me, too. That George (Goehl), that made that movie, he is doing a real good job on it. I believe he’s going to be a real good promoter, too. Promoting is fifty percent of it, you know. Which song of yours do you consider to be the biggest one you ever recorded? I’d say, "Sunny Side Of The Mountain," "Ocean Of Diamonds," "Freeborn Man," "This World’s Not My Home," they have all been pretty good. I couldn’t tell which one. I sell records in every country overseas, Sweden to Switzerland, Russia, Germany, Japan, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, all of them over there. My Decca records sell there, and some RCA Victor too. There was a feller that came over here from Switzerland and recorded a country album and wanted to me to sing "You Don’t Know My Mind" and "Sunny Side Of The Mountain," and we sung a duet on both of them. It was real popular. Well, that first Will The Circle Be Unbroken album with the Nitty Gritty Dirt band is still popular thirty-plus year later. And, you appeared on the second and third versions of that project as well. It was a biggun’. I had six songs on it, on the first one. They said I stole it. That’s what Jeff Hanna told me. That’s the reason why they wouldn’t let me do too many on the other one, they said I stole the first one. I recorded two on the third one. What are you up to these days, Jimmy? The biggest thing I’m into right now is the festival in Bean Blossom, Indiana. Bean Blossom is one of the prettiest places, its got shade, plenty of places to park. You can put tents under the trees, and everything. And so, we have a huge crowd over there. We have a festival in the middle of June every year, and one in the middle of September. And then you have other festivals beyond that, but the big ones are in June and September. Is that where you have the big squirrel fry? Yes, we have either a rabbit fry or a squirrel fry on Sunday morning. Some of them fries rabbits and brings them there on Saturday. We fry up a whole big platter of squirrels and make scrambled eggs and gravy, and biscuits and loaf bread, coffee and sweet milk, and have people gather around. They always film me when I’m there, and always gather around and eat that squirrel gravy. And if there are any pieces left I take it and put it in a little bowl and bring it home and warm it up. You tell the folks, I’d like to invite all the friends that love bluegrass music to make it a visit and come and see the Bill Monroe Park and Campground in Bean Blossom, Indiana. Dwight Dillman has put flowers all around, and has made it one of the prettiest festivals to look at in the world. We have good crowds, and it’s a good family crowd. I want everybody to make their vacation plans and come and see us at Bean Blossom because they’ll be treated right. Dwight Dillman does know how to run a festival. And, he is putting in a bunch more campground hookups. Are there any new recordings on the horizon? There is a company that is supposed to have me record an album with everybody that I named a dog after. Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson called up and said any time they wanted me to sing with them on a record, they would be ready to meet me anytime. They are trying to get George Jones and Hank Jr., and Merle Haggard. They are going to call it Jimmy Martin With His Hunting Dogs and Country Music Stars. It is good to see you do a few dates a year after all of this time in the business. Really, I don’t even have to work. But, I like to get out there and shake hands with all my friends. You’d think that you would shake hands with them all in 53 years, wouldn’t you? (laughs) They come right into Bean Blossom, and say, ‘We have always loved your albums, Jimmy. We think you’re really one of the best in bluegrass music. I’ve always wanted to meet you, I never have met you.’ I shake hands with them and I ask them, ‘Now that you have met me, what do you think about me? (laughing) How many letters and cards have you received since you found out you were sick? We get as high as a hundred or two hundred a day. There ain’t been nobody that ever loved their fans better than Jimmy Martin. I love my fans. I’m taking cancer treatment right now. Radiation and chemo. I take chemo once a week, and radiation five days a week. It makes me feel awful bad, but they say I’ll get over it. They say they can let me sing a little bit more at the bluegrass festivals. I told them I hope to. I told them I hope to sing a few good old gospel songs a few more times, anyway. But if the Lord wants me to go I got my tombstone built over here, and they can put me under the ground right next to Roy Acuff, a guy who loves good country music. And, he’s got one right over there beside him that likes good bluegrass and country music. I went over there and bought a plot close to Roy Acuff’s. It cost me 15,000 dollars. So, I already have my place dug, so if this cancer gets me down they’ll have a nice place to put me. My tombstone has been up for five or six years, I don’t know exactly. They say there are a lot of pictures taken of it, and a lot of talk of it. I wanted to be right in there beside old Roy Acuff, the King Of Country Music.
4334	dbpedia	2	14	https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-144-last-train-to-clarksville-by-the-monkees/	en	Episode 144: “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees	https://500songs.com/wp-…es66-300x300.jpg	https://500songs.com/wp-…es66-300x300.jpg	[ "https://500songs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/cropped-cropped-Logo-1-1.png", "https://i0.wp.com/500songs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Logo.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1", "https://500songs.com/wp-content/plugins/seriously-simple-podcasting/assets/css/images/player/images/icon-loader.svg", "https://i0.wp.com...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Andrew Hickey" ]	2022-02-15T02:40:14+00:00	Episode 144 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Last Train to Clarksville" and the beginnings of the career of the Monkees, along with a short primer on the origins of the Vietnam War. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of…	en	https://i0.wp.com/500son…it=32%2C32&ssl=1	A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs	https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-144-last-train-to-clarksville-by-the-monkees/	Episode 144 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Last Train to Clarksville” and the beginnings of the career of the Monkees, along with a short primer on the origins of the Vietnam War. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a seventeen-minute bonus episode available, on “These Boots Are Made For Walking” by Nancy Sinatra, which I mispronounce at the end of this episode as “These Boots Were Made For Walking”, so no need to correct me here. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I’ve used Andrew Sandoval’s liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, the only one of those that is still in print is More of the Monkees. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval’s The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book last year, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I’m a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve obviously talked in this podcast about several of the biggest hits of 1966 already, but we haven’t mentioned the biggest hit of the year, one of the strangest records ever to make number one in the US — “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Sgt Barry Sadler: [Excerpt: Barry Sadler, “The Ballad of the Green Berets”] Barry Sadler was an altogether odd man, and just as a brief warning his story, which will last a minute or so, involves gun violence. At the time he wrote and recorded that song, he was on active duty in the military — he was a combat medic who’d been fighting in the Vietnam War when he’d got a wound that had meant he had to be shipped back to the USA, and while at Fort Bragg he decided to write and record a song about his experiences, with the help of Robin Moore, a right-wing author of military books, both fiction and nonfiction, who wrote the books on which the films The Green Berets and The French Connection were based. Sadler’s record became one of those massive fluke hits, selling over nine million copies and getting him appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, but other than one top thirty hit, he never had another hit single. Instead, he tried and failed to have a TV career, then became a writer of pulp fiction himself, writing a series of twenty-one novels about the centurion who thrust his spear into Jesus’ side when Jesus was being crucified, and is thus cursed to be a soldier until the second coming. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lived until he shot Lee Emerson, a country songwriter who had written songs for Marty Robbins, in the head, killing him, in an argument over a woman. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail for this misdemeanour, of which he served twenty-eight. Later he moved to Guatemala City, where he was himself shot in the head. The nearest Army base to Nashville, where Sadler lived after his discharge, is Fort Campbell, in Clarksville: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “Last Train to Clarksville”] The Vietnam War was a long and complicated war, one which affected nearly everything we’re going to see in the next year or so of this podcast, and we’re going to talk about it a lot, so it’s worth giving a little bit of background here. In doing so, I’m going to use quite a flippant tone, but I want to make it clear that I’m not mocking the very real horrors that people suffered in the wars I’m talking about — it’s just that to sum up multiple decades of unimaginable horrors in a few sentences requires glossing over so much that you have to either laugh or cry. The origin of the Vietnam War, as in so many things in twentieth century history, can be found in European colonialism. France had invaded much of Southeast Asia in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and created a territory known as French Indo-China, which became part of the French colonial Empire. But in 1940 France was taken over by Germany, and Japan was at war with China. Germany and Japan were allies, and the Japanese were worried that French Indo-China would be used to import fuel and arms to China — plus, they quite fancied the idea of having a Japanese empire. So Vichy France let Japan take control of French Indo-China. But of course the reason that France had been taken over by Germany was that pretty much the whole world was at war in 1940, and obviously the countries that were fighting Germany and Japan — the bloc led by Britain, soon to be joined by America and Russia — weren’t very keen on the idea of Japan getting more territory. But they were also busy with the whole “fighting a world war” thing, so they did what governments in this situation always do — they funded local guerilla insurgent fighters on the basis that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, something that has luckily never had any negative consequences whatsoever, except for occasionally. Those local guerilla fighters were an anti-imperialist popular front, the Việt Minh, led by Hồ Chí Minh, a revolutionary Communist. They were dedicated to overthrowing foreign imperialist occupiers and gaining independence for Vietnam, and Hồ Chí Minh further wanted to establish a Soviet-style Communist government in the newly-independent country. The Allies funded the Việt Minh in their fight against the Japanese occupiers until the end of the Second World War, at which point France was liberated from German occupation, Vietnam was liberated from Japanese occupation, and the French basically said “Hooray! We get our Empire back!”, to which Hồ Chí Minh’s response was, more or less, “what part of anti-imperialist Marxist dedicated to overthrowing foreign occupation of Vietnam did you not understand, exactly?” Obviously, the French weren’t best pleased with this, and so began what was the first of a series of wars in the region. The First Indochina War lasted for years and ended in a negotiated peace of a sort. Of course, this led to the favoured tactic of the time, partition — splitting a formerly-occupied country into two, at an arbitrary dividing line, a tactic which was notably successful in securing peace everywhere it was tried. Apart from Ireland, India, Korea, and a few other places, but surely it wouldn’t be a problem in Vietnam, right? North Vietnam was controlled by the Communists, led by Hồ Chí Minh, and recognised by China and the USSR but not by the Western states. South Vietnam was nominally independent but led by the former puppet emperor who owed his position to France, soon replaced by a right-wing dictatorship. And both the right-wing dictatorship and the left-wing dictatorship were soon busily oppressing their own citizens and funding military opposition groups in the other country. This soon escalated into full-blown war, with the North backed by China and Russia and the South backed by America. This was one of a whole series of wars in small countries which were really proxy wars between the two major powers, the USA and the USSR, both of which were vying for control, but which couldn’t confront each other directly because either country had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world multiple times over. But the Vietnam War quickly became more than a small proxy war. The US started sending its own troops over, and more and more of them. The US had never ended the draft after World War II, and by the mid sixties significant numbers of young men were being called up and sent over to fight in a war that had by that point lasted a decade (depending on exactly when you count the war as starting from) between two countries they didn’t care about, over things few of them understood, and at an exorbitant cost in lives. As you might imagine, this started to become unpopular among those likely to be drafted, and as the people most affected (other, of course, than the Vietnamese people, whose opinions on being bombed and shot at by foreigners supporting one of other of the dictators vying to rule over them nobody else was much interested in) were also of the generation who were the main audience for popular music, slowly this started to seep into the lyrics of songs — a seepage which had already been prompted by the appearance in the folk and soul worlds of many songs against other horrors, like segregation. This started to hit the pop charts with songs like “The Universal Soldier” by Buffy Saint-Marie, which made the UK top five in a version by Donovan: [Excerpt: Donovan, “The Universal Soldier”] That charted in the lower regions of the US charts, and a cover version by Glen Campbell did slightly better: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, “The Universal Soldier”] That was even though Campbell himself was a supporter of the war in Vietnam, and rather pro-military. Meanwhile, as we’ve seen a couple of times, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean recorded a pro-war answer song to that, “The Universal Coward”: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, “The Universal Coward”] This, of course, was even though Berry was himself avoiding the draft. And I’ve not been able to find the credits for that track, but Glen Campbell regularly played guitar on Berry’s sessions, so it’s entirely possible that he played guitar on that record made by a coward, attacking his own record, which he disagreed with, for its cowardice. This is, of course, what happens when popular culture tries to engage with social and political issues — pop culture is motivated by money, not ideological consistency, and so if there’s money to be made from anti-war songs or from pro-war songs, someone will take that money. And so on October the ninth 1965, Billboard magazine ran a report: “Colpix Enters Protest Field HOLLYWOOD -Colpix has secured its first protest lyric disk, “The Willing Conscript,”as General Manager Bud Katzel initiates relationships with independent producers. The single features Lauren St. Davis. Katzel says the song was written during the Civil War, rewritten during World War I and most recently updated by Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe. Screen Gems Music, the company’s publishing wing, is tracing the song’s history, Katzel said. Katzel’s second single is “(You Got the Gamma Goochee” by an artist with that unusual stage name. The record is a Screen Gems production and was in the house when Katzel arrived one month ago. The executive said he was expressly looking for material for two contract artists, David Jones and Hoyt Axton. The company is also working on getting Axton a role in a television series, “Camp Runamuck.” ” To unpack this a little, Colpix was a record label, owned by Columbia Pictures, and we talked about that a little bit in the episode on “The Loco-Motion” — the film and TV companies were getting into music, and Columbia had recently bought up Don Kirshner’s Aldon publishing and Dimension Records as part of their strategy of tying in music with their TV shows. This is a company trying desperately to jump on a bandwagon — Colpix at this time was not exactly having huge amounts of success with its records. Hoyt Axton, meanwhile, was a successful country singer and songwriter. We met his mother many episodes back — Mae Axton was the writer of “Heartbreak Hotel”. Axton himself is now best known as the dad in the 80s film Gremlins. David Jones will be coming up shortly. Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe were record executives then at Kama Sutra records, but soon to move on — we’ll be hearing about Krasnow more in future episodes. Neither of them were songwriters, and while I have no real reason to disbelieve the claim that “The Willing Conscript” dates back to the Civil War, the earliest version I have been able to track down was its publication in issue 28 of Broadside Magazine in June 1963 — nearly a hundred years after the American Civil War — with the credit “by Tom Paxton” — Paxton was a popular singer-songwriter of the time, and it certainly sounds like his writing. The first recording of it I know of was by Pete Seeger: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger, “The Willing Conscript”] But the odd thing is that by the time this was printed, the single had already been released the previous month, and it was not released under the name Lauren St Davis, or under the title “The Willing Conscript” — there are precisely two differences between the song copyrighted as by Krasnow and Ashe and the one copyrighted two years earlier as by Paxton. One is that verses three and four are swapped round, the other is that it’s now titled “The New Recruit”. And presumably because they realised that the pseudonym “Lauren St. Davis” was trying just a bit too hard to sound cool and drug culture, they reverted to another stage name the performer had been using, Michael Blessing: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, “The New Recruit”] Blessing’s name was actually Michael Nesmith, and before we go any further, yes his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, did invent the product that later became marketed in the US as Liquid Paper. At this time, though, that company wasn’t anywhere near as successful as it later became, and was still a tiny company. I only mention it to forestall the ten thousand comments and tweets I would otherwise get asking why I didn’t mention it. In Nesmith’s autobiography, while he talks a lot about his mother, he barely mentions her business and says he was uninterested in it — he talks far more about the love of art she instilled in him, as well as her interest in the deep questions of philosophy and religion, to which in her case and his they found answers in Christian Science, but both were interested in conversations about ideas, in a way that few other people in Nesmith’s early environment were. Nesmith’s mother was also responsible for his music career. He had spent two years in the Air Force in his late teens, and the year he got out, his mother and stepfather bought him a guitar for Christmas, after he was inspired by seeing Hoyt Axton performing live and thinking he could do that himself: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, “Greenback Dollar”] As he put it in his autobiography, “What did it matter that I couldn’t play the guitar, couldn’t sing very well, and didn’t know any folk songs? I would be going to college and hanging out at the student union with pretty girls and singing folk songs. They would like me. I might even figure out a way to get a cool car.” This is, of course, the thought process that pretty much every young man to pick up a guitar goes through, but Nesmith was more dedicated than most. He gave his first performance as a folk singer ten days after he first got a guitar, after practising the few chords in most folk songs for twelve hours a day every day in that time. He soon started performing as a folk singer, performing around Dallas both on his own and with his friend John London, performing the standard folk repertoire of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, things like “Pick a Bale of Cotton”: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, “Pick a Bale of Cotton”] He also started writing his own songs, and put out a vanity record of one of them in 1963: [Excerpt: Mike Nesmith, “Wanderin'”] London moved to California, and Nesmith soon followed, with his first wife Phyllis and their son Christian. There Nesmith and London had the good fortune to be neighbours with someone who was a business associate of Frankie Laine, and they were signed to Laine’s management company as a folk duo. However, Nesmith’s real love was rock and roll, especially the heavier R&B end of the genre — he was particularly inspired by Bo Diddley, and would always credit seeing Diddley live as a teenager as being his biggest musical influence. Soon Nesmith and London had formed a folk-rock trio with their friend Bill Sleeper. As Mike & John & Bill, they put out a single, “How Can You Kiss Me?”, written by Nesmith: [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, “How Can You Kiss Me?”] They also recorded more of Nesmith’s songs, like “All the King’s Horses”: [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, “All the King’s Horses”] But that was left unreleased, as Bill was drafted, and Nesmith and London soon found themselves in The Survivors, one of several big folk groups run by Randy Sparks, the founder of the New Christie Minstrels. Nesmith was also writing songs throughout 1964 and 1965, and a few of those songs would be recorded by other people in 1966, like “Different Drum”, which was recorded by the bluegrass band The Greenbriar Boys: [Excerpt: The Greenbriar Boys, “Different Drum”] That would more successfully be recorded by the Stone Poneys later of course. And Nesmith’s “Mary Mary” was also picked up by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, “Mary Mary”] But while Nesmith had written these songs by late 1965, he wasn’t able to record them himself. He was signed by Bob Krasnow, who insisted he change his name to Michael Blessing, and recorded two singles for Colpix — “The New Recruit”, which we heard earlier, and a version of Buffy Saint-Marie’s “Until It’s Time For You To Go”, sung in a high tenor range very far from Nesmith’s normal singing voice: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, “Until It’s Time For You To Go”] But to my mind by far the best thing Nesmith recorded in this period is the unissued third Michael Blessing single, where Nesmith seems to have been given a chance to make the record he really wanted to make. The B-side, a version of Allen Toussaint’s swamp-rocker “Get Out of My Life, Woman”, is merely a quite good version of the song, but the A-side, a version of his idol Bo Diddley’s classic “Who Do You Love?” is utterly extraordinary, and it’s astonishing that it was never released at the time: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, “Who Do You Love?”] But the Michael Blessing records did no better than anything else Colpix were putting out. Indeed, the only record they got onto the hot one hundred at all in a three and a half year period was a single by one David Jones, which reached the heady heights of number ninety-eight: [Excerpt: David Jones, “What Are We Going to Do?”] Jones had been brought up in extreme poverty in Openshaw in Manchester, but had been encouraged by his mother, who died when he was fourteen, to go into acting. He’d had a few parts on local radio, and had appeared as a child actor on TV shows made in Manchester, like appearing in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street (still on today) as Ena Sharples’ grandson Colin: [Excerpt: Coronation St https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FDEvOs1imc , 13:30] He also had small roles in Z-Cars and Bill Naughton’s TV play “June Evening”, and a larger role in Keith Waterhouse’s radio play “There is a Happy Land”. But when he left school, he decided he was going to become a jockey rather than an actor — he was always athletic, he loved horses, and he was short — I’ve seen his height variously cited as five foot three and five foot four. But it turned out that the owner of the stables in which he was training had showbusiness connections, and got him the audition that changed his life, for the part of the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart’s West End musical Oliver! We’ve encountered Lionel Bart before a couple of times, but if you don’t remember him, he was the songwriter who co-wrote Tommy Steele’s hits, and who wrote “Living Doll” for Cliff Richard. He also discovered both Steele and Marty Wilde, and was one of the major figures in early British rock and roll. But after the Tommy Steele records, he’d turned his attention to stage musicals, writing book, music, and lyrics for a string of hits, and more-or-less singlehandedly inventing the modern British stage musical form — something Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, always credits him with. Oliver!, based on Oliver Twist, was his biggest success, and they were looking for a new Artful Dodger. This was the best role for a teenage boy in the UK at the time — later performers to take the role on the London stage include Steve Marriott and Phil Collins, both of whom we’ll no doubt encounter in future episodes — and Jones got the job, although they were a bit worried at first about his Manchester vowels. He assured them though that he could learn to do a Cockney accent, and they took him on. Jones not having a natural Cockney accent ended up doing him the biggest favour of his career. While he could put on a relatively convincing one, he articulated quite carefully because it wasn’t his natural accent. And so when the North American version found in previews that their real Cockney Dodger wasn’t being understood perfectly, the fake Cockney Jones was brought over to join the show on Broadway, and was there from opening night on. On February the ninth, 1964, Jones found himself, as part of the Broadway cast of Oliver!, on the Ed Sullivan Show: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Georgia Brown, “I’d Do Anything”] That same night, there were some other British people, who got a little bit more attention than Jones did: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on Ed Sullivan)”] Davy Jones wasn’t a particular fan of pop music at that point, but he knew he liked what he saw, and he wanted some of the same reaction. Shortly after this, Jones was picked up for management by Ward Sylvester, of Columbia Pictures, who was going to groom Jones for stardom. Jones continued in Oliver! for a while, and also had a brief run in a touring version of Pickwick, another musical based on a Dickens novel, this time starring Harry Secombe, the British comedian and singer who had made his name with the Goon Show. Jones’ first single, “Dream Girl”, came out in early 1965: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, “Dream Girl”] It was unsuccessful, as was his one album, David Jones, which seemed to be aiming at the teen idol market, but failing miserably. The second single, “What Are We Going to Do?” did make the very lowest regions of the Hot One Hundred, but the rest of the album was mostly attempts to sound a bit like Herman’s Hermits — a band whose lead singer, coincidentally, also came from Manchester, had appeared in Coronation Street, and was performing with a fake Cockney accent. Herman’s Hermits had had a massive US hit with the old music hall song “I’m Henry VIII I Am”: [Excerpt: Herman’s Hermits, “I’m Henry VIII I Am”] So of course Davy had his own old music-hall song, “Any Old Iron”: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, “Any Old Iron”] Also, the Turtles had recently had a hit with a folk-rock version of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”, and Davy cut his own version of their arrangement, in the one concession to rock music on the album: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, “It Ain’t Me Babe”] The album was, unsurprisingly, completely unsuccessful, but Ward Sylvester was not disheartened. He had the perfect job for a young British teen idol who could sing and act. The Monkees was the brainchild of two young TV producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who had come up with the idea of doing a TV show very loosely based on the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (though Rafelson would later claim that he’d had the idea many years before A Hard Day’s Night and was inspired by his youth touring with folk bands — Schneider always admitted the true inspiration though). This was not a particularly original idea — there were a whole bunch of people trying to make TV shows based in some way around bands. Jan and Dean were working on a possible TV series, there was talk of a TV series starring The Who, there was a Beatles cartoon series, Hanna-Barbera were working on a cartoon series about a band called The Bats, and there was even another show proposed to Screen Gems, Columbia’s TV department, titled Liverpool USA, which was meant to star Davy Jones, another British performer, and two American musicians, and to have songs provided by Don Kirshner’s songwriters. That The Monkees, rather than these other series, was the one that made it to the TV (though obviously the Beatles cartoon series did too) is largely because Rafelson and Schneider’s independent production company, Raybert, which they had started after leaving Screen Gems, was given two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to develop the series by their former colleague, Screen Gems’ vice president in charge of programme development, the former child star Jackie Cooper. Of course, as well as being their former colleague, Cooper may have had some more incentive to give Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider that money in that the head of Columbia Pictures, and thus Cooper’s boss’ boss, was one Abe Schneider. The original idea for the show was to use the Lovin’ Spoonful, but as we heard last week they weren’t too keen, and it was quickly decided instead that the production team would put together a group of performers. Davy Jones was immediately attached to the project, although Rafelson was uncomfortable with Jones, thinking he wasn’t as rock and roll as Rafelson was hoping for — he later conceded, though, that Jones was absolutely right for the group. As for everyone else, to start with Rafelson and Schneider placed an ad in a couple of the trade papers which read “Madness!! Auditions Folk and Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys ages 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview” There were a couple of dogwhistles in there, to appeal to the hip crowd — Ben Frank’s was a twenty-four-hour restaurant on the Sunset Strip, where people including Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison used to hang out, and which was very much associated with the freak scene we’ve looked at in episodes on Zappa and the Byrds. Meanwhile “Must come down for interview” was meant to emphasise that you couldn’t actually be high when you turned up — but you were expected to be the kind of person who would at least at some points have been high. A lot of people answered that ad — including Paul Williams, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks, and many more we’ll be seeing along the way. But oddly, the only person actually signed up for the show because of that ad was Michael Nesmith — who was already signed to Colpix Records anyway. According to Davy Jones, who was sitting in at the auditions, Schneider and Rafelson were deliberately trying to disorient the auditioners with provocative behaviour like just ignoring them, to see how they’d react. Nesmith was completely unfazed by this, and apparently walked in wearing a green wool hat and carrying a bag of laundry, saying that he needed to get this over with quickly so he could go and do his washing. John London, who came along to the audition as well, talked later about seeing Nesmith fill in a questionnaire that everyone had to fill in — in a space asking about previous experience Nesmith just wrote “Life” and drew a big diagonal line across the rest of the page. That attitude certainly comes across in Nesmith’s screen test: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith screen test] Meanwhile, Rafelson and Schneider were also scouring the clubs for performers who might be useful, and put together a shortlist of people including Jerry Yester and Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, Bill Chadwick, who was in the Survivors with Nesmith and London, and one Micky Braddock, whose agent they got in touch with and who was soon signed up. Braddock was the stage name of Micky Dolenz, who soon reverted to his birth surname, and it’s the name by which he went in his first bout of fame. Dolenz was the son of two moderately successful Hollywood actors, George Dolenz and Janelle Johnson, and their connections had led to Dolenz, as Braddock, getting the lead role in the 1958 TV series Circus Boy, about a child named Corky who works in a circus looking after an elephant after his parents, the Flying Falcons, were killed in a trapeze accident. [Excerpt: Circus Boy, “I can’t play a drum”] Oddly, one of the other people who had been considered for that role was Paul Williams, who was also considered for the Monkees but ultimately turned down, and would later write one of the Monkees’ last singles. Dolenz had had a few minor TV appearances after that series had ended, including a recurring role on Peyton Place, but he had also started to get interested in music. He’d performed a bit as a folk duo with his sister Coco, and had also been the lead singer of a band called Micky and the One-Nighters, who later changed their name to the Missing Links, who’d played mostly covers of Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs and later British Invasion hits. He’d also recorded two tracks with Wrecking Crew backing, although neither track got released until after his later fame — “Don’t Do It”: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, “Don’t Do It”] and “Huff Puff”: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, “Huff Puff”] Dolenz had a great singing voice, an irrepressible personality, and plenty of TV experience. He was obviously in. Rafelson and Schneider took quite a while whittling down the shortlist to the final four, and they were still considering people who’d applied through the ads. One they actually offered the role to was Stephen Stills, but he decided not to take the role. When he turned the role down, they asked if he knew anyone else who had a similar appearance to him, and as it happened he did. Steve Stills and Peter Tork had known of each other before they actually met on the streets of Greenwich Village — the way they both told the story, on their first meeting they’d each approached the other and said “You must be the guy everyone says looks like me!” The two had become fast friends, and had played around the Greenwich Village folk scene together for a while, before going their separate ways — Stills moving to California while Tork joined another of those big folk ensembles of the New Christie Minstrels type, this one called the Phoenix Singers. Tork had later moved to California himself, and reconnected with his old friend, and they had performed together for a while in a trio called the Buffalo Fish, with Tork playing various instruments, singing, and doing comedy bits. Oddly, while Tork was the member of the Monkees with the most experience as a musician, he was the only one who hadn’t made a record when the TV show was put together. But he was by far the most skilled instrumentalist of the group — as distinct from best musician, a distinction Tork was always scrupulous about making — and could play guitar, bass, and keyboards, all to a high standard — and I’ve also seen him in more recent years play French horn live. His great love, though, was the banjo, and you can hear how he must have sounded on the Greenwich Village folk scene in his solo spots on Monkees shows, where he would show off his banjo skills: [Excerpt: Peter Tork, “Cripple Creek”] Tork wouldn’t get to use his instrumental skills much at first though, as most of the backing tracks for the group’s records were going to be performed by other people. More impressive for the TV series producers was his gift for comedy, especially physical comedy — having seen Tork perform live a few times, the only comparison I can make to his physical presence is to Harpo Marx, which is about as high a compliment as one can give. Indeed, Micky Dolenz has often pointed out that while there were intentional parallels to the Beatles in the casting of the group, the Marx Brothers are a far better parallel, and it’s certainly easy to see Tork as Harpo, Dolenz as Chico, Nesmith as Groucho, and Jones as Zeppo. (This sounds like an insult to Jones, unless you’re aware of how much the Marx Brothers films actually depended on Zeppo as the connective tissue between the more outrageous brothers and the more normal environment they were operating in, and how much the later films suffered for the lack of Zeppo). The new cast worked well together, even though there were obvious disagreements between them right from the start. Dolenz, at least at this point, seems to have been the gel that held the four together — he had the experience of being a child star in common with Jones, he was a habitue of the Sunset Strip clubs where Nesmith and Tork had been hanging out, and he had personality traits in common with all of them. Notably, in later years, Dolenz would do duo tours with each of his three bandmates without the participation of the others. The others, though, didn’t get on so well with each other. Jones and Tork seem to have got on OK, but they were very different people — Jones was a showbiz entertainer, whose primary concern was that none of the other stars of the show be better looking than him, while Tork was later self-diagnosed as neurodivergent, a folkie proto-hippie who wanted to drift from town to town playing his banjo. Tork and Nesmith had similar backgrounds and attitudes in some respects — and were united in their desire to have more musical input into the show than was originally intended — but they were such different personalities in every aspect of their lives from their religious views to their politics to their taste in music they came into conflict. Nesmith would later say of Tork “I never liked Peter, he never liked me. So we had an uneasy truce between the two of us. As clear as I could tell, among his peers he was very well liked. But we rarely had a civil word to say to each other”. Nesmith also didn’t get on well with Jones, both of them seeming to view themselves as the natural leader of the group, with all the clashes that entails. The four Monkees were assigned instruments for their characters based not on instrumental skill, but on what suited their roles better. Jones was the teen idol character, so he was made the maraca-playing frontman who could dance without having to play an instrument, though Dolenz took far more of the lead vocals. Nesmith was made the guitarist, while Tork was put on bass, though Tork was by far the better guitarist of the two. And Dolenz was put on drums, even though he didn’t play the drums — Tork would always say later that if the roles had been allocated by actual playing ability, Jones would have been the drummer. Dolenz did, though, become a good drummer, if a rather idiosyncratic one. Tork would later say “Micky played the drums but Mike kept time, on that one record we all made, Headquarters. Mike was the timekeeper. I don’t know that Micky relied on him but Mike had a much stronger sense of time. And Davy too, Davy has a much stronger sense of time. Micky played the drums like they were a musical instrument, as a colour. He played the drum colour…. as a band, there was a drummer and there was a timekeeper and they were different people.” But at first, while the group were practising their instruments so they could mime convincingly on the TV and make personal appearances, they didn’t need to play on their records. Indeed, on the initial pilot, they didn’t even sing — the recordings had been made before the cast had been finalised: [Excerpt: Boyce & Hart, “Monkees Theme (pilot version)”] The music was instead performed by two songwriters, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who would become hugely important in the Monkees project. Boyce and Hart were not the first choice for the project. Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems Music, had initially suggested Roger Atkins, a Brill Building songwriter working for his company, as the main songwriter for The Monkees. Atkins is best known for writing “It’s My Life”, a hit for the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “It’s My Life”] But Atkins didn’t work out, though he would collaborate later on one song with Nesmith, and reading between the lines, it seems that there was some corporate infighting going on, though I’ve not seen it stated in so many words. There seems to have been a turf war between Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems’ music publishing, who was based in the Brill Building, and Lester Sill, the West Coast executive we’ve seen so many times before, the mentor to Leiber and Stoller, Duane Eddy, and Phil Spector, who was now the head of Screen Gems music on the West Coast. It also seems to be the case that none of the top Brill Building songwriters were all that keen on being involved at this point — writing songs for an unsold TV pilot wasn’t exactly a plum gig. Sill ended up working closely with the TV people, and it seems to have been him who put forward Boyce and Hart, a songwriting team he was mentoring. Boyce and Hart had been working in the music industry for years, both together and separately, and had had some success, though they weren’t one of the top-tier songwriting teams like Goffin and King. They’d both started as performers — Boyce’s first single, “Betty Jean”, had come out in 1958: [Excerpt: Tommy Boyce, “Betty Jean”] And Hart’s, “Love Whatcha Doin’ to Me”, under his birth name Robert Harshman, a year later: [Excerpt: Robert Harshman, “Love Whatcha Doin’ to Me”] Boyce had been the first one to have real songwriting success, writing Fats Domino’s top ten hit “Be My Guest” in 1959: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Be My Guest”] and cowriting two songs with singer Curtis Lee, both of which became singles produced by Phil Spector — “Under the Moon of Love” and the top ten hit “Pretty Little Angel Eyes”: [Excerpt: Curtis Lee, “Pretty Little Angel Eyes”] Boyce and Hart together, along with Wes Farrell, who had co-written “Twist and Shout” with Bert Berns, wrote “Lazy Elsie Molly” for Chubby Checker, and the number three hit “Come a Little Bit Closer” for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, “Come a Little Bit Closer”] At this point they were both working in the Brill Building, but then Boyce moved to the West Coast, where he was paired with Steve Venet, the brother of Nik Venet, and they co-wrote and produced “Peaches and Cream” for the Ikettes: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, “Peaches and Cream”] Hart, meanwhile, was playing in the band of Teddy Randazzo, the accordion-playing singer who had appeared in The Girl Can’t Help It, and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein he wrote “Hurts So Bad”, which became a big hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, “Hurts So Bad”] But Hart soon moved over to the West Coast, where he joined his old partner Boyce, who had been busy writing TV themes with Venet for shows like “Where the Action Is”. Hart soon replaced Venet in the team, and the two soon wrote what would become undoubtedly their most famous piece of music ever, a theme tune that generations of TV viewers would grow to remember: [Excerpt: “Theme from Days of Our Lives”] Well, what did you think I meant? Yes, just as Davy Jones had starred in an early episode of Britain’s longest-running soap opera, one that’s still running today, so Boyce and Hart wrote the theme music for America’s longest-running soap opera, which has been running every weekday since 1965, and has so far aired well in excess of fourteen thousand episodes. Meanwhile, Hart had started performing in a band called the Candy Store Prophets, with Larry Taylor — who we last saw with the Gamblers, playing on “LSD-25” and “Moon Dawg” — on bass, Gerry McGee on guitar, and Billy Lewis on drums. It was this band that Boyce and Hart used — augmented by session guitarists Wayne Erwin and Louie Shelton and Wrecking Crew percussionist Gene Estes on tambourine, plus Boyce and session singer Ron Hicklin on backing vocals, to record first the demos and then the actual tracks that would become the Monkees hits. They had a couple of songs already that would be suitable for the pilot episode, but they needed something that would be usable as a theme song for the TV show. Boyce and Hart’s usual working method was to write off another hit — they’d try to replicate the hook or the feel or the basic sound of something that was already popular. In this case, they took inspiration from the song “Catch Us If You Can”, the theme from the film that was the Dave Clark Five’s attempt at their own A Hard Day’s Night: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, “Catch Us If You Can”] Boyce and Hart turned that idea into what would become the Monkees theme. We heard their performance of it earlier of course, but when the TV show finally came out, it was rerecorded with Dolenz singing: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “Monkees Theme”] For a while, Boyce and Hart hoped that they would get to perform all the music for the TV show, and there was even apparently some vague talk of them being cast in it, but it was quickly decided that they would just be songwriters. Originally, the intent was that they wouldn’t even produce the records, that instead the production would be done by a name producer. Micky Most, the Animals’ producer, was sounded out for the role but wasn’t interested. Snuff Garrett was brought in, but quickly discovered he didn’t get on with the group at all — in particular, they were all annoyed at the idea that Davy would be the sole lead vocalist, and the tracks Garrett cut with Davy on lead and the Wrecking Crew backing were scrapped. Instead, it was decided that Boyce and Hart would produce most of the tracks, initially with the help of the more experienced Jack Keller, and that they would only work with one Monkee at a time to minimise disruption — usually Micky and sometimes Davy. These records would be made the same way as the demos had been, by the same set of musicians, just with one of the Monkees taking the lead. Meanwhile, as Nesmith was seriously interested in writing and production, and Rafelson and Schneider wanted to encourage the cast members, he was also assigned to write and produce songs for the show. Unlike Boyce and Hart, Nesmith wanted to use his bandmates’ talents — partly as a way of winning them over, as it was already becoming clear that the show would involve several competing factions. Nesmith’s songs were mostly country-rock tracks that weren’t considered suitable as singles, but they would be used on the TV show and as album tracks, and on Nesmith’s songs Dolenz and Tork would sing backing vocals, and Tork would join the Wrecking Crew as an extra guitarist — though he was well aware that his part on records like “Sweet Young Thing” wasn’t strictly necessary when Glen Campbell, James Burton, Al Casey and Mike Deasy were also playing guitar: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “Sweet Young Thing”] That track was written by Nesmith with Goffin and King, and there seems to have been some effort to pair Nesmith, early on, with more commercial songwriters, though this soon fell by the wayside and Nesmith was allowed to keep making his own idiosyncratic records off to the side while Boyce and Hart got on with making the more commercial records. This was not, incidentally, something that most of the stars of the show objected to or even thought was a problem at the time. Tork was rather upset that he wasn’t getting to have much involvement with the direction of the music, as he’d thought he was being employed as a musician, but Dolenz and Jones were actors first and foremost, while Nesmith was happily making his own tracks. They’d all known going in that most of the music for the show would be created by other people — there were going to be two songs every episode, and there was no way that four people could write and record that much material themselves while also performing in a half-hour comedy show every week. Assuming, of course, that the show even aired. Initial audience response to the pilot was tepid at best, and it looked for a while like the show wasn’t going to be green-lit. But Rafelson and Schneider — and director James Frawley who played a crucial role in developing the show — recut the pilot, cutting out one character altogether — a manager who acted as an adult supervisor — and adding in excerpts of the audition tapes, showing the real characters of some of the actors. As three of the four were playing characters loosely based on themselves — Peter’s “dummy” character wasn’t anything like he was in real life, but was like the comedy character he’d developed in his folk-club performances — this helped draw the audience in. It also, though, contributed to some line-blurring that became a problem. The re-edited pilot was a success, and the series sold. Indeed, the new format for the series was a unique one that had never been done on TV before — it was a sitcom about four young men living together, without any older adult supervision, getting into improbable adventures, and with one or two semi-improvised “romps”, inspired by silent slapstick, over which played original songs. This became strangely influential in British sitcom when the series came out over here — two of the most important sitcoms of the next couple of decades, The Goodies and The Young Ones, are very clearly influenced by the Monkees. And before the broadcast of the first episode, they were going to release a single to promote it. The song chosen as the first single was one Boyce and Hart had written, inspired by the Beatles. Specifically inspired by this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Paperback Writer”] Hart heard that tag on the radio, and thought that the Beatles were singing “take the last train”. When he heard the song again the next day and realised that the song had nothing to do with trains, he and Boyce sat down and wrote their own song inspired by his mishearing. “Last Train to Clarksville” is structured very, very, similarly to “Paperback Writer” — both of them stay on one chord, a G7, for an eight-bar verse before changing to C7 for a chorus line — the word “writer” for the Beatles, the “no no no” (inspired by the Beatles “yeah yeah yeah”) for the Monkees. To show how close the parallels are, I’ve sped up the vocals from the Beatles track slightly to match the tempo with a karaoke backing track version of “Last Train to Clarksville” I found, and put the two together: [Excerpt: “Paperback Clarksville”] Lyrically, there was one inspiration I will talk about in a minute, but I think I’ve identified another inspiration that nobody has ever mentioned. The classic country song “Night Train to Memphis”, co-written by Owen Bradley, and made famous by Roy Acuff, has some slight melodic similarity to “Last Train to Clarksville”, and parallels the lyrics fairly closely — “take the night train to Memphis” against “take the last train to Clarksville”, both towns in Tennessee, and “when you arrive at the station, I’ll be right there to meet you I’ll be right there to greet you, So don’t turn down my invitation” is clearly close to “and I’ll meet you at the station, you can be here by 4:30 ‘cos I’ve made your reservation”: [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, “Night Train to Memphis”] Interestingly, in May 1966, the same month that “Paperback Writer” was released, and so presumably the time that Hart heard the song on the radio for the first time, Rick Nelson, the teen idol formerly known as Ricky Nelson, who had started his own career as a performer in a sitcom, had released an album called Bright Lights and Country Music. He’d had a bit of a career downslump and was changing musical direction, and recording country songs. The last track on that album was a version of “Night Train to Memphis”: [Excerpt: Rick Nelson, “Night Train to Memphis”] Now, I’ve never seen either Boyce or Hart ever mention even hearing that song, it’s pure speculation on my part that there’s any connection there at all, but I thought the similarity worth mentioning. The idea of the lyric, though, was to make a very mild statement about the Vietnam War. Clarksville was, as mentioned earlier, the site of Fort Campbell, a military training base, and they crafted a story about a young soldier being shipped off to war, calling his girlfriend to come and see him for one last night. This is left more-or-less ambiguous — this was a song being written for a TV show intended for children, after all — but it’s still very clear on the line “and I don’t know if I’m ever coming home”. Now, Boyce and Hart were songwriters first and foremost, and as producers they were quite hands-off and would let the musicians shape the arrangements. They knew they wanted a guitar riff in the style of the Beatles’ recent singles, and Louie Shelton came up with one based around the G7 chord that forms the basis of the song, starting with an octave leap: Shelton’s riff became the hook that drove the record, and engineer Dave Hassinger added the final touch, manually raising the volume on the hi-hat mic for a fraction of a second every bar, creating a drum sound like a hissing steam brake: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “Last Train to Clarksville”] Now all that was needed was to get the lead vocals down. But Micky Dolenz was tired, and hungry, and overworked — both Dolenz and Jones in their separate autobiographies talk about how it was normal for them to only get three hours’ sleep a night between working twelve hour days filming the series, three-hour recording sessions, and publicity commitments. He got the verses down fine, but he just couldn’t sing the middle eight. Boyce and Hart had written a complicated, multisyllabic, patter bridge, and he just couldn’t get his tongue around that many syllables when he was that tired. He eventually asked if he could just sing “do do do” instead of the words, and the producers agreed. Surprisingly, it worked: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “Last Train to Clarksville”] “Last Train to Clarksville” was released in advance of the TV series, on a new label, Colgems, set up especially for the Monkees to replace Colpix, with a better distribution deal, and it went to number one. The TV show started out with mediocre ratings, but soon that too became a hit. And so did the first album released from the TV series. And that album was where some of the problems really started. The album itself was fine — ten tracks produced by Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets playing and either Micky or Davy singing, mostly songs Boyce and Hart wrote, with a couple of numbers by Goffin and King and other Kirshner staff songwriters, plus two songs produced by Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, and with token participation from Tork and Dolenz. The problem was the back cover, which gave little potted descriptions of each of them, with their height, eye colour, and so on. And under three of them it said “plays guitar and sings”, while under Dolenz it said “plays drums and sings”. Now this was technically accurate — they all did play those instruments. They just didn’t play them on the record, which was clearly the impression the cover was intended to give. Nesmith in particular was incandescent. He believed that people watching the TV show understood that the group weren’t really performing that music, any more than Adam West was really fighting crime or William Shatner travelling through space. But crediting them on the record was, he felt, crossing a line into something close to con artistry. To make matters worse, success was bringing more people trying to have a say. Where before, the Monkees had been an irrelevance, left to a couple of B-list producer-songwriters on the West Coast, now they were a guaranteed hit factory, and every songwriter working for Kirshner wanted to write and produce for them — which made sense because of the sheer quantity of material they needed for the TV show, but it made for a bigger, less democratic, organisation — one in which Kirshner was suddenly in far more control. Suddenly as well as Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets and Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, both of whom had been operating without much oversight from Kirshner, there were a bunch of tracks being cut on the East Coast by songwriting and production teams like Goffin and King, and Neil Sedaka and Carole Bayer. On the second Monkees album, released only a few months after the first, there were nine producers credited — as well as Boyce, Hart, Jack Keller, and Nesmith, there were now also Goffin, King, Sedaka, Bayer, and Jeff Barry, who as well as cutting tracks on the east coast was also flying over to the West Coast, cutting more tracks with the Wrecking Crew, and producing vocal sessions while there. As well as producing songs he’d written himself, Barry was also supervising songs written by other people. One of those was a new songwriter he’d recently discovered and been co-producing for Bang Records, Neil Diamond, who had just had a big hit of his own with “Cherry Cherry”: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “Cherry Cherry”] Diamond was signed with Screen Gems, and had written a song which Barry thought would be perfect for the Monkees, an uptempo song called “I’m a Believer”, which he’d demoed with the regular Bang musicians — top East Coast session players like Al Gorgoni, the guitarist who’d played on “The Sound of Silence”: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, “I’m a Believer”] Barry had cut a backing track for the Monkees using those same musicians, including Diamond on acoustic guitar, and brought it over to LA. And that track would indirectly lead to the first big crisis for the group. Barry, unlike Boyce and Hart, was interested in working with the whole group, and played all of them the backing track. Nesmith’s reaction was a blunt “I’m a producer too, and that ain’t no hit”. He liked the song — he wanted to have a go at producing a track on it himself, as it happened — but he didn’t think the backing track worked. Barry, trying to lighten the mood, joked that it wasn’t finished and you needed to imagine it with strings and horns. Unfortunately, Nesmith didn’t get that he was joking, and started talking about how that might indeed make a difference — at which point everyone laughed and Nesmith took it badly — his relationship with Barry quickly soured. Nesmith was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the way his songs and his productions were being sidelined, and was generally getting unhappy, and Tork was wanting more musical input too. They’d been talking with Rafelson and Schneider, who’d agreed that the group were now good enough on their instruments that they could start recording some tracks by themselves, an idea which Kirshner loathed. But for now they were recording Neil Diamond’s song to Jeff Barry’s backing track. Given that Nesmith liked the song, and given that he had some slight vocal resemblance to Diamond, the group suggested that Nesmith be given the lead vocal, and Kirshner and Barry agreed, although Kirshner at least apparently always intended for Dolenz to sing lead, and was just trying to pacify Nesmith. In the studio, Kirshner kept criticising Nesmith’s vocal, and telling him he was doing it wrong, until eventually he stormed out, and Kirshner got what he wanted — another Monkees hit with Micky Dolenz on lead, though this time it did at least have Jones and Tork on backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “I’m a Believer”] That was released on November 23rd, 1966, as their second single, and became their second number one. And in January 1967, the group’s second album, More of the Monkees, was released. That too went to number one. There was only one problem. The group weren’t even told about the album coming out beforehand — they had to buy their own copies from a record shop to even see what tracks were on it. Nesmith had his two tracks, but even Boyce and Hart were only given two, with the rest of the album being made up of tracks from the Brill Building songwriters Kirshner preferred. Lots of great Nesmith and Boyce and Hart tracks were left off the album in favour of some astonishingly weak material, including the two worst tracks the group ever recorded, “The Day We Fall in Love” and “Laugh”, and a novelty song they found embarrassing, “Your Auntie Grizelda”, included to give Tork a vocal spot. Nesmith called it “probably the worst album in the history of the world”, though in truth seven of the twelve tracks are really very strong, though some of the other material is pretty poor. The group were also annoyed by the packaging. The liner notes were by Don Kirshner, and read to the group at least like a celebration of Kirshner himself as the one person responsible for everything on the record. Even the photo was an embarrassment — the group had taken a series of photos in clothes from the department store J. C. Penney as part of an advertising campaign, and the group thought the clothes were ridiculous, but one of those photos was the one chosen for the cover. Nesmith and Tork made a decision, which the other two agreed to with varying degrees of willingness. They’d been fine miming to other people’s records when it was clearly just for a TV show. But if they were being promoted as a real band, and having to go on tour promoting albums credited to them, they were going to be a real band, and take some responsibility for the music that was being put out in their name. With the support of Rafelson and Schneider, they started making preparations to do just that. But Don Kirshner had other ideas, and told them so in no uncertain terms. As far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of ungrateful, spoiled, kids who were very happy cashing the ridiculously large cheques they were getting, but now wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They were going to keep doing what they were told. Things came to a head in a business meeting in January 1967, when Nesmith gave an ultimatum. Either the group got to start playing on their own records, or he was quitting. Herb Moelis, Kirshner’s lawyer, told Nesmith that he should read his contract more carefully, at which point Nesmith got up, punched a hole in the wall of the hotel suite they were in, and told Moelis “That could have been your face”. So as 1967 began, the group were at a turning point. Would they be able to cut the puppet strings, or would they have to keep living a lie? We’ll find out in a few weeks’ time…
4334	dbpedia	0	76	http://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-troubadour-west-hollywood-and-san.html	en	Rock Prosopography 101: The Troubadour, West Hollywood and San Francisco, CA: Performance List May	https://1.bp.blogspot.co…a_night_view.jpg	https://1.bp.blogspot.co…a_night_view.jpg	[ "https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X-CwhPTD730/X8EDzT2Lh9I/AAAAAAAAHwQ/H6O8_PhMe5k11kd2IXzE9OAbfDYwuLkwgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Troubadour_a_night_view.jpg", "https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p4OaNe9-vQs/YAnewEf9eUI/AAAAAAAAIC4/KdYH-v13-8oCCjKHTY91Z0yRvCp80RT-wCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Kristofferson%2Blp%2BMonument%2B1970.jpg", "https://1.bp...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	The Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA The Troubadour, The Whisky A-Go-Go and West Hollywood In the latter 60s, ro...		http://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/favicon.ico		http://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-troubadour-west-hollywood-and-san.html	The Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA The Troubadour, The Whisky A-Go-Go and West Hollywood In the latter 60s, rock bands made their bones in the ballrooms, with the light shows and people swaying. Word would pass on the underground telegraph that Cream or Quicksilver Messenger Service or Ten Years After were great, and you would check them out the next time they came to town. There were a few rock nightclubs, but most fans weren't even 21 yet, and clubs in any case were too small to create much residual buzz, not compared to a college gym. In the 1960s, however, there was one major exception to this rule. The infamous Whisky-A-Go-Go club in West Hollywood (at 8901 Sunset Blvd) defied all these conventions. Name bands played there for union scale just to get heard. The Hollywood hip people, whether in the record industry or just cool cats, heard the bands and helped to decide who got some buzz. In August 1966, the house band at the Whisky were some unknowns called The Doors, and they became as big as anybody. In January, 1969, a new group built on the ashes of the old Yardbirds played the Whisky, and within a week the word was out about Led Zeppelin. Hollywood proper had been part of the city of Los Angeles since the 1930s. But West Hollywood was unincorporated, part of Los Angeles County, but not the city. It was insulated from the notorious Los Angeles police and the machinations of the LA City Council. Thus West Hollywood was, paradoxically, the entertainment district for Hollywood, and had been since the 1940s. There were clubs, restaurants and jazz, and plenty of stars came to hang out, and that was how tastes got made. Rock and roll wasn't that different. The Whisky had opened in 1964, and made "Go-Go" a thing. By 1966, the club had a new act every week, all trying to catch the Hollywood buzz. Cream and Jimi Hendrix each played there in 1967, for practically nothing, just so that people would listen. So did numerous other ambitious groups, because rocking the Whisky was a ticket to a big tour. A mile East of the Whisky, however, was a former coffee shop called The Troubadour. The Troubadour was at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard (at Doheny Drive), near the Beverly Hills border. Proprietor Doug Weston had opened the club in 1957, but by 1970 it had a full bar and regular performers. Initially it presented folk acts, and in a sense, it still did. Electric instruments were standard fare by the end of the 60s, and the Troubadour wasn't for purists. But the Whisky was for rocking out, and the Troubadour was for reflection. As the 70s rose on the horizon, reflection was the order of the day, and success at The Troubadour would turn out to have more impact than success at the Whisky. Kris Kristofferson's debut album was released on Monument in 1970. He played the West Hollywood Troubadour in June, opening for Linda Ronstadt Troubadour Performance List, May-August 1970 The Troubadour was open seven days a week, with performers every night. The restaurant and particularly the bar were open as well, so it was a hangout for music industry types as well as musicians. Supposedly, many 70s bands, such as the Eagles, had their beginnings in the Troubadour bar. Troubadour bookings were almost always from Tuesday through Sunday. The Tuesday night show was almost always reviewed in the Thursday Los Angeles Times, giving industry and fans an idea of what was worth seeing that weekend. A good review in the Times, followed by a packed house on the weekend, could make an artist's career, as it did with Elton John later in 1970. Maximum capacity at the Troubadour was about 300. Generally, there were two shows each night, and sometimes three shows on weekend nights. Sets were relatively short, from what I can tell, in order to turn the house over. Headliners would play about 40 minutes, and openers nearer to 20. The Troubadour was a showcase, not a place where performers jammed all night with their pals. I don't know whether the Troubadour had the arrangement where if the late show was not sold out, patrons could stick around if they would buy another drink. For a packed James Taylor/Carole King show in November of 1970, the Times reported that all 4000 tickets were sold out, and while I don't know if that was for 12 or 14 shows, and whether it was an approximation, but it gives us an idea of capacity. Monday nights were "Audition Nights." Performers were booked, but they weren't advertised in the papers. Presumably, patrons could call the club, or the bands were listed at the club itself. In some cases, record companies would arrange to have performers play Monday night at the Troubadour so they could invite a few people and check them out. I assume that when a performer did not have a full Tuesday-Sunday run, and no performer was listed (usually a Tuesday or a Sunday), "auditions" were booked on those open nights too. I think one reason to call these booking auditions was also to minimize what they were paying the performer (probably just union scale). I don't think there was an admission charge on audition night. I'm not aware of any way to retrieve who played on Audition nights (and I appear to be the first attempting to capture who played the Troubadour during this period). At the beginning of 1970, many of the acts at the Whisky had their eyes on Las Vegas, Television Variety shows and the big hotels. Hippie acts that might have been welcome at the Fillmore, or even a college campus, weren't that common. By the end of the year, the hair had gotten longer and the stakes had gotten higher. Rock music and the record industry was turning out to be big money, and finding the next big recording artist was more important than knowing who was looking good for the Ambassador Hotel downtown or the Sands in Vegas. In a previous post, I reviewed the performers at the Troubadour from January through April 1970. In a short time, the Troubadour went from mostly featuring performers looking to get on TV or into Las Vegas to long haired singer songwriters that are famous today. It was becoming clear that there was big money in the booming record industry, and the Troubadour was right at the center. This post will review the performers at the Troubadour from May through August 1970. It will also cover the opening of the ill-fated Troubadour in San Francisco. April 28-May 3, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Van Morrison/Elyse Weinberg (Tuesday-Sunday) Van Morrison was yet another artist who used the Troubadour to get heard by the whole industry. Morrison had been around for a while, of course: he had been in Them, he had a '67 hit with "Brown-Eyed Girl," and a classic 1968 album Astral Weeks. Astral Weeks hadn't sold that well, however, and while Morrison had toured a little bit, he hadn't been much heard from. By this time, Morrison was based in Woodstock, NY. Moondance, Morrison's new album on Warners, had been released in February 1970. I don't need to add that it was a revelation. There were no big singles, but FM radio worked differently than AM. Songs off the album got played all the time on the big FM stations: the title track, "Crazy Love," "And It Stoned Me," "Caravan" and Into The Mystic" got played all the time. And that was just from side one. Los Angeles wanted to hear just how he was doing this. Michael Sherman gave a generally positive review of Van Morrison in the April 30 Times (covering opening night). Sherman praised the great song and the swinging six-piece band, and of course Van's epic singing voice. The only real complaint was Morrison's eerie detachment when he delivered his joyous music. Pretty much, this was the review of every Van Morrison performance ever (certainly all the ones I saw over some decades): great songs, hot band, fantastic singing, strangely aloof. Still, Van Morrison's talent wasn't going to be contained, and playing the Troubadour for a week ensured that. Opener Elyse Weinberg is fairly obscure now, but she was very much in the mix in the 1960s. She had made a solo album in 1969 on Tetragrammaton, and it wasn't the typical singer-songwriter thing, but rather sort of a psychedelic album. Born in Ontario, Weinberg had been part of the Toronto folk scene around 1963. She had moved to Los Angeles in 1966 to meet up with her friend Neil Young. Staying with Cass Elliott, her songs got heard, and she got signed. Her album featured Neil Young and others, and apparently is a sort of lost psych classic. Weinberg released another album in 1971, then signed with Geffen Records in 1973, but ultimately retired from music. May 5-10, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Rick Nelson and The Stone Stone Canyon Band/Fairport Convention (Tuesday-Sunday) Rick Nelson had been a radio and television star since the 1950s, as the real-life and TV son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. In the early 60s, teenage Ricky liked rockabilly music, so most episodes of Ozzie And Harriet featured Ricky playing a song with his band. His band included the great James Burton on guitar, and for pop music, it was pretty rockin'. Thanks to the power of TV, the records sold massively, and songs like "Hello Mary Lou" are classics today. By the end of the decade, with Ozzie And Harriet off the air, Rick (not Ricky) Nelson was more interested in country rock in the style of Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. His new album was called Rick Sings Nelson, credited to Ricky Nelson and The Stone Canyon Band. The Stone Canyon Band included pedal steel guitarist Tom Brumley, an All-Star from Buck Owens' Buckaroos. Also in the band were guitarist Allan Kemp, drummer Patrick Shanahan and bassist Peter Cetera. Opening act Fairport Convention, then fairly obscure, would have been the real revelation. Their previous album, Liege And Leif (released in the States on A&M in December 1969), had all but single-handedly invented English folk-rock. Songs like "Come All Ye Roving Minstrels" and "Matty Groves" were getting good FM airplay all over the country. Yet for their first American tour, Fairport was without their most recognizable member, lead singer Sandy Denny. Of course, all that meant was that lead guitarist Richard Thompson was even more prominent. Despite the short opening sets, Fairport clearly caught the ears of the locals, since the band returned as headliners a few months later (in September), and apparently every musician in Los Angeles would show up. May 12-17, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Hedge and Donna/Frank Kimel (Tuesday-Sunday) Hedge And Donna had deep roots at the Troubadour. The married folksinging duo (last name Capers) from the San Dieog area had been so impressive at a Troubadour Hoot Night in 1967 that Doug Weston became their manager. By 1970, Hedge And Donna had released their 4th album on Capitol, Special Circumstances. The duo were backed by heavyweight Hollywood session pros (Joe Sample, Carole Kaye, Paul Humphrey, Ron Tutt, Sneaky Pete Kleinow and Bernie Leadon, to name a few), but their folk-rock sound had become somewhat passe. Frank Kimel is unknown to me. May 19-24, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Pentangle (Tuesday-Sunday) Pentangle were brilliant and unclassifiable, but they are usually broadly lumped in with Fairport Convention as "British Folk-Rock." That's not even wrong, but Pentangle was so much more. The quintet included two of the best and most original acoustic guitarists in the British folk scene, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Established jazz bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox added a light but swinging rhythm section, and Jacqui McShee had a striking, madrigal-style voice, ably supported by singing from the rest of the band. Pentangle were among the pioneers in--for lack of a better term--amplified acoustic music. The twin guitars could be heard with the bass and drums, and the vocals soared over the delicate but firm sound. They weren't purists--banjo or electric guitar was added as needed. They did English folk songs, American folk music, the odd R&B song and even some Charles Mingus. There was nothing like them. The previous year, the band had toured all the psychedelic ballrooms. When Pentangle had opened for the Grateful Dead (Feb 27-Mar 2 '69 at Fillmore West), Jerry Garcia was so impressed that he adopted the twin-acoustics-plus-rhythm sound for the acoustic live Dead of 1970. For this tour, Pentangle was supporting their fantastic new album Basket Of Light, which had been released in October of 1969 on Transatlantic Records. May 26-31, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Doug Kershaw (Tuesday-Sunday) Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw had been a country musician for at least a decade. His song "Diggy Diggy Lo" had reached #14 in the country charts back in 1961. Cajun music, however, was particularly suited to the amplified style of rock music, and Kershaw's remake of "Diggy Diggy Lo" had reached #69 in 1969, not too shabby for an old country guy. Kershaw's 1970 album was Spanish Moss (on Warners), made in LA with James Burton, Red Rhodes (steel guitar), Russ Kunkel (drums) and others. His version of the bluegreass classic "Orange Blossom Special" had even been a minor hit. So Kershaw was playing the Troubadour, apparently to introduce himself to a different audience. June 2-7, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Mike Nesmith with First National Band (Tuesday-Sunday) Mike Nesmith had been a Monkee, of course, so he was nationally famous. Also, he was quite a talented songwriter, but the Monkees' management had no interest in that. So when the band disintegrated at the end of 1968, Nesmith set out to make himself a "real" artist, instead of the plastic Monkee that had come before. In fact, prior to the Monkees, Nesmith had carved out something of a modest career already. In 1965, when Nesmith had been "discovered" by the TV production company, he had been the "Hootmaster" at the Troubadour. His job would have been to sing a few songs and then keep the participants moving on and off the stage. He had also written and copyrighted a number of original songs. One of them, "Different Drum," had even been a hit for the Stone Poneys (with Linda Ronstadt) in 1967, during Monkeemania. So Nesmith had plenty of building blocks for the next phase of his career. Nesmith was interested in playing what would now be called "country-rock," and formed a band with pedal steel guitar ace Red Rhodes. Nesmith played guitar, sang and wrote, and drummer John Ware and bassist John London rounded out the group. In July 1970, Mike Nesmith and The First National Band would release the album Magnetic South on RCA Records. Playing the Troubadour prior to the album's release was probably intended to give agents and radio people some insight into what to expect from the former Monkee. Given how popular the Monkees had been, that was no small thing. June 9-14, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Theo Bikel/Peter Evans (Tuesday-Sunday) Theo Bikel (1924-2015) was famous as both an actor and a folksinger. Born in Austria, he had emigrated to pre-war Palestine, and then ended up in New York. Among many other credits, he had originated the role of Captain Von Trapp in The Sound Of Music. The Times noted that he would be playing triple shows on Friday and Sunday. Bikel would have appealed to a broader age range than the hippie acts who were starting to dominate the Troubadour's bookings. Bikel would have been appealing to older fans who knew him from folk music and TV. Peter Evans was a flamenco performer. June 16-21, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Ian and Sylvia with Great Speckled Bird/Danny Cox (Tuesday-Sunday) Ian and Sylvia Tyson had been a popular Canadian folk duo going back to 1959. When folk music faded away in the mid-60s, the duo easily made the switch to country-rock, both because of their talent and their excellent songwriting skills. Ian And Sylvia's early 1968 album Nashville, on Vanguard, was one of the first collaborations between rock songwriters using Nashville session men, preceding The Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. By 1969, Ian And Sylvia had evolved into the band Great Speckled Bird, releasing an album of that same name on Ampex Records in October '69. Ian and Sylvia received a very positive review, including compliments for their pedal steel guitar player. Although not named in the review, the steel chair was held down by the great Buddy Cage. Cage would play on many of Anne Murray's hits (like "Snowbird"). When Great Speckled Bird joined the fabled Canadian Train Tour immortalized in the movie Festival Express, Jerry Garcia heard Cage and tapped him as his own replacement in the New Riders Of The Purple Sage. Cage would leave Great Speckled Bird to join the Riders in the Fall of 1971. Guitarist Amos Garrett would also end up moving to the Bay Area. Danny Cox was an African-American folksinger from Kansas City. He shared management with Brewer And Shipley. Like them, Cox would also record in San Francisco with Nick Gravenites, but his debut album would not be released until 1971. June 23-28, 30, July 1-5, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Linda Ronstadt/Kris Kristofferson (Tuesday-Sunday, Tuesday-Sunday) If Linda Ronstadt and Kris Kristofferson appeared together today in Hollywood, it would be a media event--even though they both have retired and wouldn't be performing. Imagine, for a moment, both of them young, engaging, on the rise and singing for their future, appearing for two straight weeks at the Troubadour. There would have been 24 (or maybe 30) show over twelve days--no wonder the Troubadour is a West Hollywood legend. Linda Ronstadt would have been supporting her second solo album, Silk Purse, which had been released on Capitol on April. Ronstadt had been part of the Stone Poneys, with Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards. The trio had released three albums in 1967 and '68, and had even scored a modest hit with the Michael Nesmith song "Different Drum," which reached #13 in 1967. The Stone Poneys had come from Tucson in 1965, and had played the Hoot Night at the Troubadour many times. Ronstadt had received offers as a solo singer, but she had refused to abandon her bandmates. Finally, after a Troubadour hoot performance in 1966, the Stone Poneys had been signed as a group. In the 1960s, Kris Kristofferson was only known as a Nashville songwriter, albeit a quite successful one. He had written hits like "Sunday Morning Coming Down," "Help Me Make It Through The Night" and "Me And Bobby McGee" for various artists. Kristofferson had only released his first album in 1970, Kristofferson, on Monument Records. It featured his own versions of many of his hits for others. He had toured around clubs a little bit, but he wasn't yet a polished performer. Kristofferson's backing trio had Zal Yanovsky (ex-Lovin Spooful) on guitar, Norman Blake on dobro and guitar, and Billy Swan on bass. According to a Robert Hilburn article (see August 2 below), Weston had been in San Francisco working on his new project, and invited folk legend and old friend Ramblin' Jack Elliott to see it. Elliott had brought along Kristofferson, and when Weston had heard Kristofferson casually picking and singing, Weston said he knew he had to book him. Weston had very good instincts about performers, which was how the Troubadour had consistently hired good acts on the way up. July 7-12, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: John Hartford/Steve Martin (Tuesday-Sunday) John Hartford was a singer, songwriter and talented musician from Missouri. He was best known for writing the song "Gentle On My Mind," a gigantic hit for Glenn Campbell and others. The success of the song gave Hartford some economic comfort not usually afforded bluegrass musicians. By this time, Hartford was familiar to audiences for having regularly appeared on TV shows like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour. RCA had signed Hartford back in 1966, probably figuring they were getting another country singer. In fact, Hartford was a unique and creative talent, but not always very commercial. In late 1969, Hartford had released an album entitled John Hartford (even though it was his sixth record for RCA). Strangely, it was a complexly-orchestrated country "art-rock" album, if such a thing can be imagined. It was not well-reviewed, nor did it sell well. Early in the year, Hartford had played a single Friday night engagement at the Troubadour, presumably in support (on January 2, 1970). In mid-1970, Hartford had released Iron Mountain Depot. While less arty, it seemed to be a sort of wry knockoff. Micheal Sherman reviewed Hartford's show in the Times and said it was bland. Hartford had a four-piece band, and Sherman also disapproved of his playing an electric banjo. Per Sherman, Hartford played 9 songs in his set. At this time, Steve Martin was a writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and an aspiring comedian. Since the highly-rated Smothers Brothers show had been abruptly canceled, however, Martin was probably out of work. Sherman commented that Martin played the banjo and told jokes "in the style of the Kingston Trio." I don't think he meant it as a compliment. Of course, Martin's angular approach to humor may not have been fully formed yet, and it may not have struck home to Sherman, either. Neil Diamond's Gold album was recorded live at The Troubadour on July 15, 1970, and released in August. It featured performances of his biggest hits up to that time. July 15, 1970 The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Neil Diamond (Wednesday) Neil Diamond had been a hugely successful pop songwriter for many years, and in 1969 he started to get big hits under his own name. He didn't really have a reputation as a performer yet, however, so he had played a week at the Troubadour back in March (March 24-29). Playing a week at the Troubadour would have given the industry a chance to see how well Diamond could put on a show. It must have gone well, since Diamond returned for a night to record a live album. Diamond's album Gold: Live At The Troubadour was released shortly after, in August of 1970. It was a sort of "Greatest Hits" for Neil Diamond, but including some songs that had been hits for other artists. Diamond was backed by a trio (Carol Hunter [guitar], Randy Sterling [bass] and Eddie Rubin [drums]). Diamond was from Brooklyn, and had worked in the famous Brill Building in the 60s. He had moved to Los Angeles in 1969. In 1969, Diamond's big hits had been "Sweet Caroline," which had reached #4 in May, and "Holly Holy," which had reached #3 in October. It is an irony of pop culture that the bigger of Diamond's two hits that year is now largely forgotten, whereas "Sweet Caroline" (thanks particularly to the Boston Red Sox) is an anthem. July 16-19, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Eric Andersen/David Brenner (Thursday-Sunday) Eric Andersen had been among the first wave of folksingers that followed Bob Dylan. By 1969, he had released five album for Vanguard, and his songs had been recorded by a variety of artists. Andersen then signed with Warner Brothers, and given his excellent songwriting and the renewed interest in singer/songwriters, he seemed to be well-positioned. His self-titled December 1969 album had been his second album for Warners (and his seventh overall). I'm not sure whether Andersen played solo or with a band, probably the former. Despite the changes in the record industry, his career never received the renewal that would have seemed so likely. He moved to the West Coast around this time--I'm not sure precisely when--but despite his talent and stellar connections, he never reached the success that might have seemed likely. Comedian David Brenner opened the shows. I don't know if the Andersen/Brenner booking began on Tuesday and took a night off for Neil Diamond, so I have assumed they started on Thursday. July 21-26, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Albert Collins/Jerry Hahn Brotherhood (Tuesday-Sunday) The Troubadour did not have a purist aesthetic, so for this week the club featured loud electric guitars. Texas guitarist Albert "The Iceman" Collins had been recording since the 1950s. In 1964, he had a hit with the song "Frosty," and he became somewhat well-known. In 1968, the band Canned Heat was playing in Houston and attended one of his shows. The Heat offered to get Collins a record deal and live work, and he accepted. Collins signed with Imperial Records, and moved to Palo Alto, CA (of all places) in November '68. Collins' first Imperial album was Love Can Be Found Anywhere. By 1969, Collins was a regular at rock venues throughout the West Coast. In Michael Sherman's review in the Times, he praised Collins, but suggested that he was only doing what other bluesmen had already done. Sherman probably didn't know that if there was a "typical" blues guitar sound, Collins had played a role in establishing that. Still, it isn't untrue that Collins fell into the category of "very good, but not exceptional." The Troubadour, like Hollywood in general, was about the Next Big Thing, and that wasn't going to be Albert Collins. The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood were a San Francisco band that had only formed in March. They had gotten a fairly big advance from Columbia, who was heavy on the jazz-rock vein, since they had hit it big with Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago Transit Authority. Hahn was a pretty serious jazz guitarist, based in San Francisco, and he had played with John Handy and Gary Burton, among others. As "jazz-rock" became a thing, Hahn seems to have wanted to play in a more rock vein. Organist Mike Finnegan was from Wichita, Kansas. He was not only a great Hammond player, he was a terrific blues singer too (also, he was 6'6'' tall, and had gone to U. of Kansas on a basketball scholarship, making him the Bruce Hornsby of his era). Filling out the band were jazz musicians Mel Graves on bass and George Marsh on drums. Marsh had just left the Loading Zone, an interesting (if perpetually struggling) Oakland band. Michael Sherman's review of the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood was scathing. The Hahn group was used to San Francisco, where every band jammed their brains out. Not in Hollywood. Sherman bluntly said that "at times the result was appalling. The band is either ahead of its time or simply grotesque. This reviewer leans towards the latter interpretation." The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood retreated quietly back to clubs like The Matrix in San Francisco, where they didn't seem to be grotesque. July 28-August 2, 1970, The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Tiny Tim/Lynn Kellogg (Tuesday-Sunday) Tiny Tim, born Herbert Khaury, was a talented, if eccentric performer, and an expert on largely-forgotten styles of American popular music. However, he had become a sensation when he appeared on the popular NBC variety show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. He had become a national figure, although he was seen as a novelty rather than a serious artist. At this time, his current album was For All My Little Friends, released in 1969 on Reprise Records. Tiny Tim had appeared earlier in the year at The Troubadour (the week of January 13-18). Lynn Kellogg is unknown to me. The Sunday Los Angeles Times (for August 2) had a glowing Robert Hilburn profile of Doug Weston. Weston was described as "the father of folk music in Southern California." Among other things, the article mentioned that Weston owned the building housing the Troubadour. More intriguingly, however, the article revealed that Since the Troubadour's location is threatened by a future freeway, Weston has been devoting much of his energy lately to the renovation of a four-story building in San Francisco. The building will eventually serve as the center of an entertainment complex that will include a club, recording studio, health food restaurant, offices for his record company and his residence. He originally planned to open the building last month [July], but a series of delays made him revise his schedule. Now, he's planning to open one phase of the operation at a time, with the restaurant due this month. "I will be able to stay in that building and keep busy 24 hours a day" Weston said. "It's the fulfillment of my dreams." While it seems surprising that a Los Angeles personality like Weston would plan to decamp up to San Francisco, there was logic behind his thinking. For at least two decades, the San Francisco Bay Area had been an incubator of innovative musical talent that Los Angeles record companies had thrived upon. Back in the 50s, jazzmen like Dave Brubeck and Cal Tjader, singers like Johnny Mathis and groups like the Kingston Trio had all come from the Bay Area. More recently, bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and now Santana were huge successes. So San Francisco was perhaps a better place to find and nurture new talent than Los Angeles. SF was open to new sounds, and the pressure was lower than in Hollywood. Now, granted, Bill Graham was also trying to build a music machine, with concert promotion, a booking agency, management and two record companies. Graham, however, was more oriented towards loud rock groups. Graham's talent and connections were less oriented towards quieter singer/songwriters, since they were not going to go over as well when they were third on the bill at Fillmore West. Still, thanks to Graham and the Fillmore, the record companies were starting to build studios in San Francisco: Mercury had built a studio, Columbia was planning one, and all the big acts used Wally Heider's San Francisco studios. So SF wasn't a backwater. I should note in passing that outside of sports--and really just the Giants and Dodgers--any enmity between San Franciscans and Los Angeles residents was strictly one-way. People from SF delight in putting down LA, but everybody I've ever met from Southern California absolutely loves the Bay Area. So Weston's willingness to base his operation in SF made lots of sense. For one thing, there really weren't any high profile contemporary rock clubs in San Francisco. The Matrix was a tiny backwater, and clubs like The Poppycock (Palo Alto) or The New Orleans House (Berkeley) were small and out of town. Weston would not be competing with Fillmore West for acts, and he would have no other serious competitors. It was a good plan. August 4-9, 1970 The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Livingston Taylor (Tuesday-Sunday) Livingston Taylor was two years younger than his brother James, but he had been a folk singer in the Boston area since 1966. At this time, James Taylor had released one forgotten 1968 album (on Apple, of all things) and had released his Warners debut Sweet Baby James in February. So "Fire And Rain" was climbing the charts, but Livingston wasn't just "James' brother." Not yet anyway. Livingston was also a songwriter, but he played in a bluesier style than James. Livingston had been one of the first signings on Capricorn records, the Macon, GA label founded by former Otis Redding manager Phil Walden. Walden and Capricorn's flagship was the Allman Brothers Band, of course, but they had various other acts as well. Taylor's self-titled debut on Capricorn had probably just come out. The album was produced by Boston's Jon Landau, but mainly recorded in Macon. Players on the album were Southern soul/rock veterans Pete Carr (guitar), Robert Popwell (bass), Paul Hornsby (keyboards) and Johnny Sandlin (drums). August 4-9, 1970 Troubadour (North), San Francisco, CA: Kris Kristofferson/Doug Kershaw (Tuesday-Sunday) On Tuesday, August 4, 1970, the San Francisco outpost of the Troubadour opened on 960 Bush Street. Old San Francisco rock fans may recall 960 Bush Street as the address of the Boarding House, a much-beloved venue open from 1972 to 1980. For those of us that recall the intimate circular bowl of a theater at the Boarding House, however, that was not in fact the setting for the Troubadour. The Troubadour's showroom was in the basement, basically a large dining room with a stage. In the Boarding House years, the old Troubadour stage was sometimes used for comedy shows, and generally referred to as the dining room. Probably it was used to serve dinner as well (I have included a picture of the Boarding House from the mid-70s, to show what the building looked like). What few references there are to the San Francisco Troubadour often call it the "Troubadour North," but in fact that was just a nickname; the club was named The Troubadour. To keep this post from going off the rails, however, I am referring to it here as the Troubadour (North). Phil Elwood reviewed the opening of the Troubadour in the August 5 Examiner. Elwood was very positive about Kris Kristofferson, and polite but dismissive about Doug Kershaw. In general, Elwood's description is mostly positive. The club, once Facks II and the Balalaika restaurant among many other names, has been refurbished, expanded and fitted with excellent sound and light systems for the stage...It also has some traffic problems (inside and out), noisy patrons, natural foods, organic juices, sandwiches, dinners, "breakfast trips," plus beer and wine. Clearly, Weston's concept was that the Troubadour (North) would be a restaurant destination, and not just a music showcase. It's fair to say that Weston correctly anticipated culinary trends of the next few decades, but I think he was at least a decade too early. He did say to Elwood that he expected a big lunch trade in the San Francisco club. 960 Bush (at Taylor) is in Lower Nob Hill, just West of Chinatown. It's not far from Union Square, and about six to eight blocks from Market Street and downtown, depending on what route you take. Six to eight blocks from downtown sounds promising for a nightclub, or a fashionable lunch spot. But you have to think about San Francisco. For one thing, there are steep hills in San Francisco. For another, at all times of the year, the city can be cold and windy (insert mandatory Mark Twain joke). If your date or wife was wearing high heels--it was 1970, right?--were you going to say "come on honey, let's walk 8 blocks to dinner"? Sure, you could drive, but most people don't like driving on hills, much less parallel parking. So in order to go to see a show at 960 Bush Street, you had to be comfortable driving and parking in the city, and know your way around, or else be very, very warm and hearty indeed. Certainly, for suburban folks who only came to the City a few times a year, Bush and Taylor wouldn't be a trip made with confidence. August 10, 17, 24 1971 Troubadour (North), San Francisco, CA: Hoot Night (Mondays) The San Francisco Examiner usually listed the Monday auditions as "Hoot Night," continuing the pattern of the Hollywood club. I would love to know who played, but there's probably no way to ever find out. August 11-16, 1970 Troubadour (North), San Francisco, CA: Livingston Taylor/The Dillards (Tuesday-Sunday) One very obvious benefit to Weston to opening the SF Troubadour was that he could book artists in two cities. For the opening month, San Francisco and Hollywood had very similar bookings. Livingston Taylor had played the previous week in Hollywood, and then came up to San Francisco for another week. Also on the bill were The Dillards, who had played the West Hollywood club many times. The Dillards were veteran bluegrass performers, having come out to Los Angeles from Salem, MO back in 1963. The Dillards, too, had some TV fame, having had recurring roles as The Darling Family on The Andy Griffith Show. The Dillards had a new album in 1970, Copperfields, although I'm not sure exactly when it was released. It was their fifth album for Elektra, and their first in two years (since 1968's Wheatstraw Suite). By this time, The Dillards had remodeled themselves into a more folk-rock style, and less explicitly bluegrass oriented, but the high lonesome sound was probably still a big part of their stage show. Herb Pedersen had replaced Doug Dillard, but Rodney Dillard (guitar), Dean Webb (mandolin) and Mitch Jayne (bass) were still in the band. In the August 11 Examiner, Elwood had an extensive interview with Doug Weston about his new club: "The Troubadour is not a night club," the thin, 6-foot-6 owner, Doug Weston stated as we walked through his newly opened establishment. "It is the prepared health food and service here in the San Francisco Troubadour that are going to be the most important," he said, "not just the entertainment, or the recording studio, shops or even the natural food store. "The Troubadour is going to provide the opportunity, for everyone who wants it, to get out of their plastic, rubber-stamp world. We are catering to all levels and phases of San Francsico's population. "The Troubadour, you see, is a way of life to me and those who work with me. We think our life-style is worth expanding into the community." Weston, something of a legend in the world of folk-rock (he admits to coining the term) has spent a dozen years building the Santa Monica Boulevard Troubadour in Hollywood into a world-famous entertainment room. Six months ago [February] he bought the 45 year old building at 960 Bush Street and began a massive refurbishing job. The lowest level (of four) is the showroom which opened to the public last week.... One level was once the Bush Street Theater, later Coast Recording's studios. The proscenium remains, as does a mishmash of recording studios and engineer's rooms. Weston plans to present live programs and TV programs from the hall as well as utilize the recording facilities... What Elwood refers to here as the former Bush Street Theater would re-open as a theater in late 1971. By that time, SF Troubadour manager David Allen had re-opened the Troubadour as The Boarding House. Around 1972, the "Boarding House Theater" started being used for Boarding House shows, and ultimately the entire operation was based upstairs. The sightlines were better, and the capacity was greater (300 vs 225). In the Theater's prior life, it had been the Coast Recording studios in the 1950s and early '60s. In the early and mid-60s, the apprentice engineer was one Dan Healy, later the Grateful Dead's soundman (he apparently would sneak the Dead and other bands in after hours to make tapes). August 13-16, 1970 The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Laura Nyro/Peter Evans (Thursday-Sunday) Laura Nyro headlined a week at The Troubadour, and it was a major event. Todd Rundgren, a formidable songwriter himself, heard her play live and changed his whole approach to songwriting, possibly at one of these concerts (in the song "Baby, Let's Swing" from Runt he sings "Laura/I saw you open in LA"). Laura Nyro was already a hugely successful songwriter by this time, but she didn't perform much. Few people would have been able to see her live, so this was a major event. Apparently she did not disappoint. Laura Nyro (1947-1997) had been born in the Bronx. Her songs merged the catchy Brill Building sound with soul music, so her songs were catchy, deep and danceable--a formidable combination. Her 60s hit songs are familiar to everyone of a certain age: "Wedding Bell Blues" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" (both Fifth Dimension), "And When I Die" (Blood, Sweat and Tears), "Eli's Coming" (Three Dog Night) and "Stoney End" (Barbara Streisand) are just the most prominent. Her actual recording career was more checkered. More Than A New Discovery, her debut, had been released by Verve Folkways in February 1967. Nyro had then appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in July, but her soul sound did not go over as well as the more feedback-heavy acts. David Geffen then took over as her manager, and managed to void her previous contracts on the grounds that she had signed them as a minor. Nyro went to Columbia, where she had released Eli and The 13th Confession in 1968. It was followed by New York Tendaberry in Fall 1969. By 1970, Geffen and Nyro had sold her publishing (through Tuna Fish Music) for $4.5 million, a huge number. They split the money, and Nyro was then free of having to worry about her next hit. Robert Hilburn's review of the opening show (Thursday April 13 early show) is glowing. The place was packed, Nyro played 8 songs on the piano and the crowd went absolutely crazy. She comes back for two more encores. Hilburn cannot say enough nice things about her, and all of Hollywood agreed. Although only 22 (Hilburn mentions this), Nyro doesn't need to record or tour, so it makes the rare display of her many talents all the more special. The fact that Nyro played the Troubadour and not a larger place--which she could have easily sold out--added immeasurably to the club's aura. Nyro did not play a full six nights, like most acts, probably because she didn't need to. I'm sure there were additional "Audition Nights" on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I can't find any record of who might have played. I believe Peter Evans was a flamenco guitarist. August 18-23, 1970 The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: The Dillards/Longbranch Pennywhistle (Tuesday-Sunday) The Dillards now headlined a week at The Troubadour in West Hollywood. They had played the clubs many times before, but in their most recent appearance (in January of 1970) they had been opening for Phil Ochs. Now they were the headliners. I suspect this was because they had a new album (Copperfields), but I haven't been able to track down the release date. Since they were playing in Los Angeles, it's likely they were joined by fiddler Byron Berline, who was sort of an adjunct member of the group. Opening act Longbranch Pennywhistle was the singer/songwriter duo of Glenn Frey and JD Souther. The pair would release their only album on Amos Records in early 1970. They had opened at the Troubadour before, for the Flying Burrito Brothers (in January and then April of 1970). Presumably Frey and Souther's housemate, Jackson Browne, dropped by at least once. August 18-23, 1970 Troubadour (North), San Francisco, CA: John Stewart/Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks (Tuesday-Sunday) Phil Elwood reviewed John Stewart's opening night at the Troubadour in the Examiner (Thursday August 20), and hinted at the club's problems. Elwood loved Stewart, but he began the review by saying "If the new Troubadour on Bush Street can come up with a quality headliner like big John Stewart every week, most of Doug Weston's problems will evaporate." So even two weeks in, it was clear that the Troubadour wasn't catching on. Jerry Jeff Walker had originally been booked, but he seems to have been replaced by Stewart. Stewart had many local ties, and may have already been living in Marin by this time. Elwood mentions that Stewart played a 9-song set, and compliments his' singing and guitar playing, mentioning that he was backed by bassist Bryan Garafolo and drummer Lloyd Barata. John Stewart (1939-2008) had been a member of The Kingston Trio from 1961 to 1967. The group had been very popular, but they were passed by when the likes of The Beach Boys and The Beatles came along. Stewart had gone solo, and released a variety of well-received albums, such as 1969's California Bloodlines. Although he had written a hit for The Monkees ("Daydream Believer"), Stewart was well known at this time, but not particularly successful. His current album would have been Willard, released on Capitol in 1970. The album was produced by Peter Asher, and recorded in Hollywood and Nashville. The LA tracks included players like James Taylor, Carole King, Mike Stewart (John's brother) and Chris Darrow, and the Nashville tracks had stellar backing as well. Clearly, Capitol felt Stewart was ticketed for success in the new world of singer/songwriters. Stewart actually had a fairly productive career into the 21st century, but in the early 70s he did not have the success that his talent would have foretold. Elwood also briefly mentioned opening act Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. Hicks had been around the San Francisco scene as long as there had been one. He had been the drummer in the Charlatans, the band that started the psychedelic ballroom revolution in Virginia City, NV. Later he had switched to guitar, so he could sing more. The Charlatans played loud, psychedelic blues, however, and Hicks had other interests. He formed a "side group" with local violinist David LaFlamme to play a sort of modified swing music. When LaFlamme left to form It's A Beautiful Day, Hicks left the Charlatans and formed Dan Hicks And His Hot Licks. The band had released an album in 1969 on Epic, Original Recordings. The group wore Edwardian clothes, and it looked like a repackage of an old album. While the band played acoustic swing music, kind of, Hicks' wry, cynical lyrics were a striking contrast to the music. The album included future Hicks' classics like "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away" and "I Scare Myself." Nobody sounded like Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. The band at this time was probably Hicks on lead vocals and guitar, Jon Weber on lead guitar (Elwood mentions him), Sid Page on violin and Jaime Leopold on bass. "The Hot Licks" personnel varied sometimes, but at this time I believe it was Maryann Price and Naomi Ruth Eisenberg. Hicks most famous album, Where's The Money (Blue Thumb) would actually be recorded at the West Hollywood Troubadour in February 1971. August 25-30, 1970 The Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA: Elton John/David Ackles (Tuesday-Sunday) Elton John's appearance at the Troubadour was likely the most significant booking in the history of the club, and that's no small thing. Certainly, Elton John is a huge star, and his performance at the Troubadour was a booster rocket for his success. Elton himself thinks that, as the event is replayed in his biopic, where he feels like he is being lifted off the stage as he plays the Troubadour. Still, the event wasn't just significant for Elton John's formidable career. The 1960s had witnessed the rise of rock music, first the Beatles and Stones, and then Cream and Hendrix and both Fillmores. It was loud, free and electric. In Hollywood, rising rock bands played the Whisky-A-Go-Go. Led Zeppelin had come to town as nobody in January of 1969, and after a week at the Whisky they were off and running. Now, wherever you are on the spectrum of Elton John fandom, it's undeniable that he cut across a lot of boundaries. Bernie Taupin's lyrics were thoughtful, and Elton sang them with feeling. The songs were carefully arranged so the full impact of those lyrics could be heard. Yet even just with a trio, Elton John rocked hard, his piano covering a lot of musical territory. Elton could have rocked out the Whisky, no problem. Certainly, Elton killed it later in the year at both Fillmores. But he played The Troubadour the week of August 25-30, 1970, and elevated it, and the era of the singer-songwriter had begun, with its most successful performer. Elton John had been a working musician in England in the mid-60s, playing with Long John Baldry and others. He also had a songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin. Elton (birth name Reginald Dwight) had released his debut album Empty Sky in 1969. It was only released initially in the UK, and made little impact. In 1970, he released his second album, Elton John, but it was his first album released in the United States, on the tiny Uni label (DJM in the UK). Ultimately, there were two big hits off the record, "Your Song" and "Take Me To The Pilot," but the single wasn't released until October of 1970. Still, Elton's album was getting FM airplay on rock stations. Elton's management sent him to America mainly to expose him to the music industry, so that he could get radio play. It was the form book for success in the 1970s. The old 60s model had been that bands toured all the Fillmore-type places, as well as the civic auditoriums and the rock festivals and college gyms, first as an opening act, then second and finally headlining. As a band became known, they started getting airplay on the local hippie FM stations. Bands like Ten Years After became huge on this model, without any really major records. The 1970s acts inverted this model--get big on the radio, and then rake in the concert receipts. In that sense, Elton John (along with his manager John Reid) were pioneers. Robert Hilburn's review of Elton John's opening night is the biggest rave any artist has probably ever received (from the August 27, 1970 Times): Rejoice. Rock music, which has been going through a rather uneventful period lately, has a new star. He’s Elton John, a 23-year old Englishman whose United States debut Tuesday night at the Troubadour was, in almost every way, magnificent... His music is so staggeringly original that it is obvious he is not merely operating within a given musical field (such as country or blues or rock), but, like Randy Newman and Laura Nyro among others, creating his own field… The audience, which included one of the largest local gatherings of rock writers in months, roared its approval, bringing John back for an encore….Tuesday night at the Troubadour was just the beginning. He’s going to be one of rock’s biggest and most important stars. Remember, Hilburn was right in all of his predictions. Hilburn reveals another important point, too, which any 20th century rock journalist would confirm. The local rock writers in any city all knew each other, and often judged the buzz surrouding an artist by how many of their fellow critics were at a show. When Hilburn says Elton's opening show was "one of the largest local gatherings of rock writers in months," it's a marker that it isn't just Hilburn who can read the omens. Elton John was coming, and the Troubadour was where you got to see it first. David Ackles, an American songwriter, had released his second album on Elektra in 1970, Subway To The Country. Ackles was widely regarded by British artists like Elton John, Elvis Costello and Phil Collins, but he did not become known at all until later, and he was never really popular. Ackles opened for Elton John at the Troubadour in both Hollywood (August 25-30) and San Francisco (September 1-6), and apparently Elton watched his show every night. Bernie Taupin would produce Ackles' 3rd album (American Gothic) released in 1972. August 25-30, 1970 Troubadour (North), San Francisco, CA: Mike Nesmith and First National Band/Lisa Kindred (Tuesday-Sunday) Nesmith and his First National Band played a week in San Francisco. By this time, their new album Magnetic South would have been out for at least a month. Opener Lisa Kindred was a bluesy guitar player from Buffalo. She had released an interesting album on Vanguard in 1965 (I Like It This Way). While it was well-received, Kindred had had a variety of problems with record companies, and pretty much did not release anything after that. She had moved to the Bay Area by 1969, where she would perform in various configurations for many years. Elwood praises her singing, and mentions that she was accompanied by guitarist John Besharian. September 1-6, 1970 Troubadour (North), San Francisco, CA: Elton John/David Ackles (Tuesday-Sunday) The display ad above (from the August 28, 1970 Examiner) is one of the very few traces of Elton John's appearance at the San Francisco Troubadour. Following his pattern, Weston booked Elton John for a week in San Francisco right after his Los Angeles debut. Elton's performance at the Hollywood Troubadour made his career, changed his life and was a milestone in popular music. It is telling that Elton John's similar performance in San Francisco disappeared almost without a trace. I'll save you the trouble of googling--I'm the only person to write about it. Even the first-rate Eltonography site can only allude to it vaguely. Now, let's be clear--the SF Examiner reviewed the opening night, and the reviewer (Michael Kelton) acknowledges Elton's talent, energy and songs. But he dismisses him for being "inauthentic," although he uses the term "artificial." The San Francisco ethic at the time was Jerry Garcia or Carlos Santana, crouched and squinting over their guitars, not a guy in a sequined suit jumping around. Elton John's appearance at the Hollywood Troubadour is the centerpiece of his bio-movie--his appearance at the same club in San Francisco is barely even noted in the website devoted to his history. Music and the music industry was changing, and the center of gravity was heading south down Highway 101, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. By the end of 1970, as we will see in the next installment, the West Hollywood Troubadour was one of the most important venues in popular music. The San Francisco Troubadour would only last two more months, and would disappear with almost no trace.
4334	dbpedia	3	23	https://www.edsullivan.com/about-ed-sullivan/	en	About Ed Sullivan	http://www.edsullivan.com/files/2010/08/ed.png	http://www.edsullivan.com/files/2010/08/ed.png	[ "https://www.edsullivan.com/wp-content/themes/edsullivan_edsullivan/assets/images/logo.png", "https://www.edsullivan.com/files/2010/08/ed.png", "https://www.edsullivan.com/wp-content/themes/edsullivan_edsullivan//assets/images/logo-sofa.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2010-08-16T20:50:11+00:00	ED SULLIVAN (1902-1974) “Master of Variety” “Ed Sullivan can’t sing, can’t dance and can’t tell a joke, but he does it better than anyone else.” – Alan King The story of Ed Sullivan is one of a man whose on-camera persona was that of a stone-faced, humorless emcee. However, his off-screen life was full of […]	en	https://www.edsullivan.c…ed-fav-32x32.png	Ed Sullivan Show	https://www.edsullivan.com/about-ed-sullivan/	ED SULLIVAN (1902-1974) “Master of Variety” “Ed Sullivan can’t sing, can’t dance and can’t tell a joke, but he does it better than anyone else.” – Alan King The story of Ed Sullivan is one of a man whose on-camera persona was that of a stone-faced, humorless emcee. However, his off-screen life was full of glamour, great career heights and the personal satisfaction of being famous. He tried to make a name in the movies, loved the New York nightlife and was an avid world traveler. Ed led the life of an eccentric celebrity living in the Delmonico Hotel, out all night and eating pork chops for a late breakfast. But Ed’s ultimate claim to fame was that he hosted the longest running primetime variety show in the history of television. The true story of Ed Sullivan is a fascinating tale of a complex man that has never been told. Edward Vincent Sullivan and his twin brother Daniel were born in Harlem, New York on September 28, 1901. Daniel was a sickly child who lived only a few months. Ed, on the other hand, was a strong boy who loved all sports. He began his professional career as a newspaper reporter, covering sports for a variety of papers until 1931. Then his career took a major turn when he wrote a feature about Broadway, prompting The New York Daily News to hire him to write a regular column, “Little Ole New York,” on all aspects of the city. From 1932 until his death, a Sullivan column remained a popular fixture in the N.Y. newspaper world. Beginning in the late 1920’s, Sullivan added another dimension to his working life when he began hosting radio programs with Broadway themes. Many entertainers, among them Jimmy Durante, Irving Berlin and Jack Benny made their radio debuts on his show. By the 1940’s, while hosting “Ed Sullivan Presents” from the 21 Club, Ed began to accept offers to emcee reviews at theaters in Manhattan which led to him hosting additional events. He was now on his way to achieving what he had always wanted – fame. In 1926, Ed met and began dating Sylvia Weinstein. Sylvia tried to tell her Jewish family she was dating a man named Ed Solomon, but her brother figured out she meant Ed Sullivan. With both families strongly opposed to a Catholic-Jewish wedding, the affair was on-again-off-again for three years. Ed and Sylvia were finally married in a City Hall ceremony and a year later Sylvia gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, named after Ed’s mother. The couple was always “on the town,” eating out five nights a week at some of the trendiest clubs and restaurants – The Stork Club, Danny’s Hideaway and Jimmy Kelly’s. Ed would hobnob with the rich and famous, was friends with U.S. Presidents and would even receive audiences with various Popes. In 1947, Sullivan emceed the Harvest Moon Ball for The New York Daily News and, unbeknownst to him, the affair was televised (very few people had TV’s then). CBS subsequently hired Sullivan to host their new variety show, “Toast of the Town,” which debuted on June 20, 1948. It was rough going in the beginning with sponsors threatening to pull their advertising dollars unless CBS replaced Ed. Ed was a fighter and battled hard to book the best talent he could and William Paley, the head of CBS stood behind him. Ed loved to stand in the spotlight on center stage. He had found his métier. The show would air continuously on CBS Sunday nights at 8pm for an amazing 23 years. Ed fought his numerous critics and eventually his weekly show took hold and became a major ratings success, prompting the network to announce Ed Sullivan as the host at the beginning of each show. In 1955 the show was re-named “The Ed Sullivan Show” and in 1967 Ed received one of his greatest honors — the theater from where he broadcast his show was re-named The Ed Sullivan Theater. With an uncanny ability to spot top-notch talent, Sullivan presided over many “firsts” on American television. Among the individuals or groups who made their first television appearances on the show, or who were relatively unknown until they appeared, include Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Dick Van Dyke, Hank Williams, Jr., The Rolling Stones, Jack Benny, Elvis Presley and, of course, The Beatles. Still, Ed would be as likely to present unusual acts like plate spinners, the Singing Nun, Señor Wences and Topo Gigio as he would be to introduce America to “culture” like ballet, opera, classical music and Broadway show tunes. In short, Ed had become the arbiter of taste for America! One of the most important contributions Ed Sullivan will be remembered for is how he bucked the system and embraced African-American performers giving them their first television breaks. He supported talent with a passion, regardless of race, introducing an audience to timeless legends like Nat “King” Cole, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr., Ella Fitzgerald and dozens more. He even held hands with Pearl Bailey on his show, much to the chagrin of his sponsors (especially in the South). He was very close friends of Louis Armstrong and paid for the Harlem funeral of dancing legend, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson when he died penniless. In the sixties Ed embraced the brand of a small record company from Detroit – Berry Gordy’s Motown! He presented nearly all the Motown acts including The Supremes, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Jackson 5, etc. He also helped break the race barrier in the comedy world by presenting comedians such as Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley, Flip Wilson and Bill Cosby. Perhaps what most people remember about “The Ed Sullivan Show” is that it gave us two of the most memorable, iconic moments in television history – the legendary “from the waist-up only” appearance of Elvis Presley and the American television debut of The Beatles. Few people realize that Ed Sullivan didn’t actually introduce Elvis on his Sullivan Show debut. Six weeks earlier Ed and his son-in-law, the producer of the show, Robert Precht, were in a near fatal car accident near Ed’s Connecticut country home. It was guest host Charles Laughton who did the honors of introducing Presley to his biggest audience ever – 60 million TV viewers. The Beatles appeared live four times on “The Ed Sullivan Show” opening the door for the British Invasion that followed. They were the first UK group to conquer America, and as we all know – they forever changed music history. Ed was a good and loyal friend to those he liked, but heaven help you if you were his enemy. Ed’s famous feuds were legendary. Harriet Van Horne of The New York World Telegram & Sun wrote, “Sullivan got to where he is by having no personality; he is the commonest common denominator.” In response, Sullivan wrote her an uncharacteristically short note “Dear Miss Van Horne. You Bitch. Sincerely, Ed Sullivan.” On one show an address by President Johnson caused comedian Jackie Mason to have to cut his routine. A visibly shaken Mason started making fun of Ed’s pointing and motions for him to wrap up his monologue. He allegedly gave Ed “the finger” live on the air. Ed was furious, banned Jackie Mason from his show and a multi-year, million dollar lawsuit ensued. To this day Jackie still complains that Sullivan ruined his career for 20 years. A solid family man, Sullivan loved his wife and daughter Betty, but it is rumored he was also something of a ladies’ man. The truth is he loved the finer things in life, including long-legged dancers. He also liked to gamble on horses and even owned harness silkies that raced at Suffolk Downs, Boston. Ed ran his show with an iron will and he was often known to edit artists’ routines when he saw fit. During a rehearsal when CBS censors and Ed told Bob Dylan he couldn’t perform “Talking John Birch Society Blues,” the legendary singer-songwriter walked out and never appeared on the show – a decision he is said to regret to this day. Ed forced the Rolling Stones to change their lyrics from “let’s spend the night together” to “let’s spend some time together” much to the chagrin of Mick Jagger who rolled his eyes at the camera every time he came to the song’s title. Jim Morrison and The Doors were also asked to change the lyrics of “Light My Fire” and not sing “girl you couldn’t get much higher.” When they performed live they kept the song’s original lyrics which made Ed absolutely livid. After the show when Ed said, “you’ll never do the Sullivan Show again,” Morrison calmly replied, “We just did the Sullivan Show.” In 1971, CBS canceled “The Ed Sullivan Show” rather unexpectedly, claiming the costs had become prohibitive and the tastes of the American audience had changed. Sullivan produced several annual specials for CBS with his son-in-law, Robert Precht, but was bitterly angry with the network because he desperately wanted his show to complete a 25 year run. Heartbroken by the sudden cancellation of his show and crushed by Sylvia’s death the year before, Ed Sullivan died on October 13, 1974 at the age of 73. His show and its timeless 10,000 performances by so many of the world’s greatest artists (1,045 hours of “The Ed Sullivan Show” are archived) live on and to this day his name and all he accomplished still reverberates in both television and rock ‘n’ roll history.
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4334	dbpedia	3	74	https://www.blackburnchapel.com/obituary-archive	en	North Branch MI funeral home and cremation			[ "https://s3.amazonaws.com/CFSV2/stockimages/344999-mail4.png", "https://s3.amazonaws.com/CFSV2/stockimages/75200-send-flowers-blk-swq.png", "https://s3.amazonaws.com/CFSV2/siteimages/bkp/455559-bkp-logo-ks.png", "https://s3.amazonaws.com/CFSV2/stockimages/399688-deco-8-white.png", "https://www.blackburnchap...	[]	[]	[ "Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral", "funeral home", "funeral home in North Branch MI", "funeral services", "traditional funeral service", "cremation", "embalming", "caskets", "urns", "funeral flowers", "pre-need", "funeral arrangement", "funeral pre-arrangement", "funeral planning" ]	null	[ "Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral" ]	null	Obituary Archive - Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral offers a variety of funeral services, from traditional funerals to competitively priced cremations, serving North Branch, MI and the surrounding communities. We also offer funeral pre-planning and carry a wide selection of caskets, vaults, urns and burial containers.	en	//s3.amazonaws.com/CFSV2/favicons/5402-favicon.ico	Obituary Archive \| Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral \| North Branch MI funeral home and cremation	https://www.blackburnchapel.com/obituary-archive	Sue Ann Stevens, age 65 of Rhome, Texas (formerly of Oxford, Michigan) passed away on Sunday, November 6, 2016. Sue was born on December 21, 1950, the daughter of Douglas and Marion (Daymon) Parks. She had a love for all animals and was a 4-H Leader. As a 4-H leader she showed dogs, goats, ducks, and turkeys and she enjoyed gardening, growing the largest pumpkins. Left to cherish her memory are daughter, Heather (Traci Moss) Stevens; sons, Terry Stevens, Rodney Stevens and Timothy (Luanne) Stevens; sisters, Patricia Hartwick, Victoria (Duane) Turk, Linda Meshigaud and Cynthia (Don) VanGilder; brother, Darwin (Steven Piziks) McClary; 2 grandchildren, Lucas and Nicholas Stevens; many nephews and nieces. She was preceded in death by her parents, and sister, Sandra K. Spencer. Memorials may be directed to the family. The family will be present for visitation on Monday, November 14, 2016 from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. The Funeral Service will follow at 1:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Burial will be in Lum Cemetery.Rev. Ron Hutchinson will officiate. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Barbara Stover, age 75, of North Branch passed away Monday, November 7, 2016 at Marlette United Hospice. Barb was born February 11, 1941 in Atlantic Mine, Michigan, the daughter of Andrew and Elvira (Keranen) Belkola. Barb grew up in the Barnes Lake area and graduated from Lapeer High School in 1958. Barb received her Associates Degree in Business Administration. On June 13, 1959 she married Tom Stover. Barb retired from the Lapeer Area Hospice as their office manager. Barb loved the Lord and was a long term member of the Faith Community Church. Barb enjoyed embroidering, sewing, making quilts, traveling and camping. Nothing gave her more enjoyment than her husband, children and grandchildren. Left to cherish her memory are; her husband, Tom; daughter, Carol (Scott) Parish of North Branch; son, Joe (Daphne) Stover of Metamora; brothers; Gordon (Ilean) Belkola of Florida, and Glen Belkola of Hawaii; 7 grandchildren; Rebecca, David, Jeremy, Joshua, Matthew, Logan and Lexie. She was preceded in death by her parents. Memorials may be made to the United Hospice Service of Marlette or the Faith Community Church. The family will be present for visitation on Saturday, November12, 2016 from 4:00 pm to 8pm and on Sunday, November13, 2016 from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm. The Funeral Service will follow at 1:00 pm, Sunday, November 13, 2016 all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Brent Jerome will officiate. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Nancy E. Ockstadt, age 67, of Columbiaville passed away Monday, October 17, 2016 at home with her family by her side. Nancy was born on June 23, 1949 in Flint, MI. She is the daughter of the late Bill and Thelma (Lutze) Hauxwell. She grew up in the North Branch area and graduated from North Branch High School in 1967. Nancy worked for several title companies for over 30 years. Nancy attended the North Branch Wesleyan Church and volunteered for Love, Inc. Nancy also donated her time to the North Branch Thrift Shop. She loved spending time with her grandchildren, children, family and friends. Nancy is survived by: her children, Monica Ockstadt of IL and Nathan (Kaylah) Ockstadt of North Branch; grandchildren, Wade, Gracie and Hannah; brother, Bruce Hauxwell of Mayville; best friends of many years, Sue Brady and Bonnie Hunt. Nancy was preceded in death by: her parents and sister, Audrey. Nancy’s family would like to express their gratitude to Bonnie Hunt, Sue Brady, Debbie & Joe Bastien and Kim Ockstadt for all of their loving help and support the last few weeks. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to the North Branch Wesleyan Church or Love, Inc. A celebration of life for Nancy will be held on Saturday, October 22nd at 12 PM at the West Deerfield Cemetery with Pastor Peter Damaska officiating. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com David Allan Yeacker, age 55, of Fostoria, passed away on Saturday, October 15, 2016 at home in the loving care of his family. Dave was born on December 23, 1960 in Pontiac, Michigan, the son of Jerry and Mary Ann (Neville) Yeacker. Dave served his country in the U.S. Navy. Dave was employed at Delta Faucet Company/Masco of Lapeer, MI. Dave was an avid reader, he enjoyed playing cards and riding his bicycle. Left to cherish his memory are: his mother, Mary Ann Yeacker; sister, Linda (Cliff) Goffar; brother, Rod (Kara) Yeacker; nieces and nephews, Matt, Jesse, Amanda, Emily, Ben and Kate; great-uncle of eight; aunts, uncles, friends, and cousins. He was preceded in death by his father, Jerry Lee. Memorials may be made to the American Cancer Society. Cremation will take place. David's Celebration of Life will be on Saturday, October 29th from 1 pm- 5 pm at the home at 7292 North Lapeer Road, Fostoria, MI. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Harlene Chambers, age 80, of North Branch passed away October 5, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Harlene was born May 3, 1936 in Silverwood, the daughter of Charles and Florence (Hoffman) Boyle. Harlene graduated from North Branch High School in 1955. Harlene was a member of the Country Christian Church. She enjoyed sewing, crocheting, baking and the most important thing is spending time with her family and grandchildren. Harlene was very active in 4-H and going to the 4-H Fair. Harlene is survived by daughter, Kim Chambers of North Branch; son, Kevin (Rhondelle) Chambers of Northport, Alabama; sister, Caroline Woodward of Lapeer and Kendra (Russ) Richmond of Kingston; brothers, Lyle Boyle of Davison, Lowell (Sally) Boyle of Tennessee, Earl (Roxanne) Boyle of North Branch, Cecile (Corinne) Boyle of Shelby Twp., Kelly (Michelle) Boyle of Marlette; brother-in-law, Norm (friend, Joan Swaim) Haggedone of Lake Orion; 9 grandchildren, 7 great-grandchildren, many nieces, nephews, and cousins. She was preceded in death by her parents; sisters, Ellen Ann, Helen and Mina; brother, Jerome. The family will be present for visitation on Saturday, October 8, 2016 from 10am to 2pm and 4 to 8 pm, and on Sunday, October 9, 2016 from 12 to 1pm. The Funeral Service will follow at 1:00 pm, all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Rev. Ronald Hutchinson will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Jim E. Nagle, age 80, of Fostoria, passed away on Monday, October 3, 2016 at his home in the loving care of his family. Jim was born July 10, 1936 in Pontiac, the son of Homer and Ruth (Cook) Nagle. He grew up in Lake Orion area and graduated from Lake Orion in 1954. On August 10, 1974 he married Carol McKinney. Jim was a body repairman for General Motors for over 33 years. Jim and Carol were members of The Community of Christ in Lake Otter Lake. Jim enjoyed woodworking, going to flea markets running their business called the “ CJ Novelties and Gifts”, but he especially enjoyed spending time with his family. Jim is survived by his wife, Carol; daughters, Lori (Ben) Pendergrass of Tennessee, Deb (Randy) Davis of Alabama, and Debbie Anderson of North Branch; sons, Jim (Toni) Nagle of Virginia, Charles (Melinda) Nagle of North Branch, Dan (Jenis) Nagle of North Carolina, and Darryl (Shelly) Winterton of North Branch; 21 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren, many nieces and nephews. Jim was preceded in death by his parents and a sister. Family will be present for visitation on Thursday, October 6, 2016 from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, with the Funeral Service to follow at 1:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Lisa Myers will officiate. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Donna Dickerson, age 77, a lifelong resident of Silverwood passed away Sunday, September 25, 2016 at home. Donna was born November 25, 1938, in Silverwood, MI. Donna is the daughter of the late Stuart and Mildred (Boyl) D’Arcy. Donna grew up in Silverwood. Donna graduated from North Branch High School in 1956. On August 8, 1959 she married Harold Dickerson in Silverwood. Donna was a homemaker who enjoyed watching television and caring for her pets. Most of all, Donna loved spending time with her grandsons and family. Donna is survived by: her children, Tanya (Ronald) Romanowski of Fostoria, Rebecca (Michael) Hauxwell of Silverwood and Harold (Della) Dickerson of Fostoria; grandsons, Daniel, Adam and Mason; several nieces and nephews; her beloved pets, Marley, Precious, Smokey and Miss Piggy. Donna was preceded in death by her parents, husband Harold, grandson Michael, sister Joan Summersett and brother Charles D’Arcy. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to Silverwood United Methodist Church or the American Cancer Society. Family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, September 27th from 4 pm – 8 pm and on Wednesday, September 28th from 10 am – 11 am at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Funeral Service will be on Wednesday, September 28th at 11 am at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home with Deacon Joe Schierlinger officiating . Donna will be laid to rest next to her husband, Harold, in West Burlington Cemetery. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Robert “Rob” Bennett, age 50, of North Branch passed away September 18, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Regional Hospital after a short battle with cancer. Rob was born on December 25, 1965 in Caro, Michigan, the son of Ralph Raymond and Betty Ann (Tallieu) Bennett. Rob graduated from North Branch High School. Rob worked at many local factories in the area and he also worked for the DNR for a while. When Rob was younger he enjoyed hunting, and he also liked to fish, and spend time with his family. He is survived by his mother, Betty Cloutier of North Branch; sons, Robert “Bud” Bennett and Tony Bennett both of North Branch; sister, Sheila Davis of Marlette; brother, Dick (Teresa) Johnson of Tawas; grandson, Robert Bennett Jr.; several nieces, nephews and cousins. He was preceded in death by his father, grandparents, and brother, David. Memorials may be made to the family. The family will be present for visitation on Wednesday, September 21, 2016 from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM with the Funeral Service to follow at 2:00 PM all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Rob will be buried next to his father at Maple Grove Cemetery, North Branch. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com HERON- Samuel H. Heron, age 82 of North Branch passed away Thursday, September 15, 2016 after a short stay at Wm Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak.He was born December 22, 1933 in Cass City, MI to Allen and Reita (Sharrard) Heron. He was a 1953 graduate of North Branch High School, playing football for the undefeated Broncos three years in a row. After graduation, he married his high school sweetheart, Donna B. Byers on October 24, 1953. Together they shared everything in nearly 63 years of marriage. Sam was drafted into the Army in 1955 and was honorably discharged six months later after a severe leg injury. Sam worked 17 years for Chaso Royco on the floor and then as foreman. In 1970, he became an insurance agent and worked in that industry 22 years, both for Farm Bureau Insurance and then as an independent agent and owner of Sam Heron Insurance in Lapeer. Sam may be best known as a consummate horseman, having horses from 1940 (age 7) until 2014 (age 81). He and his children showed Quarter Horses for over 30 years, having an AQHA national champion pleasure stallion—Lacy Reb Robin—in 1969. He raced Standard Bred Horses for over 26 years—having the Michigan State Champion 3-Year Old Colt—Scrappy Alex—in 2014. He served on the Lapeer County Sherriff’s Posse for 40 years and was a member of North Branch Wesleyan Church, where he was an avid athletic booster for North Branch Wesleyan Academy. He was also the sexton of Westlawn Cemetery in North Branch for 60 years. Among all these things, Sam’s favorite pastime was investing time loving and supporting his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in all their endeavors! Preceding him in death were his parents; his daughter, Jane Ann (1955); his son, Jan Alden (1989) and his brother Donald A Heron (2007). Surviving him are his wife, Donna; two daughters Jill Heron and Julie (David) Richardson, all of North Branch; two sons, Jeffery (Lois) Heron of Sioux Falls, SD and Joel Heron of Greenville, MI; brother, David Atwell of Tennessee; 11 grandchildren and their spouses and 20 great-grandchildren and two more on the way. Also surviving are two sisters, Audrey (Max) Seidel of Imlay City and Patricia (Glen) Sibley of Aurora, CO. A celebration of life service will be held at 3:00 pm Sunday, September 18, 2016 at North Branch Wesleyan Church, with Pastor Peter Damaska officiating. The family will be receiving condolences on Saturday, September 17, 2016 from 2:00 to 8:00 pm and one hour prior to the funeral at North Branch Wesleyan Church, 3164 North Branch Rd., North Branch. Burial will be at Westlawn Cemetery immediately following the funeral. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be given to North Branch Area Schools Athletic Boosters; North Branch Wesleyan Youth Ministry or Global Partners. Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home is serving the family, and memories and messages of condolence may be shared at www.blackburnchapel.com. Richard "Rick" Schwerin, age 58 of Lapeer passed away on Thursday, September 8, 2016 at his home with family at his side. Rick was born May 19, 1958 in East Tawas. MI, the son of the late Vern and Ella (Hunt) Schwerin. Rick grew up in Kings Mill and Five Lakes area and graduated from Lapeer West. Rick retired from General Motors with over 30 years of service. Rick was a true outdoorsman, he enjoyed hunting, fishing and was a member of the Oakland County Sportsman Club. He was also a member of the Lapeer County Dart League and various pool leagues. Rick is survived by his sons; Jeremy Schwerin of Lapeer and Josh Schwerin of North Branch, sister; Kathy Wildey of Lapeer and sister-in-law, Gloria Schwerin of Lapeer, brothers; Wayne (Doris) Schwerin of Attica, Larry (Robin) Schwerin of Lapeer and Tom Schwerin of Lapeer, 7 grandchildren, many nieces, nephews, and cousins. He was preceded in death by his parents; brother, Bernard; sisters; Darlene and Geraldine. The family will be present for visitation on Monday, September 12, 2016 from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm with the Funeral Service to follow at 12:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Mr. Bob Star will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Karen Ferrett, age 77, of North Branch and Columbiaville area, passed away on September 4, 2016 at the Saginaw Geriatrics Home. Karen was born on February 25, 1939, she was the daughter of Chauncey and Alice Walker. On November24, 1956 she married Eugene Ferrett, he preceded her in death on October 7, 2014. Karen was a member of the Rebecca’s and an assistant leader for the Cub Scouts, and a mom to all the neighbor children. Karen enjoyed knitting, crocheting, crafts, working on needlepoint, gardening, and loved to be outdoors. Karen is survived by her daughters, Noreen Day and Brenda Ferrett; sons, Dwight (Lisa) Ferrett and Richard (Renee) Ferrett; 5 grandchildren, 4 great-grandchildren, many nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her parents; husband, Eugene; daughter, Mary Ann and great-grandson, Conner Ferrett. Karen and Eugene will be buried in West Deerfield Cemetery, Fostoria, MI. A service in Karen's memory will be held on Sunday, September 18th at 11:00 am at the Valley Lutheran High School, 3560 McCarty Rd, Saginaw, MI 48603. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Donald Kunz, age 80 of North Branch passed away on Wednesday, September 7, 2016 at the Christensen Care A.F.C ., Marlette, MI. Don was born on January 21, 1936 in Lum, Michigan. He grew up in the Lum area and attended school in Lum. On March 4, 1960 he married Darlene Cunningham in Romeo. Don retired from General Motors as a truck repairman after 30 years of service. Don enjoyed spending time with his family and grandchildren. He is survived by his daughters; Sharon (Edward) Medbery of Mayville and Sue (Roger) Vandewarker of Birch Run, sisters; Doris (Gary) Turner of North Branch, Delores (Dave) Chrivia of Marlette and Penny (Richard) Graf of Vassar, brothers; Oscar (Dorie) Kunz of Luther, MI, Eugene Kunz of Lapeer and Jim (Sharon) Kunz of Imlay City, Grandchildren; Amanda (Norm) Adamic, Jennifer Wood, Brad Vandewarker, Lance (Brittney Zielinski) Medbery, Brian Medbery, and Nathan Vandewarker, several nieces, nephews and cousins. He was preceded in death by his parents, and wife Darlene on April 6, 2013. The family will be present for visitation on Friday, September 9, 2016 from 3 to 8 pm and Saturday, September 10, 2016 from 10 to 11 am with the Funeral Service 11:00 am at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Rev. Ron Hutchinson will officiate. Don will be laid to rest next to his wife Darlene in Dawn Memorial Cemetery, Elba, Michigan. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Ora Cecile Parsons, age 74 of North Branch, formerly of Coral Springs, Florida, passed away on Wednesday, August 31, 2016 at her home. Ora was born on August 27, 1942 in Rotan, Honduras, the daughter of Kenneth and Rita (Yates) Borden. On July 28, 1966 she married the late George Parsons. Ora was a homemaker, she enjoyed reading, painting, and spending time with her friends, and family and socializing with everyone she would meet. Ora was a loving mother, grandmother and friend. She is survived by her daughters; Julie (Gregory) Parsons Leger and Megan (Jose) Parsons Baca both of North Branch; sisters; Ginni Angelastro of New Jersey and Patty Tabano of Florida; grandchildren; Christina Baca, Brandon Leger, Natalia Baca, Bryce Leger, and Maya Baca; several nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her parents, husband, George D. Parsons Jr., sisters, Dora and Nellie, brothers, Kenneth and William. Cremation has taken place. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Charles “Charlie” Dhooghe, age 84, a life time resident of North Branch passed away Friday, August 26, 2016 at home with his family by his side. Charles was born November 6, 1931 in Arcadia Township, MI, the son of Baldwin and Anna Marie (Tallieu) Dhooghe. Charlie grew up in North Branch and attended school in Kings Mill. On January 21, 1956, Charlie married Marjorie Grooms at Birch Run Catholic Church. Charles proudly served his country in the U.S. Army. Charlie worked as a dairy farmer his entire life. He was a member of SS Peter and Paul Church, where he was Eucharistic minister and an altar boy. Charlie was also a member of the North Branch Knights of Columbus. Charlie enjoyed life. He loved fishing, hunting and playing Euchre. Most of all, Charlie loved spending time with his family. Charles is survived by his wife, Marjorie of North Branch; daughter, Jane (Gary) Swoish of North Branch; sons, Jim (Debbie) Dhooghe of Peck, Joe(Kathy) Dhooghe of North Branch, and Mike (Tonya)Dhooghe of North Branch; daughter-in-law, Beth Dhooghe of North Branch; sisters, Rose Nellenbach of North Branch and Judy (Francis) Fricke of Kingston; brother, George (Kim) Dhooghe; sister-in-law, Rosemary Maybery of North Branch; 23 grandchildren; 27 great-grandchildren; and many nieces, nephews and cousins. Charles was preceded in death by his parents; son, Patrick Dhooghe; brother, Karl Dhooghe; nephew, Christopher Dhooghe; sister, Margaret Snoblen; brothers-in-law, Jim Nellenbach, George Maybery and Keith Allen. Memorials may be directed to Hometown Hospice Family will be present for visitation on Monday, August 29th from 4 pm-8 pm with a Rosary at 7 pm at Blackburn Chapel. Charlie will lie in state at SS Peter and Paul Church from 10 am-11 am on Tuesday, August 30th with the Funeral Mass at 11 am with Father Mark Prill officiating. Charlie will be laid to rest in SS Peter and Paul Cemetery with Military Honors being conducted by the North Branch American Legion Post #457. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Trever McGoldrick, age 45, of North Branch passed away on Saturday, August 20, 2016. Trever was born on December 8, 1970 in Detroit, MI. Trever attended Holly High School, and he also attended Baker College. Trever was a very skilled craftsman and tradesman. He was the owner of his own business installing wood floors. Trever was very good at working on electronics and modern technology. He loved his pets. He is survived by his mother, Barbara (Kerry) Konzer of Holly; aunt, Patty Cass of North Branch; girlfriend, Heather Terlecke; many friends, and cousins. He was preceded in death by grandparents, John T. and Thelma McGoldrick; and Francis and Myrtle McGoldrick and Milton and Bessie Underwood. Memorials may be made to the Paradise Animal Rescue. The family will be present for visitation on Thursday, August 25, 2016 from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm, and Friday, 11:00 am to noon. The Funeral Service will be Friday, August 26, 2016 at 12:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Roger Keur will officiate. Burial will be in White Chapel, Troy, MI. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com James C. King, age 71, of North Branch passed away on Saturday, August 20, 2016 at McLaren Flint Hospital. James was born on October 15, 1944 in Redford Twp., Michigan. He graduated from Imlay City High School in 1963. Jim proudly served his country in the Air Force from 1964 to 1968. He was a member of the North Branch Wesleyan Church and a member of the North Branch America Legion Post #457. Jim enjoyed going for his coffee at the Firehouse Café every morning and going to the North Branch Senior Center. Jim was a former Police Sergeant for the Village of Almont, he worked for the Lapeer Sheriff Department in the 1970's and he also was a CCW Permit Instructor. Jim was a big firearm enthusiast. Jim is survived by daughter, Peggy Robinson and son, James C. King Jr., and many church family friends. Memorials may be directed to the North Branch Wesleyan Church Grocery Give Away. The Funeral Service will be 10:00 AM on Friday August 26, 2016 the North Branch Wesleyan Church, with visitation from 9:00 to 10:00 am. Pastor Peter Damaska will officiate. Burial will be at Great Lakes National Cemetery, Holly, Michigan. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Violet Swoish, age 92, a lifelong resident of North Branch passed away Monday, August 22, 2016 at Nicole’s Place A.F.C. in Lapeer. Violet was born August 16, 1924 in North Branch, the daughter of Gilbert and Julia Kreiner. Violet grew up in the North Branch area and graduated from North Branch High School in 1942. Violet married Sylvester Kreiner on January 18, 1947, he passed away on August 12, 1952.On November 28, 1955 Violet married Leo C. Swoish in Burnside, Michigan. Violet was a member of St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Violet enjoyed watching the Tigers, reading, working on plastic canvas and word search puzzles, playing pinochle and going to casinos when her health allowed her to go. Violet is survived by sons, Dennis (Jane) Kreiner and Dale (Chris) Swoish both of North Branch; sister, Elaine (Joe) Knephler of North Carolina; brother, Eugene (MaryAnn) Kreiner of New York; sister-in-law, Blanche Swoish and Rosemary Schlaud both of North Branch; 5 grandchildren; Thomas Swoish, Elizabeth Swoish, Scott (Jill) Kreiner, Andrea (Chad) Anderson, and Makenzie Kreiner; 4 great-grandchildren; many nieces, nephews, cousins and friends. She was preceded in death by her parents; husbands, Sylvester Kreiner in 1952 and Leo Swoish 2008; brother, Raymond, sister, Florence; sister-in-law, Louise; and brothers-in-law, Bob Davis and C.J. Swoish. Memorials may be made to The Gift of Life or Eversight. Visitation will be Saturday, August 27, 2016 from 5 to 8 pm, Sunday, August 28, 2016 from 1 to 8 pm with a rosary at 2:00 pm all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. The Funeral Mass will be Monday, August 29, 2016 at 11:00 am at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Violet will be laid to rest next to her husband, Leo, in St. Mary’s Cemetery. Fr. Mark Prill will officiate. You may share an online condolence www.blackburnchapel.com Ruth Haack, age 89, of North Branch, passed away Saturday, August 20, 2016 at Stonegate Health Campus in Lapeer. Ruth was born on October 14, 1926 in North Branch to the late Louis and Pearl (Best) Payne. On October 19, 1946 she married William Haack at her parent’s home. Ruth taught school for over 25 years at the North Branch Elementary School. She received her teaching certificate through the County Normal and her Masters at Eastern University. Ruth was a member of the Country Christian Church in Deerfield. Ruth and Bill loved to spend time at their cabin in Mio, and traveling. They visited every state except Alaska and Hawaii. Ruth gave encouragement to everyone in her family. Ruth is survived by: her children, Ruthann (Ken) Johnson of North Branch and Al Haack of North Branch; brother, Marvin (Judy) Payne of Flint; grandchildren, William R. Haack, Stacey (Brian) Fike, Carolyn (Chuck) Wirsing, Roy Carrasco, Christina (Shane) Burrows and Rebecca Lang; 13 great-grandchildren and 5 great-great grandchildren; many nieces, nephews and cousins. Ruth is preceded in death by her parents, her husband William, son William H., daughter-in-law Nancy, sister, Leola Martin. Memorials may be directed to the Cancer Society. Family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, August 23, 2016 from 3 to 8 pm, and Wednesday, August 24, 2016 from 10 to 11 am, all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home with the Funeral Service to follow at 11:00 am at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Roger Keur will officiate. Burial will be in Greenwood Cemetery, North Branch. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Sally Irons, age 69, of Silverwood, passed away on Sunday, August 7, 2016 at home with her family by her side. Sally was born on September 19, 1946 in Royal Oak, MI. She was the daughter of Robert and Helen (Clement) Polonowski. Sally grew up in Royal Oak area and graduated from Dondero High School. On September 22, 1962 she married Marcus Irons at the Methodist Church in Royal Oak. Sally was a homemaker, she loved to cook and bake for her family, and she also was a book binder for a printing company for over 15 years. Sally loved to spend time with her church family at the Anchor Cove Church. The most important thing in Sally’s life was spending time with her family and grandchildren. Left to cherish her memory are daughters, Sara (Anthony) Goss of Kingston and Kellie (Kreg) Woods of Vassar; sons, Robert (Jan) Irons of St. Clair Shores, John (Diane) Irons of Sterling Heights, and Jason Irons of Silverwood; sisters, Katherine Kincaid of Novi, Carolyn (Jeff) Hardesty of Dearborn, and Roberta (Rick) Gunsch of Royal Oak; 16 grandchildren; 5 great-grandchildren; many nieces, nephews, and cousins. Sally was preceded in death by her parents. The family will be present for visitation on Thursday, August 11, 2016 from 10:00 am to noon at the Anchor Cove Church, 201 East Sanilac Road, Caro, Michigan. The Funeral Service will follow at noon on Thursday, August 11, 2016. Pastor David Wilcynski will officiate. Burial will be in Dayton Center Cemetery. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Delphine LaVell age 80, of North Branch, passed away on Sunday, August 7, 2016 at the Marlette Hospice Residence with her family by her side. Delphine was born May 13, 1936 in Flint, MI. Delphine graduated from St. Agnes in Flint. Delphine married Richard LaVell on August 29, 1959 at St. Agnes in Flint. She retired from North Branch School District working as a teacher’s aide. Delphine’s faith was very important to her. She was a member of SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church where she was a Eucharist Minister, Lector, and a member of the SS. Peter and Paul Altar Society. Delphine enjoyed playing cards with her friends, golfing and bowling. Most of all, Delphine loved spending time with her family. Left to cherish her memory are: daughters, Diane (Tom) Watrous of Florida, Cindy LaVell of Hudsonville, MI, and Pam (Jeff) Kihlmire of Alaska; sons, Steve LaVell of CA, Stan LaVell of North Branch and Greg (Tammie) LaVell of Marlette; special guest daughter, Maarit Pori of Finland; 8 grandchildren: Josh, Andie, Crystal, Nicole, Amber, Lyndsey, Sabrina and Alexis; 3 great-grandchildren: Jace, Grady and Cian; and many nieces and nephews. Delphine was preceded in death by: her husband, Richard; brother, Ed Filip and her parents, William and Esther Filip. Memorials may be made to United Hospice Service. The family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, August 9th from 3 PM- 8 PM with a Rosary at 7 PM at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. On Wednesday, August 10th, Delphine will lie in state at SS Peter and Paul Church from 10 AM- 11 AM, with the Funeral Mass at 11 AM with Father Richard Treml officiating. Burial will be in SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery, North Branch, next to her husband, Richard. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Barry Lee Rawson, age 72, of North Branch passed away Saturday, August 6, 2016 at Stonegate Health Campus. He was born on April 18, 1944 in Flint, MI, the son of William and Marjorie (Brill) Rawson. Barry grew up in the Fenton Area and graduated from Fenton High School. Barry served his country in the Marine Corp Reserves. He retired from the Construction Industry. Barry attended SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, where he was a member of the Knights of Columbus #9568. Barry was a big fan and enjoyed watching the Detroit Tigers, Detroit Lions, and NASCAR Racing. He is survived by his daughter, Kim (Paul) Rogers of North Branch; sons, Tim (Sandy) Rawson of Flint and Pat Rawson of Florida; sisters, Lynn (LeRoy) Roberts of Nebraska and Jan (Art) Gollap of Gains, MI, brother, Tom (Linda) Rawson of Fenton; 6 grandchildren, Veronica, Chelsea, Pat, Samantha, Tim and Matthew; special friend, Joanne; and several nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents and an infant brother, Mark. Memorials may be directed to the Meals on Wheels, the North Branch Knight of Columbus # 9568, or Charity of Your Choice. There will be a Memorial Mass 11:00 AM on Monday, August 15, 2016 at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, North Branch, MI with Fr. Richard Treml officiating. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Robin Ann Rossier-Krist, age 62, of North Branch passed away Monday, July 25, 2016 at home with her husband at her side after a battle with cancer. Robin was born March 26, 1954 in Royal Oak, the daughter of Larry and Kathleen (Sawyer) Rossier. Robin was born during a bad snowstorm, making it a very difficult time for her father to get her mother to the hospital. Robin met Gregory working at Action Cycle, she called him “Greg-Chops” and on April 21, 1995 they were married. Robin was a manager for a Wholesale District Electrical Supply Company before her retirement in 2014. Robin was a member of SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. She showed her faith in her action and relationship to others. Robin had the great opportunity, through a friend, that introduced her to the Denby Center in Detroit where she gave time to unwed young mothers. Robin tried her hand at knitting and crocheting, but never completed a project. She liked the thought and ideal of crafts, but never allowed the creativity to flow through. When she was younger she enjoyed biking, cross country skiing, swimming, diving and playing baseball. Robin always had a big smile for everyone and would asked them, how you are you doing? She is survived by her very best friend, Greg who got her through many trials; sister, Michele Chouinard of California and her brother, Patrick (Cecilia) Rossier of California; nephews, nieces and many friends. She was preceded in death by her parents. The family will be present for a gathering on Saturday, August 6, 2016 from 10 to 11 am. The Memorial Mass will follow at 11:00 am at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in North Branch. Father Richard Treml will officiate. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com David Chateauvert, Jr age 32,. of Westminister, Colorado, (formerly of Deerfield Twp.) died suddenly from a motorcycle accident on July 17, 2016. David was born November 23, 1983. He was the son of David and Rebecca (Soule) Chateauvert Sr. He grew up at Miller Lake and graduated from North Branch High School in 2002. David worked for a Heavy Equipment Company as an operator in Colorado. He enjoyed riding his motorcycle, four wheeling, and working on cars.Mostly, David enjoyed spending time with his family and friends. David is survived by his parents; David and Rebecca Chateauvert Sr. of Columbiaville; wife, Jessica Nicole Heyliger and her daughter, Mikaella Lynn of Colorado; brothers, Kent (Casey) Chateauvert of North Branch and Michael Chateauvert of Columbiaville; grandmother, Diana Soule of Imlay City; nieces, Gracie and Chase. David was preceded in death by his grandparents, 3 aunts, and 2 uncles. The family will be present for visitation on Sunday, July 24, 2016 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm and the Funeral Service will follow at 2:00 PM all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Deacon Joe Schierlinger will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Robert Maasch, age 75, of North Branch passed away Monday, July 18, 2016 at his home with his family at his side. Robert was born January 27, 1941 in Lapeer, MI, the son of Frank and Ann (Rapshag) Maasch. On March 25, 1978 he married Marilyn Gravlin in North Branch. Robert served his country in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. As a young man Robert grew up on a dairy farm in Lapeer, where he showed his cattle for 4-H, later in life he bought his own dairy farm in North Branch. Robert proudly was a member of the Western Thumb Tea Party. He took a big interest in his cattle, watching the bloodline in his cattle, breeding them and passing his knowledge to his daughter by showing cattle. Robert also enjoyed listening to politics on the radio. Robert is survived by his wife Marilyn; daughter, Cynrhia Maasch of North Branch; son, John Maasch of West Virginia; sister, Joanne Marchione of St. Clair Shores; brothers; Charles (Tina) Maasch of Lapeer and William (Jodi) Maasch of Clifford; granddaughter, Cassandra Jones; nieces and nephews; Chris, Mike, Tammy, Patty, Brian, Jason, Katelin, and several great nephews and nieces. He was preceded in death by his parents. Memorials may be made to Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home, P.O. Box 248, North Branch, Michigan 48461 The family will be present for visitation on Thursday, July 21, 2016 from 6 to 8 pm and Friday, July 22, 2016 from 10 am to 1pm with the Funeral Service to follow at 1:00 PM all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Ken Kilmer will officiate. Burial will be in Rich Cemetery, Mayville, MI. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Calvin Schultz, age 77, of Silverwood passed away Monday, July 18, 2016 with his family at his side. Calvin was born November 6, 1938 in Pontiac, Michigan, the son of Howard and Frieda (Hildebrandt) Schultz. Calvin grew up in Lake Orion and graduated from Lake Orion High School. Calvin retired from Pontiac Motors after 30 years of service. Calvin was a member of the John Deere Thumb Two-Cylinder Club. He enjoyed hunting, fishing, collecting John Deere tractors and riding his motorcycles. Calvin is survived by his long time friend and companion, Mary Miela; daughters, Charlene (Cheryl) Fisher, Laura (Dale) Swartz and Donna Wall all of Tennessee; grandchildren, Emily, Eric, Matthew, Mark, Michael, Joshua and Jacob; 3 great-grandchildren, Ceruh, Wilym, and Bryce; many cousins and friends. He was preceded in death by his parents. Memorials may be directed to the family. The family will be present for visitation on Wednesday, July 20, 2016 from 4 to 7 pm with the Funeral Service to follow Wednesday, July 20, 2016 at 7:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Comeron Steele will officiate. Burial will be at Oakhill Cemetery in Holly, Michigan. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home, 4216 Huron Street, North Branch, MI 48461. Phone: 810-688-3232 You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Michael Lee Arnholt, 68, of North Branch died peacefully at home on Wednesday, July 6, 2016, after a short illness. Mike’s immediate family and extended family surrounded him with love in his last few days. Mr. Arnholt was born April 5, 1948 in Toledo, Ohio to Richard and Virginia (Gerkensmyer) Arnholt. Mike married Rosemary Boyle on May 31, 1975 in Plymouth, MI. The long-time journalist earned a Bachelor Degree from U of M, Ann Arbor and began his career behind a TV camera at PBS, Channel 56 in Detroit. He broadened his career choice by switching to print journalism as a writer and photographer. Mike’s skills in that field led to decades as a copy editor, editor-in-chief, managing editor, communications and editorial director for multiple U.S. and international publications including the Detroit Free Press and Wards Auto World Magazine. Mike was a member of the North Branch Village Council and the Zoning Board of Appeals for 18 years, but most recently Mike was the Village President Pro-tempore. Mike enjoyed photography, traveling, and spending time with his family. Business took him on trips around much of the globe, but Mike was most comfortable in his rural home with his best friend and wife, Rosemary. Mike is survived by his four children: Maureen and (Brian) Baker; Melissa Murphy and (Joe Kozlowski); Graham Arnholt and (Annika Bellin) and Ryan and (Devon) Arnholt. Mike is also survived by six grandchildren: Adam and Ally Baker; Brynn, Eliza, Maren and Cole Arnholt; and two grandchildren by choice, Max and Alex Kozlowski ; sister, Pamela Gabbard of Rochester, MI, several nieces, nephews and his beloved in-laws. Mike was preceded in death by his parents, and by his nephew Jason Gabbard. In lieu of flowers memorials contributions may be directed to research for the cure of Lymphoma, or to the Furget-Us-Not Rescue P.O. Box 1053, Hazel Park, MI. 48030, a non-profit companion animal, rescue and foster group. The family will be present for visitation on Saturday, July 9, 2016 from 4 to 8 pm and Sunday, July 10, 2016 from noon until 2:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. The funeral will take place at 2:00 pm at the Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home, with Deacon Joe Schierlinger officiating. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Wayne Madsen, age 64, of Lapeer passed away peacefully at his home on Friday, June 24, 2016. Wayne was born September 27, 1951 in Wellsville, New York, the son of Robert and Alta (Hawks) Madsen. Wayne grew up in Hazel Park and graduated from Hazel Park High School in 1969. Wayne was the top salesman for East Jordon Iron Works for over 30 years. He was dedicated in helping the MICOPS and enjoyed horseback riding for the organization. Wayne loved to cook on the grill for family and friends, fishing, dancing, boating, and Wayne could fix just about anything he put his mind to. Wayne shared many laughs and conversations with all whom he loved, which included nearly everyone who knew him. He is survived by his best friend and wife, Dawn Crawford; daughter, Sabrina (Jason) Sawson of North Branch; son, Derek (Samantha) Madsen of Hadley; step-children; Jennette (Scott) Sparre of Lapeer and Jim (Julie) Crawford of Lapeer; sisters; Virginia (William) Zeigler of Detroit and Laurie Weibel of Florida; brother, Norman (Deborah) Patton of New York; grandchildren; Alyshia, Austin, Mekayla, Zoe, Logan, Austin, Gavin, and Calvin. He was preceded in death by his parents. Memorials may be made to the MICOPS Organization. The family will be present for visitation on Wednesday, June 29, 2016 from 12 to 8 pm and on Thursday, June 30, 2016 from 10 to 11am with the Funeral Service to follow all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Deacon Joe Schierlinger will officiate. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Kimberly Marie Hunt, age 34, of Grand Blanc passed away suddenly at her home on Saturday, June 18, 2016. Kimberly was born on March 14, 1982 in Lapeer, Michigan, the daughter of Ralph and Cheryl (Saltzgiber) Hunt. Kimberly grew up in the North Branch area and graduated from North Branch High School in 2000. She received her Bachelor of Science Degree in Early Childhood Development from Baker College. Kimberly was an early childhood home visitor for G. C. Card in Flint. Her passion was working with and caring for children. Kimberly enjoyed many varied interests among them shopping, working on crafts, watching cooking shows, and spending time with her family and friends. Kimberly is survived by her parents, Ralph and Cheryl Hunt of North Branch; brother, Justin (Lauren) Hunt of Beverly Hills, MI, grandparents, Ralph and Shirley Hunt of North Branch, and Jon (Bill Dixon) Saltzgiber of Lapeer; nephew, Hudson Hunt; many aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. She was preceded in death by her grandfather, Richard Saltzgiber and cousin, Elliott Orr. Memorials may be directed to the Make a Wish Foundation 7600 Grand River Avenue, Suite 175, Brighton, Michigan 48114. Family will be present for visitation on Saturday, June 25, 2016 from 10 AM-11 AM at Trinity United Methodist Church in Lapeer 1310 North Main Street, Lapeer, MI. The Memorial Service will follow at 11 AM with Pastor Dave Mulder officiating. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Patricia Ann Dubay, age 61, of Marlette, sadly passed away at her home on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 with her family at her side. Pat was born on April 13, 1955 in Roseville, MI, the daughter of William and Hanna (Meldvedt) Frei . On January 18, 1975 Pat married Louis Dubay in Mt. Clemens. Pat was a passionate and dedicated Register Nurse for St. John’s Health System for over 33 years. Pat was a member of the Fostoria Baptist Church. She enjoyed gardening, sewing, reading and cooking for her family. Pat was a loving wife and mother. She is survived by her husband, Louis; mother, Hanna Hudson of Gladwin; daughter, Christine (Alex) Dubay of Chicago; sons; Louis Dubay of Marlette and Philip Dubay (Gyampo Akawale) of Romeo; sisters; Kristine Helzer of Sandusky and Barbara (Andrew) Goodman of Gladwin, many nieces, nephews, cousins and friends. She was preceded in death by her father. Memorials may be directed to the family for their wishes. Family will be present for visitation on Friday, June 17, 2016 from 11 am to 2 pm at the Fostoria Baptist Church. The Funeral Service will follow at 2 pm at the Fostoria Baptist Church. There will be a private burial at Juhl Cemetery, Marlette, MI. Pastor Steven Henry will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Doris Laverne Ratliff, age 85, of North Branch, passed away on May 29, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Doris was born on January 4, 1931 in Greenway, Arkansas, she was the daughter of Ernest and Ruth (Parmley) Webster. Doris grew up in Piggott, Arkansas and Flint, MI area. On August 7, 1948 she married Audra Ratliff in Detroit, MI. Doris was a busy homemaker taking care of her family and she also was a factory worker. Doris attended St. Francis Baptist Church in St. Francis, Arkansas. Doris is survived by her daughters; Vanita Smith of North Branch, Nancy (John) Orrell of Claunch, New Mexico, Darla Kane (Scott Bissonnette) of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, son; Jack Ratliff of Desert Hot Springs, California; sisters; Glenda (Les) Ballard of Macomb, Michigan, Patricia (Richard) Gazley of Dalzell South Carolina and Elaine Latimer of Piggott, Arkansas; 10 grandchildren; 20 great-grandchildren; and numerous nephews, nieces, and cousins. Doris was preceded in death by her parents; husband, Audra; and brother, Billy. The family will be present for visitation on Friday, June 3, 2016 from 10:00 am to noon. The service will follow at 12:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home, North Branch, Michigan. There will be a private burial at Oakview Cemetery, Royal Oak, Michigan at a later date. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Harold “Harry” LeRoy Baragar, age 79, of Fostoria, MI passed away on Thursday, April 28, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Harold was born in South Dakota on April 27, 1937 to William and Lillian (Thomas) Baragar. Harry moved to the Lapeer area after he retired from the U.S. Navy, where he proudly served during the Vietnam War. June 21, 1980, he married Edna Harrington. They enjoyed 36 years of wedded bliss. Once in Lapeer, Harry then took work as a maintenance man for Metamora Products and Johnson Controls. He also worked on wells for Metamora Well Service. Harry was a member of the Caro American Legion. He was a “jack of all trades” and could do anything he put his mind to. Harry is survived by: his wife, Edna of Fostoria, MI; daughters, Mitzi (Jeff) Noordyke of Cedar Springs, MI, Annette (Michael) Vitale of Shelby Twp, MI, and Terri (Lloyd) Herbstreith of Jenison, MI; sons, Jeremy (Leah) Baragar of Fenton, MI, Nathan Svopa of Long View, WA, and Mike Auger of Lapeer, MI; sisters, Bobbi Letchworth, Shirley (Paul) Oren and Dorothy Willey; dear friends who loved Harry like a father, Jim and Amy Rowe of North Branch, MI; 17 grandchildren; 16 great grandchildren; and many nieces, nephews, cousins and friends. Harry was preceded in death by his parents, 5 brothers, 1 sister and 1 granddaughter. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to the American Cancer Society. Family will be present for visitation on Sunday, May 1st from 4 PM - 8 PM and Monday, May 2nd from 2 PM - 3 PM, with the Funeral Service at 3 PM all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home with Deacon Jeremy Baragar officiating. Harry will be laid to rest in West Deerfield Cemetery, Fostoria, MI, with military honors being conducted by the North Branch American Legion Post #457. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Beverly Greblo, age 72 of Otter Lake passed away on Thursday, April 28, 2016 at home with her loving family. Beverly was born on March 6, 1944 in Boise, Idaho, the daughter of Shirley (Beebe) and Eldon Leon Guthrie . Beverly grew up in Duarte, California, graduating from Duarte High School. Beverly attended Pasadena City College in California with a degree in industrial supervision. On December 31, 1983 she married Harold Greblo in North Hills, California and they renewed their vows in 2000 with blessings from the Catholic Church. Beverly was a member of SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. She was active in the Rights to Life and enjoyed helping with church activities and the Knights of Columbus. Beverly enjoyed writing poems and stories for her children and grandchildren and working in her flower gardens. Beverly’s joy in life was spending time with her husband, children and grandchildren. Beverly is survived by her husband, Harold; daughters; Laura (Jay) Byrne of Otter Lake, Carol (Randy) Ross of Idaho, Amy Heater of Otter Lake and Madeline (Paul) Madden of Otter Lake; sister, Allison (Blaine) Jackman of Georgia; brother, James Guthier of Washington, 11 grandchildren, 9 great-grandchildren, many nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her parents, son, John Heater in 1994; sister, Janice in 2007; brothers; Marvin and Eldon. Memorials may be made to Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, MI or the Right of Life. The family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016 from 4 to 8 pm with the Knight of Columbus reciting the Rosary at 7:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Beverly will lie in state at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church on Wednesday, May 4th, 2016 from 12 to 1pm. The Funeral Mass will follow at 1:00 pm with Father Mark Prill officiating. Burial will be in Watertown Twp. Cemetery. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Mirl Leneva Anderson, age 89, of Clifford, MI., made her final journey home on Monday, April 25, 2016. Mirl was born October 22, 1926 in Lawrence County, Alabama, the daughter of Henry Oscar and Johnie (Boyles) Porter. On September 12, 1942 she married her husband, Loyal Anderson in Alabama. They moved to Michigan in 1952. They had 52 years of happiness together. Mirl was an active member of Clifford Baptist Church for 39 years, and she was well known for living her faith. She carried her hope and joy in Christ in everything she did. Mirl instantly loved everyone she met and she treated everyone like they were the most special person to her. She was such a gift to those who were fortunate enough to know her. She will be dearly missed by all of them. She is survived by her sister, Iola (Puppy) Jones; children; Roy (Debbie) Anderson, Coy Don (Betty) Anderson, Sheila Keeley, and Rhonda (Chris) Hosington 13 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren, many nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her parents, Henry Oscar and Johnie (Boyles) Porter; husband, Loyal Anderson, and son-in-law, Dale Keeley. Memorials may be made to the Clifford Baptist Church. The family will present for visitation on Wednesday, April 27, 2016 from 5 to 8 pm, and the Funeral Service will be Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 12:00 pm at Clifford Baptist Church. Pastor Kelly Curell will officiate. She will be laid to rest next to her husband, Loyal at West Burlington Cemetery. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Donald G. Bruman, age 57, lifelong resident of North Branch, passed away on April 19, 2016, surrounded by his loving family, after a courageous fight with cancer. Don was born in Marlette on September 5, 1958, the son of George and Mary (Schlaud) Bruman. He was a mechanic for many years, before embarking on his own business as a handyman. One of Don’s passions was time spent in the kitchen cooking for the ones he loved; this passion grew from watching and helping his mother in the kitchen. He also enjoyed other various pursuits, such as hunting, fishing, and playing cards. Don leaves a large and loving family; his wife of 36 years, Luanne; son, George (Janel) Bruman, daughters; Michelle (Josh) Barnes and Jessica (Steven) Gould. Don’s pride and joy were his grandchildren; Alexis, Donald, Chloe, Makayla, Roslyn, Alyssa, and Raegan Bruman, Ava and Hoyt Barnes, and Elaina Gould. Additionally, Don is survived by his sister, Jo-Ann (Terry) Haske, brothers; Bill (Susan) Bruman, Dave Bruman, Bob Bruman, Lewie (Ruth) Bruman and Leonard (Joan) Bruman; sisters-in-laws; Pat (Bruman) Smith, Linda Bruman, and Jean Bruman. Don was preceded in death by his parents, George and Mary Bruman, and brothers; John Bruman, Joe Bruman, and Fred Bruman. Memorials may be made to the family. A Memorial Service will be Saturday, April 23, 2016 at 4:00 PM, at North Branch Wesleyan Church, with family visitation from 3 to 4 PM. Rev. Peter Damaska officiating. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Tara Ann Papke, age 43, of Lapeer passed away suddenly at McLaren Lapeer Region on Thursday, April 7, 2016. Tara was born April 14, 1972 in Lapeer, she was the daughter of the late Evelyn (McLaughlin)Grunenwald. Tara always had a smile on her face. She enjoyed drawing, coloring and watching the Detroit Tigers and spending time with her grandparents, sisters, aunt, and cousins. Tara is survived by her father, Charles Papke of Otter Lake; step-father, Watson Grunenwald of Brown City; grandparents, Genevieve and John McLaughlin of Lapeer; sisters, Charla (Derek) Pauley of Brown City and Jennie Papke of Otisville; Aunt Jane Hyde of Lapeer; cousin, Cindi Schlicht of Lapeer; nephews and niece. Tara was preceded in death by her mother, Evelyn “ Toby” Grunenwald. Memorials may be directed to the family The family will be present for visitation on Saturday, April 9, 2016 from 4 to 8 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. On Sunday, April 10, 2016 there will be visitation from 3 to 4 pm at the North Branch Wesleyan Church with the Funeral Service to follow at 4:00 pm. Pastor Peter Damaska officiated. Tara will be laid to rest next to her mother at Burnside Cemetery. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Katherine”Kathie” Marie Mattox, age 66, of North Branch passed away suddenly at McLaren Lapeer Region. Kathie was born December 18, 1949 in Mayville, Michigan, the daughter of John and Jane (Spanke) Schadt. Kathie graduated from North Branch High School in 1968. She was a medical assistant for over 20 years. Kathie enjoyed making jewelry, making hand-made scarves, knitting, reading and karaoke. Her daughter and her grandchildren were her greatest blessings and gave her daily overflowing joy. Kathie was outgoing, hardworking and was considered “best friend” by many. Kathie is survived by her husband, Gary of North Branch; daughter, Michelle (David Jr.) Rowlson of Grass Lake; sisters, Dris Hallock of Florida; Janie (Dennis) Bugg of North Branch, Wilma Fruechtel of North Branch, Michelle (Robert) Myers of Fostoria, and Cherelle (Chris)Adams of Kentucky; brothers, John (Karen) Schadt of North Branch and Bernie (Carrie) Fruechtel of Otter Lake, step-children, Sharon Jors of Iowa, Jim (Jody) Mattox of Michigan and David Mattox of Michigan; great-aunt, Christina Reynolds of Clarkston; grandchildren, Darian Lee Rowlson, Davien Joseph Rowlson, and Rebecca Michelle Rowlson; and many nieces, nephews and cousins. Kathie was preceded in death by her son, Gary Lee (Puddy) Mattox II and her parents, John and Jane Schadt. Memorials may be directed to her Grandchildren’s College Fund. The family will be present for visitation on Saturday, April 16, 2016 from 1 to 2 pm. The Funeral Service will follow at 2:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Rev. Ron Hutchinson will officiate. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Shirley Elizabeth Byers, age 85, of North Branch passed away on Tuesday, March 29, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Shirley was born October 4, 1930 in Keego Harbor, Michigan, the daughter of Orville and Mary Marguerite (Turner) Beadle. Shirley married Kieth Byers in 1953 in North Branch, Michigan. They were happily married for over 62 years. Shirley was a devoted employee for North Branch Area School District for 29 years before she retired, but she never stopped working , she was always volunteering for the school . She was a giving and caring person and very active member of her church, the North Branch Wesleyan Church, where she was the treasurer for over 29 years. Children of all ages from the school and church would call her Grandma Shirley. Shirley was always providing for her family and friends with her canning and treats. Left to cherish her memory are husband, Kieth; daughter, Debi Alexander of North Branch; grandchildren, Stacey Alexander of Indianapolis, and Grant (Holly) Alexander of Grand Rapids; 3 great- grandchildren, Jayde, Nevaeh and Reese; brother, Charles (Darla) Beadle of Clifford; sister-in-law, Virginia Beadle of Waterford and brother-in-law, Bill (Anne) Hodgkinson of North Branch; many nieces, nephews, cousins and good friends. Shirley was preceded in death by her parents; sister, Maxine Hodgkinson; and brother William Beadle. Memorials may be directed to the family. The family will be present for visitation on Thursday, March 31, 2016 from 3 to 8 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home and on Friday, April 1, 2016 Shirley will lie in state from 10 to 11 am at North Branch Wesleyan Church with the funeral service to follow at 11:00 am. Shirley will be laid to rest in Westlawn Cemetery in North Branch, MI. Rev. Peter Damaska and Rev. Josh Hilty will officiate. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Marilyn Randall, age 80, of North Branch, passed away Tuesday, March 22, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Marilyn was born October 18, 1935 at her home in White Lake, Michigan, the daughter of Clare and Myrtle (Welberry) Voorheis. Marilyn grew up in White Lake and graduated from Holly High School in 1954. On October 25, 1958 she married Ronald Randall at White Lake Presbyterian Church. She was a member of the North Branch First United Methodist Church. Marilyn was a busy homemaker helping on the dairy farm. She was a 4-H leader for over 30 years, active member of the North Branch Historical Society and the North Branch Days. Marilyn was an avid Michigan State fan and enjoyed watching all sports. She enjoyed shopping and spending time with her family and grandchildren. Marilyn is survived by her husband, Ronald; daughter, Karen (Zikar) Aboukarroum of Flushing; son, Kirk Randall of North Branch; brothers, Ron (Mary) Voorheis of White Lake, Roger (Kathy) Voorheis of Milford, and Calvin (Karen) Voorheis of Grand Blanc; grandchildren, Romana, Kayla, Brandon, and Diana; many nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends. Marilyn was preceded in death by her parents and son, Kevin 1986. Memorials may be made to the North Branch United Methodist Church or the Lapeer County 4-H. The family will be present for visitation on Friday, March 25, 2016 from 2 to 8 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home and on Saturday, March 26, 2016 from 10 to 11 am at North Branch United Methodist Church. The Funeral Service will be 11:00 am on Saturday, March 26, 2016. Marilyn will be laid to rest next to her son Kevin in Rich Cemetery, Mayville. Rev. Ronald Hutchinson and Pastor Peter Damaska will officiate. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Steven “Rusty” Badgley, age 58, of Peck, Michigan, passed away on March 16, 2016 at Lake Huron Medical Center. Rusty was born on November 25, 1957 in Royal Oak, MI , the son of Clarence and Mildred (Erno) Badgley. On June 24, 1998 Rusty married Dawn Ferguson. Rusty retired from General Motors in 1999 with 20 years of service. Rusty was a true outdoorsman, he enjoyed hunting, fishing, camping, traveling, swimming in the family pond, animals and riding his horses, but he especially loved to spend time with his family. Rusty is survived by his wife, Dawn of Peck; mother, Mildred Badgley of Port Huron; daughter, Stephanie (RC) Bailey of Port Huron; sisters, Jan (Gary) Hendricks of Clawson, and Teresa Pryor of Mt. Clemens; brother, Daniel (Lynn) Vaughn of Rochester Hills; mother-in-law, Linda Ferguson of Attica; 3 grandchildren: Bryce Nielsen, Makenna and Markus Bailey; many nieces, nephews and cousins. Rusty was preceded in death by his father, and brother, Howard. Memorials may be made to the MS Foundation. The family will be present for visitation on Sunday, March 20, 2016 from 3 to 8, and on Monday, March 21, 2016 from 10 to 11 am at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. The Funeral Service will be Monday, March 21, 2016 at 11:00 am at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home, North Branch, MI. Rev. Ronald Hutchinson will officiate. Burial will be in Elk Cemetery, Peck, MI. at a later date. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Kenneth Bodmer, age 91 of North Branch passed away Tuesday, February 23, 2016 at Marlette Extended Care Facility. Ken was born July 10, 1924 in Portsmouth, Ohio, the son of Russell and Exie (Knauff) Bodmer. At the age 13, Ken and his family moved to Detroit from Ohio and in 1953 Kenneth and Nellie and family moved to North Branch. On April 25, 1943 he married Nellie Vandermark in Detroit, she preceded him in death on September 25, 2012. For 60 years Ken was involved in building new homes in the North Branch area and 10 years in excavating and heavy equipment operator. Ken enjoyed camping and was a member of the Motor Home Club. He also enjoyed playing cards, square dancing, and singing and yodeling. He is survived by daughters: Carol (Vic) Bonner of Michigan, Kathy Perry of Florida, Brenda (Don) Martus of Brown City, Dawn Maitland of North Branch, son: Ken (Michelle) Bodmer of North Branch, 12 grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, 2 great-great-grandchildren, many nephews, nieces and cousins. Ken was preceded in death by his parents, wife Nellie, sisters: Martha and Dorothy. The family will be present for visitation on Wednesday, February 24, 2016 from 4 to 8 pm , and on Thursday, February 25, 2016 from 10 to 11 am with the Funeral Service to follow at 11:00 am, all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Rev. Russ Sommer will officiate. Ken will be laid to rest next to his wife Nellie at Rich Cemetery. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Philip Bluthardt, age 55, of North Branch passed away peacefully with his family near him on February 22, 2016. Philip was born October 15, 1960 in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Edward and Bertha (Wymer) Bluthardt. Phil grew up in North Branch area, and graduated from North Branch High School in 1978. On January 1st, 1983 he married Tamie Inman. Phil was a UPS package driver for 30 years before his retirement. He loved coaching the Michigan Mavericks. Phil was a member of St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church in North Branch. Phil loved his LORD above all others and he loved his family and friends. He is survived by his wife, Tamie Rene’ Bluthardt; daughters: Kayla (Nathan) Thornsberry of Kingston, and Laura Bluthardt of Grand Blanc; son: Joshua Bluthardt of North Branch; sisters: Karen (Ed) Baldwin and Wendy (Greg) Wagner; brothers: Edward (Rosemarie) Bluthardt, William Bluthardt, Kenneth (Leigh) Bluthardt and Dennis (Chris) Bluthardt, 2 grandchildren: Lucas and Derek Thornsberry, several nephews, nieces and cousins. He was preceded in death by his parents, sisters and friend: Doris Opperman, Lois Reed, and Michael Miller. Memorials may be made to St. James Lutheran Church. The family will be present for visitation on Friday, February 26, 2016 from 3 to 8 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home and on Saturday, February 27, 2016 from 10 to 11 am at St. James Lutheran Church. The Funeral Service will follow at 11:00 am at St. James Lutheran Church. Pastor Jason Baldwin will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com William H. Webb, age 82 of North Branch, passed away on Wednesday, February 17, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region Hospital. William was born January 24, 1934 in Iron Mountain, Michigan, the son of Anne (Brenner) and Earl Webb. William grew up in Iron Mountain and graduated from Iron Mountain High School in 1952. He continued his education and graduated from Northern Michigan University in 1960. On June 20, 1959 he married Joanne Westby in Iron Mountain. William proudly served his country in the U.S. Navy. William was a math teacher at Avondale Schools, and he retired after 27 years of service. William was a member of St. Mary’s Catholic Church. He enjoyed fishing, hunting, painting, woodcarving, hiking, gardening, but he especially enjoyed spending time with his family and grandchildren. William was survived by his wife Joanne; daughters; Susan (Jeffrey) Petrusha of Waterford and Lisa (Broc) Smith of Lapeer; sons: Thomas (Tasha) Webb of Pennsylvania, Michael (Barbara) Webb of White Lake, and Steven Webb of Millington; 6 grandchildren; 1 great-grandchild; many nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents and brother Roy. Memorials may be made to the North Branch Emergency Thrift Shop or McLaren Hospice. The family will be present for a gathering on Sunday, February 21, 2016 from 3 to 7 pm, with a Rosary at 6:00 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. On Monday, February, 22, 2016 there will be a gathering from 10 to 11 am at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in North Branch. The Memorial Mass will follow at 11:00 am. Fr. Mark Prill will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Glen Buono, age 62, of Hadley passed away on Tuesday, February 16, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Glen was born on March 9, 1953 in Marlette, MI, the son of Vincenzo "James" and Maria (Fantin) Buono. Glen grew up in the North Branch area and graduated from North Branch High School in 1971. Glen was a foreman and fireman for General Motors and retired after 36 years of service. He attended SS. Peter and Paul Church in North Branch. Glen enjoyed working outside. He was an avid hunter, and he enjoyed bowling. Glen was a life-long Detroit sports fan. He enjoyed watching the Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, Pistons, and the Spartans. Glen spent many summers coaching his daughters in softball in North Branch. He also enjoyed spending time with his family, especially his grandchildren. Glen is survived by his mother, Maria Buono of Silverwood; his long time love, Susan Wszelaki of Hadley; daughters, Joni (Kevin) Edwards of Attica and Erica Myers of Montrose; sister, Rose Benedict of Kingston; brothers, Richard (Marlene) Buono of Clifford and Ronald (Denise) Buono of AZ, 4 grandchildren; Chase, Carleigh, Haidyn and Jacquelyn; 1 niece; 3 nephews; and many cousins. He was preceded in death by his father, James; and brother-in-law, Mike Benedict. Memorials may be made to the Leukemia Foundation. The family will be present for visitation on Thursday, February 18, 2016 from 3 to 8 pm, with the Rosary at 3 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. On Friday, February 19, 2016 Glen will lie in state from 12 to 1 pm at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church with the Funeral Mass to follow at 1:00 pm. Fr. Richard Treml will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Joseph Tallieu, age 77, of Clifford, passed away Monday, February 1, 2016 at his home with his family at his side. Joe was born January 28, 1939 in Kings Mill, Arcadia Twp, the son of Felix and Helen (Schwerin) Tallieu. Joe grew up in Kings Mill and attended North Branch High School. On June 27, 1986 he married Gloria Cripps. Joe proudly served his country in the U.S. Army. He was a member of the Faith Lutheran Church in Mt. Pleasant . Joe enjoyed hunting, fishing, he loved his tractors, but Joe especially loved spending time with his family and grandchildren. Joe is survived by his wife, Gloria; children; Douglas (Diane) Tallieu, Joseph (Kathy) Tallieu Jr, Betty Kaye (Wayne) Sieman, Andrew (Glenda) Tallieu, and Suzanne (Kent) Clark, step-children; Keith (Christina) Lockwood, Kevin (Jamie) Lockwood, Kimberly (David) Malecki, Kurt (Latinamarie) Lockwood; brother; Jerry (Lois) Tallieu; sisters; Vernetta Goss and Betty Cloutier, 28 Grandchildren, many great-grandchildren, several nieces, nephews, and cousins. Joe was preceded in death by his parents, son, Mark; brothers; Lewis and Stanley. Memorials may be made to the family. Family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 from 4 to 8 pm and Wednesday, February 3, 2016 from 10 to 11 am, with a memorial service to follow at 11:00am at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. There will be a memorial service at Our Faith Lutheran Church in Mt. Pleasant at a later date. Pastors David Sutton and Mike Beibender will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Barbara Ann Szczepanski, age 67, of Marlette, passed away Thursday, January 28, 2016 at United Marlette Hospice Residence. Barbara was born February 9, 1948 in Detroit, MI. She was the daughter of Stanley and Jean (Sochacki) Kukielka. Barbara grew up in Detroit and graduated from High School in 1966. Barbara was a member of SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in North Branch. She enjoyed bowling, but she especially enjoyed spending time with her family. Barbara is survived by her sons; Jeffrey of Almont, MI, Kevin (Rebecca) of Davison, MI, Sean (Tracey) of North Branch, MI, and Jeremy (Lisa) of Washington, 8 grandchildren, and brother Robert (Geraldine) Kukielka. Memorials may be made to the Marlette United Hospice Service. There will be a Memorial Mass for Barbara on Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 11:00 AM, at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Fr. Treml will officiate. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com George Medbery, age 77 of North Branch passed away January 14, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region. George was born on February 13, 1938 to Ralph and Helen (Opdyke) Medbery. George graduated from North Branch High School in 1956. On August 22, 1968 he married Bonnie Mulholland. George retired from AC Sparkplug after 30 years of service. He also worked at Chaso-Royco in North Branch. He was a member of the MWHA. George enjoyed hunting, fishing, his dog, Dakota and spending time with his family, grandchildren and friends. George is survived by daughter: Sherry (Jeremy) Fricke of North Branch; sons: Jeff (Sue) Berlin of Grand Rapids, Roland Hopkins of Kalkaska, Tracy Hopkins of Brooksville, FL, and Jason (Natalie) Hopkins of Grand Blanc, David (Susan) Medbery of FL., and Daniel Medbery; sister: Susie, brothers: Tom and Bill. Grandchildren: Danielle, Eric, Andrew, Alexa, Kalah, Natalya, Brandon, Hunter, and Amanda; great-grandchildren: Ryder, Aria, Cameron, and Ezra; many nieces, nephews, cousins and friends. Memorials may be directed to the North Branch Thrift Shop. The family will be present for visitation on Sunday, January 17, 2016 from 4 to 8 pm; Monday, January 18, 2016 from 10 to 11 am. The Funeral Service will be 11:00 am, January 18, 2016 at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home with Father Mark Prill officiating.. George will be laid to rest next to his wife, Bonnie in Deerfield Cemetery. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Fred Smith Jr. age 81, of North Branch, passed away on Saturday, January 8th, 2016 at his home with his family at his side. Fred was born June 6, 1934 in Atlas Township, MI to Fred and Bessie (Sharick) Smith. Fred graduated from North Branch High School in 1953. On September 24, 1960, he married Marjorie Van Conant. Fred proudly served his country in the U.S. Army. Fred retired from General Motors after 30 years of service. He attended North Branch Wesleyan Church. Fred was a member of the Lapeer American Legion Post #16 and the Old Caboose Hunt Club. Fred enjoyed fishing, hunting, camping, playing cards and spending time with his family. Fred is survived by his daughter, Marjorie (Bernell) Wilson of North Branch; sons, Tom Smith of North Branch and Kenneth (Wanda) Knox Elkhart, IN; sister, Shirley Heussner of Lapeer; 10 grandchildren; several great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews. Fred was preceded in death by his wife, Marjorie in 2007; sons, Donald and James; and sister, Phyllis. Memorials may be directed to the family. Family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, January 12, 2016 from 4 to 8 pm, and Wednesday, January 13, 2016 from 10 to 11 am. The Funeral Service will be 11:00 am, Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Josh Hilty will officiate. Fred will be laid to rest next to his wife, Marjorie at West Deerfield Cemetery of Fostoria, with military honors being conducted by the North Branch American Legion Post #457. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com .Candace “Candy” Coulter, age 70 of North Branch passed away on January 1, 2016 at McLaren Lapeer Region with her family by her side. Candy was born on May 27, 1945 in North Branch to the late Fred and Elizabeth (Blackburn) Ritter. Candy grew up in North Branch and graduated from North Branch High School in 1963. In December of 1978, Candy married Dick Coulter in Las Vegas. Candy worked for M.K. Chambers and Adam’s Apotheke for many years where she made life-long friends. She was an active member of the North Branch Wesleyan Church, where her heart was always with the Lord. Candy loved to work blood drives. Candy humbly and selflessly cared for others. Mostly, Candy loved spending time with her family and friends. Candy is survived by: her husband, Dick; daughters: Tammy Sue (Kevin) Stayton of Grand Blanc, Jolynn (Jon) McKenney of North Branch, Lynn (Tom) Rogers of North Branch and Joy (Jeff) Brown of Denver, CO; sons: Dan (Brenda) Coulter of Metamora, Curt (Karen) Coulter of North Branch, Paul (Michelle) Coulter of Lapeer, Richard Coulter of Vero Beach, FL and Eric (Amber) Coulter of Urbana, IL; sisters: Nancy Hart of North Branch, Anabel “Dutch” (Wayne) Harris of North Branch and Pam (Gary) Currie of Howell; 24 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren; and many nieces, nephews and cousins. Candy was preceded in death by: her parents, parents-in-law, the father of her children, Charles Hebberd and brother-in-law, Keith Hart. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to the North Branch Wesleyan Church or the North Branch Thrift Shop. Family will be present for visitation on Monday, January 4th from 5-8 PM, Tuesday, January 5th from 4-8 PM and on Wednesday, January 6th from 10-11 AM at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Funeral Service will be at 11 AM on Wednesday, January 6th at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home with Pastors Peter Damaska and Josh Hilty officiating. Candy will be laid to rest in Westlawn Cemetery in North Branch. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Patricia Ann Emory, age 79, of Luzern, MI passed away on Tuesday, December 22, 2015 in North Branch surrounded by her loving family. Patricia was born to Conrad and Fern (O’Toole) Berghofer on November 2, 1936 in Detroit, MI. She grew up in the Rochester area. On July 5, 1985, she married James Dean Emory in Rochester, MI. Patricia was a nurses aid for many years. Patricia enjoyed being outside and spending time with her animals. She also an avid crocheter. Most of all, Patricia loved spending time with her family and friends. Patricia is survived by: her husband, James Dean Emory; children: Deborah Florence Merser and her husband, Keith of North Branch, Janet Marie McNamara of Macomb and Kimberly Ann Johnson of Florida; brother: Conrad Edward Berghoefer; 8 grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews. Patricia was preceded in death by: her parents, her son, Ronald James Earich Jr.; sisters Yvonne White and Margaret Canfield and her brother, Robert Berghoefer. Memorials may be directed to the family. Family will be present for visitation on Monday, December 28, 2015 from 11 AM to 3 PM at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. The funeral service will be Monday, December 28th at 3 PM at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home with Pastor Anthony Ferriell officiating. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Floyd Albert North, age 90, of Columbiaville passed away on Dec. 21, 2015 at his home. Floyd was born May 1, 1925 in Burnside Twp., the son of Bruce and Iva (Crake) North. Floyd retired from General Motors. Floyd was a member of the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Lapeer. Floyd’s faith and his family were very important to him. He enjoyed deer and turkey hunting, fishing, spending time at the lake, going to antique and garage sales, and visiting his neighbors. Floyd is survived by his daughters: Theresa (Keith) Mueller of West Branch, and Annita Coulter of Columbiaville; son, Kevin (Roxanne) North of North Branch; step-son, Ernie Hensel of North Branch; brother, LJ (Wilma) North and sister-in-law, Mary North both of Burnside Twp., 7 grandchildren, several great-grandchildren , and many nieces, nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, brothers, Bruce, Gerald, and Marvin; sister, Judy; and son-in-law, Daniel Coulter. Memorials may be directed to the family. The family will be present on Sunday, December 27, 2015 from 4 to 8 pm., and on Monday, December 28, 2015 Floyd will lie in state at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in North Branch, MI. from 10 to 11 am with the Funeral Mass to follow at 11:00am. Floyd will be Buried at Burnside Twp. Cemetery. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Marion “Suzie Mason” Rowe, age 88, of East Lansing (formerly of North Branch) passed away on December 17, 2015. Marion was born August 20, 1927 in Windsor Ontario, the daughter of Harvey and Agnus (MacKay) Mason. Suzie graduated from the prestigious Royal Conservatory of Music with honors. She was a beautiful piano player and throughout her life she taught hundreds of children and adults to play. Suzie married Harvey “Bub” Rowe and moved to North Branch, MI where they became successful dairy farmers. While farming and teaching piano she also worked in human resources at Eaton Corporation. She and her husband learned to fly and earned their pilot licenses. They both flew their private plane to various locations across Midwest. In retirement they moved to their cottage in Indian River on Burt Lake. Nobody had more toys or more fun than the Rowes. From plane, to snowmobiles, to jet skis, a Chris Craft boat and more. Suzie’s husband, Bub passed away 15 years ago and Suzie went on to travel the world with friends. She became an avid bridge player and golfer, and even made a hole in one. Eventually, she made the move to a nursing home in East Lansing where she brought joy to all of the staff and residents who crossed her path. She entertained on the piano, brought friends together doing puzzles and always had a smile on her face. Suzie will be especially missed by her brother, Ronald and his wife, Marion Mason, her nieces Cindy and Tracey, and Tracey’s sons, Travis and Tyler. Memorials may be made to the North Branch Area School Music Department. The family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, December 29, 2015 from 9:00 am to 11:00am, with the Funeral Service to follow at 11:00 am, all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Rev. Ronald Hutchinson will officiate. Suzie will be laid to rest next to her husband, Bud in West Burlington Cemetery, Silverwood, MI. Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home 416 Huron Street, P.O. Box 248, North Branch, MI. 810-688-3232 You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Mary Nellenbach, age 85, of North Branch, passed away unexpectedly on Tuesday, December 1, 2015 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Mary was born May 19, 1930 in Goodrich, Michigan, the daughter of Thomas Coyne and Frances Glaser-Walenta. Mary grew up in Davison and graduated from Goodrich High School in 1948. Mary continued her education at Oakland University, receiving her Bachelors Degree of Science and Education. On October 23, 1948 she married Paul Nellenbach of North Branch. Mary was a very busy homemaker for her large family. She also was a substitute teacher, the music director for St. Mary’s Catholic Church and SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church and was District 1 County Commissioner for over 14 years. Mary was active in the M.M.P.A., she enjoyed singing for the Sweet Adelines for many years, quilting, crocheting, knitting, working on her word games and Suduko, and traveling when she was able. Mary is survived by daughters: Joanne (Frank) Rowe of Lapeer, Paulette Lindsay of St. Clair, Kathy “Agnes” Calligaro of St. Clair, Suzanne (Dan) Stechschulte of Canton, daughters-in-law: Patty Nellenbach of Attica and Pam Nellenbach of Lapeer; sons: Thomas (Louise) Nellenbach of North Branch, Bill (Penni) Nellenbach of Texas, and Doug (Denise) Nellenbach of Lapeer; 22 grandchildren; 22 great-grandchildren; brother-in-law, O.J. (Doris) Nellenbach of Shelby Twp.; and sister-in-law, Rose Nellenbach; many nieces, nephews, and cousins. She was preceded in death by her parents; husband, Paul, sons, Bob and Rick; grandson, Jacob; great-granddaughter, Aubrey; brothers, Thomas Coyne, Patrick Coyne, Edward Podbielniak; brothers-in-law, Robert, Leo, Hank, Joe, Nick, and Jim Nellenbach; sisters-in-law; Mary Kowalweski, Louise Kreiner, Rita Kreiner and Dorothy Gusta. Memorials may be made to St. Mary’s Catholic Church or the Senior Health Services of Lapeer. The family will be present for visitation on Friday, December 4, 2015 from 3 to 8 pm, a rosary at 7:00 pm all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Mary will lie in state from 10 to 11 am at SS. Peter and Paul on Saturday, December 5, 2015, the Funeral Mass will follow at 11 am at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Mary will be laid to rest next to her husband Paul at St. Mary’s Cemetery. Fr. Rich Treml will officiate. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Carl Frances Wright, age 90, of Brown City, passed away November 29, 2015 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Carl was born October 17, 1925 in Oxford, Michigan, the son of Walter and Hazel (Rosencrants) Wright. On September 22, 1945 he married Verla Chesney, she preceded him in death in 2003. Carl attended North Branch Area School. Carl was a welder for over 40 years for Vesley and Champion Bus Company. He enjoyed woodworking, fishing and spending time with the family at family gatherings. Carl is survived by his daughter, Mary Ann (David T.) Smith of Utica; sons, Roger (Pam) Wright of Brown City, George (Nancy) Wright of Silverwood and Andy (Janel) Wright of Manton, Michigan; 45 grandchildren, 51 great-grandchildren, 8 great-great-grandchildren, many nieces, nephews and cousins. He was preceded in death by his parents, wife, son Gary, daughter, Carole Pettit, and son Carl Wright. Memorials may be made to Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home to help for funeral expenses. Family will be present for visitation on December 3, 2015 from 11:00am to 1:00pm with the Funeral Service at 1:00pm all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Brian Cheever will officiate. Carl will be laid to rest next to his wife, Verla at Westlawn Cemetery, North Branch. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Sarah Elizabeth Adams, age 83, of North Branch (formerly of Lapeer) passed away Sunday, November 29, 2015 at Marlette Hospice Residence. Sarah was born August 22, 1932 in Burlington Twp., North Branch, the daughter of Claude and Della (Lamphier) Raymond. Sarah grew up in North Branch and graduated from North Branch High School in 1950. Sarah worked as a machinist for Chaso Royco over 20 years in North Branch before retiring. Sarah was very active at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Lapeer, before moving to North Branch where she was a member at New Life In Christ Lutheran Church. Memorials may be made to 7 Ponds of Dryden or to the Marlette United Hospice Service. Sarah is survived by: brothers-in-law; George Knox of North Branch and Jr. Adams of Dryden; some nieces and nephews. Sarah was preceded in death by her parents; husband, Virgil; and brother, Floyd Visitation will be on December 2, 2015 from 10 to 11 am at the New Life In Christ Church, North Branch. The Funeral Service will follow at 11:00 am. Deacon Joe Schierlinger and Pastor Marvin Ramthun will officiate. Sarah will be laid to rest next to her husband Virgil at Greenwood Cemetery. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Dorothy O’Leary, age 93, of North Branch( formerly of Centerline) passed away Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at Marlette Extended Care. Dorothy was born July 3, 1922 in Portsmouth, Ohio, the daughter of Russell and Exie (Knoff) Bodmer. Dorothy was a busy homemaker and she enjoyed cooking, cleaning and more cleaning. Dorothy is survived by daughters; Pat Sauer of North Branch and Peggy (Art) Smith of Rockford, Illinois, sons; Dan (Wendy) O’Leary of California and Tim (Theresa) O’Leary of Washington, Michigan, brother; Kenneth Bodmer of North Branch, 8 grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren; many nieces, nephews and cousins. Dorothy was preceded in death by her husband; great-granddaughter and 1 sister, Martha. Memorials may be directed to the Marlette Extended care Facility. Burial will be held at a later date. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Inez Harmon, age 88, of North Branch passed away on Saturday, November 14, 2015 at Marlette Hospice Residence. Inez was born March 6, 1927 in Richmond Twp., Michigan , she was one of seven children and the daughter of Arthur and Ethel (Shue) Plagens. After attending a country school , she attended Richmond High School, where she met Cob Harmon. On May 24, 1947 Inez married Claude “Cob” Harmon, they had 68 precious years before he passed away in September 18, 2015. Inez was a busy homemaker and a hair dresser for many years, until they bought the Bulk Plant from Standard Oil Company in 1977. Inez worked with Cob operating the business, until his death. She was a member of Our Savior Lutheran Church of Marlette. Inez enjoyed playing cards with their card club, decorating her home, shopping from catalogs, and her favorite place to go was Frankenmuth on weekends. Inez is survived by her daughter, Claudia Jakubiak of Columbus, MI; sons, Tom (Maria) Harmon and Tim (Ellen) Harmon both of North Branch; daughter-in-law, Lora Harmon; 14 grandchildren; 9 great-grandchildren; brother, Marvin (Bonnie) Plagens of Columbus; and sister, Aleta Schneider of Richmond; many nieces, nephews, cousins and friends. Memorials may be made to the United Hospice Service of Marlette or Our Savior Lutheran Church of Marlette. She was preceded in death by her parents, husband Cob, son Patrick, son-in-law Tom Jakubiak, brothers Elroy and Stanley, sisters Nadene and Grace. The family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015 from 5 to 8 pm, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015 from 4 to 8 pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Inez will lie in state at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Marlette, from 10 to 11 am on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015. The Funeral Service will follow at 11:00 am. Pastor Eric Kilmer and Pastor David Sutton will officiate. Inez will be laid to rest next to her husband, Cob in Maple Grove Cemetery, North Branch. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Larry Bader, age 67 of North Branch passed away Wednesday, November 11, 2015 at Marlette United Hospice Service Residence. Larry was born on July 18, 1948 in Lapeer, the son of Willard and Catherine (Yaklevich) Bader. Larry grew up in the North Branch area and graduated from North Branch High School in 1966. Larry retired from M K Chambers as a machinist. He was a member of the SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church and the SS. Peter and Paul Knights of Columbus. Larry was a big collector, he enjoyed collecting trains and old coins, he loved John Deere tractors, woodworking and taking pictures. Larry is survived by his sisters: Ruth Ann (Robert) Bostick and Mary Kay (Al) Johnson both of North Branch, many nieces, nephews and cousins. He was preceded in death by his parents and infant brother Paul. Memorials may be made to United Hospice Service of Marlette. The family will be present for visitation on Sunday, November 15, 2015 from 1 to 5 pm, with a rosary at 4:00pm at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. The Funeral Mass will be Monday, November 16, 2015, 11:00 am at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Larry will be laid to rest next to his parents at SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery. Fr. Mark Prill will officiate. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Alice “Susie” Ide, age 75, of Marlette passed away on November 9, 2015 at McLaren Macomb. Alice was born August 14, 1940, the daughter of Jessie and Grace (Quigley) Bowman. She grew up in Roseville, Michigan. On May 19, 1962 she married Michael Ide in Roseville. Alice was a busy homemaker taking care of her family. She enjoyed dancing, making crafts, reading and spending time with her family. Alice is survived by her children: son, Tim (Margie) Bowman of Roseville; daughter, Betty (Rex) Hamlin of Lapeer; son, Michael (Nancy) Ide of Deckerville; daughter, Lee (Don) Johnson of Marlette; grandchildren: Rickquel (Chad) Lauren and Brandon Dempsey; Patrick Boughan; Aaron Bowman; Tim (Angel) Bowman; Michelle (Doug) and Aubrey McRobbie; Nicole (Stephen) Fleming; Jessica Ide and Kayla Wells. Sisters: Billie and Irene; many nieces, nephews and cousins. She was preceded in death by her parents, husband Michael, sister Sandy and brother Charles. Family will be present for a gathering on Friday, November 13, 2015 from 1 to 3 pm. The Memorial Service will follow at 3:00 pm all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Deacon Joe Schierlinger will officiate. .You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Vivian Joan Pincumbe, age 78, (formerly of Clifford), passed away on Saturday, October 17, 2015 at her home. Joan was born on November 26, 1936 in Oxford, the daughter of Matt and Gladys Mersino. Joan was a longtime member of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Clifford, Michigan. She was an avid Tigers fan. Vivian was a devoted mother and she is survived by her nine children: Dawn of North Branch; Cheryl (Jim) of Dunkirk Ohio; Rick of Crestview, Florida; Julie (Jim) of Brunswick, Maine; Dale (Dionne) of North Branch; Wayne (Veronica) of Marlette; Connie of Kingston; Pam (Tico) of Hamilton, Virginia; and Ron (Amie) of Big Rapids. Grandchildren: Jr Light; Robert, Brad, Jeremy and Justin Crossman; John and Mary Pincumbe; Jennifer, Jessica, and Jordan Timmreck; Courtney Thibodeau; Austin Pincumbe; Dillon Pincumbe; Derek and Felisha Miller; Melissa Pendleton; Kristina Sheppard; Kaylee and Jared Forero; Madelyn, Grace, Sophia and Jackson Pincumbe; 21 great-grandchildren; sister: Phyllis Pagel; brothers: Matt, Richard, Stan, and Dennis Mersino; many nieces, nephews, cousins and friends who will miss her dearly. Joan was preceded in death by her husband, Richard, and grandson, Nicholas Miller, 1 sister and 3 brothers. Family suggests memorial donations be made to the American Lung Association. Visitation for Joan will be on Thursday, October 22, 2015 from noon to 2 pm, and from 5 to 8 pm, with a Rosary at 7:30 pm all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. A Funeral Mass will be held at 11:00am, October 23, 2015 at SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in North Branch. Joan will be laid to rest beside her husband, Richard at St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Clifford, MI at a later date. .You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Ann B. Fromwiller, age 82 of North Branch died Wednesday, October 7, 2015 at McLaren Lapeer Region. Ann was born April 25, 1933 in Pontiac, MI, she was the daughter of William and Viola (Egan) Anderson. Ann grew up in Lake Nepessing, and she graduated from Lapeer High School. She married Ralph Fromwiller March 1, 1952. Ann worked hard on their dairy farm beside her husband. She enjoyed working in her flower gardens, sewing, crafts, and was well known for her fudge and divinity. But, most of all her grandchildren were the love of her life. She is survived by her daughter Staci Fromwiller of Myersville, Maryland; son, David (Annette) Fromwiller of North Branch; sister, Janet Staley of Mt. Morris; 2 grandchildren, Caleigh and Sammy Jo Fromwiller; and many extended family members. She was preceded in death by her parents; husband, Ralph; brother, John; and sister, Helen. Memorials may be made to the United Hospice Service or the American Diabetes Foundation. Ann will be laid to rest next to her husband Ralph in Davison Cemetery on Saturday, October 10, 2015 at 11:00 am. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Donald Gould , age 78 of North Branch, died Sunday, October 4, 2015. Donald was born June 2, 1937 in Clifford, the son of Alton and Frances (Hickie) Gould. Donald grew up in North Branch and graduated from North Branch High School in 1956. On January 9, 1965 he married Crystal Stroup in Lapeer. Donald proudly served his country in the U.S. National Guard for 8 years. Donald retired from Lemforder in Lapeer after many years of service as a truck driver and shipping and receiving supervisor. He was a member of the Faith Community Church. Donald enjoyed collecting small replica cars, watching western movies, mowing lawns and he volunteered his time mowing lawn for Faith Community Church. Donald is survived by his wife, Crystal; daughter, Debra (Michael) Miller of Cass City; sons, Richard (Dawn) Gould of Freeland, Joseph (Kristin) Gould of Hudsonville, and Jeffery (Sandra) Gould of Burke, VA; 10 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren; sister, Ellen (Jerry) Holmes of Brighton. Donald was preceded in death by his parents; brother, Robert ; and sister, Judy Erwin. The family suggests memorials may be made to the North Branch Thrift Shop or the Faith Community Church. The family will be present for visitation on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 from 4 to 8 pm; Wednesday, October 7, 2015 from 10 to 12 am with the Funeral Service to follow at noon all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home. Pastor Brent Jerome will officiate. Burial will be in Maple Grove Cemetery, North Branch. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Donna A Turner, age 89, of North Branch passed away on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 at Lapeer County Medical Care Facility with her family at her side. Donna was born October 26, 1925 in Millington, the daughter of Fay and Irene (Lumley) TerBush. Donna taught at a one room country school, and she received her teaching certificate at the County Normal. Donna married Alvin Turner on March 30, 1946 at the North Branch Methodist Church. She was a homemaker and she helped on the dairy farm with her husband. Donna had a green thumb and enjoyed growing African violets and working in her gardens. Donna enjoyed going square dancing and having family gatherings on the farm. Donna is survived by her children; Gary (Doris) Turner of North Branch, Beverly (Raymond) Strzynski of North Branch, Larry Turner of Brown City, and Perry Turner of North Branch; 10 grandchildren; 8 great-grandchildren, 1 great-great grandchild; sisters; Rita (Wayne) Rhode of Fostoria, Rosemary (James) Freeland of Fostoria and Charlotte (Jerry) Brown of Mayville, brothers; Jim TerBush of Vestaburg, Roger TerBush of Mt. Pleasant, Hubert TerBush of Vassar, Morley (Bonnie) TerBush of Flushing and Lonnie (Denise) TerBush of Mayville; many nieces and nephews. The family will be present for visitation on Thursday, Sept. 24th, from 4 until 8 PM, and Friday the 25th from 10-11 AM, with the funeral service at 11AM at the funeral home. Reverend Ron Hutchinson will officiate. Burial will be at Maple Grove Cemetery, North Branch. Memorials in Donna’s name may be made to Lapeer County Medical Care Facility. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Charles William Braidwood, age 79, lifelong resident of North Branch passed away on September 23, 2015 at Marlette United Hospice. Charlie was born on May 4, 1936 in Almont to John and Margaret (Sillers) Braidwood. Charles graduated from North Branch High School in 1954. On May 14, 1960 he married Marie Doherty at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Charles was a dairy farmer most of his life in North Branch. He was supervisor and assessor for Burlington Twp. for over 20 years. Charles was a member of SS. Peter and Paul Knights of Columbus, Michigan Milk Producers and the Animal Breeders Association. He enjoyed golfing, gardening, a big Tiger fan and watching college basketball. Charles was very active in the North Branch Area Schools Alumni. Left to cherish Charles memory are his wife, Marie; daughters, Colleen Braidwood, Chris (Tom) McNulty, Theresa (Don Lamb) Koehler, Marian (Gene) Somerville; sons, Chuck (Brian Mailley) Braidwood, and Phil (Rhonda McDowell) Braidwood; grandchildren, Pat (Stevie), Keely, Ethan, Ian and Calla McNulty, Nik and Alex Koehler, Abbey, Hannah and Lucas Braidwood; sister, Doris (Jerry) Strich; brother, John Braidwood; many nieces, nephews, and cousins. He was preceded in death by his parents. The family will be present for visitation on Friday, September 25, 2015 from 4 to 8 pm with a rosary recited at 4:30 pm all at Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home and Saturday, September 26, 2015 Charles will lie in state at SS. Peter and Paul Church from 10 to 11 am with the Funeral Mass to follow. Fr. Mark Prill officiating. You may share an online condolence at www.blackburnchapel.com Arrangements by Blackburn Chapel-Martin Funeral Home Claude “Cob” Harmon, age 90, of North Branch, passed away on Friday, September 18, 2015 at Marlette United Hospice. Claude was born July 4, 1925 in Richmond, MI, the son of William and Emma (Grubb) Harmon. On May 24, 1947, Cob married Inez Plagens and together they have celebrated 68 precious years of marriage. Cob was a tree trimmer for a contractor for Detroit Edison for 21 years. In February 1969, Cob became an agent for Standard Oil in Brown City, where he had a one-truck operation. In June 1976, he purchased the bulk plant in North Branch, which is well known as the Harmon Oil Company. Cob also enjoyed farming, working in his flower beds, golfing, playing cards, and listening to the Tiger games. Most of all, Cob enjoyed spending time with his family. Cob is survived by his wife, Inez; daughter, Claudia Jakubiak of Columbus, MI; sons, Tom (Maria) Harmon, and Tim (Ellen) Harmon both of North Branch; daughter-in-law, Lora Harmon; 14 grandchildren; 9 great-grandchildren and a special Godchild, Clara Ball. He
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4334	dbpedia	1	82	https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/notable-deaths-in-2023/	en	Notable Deaths in 2023	https://assets3.cbsnewss…23b70dacd2a620f1	https://assets3.cbsnewss…23b70dacd2a620f1	[ "https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2024/01/03/de8f7d56-4864-4da8-bf49-63100ca1d724/thumbnail/620x748/1e62a052b0026d7dd7f2b2479fa12912/tom-wilkinson-getty-74788990.jpg?v=ca135fae0838bc5b23b70dacd2a620f1", "https://assets2.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2023/12/29/ce293b3c-91d0-4710-971a-8274c9ef7f07/thumbnail/6...	[]	[]	[ "Obituary" ]	null	[ "David Morgan" ]	2023-12-08T11:07:00-05:00	A look back at the esteemed personalities who've left us this year, who'd touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity.	en	https://www.cbsnews.com/…23b70dacd2a620f1		https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/notable-deaths-in-2023/	A look back at the esteemed personalities who left us this year, who'd touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity. By CBSNews.com senior producer David Morgan. The Associated Press contributed to this gallery. British actor Tom Wilkinson (February 5, 1948-December 30, 2023) was a scene-stealer of the highest order. Rarely playing a lead role, his characters infused the films he was in with gravity, tragedy and sardonic humor. He won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance as Benjamin Franklin in the HBO series "John Adams." Wilkinson earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his performance in "Michael Clayton" (2007), as an attorney who appears to fall apart owing to his experience litigating a multi-billion-dollar class action lawsuit over a carcinogenic weed killer. His come-to-Jesus moment of clarity about his complicity sets off a chain reaction that threatens the high-priced law firm hired to clean up the chemical company's mess. Edens (Tom Wilkinson): "I have blood on my hands." Clayton (George Clooney): "You are the senior litigating partner of one of the largest, most respected law firms in the world. You are a legend." Edens: "I'm an accomplice!" Clayton: "You're a manic-depressive!" Edens: "I am Shiva, the god of death." He also earned a best actor Academy Award nomination for Todd Field's 2001 drama "In the Bedroom," playing a father grieving over the murder of his son. A Yorkshire native born into a farming family, Wilkinson attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and appeared on stage and in such films and TV programs as "Sylvia," "Prime Suspect," "In the Name of the Father," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Ghost and the Darkness," "Oscar and Lucinda," "Martin Chuzzlewit" and "Rush Hour," Then came his breakout role, in the 1997 comedy "The Full Monty," as an unemployed steel mill foreman who seeks a new career as a male stripper. It was followed by "Shakespeare in Love," "The Patriot," "Girl with a Pearl Earring," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Batman Begins," "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," "Valkyrie," "The Debt," "The Kennedys," "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol," "Belle," "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "Selma." He recently reunited with "Full Monty" co-stars Robert Carlyle and Mark Addy in a Disney+ series of the same name. Tom Smothers Tom Smothers (February 2, 1937-December 26, 2023), one-half of the duo The Smothers Brothers, said they didn't think of themselves as comedians. "No, we thought of ourselves as folk singers," Tom told "Sunday Morning" in 2022. But the pair – Dick playing bass and straight man, Tom (two years older) on guitar and cracking wise – were a hit with their late '60s variety show, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." With guest stars like comedian George Carlin and anti-war activist Pete Seeger, and a writing staff that included Steve Martin and Rob Reiner, the show was a counterculture hit that tweaked the powers-that-be, whether in the White House or at CBS' headquarters at Black Rock. With their charm and light banter of sibling rivalry ("Mom liked you best!"), they lampooned politicians, decried the war in Vietnam, and made fun of network censors. They were a hit almost instantly; within two weeks, they were beating the venerable "Bonanza" in the ratings. As their humor got sharper, censors sharpened their scissors, cutting out controversial content, sometimes entire skits, which put Tom on the defensive, willing to continue poking the bear: "I was offended; 'What do you mean I can't say that?'" he said. CBS finally cancelled the show after 72 episodes. The brothers sued the network for breach of contract and won, but the show was over. Tom recognized that, by the end of their run, anger was getting in the way of humor: "I was doing material, it was kind of mean comedy," he said. "I needed to be fired. If we would have gotten another year, it'd have been strident!" They didn't give up performing, though; they did a few more TV and stage shows, including a '90s reboot of their "Comedy Hour" (on CBS, no less), and starred on Broadway. The two had started while Tom was a student at San Jose State College, part of a music group, The Casual Quintet. Tom encouraged Dick to join, and the two continued as a duo after other players dropped out. Mixing comedy with folk music, The Smothers Brothers made numerous appearances on TV variety shows, records, and college venues. They played brothers – one a fledgling guardian angel – in a 1965 sitcom, "The Smothers Brothers Show," which failed to showcase their musical talents. The year after that ended, their "Comedy Hour" took off. In 2008, as he received a lifetime Emmy Award, Tom said, "It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war." He dedicated his award to those "who feel compelled to speak out and are not afraid to speak to power and won't shut up." They retired in 2010, but returned in 2021 with a series of stage shows. "People laughing is holy," Tom told "Sunday Morning," as they prepared for another tour. "And if you can be part of that, and control it, and create it, it's the best thing ever." Ryan O'Neal Ryan O'Neal (April 20, 1941-December 8, 2023) transitioned from an actor on TV's "Peyton Place" to an Oscar-nominated role in "Love Story," the blockbuster tear-jerker that catapulted him into the front ranks of Hollywood stars in the 1970s. O'Neal and Ali MacGraw starred as college students from disparate backgrounds who fall in love, marry, and then discover she is dying of cancer. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture. Appearing in a wide range of comedies and dramas, O'Neal cleverly used his boyish good looks to play men who hid sinister backgrounds behind clean-cut images. He starred in Stanley Kubrick's historical epic "Barry Lyndon," playing a roguish opportunist whose life cascades between poverty and wealth, from the battlefields of Europe to an aristocratic estate. O'Neal's gift for comedy shone opposite Barbra Streisand in Peter Bogdanovich's "What's Up, Doc?"; and he shared the screen with his daughter, Tatum, as a pair of confidence tricksters in "Paper Moon," for which the 10-year-old won an Oscar for best supporting actress. His other film credits included "The Big Bounce" (in which he appeared with his second wife, Leigh Taylor-Young), "Wild Rovers," "Nickelodeon," "A Bridge Too Far," "The Driver," "Oliver's Story" (a poorly-received sequel to "Love Story"), "The Main Event," "Irreconcilable Differences," "Tough Guys Don't Dance," and "Knight of Cups." O'Neal continued acting into his 70s, appearing on TV's "90210," "Bull," "Bones," "Malibu's Most Wanted," and "Desperate Housewives." Talented but troubled, O'Neal's boy-next-door image was sometimes at odds with his personal life, marked by a hot temper, drugs and alcohol. Twice divorced, he had strained relationships with three of his four children. In her autobiography Tatum O'Neal wrote of suffering physical and emotional abuse from her dad. They tried to patch things up by participating in a reality TV series, "Ryan and Tatum: The O'Neals." In 2007 Ryan was arrested for firing a gun at his son Griffin, but charges were dropped. The following year, he was arrested along with his son Redmond on drug charges. In 2009 he told Vanity Fair magazine, "I'm a hopeless father. I don't know why. I don't think I was supposed to be a father." The one constant in his life was Farrah Fawcett. Their relationship was an on-again/off-again affair, which was rekindled in 2001, when O'Neal was diagnosed with leukemia; Fawcett was at his side. Five years later, when Fawcett was diagnosed with cancer, he was there for her until the end, when she died in 2009. He even suggested that the hospital chaplain marry the two. "She said, 'Okay, let's get married,'" O'Neal told "CBS This Morning" in 2012. "But by then, she was so weak that he was only able to give her the last rites." In 2021, O'Neal and MacGraw spoke with "Sunday Morning" about the making of "Love Story," and noted that over the years they'd been asked frequently to explain the movie's most famous quote: "Love means never having to say you're sorry." "Neither of us knew at the time," said O'Neal. "But over the years, we have come up with answers that … I don't know. I had to say 'I'm sorry' a lot in my life, that's all I know!" Norman Lear Legendary TV producer Norman Lear (July 27, 1922-December 5, 2023) was responsible for such groundbreaking situation comedies as "All in the Family," "Maude," "The Jeffersons," "Sanford & Son," and "One Day at a Time" – shows that broke taboos on broadcast entertainment and helped define a generation. His comedies routinely tackled serious social issues, some rarely seen on TV before, from racism, rape and abortion to menopause, homosexuality and religion, all viewed through the prism of laughter. Nowhere was this more effective than in the debates pitting arch conservative Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O'Connor) and his liberal son-in-law Mike (Rob Reiner) in "All in the Family." In a 2021 interview on "Sunday Morning," Lear said people on both ends of the political spectrum found something to connect with in the show. "I like to think what they saw was the foolishness of the human condition," he said. "The intention was to show there's humor in everything," he told "CBS This Morning" in 2017. "And I never thought of [Archie] as a hater so much as a man fearful of progress." Lear, a World War II veteran, got his start as a writer for radio and TV in the post-war years. It was "All in the Family," which premiered on CBS in 1971, that put him on the map. The show ran for nine seasons, won 22 Emmy Awards, and was No. 1 in the ratings for five consecutive years. Even when the subject matter was divisive, the audience would be bonded by humor. "To be able to laugh in a rehearsal at something you hadn't expected, and then to stand to the side or behind an audience laughing, and watch them, their bodies – a couple of hundred people as one – when something makes them laugh, I don't think I've ever seen a more spiritual moment than an audience in a belly laugh!" Lear said. "The soundtrack of my life has been laughter." "All in the Family" was followed by the popular and provocative spin-offs "Maude" (starring Bea Arthur), and "The Jeffersons" (starring Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley), which brought storylines about women's liberation and race into millions of living rooms across the country. "Sanford and Son" (starring comedian Redd Foxx) and "Good Times" broke ground with mostly Black casts. In "One Day at a Time," Bonnie Franklin starred as a divorcee struggling against sexism, chauvinistic bosses and cheating boyfriends, while raising two teenage daughters. Lear also created the syndicated "Mary Hartman, Marty Hartman," a parody of soap operas, and was executive producer of "Hot l Baltimore" (based on the Lanford Wilson stage comedy), set in a run-down hotel populated by prostitutes, undocumented immigrants, and a gay couple. The political and social issues he explored on screen also inspired his own activism. In 1981, he co-founded the nonprofit group People For the American Way to advocate for progressive causes and counter anti-democratic or divisive politics. In a 2022 conversation with Ted Koppel for "Sunday Morning," Lear discussed the state of a world that closely monitors discrimination towards minorities, women, gays or other groups. Koppel said, "Every office now has a department of someone who is there to make sure that others in the department don't go around offending one another. We didn't have that 50 years ago. Is that a good thing?" "Oh my God, my sense is there's something wrong, that we're living in a culture where that has to exist," said Lear, "that there is a role for a person to make sure that other people are being decent humans. It says something about the culture we live in." "I'm getting the impression that what you're saying is we shouldn't need a department to make us be nice to one another?" Koppel asked. "Yes. Yes, yes, yes," Lear replied. And the key to achieving that, he said, was to be able to laugh at ourselves. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor In 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor (March 26, 1930-December 1, 2023), a conservative judge and elected official from Arizona, was named by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first female justice in the high court's 191-year history. A moderate conservative, O'Connor wasted little time building a reputation as a hard worker who wielded considerable political clout on the nine-member court. O'Connor had a tenacious, independent spirit that came naturally. As a child growing up in the Arizona outback, on a ranch founded by her pioneer grandfather, she learned early to ride horses, round up cattle and drive trucks and tractors. "I didn't do all the things the boys did," she said in a 1981 Time magazine interview, "but I fixed windmills and repaired fences." Her most influential votes came in 1989, when she refused to join four other justices ready to reverse the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion; and in 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when she led a five-justice majority that reaffirmed the core holding of Roe. Reading a summary of her decision in court, O'Connor said, "Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that can't control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code." [Thirty years later, the justice who replaced O'Connor upon her retirement, Samuel Alito, wrote the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned Roe, allowing states to ban abortions with few or no exemptions.] In 2000, O'Connor was part of the 5-4 majority that effectively halted the counting of ballots in Florida, thus deciding the disputed presidential election in favor of Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore. O'Connor was regarded with great fondness by many of her colleagues. When she retired in 2006, Justice Clarence Thomas, a consistent conservative, called her "an outstanding colleague, civil in dissent and gracious when in the majority." She could, nonetheless, express her views tartly. In one of her final actions as a justice, a dissent to a 5-4 ruling to allow local governments to condemn and seize personal property to allow private developers to build shopping plazas, office buildings and other facilities, she warned the majority had unwisely ceded yet more power to the powerful. "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property," O'Connor wrote. "Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing ... any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory." Once called the nation's most powerful woman, O'Connor remained the court's only woman until 1993, when President Bill Clinton nominated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. [The current court includes four women.] In a 2006 interview with CBS News, in which she was described as "charmingly feisty," O'Connor said she was not comfortable with some of the labels used about her during her tenure, such as "swing vote." "I'm not OK with that," she said. "I think that's a term the press developed, and it has no appeal for me." When asked how reporters could do a better job covering the judicial branch, O'Connor replied: "Oh, give the Court credit for not making political decisions. Give them credit for trying to resolve the issues fairly sometimes." Rosalynn Carter Former first lady Rosalynn Carter (August 18, 1927-November 19, 2023) was the closest adviser to Jimmy Carter during his presidency. Both said she was the more political of the pair. Unlike many previous first ladies, Rosalynn sat in on Cabinet meetings and spoke out on controversial issues. The president even sent her on a trip to Latin America to tell dictators he meant what he said about denying military aid and other support to violators of human rights. Fiercely loyal and politically astute, Rosalynn prided herself on being an activist first lady, whose support for projects was often enlisted by White House aides before they discussed it with the president. She acted to address mental health and problems of the elderly as her signature policy emphasis, and criticized reporters who neglected to cover those issues. She became the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to address a congressional panel when, as honorary chairwoman of the President's Commission on Mental Health, she testified before a Senate subcommittee. After losing reelection in 1980 and leaving Washington, Jimmy and Rosalynn co-founded The Carter Center in Atlanta to continue their humanitarian work. They built homes with Habitat for Humanity, promoted public health initiatives (such as eradicating Guinea worm) in the developing world, and monitored elections across the globe. She also wrote several books, including an autobiography, "First Lady From Plains," and (with Susan K. Golant) "Helping Someone with Mental Illness: A Compassionate Guide for Family, Friends, and Caregivers." She co-authored a book with her husband "Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life," a collaboration they both agreed had tested their marriage like no White House crisis ever did. In a 2013 interview with C-Span, Rosalynn Carter said, "I hope my legacy continues more than just first lady. The Carter Center has been an integral part of our lives and our motto is 'Waging peace, fighting disease and building hope.'" "I get tired," she once said of her travels. "But something so wonderful always happens. To go to a village where they have Guinea worm and go back a year or two later and there's no Guinea worm, I mean the people dance and sing - it's so wonderful." David Del Tredici Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici (March 16, 1937-November 18, 2023) was a proponent of a concert hall movement dubbed Neo-Romanticism – lushly detailed orchestral and vocal works, which in the case of Del Tredici served as melodic interpretations of the writings of Lewis Carroll, specifically his "Alice" books. Trained as a pianist, Del Tredici shifted to writing music after experiencing the withering criticism of an instructor, followed by composition studies at Berkeley and Princeton. He set the words of James Joyce to music ("Sysygy"), and then found inspiration in Carroll's books (and in the English writer's infatuation with young Alice Liddell). In a 2012 interview by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, Del Tredici recalled his earlier dissonant pieces: "In those days it was so exciting to be atonal because it was so new. We were happy with our kind of wholesome, heartfelt, woodland music which in a way was what my generation had been fed on, but to have this totally horrifying aesthetic, which was atonal, was thrilling. When you're a composer, you want to be different, you want to have something special to say, you want to be shocking, you want to get attention. And this filled the bill." But for Carroll, and the theme of suppressed love, he said, "I needed another language. Somehow atonality didn't do it." His earlier experimental and minimalist music would become overshadowed by such pieces as "Final Alice," a brash and melodic 1975 work for soprano and orchestra. Similarly, "In Memory of a Summer Day" – a meditation on love and death for soprano and orchestra – takes the title from Carroll's dedication in his original manuscript. In the composer's notes he wrote: "Like many of my pieces, this movement began chastely, but grew (Wonderland-style) to alarming proportions." It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, and became the basis of a dance work by the National Ballet of Canada. Roger Kastel Artist Roger Kastel (June 11,1931-November 8, 2023) created more than 1,000 illustrations used in magazines, comics, book covers and movie posters, none more recognizable than his artwork for Peter Benchley's bestseller "Jaws." The image of a great white shark rising up towards a naked female swimmer was created for the paperback edition, for which Kastel went to the American Museum of Natural History to photograph closeup views of a shark's teeth. He also had a model pretend to swim while stretched out on a stool. So striking was Kastel's illustration (and successful – the Bantam Books paperback edition initially sold three million copies) that Universal Pictures used it to market Steven Spielberg's 1975 movie version. It became one of the most iconic movie posters of all time, and was featured in the anthologies "200 Years of American Illustration" and "The Illustrator in America." The whereabouts of Kastel's original artwork – oil on masonite – became a mystery. Kastel last saw it at a museum exhibition in the '70s, after which it allegedly was shipped to Hollywood. (In 1993 it was spotted by this writer hanging on a wall at Bantam Books in New York City, prior to the publisher moving its offices to Times Square.) To date efforts to locate it have failed. Other movie posters featuring Kastel's work include "The Great Train Robbery" and the "Star Wars" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back." In the 2012 documentary "The Shark Is Still Working," Kastel recalled his seven-year-old grandson asking him, "'Did you ever do a Mona Lisa?' That really threw me. I said, 'I don't think I've done the Mona Lisa.' And he said, 'Well, the shark will just have to be your Mona Lisa.'" Frank Borman A U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and instructor at West Point, astronaut Frank Borman (March 14, 1928-November 7, 2023) commanded Apollo 8's historic 1968 flight – the first manned mission to the moon. Borman, James Lovell and William Anders circled the moon 10 times beginning on December 24, paving the way for Apollo 11's lunar landing the following year. In 2018 Borman told "Sunday Morning" that his goal was to "go to the moon and come back alive, because I knew that would beat the Russians." Leaving low-Earth orbit, the crew of Apollo 8 traveled further than any humans ever had. In his 1988 book, "Countdown: An Autobiography," Borman wrote of the "intensely emotional" experience of being among the first to see Earth from the depths of space. "We said nothing to each other, but I was sure our thoughts were identical - of our families on that spinning globe. And maybe we shared another thought I had, This must be what God sees." On Christmas Eve, in a live broadcast from lunar orbit, the astronauts read from the Book of Genesis. "We were told that we would have the largest audience that ever listened to a human voice before," said Borman. When asked if he knew at the time what kind of impact their Bible reading would have, Borman replied, "No, but as we flew and as we contemplated it afterwards, we all agreed that we couldn't have done anything more appropriate." Borman ended the broadcast with, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth." At the end of one of America's most turbulent years – rocked by war, riots, political assassinations and generational clashes – Borman said, "We got thousands of telegrams after the flight, but the one that struck me the most said, 'Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.' And I think in a way we helped to heal it." After leaving NASA, Borman joined Eastern Airlines (then the fourth-largest airline in the U.S.) as a special adviser, eventually becoming its president, CEO and, in 1976, chairman of the board. He retired in 1986. Having begun flying at age 15 with flight lessons paid for by money he earned pumping gas, Borman continued flying into his 90s. Bob Knight College basketball coach Bob Knight (October 25, 1940-November 1, 2023) became famous as much for his legendary temper as for his success on the court. He played on a national championship team at Ohio State, and as a coach won three NCAA titles at Indiana. He also coached the U.S. Olympic team to a medal in 1984 – the last amateur American team to win gold in men's basketball. Nicknamed "The General," and at 6'5" an intimidating presence, Knight was among the winningest and most controversial coaches in the sport, finishing his career with 902 victories in 42 seasons at Army, Indiana and Texas Tech, while also mentoring some of America's best coaches. His trademark temper cost him his job at Indiana in 2000. His behavior included throwing a chair across the court, hitting a police officer in Puerto Rico during the 1979 Pan American Games, and firing a blank from a starter's pistol at a reporter during a 1980 news conference. He was also accused of wrapping his hands around a player's neck. Hired by Texas Tech (its president described the decision as a "no-brainer"), Knight turned the Red Raisers' fortunes around. He told "Sunday Morning" in 2002 that the words of his mother, an elementary school teacher, continued to ring in his ears: "I can close my eyes and see my mom saying it as I left the house. It didn't make any difference what I was going to do, whether it was football or basketball or baseball that I was going to play: 'But now just remember, somebody has to lose.' And I didn't want it to be me, no." So, Bob Knight pretty much won. He also wrote a book, "Knight: My Story," in order to counter the press' fascination with Knight's uncourtly behavior on court. "Everybody has tried to tell my story over the years," he said. "And the only guy that knows – it's like bullfight critics, row on row, crowd the enormous plaza full, and there's only one man there who knows, and he's the one who fights the bull. So, this is a bullfighter's story right here." Matthew Perry As Chandler Bing, a quick-witted, sarcastic member of the coterie of "Friends," Matthew Perry (August 19, 1969-October 28, 2023) was one of TV's most beloved actors, with success that stretched from the 10 seasons that the show was on the air (from 1994 to 2004), to the following it gained among a younger generation as a streaming staple on Netflix. In 2015 he told "CBS This Morning," "People come up to me that I know were not born while we shot the show for sure, and they're just surprised at how elderly I look." Starring alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer, Perry earned an Emmy nomination as Bing, a man with commitment issues, but who winds up marrying Cox's character. In his 2022 memoir, "Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing" (which became a #1 New York Times bestseller), Perry described reading the "Friends" script for the first time: "It was as if someone had followed me around for a year, stealing my jokes, copying my mannerisms, photocopying my world-weary yet witty view of life. … it wasn't that I thought I could 'play' Chandler. I 'was' Chandler." Unknown at the time that "Friends" was one of TV's biggest hits was the struggle Perry had with addiction: "'Friends' was huge. I couldn't jeopardize that," he wrote. "I loved my co-actors. I loved the scripts. I loved everything about the show but I was struggling with my addictions which only added to my sense of shame. … I had a secret and no one could know." He recalled in his memoir that Aniston confronted him about being inebriated while filming. "I know you're drinking," he remembered her telling him once. "We can smell it," she said, in what Perry called a "kind of weird but loving way, and the plural 'we' hit me like a sledgehammer." He made repeated trips to rehab, for prescription pill addiction, and in 2011 checked in for what (he said in a statement to TMZ) was preventive reasons: "Please enjoy making fun of me on the world wide web," he noted. Perry was very open about his recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, and in 2015, Perry told CBS he was supportive of other recovering addicts. He also operated a sober living facility out of his former home in Malibu, called the Perry House. "I think people don't understand it's a disease," Perry said. "It was declared a disease in 1955 by the American Medical Association and even people in trouble with this thing don't kind of realize that they're suffering with a disease, so they blame themselves. It's important to get it out there and not have it be a secret, so you can get the help you need." Prior to "Friends," Perry appeared on shows such as "Charles in Charles," "Silver Spoons," "The Tracey Ullman Show," "Highway to Heaven," "Empty Nest," "Growing Pains," "Who's the Boss," "Dream On," "Sydney," and "Boys Will Be Boys." His films roles included "A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon" with River Phoenix. After "Friends," Perry received two more Emmy nominations as White House counsel Joe Quincy on "The West Wing." He starred in the rom-com "Fools Rush In" opposite Salma Hayek, and the Bruce Willis crime comedy "The Whole Nine Yards." He also starred in the short-lived series "Go On," as one member of a support group. In 2015, he played Oscar Madison in a CBS reboot of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple." He told "CBS This Morning" that he is better in front of an audience: "I like hamming it up in front of an audience, and you get an instant reaction. You get to find out right away if a joke works or if a joke doesn't work, and if a joke doesn't work, they all fix it." He also earned Emmy nominations for the TV movie "The Ron Clark Story," and for the 2021 "Friends" reunion special for HBO Max. But it wasn't acting that was most gratifying to him. In 2015 he told the Hollywood Reporter, "I've had a lot of ups and downs in my life and a lot of wonderful accolades, but the best thing about me is that if an alcoholic comes up to me and says, 'Will you help me stop drinking?' I will say, 'Yes. I know how to do that.'" Richard Roundtree As the star of the trailblazing 1971 action movie "Shaft," Richard Roundtree (July 9, 1942-October 24, 2023) transitioned, at age 28, from a model to the first Black action hero. He tore up the screen as the street smart, ultra-smooth New York City detective John Shaft, a nemesis to drug pushers in Harlem and a magnet for women. "What we were doing was a good old, Saturday afternoon shoot 'em up," Roundtree said in a 2000 Associated Press interview. Directed by Gordon Parks, "Shaft" was part of a wave of blaxploitation films marketed primarily to Black audiences, but its success helped Roundtree break through, and he became the shoulders on which other Black actors rose. He returned to the character in the sequels "Shaft's Big Score" and "Shaft in Africa," as well as a short-lived CBS TV series. Proving you couldn't keep a good detective down, he also played "Uncle John Shaft" in a 2000 reboot starring Samuel L. Jackson, and "John Shaft Sr." in a 2019 film with Jessie T. Usher. Roundtree's other film and TV credits included "Earthquake," "Man Friday," "Roots," "The Love Boat," "Magnum, P.I.," "A.D.," "Generations," "Maniac Cop," "L.A. Law," "Se7en," "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," "George of the Jungle," "Rescue 77," "Alias," "Desperate Housewives," "Speed Racer," "Diary of a Single Mom," "Chicago Fire," "What Men Want," "Haunting of the Marie Celeste," and "Family Reunion." Piper Laurie Actress Piper Laurie (January 22, 1932-October 14, 2023) earned three Academy Award nominations, for the 1961 poolroom drama "The Hustler"; the 1976 film version of Stephen King's horror classic "Carrie" (as the hellfire-breathing mother of Sissy Spacek); and the 1986 drama "Children of a Lesser God." Those roles came after she had given up on Hollywood, more than once. Rosetta Jacobs arrived in Los Angeles in 1949 and quickly signed a contract with Universal-International, acquiring a new name (which she hated), and a string of roles opposite such stars as Ronald Reagan, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and Francis the Talking Mule. Frustrated with the quality of scripts, in 1955 she walked out on her contract, vowing not to work in Hollywood until she was offered a decent part. In her 2011 memoir "Learning to Live Out Loud," she wrote about a script being offered for what she dismissed as a "C" western: "The woman's part was a prop and just barely that, possibly the worst part they had ever handed me. I suddenly felt so deeply insulted, so unappreciated, so mortally wounded. This time they had gone too far. I calmly got up, walked over to the fireplace, and dropped their script into the flames. With it went a little of the humiliation I had endured in the last five years. Something was coming alive in me." Moving to New York, she found work in theater and live television. Emmy nominations for "The Deaf Heart" and "Days of Wine and Roses" led to her starring opposite Paul Newman in "The Hustler." She earned her first Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for that movie, but didn't appear in another film for 15 years. Apart from a spate of '60s TV roles, she turned her back on acting. She married, had a daughter, and moved to a farmhouse in Woodstock, New York. Her baking recipes appeared in The New York Times. "I was disenchanted and looking for an existence more meaningful for me," she recalled. She was coaxed back for Brian DePalma's film version of "Carrie," to play Sissy Spacek's mother, whose religious fervor leads to tragedy. (Both she and Spacek were nominated for Oscars.) The burst of film and TV roles that followed included David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" (as the duplicitous Catherine Martell), and playing George Clooney's mother on "ER." Suzanne Somers Actress Suzanne Somers (October 16, 1946-October 15, 2023) was best known for playing Chrissy Snow on the 1970s sitcom "Three's Company." A ditzy blonde, Chrissy was one of two young women who shared an apartment with a man (played by John Ritter) on condition that he pretend to be gay, in order to assuage their nosy landlord. "Creating her was actually intellectual," she told CBS Station KCAL in 2020. "How do I make her likable and loveable ... dumb blondes are annoying. I gave her a moral code. I imagined it was the childhood I would've liked to have had." Born in San Bruno, California, to a gardener father and a medical secretary mother, Her father was an alcoholic and abusive. She married young, at 19, to Bruce Somers, after becoming pregnant with her son, Bruce. The couple divorced three years later, and she began working as a model to support herself in the 1960s and early '70s. Her breakout part was a wordless cameo as a stunning blonde in a Thunderbird, in George Lucas' "American Graffiti." Her small but striking role earned her a guest spot on "The Tonight Show," which led to her being signed up by the producers of "Three's Company," who were recasting for their third attempt at a pilot episode. The show was a major hit for ABC, but after four seasons Somers asked for a raise from $30,000 an episode to $150,000, so that she'd earn as much as her male costar. The producers fired her, replacing her character with two different roommates for the remaining years that the show aired. The pay fight led to a rift with her co-stars that lasted for years. Somers would later reconcile with Ritter before his death, and then with Joyce DeWitt. But Somers took the break from "Three's Company" as an opportunity to pursue new avenues, including a Las Vegas act, hosting talk shows (online and on the Lifetime channel), and becoming an entrepreneur. In the 1990s, she became the spokesperson for the ThighMaster. She promoted health and beauty products, and wrote nearly two dozen books, including several New York Times bestsellers, on such topics as aging, menopause, beauty, wellness, sex and cancer. Her tumultuous early years were dramatized in a 1991 TV movie, "Keeping Secrets," in which Somers played herself. Cancer colored much of her life. First diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, she had previously battled malignant melanoma, and also suffered severe hyperplasia in her uterus. In 2008 she was even misdiagnosed with "full-body cancer." She wrote about alternative treatments, and received backlash from doctors for arguing against the use of chemotherapy. In 2020 she told CBS, "I thought that when I turned 73 that I would be old, chronologically old. But I'm not old, and I believe it's because of the way I've been taking care of myself. I've really thought of [my body] as a Maserati, and I feed it right and put the highest octane fuel I can put in there and it pays off." Rudolph Isley Singer-songwriter Rudolph Isley (April 1, 1939-October 11, 2023) was a founding member of the R&B group The Isley Brothers, who recorded such hits as "Shout," "Twist & Shout," "That Lady" and "It's Your Thing." Raised in Cincinnati, Rudolph began singing in church with brothers Ronald and O'Kelly, and was still in his teens when they broke through in the late 1950s with "Shout" (a secularized gospel rave later immortalized in the film "Animal House"). The Isleys scored again in the early 1960s with "Twist & Shout," which the Beatles covered on their debut album. Other Isley hits included "This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)," and the Grammy-winning "It's Your Thing." In the 1970s, after younger brothers Ernest and Marvin Isley and brother-in-law Chris Jasper joined the group, they had even greater success with "That Lady" and "Fight the Power (Part 1)," and such million-selling albums as "The Heat Is On" and "Go for Your Guns." In 1989, three years after the sudden death of O'Kelly Isley, Rudolph left the group to become a Christian minister. He was among the Isleys inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Phyllis Coates Actress Phyllis Coates (January 15, 1927-October 11, 2023) played opposite George Reeves in the 1951 film "Superman and the Mole Men," and continued as the first Lois Lane in the 1950s TV series, "Adventures of Superman." (Noel Neill took over the role in the second season.) A native of Wichita Falls, Texas, Coates was a dancer performing in burlesque shows before being featured in a series of B movies, such as the westerns "Outlaws of Texas" and "Nevada Badmen." She had scores of appearances on television, including "The Cisco Kid," "The Adventures of Kit Carson," "The Millionaire," "Lassie," "The Lone Ranger," "Death Valley Days," "Perry Mason," "Rawhide," "The Untouchables" "Death Valley Days" and "Gunsmoke." She continued acting into the 1990s when she appeared in "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." One of her last roles was as Lois Lane's mother, Ellen Lane, in "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." Burt Young Character actor Burt Young (April 30, 1940-October 8, 2023) was best known as Paulie Pennino, best friend of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, and brother of Rocky's girlfriend/wife, Adrian. Young earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for the 1976 film, and reprised his role in five "Rocky" sequels. "I'm not Paulie," Young told New York Newsday in 2007, "but there's a part of Paulie in all of us ... cowardice, bravado, false bravado. And I knew how to beat the drum to make the guy interesting and ugly and pathetic." A veteran of more than 160 film and TV roles, Young was born Richard Morea and raised in Queens, New York. He served in the Marine Corps, was a professional boxer, and worked laying carpets before he took up acting. He studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Small roles in films like "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" and "Across 110th Street" led to "Chinatown" (as a fisherman who throws a fit when Jack Nicholson's private detective shows him pictures proving his wife's infidelity), "The Gambler," "Serpico," and then "Rocky." Other films included "Once Upon a Time in America," "Back to School," "The Pope of Greenwich Village," "Last Exit to Brooklyn," and "Bright Angel." He also wrote and starred in "Uncle Joe Shannon." His TV credits included "MASH," "Miami Vice," "The Equalizer," "Law & Order," and "The Sopranos." He made his Broadway debut in 1986 opposite Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in "Cuba & His Teddy Bear." Dianne Feinstein Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein (June 22, 1933-September 28, 2023) broke gender barriers throughout her long career in local and national politics. The oldest sitting U.S. senator, she was a passionate advocate for issues important to her home state of California, including environmental protection, reproductive rights and gun control. But she was also a pragmatic lawmaker who reached out to Republicans and sought middle ground. She was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 and became its first female board president in 1978, the year Mayor George Moscone was gunned down at City Hall alongside Supervisor Harvey Milk. Feinstein remembered finding Milk's body, her finger slipping into a bullet hole as she felt for a pulse. It was a story she would retell often in the years ahead as she pushed for stricter gun control measures. (In 1993, during a debate on the assault weapons ban, Republican Senator Larry Craig accused Feinstein of having insufficient knowledge of guns. She retorted, ''Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.") After Moscone's death, Feinstein became San Francisco's first female mayor. Even her critics credited her with a calming influence during a turbulent period, and she won reelection twice. In 1990 she won the Democratic nomination for California governor, but narrowly lost to Republican Pete Wilson. Two years later she ran for the Senate seat Wilson had vacated. Feinstein campaigned jointly with Barbara Boxer (who was running for the state's other Senate seat), and both won, benefiting from positive news coverage and excitement over their historic race, boosted by voters galvanized by the Supreme Court hearings for nominee Clarence Thomas and the questioning of Anita Hill. One of Feinstein's most significant legislative accomplishments was early in her career, when the Senate approved her amendment to ban the manufacture and sales of certain types of assault weapons, part of a crime bill that President Bill Clinton signed in 1994. (The assault weapons ban expired 10 years later and was never renewed or replaced.) Feinstein was appointed to the Judiciary panel and eventually the Senate Intelligence Committee, becoming the chairperson in 2009 – the first woman to lead the intelligence panel. Under her leadership, the intelligence committee conducted a wide-ranging, five-year investigation into CIA interrogation techniques during President George W. Bush's administration, including waterboarding of terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons. The resulting 6,300-page "torture report" concluded among other things that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" did not provide key evidence in the hunt for bin Laden. A 525-page executive summary was released in late 2014, but the rest of the report remains classified. Feinstein's experiences colored her outlook through her five decades in politics, telling the Associated Press in 2005 that she recognized "women have had to fight for everything they have gotten, every right." But she also changed her views on some issues, such as same-sex marriage, which she initially opposed. In 2008 she told "Sunday Morning" that in the harsh world of politics, what people want often goes beyond rights that are written into law. "There is a right to happiness, too," she said. "And happiness is an ethereal quality, but by golly, it sure is important." Michael Gambon Irish-English actor Sir Michael Gambon (October 19, 1940-September 27, 2023) earned fame for his stage work, films such as "Gosford Park" and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," and his starring role in the 1986 BBC miniseries "The Singing Detective." But he is warmly remembered by younger audiences for his portrayal of Albus Dumbledore in six "Harry Potter" films. Gambon took over the role of the Hogwarts headmaster from Richard Harris, who died in 2002, beginning with "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." Born in Dublin and raised in London, Gambon originally trained to be an engineer, like his father. He started work in the theater as a set builder, then made his stage debut in a production of "Othello." In 1963 he got a small part in "Hamlet" at the National Theatre Company. He won three Olivier Awards (for "A Chorus of Disapproval," "A View from the Bridge," and "Man of the Moment"), and was nominated for a Tony (for "Skylight"). Gambon became a household name in Britain by starring in Dennis Potter's TV drama "The Singing Detective," in which a Raymond Chanderesque writer, suffering from a debilitating disease, falls into surreal reveries of childhood reminiscences and a musical fantasy about a private eye, "Philip Marlow." Gambon won the BAFTA for best actor for his performance. He also won two Screen Actors Guild Awards (for "Gosford Park," and "The King's Speech" as King George V), and earned two Emmy nominations (for "Path to War," playing President Lyndon B. Johnson, and "Emma"). Gambon once told the BBC he preferred to play "villainous characters," such as gangster Eddie Temple in the crime thriller "Layer Cake." He recently appeared in the Judy Garland biopic "Judy." In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Gambon demurred from analyzing the actor's craft: "You just do it," he said. "That's what acting is." But he offered a more thoughtful explanation for how he accomplished crying on cue: "I admit I try and summon up a powerful image. The one I often think of is that of a little girl in uniform, taken during the Vietnam war, with her clothes and body on fire because of an aerial bomb. I believe she recovered and is now a doctor, which makes me feel I'm not simply exploiting someone else's tragedy." Brooks Robinson Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson (May 18, 1937-September 26, 2023) was one of the most gifted third basemen to play the game, with 16 consecutive Gold Glove Awards earned during his 23-year career with the Baltimore Orioles. Robinson was the American League's MVP in 1964, homered in Game 1 of the Orioles' 1966 sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers for their first World Series win, and almost single-handedly helped Baltimore defeat the Cincinnati Reds in the 1970 World Series. Dubbed "Mr. Oriole," his glovework made him the finest fielding third baseman in MLB history. In 2,870 career games (more than anyone else at that position), he established major league records for his position for fielding percentage, putouts, assists and double plays. He became known as "the human vacuum cleaner." He also swatted 268 homers, with 1,357 RBIs, and had a lifetime batting average of .267. Robinson's most memorable performance came in the 1970 World Series, when he was MVP. He hit .429, homered twice, and drove in six runs, while deftly making numerous striking defensive plays that stifled the Reds' bats. The Orioles won the series 4 games to 1. "I tell people that I played 23 seasons and I never did have five games in a row like I did in that World Series," Robinson said. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime five-game series for me, and it just happened to be in a World Series." David McCallum Actor David McCallum (September 19, 1933-September 25, 2023) was responsible for two endearing and enduring TV characters: first, as secret agent Illya Kuryakin in the hit 1960s spy series "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," and then, forty years later, as eccentric medical examiner Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard in CBS' "NCIS." McCallum's work on "U.N.C.L.E." earned him two Emmy nominations; he received a third as an educator struggling with alcoholism in the 1969 drama, "Teacher, Teacher." The Scottish-born McCallum appeared in the Titanic drama "A Night to Remember," "Billy Budd," "The Great Escape" (as Ashley-Pitt, a.k.a. "Dispersal"), and "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (as Judas). "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," about an international agency of crimefighters, debuted in 1964, and starred Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, with McCallum as his Russian sidekick. The series ran for three years, and in 1983 Vaughn and McCallum were reunited for a TV movie sequel, "The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E." In 2003 McCallum began a 20-year run as pathologist "Ducky" Mallard on "NCIS." McCallum said he thought Ducky "looked a little silly, but it was great fun to do." In addition to "NCIS," McCallum also appeared as Ducky on "NCIS: New Orleans" and "JAG." He also starred in the sci-fi series "The Invisible Man" and "Sapphire and Steel," and has guest roles in such shows as "Perry Mason," "The Outer Limits," "Marcus Welby, M.D.," "Murder, She Wrote," "Hart to Hart," "Law & Order," and "Sex and the City." His other film and TV movie credits included "Freud," "Around the World Under the Sea," and "Frankenstein: The True Story." In 2007, while he was working on "NCIS," McCallum told a reporter: "I've always felt the harder I work, the luckier I get. I believe in serendipitous things happening, but at the same time, dedicating yourself to what you do is the best way to get along in this life." Jimmy Buffett The songs of Jimmy Buffett (December 25, 1946-September 1, 2023) spoke to anyone who'd ever dreamed of getting away from it all. Best known for his wistful but tunefully chirpy "Margaritaville," Buffett's brand of Key West music was an intoxicating blend – a margarita glass filled with country, rock and Calypso, served with an umbrella and, of course, a shaker of salt. Raised in Alabama, Buffett tried to break into the music business in Nashville, and drifted to New Orleans in the early '70s, playing for tourists in the clubs and the streets as one of the city's sidewalk musicians. The experience, he told "Sunday Morning" in 2018, was formative: "It made me a better professional player … This was my training ground for all of that." In the years that followed, he moved to Key West, Florida, refining that country-meets-Caribbean sound, and his career took off. Over the course of 29 studio albums, he sang songs of regrets and hopes, his most famous being the 1977 hit "Margaritaville," in which the narrator drowns his sorrows over a failed romance. The song seemed to launch a new genre, one he owned exclusively. But somewhere along the way Buffett realized that he might be having a little too much fun, and cut down on the partying that was the subject matter of songs like "Livingston Saturday Night," "Why Don't We Get Drunk," "Boat Drinks," and "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes." "Hangovers became, like, surgical recovery," he said. "And I didn't want to be one of those statistics. And I owed it to my parents, who had worked hard, you know, to give all of us kids what they could. I thought I owed it to them to not be that." And he also wanted to be in charge of a band, rather than simply be in one. "I guess it kind of goes back to being raised in a seafaring family where there was ship captains and people in charge. Somehow I figured I'd rather be that than in the crew. I wanted to be the captain." By the early 1990s Buffett, touring with his Coral Reefer Band, was one of the biggest acts in the business, with hordes of adoring fans who called themselves "Parrotheads." At the same time, Buffett, a married father of three, also exercised his business sense, starting his own record label, and running a chain of Margaritaville bars, restaurants, hotels, tequila brands, margarita mixes, and clothing lines that made him a half-billionaire. He wrote New York Times bestselling books, including "Tales of Margaritaville," "Where Is Joe Merchant?," and "A Pirate Looks at Fifty," and co-authored two children's books with his daughter, Savannah Jane. And in 2018, a jukebox musical, "Escape to Margaritaville," opened on Broadway, replete with Buffett standards like "Cheeseburger in Paradise," "License to Chill," "Son of a Son of a Sailor," "One Particular Harbour," and "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere." It was all in the service, he told "Sunday Morning" in 1992, of helping audiences relax with a virtual vacation: "I think that the biggest problem with 20th century life is we've all taken ourselves much too seriously. When we come to town, all of a sudden we're an excuse to go crazy. I think that's an essential part of life in the 20th century, and I'm glad it's my job." All those years of touring were put on hold, for a time, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even then, Buffett couldn't stop giving fans a chance to head out to the beach for a spell; he performed online concerts, often for first responders. "You know, historically you think about it, in times like this you still have to have a little fun," Buffett told "Sunday Morning" in 2020. "You still have to have a rest from what's going on. And I knew that that was the case, because a lot of healthcare workers and doctors I've known for a long time have used my music in operating rooms and emergency rooms to calm down." Bill Richardson Bill Richardson (November 15, 1947-September 1, 2023), a two-term Democratic governor of New Mexico and an American ambassador to the United Nations, worked for years to secure the release of Americans held by foreign adversaries Born in Pasadena, Calif., Richardson grew up in Mexico City with a Mexican mother and an American father, a U.S. bank executive. He attended prep school in Massachusetts and later went to Tufts University and its graduate school in international relations, earning a master's degree in international affairs. After working as a Capitol Hill staffer, in 1978 Richardson moved to New Mexico, to run for political office. He won a congressional seat in 1982. It was while he was a Congressman in December 1994, during a visit to North Korean nuclear sites, that he received word an American helicopter pilot had been downed and his co-pilot killed. The White House enlisted Richardson's help and, after days of tough negotiations, he accompanied the remains of Chief Warrant Officer David Hilemon, while paving the way for Chief Warrant Officer Bobby Hall to return home. The following year, after a personal appeal from Richardson, Saddam Hussein freed two Americans who had been imprisoned for four months, charged with illegally crossing into Iraq from Kuwait. Richardson left Congress after 14 years, in 1997, to join the Clinton administration as U.N. ambassador. He later became secretary of energy. Richardson was elected Governor of New Mexico in 2002. During the campaign, he reportedly shook 13,392 hands in an eight-hour period, setting a world record (at one point held by Theodore Roosevelt). During his two terms he was the nation's only Hispanic governor. He described being governor as "the most fun. You can get the most done. You set the agenda." As governor, Richardson raised teachers' salaries, increased the minimum wage, expanded pre-K, pushed renewable energy requirements for utilities, and financed large-scale infrastructure projects, including a commuter rail system and a commercial spaceport. Once a supporter of capital punishment, he also signed legislation that repealed the state's death penalty. Richardson continued his freelance diplomacy while serving as governor, recovering the remains of American servicemen killed in the Korean War. He helped secure the 2021 release of American journalist Danny Fenster from a Myanmar prison, and also helped in the release of Americans detained in Russia and Iran. It was a role – bargaining with America's adversaries – that Richardson relished, once describing himself as "the informal undersecretary for thugs." "I plead guilty to photo-ops and getting human beings rescued and improving the lives of human beings," he once told reporters. Bob Barker The genial host of "The Price Is Right" for 35 years, Bob Barker (December 12, 1923-August 26, 2023) started each program, he told "Sunday Morning" in 2008," by "looking for someone with whom I could create laughter and have fun." And he ended each program with a plea that spoke to his passion for animal rights, by calling upon viewers to spay or neuter their pets. Barker grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where his mom taught school after Barker's father died. He married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Jo Gideon; served in the Navy as a pilot; and then tried his hand at broadcasting. After hosting a live audience participation program on radio, his wife told him, "That's what you should do. You did that better than you've ever done anything else." Barker moved to Los Angeles, where he was called in for an interview with TV game show impresario Ralph Edwards. The result: "Truth or Consequences," in which contestants engaged in crazy stunts. Barker hosted the show for 18 years, before going on to host a 1972 reboot of "The Price Is Right" on CBS. Welcoming contestants to vie for prizes by correctly guessing prices, Barker invited players to have a hand at a variety of challenges: Plinko, Dice Game, Hole in One, Master Key, Cliff Hangers (featuring a yodeling mountain climber), and of course the giant spinning wheel. The show's longevity was directly tied into Barker's effusive personality and ability to blend comfort television with high-stakes gamesmanship, topped by his authentic joy when a contestant won a car or appliance. As Barker's fame grew, so did his commitment to animals, a passion he shared with his wife (who died in 1981). He donated millions for animal protection, including sponsoring programs to spay and neuter animals, to counter the problem of pet overpopulation. He angered the fur industry when he quit hosting the Miss Universe pageant in 1987 because sponsors refused to stop giving away fur coats as prizes. When asked if he feared hurting his career, Barker said no. "My accountant had feelings about it, but I didn't," he told "Sunday Morning." "I've always loved animals, and I always had animals." Over the course of his career, during which he taped more than 5,000 shows, Barker earned 19 Emmys, including a lifetime achievement award in 1999; he also won awards for protecting animals. He even played off his dapper, affable TV aura with a memorable cameo appearance in the 1996 comedy "Happy Gilmore," in which he got to beat up Adam Sandler on a golf course. In his 2009 memoir, "Priceless Memories," he summed up his joy from hosting "Price Is Right" as the opportunity "to watch people reveal themselves and to watch the excitement and humor unfold." Sometimes the contestants were very revealing. On one occasion, a young woman wearing a tube top jumped up and down for joy at being called upon to "come on down," so much so that both her breasts popped out. Barker, off-stage during the wardrobe malfunction, read the room wrong when he walked out: "The audience was screaming. And I thought, 'They love me. They love me.' And then I came to terms with the fact that no audience had ever loved me this much!" Robbie Robertson Robbie Robertson (July 5, 1943-August 9, 2023), for many years the lead guitarist for Bob Dylan and the principal songwriter for The Band, was part of a revolution in music. His most famous songs include "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "The Weight." Raised in Toronto, Robertson (half-Mohawk, half-Jewish) started playing guitar at age 10, and by 16 was on the road full-time. He joined Arkansas rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins' band, where he met a young drummer, Levon Helm. The two clicked right away, and after Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko also joined the group, they split off from Hawkins to form their own band. Originally called Levon and The Hawks, they would eventually become known as, simply, The Band. In New York, they became Bob Dylan's backing musicians for his new tour. And when Dylan retreated to Woodstock, N.Y., in 1967, The Band rented a small house in nearby West Saugerties and turned its basement into a studio. They'd call the place The Big Pink. "And it was like Valhalla," Robertson told "Sunday Morning" correspondent Anthony Mason in 2016. "We're in our own world. We're making music that nobody is supposed to ever hear." Drawing from folk, blues, gospel and country, The Band's groundbreaking debut album, "Music From Big Pink," was released in 1968. They played at Woodstock, and for eight years were one of rock's most influential groups. But by the mid-seventies, drug problems were taking their toll on the group. The friction led to their final concert together, on Thanksgiving Day 1976, at San Francisco's Winterland. Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Van Morrison all showed up. Documented by director Martin Scorsese in the film "The Last Waltz," it was rock's most famous farewell concert. Robertson said he expected that, after taking a break, the band would eventually regroup, as he told The Guardian in 2019: "And then, as I said in the film, when I realized everybody forgot to come back, I had to read the writing on the wall." The other members did eventually regroup, in 1983, but without Robertson. They recorded three albums. Manuel died in 1986, Danko in 1999, and Helm in 2012. Robertson wrote an autobiography, "Testimony," published in 2016, and released several solo albums (including "Robbie Robertson," "Storyville," and "How to Become Clairvoyant"). He also collaborated with Scorsese on the music for several of his films, including the upcoming "Killers of the Flower Moon." William Friedkin He was one of the mythic directors who helped usher in a glorious chapter of Hollywood in the late 1960s and early '70s, making innovative and thought-provoking films that pushed the envelope of technique and heralded a daring new approach to challenging material. William Friedkin (August 29, 1935-August 7, 2023) won an Academy Award for the police thriller "The French Connection" (whose highlight was the greatest car chase ever filmed), and shocked audiences with the horror classic "The Exorcist." Friedkin started out directing live television and documentaries, including a 1966 film about police, "The Thin Blue Line." His early movies reflect an eclectic mix of subject matter: "Good Times," a knockabout farce starring Sonny & Cher; a filming of Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party" starring Robert Shaw; the comedy "The Night They Raided Minsky's"; and "The Boys in the Band," a film version of Mart Crowley's groundbreaking off-Broadway play about gay men. Based on a true story, "The French Connection" dramatized the efforts of a maverick New York City police detective to hunt down the criminal mastermind of a ring of heroin smugglers. Gene Hackman earned an Oscar for his performance as "Popeye" Doyle, a cop who abided by few rules. But as riveting as Hackman was, he could not compete for sheer bravado against the chase sequence in which Doyle, in a car, pursues an assassin fleeing aboard a subway train. Friedkin had to orchestrate the chase with no city permits (the movie's advisers from the NYPD knew how to get around that), and even filmed some of it himself from the backseat using a handheld camera as stunt driver Bill Hickman propelled his Pontiac LeMans, equipped with a police siren, through the streets of Brooklyn at up to 90 mph. Doyle car's collided with several vehicles along the way, and narrowly avoided a woman pushing a baby carriage. (Hackman as well crashed into a wall when he was driving himself.) The fact that many of the people seen in background had no idea they were in a movie only heightened the guerilla techniques used. "There was absolutely no control," Friedkin admitted in a 2009 behind-the-scenes documentary. "We didn't stop cross traffic, we didn't stop pedestrians from crossing the street. … People heard a siren and tried to get out of the way, but they didn't see a police car." Friedkin described the chase as a metaphor that reflected the obsession of Doyle, "who would stop at nothing to get the guy he was looking for." But he acknowledged that he wouldn't replicate that experience today. "We'd find another way of doing it … Thank God no one was hurt." In addition to Hackman's win, "The French Connection" took Oscars for best picture, director, adapted screenplay and editing. Friedkin followed with a harrowing film version of William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel, "The Exorcist," about Catholic priests trying to free a little girl possessed by the devil. Starring Jason Miller, Ellen Burstyn, Max Von Sydow and Linda Blair as young Regan, the movie was a tale of a crisis of faith, wrapped in the horror trappings of a young girl who undergoes terrifying physical transformations. In a 2018 interview with New York magazine, Friedkin noted how, prior to Blatty's novel, there had been no public familiarity with exorcisms. When Friedkin, a non-Catholic, was granted permission to film a real exorcism led by the Vatican's exorcist in 2016, and later showed the footage to psychiatrists (who had added "possession trance disorder" to the DSM-IV), he was surprised by their reaction: "'It looks authentic, but it doesn't have the classical symptoms.' And I said, 'What are the classical symptoms?' And they each said, 'Well, the head spinning, and levitation.' And I remember saying, 'Doctor, we invented that. Mr. Blatty wrote that, and I had to find a way to film it.' But I never heard of it. I never heard of that happening." "The Exorcist" received 10 Oscar nominations, and won two, for Blatty's script and for sound. Friedkin's later films and TV movies would not reach the box office heights of "The Exorcist," but they demonstrated his willingness to tackle uncommercial material. His 1977 film "Sorcerer," a remake of the French thriller "The Wages of Fear," about men driving a truck of nitroglycerin though the jungle, failed with critics and ticket buyers but has since acquired a following. His next film was criticized even more: "Cruising," a police drama starring Al Pacino as a detective going undercover to investigate the murders of gay men. But he was back in the driver's seat with "To Live and Die in L.A.," about law enforcement agents on the trail of a counterfeiter. It also featured a memorable chase, in which cars drive against traffic on a crowded Los Angeles highway. He authored a candid memoir, "The Friedkin Connection," and directed well-received movies adapted from Tracy Letts plays, including "Bug" and "Killer Joe." Other credits included "The Brink's Job," "Jade," "Rules of Engagement," a TV remake of "12 Angry Men," and episodes of "The Twilight Zone," "Tales From the Crypt," "Rebel Highway," and "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." His last film, "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial," starring Kiefer Sutherland, is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival next month. Paul Reubens Friends of actor and comedian Paul Reubens (August 27, 1952-July 30, 2023) remarked that he was a quiet, unassuming personality off-stage. So, it's ironic that he was best known for the character he created who was entirely the opposite: Pee-wee Herman, a boisterous, fun-loving child-man whose whimsical adventures and anarchic humor – not to mention his propensity to invite people to SCREAM REAL LOUD! – made him a 1980s pop cultural phenomenon. Pee-wee was born when Reubens was part of the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improv group, in the 1970s. His 1981 live stage show, "The Pee-wee Herman Show," modeled after a typical Saturday morning TV program, featured Reubens and a supporting cast that included Phil Hartman, John Paragon, Edie McClurg and Lynne Marie Stewart. The show was recorded as an HBO special. Reubens took Pee-wee to the big screen with 1985's "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," in which Pee-wee travels the country on the trail of his beloved stolen bicycle. Directed by Tim Burton and co-written by Hartman, the movie grossed $40 million, and led to "Pee-wee's Playhouse," his actual Saturday morning TV series on CBS. Pee-wee's surreal playhouse was shared with a talking chair, a pterodactyl, a genie's disembodied head, and a magic screen that could transport Pee-wee to animated landscapes. The show, which ran for five seasons, won 15 Emmys, and attracted both children and adults with its anarchic humor. "There's not really a good answer to how it was allowed to happen," Reubens told GQ magazine in 2016. "It was all kind of a fluke." He followed with a big-screen sequel, "Big Top Pee-wee," set in a circus. But Reubens faced a real-life media circus after he was arrested in an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Florida, for indecent exposure. He was handed a small fine, but the damage was incalculable. CBS cancelled his show, and his Pee-wee character all but disappeared. Yet, Reubens continued to work apart from his alter-ego. He had roles in "Batman Returns," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Matilda," the Johnny Depp drama "Blow," "Mystery Men," and the TV series "Murphy Brown," "30 Rock," "The Blacklist" and "Gotham." Reubens slowly re-introduced Pee-wee, and eventually performed his show on Broadway in 2010. Judd Apatow produced a new Pee-wee movie in 2016 for Netflix, "Pee-wee's Big Holiday." In his GQ interview Reubens resisted analyzing the connections between himself and the larger-than-life character he created: "It's not because I'm being coy. I just don't think about it. And when I do think about it, it ruins it for me. It takes all the joy out of what I do. And I'm afraid it would change what I do." Sinéad O'Connor Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor (Dec. 8, 1966-July 26, 2023), a gifted rebel whose powerful voice was matched with provocative statements, became a superstar in her mid-20s with her shattering 1990 cover of the Prince ballad "Nothing Compares 2 U." The song topped charts around the world, aided by a music video in which O'Connor – with shaved head and piercing grey eyes – was featured in extreme closeup. Growing up in an abusive household, as a teenager she spent time in a church-sponsored institution for girls. A nun gave O'Connor her first guitar, and soon she was singing and performing on the streets of Dublin, her influences ranging from Bob Dylan to Siouxsie and the Banshees. "I suppose I've got to say that music saved me," she said in an interview with the Independent newspaper in 2013. "I didn't have any other abilities, and there was no learning support for girls like me, not in Ireland at that time. It was either jail or music. I got lucky." Her 1987 debut album, "The Lion and the Cobra," was followed by 1990's "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got." Rolling Stone magazine would name her 1991's artist of the year. The album, which went platinum, was nominated for four Grammys, winning one. (She skipped the Grammy ceremony, criticizing the music industry for its "false and destructive materialistic values.") A critic of the Roman Catholic Church well before allegations of sexual abuse were widely reported, O'Connor made headlines in October 1992 when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II while appearing on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and denounced the church as the enemy. Shortly after, she appeared at an all-star tribute for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden and was immediately booed. Although consoled and encouraged by fellow musician Kris Kristofferson, she left the stage and broke down. Her performance was kept off the concert CD. O'Connor also faced boycotts from U.S. radio stations after she refused to perform at a New Jersey concert venue if they played the national anthem beforehand. She announced her retirement from music in 2003, but she continued to record new material. She released 10 studio albums in all, her latest "I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss," in 2014. In 2010, when Pope Benedict XVI apologized to Ireland to atone for decades of abuse, O'Connor condemned the apology for not going far enough and called for Catholics to boycott Mass until there was a full investigation into the Vatican's role. "People assumed I didn't believe in God. That's not the case at all. I'm Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation," she wrote in the Washington Post in 2010. O'Connor announced in 2018 that she had converted to Islam and would be adopting the name Shuhada' Davitt, later Shuhada Sadaqat, although she continued to use Sinéad O'Connor professionally. She was public about her struggles with mental health issues. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she attempted suicide in 1999. When her teenage son Shane died by suicide last year, O'Connor tweeted there was "no point living without him." She was soon hospitalized. Her final tweet, sent July 17, read: "For all mothers of Suicided children," and linked to a Tibetan compassion mantra. If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or a suicidal crisis, you can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. You can also chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline here. Jane Birkin One of the most photographed women of the Sixties, actress, singer and style icon Jane Birkin (Dec. 14, 1946-July 16, 2023) perhaps became best known for the highly-desirable Hermès fashion accessory that bore her name: The Birkin bag. Born in London, Birkin was just 18 and married to James Bond composer John Barry when she appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic "Blow Up," where she romped naked across the screen. But then Barry left her and her daughter, Kate. Birkin went to Paris to audition for the film "Slogan" and was paired with Serge Gainsbourg, then building a reputation as the French Bob Dylan. He'd just come out of a very unhappy affair with Brigitte Bardot. Birkin denied that that was intimidating: "No. I thought, 'Gosh, if he'd been in love with the most beautiful woman in the world (which was Bardot at the time) and if he could take a look at me…' To the contrary!" Gainsbourg had written a song for Bardot that he now wanted Birkin to sing. "Je t'aime… moi non plus," in which Birkin suggestively moaned, was incendiary for its time, and was banned by the BBC. For 13 years, Birkin and Gainsbourg were an inseparable "It" couple, songwriter and muse, until the union was ended by his drinking problem. Birkin, who had had another daughter with Serge (renowned actress Charlotte Gainsbourg), moved in with French director Jacques Doillon; they had a daughter (Lou, an award-winning singer). But Serge stayed in the picture, writing songs for Birkin until his death in 1991. "And when Serge died, everything else collapsed," she said. "Nothing was really the same again." Birkin and Doillon split, and she focused on her three daughters. Kate Barry, her oldest, a successful photographer, battled depression. In 2013, Kate fell from her apartment window, an apparent suicide. For nearly three years, Birkin could barely leave her Paris home. But in her 70s, Birkin began to find her way again, touring the world with an orchestra performing Serge Gainsbourg's songs (including at a 2018 concert at New York's Carnegie Hall). Yet, she became synonymous with a handbag, thanks to a serendipitous airline upgrade in 1983, when she was seated next to the CEO of Hermès, to whom she suggested a larger variation of their popular handbag. He sketched out a design on a handy air sickness bag. The Birkin Bag was born. "Sunday Morning" correspondent Anthony Mason said to Birkin in 2018, "It's so funny that, after all this, you might be known for a bag." "Well, could be worse!" she laughed. In 2021 her daughter profiled Birkin in the intimate documentary "Jane by Charlotte" – a testimonial to the mother-daughter relationship that endured the intrusions of fame, from both sides, and to a life which Birkin has forged for herself in France, partly in the spotlight, partly cloistered in nature, and partly paying tribute to her late lover Serge. News of Birkin's health – a cancer diagnosis, and a stroke – gave the film a somewhat uncomfortable immediacy of purpose (Get Mother on film before it's too late), but the bond the two shared was palpable, strong and entrancing. Tony Bennett Singer Tony Bennett (August 3, 1926-July 21, 2023) was one of the most popular interpreters of jazz, pop and Broadway standards, thanks to his joyful and stirring renditions of such classics as "Rags to Riches," "The Way You Look Tonight," and his signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." The recipient of 20 Grammy Awards during his seven-decade career, Bennett recorded 60 studio albums and dozens of live albums and compilations. Seven were Top 10 albums on the Billboard charts. But he was inextricably linked to one song above all others – a song that he first rehearsed without ever having set foot in San Francisco. Bennett recalled for "Sunday Morning" in 2014 how his music director, Ralph Sharon, found the song as they were headed to San Francisco for the first time. The two rehearsed it one afternoon at a nightclub in Little Rock, Arkansas: "And the bartender said, 'I don't wanna interrupt you two fellows, but if you ever record that, I'm gonna be the first guy to buy the record.' And we felt a little encouraged! And when I got to San Francisco, at rehearsal I started singing it, everybody ran up to me and said, 'You've gotta record this song.' "Most artists that are connected with one famous thing, they get upset: Why should it just be one thing? What about all the other things that I do?" Bennett told "Sunday Morning." "But I feel different. I love 'San Francisco,' the song. I sing it every night like it was the first time I ever sang it." He would even sing it during a 1994 appearance on "MTV Unplugged," in which he performed with Elvis Costello and k.d. lang. A recording of the concert went platinum and won two Grammys, including album of the year. Bennett earned a new generation of fans in 2014 when, at 88, he teamed with singer Lady Gaga, 60 years his junior, for an album of duets, "Cheek to Cheek" – standards that included "Anything Goes," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," and "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." The album went to #1 and won the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album. Raised in Astoria, Queens, Bennett nurtured artistic expression both through music and art. He attended the High School of Industrial Art in Manhattan where one art teacher told him, "'You know, you're a very good singer.' And he got all the other teachers mad at him, 'cause [I'm] supposed to be studying art, not music!" He dropped out of school to help support his family, earning money while singing in restaurants and saloons. After World War II, thanks to the G.I. Bill, Bennett attended the American Theatre Wing, taking vocal classes. Signed by Columbia, Bennett's first single, "Because of You," went to #1 in 1951. He followed with such hits as "Cold, Cold Heart," "Rags to Riches," "There'll Be No Teardrops Tonight," "Stranger in Paradise," and "Can You Find It In Your Heart?" Later hits by Bennett included "The Good Life," "Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)," "Fly Me to the Moon," "The Shadow of Your Smile," and "For Once In My Life." Bennett struggled in the 1970s, as musical tastes in the industry changed, and his albums didn't find an audience. He was without a manager or a recording label. His own record company failed. His live performances were limited to Las Vegas. Having divorced his first wife, his second marriage was faltering. He had a drug addiction, and the IRS initiated proceedings to take his house. Bennett's son, Danny, took over as manager, and got him re-signed with Columbia Records; he also got his father on "MTV Unplugged." "I realized that young people had never heard those songs," Tony told AARP magazine. "Cole Porter, Gershwin – they were like, 'Who wrote that?'" In early 2021 Bennett revealed in an article for AARP magazine that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He still rehearsed twice a week in his living room. And in August 2021 he performed what would be his final concert, at New York's Radio City Music Hall, sharing the stage with Lady Gaga. His family wasn't sure he would be in condition to perform, but when it came time to rehearse, Bennett's accompanist, Lee Musiker, began playing, and suddenly the legendary showman was back. He had no notes, no cue cards. He sang an hour-long set from memory. On what was Bennett's 95th birthday, a sell-out crowd was waiting. His third wife, Susan, told "60 Minutes," "Once he saw the audience, and, you know, and he raises his hands, I knew we were alright because he became himself. He just turned on. You know, it was like a light switch." Bennett sang more than a dozen songs and got at least 20 standing ovations. A few days later, Bennett had no memory of playing Radio City at all. Alan Arkin In the 2006 indie comedy "Little Miss Sunshine," Alan Arkin (March 26, 1934-June 29, 2023) played the irascible, opinionated and heroin-addicted grandfather of a dysfunctional family traveling cross-country to enter their little girl in a kiddie beauty pageant. It's a role Arkin almost didn't get. "They thought I was too virile for the part, which is the best turn-down I've ever had in my life," Arkin, then 72, told "Sunday Morning" in 2007. "Little Miss Sunshine" was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival. Fox Searchlight grabbed the distribution rights for a then-record $10.5 million, and the movie went on to earn more than $100 million at the box office and four Academy Award nominations. Arkin went home with an Oscar for best supporting actor. In the beginning people paid attention to Arkin not for his acting but for his singing, with a folk group called the Tarriers. He did it for pocket money, at first, but after their hit, "The Banana Boat Song" (which Arkin co-wrote), he questioned his career choice: "I got to the Olympia Theater in Paris and I was playing the guitar and singing my brains out, and looked down at myself with my black satin pants on and my sports shirt opened to the navel. And I said, 'What the hell am I doing? Who am I?' I said, 'I gotta get back to acting.' And I quit the next day — and starved for another couple of years." He joined Second City, a bold new improvisational comedy group in Chicago. It launched his acting career. He won a Tony Award for "Enter Laughing," and for his film debut, in "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming," he received a best actor Oscar nomination as a Soviet submariner stranded in New England. Two years later he received a second nomination playing a deaf mute in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." The film roles cascaded: "Wait Until Dark," "Carch-22," "Little Murders," "Popi," "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," "Freebie and the Bean," "Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins," "Hearts of the West," "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," "The In-Laws," "Simon," "The Magician of Lublin," "Edward Scissorhands," "Glengarry Glen Ross," "Grosse Pointe Blank," "Get Smart," "Argo," and the TV series "The Kominsky Method" – each showing the range of Arkin's ability to wring laughs, or heartache, from a character. On Broadway, he directed the Neil Simon comedy "The Sunshine Boys," and Elaine May's "Taller Than a Dwarf." In a 2020 Guardian interview, Arkin, who'd just published a memoir titled "Out of My Mind," remarked on how, with age, he was less drawn to music and great books and more to solitude and silence: "Looking at the garden. Having a relationship with trees and flowers and the sky. That's what's profound to me now." When told he sounded like he was preparing for the end, Arkin scoffed: "There is no end. There was no beginning and there is no end. We are all a part of that endless flow." John Goodenough Scientist John Goodenough (July 25, 1922-June 25, 2023) was a Nobel Prize recipient for his work developing the lithium-ion battery. Goodenough, who shared the 2019 prize in chemistry with M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, became, at 97, the oldest Nobel winner in history. Lithium-ion batteries, the first truly portable and rechargeable batteries, took more than a decade to develop. Goodenough, Whittingham and Yoshino each had unique breakthroughs that laid the foundation for developing a commercial rechargeable battery. Whittingham's work in the 1970s harnessed the tendency of lithium, the lightest metal, to give away its electrons to make a battery capable of generating just over two volts. By 1980, Goodenough had built on Whittingham's work and doubled the battery's capacity to four volts by using cobalt oxide in the cathode, one of the two electrodes that make up the ends of a battery. That battery remained too explosive for general commercial use. Yoshino's work in the 1980s eliminated the volatile pure lithium from the battery and instead opted for lithium ions that are safer. The first lightweight, safe, durable and rechargeable commercial batteries entered the market in 1991, transforming the world by making portable electronic devices such as cellphones, computers and pacemakers, as well as electric cars, feasible. Goodenough, who was head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford in England when he made his lithium-ion discovery, joined the University of Texas faculty in 1986, and was still teaching and researching battery materials and solid-state science and engineering problems when he won the Nobel Prize. "Live to 97 and you can do anything," Goodenough said, adding he was grateful he hadn't been forced to retire at 65. Frederic Forrest Actor Frederic Forrest (December 23, 1936-June 23, 2023) was best-known for his performance as Jay "Chef" Hicks, who accompanies Martin Sheen's Captain Willard upriver and encounters a tiger in the jungle, in the Francis Ford Coppola classic "Apocalypse Now." That same year, he played an Army deserter who becomes Bette Midler's lover in "The Rose," for which he received an Oscar nomination. His other film roles included "The Conversation," "The Missouri Breaks," the musical "One from the Heart," "Hammett" (playing novelist Dashiell Hammett), "Valley Girl," "The Two Jakes," "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," "Music Box," "Falling Down," and "All the King's Men." Born in Waxahachie, Texas, Forrest studied theater in New York City, making his stage debut in 1966 in "Viet Rock," an off-Broadway musical. He then migrated to Los Angeles, where he captured TV roles, including a man wrongly confined in a mental ward in "Larry." He played an assassin in "Ruby and Oswald"; a bandit in "Lonesome Dove"; policemen in "21 Jump Street" and "The Deliberate Stranger"; and an imprisoned Civil War Army sergeant in "Andersonville." Glenda Jackson Glenda Jackson (May 9, 1936-June 15, 2023) had careers on two distinctly different stages: as an actress, she won two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs and a Tony; and, as a member of Parliament for nearly a quarter-century, she was a formidable spokesperson for labor issues and against conservative policies. Born into a working-class family in Birkhenhead, northwest England, Jackson trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She became a leading star on stage in the avant-garde drama "Marat/Sade," directed by Peter Brook. After transferring to Broadway, the show earned Jackson her first Tony nomination, and she repeated her performance in the 1967 film version. She won her first Oscar for Ken Russell's D.H. Lawrence adaptation, "Women in Love," a powerful romantic drama costarring Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. Jackson then won two Emmys for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC/"Masterpiece Theatre" series, "Elizabeth R." She won her second Academy Award for a romantic-comedy, playing a married man's mistress, in "A Touch of Class." She received two other Oscar nominations in the '70s, for "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and "Hedda." Other notable films showed Jackson's enormous breadth, and willingness to switch from serious or challenging roles ("Mary, Queen of Scots"; "The Music Lovers"; "Stevie," as the poet Stevie Smith; "The Rainbow"), to frothy, lightweight fare ("Nasty Habits"; "House Calls"; "Hopscotch"; "Turtle Diary"). She earned three more Tony nominations in the 1980s, for "Rose," "Strange Interlude" and "Macbeth." In her 50s, Jackson dropped out of acting and went into politics, drawn into that world, she told "Sunday Morning" in 2018, by what she considered to be the socially-destructive policies of the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher." "For me, the final straw was when she said there's no such thing as a society," Jackson said. She won election to Parliament in 1992 on the Labor Party ticket. She served as a minister for transport in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in 1997, but came to be at odds with Blair over the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She said Blair's decision to enter the U.S.-led war without United Nations' authorization left her "deeply, deeply ashamed." Jackson's blunt manner and outspokenness continued throughout her political career. In 2013 when Thatcher died and other MPs paid polite tribute, she didn't: "Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: Greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees," she said in Parliament. She recalled, "I think they were surprised, because up until that point practically everything had been praise. I mean, talk about rewriting history. I mean, it was astonishing! But then they calmed down actually." Once she decided to end her political career, it wasn't long before her old life came calling. She returned to the stage with one of the most artistic and physically-demanding roles ever written: Shakespeare's King Lear. Her gender-bending turn opened at London's Old Vic in 2016 and later played on Broadway. In 2018 she starred on Broadway in the Edward Albee drama "Three Tall Women." Jackson took home a Tony for her blistering portrayal of a difficult-to-deal-with woman in her 90s. And her return to the screen in the movie "Elizabeth Is Missing," playing a woman with Alzheimer's trying to solve a mystery, earned her a second BAFTA. She recently completed filming "The Great Escaper," costarring Michael Caine. It was a stage in her life when she received meaty roles, after long and famously complaining about the lack of good parts for women. "I mean, I can remember when I was still doing films - and I'm going back a long way now - it was not infrequent to have a woman in a film to prove that the hero wasn't gay," Jackson told "Sunday Morning." "I mean, you saw that was the kind of reason for being. We've still got a long, long way to go." Cormac McCarthy Though fame and commercial success came to him later in life, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy (July 20, 1933-June 13, 2023) had long earned critical acclaim for his novels, written in prose that drew comparison to William Faulkner. Set in the stark and forbidding landscapes and rundown communities of Appalachia and the Southwest, McCarthy's works are populated with drifters, violent criminals and broken men, fated to suffer, and to cause suffering. In addition to his "Border Trilogy" novels set along the Mexico border (the National Book Award-winning "All the Pretty Horses," "The Crossing," and "Cities of the Plain"), McCarthy wrote "No Country for Old Men" (adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen into a film that won four Oscars, including best picture), the post-apocalyptic father-and-son journey "The Road" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and "Blood Meridian," an ultra-violent tale of bounty hunters along the Texas-Mexico border murdering Indians, which has been hailed as one of the greatest American novels. McCarthy, who was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote his first novel, 1965's "The Orchard Keeper," while working as an auto mechanic in Chicago. He sent it to Faulker's editor at Random House, Albert Erskine, who would become McCarthy's longtime editor. He followed with the novels "Outer Dark," "Child of God," and "Suttree." He received a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called "genius grant") in 1981, which he used to research "Blood Meridian." He also wrote two plays, "The Stonemason" and "The Sunset Limited," and several screenplays, including "The Gardener's Son" and "The Counselor." In 2007, after Oprah Winfrey chose "The Road" for her book club, McCarthy consented to a rare interview, in which he described to Winfrey the book's origin: a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, early in the decade. Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night as his son slept nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future. "I just had this image of these fires up on the hill ... and I thought a lot about my little boy," he said. There would be a long period of silence from McCarthy – 15 years – until news of two connected novels to be published back-to-back in 2022: "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris," narratives about a brother and sister, mutually obsessed siblings, and the legacy of their father, a physicist who had worked on atomic technology. Both would be New York Times bestsellers. When asked by Winfrey if he was passionate about writing, McCarthy said, "I like what I do. "Some writers have said in print that they hated writing, it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult but you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve but which you never stop trying to achieve," he said. "That's your signpost and your guide. You can't plot things out. You just have to trust in, you know, wherever it comes from." Treat Williams Actor Treat Williams (December 1, 1951-June 12, 2023) appeared in more than 120 film and TV roles, most notably in the movies "Hair" and "Prince of the City" (both of which earned him Golden Globe nominations), "Once Upon a Time in America," "Smooth Talk," and the TV series "Everwood," in which he starred as Dr. Andrew Brown, a widowed brain surgeon from Manhattan who moves with his two children to a Colorado mountain town. Other film credits included "The Eagle Has Landed," "1941," "The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper," "Flashpoint," "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead," "Mulholland Falls," "Deep Rising," and "127 Hours." He starred opposite Ann-Margret and Beverly D'Angelo in a TV adaptation of "A Streetcar Named Desire," garnering a third Golden Globe nomination; he also earned an Emmy nomination for his role in the TV movie "The Late Shift," playing Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz. Other TV credits included "J. Edgar Hoover," "Heartland," "Chicago Fire," "Chesapeake Shores," "The Christmas House," and "Blue Bloods." His stage appearances included the Broadway shows "Grease," "The Pirates of Penzance," and "Follies." Roger Payne Biologist Roger Payne (January 29, 1935-June 10, 2023) spurred a worldwide environmental conservation movement with his discovery that whales could sing. During a 1967 research trip to Bermuda, in which a Navy engineer provided him with a recording of curious underwater sounds documented while listening for Russian submarines, Payne identified the haunting tones as songs whales sing to one another. He saw the discovery of whale song as a chance to spur interest in saving the giant animals, who were disappearing from the planet. In 1970 Payne produced the album "Songs of the Humpback Whale." A surprise hit, the record galvanized a global movement to end the practice of commercial whale hunting and save the whales from extinction. The impact of the whale song discovery on the nascent environmental movement was immense. Payne's album remains the best-selling environmental album in history. Payne founded Ocean Alliance in 1971 to advocate for the protection of whales and dolphins. The organization played a role in the 1972 passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the 1982 commercial whaling moratorium passed by the International Whaling Commission. Whale song also entered the popular imagination, such as in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," in which the crew of the Enterprise travels back in time to retrieve whales that could communicate via whale song with an alien probe. In a 2021 interview with Nautilus Quarterly Payne said he knew almost instantly that the sounds were indeed whales once he heard the recording in the loud engine room of the research vessel. "In spite of the racket, what I heard blew my mind," he said. Françoise Gilot Françoise Gilot (November 26, 1921-June 6, 2023) was 22 when she painted her self-portrait in 1944, soon after she'd started a relationship with a much older artist, Pablo Picasso. When asked in 2017 by "Sunday Morning" whether it was intimidating to be working in the shadow of a master, Gilot laughed: "If you have to be intimidated, then you don't go there. Either you have courage, or you don't in life. If you have courage, you receive a few bumps here and there. But on the whole, it's more interesting." Gilot's very interesting life took a turn after attending law school for two years. "It has been very helpful to me," she said. "Because a painter is a man or woman who has to do contracts, and the dealers are not the most reliable people sometimes." It was in 1943, during the German occupation of Paris, that Gilot met Picasso. She was 21; he was 61. Gilot would later write, "It was a catastrophe I didn't want to avoid." While Picasso frequently used her image as inspiration, Gilot continued quietly working herself, not (she reflected) showing too much personality. They would spend 10 years together, and have two children, Claude and Paloma. But then Gilot became the only one of Picasso's women to walk away. She recalled his self-assurance: "'Ha, ha, ha. Nobody leaves a man like me!' I said, 'Wait and see!'" Gilot's 1964 memoir, "Life with Picasso," became an international bestseller, despite the artist's attempts in court to block publication. She moved to the U.S., and attracted another giant of the 20th century: Dr. Jonas Salk, pioneer of the polio vaccine. They married in 1970. Gilot continued working in New York City, creating thousands of paintings. When asked at age 95 if she would give up painting, she replied, "No. Why should I? It will give me up. But I won't give it up. I don't want to commit suicide. And nobody wants to kill me. So, what can I do?" Astrud Gilberto Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto (March 29, 1940-June 5, 2023) was born into a musical family, one that was also at ease with foreign languages (her mother was a singer and violinist, her father a linguistics professor). As a teenager, she joined a circle of musical friends that would grow to include a rising star in Rio's emerging bossa nova scene, singer-songwriter-guitarist João Gilberto, whom she soon married. Astrud became an overnight, unexpected superstar in 1964, thanks to knowing just enough English to be recruited by the makers of the classic bossa nova album "Getz/Gilberto" (featuring saxophonist Stan Getz) to sing the wistful ballad, "The Girl from Ipanema." Already a hit in South America, the song's lyrics were rewritten to include English to expand its appeal. Astrud joined João in the studio, singing the chorus. Tall and tan and young and lovely The girl from Ipanema goes walking And when she passes Each one she passes goes, "Ah" In a 2002 interview posted on her website, Astrud recalled, "I'll never forget that while we were listening back to the just-recorded song at the studio's control room, Stan said to me, with a very dramatic expression: 'This song is going
4334	dbpedia	1	94	https://www.revexproductions.org/the-big-list-of-problematic-artists-and-songs	en	The Big List of Problematic Artists and Songs — Revolutionary Exchange Productions	https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/default-favicon.ico	https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/default-favicon.ico	[ "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b520f1cc3c16a2d58a60490/1532110403273-X2OF2CQ3KNDPDHJZ2ABH/Opaque_RevXPROD-01.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b520f1cc3c16a2d58a60490/1532110403273-X2OF2CQ3KNDPDHJZ2ABH/Opaque_RevXPROD-01.png?format=1500w", "https://images.square...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/default-favicon.ico	Revolutionary Exchange Productions	https://www.revexproductions.org/the-big-list-of-problematic-artists-and-songs	There are no claims made about artists on this page, just links to publicly-available claims. The list is focused on the U.S. (where I live) and artists that perform in English (since I don’t have translation skills). I do not find profanity in general to be problematic. Only profanity relating to hate speech. According to academic definitions, not to your standards. Depicting a bad thing can be offensive, even if that thing isn’t being endorsed. That you or I like someone is not a valid reason for them to not be on this list. It’s a binary thing, they did something problematic or they didn’t. Minor transgressions are on the list, even if apologized for or forgiven. If you’re a liberal and you want to complain about this list, make sure you read the full context and understand what this list is. If you don’t agree with the statements above, keep your criticism, I’m not interested. The only feedback I’m looking for from you are factual errors (NOT interpretation of facts, only specific facts) or omissions. Submit something missing, I’ll review the facts and add if warranted. If you’re conservative and you want to complain about this list, don’t. Instead you should fuck off. This isn’t for you and your thoughts about this don’t matter. I will delete without reading. This is a woke list and proud of it. 50 Cent, “P.I.M.P.”: Includes misogynistic lyrics and slurs. Aaron Lewis, “Am I the Only One”: Includes lyrics that are jingoistic, pro-Confederacy and anti-liberal. Aaron Tippin, “Drill Here, Drill Now”: Favors environmentally-destroying oil drilling. AC/DC, “Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)”: Depicts violence against women. Adam Sandler, “At A Medium Pace”: Kink-shaming and graphically explicit in extreme ways. Adolescents, “She Wolf”: Includes racial slur and misogynist lyrics. Aerosmith, “Dude Looks Like A Lady”: Includes transphobic lyrics. Aimee Allen, “Ron Paul Revolution”: Pro-Ron Paul song. Alice Cooper, “Raped and Freezing”: Depicts rape, implied racism in the lyrics. Alien Ant Farm, “Smooth Criminal”: Depicts violence against women. Andrew Bird, “Fake Palindromes”: Depicts violence against a woman. Angry Samoans, “They Saved Hitler's Cock”: Makes light of Nazi war crimes. Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”: From the point of view of an abusive man. Aqua, “Barbie Girl”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Asking Alexandria, “Not The American Average”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. The Association, “Cherish”: The last verse seems to suggest the song advocates grooming. Beastie Boys, “Girls”: Filled with misogynistic lyrics. The Beatles, “Getting Better”: Depicts violence against women. The Beatles, “I’ll Get You”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. The Beatles, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”: Depicts violence against a woman. The Beatles, “Run For Your Life”: Advocates violence against women. The Beatles, “You Can’t Do That”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. The Bellamy Brothers, “You Ain’t Just Whistlin’ Dixie”: Celebrates the confederacy. Ben Colder, “Welfare Cadillac”: Racist, contains right-wing propaganda. Ben Folds, “Btches Ain’t Shit”: Includes misogynist slurs, sexism and homophobia. Billie Holiday, “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”: The narrator of the song excuses a man’s abuse against a woman. Billy Currington, “Hey Girl”: Infantilizes women and objectifies them. Black Flag, “Slip It In”: Includes misogynistic lyrics and seems to depict rape. Blink-182, “Voyeur”: Song is from the point of view of someone who violates the privacy of a woman he has a crush on. Bloodhound Gang, “The Ballad of Chasey Lane”: Filled with misogynistic lyrics. Bloodhound Gang, “A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying”: Filled with misogynistic lyrics. Brad Paisley, “Accidental Racist”: Includes a false equivalency between racism and violence and cultural choices. Bryan Lewis, “I Think My Dog’s a Democrat”: Filled with right-wing nonsense. Bryson Gray, “MAGA Steppin’”: Pro-Trump right-wing propaganda. Buddy Brown, “If This Country Still Had Balls”: Pro-lynching song. Buju Banton, “Boom Bye Bye”: Advocates for the murder of gay men. Cage, “I Never Knew You”:Includes misogynistic lyrics and humanizes a serial killer. Charlie Daniels, "Simple Man": Right-wing nonsense, advocates violence. The Charlie Daniels Band, “This Ain't No Rag, It's A Flag”: Includes jingoistic and racist lyrics. Cheap Trick, “The Ballad of TV Violence”: Written about murderer Richard Speck. City High, “What Would You Do?,”: Talks about rape, portrays slut-shaming. Clint Black, “Iraq and Roll”: Jingoistic, pro-war. Conflict, “An Option”: Includes racist and sexist slurs. Contains extreme right-wing views. Creed Fisher, “If You Have a Right to Burn My Flag (Then I Have a Right to Kick Your Ass)”: Jingoistic, racist and pro-confederacy. The Crystals, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)”: Advocates for domestic violence. Dead Kennedys, “California Uber Alles”: Makes light of Nazi war crimes. Dean Martin, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: Song includes predatory lyrics. Decemberists, “We Both Go Down Together”: Makes light of suicide. Def Leppard, “Two Steps Behind”: Lyrics are kinda predatory. Denis Leary, “Asshole”: Ableist, jingoistic, advocates for environmental pollution, filled with toxic masculinity. The Descendents, “I’m Not A Loser”: Contains homophobic and misogynistic lyrics. The Descendents, “No FB”: Contains misogynistic and fat-phobic lyrics. The Descendents, “Pervert”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Dictators, “Master Race Rock”: Makes light of Nazi war crimes. Digital Underground, “The Humpty Dance”: Makes fun of fat people. Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing”: Includes homophobic (and possibly racist) lyrics. Dr. Dre, “Btches Ain’t Shit”: Includes misogynist slurs, sexism and homophobia. Easy-E, “Fat Girl”: Makes fun of fat people, contains misogynistic lyrics. Ed Helms, “Stu’s Song”: The lyrics joke about a convicted rapist. Eminem, “Criminal”: Contains homophobic lyrics and slurs. Eminem, “Kill You”: Contains violently misogynistic lyrics and violence against women. Eminem, “Stan”: Depicts violence against a woman. Eminem, “Superman”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Emmure, “Drug Dealer Friend”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Eric Clapton, “This Has Got to Stop”: Anti-vaxxer song. Fear, “The Mouth Don’t Stop (The Trouble With Women Today Is)”: Includes misogynistic lyrics. First Love, “Game On”: The song is pro-Rick Santorum. The Flaming Lips, “Bad Days”: Advocates workplace violence. Flower Leperds, “Preacher's Confession”: Includes racial slurs, rape and violence against women and people of color. Makes light of incest and rape. Frank Zappa, “Jewish Princess”: Contains anti-Semitic tropes and sexism. G.G. Allin, “I Wanna Kill You”: Includes a racist slur and anti-Semitic lyrics. Advocates for rape and murder, including of Jewish people. G.G. Allin, “No Room for N***r”: The song is pure racism. G.G. Allin, “Die When You Die”: Includes racist, sexist, transphobic and homophobic lyrics and slurs. Makes light of AIDS deaths. Garth Brooks, “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association”: Includes lyrics that denigrate paying taxes, spread misinformation about welfare recipients, is pro-gun and jingoistic. George Michael, “Father Figure”: Has predatory lyrics. Guns N' Roses, “One in a Million”: Includes racist and homophobic slurs. Includes other racist and homophobic lyrics. Guy Drake, “Welfare Cadillac”: Implied racism, right-wing propaganda. Hank Williams Jr., "A Country Boy Can Survive": Right wing fantasy. Hank Williams Jr., “If the South Woulda Won”: Pro-confederacy. Hank Williams Jr., "I’ve Got Rights": Right-wing fantasy, advocates for violence. Hank Williams Jr., “Keep the Change”: Ignorant right-wing propaganda. Harlan Howard, “Mr. Professor”: Ignorant right-wing propaganda. Hollywood Undead, “Undead”: Includes homophobic and misogynistic lyrics and makes light of suicide. The Human League, “Don’t You Want Me”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Ian Dury & the Blockheads, “Reasons To Be Cheerful, Pt. 3”: Lauds Woody Allen. Ice Cube, “Black Korea”: Includes racist lyrics. Ice Cube, “No Vaseline”: Contains anti-Semitic lyrics. The Ides of March, “Vehicle”: Includes predatory lyrics. The J. Geils Band, “Centerfold”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Jenny Lewis, “Jack Killed Mom”: Depicts violence against a woman. Jimi Hendrix, “Hey Joe”: Depicts violence against a woman. Jimmy Soul, “If You Wanna Be Happy”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. (Any many covers) Joanie Sommers, “Johnny Get Angry”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. John Rich, "I’m Offended": Ignorant right-wing nonsense. John Rich, "Progress": Ignorant right-wing nonsense. Johnny Cash, “Delia’s Gone”: Depicts violence against a woman. Johnny Cash, “Johnny Reb”: Celebrates the confederacy. Johnny Cash, “Transfusion Blues”: Depicts violence against a woman. Johnny Horton, “Johnny Reb”: Celebrates the confederacy. Julie Brown, “Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun”: Makes light of a school shooting. Kid Rock, “Don’t Tell Me How to Live”: Contains right-wing lyric and sexist lyrics. Korn, “All In the Family”: Includes homophobic and sexist lyrics. Makes light of incest and sexual assault. Lana Del Ray, “Ultraviolence”: Depicts violence against a woman. Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers, "Stand Up and Say So (Hillary’s America)": Ignorant right-wing nonsense. Lil Pump, “Lil Pimp Big MAGA Steppin’”: Pro-Trump, misogynistic, right-wing propaganda. The Lonely Island, “No Homo”: Includes homophobic lyrics. Lou Christie, “Lightnin' Strikes”: Lauds predatory behavior. Lynyrd Skynyrd, “God & Guns”: Pro-gun, pro right wing religion. Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Sweet Home Alabama”: Pro-confederacy. Mac Davis, “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked On Me”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Maroon 5, “Animals”: Lauds predatory behavior. Matchbox 20, “Push”: From the point of view of an abuser. Metallica, “Last Caress/Green Hell”: Makes light of rape and violence against children. Metallica, “Stone Cold Crazy,”: Adds violent lyrics not in the original. MC Chris, “Fett’s Vette”: Includes lyrics that are misogynist, ableist and homophobic. Merle Haggard, “Okie from Muskogee”: Filled with right-wing talking points. Michael Jackson, “Smooth Criminal”: Depicts violence against women. Michael Jackson, “They Don't Care About Us”: Contained anti-Semitic lyrics. Millions of Dead Cops, “John Wayne Was A Nazi”: Makes light of Nazi war crimes. The Mindbenders, “The Game of Love”: Aggressively heteronormative. Miranda Lambert, “Gunpowder & Lead”: Depicts violence against women. The Misfits, “Last Caress”: Depicts violent misogyny and makes light of rape and child murder. Motley Crue, “Girls Girls Girls”: Objectifies women. Motley Crue, “Wild Side”: Makes light of rape and murder. Motley Crue, “You’re All I Need”: Depicts murder of a woman. Mr. T Experience, “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend”: Makes light of Nazi war crimes. Mungo Jerry, “In the Summertime”: Contains sexist and classist lyrics. Mushroomhead, “Bwomp”: Lauds Charles Manson. N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton”: Contains misogynistic and lyrics. Necros, “Youth Camp”: Includes racial and homophobic slurs and anti-Semitic lyrics. Nick Cave & Kylie Minogue, “Where the Wild Roses Go”: A song about graphically murdering a woman. Nickelback, “Figured You Out”: Contains violently misogynistic lyrics. Nirvana, “Negative Creep”: Song about a predator who pursues young women. Nirvana, “Polly”/“New Wave Polly”: Depicts violence against a woman. Nirvana, “Rape Me”: Makes light of rape. The O’Kaysions, “Girl Watcher”: A song about objectifying women and infantilizing them. Oliver Anthony, “Rich Men North of Richmond”: Contains racist lyrics and false right-wing talking points. Passenger, “Night Binoculars”: Has creepy lyrics about stalking a woman. PewDiePie, “Bitch Lasanga”: Includes racist and sexist lyrics. The Police, “Can't Stand Losing”: Includes misogynistic lyrics. The Police, “Every Breath You Take”: Includes misogynistic lyrics. The Police, “Roxanne”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”: Includes homophobic and misogynistic lyrics. The Prodigy, “Smack My Btch Up”: Makes light of violence against women, misogynistic lyrics. Ramones, “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World”: Makes light of Nazi war crimes. The Rays, “Silhouettes”: Contains creepy predatory lyrics. Robin Thicke, “Blurred Lines”: Contains predatory lyrics. Rocko f. Rick Ross, “U.N.E.N.O.”: Advocates for date rape, contains misogynistic lyrics. Rolf Harris, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport”: The original song included a verse with racial slurs. The Rolling Stones, “Some Girls”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Shabba Ranks, “Bedroom Bully”: Endorses sexual violence and abuse. Sir Mix-A-Lot, “Baby Got Back”: Objectifies women. Skepta, “Redrum”: Makes light of violence against women. Slayer, “Dittohead”: Pro-Rush Limbaugh song. Slayer, “Silent Scream”: Anti-abortion song. Soulja Boy, “Crank That (Soulja Boy)”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. Sparks, “Girl from Germany”: Makes light of Nazi war crimes. The Steeles, “We Want America Back”: Is a white Christian nationalist anthem. Stephen Foster, “Camptown Races”: Has racist origins. Stephen Foster, “Oh! Susanna”: Has racist origins. Stephen Foster, “Old Folks at Home/Swanee River”: Has racist origins and originally included racial slurs. Stone Temple Pilots, “Sex Type Thing”: Depicts rape. Sublime, “Date Rape”: Makes light of rape. Encourages prison rape. Sublime, “Santeria”: Depicts violence against a woman. Sunscreem, “Love U More”: Makes light of rape. Team America, “Everyone Has AIDS”: Makes light of the AIDS epidemic. Team America, “I'm So Ronery”: Filled with racist lyrics. Ted Nugent, “Come and Get It”: Advocates violence against his political enemies. Ted Nugent, “I’m A Predator”: Lauds predatory behavior. Ted Nugent, “I Am the NRA”: Lauds gun culture and the NRA, which is responsible for many gun deaths. Toad the Wet Sprocket, “Hold Her Down”: Depicts violence against a woman. Toadies, “Possum Kingdom”: From the POV of a serial killer. Toby Keith, “Beer for My Horses”: A pro-lynching song. Tom Jones, “Delilah”: Depicts violence against a woman. Tom Petty, “Honey Bee”: Contains predatory lyrics. Tool, “Prison Sex”: Includes lyrics about prison rape. Traditional, “5 Little Monkeys/10 Little Monkeys”: Has racist origins. Traditional, “Dixie”: Racist and pro-Confederate. Traditional, “Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon”: Racist. Traditional, “From Dixie With Love”: Racist and pro-Confederacy. Traditional, “Go, Mississippi”: Has segregationist origins. Traditional, “I've Been Working on the Railroad”: Has racist and sexist origins. Traditional, “Jim Along Josey”: Has racist origins. Traditional, “Jimmy Crack Corn”: Has racist origins. Traditional, “Pick a Bale of Cotton”: Has racist origins and originally included racial slurs. Traditional, “Shortnin’ Bread”: Has racist origins. Traditional, “Ten Little Indians”: Has racist origins and lyrics and is appropriationist. Traditional, “Turkey in the Straw”: Has racist origins and multiple early versions included racial slurs. U2, “Stay (Faraway, So Close)”: Depicts violence against a woman. Van Zant, “Sweet Florida”: The song is about extremist Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Vince Gill, “Everybody’s Sweetheart”: Contains misogynistic lyrics. The Vogues, “Turn Around, Look At Me”: Kinda predatory. Wang Chung, “Dance Hall Days”: Kinda aggressive and creepy. Washington Commanders, “Hail to the Commanders”: Has racist origins. Warren Zevon, “Excitable Boy”: Depicts rape and murder of a woman. Weird Al Yankovic, “Fat”: Makes fun of fat people.
4334	dbpedia	3	35	https://denison.edu/magazine/summer-2024/143402	en	Obituaries - Summer 2024	https://denison.edu/themes/favicon.ico	https://denison.edu/themes/favicon.ico	[ "https://denison.edu/sites/default/files/styles/rectangle_focal_point_small/public/news/image/2024/lavalley_student_internships.jpg?h=81518718&itok=J6uIgZE2", "https://denison.edu/sites/default/files/styles/rectangle_focal_point_small/public/news/image/2024/john-haller-t_0.jpg?h=2e6db665&itok=3ZNmamHn", "https:...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-08-08T12:51:02-04:00	All information for obituaries was submitted over the last year, prior to publishing. We will be updating obituaries online at this location.	en	/themes/favicon.ico	Denison University	https://denison.edu/magazine/summer-2024/143402	Search No Results Denison’s purpose is to inspire and educate its students to become autonomous thinkers, discerning moral agents and active citizens of a democratic society. We are thrilled that you are considering Denison during your college search, and we look forward to getting to know more about you. Our students bring diverse talents, interests, backgrounds, and experiences to campus; see how Denison helps them make this college their own.
4334	dbpedia	2	4	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nesmith	en	Michael Nesmith	https://upload.wikimedia…66_-_Nesmith.JPG	https://upload.wikimedia…66_-_Nesmith.JPG	[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/The_Monkees_1966_-_N...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2002-01-15T19:44:42+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nesmith	American musician, songwriter, and actor (1942–2021) Musical artist Robert Michael Nesmith (December 30, 1942 – December 10, 2021) was an American musician, songwriter, and actor. He was best known as a member of the Monkees and co-star of their TV series of the same name (1966–1968). His songwriting credits with the Monkees include "Mary, Mary", "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", "Tapioca Tundra", "Circle Sky" and "Listen to the Band". Additionally, his song "Different Drum" became a hit for Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys. After leaving the Monkees in 1969, Nesmith continued his successful songwriting and performing career, first with the seminal country rock group the First National Band, with whom he had a top-40 hit, "Joanne" (1970). As a solo artist, he scored an international hit with the song "Rio" (1977). He often played a custom-built Gretsch 12-string electric guitar with the Monkees and afterwards. In 1974, Nesmith founded Pacific Arts, a multimedia production and distribution company, through which he helped pioneer the music video format, winning the first Grammy Award for Video of the Year for his hour-long comedy/variety program, Elephant Parts (1981).[2] He created one of the first American television programs dedicated to music videos, PopClips, which aired on Nickelodeon in 1980, and was soon after approached to help develop the MTV network, though he declined. Nesmith was also an executive producer of the film Repo Man (1984). Early life [edit] Nesmith was born in Houston, Texas, on December 30, 1942.[3] He was an only child; his parents, Warren and Bette Nesmith (née McMurray), divorced when he was four. His mother married Robert Graham in 1962, and they remained married until 1975. Nesmith and his mother moved to Dallas to be closer to her family. She took temporary jobs ranging from clerical work to graphic design, eventually attaining the position of executive secretary at Texas Bank and Trust. When Nesmith was 13, his mother invented the typewriter correction fluid later known commercially as Liquid Paper. Over the next 25 years, she built the Liquid Paper Corporation into an international company, which she sold to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million. She died a few months later at the age of 56.[4] Nesmith attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas, where he participated in choral and drama activities,[5] but enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1960 before graduating. He completed basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, was trained as an aircraft mechanic at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, and was permanently stationed at Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base near Burns Flat, Oklahoma.[6][7] He obtained a GED certificate and was honorably discharged in 1962.[8] Music career [edit] After Nesmith's tour of duty in the Air Force, his mother and stepfather gave him a guitar for Christmas. Learning as he went, he played solo and in a series of working bands, performing folk, country, and occasionally rock and roll. He enrolled in San Antonio College, where he met John London and began a musical collaboration. They won the first San Antonio College talent award, performing a mixture of standard folk songs and a few of Nesmith's original songs. Nesmith began to write more songs and poetry, then he moved to Los Angeles and began singing in folk clubs around the city. He served as the "Hootmaster" for the Monday night hootenanny at The Troubadour, a West Hollywood nightclub that featured new artists.[9] Randy Sparks from the New Christy Minstrels offered Nesmith a publishing deal for his songs.[8] Nesmith began his recording career in 1963 by releasing a single on the Highness label. He followed this in 1965 with a one-off single released on Edan Records followed by two more recorded singles; one was titled "The New Recruit" under the name "Michael Blessing", released on Colpix Records, coincidentally also the label of Davy Jones, though they did not meet until the Monkees formed.[10] Barry Freedman told him about upcoming auditions for a new TV series called The Monkees. In October 1965, Nesmith's confident, carefree and laid-back manner impressed the producers and he landed the role as the wool hat-wearing guitar player "Mike" in the show, which required real-life musical talent for writing, instrument playing, singing, and performing in live concerts as part of the Monkees band.[11] Nesmith's "Mary, Mary" was recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Monkees themselves on their second LP in 1967, and then reworked by rap group Run DMC in the mid 1980s. His "Different Drum" and "Some of Shelly's Blues" were later recorded by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys in 1967 and 1968, respectively. "Pretty Little Princess", written in 1965, was recorded by Frankie Laine and released as a single in 1968 on ABC Records.[citation needed] Later, "Some of Shelly's Blues" and "Propinquity (I've Just Begun to Care)" were made popular by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their 1970 album Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy.[8] The Monkees [edit] From 1965 to early 1970, Nesmith -- along with Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones -- was a member of the television pop-rock band the Monkees, created for the television situation comedy of the same name. Nesmith won his role largely by appearing nonchalant when he auditioned.[8] He rode his motorcycle to the audition, and wore a wool hat to keep his hair out of his eyes; producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider remembered the "wool hat guy" and called Nesmith back.[citation needed] Once he was cast, Screen Gems bought his songs so they could be used in the show. Many of the songs Nesmith wrote for the Monkees, such as "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", "Mary, Mary",[8] and "Listen to the Band" became minor hits. One song he wrote, "You Just May Be the One", is in mixed meter, interspersing 5/4 bars into an otherwise 4/4 structure.[citation needed] Even before Colgems and Don Kirshner's surreptitious release of the Monkees 2nd LP, without the knowledge or consent of the four musician-actors, they came to be frustrated by their studio-manufactured "bubblegum" image. Within weeks of the release of More of the Monkees, Nesmith lobbied successfully with the group's creators, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, that the Monkees be allowed to play their instruments on future records. During a group meeting with Kirshner and Colgems lawyer Herb Moelis, in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, each actor received a $250k royalties check, yet Nesmith still threatened to quit. Moelis rebuked him, "You'd better read your contract". Nesmith defiantly punched a hole in the wall, declaring to Moelis, "That could have been your face, motherfucker!" Weeks later, due to a breach of (verbal) agreement over the next single release, which was promised to Nesmith by Rafelson & Schneider, Nesmith led the charge in completely ousting musical supervisor Don Kirshner, effectively giving the four youths complete artistic and production control of their output, and the group finally worked as a true 4-man rock group on 1967's Headquarters, despite Jones & Dolenz having very limited instrumental skills, studio time being pricey and retakes costly.[11] During the band's first independent press conference, Nesmith called their 2nd LP, More of the Monkees "probably the worst record in the history of the world", partly due to rushed, shoddy studio engineering. The band took a hit to its artistic credibility when fans learned the four had not played all the instruments on the first 2 LPs. But still sales continued to be profitable. Headquarters sold 2 million copies, down 2 million units from its predecessor, but still reached the number 1 spot on Billboard, falling only to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band a week later and remaining #2 all through the entire 1967 Summer of Love.[11] For the remaining five Monkees LPs, ironically, the original Kirshner formula of hired studio musicians & songwriters again became the norm, although Nesmith, Tork, Dolenz and Jones contributed about 50% of the original compositions, Nesmith the majority of those.[11] By the end of the Monkees run, Nesmith was withholding many of his original song ideas from Monkees albums, planning to release them in his post-Monkees solo career. Nesmith's last contractual Monkees commitment was a commercial for Kool-Aid and Nerf balls in April 1970 (fittingly, the spot ends with Nesmith frowning and saying, "Enerf's enerf!"). As the band's sales declined, Nesmith asked to be released from his contract, despite it costing him: "I had three years left ... at $150,000 [equivalent to $1.16 million in 2022] a year."[citation needed] He remained in a financial bind until 1980, when he received his inheritance from his mother's estate. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he said of that time: "I had to start telling little tales to the tax man while they were putting tags on the furniture."[citation needed] Return to the Monkees [edit] Nesmith did not participate in the Monkees' 20th anniversary reunion,[8] due to contractual obligations with his production company, but he did appear during an encore with the three other Monkees at the Greek Theatre on September 7, 1986. In a 1987 interview for Nick Rocks, Nesmith stated, "When Peter called up and said 'we're going to go out, do you want to go?' I was booked. But, if you get to L.A., I'll play."[12] Nesmith next joined his fellow Monkees for the 1986 "Monkees Christmas Medley" video for MTV appearing throughout dressed/disguised as Santa Claus until the finale, when he revealed his identity - and participation - to all.[13] "The question I am most often asked is 'how does it feel to be up with the guys after all this time?' Well, it's a mixture of feelings and all of them are good. But the one that comes to mind is the feeling of profound gratitude." Michael Nesmith, speaking about being part of The Monkees at the Hollywood Walk of Fame Star award in 1989. In 1989, Nesmith reunited with the other members of the Monkees, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones. Prior to the official kickoff of The Monkees '89 tour (on July 1 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) all four Monkees gathered in Los Angeles, California, making two live radio appearances (KLOS-FM: The Mark and Brian Show on June 28 and KIIS Radio on June 30) to promote their reunion concert at the Universal Amphitheatre where they appeared together as a foursome live on stage on July 9. The following day (July 10th) all four band members were in attendance as the Monkees received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star.[14] In 1995, Nesmith was again reunited with the Monkees to record their studio album (and first to feature all four since Head in 1968), titled Justus, released in 1996. He also wrote and directed a Monkees reunion television special, Hey, Hey, It's the Monkees. To support the reunion, Nesmith, Jones, Dolenz, and Tork briefly toured the UK in 1997.[8] The UK tour was the last appearance of all four Monkees performing together. In 2012, 2013, and 2014, after Jones's death, Nesmith reunited with Dolenz and Tork to perform concerts throughout the United States. Backed with a seven-piece band that included Nesmith's son, Christian,[15] the trio performed 27 songs from The Monkees discography ("Daydream Believer" was sung by the audience).[16] When asked why he had decided to return to the Monkees, Nesmith stated, "I never really left. It is a part of my youth that is always active in my thoughts and part of my overall work as an artist. It stays in a special place."[17] In 2016, Nesmith contributed vocally and instrumentally to the Monkees' 50th anniversary album Good Times!. He additionally contributed a song, "I Know What I Know", and was reportedly "thrilled" at the outcome of the album.[18] Despite not touring with Dolenz and Tork for the majority of the Monkees' 50th-anniversary reunion in 2016, Nesmith did twice fill in for the ailing Peter Tork and appeared for the final show of the tour, which featured the three surviving band members (the last show to do so). At the end of the final show, Nesmith announced his retirement from the Monkees, never to tour again.[citation needed] In 2018, Nesmith and Dolenz toured together as a duo for the first time under the banner "The Monkees Present: The Mike and Micky Show". The tour was cut short four dates out due to Nesmith having health issues (he was flown back home and proceeded to have quadruple bypass surgery). He contributed two songs to the Monkees' 13th studio album, Christmas Party (the group's first Christmas album), released on October 12, 2018.[citation needed] In 2019, Nesmith and Dolenz reunited again to make up the cancelled dates of the tour and adding several more dates, including a planned tour of Australia and New Zealand. Nesmith and Dolenz announced a follow-up tour, "An Evening with the Monkees", to begin in early 2020.[19] The tour was delayed, however, due the COVID-19 pandemic. It was announced by Nesmith and Dolenz on May 4, 2021, that the Monkees would disband following a farewell tour. Dubbed "The Monkees Farewell Tour", the tour consisted of over 40 dates in the United States from September to November. However, because of restrictions due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they were not able to play shows in Canada, the UK or Australia. The final date of the tour was held on November 14, 2021, at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.[20][21] Solo career [edit] As he prepared for his exit from The Monkees, Nesmith was approached by John Ware of The Corvettes, a band that featured Nesmith's Texas band mate and close friend John London. London played on some of the earliest pre-Monkees, Nesmith 45s, as well as numerous Monkees sessions, and had 45s produced by Nesmith for the Dot label in 1969. Ware wanted Nesmith to put together a band. Nesmith's interest hinged on noted pedal steel player Orville "Red" Rhodes; their musical partnership continued until Rhodes's death in 1995. The new band was christened Michael Nesmith and the First National Band and recorded three albums for RCA Records, the first two issued in 1970 and the third released in 1971.[citation needed] Nesmith's First National Band is now considered a pioneer of country-rock music.[22] Nesmith wrote most of the songs for the band and he is considered one of the trailblazers of country rock.[23] He also had moderate commercial success with the First National Band. Their second single, "Joanne", hit number 21 on the Billboard chart, number 17 on Cashbox, and number four in Canada, with the follow-up "Silver Moon" making number 42 Billboard, number 28 Cashbox, and number 13 in Canada. Two more singles charted ("Nevada Fighter" made number 70 Billboard, number 73 Cashbox, and number 67 Canada, and "Propinquity" reached number 95 Cashbox), and the first two LPs charted in the lower regions of the Billboard album chart. No clear answer has ever been given for the band's breakup.[citation needed] Nesmith followed up with The Second National Band, which consisted of Nesmith (vocals and guitar), Michael Cohen (keyboards and Moog), Johnny Meeks (of The Strangers) (bass), jazzer Jack Ranelli (drums), and Orville Rhodes (pedal steel), as well as an appearance by singer, musician, and songwriter José Feliciano on congas. The album, Tantamount to Treason Vol. 1, was a commercial and critical disaster. Nesmith then recorded And the Hits Just Keep on Comin', featuring only him on guitar and Red Rhodes on pedal steel.[citation needed] Nesmith then became more heavily involved in producing, working on Iain Matthews's album Valley Hi and Bert Jansch's L.A. Turnaround. Nesmith was given a label of his own, Countryside, through Elektra Records, as Elektra Records's Jac Holzman was a fan of Nesmith's. It featured a number of artists produced by Nesmith, including Garland Frady and Red Rhodes. The staff band at Countryside also helped Nesmith on his next, and last, RCA Victor album, Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash. Countryside folded when David Geffen replaced Holzman, as Countryside was unnecessary in Geffen's eyes.[citation needed] In the mid-1970s, Nesmith briefly collaborated as a songwriter with Linda Hargrove, resulting in the tune "I've Never Loved Anyone More", a hit for Lynn Anderson and recorded by many others, as well as the songs "Winonah" and "If You Will Walk With Me", both of which were recorded by Hargrove. Of these songs, only "Winonah" was recorded by Nesmith himself.[citation needed] During this same period, Nesmith started his multimedia company Pacific Arts, which initially put out audio records, eight-track tapes, and cassettes, followed in 1981 with "video records". Nesmith recorded a number of LPs for his label, and had a moderate worldwide hit in 1977 with his song "Rio", the single taken from the album From a Radio Engine to the Photon Wing.[8] In 1979, Nesmith released the single Cruisin', also known as "Lucy and Ramona and Sunset Sam", which was popular on AOR rock stations and in New Zealand.[24] In 1983, Nesmith produced the music video for the Lionel Richie single "All Night Long". In 1987, he produced the music video for the Michael Jackson single "The Way You Make Me Feel".[citation needed] PopClips and MTV, Elephant Parts, and Television Parts [edit] Further information: PopClips During this time, Nesmith created a video clip for "Rio", which helped spur Nesmith's creation of a television program called PopClips for the Nickelodeon cable network. In 1980, PopClips was sold to the Time Warner/Amex consortium. Time Warner/Amex developed PopClips into the MTV network.[8] Nesmith won the first Grammy Award presented for (long-form) Music Video in 1982 for his hour-long Elephant Parts. He also had a short-lived series (1984-5) on NBC inspired by the video called Michael Nesmith in Television Parts. Television Parts included many other artists who were unknown at the time, but went on to become major stars in their own right: Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, Whoopi Goldberg,[8] and Arsenio Hall. The concept of the show was to have comics render their stand-up routines into short comedy films much like the ones in Elephant Parts. Nesmith assembled writers Jack Handey, William Martin, John Levenstein, and Michael Kaplan, along with directors William Dear (who had directed Elephant Parts) and Alan Myerson, as well as producer Ward Sylvester to create the show. The half-hour show ran for 5 episodes in the summer of 1985 on NBC Thursday nights in prime time.[citation needed] Pacific Arts and legal dispute [edit] Nesmith formed the Pacific Arts Corporation, Inc. in 1974 to manage and develop media projects. Pacific Arts Video became a pioneer in the home video market, producing and distributing a wide variety of videotaped programs, although the company eventually ceased operations after an acrimonious contract dispute with PBS over home video licensing rights and payments for several series,[8] including Ken Burns' The Civil War. The dispute escalated into a lawsuit that went to jury trial in federal court in Los Angeles. On February 3, 1999, a jury awarded Nesmith and his company Pacific Arts $48.875 million in compensatory and punitive damages, prompting his widely quoted comment, "It's like finding your grandmother stealing your stereo. You're happy to get your stereo back, but it's sad to find out your grandmother is a thief." Six months after the verdict, a settlement was reached with the amount paid to Pacific Arts and Nesmith kept confidential.[25] Nesmith's most recent Pacific Arts project was Videoranch 3D, a virtual environment on the internet that hosted live performances at various virtual venues inside the ranch. He performed live inside Videoranch 3D on May 25, 2009.[26] Movies and books [edit] Nesmith was the executive producer for the films Repo Man, Tapeheads, and Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, as well as his own solo recording and film projects.[27] In 1998, Nesmith published his first novel, The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora. It was developed originally as an online project and was later published as a hardcover book[8] by St Martin's Press.[28] Nesmith's second novel, The America Gene, was released in July 2009 as an online download from Videoranch.com.[29] Recent history [edit] In the early 1980s, Nesmith teamed with satirist P. J. O'Rourke to ride his vehicle Timerider in the annual Baja 1000 off-road race. This is chronicled in O'Rourke's 2009 book Driving Like Crazy.[30] During the 1990s, Nesmith, as trustee and president of the Gihon Foundation,[8] hosted the Council on Ideas, a gathering of intellectuals from different fields who were asked to identify the most important issues of their day and publish the result. The foundation ceased the program in 2000 and started a new program for the performing arts. Nesmith also spent a decade as a board of trustees member, nominating member and vice-chair of the American Film Institute.[citation needed] In 1992, Nesmith undertook a concert tour of North America to promote the first CD release of his RCA solo albums (although he included the song "Rio" from the album From a Radio Engine to the Photon Wing). The concert tour ended at the Britt Festival in Oregon. A video and CD, both entitled Live at the Britt Festival, were released capturing the 1992 concert.[31] Nesmith continued to record and release his own music. His final album, Rays, was released in 2006. In 2011, he returned to producing, working with blues singer and guitarist Carolyn Wonderland. Nesmith produced Wonderland's version of Robert Johnson's "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" on her album Peace Meal. Wonderland married writer-comedian A. Whitney Brown on March 4, 2011, in a ceremony officiated by Nesmith.[32] In 2012, Nesmith briefly toured Europe prior to rejoining the Monkees for their tours of the United States.[33] Intermixing the Monkees concerts, Nesmith also launched solo tours of the U.S. Unlike his 1992 U.S. tour, which predominantly featured music from his RCA recordings, Nesmith stated that his 2013 tour would feature songs he considers "thematic, chronological and most often requested by fans".[citation needed] Chris Scruggs, grandson of Earl Scruggs, replaced the late Red Rhodes on the steel guitar. The tour was captured on a live album, Movies Of The Mind.[citation needed] In 2014, he guest-starred in season four, episode nine, of the IFC comedy series Portlandia in the fictitious role of the father of the mayor of Portland, Oregon.[27] In 2017, Nesmith released a memoir and companion "soundtrack" album titled Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff.[34] In 2018, he announced that he would be doing a five-date tour of California with a revamped version of The First National Band, including a date at The Troubadour, where he performed before The Monkees.[35] On February 20, a tour was announced as "The Monkees Present: The Mike and Micky Show", their first tour as a duo. The pair would play Monkees music and promote the tour under the Monkees banner, but Nesmith stated, "there's no pretense there about Micky and I [sic] being the Monkees. We're not."[36] The tour was cut short in June 2018, with four shows left unplayed, due to Nesmith having a "minor health issue"; Dolenz and he rescheduled the unplayed concerts plus adding several other including an Australian and New Zealand tour in 2019.[37] After recovering from his health scare, Michael Nesmith and the First National Band Redux went on a tour of the U.S., with mostly the same lineup and setlist as the southern California shows.[citation needed] In 2019, Nesmith toured in a two-piece configuration with pedal steel player Pete Finney, focusing on his 1972 album, And the Hits Just Keep on Comin'. This was the first time Nesmith had performed in this format since 1974 with Red Rhodes. Nesmith was also joined by special guests Ben Gibbard and Scott McCaughey on opening night in Seattle.[38] Personal life [edit] Nesmith was married three times and had four children. He met his first wife, Phyllis Ann Barbour, in 1964, while at San Antonio College.[39] Together, they had three children: Christian, born in 1965; Jonathan, born in 1968; and Jessica, born in 1970. Nesmith and Barbour divorced in 1972. Nesmith also had a son, Jason, born in August 1968 to Nurit Wilde, whom he met while working on The Monkees.[40] In 1976, he married his second wife, Kathryn Bild.[41] In 2000, he married his third wife, Victoria Kennedy, but the marriage ended in divorce in 2011.[42] When the Monkees' TV series ended in 1968, Nesmith enrolled part-time at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied American history and music history. In 1973, Nesmith founded the Countryside Records label with Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records.[43] In 1974, Nesmith started Pacific Arts Records and released what he called "a book with a soundtrack", titled The Prison, as the company's first release.[44] Health and death [edit] Nesmith was forced to cancel the last four dates of his 2018 tour with Micky Dolenz due to a "minor health scare". In an interview with Rolling Stone published on July 26 of that year, Nesmith said he had undergone quadruple bypass heart surgery, and had been hospitalized for over a month.[45] Nesmith died from heart failure at his home in Carmel Valley, California on December 10, 2021 at the age of 78.[46][47] His family said in a statement: “With infinite love we announce that Michael Nesmith has passed away this morning in his home, surrounded by family, peacefully and of natural causes.”[48] Dolenz memorialized Nesmith as "a dear friend and partner."[49][50] Discography [edit] Main article: Michael Nesmith discography Source:[51][48] Filmography [edit] Television [edit] Year Title Role Notes 1966–1968 The Monkees[48] Himself Credited as Monkees persona "Mike" 1969 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee Host NBC special[52] 1985 Television Parts[53] Host One-series spin-off from Elephant Parts 1997 Hey, Hey, It's the Monkees[53] Himself Credited as Monkees persona "Mike" 2014 Portlandia Father of the Mayor Season 4, episode 9 Films [edit] Year Title Role Notes 1968 Head[53] Himself Credited as Monkees persona "Mike" 1982 Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann[53] Race Official uncredited 1984 Repo Man Rabbi credited 1987 Burglar[53] Cabbie uncredited 1988 Tapeheads[53] Water Man Home video [edit] Year Title Role Notes 1981 Elephant Parts Various characters/Producer Released on DVD 1998 and again in 2003 1981 An Evening with Sir William Martin Foyer the butler/Writer/Producer Half-hour comedic monologue 1983 Rio and Cruisin'[52] Performer/Producer Music videos 1985 The Television Parts Home Companion Various characters/Producer Compilation from television series 1986 Dr. Duck's Super-Secret All-Purpose Sauce Various characters/Producer Music and comedy segments 1989 Nezmusic Performer/Producer Music videos 1991 Live at the Britt Festival Performer/Producer Concert from 1991 concert 2008 Pacific Arts Performer/Producer Music videos on DVD Books [edit] (n.b. books proper – not including The Prison and The Garden) The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora (1998)[8] The America Gene (2009)[29] Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff (2017)[34] Audiobooks [edit] The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora (2004) (with Nesmith reading the story)[51] Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff (2017) (narrated by Nesmith)[7] References [edit] Further reading [edit] Article in Wired magazine about Michael Nesmith and the Council on Ideas Michael Nesmith biography (Unofficial) Michael Nesmith home page SWINDLE Magazine interview Michael Nesmith interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969) Michael Nesmith: Overcoming The Monkees at NPR.com Michael Nesmith interview 2013 Michael Nesmith Interview at NAMM Oral History Collection (2019)
4334	dbpedia	3	15	https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/broken-record	en	Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell Music Podcast	https://e1.nmcdn.io/push…x3000-1--600.png		[ "https://e1.nmcdn.io/pushkin/wp-content/uploads/imported-files/Broken-Record-Website-300x300.jpg/v:1-dynamic:1-aspect:1-fit:cover/Broken-Record-Website-300x300--600.jpg", "https://e1.nmcdn.io/pushkin/wp-content/uploads/1970/01/PUSHKIN_MW_NEW_GOLD_3000x3000-1.png/v:1-dynamic:1-aspect:1-fit:cover/PUSHKIN_MW_NEW_GOL...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Rick Rubin" ]	1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00	The musicians you love talk about their life, inspiration, and craft in the Broken Record podcast. Click now to listen to Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, and your favorite artists.	en	https://www.pushkin.fm/w…hkin/favicon.png	Pushkin Industries	https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/broken-record	Order your copy of Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam’s new audiobook, Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, now! If you purchase directly from our website, you’ll receive an exclusive Listener’s Guide. Check it out below. For generations of music lovers, the liner notes on albums were a central part of the way music was heard. You bought an album and it came with an accompanying narrative: a digression, an aside, a backstory—maybe even an invented history. We intuitively understood that great music required not just listening but conversation between the artist and the audience and the audience and the rest of the world. Broken Record is a podcast that restarts those conversations—in a world without liner notes—for a new audience of music lovers. Broken Record is hosted by Justin Richmond with interviews by producer Rick Rubin, writer Malcolm Gladwell, and former New York Times editor Bruce Headlam.
4334	dbpedia	2	18	https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/tag/travels/	en	Not a Blog	http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IMG_5353-e1573950945310-768x1024.jpg		[ "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/themes/dark-shop-lite/images/facebook.png", "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/themes/dark-shop-lite/images/twitter.png", "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/themes/dark-shop-lite/images/westeros.png", "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablo...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Another Christmas has come and gone, and the New Year looms just ahead. Where the hell does all the time go? I did take a few days off for the holidays, I confess. Shame on me, I guess. But now I am back in the salt mine, working… working on so many bloody things, my head may soon explode. Yes, WINDS OF WINTER, yes, yes. And HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, season two. And several of the other successor shows that we’re developing with HBO. (Some of those are moving faster than others, as is always the case with development. None have been greenlit yet, though we are hoping… maybe soon. A couple have been shelved, but I would not agree that they are dead. You can take something off the shelf as easily as you can put it on the shelf. All the changes at HBO Max have impacted us, certainly). We are also still developing the Wild Cards tv series for Peacock, based (largely) on FORT FREAK. And I have Wild Cards books to edit. Oh, and did I forget WINDS OF WINTER? No, of course I didn’t. But if I ever did, I know you folks will remind me. There’s also the railroad, the bookstore, and the theatre. Thankfully, I have great people doing most of the work on those. I was on the road, in New York City and Chicago, from late October through the middle of November, promoting the new illustrated book, RISE OF THE DRAGON. I was doing a series of blog posts about the trip, you will recall. The interview with David Anthony Durham, the visit to Kevin Smith’s theatre in Jersey, my appearance on the Colbert Show. You can find links to all of those down below. I wasn’t FINISHED, though. I also did a talk with Neil Gaiman at the Symphony Space in NYC. I cannot link to that one, alas. There were reporters present, however, and there have been a number of stories online about our discussion about adaptations… a subject we both have strong opinions on. Neil and I talked about a lot of things as well. It was a fun event. I had dinners with Vincent d’Onofrio and Joe Tracz and my friends at Tor/ Macmillan and Random House/ Bantam as well, and saw a few Broadway shows (DEATH OF A SALESMAN, THE MUSIC MAN, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, and SIX, fyi). Then I flew off to Chicago for a presentation at Northwestern… which DOES deserve its own post, so I will try to get to that soon. Since I do not travel with a computer, I returned home to 2000 emails. Took me a while to catch up, even though 1500 of them were spam. I taped all the games the Jets and Giants played while I was on the road, and tried to avoid hearing the scores (not entirely successfully). Turns out both teams did pretty well while I was travelling (and not watching). Since I have been back, however… well, this past week the G-Men lost a heartbreaker to the Vikings, and the Jets failed to turn up for their game against the Jags. (Please, Mike White, get well soon). Life is meaningless and full of pain. Clearly, the Football Gods hate me. Maybe they are pissed off about WINDS being so late too… I meant to say a few words about some TV shows and movies we’ve enjoyed. I can see why THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN is getting so much acclaim, even though there aren’t any banshees in it. Brilliant performances by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. A powerful story, one I will long remember… but damn, so sad. I see people calling it a comedy. Really? OK, but that’s dark humor. Parris and I have also been enjoying EXTRAORDINARY ATTORNEY WOO. Not a new show, I gather, but it was new to us. (So much good TV right now). I hope there’s more coming of that one. We were very happy to hear that SANDMAN has been renewed for a second season. Took them long enough, but better late than never. And watching WHITE LOTUS 2 on HBO made me want to go visit Sicily… but I won’t, not until WINDS is done and delivered, I promised. We also watched some holiday favorites. Several versions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, A CHRISTMAS STORY, and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. And yes, I get it, life would really have been horrible for a lot of people if George Bailey had never been born… but hey, am I the only one who thinks that Potterville looks a lot livelier at night than Bedford Falls? We haven’t seen the new AVATAR yet, but it’s high on our list. So is BABYLON, though that one is getting mixed reviews. Oh, and awards season is at hand, and congratulations are due to HOUSE OF THE DRAGON and Emma d’Arcy for their Golden Globes nominations, and to Milly Alcock, Matt Smith, and the show for the Critic’s Choice Award nods. Well deserved. Finger and toes crossed for all of them. But hey, when the Emmy nominations come out, I will be hoping that Paddy Considine, Steve Toussaint. Olivia Cooke, and Emily Carey get some love as well. They were all extraordinary. I also want to thank all my fans and readers, who made RISE OF THE DRAGON such a success. We have been hitting bestseller lists all over the world, I am pleased to say. I hope all of you enjoyed the art as much as I did. (And if you have not snagged a copy yet, autographed copies are still available from Beastly Books in Santa Fe. The Strand in NYC may have some signed copies left as well, though I would not bet on that). Current Mood: busy I am back in the Land of Enchantment, as of the day before yesterday. I’ve been away for three weeks or thereabouts, in New York City, New Jersey, and finally Chicago. I don’t lug a laptop around with me when I travel; on the road, I am only reachable by phone or text. Which helps keep me sane, but it did mean that I had 2,000 emails waiting for me when I got home. I am still digging out. The trip… three weeks, I said, but at times it felt more like three months. My latest book, the illustrated Targaryen history RISE OF THE DRAGON, was released on October 25, so I had a lot of promotion to do. My sisters and their children and grandchildren and spouses still live in New Jersey, so I needed to see them too. The last time I got back east was in 2019, before the pandemic started. I had meetings with my publishers and agents and editors, and some meals with old friends. I am not one for writing long trip reports… and this one would need to be VERY long. It was that kind of trip. Joy and sadness, tragedy, love, a lot of work. Highs and lows, and so much to do, it really took it out of me. I will tell you about much of that, but not right now, and not all at once. I think I will make a series of small blog posts, rather than doing one enormous one. The things that happened… well, it would not feel right to mush them all together. Let me start with the original reason for the trip: the release of RISE OF THE DRAGON. Rather than a traditional book tour, which could have taken months I did not have, we launched RISE with a virtual event at the Random House offices in New York City. I was thrilled to have David Anthony Durham interviewing me. David is one of my Wild Cards writers, and much much more. He’s written epic fantasy, historical fiction, westerns, YA books, and he has beenpart of the team on every one of prequels we have been developing for HBO for the last year and a half. Good guy, terrific writer. If you missed our talk, no problem — it is online now. I am pleased to report that RISE OF THE DRAGON is doing very very well, hitting numerous bestseller lists here and abroad. (I will post more about my events in New York and New Jersey and Chicago in the days to come, once I’ve caught up on some of those damned emails). Current Mood: tired Yes, it’s true. I will be heading to San Diego for Comicon at the end of the month, for the first time in… ah… a bunch of years. That’s not news to most of you, I know. There have already been a raft of stories out there about HBO’s plans for promoting HOUSE OF THE DRAGON at Comicon (which plans are pretty mind-boggling, by the way), and my name has popped up in a good many of them. So I’m not revealing any secrets here, but I can confirm. I’ll be joining the HOUSE OF THE DRAGON panel in Hall H, together with showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik and eleven of our cast members. I will be as excited to meet them as you are. I was not able to visit the Hot D sets, so this will be the first time I have met any of them… well, aside from Matt Smith, who I did meet for about two minutes in the lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel at a previous Comicon, but he was the Doctor at the time, not Daemon Targaryen, and that’s not at all the same. I will also be doing a couple of signings at San Diego. One for my publisher, Bantam Spectra/ Random House. I will be signing copies of FIRE & BLOOD and my other novels. And one for Marvel Comics, with Paul Cornell, to promote the new Wild Cards graphic novels that Paul has scripted. Raya Golden, ace minion, art director, and illustrator, will be travelling with me, and she’ll be on hand to sign copies of STARPORT, the graphic novel she adapted and illustrated from an old unproduced television pilot of mine (which may come back to life as a feature film, but that’s a tale for another day). This being Comicon, where the crowds are immense, all these signings will be capped and strictly limited, so if you want me to scrawl on one of your books, join the queue early. (Sorry, I will NOT sign while walking the floor, eating lunch, or taking a piss in the men’s room. Don’t ask, okay?) In June 2021, I went to Chicago for a week to accept an honorary doctorate from Northwestern. Aside from that, this will be the first time I have left home since the pandemic struck in March 2020. I am looking forward to it… but, truth be told, I am also a tad anxious. I have managed to avoid getting covid so far, knock wood… but if this Comicon is like the last one I went to, I am going to be in one big room with 150,000 other people, some of whom may not have been as careful as we have. That could be a challenge. Yes, I am fully vaccinated and double boosted, but that’s true of a number of friends of mine, who have still contracted omnicron despite that. (Mild cases, mostly, but still). I do not want covid, not even a mild case, so please be advised, I will be doing all I can to prevent that. I will be masked almost all the time. I will not be shaking hands, sorry. Or even bumping fists. You can take my picture when I am signing your book, but stay on your side of the table, please. No selfies. No hugs. In past years, I was always glad to do all that, to make myself available to my readers, but these are not normal times. Once covid goes away for good — if it ever does — perhaps I will be able to do all that again. But not now. I cannot get sick. I have too much work to do. I ask for your understanding. And I hope all of us have a great time in San Diego, regardless of these challenges. Current Mood: anxious The last stop on my October travels was Asbury Park, New Jersey, where I was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. I was born and raised in Bayonne, as most of my readers probably know by now, but I left New Jersey in 1966 for Evanston, Illinois, to start my college education at Northwestern University. I never really returned, except for visits… but I do visit often, since almost all of my family is still in Jersey, along with a few old friends, a lot of memories (mostly good, some less so), and a big piece of my heart. Also, New Jersey still has the best pizza in the world (New York and Connecticut are very close, though). You can take the boy out of Jersey, I guess, but you can’t take Jersey out of the boy. Asbury Park is one of the iconic Jersey shore towns. When I was growing up, a lot of my friends and schoolmates spent their summers down on the Jersey Shore. If not at Asbury Park, then at Atlantic City, Seaside, Tom’s River, Keansburg, or one of the other shore towns. Splashing on the beaches, eating salt water taffy, strolling the boardwalks, riding roller coasters and other rides in the old amusement parks. Not me. We were projects kids, we did not even own a car, so we spent our summers in Bayonne, mostly. Water all around, but no beaches (though once or twice each summer we’d get to take an excursion boat from Brady’s Dock across the street from the projects to Rye Beach or Far Rockaway). The only amusement park I got to visit was Uncle Milty’s, right down First Street, where I could blow my allowance playing Skee-Ball… and would eventually land my first job, running the Tubs O’ Fun for the kiddies one summer. I think I got paid twelve dollars a week (in a pay envelope, with a ten and, yes, a two-dollar bill). I had never been to Asbury Park before this visit, but I have to say, I was charmed by the place. The sand, the surf, the boardwalk… iconic old bars like the Stone Poney and the Wonderbar… lovely grand houses and old hotels, a downtown that felt like stepping back in time… all in all, a cool town to visit. And of course the awards ceremony was great fun. As a Mets fan, it was a great honor for me to be inducted by Ed Kranepool of the Amazin’ Mets of 1969, and Todd Frazier of the current squad… and to share the night with Jason Alexander, Harry Carson, Bart Oates, Martha Stewart, Bon Jovi, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and many more incredible Jerseyites. Before the ceremony, I was also thrilled to be able to meet a couple of my favorite Giants from the Superbowl champions of 1986, Harry Carson and Bart Oates. Bart actually let me try on his Superbowl ring! And Harry showed me his Hall of Fame ring, which was big enough for four of my fingers. Having my family present for the induction ceremony made it even more special. I am told the permanent home of the New Jersey Hall of Fame will be in American Dream, the new mega-mall that just opened in the Meadowlands across the parking lot from Giants Stadium. Yes, the former Xanadu, decades in the building. Meanwhile, there are plaques of us at Newark Airport. That’s cool. I like the idea of being on an airport wall down from the Boss. Current Mood: bouncy I try to get to New York City once or twice a year. It’s one of my favorite cities in the world, and my visits there are always half business, half pleasure. On the business side, I check in with all my publishers (I have several), my agents (I have several), with my editors (past and present), with my friends and colleagues at HBO (past and present). I often do a signing, an interview, or some other sort of public event. On this most recent visit, Raya Golden and I did a signing down at Midtown Comics for her wonderful graphic novel of my unproduced pilot, STARPORT. We scribbled in hundreds of books, and afterwards sat down for a short interview. Autographed copies of STARPORT may still be available from Midtown Comics in Manhattan. Or not. We signed a lot of stock, but I am not sure how long they will last. In any case, copies are certainly available from Santa Fe: https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product/starport-graphic-novel-pre-orders/ On the pleasure side… well, we often try to get to a Broadway show or two, but I was too busy this year. I did find time to get together with my friends Ellen Datlow and Mr & Mrs X for a pizza crawl through the wilds of Jersey in search of bar pies. This year we managed to hit the Landmark Tavern in Livingstone and the Star Tavern in Orange, both of which were amazing. ((And if you don’t know what a bar pie is, you don’t know pizza)). I also combined business and pleasure with a dinner at the historic Keens Steakhouse with Kay McCauley, queen of agents, and my friends from Tor, publisher Tom Doherty and our Wild Cards editor, Diana Pho. http://www.keens.com/ Keens has been a Manhattan mainstay since 1885, famous for their fabulous steaks and mutton chops… and for the hundreds of clay pipes that adorn their ceilings and walls. In ye older times, no meal was considered complete without a bowl at its conclusion, and the regulars at Keens traditionally left their long, fragile “churchwarden” pipes at the restaurant, to be called for at need. Keens still displays the pipes belonging to Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers,, Albert Einstein, George M. Cohan, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, John Barrymore, David Belasco, Adlai Stevenson, Douglas MacArthur, “Buffalo Bill” Cody… and now me. At the conclusion of the meal, Keens presented me with my own pipe and had me sign it. My pipe will now join the other celebrity pipes in Keens display cases. And presumably I can call for it at need, the next time I visit New York City and have a hankering for a mutton chop and a bowl. Not that it’s likely to happen, since I don’t smoke. Never have. And for that matter, Keens Steakhouse does not allow smoking these days, no more than any other Manhattan restaurant. But it’s still a cool, and unique, honor. My thanks to Tom Doherty and Kay McCauley, who arranged it. Current Mood: calm I received a number of awards and honors during last month’s trip to London, Dublin, and Belfast. I want to say a few words about all of them… but not all at once and not all today. I will address them all individually, and in no particular order. Starting with the last, then… on the day before we left Ireland to return home to the Land of Enchantment, I was awarded the Burke Medal for “Outstanding Contribution to Discourse Through the Arts” by the College Historical Society at Trinity College, Dublin, the oldest surviving undergraduate society in the world. The society’s auditor told me, “The College Historical Society, more commonly known as the Hist, is dedicated to the promotion of discussion and thought. Founded by Edmund Burke in 1770, the Society retains a deep interest and affinity to the field of social activism and continues its tradition of elevating civic discourse in the College. For 250 years the Society has recognised the efforts of great women and men who promote discussion and discourse. Pattie Smith, Sinéad O’Connor, W.B. Yeats, Natalie Dormer, Dame Hillary Mantel, Bob Geldof, and Ralph Fiennes have received the Burke Medal.” That’s pretty heady company. I am very pleased and proud to be numbered among them. And for a noble reason — promoting discussion and discourse. In times like ours, when the toxic mobs on the internet seem to set the tone for debate, that is needed more than ever. The medal itself was struck from the same molds that the Hist has been using for centuries. The president mentioned to me that he’d noted I had once won the Bram Stoker Award (as indeed I have), and that the medal they were giving me had once been awarded to Bram Stoker himself. I think that is so cool. Here’s a look: In awarding the medal, the Hist said, “As a celebrated author, your exploration of difficult themes has inspired countless people worldwide to examine, more-closely, the fabric of our society. Through you, the reader has encountered new concepts, ideas, and emotions. From the magical children’s tale The Ice Dragon and the dark yet playful “A Night at the Tarn House” to the unprecedently popular A Song of Ice and Fire your work has made you a global phenomenon. And with your rise to greater prominence has come an increase in public dialogue around the major themes of your work. Your sublime writings have engendered intense debate on duty and honour, faith and cowardice, parricide and governance in readers world-wide. Our former member Oscar Wilde wrote that “It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection”. Through your art the general public have explored new themes, new ideas, and bettered themselves. This is precisely the contribution to public discourse that the Burke Medal aims to recognise.” Since the Hist is devoted to discourse and discussion, those so honored are expected to say a few words. I was glad to do so. The good folks at Trinity recorded my speech and the Q&A that followed. YouTube has it up for those who are interested and could not be in Dublin to attend… but be warned, I got into some pretty heavy current issues in this one, not just my own life and writing and the world and SF and fantasy (though of course I touched on those as well). Current Mood: pleased
4334	dbpedia	0	6	https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/linda-ronstadt-heartbreak-on-wheels-172427/	en	Linda Ronstadt: Heartbreak on Wheels	https://www.rollingstone…600&h=900&crop=1	https://www.rollingstone…600&h=900&crop=1	[ "https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035310&c4=&cv=3.9&cj=1", "https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-rollingstone-2022/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif", "https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-rollingstone-2022/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif", "https://www.rol...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Ben Fong-Torres" ]	1975-03-27T12:00:00+00:00	Linda Ronstadt: Heartbreak on Wheels. The singer-songwriter's life on the road, looking for love in all the wrong places	en	https://www.rollingstone…Favicon.png?w=32	Rolling Stone	https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/linda-ronstadt-heartbreak-on-wheels-172427/	Linda Ronstadt arrived in Honolulu, drowsy and a little on the dowdy side, in a red rock T-shirt, blue Lee overalls and sandals. Her hair was a postflight brunette tangle, with a string of gray here and there. On the eve of one of her favorite holidays — St. Valentine’s — she was Number One on the pop charts with her album, Heart like a Wheel, and her single, “You’re No Good.” The flip, “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You,” was in the Top Five, meantime, on the country charts. And after the show tomorrow night at the Waikiki Shell her latest tour would be over, pau, as they say here. At the gate, before she’d even had a chance to rub her eyes, the local concert promoter, a young, earnest-looking Korean named William Kim, stepped up and greeted her: “I’m here to give you your first lei,” he cracked. A photographer maneuvered into position. Ronstadt blinked her eyes and backed off. She turned to Peter Asher, her manager. “What is this crap all about?” she asked. Finally, properly introduced, she accepted the lei and allowed herself to be pecked on the cheek — but not to be photographed. As she climbed the steps of a Wiki bus headed for Baggage Claim, she turned to Asher again. “Was that rude?” she asked. The day before, in Hollywood, Linda was reconsidering something she had said in an interview for the book, Rock ‘n Roll Woman — that she was basically an unhappy person. That was in early 1974, shortly after the release of Don’t Cry Now, an album that had taken over a year, some $150,000 and three producers (not counting herself) to complete. Now, she had her first hit single since 1970’s moderate success, “Long Long Time.” She was about to finish a smooth and successful tour, a five-week run that showed off a more musically assured Ronstadt than ever. And in Peter Asher she seemed to have found an astute manager and a compassionate, trustworthy producer. Could she possibly still be unhappy? Well . . . yes. “I’m more confused than ever about that,” she said. “I went through an intensely happy period for about six months, and then it changed, real fast, last summer and that’s when I got fat.” She wailed, as if betrayed: “I went, ‘Oh, no! It’s all a lie!'” Editor’s picks Away from the album covers, Ronstadt still has an open, Sally Fields-cute, country-cousin appearance (with a shape she describes as approximating “a fire hydrant”). At age 28, she often looks, acts and sounds like a little girl. To punctuate unpleasant thoughts or flashes of guilt or excitement, the wide eyes widen, the comic-strip perfect lips stretch out in dumbfounded anxiety, and the voice revs up, sometimes getting loud and strident. Now, she is quiet, reasoned: “I don’t know, I may be just an unhappy person forever. I’m very dissatisfied with everything. I’m hard to please and very restless, so it’s always a battle between that and my real deep desire to have a home and roots, which is a kind of contentment which is beyond description when you find it. And I’ve only had glimpses of it.” For her body, Ronstadt joined a health club in Los Angeles and went through a rigorous program of running seven miles a day. For her head, she has been seeing a psychiatrist for the last six months. “I think it’s helped,” she said, “but I’m getting restless about that now, too. I do everything for about six months, then I go, ‘Pfft — next!‘ “I had to start going because I couldn’t perform. I just felt very alienated. I would stand onstage and look at the audience, and they would appear dehumanized to me; they weren’t human beings and I wasn’t a human being and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be there to hear it. I didn’t have anything to say to anybody, and I found it very difficult to concentrate. But it’s changed; I don’t feel that way anymore.” She shifted around in the sofa. “It’s harder, though. There are more people looking at me and people come up and say, ‘Gee, you’re dada-dada-da!’ and I don’t like that. I feel dehumanized and sort of insulted. People intimidate me like mad, so I try to be as polite as I can be and stay as withdrawn as I can. But very often I come off rude.” Onstage at the Waikiki Shell, Linda Ronstadt was reserved; she made only a brief mention of Valentine’s Day. She wore her standard tour apparel: blouse tied at the waist and blue jeans. No lei. She barely moved onstage, holding the mike stand with both hands and allowing her hips to sway on the fast numbers only as much as a tapping foot seemed to require. Still, when it got down to the singing, she checked in strong and clear. The little girl has always been a woman in song, but now the powerful voice is more controlled; Linda is able to express multiple emotions in a single phrase, snarling out one word and crying another in “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You.” Hot-pointed anger and heartbroken concession all at once. Despite a lingering flu, her control of falsetto and of the mid-glide up from falsetto back to chest voice was remarkable. Related But some in the crowd were not there for musical appreciation. One fan tossed a heart-shaped box of chocolates to her in midsong and it startled her. “I thought it was a bomb,” she said with a decided lack of diplomacy after inspecting the contents. And, as she began a fragile number, “Keep Me from Blowing Away,” she was suddenly faced with a large blond man who’d swayed his way up to the stage apron, then somehow vaulted up onto the stage. Just as he was getting a good look at Linda — who kept singing — a security guard caught up with him and Ronstadt’s stage manager hauled the young man backwards off the stage and back onto earth. For the next minute, the dazed man was shuffled, pushed and dragged around while members of the audience yelled for the authorities to leave him alone. Ronstadt stayed at the mike, trying to concentrate on the song, eyes intently focused somewhere above the audience in the trees and the carbon blue skies. After the song, she attempted to shrug it off: “Looks like ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ here tonight,” she said. But after the show she was torn. Sure, she was frightened by the hulk. “He looked so scary. He was just there all of a sudden. He looked like a gorilla. You never know what anyone might do to you. But, boy, I felt bad for him ’cause he was obviously so loaded. And I heard his head, it went crack against that floor . . .” She shuddered and groaned. “I went, ‘Ohh, no . . .’ “But I also felt I didn’t want him up on the stage.” It is not a happy Valentine’s Day for Linda Ronstadt. In Hollywood, she had stayed up late with Peter and Betsy Asher making a valentine for Albert Brooks who was in the studio finishing up a new album. But here in Waikiki, she watched a couple walking in front of her, holding hands, and she pined away for Brooks. “Oh, I don’t have anybody to kiss me,” she complained. At night’s end, she disappeared, alone, into a Sheraton elevator. Linda Ronstadt was always a lover. She learned about the birds and the bees, the boys and the girls, at age seven from a cousin who was one year older. In junior high in Tucson, Arizona, she started dressing up sexy. “I was trying to be Brigitte Bardot,” she said. In rebellion against the nuns at the school — St. Peter and Paul — she went “boy crazy.” At Catalina High, she went out with older men, among them a steel guitar enthusiast with whom she left town at age 18. In Los Angeles, she sought a career in music and became the object of attention — the kind that led to too many wrong relationships, too many years of hating her own records and concerts, too many sad songs to sing and, today, to a still uncertain Linda Ronstadt. Welcome to the top of the pops. Our stay with Linda began in Berkeley, where she had given a concert. We would hit Davis, near Sacramento, for two shows at the University of California campus there; Bakersfield, 300 miles away, for one show and Tucson for two hometown concerts. After a few days’ rest in L.A., the tour would end in Honolulu. Linda — and most of her band — are afraid of flying and most of the tour had been by bus. On the eastern swing, just finished, they had rented Hank Williams Jr.’s custom vehicle, called “The Cheatin’ Heart Special,” with nine bunk beds and plenty of room for playing cards. Now the group was making do with the largest mobile home they could find. There was one long seat up front, two bunks built into overhead shelves and two tables, one front, one rear, with a kitchenette between them. There would be little sleeping, but lots of blackjack, with stakes constantly reaching serious proportions (“Last game,” Linda said, “they all owed each other their houses”). Linda would join the table on another trip, but for now she was content to chat and work on a sweater for Albert in cream and jade heather colors. Linda talked freely, with a bright, winsome manner, and began to reveal herself. Her father, Gilbert, 63, of Mexican and German descent (Ronstadt is a German name), is a musician, a guitarist and a singer who has sung informally with mariachi bands on visits to Mexico. He also crafts jewelry, and now runs Ronstadt Hardware (“Established in 1888”) in downtown Tucson. It was Pop who exposed her to music other than her early Sixties staples: folk music and rock, “especially the Beach Boys.” Her father, she said, is “into melodies, and he made me listen to Peggy Lee and Billie Holiday . . . ” Her sister kept Hank Williams records on all day long until Linda was hooked. Now, she lists Williams, along with Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye among her favorite male singers. She’s also listening now to Sinatra. “Those Nelson Riddle arrangements are so sensitive . . .” And George Jones and Tammy Wynette, recently split. “I saw him singing ‘Grand Tour’ on television and I sat there and cried like a housewife,” said Linda. “He’s one of my heroes.” She talked about love. People commit suicide without it, she offered. “I was reading about a study that showed people did it because they couldn’t make an intimate connection with another human being. You need that — or else it’s religion or drugs. I could never handle religion. And drugs — there’s no way out of that.” She resorted to plenty of cocaine she said, during the Neil Young tour of early 1973 when she had to face 15,000 Neil Young freaks as an opening act, often as a last-minute booking and an unwelcome surprise for impatient Youngies. “I had to have my nose cauterized twice — I think they shot sodium nitrate up there — I’m okay now. I don’t put anything up my nose anymore, except occasionally my finger.” She looked at my notebook and winced, disgusted with herself. On Highway 80, just south of Fairfield, the bus broke down and required a half-hour stop, but Linda wasn’t disturbed. She talked about Led Zeppelin. “Andrew Gold from the band is indoctrinating me,” she said. “Their stuff is like insect music to me. I can’t listen for a long time without getting a headache, but I’m getting to understand it.” A little later she asked a question of no one in particular: “What’s Plant look like? That’s such a great name for someone who sings like that.” A few other men’s names popped up: Governor Jerry Brown, comedian Steve Martin, Little Feat’s Lowell George, songwriter Tom Campbell. They’ve all been boyfriends — excepting the new governor of California. “We just went out a couple of times,” she said. “There was no romance. I met him at Lucy’s in L.A. — they have the greatest enchiladas — he was secretary of state and thinking about campaigning. And then he called me later and asked for me to help in his campaign. I said, look, I don’t know anything; I’m the worst. I don’t watch TV; I just read what I want to read about. I said, please, I’m in no position, I can’t even be responsible for my own vote and I still feel that way.” Did she vote for him? “I didn’t vote last election ’cause I was at the fat farm . . . ” She is betting Andrew Gold $200 that she can best him to a 15 pound weight loss inside of two months. Gold, the eclectic member of an all-eclectic band, appears trim, but Linda knows better. “You should see him with his clothes off,” she said. “He looks like a 12-year-old around the shoulders, and about 40 years old with his belly.” Anyway, she will begin her diet in earnest today. But her first stop, on arrival at the hotel in Davis, was the coffeeshop where she watched pies revolving in a display case. After the soundcheck, she returned to the hotel and placed a call to Brown, who invited her to breakfast and a tour of the old governor’s mansion the next morning. But the group’s schedule would not allow the visit. The first show in Davis went well, but she called for another quick soundcheck and some unhappiness with the monitors was quickly taken care of. Backstage, Linda shared her upstairs dressing room with the band, and the music of Roger McGuinn and his band was barely audible. Nostalgia . . . and a sense of irony . . . pervaded the group. There were quick nods and tributes from the band members — several of whom are on their first tour of any substance — to the man who introduced them all to folk rock . . . who tonight was their opening act. But they didn’t dwell on rock & roll’s roller coaster. In fact, after a round of “Many Rivers to Cross,” most of the attention in the room was given to yo-yos. Don Francisco, the drummer, had invited a buddy from his hometown, Pensacola, Florida, to the Davis shows, and the friend, a jaunty, chubby, curlyhaired 33-year-old named Paul Lybrand, happened to be the Duncan Yo-Yo champion of America. Champ, in fact, since 1972. Duncan pays him to tour the country nine months a year, doing promotional exhibitions at schools. He brought along a brown paper sack full of yo-yos. Linda had watched him spin through a series of neat tricks in front of the food table and decided to let him do a spot during her own set. Now, in the dressing room, the band and road managers and crew members were throwing the yo-yos in all directions while Linda sat and knitted. Peter Asher laughed. “As soon as we offered him the gig, he went out to his car and got his jacket — this red blazer with the yo-yo champion emblem on it.” The laughter is just short of deprecating. But short. At the five-minute cue to go backstage, Linda called out, “Ten more stitches,” completed them and moved easily to the mirror, where she knotted her blouse at the navel — “Not to make me look sexier,” she said. “I want to look thinner” — and put on some light makeup. The show was, again, smooth. During the Dolly Parton number, “I Will Always Love You,” a nervous Paul Lybrand, in his championship jacket, rehearsed furiously backstage, Walking the Dog, bending down to let the yo-yo do the Creeper, snapping the string to form the Man on the Flying Trapeze. This would be a high point in 25 years of yo-yoing. Onstage, he came through with a tight, five-trick set that lasted only 50 seconds, with Gold and Francisco offering support on piano and drums. The crowd had greeted him with freak-show laughter, but wound up whooping and hollering. Lybrand did Duncan proud. The show ended with Linda soothing the audience with the ballad, “Heart like a Wheel,” accompanied only by Gold on the piano. The crowd, up for the last two numbers — “You’re No Good” and a razzle-dazzle reading of “Heat Wave” — stayed up and paid attention. And it’s only love and it’s only love That can break a human being And turn him inside out Up near the stage, the audience looked like an assembly of kids getting a light scolding; moustache-fingering thoughtful, as if listening to a eulogy. Linda Ronstadt is no longer just a slice of country pie. In the mobile home on the way back to the hotel, the entire band was up front, playing around with a scat sing of the instrumental parts of Led Zeppelin’s “Dancing Days.” Ed Black, a blond baby-faced guitarist, stood by the screen door and Ronstadt looked up from her knitting bag, pleased. “This is just like a family in a house,” she said. The band is Andrew Gold on piano, guitar and vocals; Kenny Edwards, a former Stone Poney along with Linda, on bass and vocals; Dan Dugmore on pedal steel and rhythm guitars; Ed Black on pedal and lead guitar and occasional piano and Don Francisco on drums. It is a friendly, tourtightened unit, one of Linda’s best. Gold and Edwards had worked behind Wendy Waldman, a longtime friend of Linda’s from Tucson days. The two men had also formed a rock band and opened for Ronstadt at a McGovern benefit at the Daisy in Hollywood. Edwards, an affable sort, a kind of cross between Elliott Gould and Fred MacMurray, is not at all uneasy about his return to the Ronstadt fold. When he split from the Stone Poneys, it was because he wanted to rock, while the Poneys’ leader, Bob Kimmel, wrote mostly folkie, Pentangled material. Now, he is rocking. Francisco is another whose face reminds of others — in his case, Richard Greene and Roger Daltrey come to mind. Francisco is a former history and geography teacher and barker at a topless joint in San Francisco. He was hired for the band late last year, just before the tour. Dan Dugmore is also a recent addition, joining after a tour with John Stewart. Ed Black, a former guitar teacher, met Linda almost four years ago on the road, when he was with Goose Creek Symphony. A half year later, he got a call and his first assignment was to overdub one note for the Linda Ronstadt album — the last steel guitar note on “I Fall to Pieces” — originally played, live, by Sneaky Pete at the Troubadour. Over the course of her solo career, Linda Ronstadt has been understandably wary about her backup groups. For one thing, she felt inadequate — she didn’t know how to talk in musical terms, she said and couldn’t give effective orders. For another: “Backing up a girl wasn’t cool at all. They didn’t want to do that. They wanted to be rock & rollers and have this sexual identity they get by being up onstage with their guitars.” The extreme example occurred in 1972, when she hired Glenn Frey and Don Henley, now Eagles. “I knew Glenn was a temporary thing,” she said. “I knew he was going to be a star the minute I met him, he was such a hot shot. I loved him. When Glenn met Don, they wanted to form a band right away.” The current backup men also have aspirations (in fact, Gold has signed an artist contract with Asylum Records), but they seem to have a sense of duty. Francisco, before his audition, got a tip that Ronstadt liked, more than anything, a good back beat with emphasis on the high hat, the snare and the bass. “And that’s exactly what I play.” “She doesn’t like complicated licks,” said Black. Dugmore completed the thought: “It’s understandable. You’re trying to showcase the song and the singer, not the band.” Sitting around the front of the bus while Linda played blackjack, Black, Francisco and Dugmore also seemed uniformly devoted to Linda as a person. Were they ever tempted to advance beyond a professional relationship? Nervous laughter. Black spoke first. “There’ve been a couple of instances of more than a musical thing,” he said, “but I don’t care to go into it.” He slowed down, and added: “You know.” Francisco confessed: “At the outset I had amorous designs — a straight-out crush. But then I got to know her as a friend . . . ” Which would not have stopped me, I was going to say, but I was interviewing them. Dugmore remained silent. “He’s married,” said Black, “so he has to watch out.” More nervous laughter. On the road to Bakersfield, Ronstadt talked some more about drugs. She has taken just about every drug around, she said in answer to a question. But she’s given up almost every one. Grass once made her hands swell, she said. Cocaine made her “feel terrible. And I also can’t take opiates,” Nor can she drink. A steady diet of gin, she said, made her dizzy and she thought she had vertigo. Other drinks gave her skin rashes. She tried heroin “once or twice, but it’s not for me.” She can take speed and declared Methedrine her only remaining vice. “But it makes me sneeze too much. But the fat farm [actually the Ashram, in Los Angeles, affiliated with Ronstadt’s now defunct health club] taught me that running does the same thing speed does, and it doesn’t make you feel bad, so now I run whenever I can.” Her current obsession is food. And, between mouthfuls of a burrito from a roadside burger stand, she expressed a desire to kick, for professional reasons: “I can sing better after shooting smack in both arms than after eating too much,” she said. Linda turned to a man-on-the-street question feature from the San Francisco Chronicle. The question was, “Do you like hairy girls?” Ronstadt: “Jackson [Browne] and J.D. [Souther] aren’t hairy. I like furry men. Albert’s hairy.” She brightened. “You can cling to him and slide all around. He’s just like a human teddy bear.” The next day, the day of the Bakersfield concert, the Los Angeles Times‘s review of Linda’s concert at the Music Center was out; it was a rave, headlined: “A Triumph for Linda Ronstadt.” The show had ended with Maria Muldaur joining in on “Heart like a Wheel.” Linda slowly read the review and looked up at Asher with only one comment: “Hmm, he didn’t say anything about Maria.” Bakersfield was where Ronstadt lost her temper, something her friends say she has learned to keep in check in recent years. Onstage, she is easily distracted by exploding flashbulbs. At Bakersfield Civic Auditorium, the stage is only a foot or two high and the front row is only the width of an aisle away from the edge of the stage. After the opener, “Colorado,” Linda asked that all flash pictures be taken during the second song, “That’ll Be the Day.” But one man in the front row either didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear Ronstadt’s request and he kept shooting away. On the instrumental break of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” she gestured for him to quit — and he didn’t. Last time she got really mad, Linda tried kicking in a door and broke her leg. Before that, she heaved a wax candle at a loudmouthed customer at the Troubadour (she was in the audience, not onstage). Here in Bakersfield, she completed “Silver Threads” and hurled her tambourine, Frisbee style, at the flasher. “That was for the asshole who keeps taking flash pictures,” she said and repeated her request. Linda recovered and rolled through the rest of the hour-long set with ease; she received, an encore call from a mostly tepid crowd. After the concert, she packed up her knitting case quickly, joked with the band and talked with Asher and crew members about the sound system. As for the tambourine incident, she was sorry — not about having thrown the instrument, but about her poor aim. “I hit some girl in the shin,” she said, and made a face that said something between “Oops” and “Yikes.” But the show was over, and Linda was coming home. Linda Maria Ronstadt comes from singing stock. At age three she was listening to music on the radio and begging her mother to play the ukelele. “I remember doing it in baby talk,” she said. Linda was serenaded on birthdays with a family favorite, “Las Mananitas.” Her parents frequently hosted dinner parties and invariably her father would pick up a guitar around 10:30 and family and friends would gather around for a group sing that would last till two or three in the morning. And the kids were allowed to stay up. “We’d be lying on the floor trying to hold our eye lids up,” said Linda, “but they’d let us sing along, without trying to make us perform.” Linda learned much of her music from the records of Lola Beltran, a master of the falsetto studded, rancheros style of singing. At Tuscon International Airport Linda was greeted by brother Pete, 33, a policeman, his wife, Jackie, and two kids, Phil and Mindy. Linda was immediately the neat aunt, modestly famous, to the extent that they hear her songs and ask for the concert on the radio. “Oh,” Linda responded. “Do you still have that Snoopy radio?” At home, Linda was greeted by her mother at the door; they had seen each other a couple of weeks ago, when Mrs. Ronstadt, known to friends as “La,” accompanied the tour through several Eastern cities, sleeping on “The Cheatin’ Heart Special” and winking at the funny-smelling smoke. “I had so much fun I forgot I was 60,” she said. Linda’s father, a fair-sized man with expansive, Cugat facial features, embraced his daughter inside, patting her three times on the ass, and gave her a gift: a gold heart on a setting of wood. Linda, suddenly the little daughter, immediately asked for a chain to go with it. Sister Suzi, 35, a housewife, brother Mike, 21, bearded and hoping to be a singer himself, and an assortment of in-laws, nephews, nieces and friends dropped by. In a quiet moment, everyone sitting around waiting for someone to talk, Mom asked: “How does it feel to be Number One, Number One and Number One?” Linda made a dunno face. “I’m not crying,” she shrugged and sat down on the carpet to listen to Phil’s singing, on tape, of “Snoopy and the Red Baron.” The family was in a reminiscing mood and the center of the stories, of course, was number one daughter, how she, Suzi and Pete were such a dynamite group in the folkie days, playing Tucson parties, pizza joints and, one time, a bra and girdle sale downtown. “Linda had a solo spot,” said Suzi. “She sang things like ‘The Trees They Do Grow High.’ She was so cute and little, and she wore a black dress with a string of pearls.” Bob Kimmel, the Stone Poney who played bass for the Ronstadts on occasion, remembered Linda at age 14: “She had a phenomenal voice. The quality of it, the characteristic Linda Ronstadt sound, was there.'” On the way in from the airport, Linda had casually told Pete: “We’re not doing ‘Silver Threads’ and ‘I Can’t Help It’ too well. You wanna sing with us?” And Pete, who’d effectively killed the family act when he decided to join the force, casually replied: “Sure. In fact, we’ve worked up some la-las for ‘Keep Me from Blowing Away.'” At the house, the three, plus Mike, worked out parts for the Hank Williams classic, while La sat at a distance, smoking and making requests for “So Fine.” At the soundcheck at the Tucson Music Center, the band seemed happy to step back and make way for the family. The harmonies, onstage that evening, were difficult to hear — the sister is a little mike shy, and all three were unaccustomed to electric backing. But what was audible was pleasant, as it was at the house. If Pete hadn’t become a cop, it could very well have been Linda and the Ronstadts. It was late by the end of two shows, but the Ronstadts had planned a party for the band, the family and a few friends, featuring Mom’s Mexican cooking. The first little scene at the party was Peter Asher’s entrance. As soon as the timid-looking manager was pointed out to Mr. Ronstadt, Linda’s father went over, hugged him and whisked him away for a little talk. Later, everyone fed, Mr. Ronstadt accepted a guitar from Mike and began to sing a lilting Spanish song. Linda joined in on the chorus, in high harmony. On another number, with Pete taking over on guitar, Mr. Ronstadt reached out and held his younger daughter’s hand for a fleeting moment. Guests looked at each other with soft smiles. A rock & roll party, indeed . . . Back in Los Angeles, on the eve of Hawaii, Linda recalled the family sing and, to the best of her ability, the songs. “They’re all revolutionary songs,” she said. “One was ‘El Adios del Soldado,’ a song of great heartbreak, about a soldier riding away. This guy says, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m going off to battle, but I’ll be back tomorrow.’ And the next day, his ghost rides back.” We were in Albert Brooks’s house, in the Hollywood Hills: nice place, white walls, lots of recording equipment. Linda moved in last Christmas but has hardly been there; her cartons are still in one room, unopened. If she and Albert stay together, they’d want another house, she said. And if they split, she’d rather not go through another packing job. Life, as always, is unsettled. I asked about her parents’ response to her success. “They’re proud of me. I left home at 18 and they didn’t stand in my way. They thought I was too young, but they knew I wanted to sing. My father gave me $30 and he gave me this advice . . . ” Linda started to titter . . . ” which was, basically, ‘Don’t let anyone take your picture with your clothes off.’ “She laughed. “Watch out for those guys in the city.’ And he gave me a two-dollar bill with a corner torn off, which I still have.” Linda went to Los Angeles, at the behest of Bob Kimmel, the first beatnik Linda ever ran across in Tucson. Kimmel moved to L.A. when Linda was still a senior at Catalina High. He wrote her about the L.A. music scene and invited her out. She tried a weekend during the Easter break of 1964 and sang with Kimmel at the Insomniac, a small club in Hermosa Beach (it is now a parking lot). By the time she was out of high school, Kimmel had met Ken Edwards, who hung out at the Ash Grove and picked up music from ‘the likes of Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder and saw player Larry Hagler. Later that year, Linda made the split from home and in L.A. she heard Kimmel’s plans for a group. “It was going to be five people. We had an electric autoharp and a girl singer, and we thought we were unique in the world. And it turned out the Jefferson Airplane and the Lovin’ Spoonful had beaten us.” The dream was trimmed to a trio, and one night, doing their wash and minding their business, they got discovered. “There was a place called Olivia’s, which was an amazing soul food place down in Ocean Park [between Venice and Santa Monica]. Everybody ate there. The Doors were getting together then and they ate there. We used to do our laundry across the street, and these two guys — they were sort of would be managers — were eating lunch, and they heard us rehearsing [with Kimmel on guitar] all the way across the street, through the traffic and the dryers. They came over and — you know — ‘We’re going to make you stars.’ They took us down to see Mike Curb, who was working for Mercury, and we thought, ‘Wow, this is it!’ “But they wanted to call us the Signets; they wanted me to wear evening gowns and work in Vegas. They wanted us to make surfing music. They hired the Hondells to play on our records. We made a couple of records, ‘So Fine’ and a couple of Bobby’s tunes, and then we told them to forget it, ’cause we wanted to be called the Stone’ Poneys, and I wanted to wear this denim skirt I had.” A comic who worked at another club in Hermosa Beach stepped in and offered to get them a hoot at the Troubadour; he did, but immediately after the set he introduced her — and only her — to Herb Cohen, a folk manager and promoter. “He and Herb came and grabbed me and started to propel me out the door, and they took me to Tana’s, next door, and Kimmel wandered over eventually and I remember Herbie saying to Kimmel, ‘I don’t know whether I can get you guys a contract, but I can get your girl singer recorded,’and that was sort of the beginning. Trouble in the ranks. And I said, ‘No, no, I won’t sing without the group.'” Without Cohen, the Poneys got a job at the Troubadour, opening for Oscar Brown Jr. “It was so demoralizing,” said Linda. “He had a band and this amazing chick he married [Jean Pace], and he got a very uptown black audience. It was such a blow to our confidence that we broke up. I moved to Venice and Kenny and I continued to play at a couple of places, but we were starving to death for two or three months. My mother sent me rent money.” When Linda heard a record by one of Herb Cohen’s acts, the Modern Folk Quartet, on the radio she thought she’d blown her chance, but called him anyway. “He tried to get me together with Frank Zappa to cut a demo. Jack Nitzsche was looking for a girl Rolling Stones kind of singer.” Ronstadt considered herself provincial at that point but she was open, she said, to “modern music.” But the matchup went nowhere, and she regrouped with the Poneys. Cohen stuck with her — and the group — and introduced them to Nick Venet, a producer who shortly after meeting the group got a job at Capitol Records. “Capitol wanted me as a solo,” she said, “but Nick convinced them I wasn’t ready, that I would develop. It was true. I wasn’t ready, to do anything. I still wasn’t ready when I became a single.” Still, she was constantly being pushed. “I remember when we first recorded, Nick and Herbie put their arms around me, took me out in the hallway and said, ‘You realize that you’re going to be a single if you’re good.’ I still thought the situation would resolve itself, that we would develop as a group and they would see it that way.” A first album, sort of soft/folkie, We Five sounds with Linda doing lead on several cuts, flopped. The second album included a rock number pulled out by Venet called “Different Drum,” with Linda backed by four L.A. sessionplayers. Before “Drum” hit, in late 1967, Capitol sent the group out on a promotional tour. “We did things like open for Butterfield at the Cafe au Go Go — which was worse than Oscar Brown.” Linda looked sorrowful at the memory. “Here we were rejected by the hippest element in New York as lame. We broke up right after that. We couldn’t bear to look at each other.” Edwards split for India. But the Poneys had a hit. Linda and Kimmel pulled themselves together, hired some help and toured with the Doors. “Second acts,” Linda laughed. “It’s really the pits, you know?” After the tour, Kimmel left and settled in Big Sur for a year, working as a vegetable gardener and night watchman; he now operates McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Los Angeles. Capitol squeezed out one more album, this time with Linda and all session musicians, and called it Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poney and Friends, Vol. 3. But she was definitely on her own now — and, once again, in poverty. “See, the Poneys were taken off the books after the second album. Since it was a hit, they made royalties off it. But I didn’t. I paid all by myself for the third album, which was expensive and it put me severely in the red by the time I started recording my first solo album. I never made any royalties until . . . well, I’ll make some at the end of this next royalty period . . . I’ll make a bunch.” Don’t Cry Now, her first album for Asylum, sold over 300,000 but royalties were swallowed up by recording costs and the advance she had received for switching over. Her first solo album for Capitol, Home Grown, was produced by Chip Douglas and had her running through songs by Dylan, Randy Newman, John D. Loudermilk and Fred Neil. To her, it’s an easily forgotten album. So is Silk Purse, produced by Elliot Mazer in Nashville, despite the hit, “Long Long Time.” “I hate that album,” she said. There was no hesitation in saying so. “I’m sure Elliot doesn’t think it’s very good either. I couldn’t sing then, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was working with Nashville musicians and I don’t really play country music; I play very definitely California music, and I couldn’t communicate it to them.” And the one song she liked — Gary White’s “Long Long Time” — was ignored by Capitol until L.A. radio airplay forced the label. “They released it,” said Linda, “but they told me, ‘Don’t bring us another country single.'” Linda then met John Boylan, whose production work (especially on Rick Nelson’s record of Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me”) she liked. “I wanted someone who knew what I was trying to do and would do what I wanted. So eventually we moved in together.” Boylan became her producer and, from here on, things get a little muddy. Boylan became her former boyfriend — Linda met and moved in with J.D. Souther — and she dropped Cohen as manager. She tried for a friend, Peter Asher, but he was managing Kate Taylor and feared a conflict of interests. “Just,” said Asher, “in terms of a gig coming up that would be ideal for both, and one would have a hard decision to make.” Boylan agreed to manage her. These shifts burdened Ronstadt through what she calls “the bleak years, when I was just grinding it out.” One of her problems, she said, was her tendency to fall into dependent, father-daughter relationships. “Herbie Cohen gave me a perspective on the music business — how it was basically all bullshit. But he was older than me — he’s 40ish now — and he intimidated me. I did everything he did and I related to him in a whiney, wimpy way. But he wasn’t a musician and couldn’t help me with the music. He had me on the road with any old kind of band, which is terrible, and if I needed a guitar player, his idea would be to call up the musician’s union. “Boylan was more effective transmitting things, but we argued a lot; we competed enormously in the studio. I just didn’t trust him, I didn’t trust anyone then, and I was always afraid that something was going to get pulled over me. I was punch-drunk from producers. I must have been very difficult to work with.” And Boylan was another dad-kid relationship. “I’d wake up and call him and ask, ‘Gee, what should I do today? What socks should I put on?’ It was very unhealthy, and it went on for a couple of years. And finally, in the middle of the Neil Young tour, we were just getting on each other’s nerves too much and I was turning into an idiot, and I wasn’t doing any thinking for myself, and it wasn’t right, because of course you have to make your own decisions.” On the Young tour, in Boston, Linda ran into Kate Taylor, who told her she wasn’t working anymore and that Asher might be free. He was. Literally. “Here I had a situation with Herbie Cohen where I was still paying commissions because I couldn’t get out of that contract — it was seven years or something horrible like that; I’m still paying him off — and Peter was really groovy. He waived commissions for a year and really worked his ass off for me.” Linda began Don’t Cry Now with John Boylan. “I knew Peter wanted to produce it, but I was too paranoid; I was too afraid to move from another situation again. John had got me off Capitol, negotiated the deal with Asylum — I was going to make an album for Asylum, then another one for Capitol — and that’s when Peter came into the situation. I continued for a few months to try to record with John, but it was apparent our relationship had deteriorated to the point where we couldn’t work together anymore.” She asked Asher to help on a couple of tracks (“Sail Away” and “I Believe in You”), and while they were among the best sounding, ultimately, to her, she called the sessions “disastrous” — “I had personal problems or something else was happening.” One of her better songs on the Young tour was a version of the old Betty Everett hit, “You’re No Good,” and she tried cutting it. “It was terrible,” said Asher. “I had the wrong rhythm section. They were very good, but they were playing the wrong kind of thing. We gave up.” “Then,” Ronstadt continued, “I started rerecording everything with J.D. Souther. We were like kids in the studio, just inept, and we took a lot of time. But I learned a lot and it was worth it, almost, because it was such hard work. After that experience, I knew so much more when I went into the studio with Peter, so it was easier for me to talk to him; it wasn’t like I was a person who didn’t know how to do what she wanted to do.” It is all finally coming together. After six years at it, she is even feeling all right about being a solo singer. “I didn’t feel at ease about it until this month,” she said. “I mean I finally feel that I’m doing okay as a singer, and that we’re doing good shows, and the band is cooking and it’s great.” “See, my voice was always the thing I hated the most. I thought it was nasal. But I always had lousy sound systems, and I never knew I was a loud singer till this year, I never heard myself; I sang by radar. I would oversing, ruin my voice and never develop subtle nuances, or try to experiment. Being onstage was always an unpleasant experience for me. “I always thought I was horrible. If people didn’t like me, I thought they just had good taste.” She laughed. “But I didn’t think it always had to be bad or I would’ve quit. I thought it was bad because of reasons I had to correct and I was right. What I finally did was, when I got Peter, I finished off Don’t Cry Now and two days later I had to be on the road, I had to take this band I put together real fast, with a lot of good musicians, but people who couldn’t play with each other. And Peter was looking at it, and I thought, ‘My god, he’ll think this is terrible and he’ll quit!’ That’s when I realized it was up to me; I’d have to pull it together, get up onstage and take command. And I did. I started playing guitar onstage, ’cause we needed an acoustic guitar player. I remember sitting in the dressing room rehearsing “Long Long Time” between shows, so I could go onstage and do it. And Peter was impressed that I was able to pull it off. “The band before that was so clumsy. We’d play ballads and it sounded like elephants playing, it was so musically unrefined. And I’d feel bogus about it and couldn’t stand up onstage and say, ‘This is great music and we’re gonna lay it on you.'” A book of the onstage wit and wisdom of Linda Ronstadt would wind up just a shade thicker than a book of Nixon’s factual statements about Watergate. We now know that the adolescent giggling is part of Linda’s character when she’s nervous or ill at ease. Also, a person is not normally stocked with a variety of giggles from which to choose for crowd-pleasing purposes. So hers is an awkward one that gets Peter Asher, for one, “empathetically squirmy.” “Uh, it makes me uncomfortable,” he said, “because it means she’s uncomfortable. The solution is to get everything right. “They say a pro can handle whatever happens, but the trouble with proness is: You start to get unreal and have fixed lines. To be real like Linda, you almost have to be nervous or embarrassed — or, if someone in the audience is objectionable, you have to dislike them — not necessarily throw her tambourine — but mentally, you have to. “Joni Mitchell suffered from the same things. She’s done shows where she’s burst into tears and run off. In a sense, they’re both in the same situation, of trying to say what they think.” But when it comes to story-telling, Joni wins, even with her giggles. Linda, without the aura and the stance of writer of the songs she sings, can come off like a babbling idiot in comparison. Recently, however, she has learned to edit herself and now her remarks about the songs she sings are illuminating and to the point. “I knew people thought I was dumb,” she said, “and I encouraged it a lot of times, ’cause I would get onstage and be very self-conscious.” Offstage, “People would get me in situations and actually try to make me feel dumb . . . Yeah, so they’d have more control over me. Peter and Betsy, I met them in New York five years ago and they were so nice. I always do better on the East Coast, for some reason. People who I met on the East Coast thought I was neat and intelligent. People I met on the West Coast thought I was an idiot who always threw drinks around the Troubadour bar, so it was fortunate I met them on the East Coast. They moved out to Los Angeles and would invite me to parties and Peter was an intelligent person I could talk to and he would talk back to me like a person, not like somebody he wanted to ball, or somebody he thought was silly and could push around. All I needed was somebody to react to me like that.” Peter Asher is a thin, redheaded, eyeglassed, shy sort, British and a teen idol ten years ago, the Peter of Peter and Gordon. Since then he has shied from performing — except for background bits behind the acts he has produced and managed, James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. Their five-year friendship, he said, has helped in the studio. “Her musical instinct and ear were exceptional and almost always right,” he said. “People in the past have tended to discount that, but I think it was because she had a hard time getting people to understand her.” Linda, he said, chose most of the songs and worked out the initial vocal arrangements on Heart like a Wheel. Instrumental arrangements were a cooperative matter among Asher, Ronstadt and Andrew Gold. One of the few and major arguments about the album was over “You’re No Good.” Asher had resurrected the song and, with Gold, tried to come up with a guitar track. “We’d been there all night and tried a million things. Finally we built up this montage of all these guitar overdubs which we were very proud of by the end of this 12-hour thing. Linda came in the next day and didn’t like it. And for a while she actually tried having someone else [Ken Edwards] overdub something else. But in the course of listening to it several times, she completely turned around.” Linda had heard part of Asher’s remarks, and I asked her what she didn’t like about the guitar lines. “Oh, I thought it sounded like the Beatles,” she said. And it does. I turned back to Asher. What about the time, in Tucson, when Linda’s father took Asher aside. What did he say? “He said he was glad to meet me, that he was glad she was successful and thanked me. And he said he hoped she was making some money that she would keep, because she wouldn’t be doing this forever. He knows she’s never made any money in the past.” I asked Asher for the secret of his success with Linda. “I think the thing it’s frequently attributed to is that I’m the first person who’s managed and produced her with whom, as they so delicately put it, there is a solely professional relationship. It must be a lot harder to have objective conversations about someone’s career when it’s someone you sleep with.” Ah . . . but what about temptation? Or, as I so delicately put it, “Was Betsy ever insecure that you might fall into a relationship with Linda?” Asher smiled. “I’ve no doubt it’s crossed her mind,” he replied. “Crossed my mind.” I always felt I fell in love with people for neurotic reasons,” said Linda. “It’s nice to like someone who is nice to you for a change.” She likes Albert Brooks, the comedian. For once, she is not in competition with a musician/boyfriend. Based on eight months together, Ronstadt says it’s too hard to tell about him. “But he’s the nicest person I’ve known.” At a hotel in Los Angeles, after an interview, she called him to let him know she was on her way home. She baby talked to him, asking if he was smiling, even though he’d been up all night working on his album and fighting with engineers. And even though he and Linda weren’t on the best terms. “I’ll make you smile,” she cooed into the phone. Linda doesn’t talk much about her love life, but from the songs she has chosen to sing and the stories she has told about her frustrations, I began to toy with the word “heartbreak” for her story. I told her this in Hawaii and she perked up. “I’ve been heartbroken a lot,” she said. “That’s a key word. It’s like that John David song — ‘Faithless love, where did I go wrong/Was it telling stories in a heartbreak song . . . ‘ “When you choose to become a singer and sing about stuff like that, it means you choose a life like that. It naturally means it’ll be overbalanced in areas that don’t contribute to emotional security and continuity with anyone. It contributes to an overall person who is more paranoid and volatile; you have to stay sensitive and more vulnerable in that way and things change so fast; people like you for such strange reasons, for such untrustworthy reasons, that pretty soon you don’t know who to believe or trust. “The weirdest things make me fall in love. Usually, it’s whatever I happen to be missing right at the moment. I can have a guy I’m in love with who has everything but one thing; then the next guy I meet has a whole lot of that one thing and I go, ‘Oh, I’m in love with him,’ but he hasn’t got any of the other things. So it’s usually very illusory.” Ronstadt emphasizes the ill. At L.A. International, the plane to Honolulu was delayed and Linda and Peter made small talk. Bonnie Raitt needs a producer and two suggestions have come up for her comment: two producers who have worked with Linda. She dismissed both — one as too sloppy, the other as a jerk. “You should produce her,” she told Asher — “even though I might be cutting my own throat.” They also talked about Asylum. They have begun planning an album, which the company wants ready for release in May, and if they don’t deliver, David Geffen is considering releasing a single from Don’t Cry Now. Meantime, Capitol, having already released a collection of old Stone Poneys and solo tracks under Linda’s name, is now thinking of repackaging the first and worst Poneys album under her name. Since Capitol owns the album, there is nothing to be done, but Asher hopes to stop the company from representing it as a Linda Ronstadt album. “If the Beatles had broken up and split into obscurity except Ringo,” he reasoned, “I don’t think you could put out Revolver and call it Ringo Starr.” Trending Speeding toward Hawaii, Peter Asher relaxed into the latest Reader’s Digest while Linda watched The Sting. Asher had already gone through Business Week, and he’d read the New Yorker at home. Seconds later, he nudged my attention and pointed to an article he’d found about a leukemia victim in Nashville. He wanted me to note the title, in romantic pink type: “Linda’s Extraordinary Triumph and Rebirth,” it read.
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4334	dbpedia	3	97	https://pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/linda-ronstadt-stone-poneys/	en	Linda Ronstadt Stone Poneys	https://149777103.v2.pre…square-32x32.jpg	https://149777103.v2.pre…square-32x32.jpg	[ "https://149777103.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1970s-NwsWk-cvr-4-320.jpg 320w , https://149777103.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1970s-NwsWk-cvr-4-320-217x300.jpg 217w ", "https://pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1970s-running-for-Gov-2-300.jpg", "https://149777103...	[]	[]	[ "Pop History Dig", "popular culture", "pop culture", "history", "pop history", "music", "music history", "rock 'n roll", "American history", "film history", "television history", "TV history", "history of radio", "music history", "sports", "sports history", "sports celebrity", "med...	null	[ "J.D" ]	2014-08-22T16:53:50-04:00	Magazine-styled website about contemporary culture, politics, and business history, crafted to engage readers on topics ranging from civil rights history to the power of the entertainment industry, environmental politics, sports history, music, film, and the media.	en	https://149777103.v2.pre…square-32x32.jpg		null	Linda Ronstadt and Jerry Brown first met sometime in 1971 at Lucy’s El Adobe, a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles. They were introduced by Lucy Casada, the co-owner of the restaurant along with her husband, Frank. Jerry Brown was then California’s Secretary of State. Linda Ronstadt was in the pre-superstar stage of her musical career, not yet the mega star she would soon become. She was 25 at the time; Jerry Brown was 33. The friendship between Linda Ronstadt and Jerry Brown grew gradually; they had some compatible interests and liked each other’s company. They enjoyed ethnic food, long walks along the California seaside, Japanese movies, and country music. Both were also Catholic. By 1975, however, Brown and Ronstadt became high-profile celebrities in their respective realms – he in politics, by then California’s governor, and she, rising to the top of the music charts with her Heart Like a Wheel album. There is a lot more to their respective careers, both before and after 1975, explored later. Yet through their rising fame, and through most of the 1970s – including the glare of Brown’s presidential bids in 1976 and 1980 – they continued to see each other, with speculation at one point, mostly in the press, of a possible marriage between the two. That, however, in the words of an earlier Ronstadt/Stone Poneys song, “Different Drum,” would not likely occur, as the song’s lyrics suggest: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum / Oh, can’t you tell by the way I run / Ev’ry time you make eyes at me…” Still, there was an interesting decade of activity between this rock star and politician, made more interesting by the swirl of music and politics of those times. What follows here is a look back at some of that history. Jerry Brown Jerry Brown was born in San Francisco in 1938. His father, Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown, was then District Attorney of San Francisco and later Governor of California for two terms (1959-1967). Young Jerry grew up in San Francisco and graduated from St. Ignatius Catholic High School. In 1955, after a year at Santa Clara University, he entered a Jesuit seminary, intent on becoming a Catholic priest, but left after three years. He then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, graduating a year later with a degree in Latin and Greek. A law degree from Yale followed in 1964. After law school, Brown returned to California and clerked for California Supreme Court Justice Mathew Tobriner. He then went into private practice in Los Angeles. In 1968, he left his L.A. law practice briefly to join U.S. Senator Gene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. Back in California in 1969, Brown ran for and won his first elective office, the newly created Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees. The following year he was elected Secretary of State. In that post through 1974, among other things, Brown argued before the California Supreme Court and won cases against Standard Oil of California, International Telephone and Telegraph, Gulf Oil, and Mobil for election law violations. He also forced legislators to comply with campaign disclosure laws. In 1974, he ran for, and was elected governor of California at age 36, the youngest to do so in the state’s history. Brown followed Ronald Reagan in the Governor’s office, who previously held the post for two terms, 1967-1975. On taking office, Brown garnered some headlines when he canceled the inaugural ball and refused to live in the $1.3 million governor’s mansion that Ronald Reagan had built. He also sold the governor’s limo and wouldn’t use the jet plane. He lived in an apartment, walked to work, and had his chauffeur drive him around in his 1974 Plymouth. Once in office, Brown pushed a landmark farm labor law and new environmental initiatives. The farm labor measure won him particular kudos, as agreement on that front — while retaining labor’s right to strike — had eluded other politicians for more than 40 years. He also made some notable appointments, including Sim Van der Ryn as State Architect, and environmentalist Stewart Brand as Special Advisor, also adding minorities and women to major government posts. He significantly boosted funding for the California Arts Council. In 1975, Brown helped repeal a prized oil-industry tax break, the “depletion allowance,” and later in his term sponsored the “first-ever tax incentive for rooftop solar.” Brown also strongly opposed the death penalty and later in his term vetoed it as Governor, although the legislature overrode his veto. Linda Ronstadt Linda Ronstadt was born in 1946 in Tucson, Arizona, to Gilbert Ronstadt, a prosperous machinery merchant who ran the F. Ronstadt Co. hardware store. Her mother, Ruth Mary Copeman, from the Flint, Michigan area, was the daughter of Lloyd Groff Copeman, a prolific inventor and holder of nearly 700 patents, among them, an early form of the microwave oven and a flexible ice cube tray, the latter earning millions in royalties. Linda’s father came from a pioneering Arizona ranching family and was of German, English, and Mexican descent, and also a guitarist who sang Mexican songs to his children. Linda was raised on the family’s ten-acre ranch in Tucson along with three siblings. She had a pony and later a horse. As a teen, she formed a folk trio with brother Peter and sister Suzy; calling themselves the New Union Ramblers. Music Player “Different Drum”- Ronstadt/Stone Poneys https://pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Different-Drum.mp3 At age 18 in 1964, after meeting guitarist Bob Kimmel while attending University of Arizona briefly, the pair left for Los Angeles, joining guitarist and singer/songwriter Kenny Edwards to form the Stone Poneys. After three years the group broke up, but scored a Top 20 hit in 1967-68 with the Ronstadt-led “Different Drum.” Following her stint with the Stone Poneys, Ronstadt then began a solo career, struggling for about five years, playing with various transient and backup musicians. Owing in part to her timid nature, she had some performance and self-confidence troubles in the studio and on stage. Along the way, there were also difficult romantic entanglements and some cocaine use, a period of her life she sometimes refers to as the “bleak years.” But it wasn’t all bad. In March 1970, her second solo album, Silk Purse, was released, but it did not fare well on the music charts. However, one of its singles did – “Long Long Time,” rising in late-summer 1970 to No. 25 on the Billboard pop chart. The song proved to be an opening for Ronstadt, highlighting her voice and talent. Music Player “Long Long Time”- Linda Ronstadt https://pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Linda-Ronstadt-Long-Long-Time.mp3 “Long Long Time” earned her a Grammy Award nomination in early 1971, although Dionne Warwick took the prize that year for best contemporary female vocalist. One of Ronstadt’s backing bands in her early solo period featured musicians Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner, who went on to form the Eagles, one of the most successful American rock bands of the 1970s. They toured with her for a short period in 1971 and played on Linda Ronstadt, her self-titled third album. In those years she was beginning to define a new genre of music, sometimes called country rock. Still, by the end of 1972 Linda Ronstadt was in debt and paying commissions to two managers. Then came Peter Asher, formerly of the Peter & Gordon duet, who had also been a manager at the Beatles’ Apple Records label. Asher became her producer and manager. With Asher, she made two albums – the first, Don’t Cry Now, came out in 1973 which would sell 300,000 copies. Among its songs was “Desperado,” an Eagles song she would notably perform in concert. The album also included her first country hit, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” which broke into the Top 20. Capitol Records, meanwhile, perhaps suspecting there might be more upside business opportunity in Ms. Ronstadt’s voice than they previously believed, began digging up her older tunes and issuing them as compilation albums, one of which appeared in early 1974 under the title, Different Drum. But the second album she made with Peter Asher, Heart Like a Wheel, became her big breakthrough album. Asher would later tell Time magazine: “Linda is brilliant musically. Her voice is qualitatively exceptional…”. Released shortly before Christmas 1974, Heart Like a Wheel hit No. 1 on both the Billboard albums chart and the Country & Western chart (C&W). The album offered Ronstadt doing a mix of pop covers and contemporary songs. One of its singles was “You’re No Good,” a song previously done in 1963 by Betty Everett (famous for “It’s In His Kiss”, the “shoop shoop song”). “You’re No Good” was released a week after the Heart Like A Wheel album came out. It soared to No. 1 on the singles chart by February 15, 1975 and stayed in the Top 40 for ten weeks. Music Player “You’re No Good”- Linda Ronstadt https://pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Youre-No-Good-Linda-Ronstadt.mp3 “You’re No Good” was also a hit for Ronstadt in Australia (#15), the Netherlands (#17), and New Zealand (#24). The B-side, “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You,” a Hank Williams cover, hit No. 2 on the C & W chart. That song would also win her a Grammy that year for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. Another song from Heart Like A Wheel – the follow-up single, “When Will I Be Loved” – a 1960 Everly Brothers hit, was also a big Ronstadt hit. In May 1975, her uptempo version of this song hit No. 2 on the pop chart and No. 1 on the country chart. A review of the song at AllMusic.com by Denise Sullivan notes, in part: “…There was no disputing her vocal prowess, but Ronstadt’s choice in repertoire was equally important to her success, as she continually picked heartbreakers and tearjerkers like ‘When Will I Be Loved.’ Oddly, there wasn’t a shred of inauthenticity in the sung sentiments, even though Ronstadt was considered to be a hugely popular singer and sex symbol with an active personal life. Yet, she gave the song its definitive reading, even more so than the Everly Brothers…” Although Ronstadt still had problems with stage jitters, she soon became a popular concert attraction. Heart Like a Wheel, meanwhile, would go on to sell over two million copies in the U.S. With this success, her first Rolling Stone magazine cover appeared on March 27, 1975 with a story titled, “Linda Ronstadt: Heartbreak on Wheels,” reporting on her earlier struggles to make it in the rock ’n roll business. In September 1975, another Ronstadt album came out – Prisoner In Disguise – which quickly climbed into the top five on the Billboard chart and sold over a million copies. Asylum Records also issued a single from that album with a Ronstadt version of “Heat Wave,” a 1963 Motown/Martha & The Vandellas tune on the A-side, and Neil Young’s “Love Is a Rose” on the B-side. “Heat Wave” proceeded to crack the top five on Billboard’s pop chart, while “Love Is A Rose” did the same on Billboard’s country chart. With her new-found success that fall, she also bought a place of her own – reported at the time to be a $325,000 beach house in Malibu. Ronstadt by this time was also filling up her rock concert outings, as she did at the Center for the Performing Arts, San Jose, California on September 22, 1975. In 1976, a European tour — her first outside the U.S. — extended her popularity. Back in the States, meanwhile, her friend, Jerry Brown was about to make some waves of his own. “Brown-for-Prez” (Pt.1) In March 1976, Jerry Brown began his first run at the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. However, the primary season had already begun and several other candidates, including Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, had been campaigning for a year. The Democratic primaries that year had become more numerous and more important in the nominating process than they were previously, and Carter, for one, set out to run in all of them. He surprised political pundits by finishing second in the Iowa caucuses (“uncommitted” finished first). Rep. Morris Udall, a front-runner in early polls, came in fifth behind former Senator Fred R. Harris. Carter went on to win in New Hampshire, North Carolina (defeating George Wallace), Pennsylvania (defeating Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson ) and Wisconsin (beating Mo Udall). However, some Northern and Western liberal Democrats viewed Carter as too conservative, and sought alternative candidates to block him from getting the nomination. Jerry Brown and Senator Frank Church of Idaho were seen by some as possible alternatives to Carter, or at least to help slow him down. By May 1976, Brown’s name began appearing on primary ballots, and he visited with key party leaders and bosses to improve his chances, including Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Maryland Governor Marvin Mandell. Brown won contests in Maryland, Nevada, and his home state of California with its 280 delegates. In Oregon, he missed the deadline, but as a write-in candidate, he took an unprecedented 25 percent of the vote, finishing third behind Jimmy Carter and Senator Frank Church of Idaho. In the New Jersey and Rhode Island primaries, Brown supported uncommitted slates of delegates which “won” in those contests. In Louisiana, Governor Edwin Edwards backed Brown, helping him win a majority of that state’s convention delegates, besting southerners Carter and George Wallace. Brown’s late bid and his gathering of delegates was seen as a possible way to influence uncommitted delegates at the Democratic National Convention in July. Still, Brown’s bid for the Democratic nomination was seen as too late by party insiders and quixotic by others. People magazine ran a June 14, 1976 cover story on Brown with the tagline, “The far-out candidate who puzzles almost everybody.” In campaigning, Brown spoke of “an era of limits” – not typically a Democratic sentiment – while critics found his term as California’s Governor unimpressive. Yet his late-coming primary victories had been a demonstration of his voter appeal. Despite Jerry Brown’s impressive showing in a short amount of time, he was unable to stall Carter’s momentum. At the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York city, Carter was nominated on the first ballot. Brown finished third with roughly 300 delegate votes behind Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona. Jerry Brown, however, had his supporters during his brief presidential bid – not least of whom was a contingent of rock music stars, including Linda Ronstadt. Brown had Ronstadt’s help and that of others from the rock music business. Ronee Blakley, Helen Reddy, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Ronstadt all performed at various times for Brown at fund-raisers and rallies. At one “Brown For President” benefit concert event held at the Capital Center in Maryland in mid-May 1976, Brown joined Ronstadt, The Eagles and other performers on stage briefly, waving to the audience. Although Jerry Brown’s run for the presidential nomination ended, and he went back to being Governor of California, there would be more Jerry Brown presidential politics in the future. Linda Ronstadt, meanwhile, in a December 1976 interview with Creem magazine, appeared to be having some second thoughts about mixing her concert gigs with political advocacy: “I’ve retired from politics…. For a while, I thought it might do some good working for someone I believe in, like Jerry Brown, but now I’m only going to do benefits for concrete causes in the community that I live. Right now that happens to be Los Angeles.” “I just got tired of mixing up the message. I mean, if kids are there to listen to music, I don’t want to ram politics down their throats. It ruins the magic of the music. I just think it’s taking unfair advantage of the audience to sort of slip in some specific political message while they’re captivated by your music. Politics should not be run like a circus.” Still, Ronstadt appeared to be a person who stayed informed on the issues of her day, noting in late December 1976 that she was a daily reader of the Wall Street Journal. She would not likely be retired from politics for very long. Ronstadt Rising Ronstadt’s musical career, meanwhile, was heading into the stratosphere. In August 1976 she released Hasten Down the Wind, an album that included her version of Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be The Day,” the single for which hit No. 11 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts. It also rose to No. 27 on the Billboard country chart. Hasten Down the Wind also included a cover of Willie Nelson’s classic “Crazy,” which became a Top Ten country hit for Ronstadt in early 1977. Hasten Down the Wind was Ronstadt’s third straight million-selling album – a feat no other female artist had then accomplished. The album earned her a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. It was her second Grammy. In early December 1976 she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone for the second time, as photographed by Annie Leibovitz. That Christmas season, Ronstadt issued a Greatest Hits LP that also became a top seller. And while Jerry Brown was not the Democratic Presidential nominee that political season, Ronstadt was invited to sing at Jimmy Carter’s presidential inaugural in January 1977. Meanwhile, the notices on her music kept coming. By late February 1977, she appeared on the cover of Time magazine (see below right) with the cover-story tagline: “Linda Ronstadt: Torchy Rock,” referring to her love-hurts balladeering in the rock ‘n roll age. Said Time: “Ronstadt has used the driving energy of rock and the melancholy of country music to transport …her audiences into a region…rarely explored by a mainstream singer in the past two decades. …[S]he has the neural-overload generation…screaming for a kind of music that … goes back to the cabaret singing of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee. Linda has made the Stones’ people listen to a torch singer. Try a new name: torch rock.” Time also added that Ronstadt was “a superstar on the verge of becoming …a Big Superstar.” “Torchy Linda” Image Politics As a rising rock star – and “rock star cover girl” – Linda Ronstadt was also dealing with issues involving her image, both in how she appeared to the public as well as backstage, in the male-dominated music business. The December 1976 Rolling Stone cover story and photo shown above earlier, also included a couple of photographs inside the magazine of Ronstadt at home – photos taken by avant garde photographer Annie Leibovitz. One of the photos of Ronstadt that ran in the Rolling Stone story, included her sprawled across her bed at home in a skimpy red slip and underpants (shown below). However, Leibovitz had refused to grant any veto of the photos that would run in the December 2, 1976 issue of Rolling Stone, which incensed Peter Asher, Ronstadt’s manager. Asher reportedly kicked Leibovitz out of the house when she visited to show them the photographs prior to publication. Ronstadt would later explain: “Annie [Leibovitz] saw that picture [sprawling on the bed ] as an exposé of my personality. She was right. But I wouldn’t choose to show a picture like that to anybody who didn’t know me personally, because only friends could get the other sides of me in balance.” Not all of the photos Leibovitz took appeared in the magazine (However some of them did appear later in the tabloid, Modern People of January 28, 1979, and possibly others). But it wasn’t just Leibovitz and Rolling Stone. With Ronstadt’s February 1977 Time magazine cover photo using the “Torchy Rock” banner, shown above, Ronstadt also felt manipulated. For one, the photographer pushed her to wear a dress, which was an image she did not want to project. Some years later, in 2004, Ronstadt was interviewed for CBS This Morning and stated that this image was not her because she did not sit like that. Ronstadt said she hated the image the Time cover photo of her projected. Still, at least part of Ronstadt’s image in her heyday was that based on her sex appeal, exploited by more than Rolling Stone and Time, also seen in her mid-1970s album covers as well as her nightclub and rock concert attire, which could run to hot-pants-and-heels for some performances. But Ronstadt was also a women’s rights advocate, especially in her profession. Peter Asher, for one, called her “an extremely determined woman, in every area. To me, she was everything that feminism’s about.” In the October, 14th, 1977 issue of New Times magazine, John Rockwell wrote a piece titled “Linda Ronstadt: Her Soft-Core Charms,” a piece that covered Ronstadt’s career and persona at the time, quoting her during an ongoing interview. In the piece, Rockwell noted: “Even before her 1970 Daisy Mae, Moonbeam McSwine album cover on Silk Purse [her second album] Linda was regarded as a sex symbol. Then it was braless bouncing and bare feet; today, it’s more sophisticated and complex, though no less overt…” Then Rockwell added there were “problems in being a sex goddess,” and that Linda was mindful of those, quoting her as follows: “…I don’t know how good a sex symbol I am, but I do think I’m good at being sexy. The sexual aspect of my personality has been played up a lot, and I can’t say it hasn’t been part of my success. But it’s unfair in a way, because I don’t think I look as good as my image. Sometimes I feel guilty about it, sometimes I feel embarrassed about it, sometimes I feel I have to compete with it. But that’s part of the fun, too- that’s part of the charade. When you look at somebody like Jean Harlow real close, she really did have an exquisitely formed face and beautiful hair and beautiful skin and a real gorgeous figure, and those are things I just don’t have. But I don’t think they’re essential to being attractive. Sometimes they’re more of a handicap than a help. I think vitality is what is attractive to people. That’s why there are a lot of pretty girls that are kind of boring to look at. If I get a hot romance, my sexuality is likely to work whether I curl my hair and put makeup on or not. When it’s successful and I’m at my shining best, I like to think of it as sassiness that incorporates sexuality and strength. It’s aggressive without being intimidating. As long as there’s strength in my attitude, I like it.” Still, some years later, in a September 2008 New York Times piece by Patricia Leigh Brown, Ronstadt explained of her rock ‘n roll years that she was marketed as “this sexualized being, somebody else’s version of me walking around with my name. It became a strange distortion. Eventually I had to put out the complete version of who I was.” Which she eventually did, both in her later personal life and through her demonstrated musical diversity. As John Rockwell would note in his 2014 Rock Hall of Fame biographical essay on Ronstadt, in which he would make special mention of Ronstadt’s vocal range and versatility: “People may have loved her looks, but they bought her records because of the sounds she made.” Back in 1977, meanwhile, Ronstadt’s eighth studio album, titled Simple Dreams, was released in September. Two months later it had replaced Fleetwood Mac’s long-running No. 1 album Rumours in the top spot. Simple Dreams stayed atop the Billboard albums chart for five consecutive weeks. Music Player “Blue Bayou”- Linda Ronstadt https://pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Linda-Ronstadt-Blue-Bayou.mp3 On the Billboard country chart, Simple Dreams knocked Elvis Presley out of the No.1 slot. The album would sell over 3.5 million copies in less than a year in the U.S. alone, and would also hit No. 1 on Australia and Canada’s pop and country charts. Simple Dreams also spawned a string of hit singles including covers of Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou”; Buddy Holly’s “It’s So Easy,” and up-and-coming songwriter Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” Of the three, “Blue Bayou” – which included Don Henley of the Eagles singing backup – was the biggest hit, rising to No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart in late 1977, where it held for four weeks. It also hit No. 2 on the Cash Box chart, No. 2 on the country chart and No.3 on the “easy listening” chart. “Blue Bayou” would become one of Ronstadt’s signature tunes. It sold more than 1 million copies by January 1978, and would later surpass the 2 million mark, becoming a worldwide hit with a Spanish version as well. By October 1977, Linda Ronstadt was pretty much at the top of the rock world. She had turned out five straight million-selling albums, was grossing something on the order of $60 million from those albums, and had much more music ahead. That fall she was also asked by the Los Angeles Dodgers to sing the National Anthem on October 24, 1977 at game three of the World Series as the Dodgers hosted the New York Yankees. Jerry & Linda As for Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt, they continued to see each other in the late 1970s. In December 1977, it was reported that Brown took Ronstadt to some of his old haunts in San Francisco where he had grown up: City Lights Bookstore, a landmark of the 50s beat culture, the Spaghetti Factory, and the museums at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Later that month, they spent the Christmas holiday together in Malibu. In the following year, they were seen together occasionally at public events, ranging from a March 1978 tribute to Neil Simon at the Long Beach Civic Auditorium to a reception at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a group of Chinese diplomats. They also appeared together at rock music hangouts such as the Roxy in Los Angeles. On May 17, 1978, US magazine put Ronstadt on its cover along with a smaller inset photo of Governor Jerry Brown, with the headline: “The Governor and The Rock Queen” plus an additional teaser tagline that read: “Jerry Brown courts Linda Ronstadt: Are they playing love songs…or politics?” The magazine reported that in early April 1978 the couple celebrated Brown’s 40th birthday at Lucy’s, the Mexican restaurant where they met back in 1971. The next afternoon Brown was seen emerging from Ronstadt’s house. That night, they were seen dining together at Tony Rome’s, another popular Hollywood restaurant. There were also reports that the Governor was spending weekends at Ronstadt’s house. Orville Schell, who wrote a book about Brown (Brown, Random House, 1978), recounted one Saturday morning visit to Ronstadt’s Malibu house to meet with Brown, as Ronstadt moved in and out of the room in which they met. Later, Schell described the three of them leaving for a drive in Ronstadt’s Porsche, with Schell driving and Ronstadt sitting on Brown’s lap. Still, some believed Brown’s relationship with Ronstadt was just a friendship and nothing more. “I just think he uses Linda’s home as a sanctuary,” said Robert Pack in a May 1978 article in US magazine. “It’s situated among an expensive group of houses that are guarded and closed off to the public,” explained Pack, whose biography, Jerry Brown: The Philosopher Prince, was published that year by Stein & Day. “His favorite pastime is walking on the beach. And he takes his privacy seriously…I don’t think he would have a serious relationship with her because of her background,” Pack noted, referring to numerous affairs Ronstadt acknowledged having. Ronstadt, for her part, found reports of her many involvements to be greatly exaggerated, once quoted as saying: “I wish I had as much in bed as I get in the newspapers.” Jerry Brown as governor, meanwhile, was very popular among California voters. In his first year as governor, Brown had a voter approval rating of 87 percent – then the highest in the history of polling in the state. Brown’s popularity, and public opinion about him, was then being watched very closely by President Jimmy Carter’s staff in Washington, then monitoring Brown’s activities. Carter’s aides considered Brown to be the “single largest threat” to the President’s re-election in 1980. Yet first, before Brown could challenge Carter, he faced a gubernatorial re-election campaign in California, beginning with the 1978 primary elections. Seeking Re-Election In the California gubernatorial primaries of 1978, California Attorney General Evelle Younger won the Republican primary defeating three other candidates, including Pete Wilson, then Mayor of San Diego. On the Democratic side, Jerry Brown, with only minor opposition, won the Democratic Primary and would seek a second term. The one big issue in California during the time of primaries was Proposition 13, a ballot initiative authored by anti-tax crusader Howard Jarvis. Prop 13 sought to drastically reduce property taxes and change the way property taxes were calculated – a provision if enacted would play havoc with government budgets and funding of key services. Younger and most Republicans supported Proposition 13 while Brown and most Democrats opposed it. The initiative, which appeared on the June 6 primary ballot, passed with 64.8 percent of the vote and is still in effect today. Then came the general election campaign in the fall of 1978. With the apparent taxpayer revolt now enrolled in law, Republican candidate Younger attempted to seize the Prop 13 momentum and Brown’s opposition to it. Younger, however, was not the best campaigner, and his organization faltered. The Republican primary battle had also drained Younger’s campaign of money, leaving him short of funds in the general election. Brown, on the other hand, saw a campaign opening. During the primaries that summer, Brown had called Prop 13 “consumer fraud, expensive, unworkable and crazy, the biggest can of worms the state has ever seen.” But in the June election ballot vote, more than 4 million voters went for Prop 13 by a 2-1 margin. Once these results were in, Brown cleverly pivoted to a new position as the would-be top official in charge of implementing the law, promising, as enforcer-in-chief, if elected, to back the law. “The people have spoken [on Prop 13],” he said, “and as Governor I will diligently enforce their will.” Thus Brown turned a negative into a positive. In addition, since he was relatively unchallenged in the primary, he had a much bigger campaign war chest. During his campaign in 1978 Brown opposed another high-profile initiative– this one on the general election ballot. Proposition 6, also known as the Briggs Initiative, sought to ban gays and lesbians from serving as public school teachers in California. Brown opposed and helped defeat the initiative on November 7. Jerry Brown ultimately won reelection in a landslide, beating Republican Evelle Younger by some 1.3 million votes, one of the biggest margins in California election history. Linda’s 1978 During 1978, Linda Ronstadt scored her third consecutive No.1 album with Living in the USA. It appeared on the Billboard album chart in September 1978 and was the first album by any recording act to ship over 2 million advance copies. It would eventually sell some 3 million copies in the U.S. alone. A major hit single from that album in October 1978 was a cover of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “Ooh Baby Baby.” That single, in fact, appeared on all four of the major music charts – Pop (No. 7), Adult Contemporary (No. 2), Country, and R&B. Ronstadt appeared on another Rolling Stone cover October 19th in a photo by Francesco Scavullo, and was also featured in the magazine’s interview. She also appeared in the 1978 film FM, about competing radio disc jockeys and the rock music business. In the film, Ronstadt performed the songs “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” “Love Me Tender,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice.” Earlier that year, in July, she made a guest appearance in her hometown of Tucson appearing with the Rolling Stones at the Tucson Community Center where she and Mick Jagger sang “Tumbling Dice” together. By the end of 1978, Linda Ronstadt had solidified her role as one of rock and pop’s most successful solo female acts. She was selling out her rock concerts, including those in large arenas and stadiums, with tens of thousands of fans. According to some sources, she was the “highest paid woman in rock,” with income that year estimated at more than $12 million, or more than $43 million in today’s dollars. Her 1978 album sales were reported to have reached some 17 million units – with a gross return of well over $170 million in today’s dollars. Billboard magazine crowned Ronstadt with three No. 1 Awards for the Year – Pop Female Singles Artist, Pop Female Album Artist, and overall Female Artist of the Year. By then six of her albums had exceeded 1 million in sales, three of which had been No. 1 on Billboard, as well as numerous Top 40 singles. Her friend Jerry Brown also had a pretty good year. Following his reelection as California’s Governor, he was expected to mount a second try for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1979-1980. But before he did, he and Linda Ronstadt would have what some might call a high-profile moment. Trip To Africa In early April 1979, Governor Jerry Brown and rock star Linda Ronstadt decided to do some traveling together. The governor had been advised to go to Africa and meet with some of its national leaders. There were also environmental issues he wanted to explore there. The couple perhaps thought they could mix a little business with pleasure, take a respite from their busy lives, and explore Africa’s land, wildlife and culture. The period they selected to travel also included Jerry Brown’s 41st birthday. On April 6, 1979, the couple left for their trip as the Los Angeles Times reported in a news story headline: “Brown, Miss Ronstadt Slip Quietly Out of New York; Board Plane for Africa.” But if they thought their trip would go unnoticed in the U.S, or that there would be little interest in them in Africa, they were sadly mistaken. At the time, there had been a sizable contingent of western photographers and reporters already in Africa, trying to cover a war in Uganda. But failing to gain entry to that country, they turned their cameras and attention to covering the California Governor and his rock star guest. Reporters and photographers camped outside hotel rooms and mobbed the couple whenever they appeared. The press stalked the couple at Nairobi’s airport, where Ronstadt was reluctant to show herself to board a plane, even though Brown coaxed her to let the press have one photo and be done with it. One report quoted a Ronstadt friend as saying the press really freaked her out and that she felt badly that she was “ruining Jerry’s trip.” When Brown set off for meetings with African presidents or environmental officials, Ronstadt often remained behind in the hotel or cottages where they has stayed. At one point, it was reported that she inquired about an early departure. One April 11th, 1979 Los Angeles Times headline noted:“Brown Politicks; Miss Ronstadt ‘May Go Home’.” However, the couple did have some luxury camping in Tanzania, where they also safaried to watch buffalo, wildebeests and cheetahs, later dining on beef Wellington around a campfire. And Ronstadt established a truce with the press, sharing stories and drinks with them at one point. Near the end of their trip, Ronstadt departed separately and flew to London, where Brown later caught up with her, flying home together to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the press coverage of their trip back in the States had been reported by the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, and soon the magazines had stories as well, including cover stories in Newsweek’s April 23 edition (shown at the top of this story), and People’s April 30th edition. Look magazine ran a later story on the trip in June. The magazine accounts played up the relationship side of the story, and also what the trip might mean for Brown’s presidential ambitions. Many in the political community then following the reporting on the Brown/Ronstadt trip, believed Brown had made a political misstep by taking the trip with Ronstadt. Some felt he had damaged his chances of being a prominent challenger to incumbent Jimmy Carter for the 1980 nomination. One senior Carter aide told Time magazine he thought the trip would “hurt [Brown] in a serious way,” adding, “I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something self-destructive in him.” Democrats watching from the early primary state of New Hampshire had similar thoughts. Dudley Dudley, a leading liberal Democrat there told Time: “In political terms, this sort of thing is counterproductive. A lot of people are chuckling about [his trip with Ronstadt].” The Newsweek and other stories on the Africa trip also refocused attention on the Brown/Ronstadt relationship and what had or had not transpired between the two in Africa, as well as previously back home. Newsweek’s writers asked, “were the singer with a heart like a wheel and the governor with a soul set on the White House getting it all together at last?” One rumor at the time had it that Brown and Ronstadt were going to the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro to be married. In terms of what had already transpired between the two back home, Newsweek reported that they took long walks together, “hand in hand,” along the Malibu beach; sometimes went to midnight Japanese movies in West L.A., or enjoyed country music “at the funky Palomino out in the San Fernando Valley.” And as regulars at the El Adobe restaurant where they met, co-owner Frank Casada reported them having a good time there, enjoying each other’s company, and giving each other pecks on the cheek occasionally. “They really like each other,” explained California State Assemblyman Willie Brown in the Newsweek story – a friend who had spent time with them. “He’s a different person when he’s with her,” Willie Brown said. “There’s a side the public never sees. He’s flirty, flippant and very funny. And he’s as interested in her physically as I’d like to be.” “It’s a very, very special relationship that they have,” one of Brown’s aides was quoted in the Newsweek story. “It’s a very important thing, and it’s not something that either of them takes lightly.” But whether the couple had more serious intentions ahead, was quite another matter. Both had made statements they could not be married to one another, Brown saying it would stop him from reaching the White House, and Ronstadt saying that the political life for her would be too confining. Yet some of Ronstadt’s friends offered Newsweek a different take: “Marrying Jerry is an urge that comes on her periodically. She wants a sense of stability. She has talked about their becoming hermits on Jerry’s land in northern California.” But Linda’s mother Ruthmary Ronstadt, weighed in with a definitive “I know she would not like being a political wife.” And Ronstadt herself – pointing to an occasion when Mick Jagger breezed through town and called her to meet him in Mexico – acknowledged, “that’s the sort of thing I couldn’t do if I was married to Jerry.” Still, they continued their relationship in the meantime. In November 1979, Jerry Brown formally announced that he would be a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1980. 1979-1980 “Brown-for- Prez” (Pt 2) The late 1970s were an anxious time in America. Overseas, the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 had curtailed oil supplies, spurring inflation and gasoline lines in America by the summer of 1979. President Carter’s approval ratings had plummeted to below 30 percent. And earlier in the year, in March, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania had a catastrophic accident, an event which raised questions about the safety of nuclear power nationally while elevating the potential for energy alternatives. Jerry Brown had been a proponent of energy alternatives to both continued oil import dependency and nuclear power, and so, was a politician who might draw some attention nationally by way of these issues. But Brown was also now a second term governor, and had a record of what he had and had not accomplished. In his first term as California governor, Brown came down hard on crime, refused to raise taxes, and sought to eliminate waste in the state bureaucracy. Personally, he had refused the trappings of office early on, living frugally without the big limo and Governor’s mansion. But liberals believed he had fallen short on job programs for the inner cities, child-care, housing for the poor, and tax reform. Brown did develop a strong relationship with the large Mexican-American community, an important voting bloc. He also negotiated a landmark farm-labor law with Cesar Chavez, the growers, and the Teamsters Union. And he signed laws decriminalizing marijuana, another ending oil depletion allowances, and a third permitting sexual freedom between consenting adults. Yet Brown was still a puzzle for many; a man hard to pin down, frustrating the press by answering their questions with questions of his own, or offering some philosophical nugget from Thomas Aquinas or a Zen aphorism. Still, he often proved the pundits wrong and had a keen political sense of public sentiment. Said one observer: “He’s capable of taking the pulse of the public before the public even knows what it’s feeling.” He was also capable of running counter to public sentiment. When a bill to reinstitute the death penalty came to his desk as governor – with polls showing an overwhelming 70 percent of the public favoring it – he vetoed it. But this action did not hurt him politically that year, as the legislature overrode his veto. In California, some viewed Brown as an opportunist, hellbent on the White House. State House Republican minority leader Paul Priolo stated at one point that Brown’s philosophy was “to do what’s necessary to become President.” Some even suggested that his relationship with Ronstadt was a calculated media ploy to further his career. In November 1979 when he announced that he would be a candidate for the 1980, Democratic Presidential nomination, Brown offered a platform with three main planks: a call for a constitutional convention to ratify the Balanced Budget Amendment, a promise to increase funds for the space program, and, in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear powerplant accident, opposition to nuclear power. The anti-nuclear movement in California was especially strong, and Brown had addressed activist gatherings that helped give him national visibility on the issue. On the subject of the 1979 energy crisis, Brown charged that Carter had made a “Faustian bargain” with the oil industry. He also declared that he would greatly increase federal funding of research into solar power. During his campaign he described the health care industry as a “high priesthood” engaged in a “medical arms race” and called for a market-oriented system of universal health care. Brown also endorsed the idea of mandatory, non-military national service for the nation’s youth, and suggested that the Defense Department cut back on support troops while beefing-up the number of combat troops. In his presidential bid, however, Brown had trouble gaining traction in both fundraising and polling. Part of the problem had come from Jimmy Carter regaining voter approval after American hostages were taken in Iran, as the country traditionally rallied around any President during a national crisis. But the more serious problem for Brown as a challenger to Carter came from the rival candidacy of liberal icon, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Senator Kennedy had refused to run previously in 1972 and 1976, primarily due to his Chappaquiddick auto accident and the death of passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. But 1980, many believed, was Kennedy’s moment, and he mounted a major challenge to Carter. Still, Brown continued his candidacy, and among his supporters were a number of film stars and others from Hollywood, as well as those from the music industry. Linda Ronstadt did benefit concerts for Brown, including one on December 22nd, 1979 in Las Vegas. At that concert, she mentioned on stage that evening that Brown had been running hard for president “in the the last two months” and that she hadn’t seen him much during that time, “except on TV.” She went on to say that he was coming home soon, and dedicated the next song in her performance to him – “My Boyfriend’s Back.” Another benefit concert for Brown on December 24th that year included others from Hollywood and the music business, including Jane Fonda, Helen Reddy, and members of the rock band Chicago. The star-studded benefit concerts, however, did not produce the turnout or revenue the Brown campaign had hoped for. Linda Ronstadt would also campaign for and with Brown on occasion, and was mentioned in news stories about his campaign. Her image also appeared on various campaign buttons, some with Brown and others by herself, the latter touting her for “First Lady.” Jerry Brown’s supporters from Hollywood and the music industry, however, could cut both ways with voters. Conservative commentators of the day began describing some of Brown’s supporters such as activists Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and Jesse Jackson as on “the fringe,” which did hurt Brown in certain quarters. Brown appeared on the ballot in a number of primary states. In the February 26, 1980 New Hampshire primary, however, he received only 10 percent of the vote. By late March 1980, Brown had spent $2 million but had won no primaries. Kennedy, on the other hand had beaten Carter in the Connecticut and New York primaries on March 25th, and seemed to be picking up steam. Brown then announced that his continuation in the race would hinge on a good showing in the April 1st, 1980 Wisconsin primary. Brown had polled well in Wisconsin throughout the primary season. Then came a plan to film Brown on the steps of the Wisconsin state capitol at Madison in a special 30-minute event to be broadcast live and then used as a campaign commercial. Hollywood’s Francis Ford Coppola was retained to produce and direct the event, and a thoughtful speech was prepared titled, “The Shape of Things to Come.” However, due to technical problems, the event did not go well, and contributed to the melt-down of Jerry Brown’s candidacy. On April 1st, 1980, after finishing 3rd in the Wisconsin primary behind Carter and Kennedy, Brown withdrew from the Democratic Presidential race. Momentum thereafter went briefly in Kennedy’s direction after Carter’s attempt to rescue the hostages on April 25th ended in disaster. Still, Carter was able to hold off Kennedy, winning the nomination in the end, but losing to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 general election. Linda’s Interview A few days after Jerry Brown quit his presidential bid, Linda Ronstadt appeared on the April 3rd, 1980 cover of Rolling Stone in a piece titled “The Styles of Linda Ronstadt,” with Annie Leibovitz photos. However, around the same time, she had also given an interesting interview to Playboy magazine – an interview conducted earlier that spring that was published in the April 1980 issue. The interview was billed by Playboy as: “a candid conversation with the first lady of rock about her music, her colorful past, her new image, and her ‘boyfriend,’ Jerry Brown.” The magazine likely reached subscribers and the newsstands before Jerry Brown had quit the presidential race, and so would still be topical with Brown’s candidacy in mind. But in the interview, Ronstadt offered some thoughtful observations on how she dealt with her celebrity and political involvement. A few excerpts follow below: …PLAYBOY: Why weren’t you involved in the benefits opposed to nuclear power? RONSTADT: I didn’t have a band and I felt it might be construed as an attempt on my part to start stumping for Jerry Brown. PLAYBOY: What’s wrong with that? RONSTADT: I feel it can be dangerous for me as an artist to get involved with issues and, particularly, with candidates. But at some point, I feel like I can’t not take a stand. I think of pre-Hitler Germany, when it was fashionable for the Berliners not to get involved with politics and, meantime, this horrible man took power.If I am saying things about nuclear power, I want people to go out and learn about it. I don’t want them to say “No nukes” because Jackson and Linda say it. But it is difficult for me as a public person. I don’t want people to take my word for something because they like my music. That’s a danger in itself. I am real aware of my ability to influence impressionable people and I am reluctant to wield that power. If I am saying things about nuclear power, I want people to go out and learn about it. I don’t want them to say “No nukes” because Jackson (Browne) and Linda say it. I don’t want them to think that to be hip, they have to be a no-nukes person. I don’t want people to think about issues when they hear my music. I really want them to hook their dreams onto what I am singing. When I’m out in public, I want to be singing. PLAYBOY: But you are stumping for Brown. You had a $1000-a-couple dinner for him and you’re doing concerts, something you said you’d never do. RONSTADT: You know how most people burn their bridges behind them? Well, I have a tendency to burn my bridges ahead of me. I swore up and down I wouldn’t do a benefit for Jerry. The artistic reason is the selfish reason, but also, I always thought that if I did a concert for Jerry, it would be perceived by the public as him trying to use me. They would say, “I told you all along: The basis of their relationship is that she can do concerts for him and make him a lot of money.” But there is no way for me to stay neutral.…A candidate like Ronald Reagan can go to Westing- house and ask for lots of money…Jerry Brown can’t go to Westinghouse. He can only go to indivi- duals. He has no corporate financing for his ideology. …Jerry Brown can’t go to ARCO for money for solar power, because it’s not in the company’s interest…. If I won’t support him, and I know him best, it looks like an attack. I would like him to be able to speak his ideas. I think they are really important and good and, for the most part, he’s right. It’s so hard for me, not only as a public figure but also as someone who believes in him, cares about him, is close to him and is on his side. I want to be on his side. PLAYBOY: What’s the reaction to your limited public support of Brown? RONSTADT: I’m going to take a lot of heat for it, but I’m ready. I just don’t feel that any of the alternatives are as good as Jerry, and that’s what it comes down to. Look at it this way: The Eagles and I, in a way, represent the antinuclear concern. Westinghouse is heavily invested in nuclear power. A candidate like Ronald Reagan can go to Westinghouse and ask for lots of money and despite the $1000 limit, Westinghouse can commandeer huge sums of money. Plus, it can hire lawyers and take out huge ads in the newspapers and continue to brainwash the American public about the safety of nuclear power, which I think is a lie. Jerry Brown can’t go to Westinghouse. He can only go to the individuals. He has no corporate financing for his ideology. A candidate like Jerry Brown can’t go to Arco for money for solar power, because it’s not in the company’s interest. I believe it’s in the public interest to have a candidate who is interested in furthering technology like solar power and protecting us from things like nuclear power. PLAYBOY: Then you’re not wary about ill-informed performers’ affecting politics. RONSTADT: A lot of us were naive in the beginning about doing benefits. We tended just to take people’s word for things. I don’t now. I read newspapers, periodicals. I’m not saying I’m an expert, but I am a hell of a lot better informed than before and better informed than the average person. I think my opinion is informed enough to put out there.…But if Frank Sinatra is going to do a benefit for Reagan, then I guess I have to do a benefit for Jerry…. Richard Reeves wrote sarcastically about how nobody would pay $400,000 an hour to watch him type, but Richard Reeves, in fact, swings much more influence with a typewriter than I ever could. He’s a political writer. He sways public opinion every day. Doing a concert for a candidate can’t swing an election. We flatter ourselves to think that. What I can do is provide better access to the public forum, and then it’s up to the public to decide. Artists like Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Vanessa Redgrave, I say more power to them, they are sticking out their necks. I don’t particularly want to stick out my neck. But I don’t see how I can not take a stand. It’s dangerous territory for me, that’s for sure. But if Frank Sinatra is going to do a benefit for Reagan, then I guess I have to do a benefit for Jerry…. Subsequent Lives In the early 1980s, Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt would continue to be seen together occasionally. She joined him and other friends at an informal gathering in Sacramento on January 3, 1983 after he stepped down as governor. Later that year, on March 20th, 1983, they were photographed together attending the opening of the film Dreamgirls at the Shubert Theater in Century City, California. But after their active friendship years ended, Brown and Ronstadt went their separate ways, continuing in their respective careers. In 1982, Jerry Brown could have sought a third term as governor, but instead decided to run for the U.S. Senate. He was defeated in that attempt by Republican Pete Wilson. Afterward, he took some personal time, traveling to Mexico to learn Spanish, to Japan to study Buddhism in a monastery, and to India to work with Mother Teresa. Upon his return in 1988, Brown won a race to become chairman of the California Democratic Party, and in that post he greatly expanded the party’s donor base. But in early 1991, Brown resigned as Democratic Party Chairman, announcing he would run for the U.S. Senate seat held by then retiring Alan Cranston. Although he led in the polls for both the nomination and the general election, he quit this Senate bid in favor of running for president for a third time in 1992. Running as an outsider, he won six primaries, but still lagged well behind frontrunner Bill Clinton. After Jerry Brown’s third failed attempt at the Presidency, many believed his political career was over, and for six years or so, he remained in the political wilderness. But in 1997, running as an independent, Brown became mayor of Oakland, California where he helped revitalize the city and reverse its hemorrhage of residents. In 2007, Brown ran for and won the post of State Attorney General, and four years later, succeeded Arnold Schwarzenegger in a third term as California’s governor. As this is written, Brown is running for an historic fourth term as California’s governor, which if he wins on November 4, 2014, will begin in January of 2015. Linda Ronstadt, for her part, went on making music – all kinds of music. In 1981, she went to Broadway as Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, co-starring with Kevin Kline. She also co-starred with Kline and Angela Lansbury in the 1983 film version. In music she continued to put out popular recordings and appear at concert venues. In 1983, her estimated worth was placed at over $40 million, mostly from records, concerts and merchandising But she soon tired of rock concerts, where the audience – sometimes into beer and pot – was not always focused on the performer. Ronstadt longed for venues that had “angels in the architecture,” as she once put it. In late 1984 she ventured into opera, cast as Mimi in La Bohème in New York City. Back in the studio, meanwhile, in 1983-1986, she collaborated with Nelson Riddle on songs from the Great American Songbook, producing three albums of jazz and traditional pop standards that between them sold more than seven million copies in the U.S. In 1987 she collaborated with Dolly Parton and Emmy Lou Harris to produce the album Trio which held the No.1 position on Billboard’s country albums chart for five weeks. In late 1987, Ronstadt released Canciones de Mi Padre, an album of traditional Mexican folk songs. For Ronstadt the 1980s proved to be just as commercially successful as the 1970s. Between 1983 and 1990, she turned out six additional million-selling albums; two of which sold more than three million U.S. copies. In 1991, she released a second album of Mexican music, Mas Canciones, for which she won a Grammy. And there is lots more about her music, politics, and personal life – covered elsewhere in greater detail. Suffice it to say here that Linda Ronstadt was one of the most successful and versatle female singers in U.S. history. To date, she has sold in excess of 100 million records worldwide and also became one of the top-grossing concert performers for over a decade. During her career, she released over 45 albums, 30 of those studio productions. Among her singles, 38 charted on Billboard’s pop chart – 21 in the Top 40, ten in the Top 10, three at No. 2, and “You’re No Good” at No. 1. She has earned 11 Grammy Awards, two Academy of Country Music Awards, an Emmy Award, and an ALMA Award. But sadly, in August 2013, Ronstadt revealed she has Parkinson’s disease, leaving her unable to sing. In April 2014, Linda Ronstadt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In July 2014, President Obama awarded her one of twelve 2013 National Medals of Arts and Humanities. He also stated that he had had a crush on her when he was younger. Engaged to filmmaker George Lucas for a time in 1984, Linda Ronstadt never did marry. In her 40s, during the 1990s, she adopted two children – Mary and Carlos, now young adults. Her autobiography, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, was released in September 2013 when it debuted in the Top 10 on the New York Times best sellers list. In that memoir she writes: “Jerry Brown and I had a lot of fun for a number of years. He was smart and funny, not interested in drinking or drugs, and lived his life carefully, with a great deal of discipline.” She said she found him to be “a relief” from the musicians she hung around with. But she also added: “Neither of us ever suffered under the delusion that we would like to share each other’s lives. I would have found his life too restrictive, and he would have found mine entirely chaotic…Eventually we went our separate ways and embraced things that resonated with us as different individuals…We have always remained on excellent terms.” For additional stories at this website on music please see the “Annals of Music” category page, and for politics, the “Politics & Culture” page. See also, “Noteworthy Ladies,” a topics page with more than 40 story choices on the history and careers of famous women. Thanks for visiting – and if you like what you find here, please make a donation to help support the research, writing, and continued publication of this website. Thank you. – Jack Doyle ____________________________________ Date Posted: 22 August 2014 Last Update: 17 July 2023 Comments to: jackdoyle47@gmail.com Article Citation: Jack Doyle, “Linda & Jerry: 1971-1983,” PopHistoryDig.com, August 22, 2014. ____________________________________ Books & music at Amazon.com… Sources, Links & Additional Information “Linda Ronstadt,” in Holly George-Warren and Patricia Romanowski (eds), The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, Rolling Stone Press, New York, 3rd Edition, 2001, pp. 837-839. Kari Bethel, “Linda Ronstadt, Singer,” Contemporary Hispanic Biography/Encyc- lopedia.com, 2003. “Linda Ronstadt,” Wikipedia.org. Anne Johnson, “Ronstadt, Linda.” Contem- porary Musicians / Encyclopedia.com, 1990. “Linda Ronstadt and Bobby Darin – Long Long Time” (her appearance on “The Darin Invasion 1970” TV special, October 1970), YouTube.com. “Bright Song Style of Linda Ronstadt Lights Up Fillmore,” New York Times, May 9, 1971. “Linda Ronstadt Gifted As Singer, But Her Country Style Art Reveals Contradictions,” New York Times, August 2, 1972. “Can Linda Find a Focus?,” New York Times, November 11, 1973. John Rockwell, “Linda Ronstadt Is Surer Now; Singer, Here for 3 Concerts, Shows New Confidence An Album Success Helps Her Revise Cult-Object Image,” New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 1975. “Linda Ronstadt at Her Best,” New York Times, January 28, 1975. “A Benefit for Jerry Brown,” Washington Post, May 6, 1976, p. 80. Larry Rohter, “Pop and Politics: When Two Worlds Collide,” Washington Post, May 15, 1976, p. B-1 “You’re No Good,” Wikipedia.org. “Jerry Brown Likes Granola, Zen and Winning Elections,” People, June 14, 1976, p. 43. “Looking for Mr. Good Guy: The Democrats Wonder If Guru-Governor Jerry Brown Could Be the Answer,” People, June 14, 1976. “Jerry Brown,” Wikipedia.org. Cameron Crowe, “Linda Ronstadt: The Million-Dollar Woman,” Rolling Stone, December 2, 1976. “Linda Ronstadt: a Vagabond Grows up as Country Rock’s First Lady,” People (double issue), December 27, 1976 – January 3, 1977. Robert Hilburn, “Harris Averts the Ronstadt Connection,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1977, p. S-68 “Dramatic and Charming Ronstadt,” New York Times, August 24, 1977. Robert Hilburn, “Ronstadt’s Concert Trail: Long Nights of Doubt,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1977, p. Q-1. Mark Kernis, “’Simple Dreams’: A Masterful, Exciting New Album by Linda Ronstadt,” Washington Post, September 21, 1977, p. D-12. Jack Ong, “Linda Ronstadt Sings Her Way to the Top,” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1977, p. I-13. Robert Windeler, “Liberating Linda; On the Charts and in Men’s Hearts, Rock’s Hottest Torch Linda Ronstadt Is No. 1,” People, Vol. 8, No. 17, October 24, 1977. John Swenson, “Linda Ronstadt, Female Vocalist of the Year; At the Top of Her Field, She Become an American Heroine,” Circus, February 16, 1978. Ed Ward, “The Queens of Rock – Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Stevie Nicks – Talk about Their Men, Music and Life on the Road,” US Magazine, February 21, 1978. William Carlsen, “The Governor and The Rock Queen,” US Magazine, May 16, 1978. “Elder Brown Has Wish–That Son Would Wed,” Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1978, p. B-3. Nancy Skelton, “Called Man of Intrigue; Engagement Now Could Hurt Brown, Pollster Says,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1978, p. A-10. “California Gubernatorial Election, 1978,” Wikipedia.org. Vivian Claire ( for the Los Angeles Times), “Linda Ronstadt: Of Love And Drugs And Jerry Brown,” The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), November 13, 1978 (second of a five-part series extracted from Vivian Claire’s biography, Linda Ronstadt ). Tom Zito, “Sex and the Single Governor; Brown, Ronstadt: Good Fortune?,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1978, p. H-6. Elizabeth Kaye, “Linda Ronstadt: Why Is She The Queen Of Lonely?,” Redbook, February 1979. William K. Knoedelseder Jr. and Ellen Farley, “El Adobe Looks East; Jerry Brown’s Favorite Restaurant Aims for Washington,” Washington Post, April 5, 1979, p. D-1. John J Goldman, “Brown, Miss Ronstadt Slip Quietly Out of New York; Board Plane for Africa, Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1979, p. A-1. “Brown Politicks; Miss Ronstadt ‘May Go Home’,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1979, p. B-28. Victoria Brittain, “The African Jaunt: On Safari With Jerry Brown And Rock Star Linda Ronstadt,” Washington Post, April 16, 1979, p. B-1. “Politics Is a Real Jungle,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1979, p. D-6. “Making the African Scene,” Time, April 23, 1979. Tom Mathews, with Martin Kasindorf and Janet Huck, “Ballad of Jerry and Linda,” Newsweek, April 23, 1979. Karen G. Jackovich, Harry Minetree, Patricia Newman, “Swinging Safari: Jerry Brown’s Safari with Rock Star Linda Ronstadt Could Just Be the End of Something Big,” People, April 30, 1979 Vol. 11, No. 17. William K, Knoedelseder, Jr; Ellen Farley, “Where the Elite Meet Discreetly,” Los Angeles Times, Apr 22, 1979, p. U-3. Jimmy Breslin, “She Stoops to Conquer–But What?,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1979, p. F-6.F6 “Ronstadt Takes on the Press,” Look, June 11, 1979. Alan Baron, “Jerry Brown Rolls Out the Campaign Banner,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1979, p. E-1. Kathy Sawyer, “Brown Launches Underdog Race,” Washington Post, November 9, 1979, p. A-1. Laurie Becklund, Nancy Skelton, “Less Isn’t More at Brown Fund Raiser,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1979, p. A-30. Laurie Becklund, “Ronstadt Shines a Little Light on Brown Campaign; Ronstadt Gives Boost to Brown Campaign,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1979, p. B-3. Robert Hilburn, “Brown Benefit: Clash of Music and Politics,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1979, p. E-5. Murray Fromson, “Undaunted by Iowa, Brown Sees Hope in Zero-Based Campaign,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1980, p. F-3. William Endicott, “Ronstadt Joins Brown in Wooing Voters,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1980. “Linda Tries ‘First Lady’ on for Size: ‘I’d Die Laughing’,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1980, p. A-2. Charlotte S. Perry, “Jerry Brown’s Dream-Turned-Nightmare; ’76 Celebrity Status Haunts Him in ’80 as Public’s Familiarity Breeds Contempt,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1980, p. C-7. “Linda Ronstadt at Music Hall,” New York Times, April 17, 1980. Robert Hilburn, “Linda Ronstadt: Opening Up on the Rock ‘n Roll Trail; On the Road with Ronstadt,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1980. Jean Vallely, “Linda Ronstadt: a Candid Conversation with the First Lady of Rock about Her Music, Her Colorful Past, Her New Image and Her ‘Boyfriend,’ Jerry Brown,” Playboy, April 1980. John J. Goldman, “Brown–From Celebrity to Good Soldier; Media Magnetism Is Gone,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1980, p. B-19. “Linda Ronstadt Interview on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, 1983″ (part), You Tube.com, Uploaded on December 19, 2009. Mary Ellin Bruns, “Ronstadt: The Gamble Pays Off Big” (interview), Family Weekly, January 8, 1984. “What’s New with Linda Ronstadt? She’s Singing Her Love Songs to Star Wars Czar George Lucas,” People, March 26, 1984. Patricia Leigh Brown, “Linda Ronstadt, Home Again,” New York Times, September 22, 2008. “Linda Ronstadt Articles & Interviews,” Ronstadt-Linda.com (fan site). “The Reinvention Of Calif.’s New and Former Governor,” NPR.org, November 18, 2010. Nathan Masters, “Governor Brown, Then and Now,” KCET.org, January 13, 2011. Jerry Roberts, “Shades of Jerry Brown: How and Why Governor Moonbeam Returned to Earth,” The Independent (Santa Barbara, CA), November 1, 2012. Matthew Garrahan, “Second Coming: the Governor of California Talks about Taxes, Mother Teresa and Being Back in Charge,” FT.com (Financial Times), April 5, 2013. Daniel Buckley, “Why Linda Ronstadt Still Matters to Tucson A Tucson Music Historian Reflects on the Lasting Influence of Our City’s Most Famous Musical Export,” Tucson Weekly.com, September 12, 2013. John Rockwell, “Linda Ronstadt,” RockHall .com, Inducted 2014. Anthony York, “Linda Ronstadt Recalls Time with Jerry Brown in New Memoir,” Los Angles Times, September 17, 2013. Stephen Spaz Schnee, “Get Closer: An Exclusive Interview with Linda Ronstadt,” DiscussionsMagazine.com, Wednesday, May 14, 2014 Maureen Dowd, “Palmy Days for Jerry,” New York Times, March 22, 2014. _________________________
4334	dbpedia	3	78	https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv52062	en	Early photographers collection			[ "https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/layout/images/orbis-white.png", "https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/layout/images/menu.png", "https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/layout/images/search/search.png", "https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/layout/images/cc-zero.png", "https://archiveswest.orbiscascad...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Archives West provides access to descriptions of primary sources in the western United States, including correspondence, diaries, and photographs. Digital reproductions of primary sources are available in some cases. Archives West was formerly known as the Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA).	en			null	Active in Portland, Oregon 1878-1899 and 1897-1907. Frank G. Abell (1844-1910) was born in Illinois and moved with his parents to California in 1857. In 1862, at the age of 18, he joined the firm of William Shew in San Francisco, where he spend 4 years learning the art and business of photography. On his own, Abell opened his first gallery, the Abells Star Gallery, in Stockton in 1866. Moving back to San Francisco the following year, he then worked his way north, through Grass Valley, Red Bluff, and Yreka, arriving in Roseburg, Oregon in 1877. From 1878-1888 he was located at 167 & 169 1st St., Portland. He worked with his son George L. Abell, at addresses: 29 Washington St. and Labbe Building, fourth floor, 1884-1887. After a few years Abell went to San Francisco for a while, and later returned to Portland to stay, 1897-1907. Elbridge W. Moore bought and continued the photography business at the same location. Known primarily for his studio portraits, his gallery in Portland was both spacious and well furnished, including an "elegant piano for the free use of patrons". Abell also produced "Cards, Cabinets, Panels, Boudoirs, Stereoscopic and Out Door Views, and Living Statues", the latter being photos of living subjects arranged to present the appearance of a marble bust on a pedestal. He moved to Tacoma in 1908 in failing health, and died in 1910. See Also: Abell, Frank G. & Son See Also: Moore, Elbridge W. Lt. Allen (1859-was a member of the 2nd Calvary and participated in longest exploratory expeditions on the North American continent in American history, the Allen Expedition of 1885. The 1885 Allen Expedition entailed exploration of uncharted terrain and resulted in many new discoveries. It was the first time westerners traveled from the coastal regions of south-central Alaska northward through the Alaska Range into the Yukon drainage. From there the expedition continued westward to the Bering Sea — completing a total of 1,500 miles in less than 20 weeks. Had it not been for the Alaska Native people encountered, at times the small group of travelers might have perished. The Unalakleet were considered “members of the crew” for a portion of the trip. Surprisingly, Allen continued to take up war against the Native American population once he returned to the lower 48 states. Ed Andrews (1872-1937) was born in Norway. According to a note from donor Carolyn Brown, he changed his name from Edvard Engrebretsen to Ed Andrews when he immigrated. Later he moved to South Dakota where he lived on the family farm. In 1897, he came to Douglas and worked as a clerk in the Treadwell Store. After owning and operating a restaurant he opened the Ed Andrews photography studio. As a prominent Douglas photographer, Andrews distributed images to dealers all over Alaska. He also served as the official photographer for the Admiral Line, the Alaska Steamship Line, Copper River Railroad, White Pass and Yukon Railway and for Captain Sid Barrington, Stikine River navigator. On December 2, 1937, The Daily Alaska Empire, reported that Andrews’ negatives were lost in one of the Douglas fires. Andrews lived in Douglas until his death. Active in Colville, Washington, 1898-1916. Frank Fuller (also known as F.F.) Avery (1862-1872) was born in Indiana. He began working for the Indian School Service on September 22, 1890. Before moving to Washington State he and his wife, Anna Avery, whom he married in 1892, were employed by the Indian Service in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Crow Creek, North Dakota. He became associated with the Colville Indian Agency and from 1898-1916 Avery worked in a number of capacities, first as superintendent of the Indian Boarding School at Fort Spokane, and then as inspector of Colville Indian Agency Day Schools. Photos from the Colville Indian Agency, were taken between 1901-1916 when Avery was assigned to the Colville Indian Agency. The images record agency headquarters and personnel, along with numerous photographs of Colville Indian farmers and school children. Active in Washington. Louis Fabian Bachrach, Sr. (1881-1963) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1897, studied at the Maryland Institute of Design from 1898-1899, and attended the Art Students' League in New York City in 1900. Bachrach was a second generation photographer. In 1868, Bachrachs father, David, opened a photographic studio in Washington and another in Baltimore. Louis began his photographic career by working with his father in Washington and Baltimore and by helping several photographers in New York. In 1904 Louis continued the national chain by opening a studio in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1915 he assumed the presidency of Bachrach, Inc., a position which he retained until 1955. He was succeeded by his son, Bradford. Bachrach, Inc. is said to be the “longest continuously operated photography studio in America.” today. By 1929, there were 48 Bachrach studios, and at its height it included forty-eight studios with six hundred employees. He died in semi-retirement in Boston, Massachusetts. Active in Seattle, Washington, 1892-1904. James Presley (J.P.) Ball Sr. (1825–1904) was a prominent African American photographer abolitionist, and businessman. Ball was born in Virginia, probably a freeman. As a young man he learned daguerreotyping and opened his first studio in Cincinnati (1851) at age twenty. He hired his future brother-in-law, Alexander Thomas, around 1851-52. Thomas became a full partner in the business in November of 1857 to March 1860. Ball & Thomas became known as "the finest photographic gallery west of the Allegheny Mountains." In Cincinnati, by 1853, Balls studio included nine employees. "Balls Great Daguerrian Gallery of the West" quickly became one of the most well known galleries in the United States. Balls younger brother, Thomas C. Ball, continued as a studio photographer in partnership with Alexander Thomas until Thomas death in 1875. Balls work was featured in exhibitions of photography at expositions held in 1852, 1854, 1855, and 1857 at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. At the 1857 exposition, Ball and another photographer won a bronze medal for photography. Ball experienced financial difficulties between 1865 and 1871. He lost a substantial amount of money as a result of "unfortunate speculations" and his assets were liquidated at a Constables sale in 1868, though he continued with limited funds under the supervision of the Bankruptcy Court. Ball gave his son an interest in the business in 1869 and the firms name was changed to Ball & Sons at 106 Columbia St. Bet. First & Second Aves, Seattle, Washington. In about 1887, he went to Montana with son James Presley, Jr. and now well into his sixties, he opened another busy daguerreotyping studio in Helena. In the second half of 1900, Ball followed his son J.P. Ball, Jr., to Seattle in the Western Territory of Washington. Ball Jr., opened the Globe Studio in 1892 and Ball & Sons studio in 1897 while he was developing a practice as a lawyer. Ball Sr. remained active in civic affairs and founded and organized Shriners' lodges in Seattle and Portland. He left Seattle for Honolulu, presumably for the change in climate to help relieve his crippling rheumatism. He opened a studio in his home in Honolulu, which was probably run by his daughter, Estella. Ball Sr. died on May 4, 1904, in Honolulu. Orville Borgersen was a skier and ski photographer. He explored various ski routes and possible ski routes on Mount Rainier and was a part of the Washington Ski Club. He often photographed while on ski trips and shared his photographs with the ski club. He won the Seattle Times Amateur snap shot competition in 1935 and would continue on and start filming ski outings. He had three brothers who were all skiers as well, Melvin, Le Roy and Stanley. Orville's father was a furrier and Orville grew up in the business, graduating from the Mitchell Designing School in New York and continuing his studies at fashion centers in Europe. In 1955 he was elected the Chairman of the Seattle Retail Trade Bureau and to the board of the Master Furrier's Guild of America Inc. He retired from the fur business in 1977. Beverly Bernett (B.B.) Dobbs (1868-1937) started a photography studio in Bellingham, Washington, in partnership with F.F. Fleming circa 1890-1891. B.B. Dobbs was active as a photographer and also was a pioneer in the emerging motion picture business in both Alaska and Washington State during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; he is believed to be one of the first individuals to have used motion picture film north of the Arctic Circle. Born Beverly Bennett Dobbs near Marshall, Missouri, he first learned photography in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1888, Dobbs moved to Bellingham, Washington, where he would operate a photography studio for twelve years (including a partnership with F.F. Fleming under the name Dobbs & Fleming between 1890-1891). Lured by the gold rush, Dobbs moved to Nome, Alaska in 1900, but ultimately found more success documenting life in Alaska as a photographer and film maker. By 1903, he had formed a partnership with A.B. Kinne. The Dobbs & Kinne studio in Nome offered photography services and photo supplies. Dobbs photographed scenes in Nome and the Seward Peninsula and made award-winning portraits of the Iñupiat people (more commonly referred to at the time as Iñupiats). Around 1909, he established the Dobbs Alaska Moving Picture Company, producing Atop of the World in Motion, a collection of travelogues. Just a few years later, Dobbs began to focus exclusively on film making. He sold his photography negatives to the Lomen Brothers (who later issued some of his work under their company name). By 1914, he had set up the Dobbs Totem Film Company in Seattle, Washington. Dobbs is listed as the cinematographer for A Romance of Seattle, a film shot in and around Seattle in 1919. During the 1930s, Dobbs photographed fish processing operations at Pacific American Fisheries (PAF) in the Fairhaven area of Bellingham. Duclos (1863-1917) was active in Dawson, Yukon Territory, Alaska, 1899-1812. Duclos was originally from Quebec, but learned his photography skills in Maine. He and his wife moved to Dawson in 1898. He partnered with Per Edward Larss creating the photography firm of Larss & Duclos, 1899-1904. Duclos specialized in studio portraits while Larss roamed the streets and the gold fields. They sold views of the Chilkoot Pass, Dawson, and gold fields scenes taken in 1898, advertising Thousands of negatives in stockLarss and Duclos also sold film and supplies for amateurs. The firm was dissolved in 1904 when Larss married and left the Yukon. Duclos continued as a photographer in Dawson until 1912, when he sold his studio to E.O. Ellingsen. Duclos reported to Larss in 1905 that he was getting a fair share of the work although there was competition in the portrait business from Edward Adams and Mrs. Edith Goetzman. Joseph Duclos died of pneumonia after undergoing surgery in Alaska in 1917. Active at 936 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, Washington, 1891-1906, Arthur French was born around 1864 in Maine. He worked as a photographer in Tacoma during the 1890s and early 1900s. French took an early series of photographs of the Puyallup Reservation in Tacoma, WA. He is listed as a partner to the photographer, La Roche, in 1891, but after that he had his own studio until at least 1906. By the 1910 census he was living in New York, and according to a family tree found on Ancestry he remained on the East Coast for the rest of his life. He died in 1948 in Connecticut. His wife, Mabel, whom he married 1895, outlived him and died 1956 in Connecticut. Additional photos can also be found in French's book Views of Tacoma, Washington. Photo-gravures, 1900. E. Arthur (Happy) French (1897-1962). Photographer Art 'Happy' French worked at the Seattle P-I from 1923 until his retirement in 1946. French (called Happy because he never looked it) was typical of newspaper photographers of his day in that he had little formal schooling and a strong nonconformist streak. Beginning his career at the P-I in 1923, French made a reputation for his trick photography and composite images. He was able to produce better snowstorm pictures than his rivals by splattering ink on his negatives. Known for his sassy remarks, when Romania's Queen Marie asked him, "Don't you ever shave?" he replied, "Say, I been following you for the last coupla days at 60 miles an hour; when d'ja think I'd have time to shave?" In 1943, he observed long line of children waiting to get into the department store across the street to see Santa Claus. He walked over and took a few photographs of the children and Santa Claus. The pictures became so successful the following year he took a leave of absence and sold his Santa Claus photographs for $1 a print. He ended up earning $10,000 in five weeks, commenting "What the hell, there is a Santa Claus." He retired from the PI in 1946 saying he had found a way to earn "three times the money in one-tenth the time." He was married to a Cherie Hernas, who died in 2000. Mitsutaro Fuku came to the United States in 1922 where he worked in the dry goods business in Seattle. By the 1930s, he was very active as a photographer, exhibiting his work in Seattle (where he had a solo exhibition in 1935) and in photographic salons. In 1934 he became the director of the Seattle Photographic Society but he returned to Japan by 1936 and the next year had a solo exhibition there in Mitsukoshi department store. His work was published in Photographie 1936, a special issue of the magazine Artes et Metiers Graphiques dedicated to modern photography which published the work of leading photographers of the time. In 1940 he taught photography at Nihon University for one year. After World War II, Fuku ran a commercial photographic studio in Kyōbashi, Tokyo. Gardiner (also spelled Gardener), photographer and manager for the Great Eastern Photographic Advertising Co., Victoria, 1888; as well as, British Columbia, Oregon, and various locations in California, circa 1885-1900. In the "Local Notes," Democratic Times, Jacksonville, January 3, 1889, page 3: Two agents of the Great Eastern photo and advertising company, of which R. H. Gardiner is the manager, are in southern Oregon for a short time, making views along the railroad for advertising purposes. The company wants views of all residences and business places. They will show you the pictures and give you a chance to purchase some if you wish. They are sold in one-half dozen and one dozen lots at low rates. Give them a chance to show up your business. Hazeltine (1827-1903) was active in Baker City, Oregon and operated Hazeltine's Excelsior Studio, circa 1880-1903. While living in Oregon, Hazeltine also traveled to Idaho and Nevada where he took stereoview scenes of the region became a respected "traveling photographer". Hazeltine was first active in several cities on the east coast around his home state of Vermont, including New York, Chicago, St. Charles, Illinois. In 1853 Hazeltine moved to San Francisco with his brother George Irving Hazeltine (1836-1918) and they operated a studio creating daguerreotype together till 1855. During his time in California Hazeltine also traveled around the state taking stereoview photographs documenting many places, including Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Butte Mine and was a highly respected pioneer photographer with extensive field work throughout the far West. Many of his views taken in the Mendocino area were later published by such firms as J. P. Soule and Lawrence & Houseworth. In 1888, Martin was assisted at fairs near Baker City by a young boy, Wesley Andrews, who later gained renown as a photographer and postcard marketer in the Northwest. Among photographers who worked for Martin Hazeltine in the 1890s were Miss Josephine Rea and Miss Rata Allen. Two of Martins children became photographers. Leland S. Hazeltine was offering his photography services in Joseph, Or., as early as 1884, and he is believed to have established himself in the photography business at Lakeview, Or. Viola Hazeltine, herself a photographer, married Roland T. Parker of Parkers Studio in Baker City and worked with her husband in the business under the name Parker Studio. T.J. (Tomar Jacob) Hileman (1882–1945) was active at Glacier Park, Montana, photographing landscapes and the Blackfoot Indian people. After working in Chicago and graduating from Effingham School of Photography, he was a photographer in Colorado. In 1911 Hileman moved to Kalispell, Montana to open his own portrait studio. He and Alice Georgeson were the first couple to marry in Glacier National Park in 1913. Hileman was appointed the official photographer for the Great Northern Railway in 1924, and created photos of Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada, moving bulky camera equipment by packhorse, even at times perching on a narrow ledge to get just the right image on film. He also photographed the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton, Alberta, which was built by the railway. In 1926 Hileman opened photo-finishing labs in both Glacier Park Lodge and Many Glacier Hotel, which were convenient for tourists who could drop off their film evenings and pick up their prints the next morning. Harriet Elizabeth (Frost) Hunt, (Lizzie), (1865-1934) was active in Ketchikan, Alaska, 1898-1934. Harriet and her daughter Bertha Hunt Wells were the first female photographers in the territory. Harriet and her husband Forest Joseph Hunt moved from Washington to Wrangall, Alaska, in 1898. She immediately took over the operation of a small café, the Blue Front. She was very popular for her lemon pies. The family moved to Ketchikan in March, 1900. When the family was settled in Ketchikan, Harriet Hunt opened a photo studio and gallery in the family store. The Hunt store was one of the first to recognize the need to serve the visitor trade as well, making postcards and even putting Harriet's photos on china souvenirs. She took hundreds of photos over the next few years, but then gave up photography over concerns about working with the chemicals and the physical exertion of lugging the big camera back and photographic plates back and forth. Their pet black bear could sometimes be seen waiting out side their meat store on Front Street. Lizzie founded the Lyceum club which became the library board and would serve on it for the rest of her life. She would also found the women's Chamber of Commerce and be active in local lodges and other groups. Forest was Ketchikan’s mayor, an active community leader, and State Legislator. They owned Hunt’s Book and Novelty Store where you could “buy almost everything you want”. The store was a very popular stop for visitors and locals. It closed in 1954. Owned by Joseph (Joe) Jeffers and operated in Olympia, Washington, 1903-1975. After graduating from Olympia High School Joe apprenticed with his old friend and photographer A.D. Rogers, working along side Rogers' own son. After completing a year of Business College Joe struck out on his own. As Darius Kinsey was covering the upper Sound region, Jeffers worked the camps of the southern Sound. He was a traveling photographers, going town to town making photographs at any opportunity, as well as a salesman and technician, cleaning, repairing and trading the " Kodaks" (as cameras were then called). Joe was capturing the early development of the Pacific Northwest and its people. His wife, Opal, learned from him to both take photos and process them, she also became a very talented photographer and hand-colorist. Jeffers purchased an art studio located on the southeast corner of 5th Avenue and Washington Street and established Jeffers Art Studio in 1903. They soon became the photographers of choice for the Society Set in the entire region. Jeffers Studios motto was: Ars Gratia Artis; Art for Arts Sake (also the motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Which, to an working artist, serves as a reminder.colorist. Jeffers By 1913 they were had a new building designed especially for their photographic arts. It was the first one of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. The Jeffers Studio building, designed by their good friend, the young architect Joseph Wohleb, just from California. Especially unique is the buildings large sloping skylight on its north side, which allowed in the beautiful northern light that artists covet. On the Olympia Heritage Register of Historic Properties, this Mission Revival style beauty stands today as a monument to both artists - Jeffers and Wohleb on the SE corner of historic 5th Avenue at Washington Street, just north of the Washington Center for the Performing Arts downtown Olympia, Washington. Jeffers fell to his death at age 45 while climbing a dangerous ice chimney on the Jeffers Glacier on the Olympic mountains. Charles A. Kinnear was born in Metamora, Illinois, on March 22, 1868. He came to Seattle with his parents, George and Rebecca Kinnear in 1878. He graduated from the original location of the University of Washington in 1888. He then earned a law degree from the University of Michigan in 1890. He returned to Seattle and started a law office that he operated for three years. In 1901 he was part of the inaugural meeting of the Amateur Photographic Club of Seattle. The meeting was held at the Young Naturalist Hall in March of 1901. Clarence and Clark Kinsey were brothers of Darius Kinsey. They left for the Klondike in 1898 and settled in Grand Forks, otherwise known as Bonanza. Here they built a cabin and filed a claim in nearby Gold Hill. Initially working out of a tent, it was almost four years before they could afford a permanent wood framed building. With their photographic equipment they did a substantial amount of portrait work and also had photographs appear in publications, brochures and pamphlets advertising goods for miners and describing the Klondike to outsiders. They were the official photographers for the Seattle & International Railway which was active under that name from 1896-1901 in Snoqualmie, Washington. Their partnership dissolved in 1906, when Clark Kinsey and his wife left for Seattle. See also: Kautze and Kinsey. Clark and Darius went on to document the logging industry. [See Clark Kinsey Photograph Collection]. Edwin Levick, originally from London, came to the United States in 1899 and began working as an Arabic translator for the Guaranty Trust Company, New York City. He began taking photographs for various publications, such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. After writing and photographing for newspapers and magazine, he decided to specialize in maritime photography. He is well known for his images of ships and sailboats. His photography studio was very successful and at one point employed seven to eight assistants. The studio was located at 10 West 47th Street, New York City. Levick died in 1929 in New Rochelle, New York. After his death, Levick's studio continued to produce photographs covering a variety of events and topic. Active in Spokane, Washington. Charles A. Libby (1879-1966), born in Olympia, Washington, began his career in photography working for his sister, Addie, in the Libby Art Studio in 1898. He opened the Charles Libby Studio on his own studio in 1901. Libby did both portrait and commercial work from the beginning and took on both portraits, commercial photography, pictures of train wrecks for insurance companies, and houses for real estate companies. When Charles A. Libby, Jr. joined the firm in the early 1920s, the studio began to do extensive aerial photography in and around Spokane and the Inland Empire. During this time, Charles Sr. was elected president of the Inland Empire Photography Association. Charles Libby Sr. was so proud of his son, that in 1928 he changed the company name to “Charles Libby and son”. After Charles, Sr. died in 1966, Charles, Jr. continued to operate the studio until 1969, when he sold it. Born in South Dakota in 1887, Lutz spent his childhood years in St. Paul, Minnesota, and eventually attended Hamline University there. At the age of 27, he decided to turn his interest in photography into a career and purchased the Peter Holmboe Photographic Studio in Mandan, North Dakota, ultimately benefitting from the longest running cottage industry in Mandan. Starting in 1924, members of the Standing Rock Sioux nation were hired by the Northern Pacific Railway to perform as a tourist attraction for patrons who selected the NP line versus their competitors line which ran through Minot. Tribal members would charge a quarter to pose for custom pictures in full traditional dress and Lutz mass marketed these images as postcards for a nickel each. Lutz sold his practice to Lee Mohr in 1937 and moved his family west by rail to Tacoma, WA., where he had recently purchased a new studio. He gained national attention when he was honored with the title "Master Photographer of America," The Lutz's moved to Bainbridge Island when the photographer retired to be nearer to his children and grandchildren. Rolland Lutz died in 1964 and is buried next to his wife on the island. Frank (Sakae) Matsura (1873–1913) was born in Japan and he arrived in Okanogan, by way of Seattle, in 1903. He operated a photo studio, 1904-1912 and was well known for portraits and landscapes. He is a descendant of Emperor Saga, the 52nd emperor of Japan, through the Matsura, lords of Hirado Island (northwest of Kyūshū). His father and uncle were samurai, serving Tokugawa Yoshinobu, 15th Shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the family entered the tea business. Matsuras parents died, and he was raised by an uncle and aunt, learning English at a school they founded in Tokyo. As further evidence of his family's high standing, he possessed a ceremonial sword. In 1903, he answered an ad in a Seattle newspaper for a cooks helper and laundryman placed by Jesse Dillabough, owner of the Elliott Hotel in Conconully, Washington, and was hired. He arrived with his camera equipment and began photographing the Okanogan region. His photographic subjects were wide and varied and included portraits, infrastructure projects such as the construction of Conconully Dam, Native Americans, celebrations and parades, stage coaches, riverboats, farming and ranching, and virtually all aspects of the lives of the people of Okanogan county. Matsura was a respected and beloved figure in this frontier region that he documented with his camera. His funeral attracted more than three hundred Native American and pioneer mourners. Active in Victoria, British Colombia, Canada, 1864-1912. Hannah Hatherly Maynard (1834-1918) (Mrs. Richard) was born in Stratton, Cornwall, England. She married Richard Maynard (1832-1907) in 1852 sailed with him to Canada and lived in Bowmanville, what is now the province of Ontario. Hannah became one of British Colombia's first professional photographers. Richard Maynard left his family and joined the Fraser River gold rush 1858-59 and successfully mined the Huson Bar while Hannah learned photography at home in Bowmanville. They emigrated to the Colony of Vancouver Island along with their 4 children in 1862. By 1864 he was noted for his photographic work as well. In 1874 Hannah and Richard built one of the city's first portrait studios, Mrs. R. Maynards Photographic Gallery on Douglas Street at the corner of Johnson, with Richards adjoining boot and shoe store. She experimented with every new photographic techniques, and Richard was almost exclusively known for his landscapes. Both Hannah and Richard were well traveled and photographed their adventures. Her work was marketed under a separate imprint, and his photographs were primarily landscapes. Active in Victoria, British Colombia, Canada, 1864-1907. Richard Maynard (1832-1907) was born in Bude, England. He married Hannah Hatherly Maynard (1834-1918) in 1852, sailed Canada and lived in Bowmanville, what is now the province of Ontario. They emigrated to the Colony of Vancouver Island along with their 4 children in 1862. Richard's wife Hannah became one of British Columbia's first professional photographers. In 1874 Richard and Hannah built one of the city's first portrait studios, Mrs. R. Maynards Photographic Gallery on Douglas Street at the corner of Johnson, with Richards adjoining boot and shoe store. Both Hannah and Richard were well traveled and photographed their adventures. Her work was marketed under a separate imprint, and his photographs were primarily landscapes. Active at 705 Broadway N. and Seattle’s Loveless Studio building at 711 Broadway E, Seattle, Washington. Ella E. Mcbride (1863-1965), was an internationally noted fine-art photographer, as well as an avid mountain climber, environmentalist, and civic leader. Ella had several creative and athletic interests. She belonged to a Spanish Guitar Club, a Bicycle Club, and being tall and broadly built, she soon caught “Mountain fever” as she described it. In 1896, joined the Portland mountaineering organization Mazamas (meaning “mountain goat”) and served as their historian/secretary from 1897-1899. 1897, she met photographer Edward S. Curtis, who was leading a Mazama-sponsored ascent to Mt. Rainier along with his wife and several distinguished climbers and scientists. Ella McBride began working in the photography when Edward Curtis convinced McBride to leave her teaching position in Portland and relocate to Seattle to assist him. She accepted and during 1907-1916 she was working in his darkroom and showroom, and manager of his studio. For more than 30 years operated her own successful Seattle photography studio starting in 1917-1922 with Edmund Schwinke. Wayne Albee, (1882-1937), fine-art photographer of Tacoma had also joined the McBride studio by 1919 as partner and chief photographer. Albee moved to San Diego in 1925, and McBride continued to operate a studio in various Seattle locations. Others associated with her studio included the brilliant Pictoralist, Frank Asakichi Kunishige (1878-1960) and Soichi Sunami (1885-1971), who would become a major force in the field of dance photography. Her main interest for subject matter centered on floral studies, for which she seems to have had immediate success. Her love of flowers likely stemmed from her recollection of the abundant flora in the foothills of Mt. Rainier. She later recalled, “we were just right out in the rain and picked flowers and the flowers were just gorgeous. it was just a blaze of flowers, you couldn’t step without stepping on flowers or pitch a little tent without the floor covered with flowers” (Molenaar Audio Interview). In 1932 she partnered with Richard Anderson (1908-1970); they continued to work together until she retired in 1954 due to her failing eyesight. She died at the age of 102. This is possibly Roy and Ray McClinton or Amberson L. McClinton. Roy, Ray and Amberson were sons of James G. McClinton and moved from Aurora, Nevada to Quilcene in 1889 and later to Port Angeles, Washington. Ray and Roy were the youngest in the family and were fraternal twins who photographed mostly around Clallam County. This included Port Angeles school photographs, and the surrounding woods and outdoors. Amberson McClinton was Roy and Ray's older brother, and happened to be a twin as well with brother, Myron. Amberson was a customs and steamship official for the Seattle Port Commission and the deputy collector of customs for Port Townsend. He arrived in Seattle in 1894 and worked for the Alaska Steamship Company as a purser on the S.S. Rosalie from 1897-1900. In 1915 he was put in charge of the Bell Street Dock, Seattle. Amberson died June 5, 1920. Active at 514 9th St., Seattle, Washington. McDonald is listed only in the 1892-93 Corbett Seattle Directory. Some of his images are also stamped "A.J. McDonald & Son." Perhaps the economic panic of 1893 drove him back to California. The California State Library preserves a large collection of his San Francisco subjects, but only a few Seattle scenes survive in local collections. Probably most of his Seattle subjects were taken during the photographers brief stay here. McDonald is well known for his stereoviews of California. He is one of the few photographers who recorded a view of the 1863 Cliff House and the Cliff House to Ferry Railroad in San Francisco, California. Myers was born in Tuscarawas county, Ohio on November 4, 1857. He was one of four sons born to John and Mary Myers. He learned photography early on from his uncle, Austin Kracaw. He then moved to Chicago where he studied under various photographers including Rider's and Stefifens'. He started his own business in Peoria, Illinois, where he remained for three years. He afterward returned to his old home town of Washington, Iowa, and later to Biloxi, Mississippi, where he lived for six years. In August of 1902, he purchased the Vassar Northrup Studio at 1414 Hewitt Avenue in Everett, opening Myers Art Studio from 1902-1926. Charles Robert Pratsch (1857-1937 ) was active at F Street, between Heron and Wishkah, Aberdeen, Washington, 1888-1913. He took photos of the local sports teams for many years. Pratsch left Iowa at the age of 25 with his brother-in-law, Lester L. Darling, and the two homesteaded adjacent claims on the Wishkah River in the Grays Harbor country, 1884. Pratsch had paid Tolman $300 to teach him photography techniques, and built a studio in 1890 to "attend to all classes of work, such as portraits, views, buildings, copying, enlarging, reducing, etc., and charges very reasonable prices". In his later years Charles Robert Pratsch was caretaker of the Laidlow Island duck preserve. He died at the age of 79 a few days after walking into a slowly moving train. His son, Fred Pratsch, acquired the negatives and made prints which he reproduced as oil paintings. Prentiss (1865-1940) was active at 45 4th St., Portland, Oregon, 1922. Prentiss joined the Weister Company in 1913, and by 1917, he joined Benjamin A. Gifford, the most famous photographer of Oregon at that time, creating Gifford-Prentiss Inc. The Gifford & Prentiss Studio was located on SW Washington between Twelfth and Thirteenth Street in Portland and lasted until Gifford retired in 1920. In 1922 Prentiss acquired Weister's Studio and negatives. Arthur M. Prentiss principal studio, as a single professional photographer, was in 45 Fourth Street in Portland Oregon. Prentiss is known for producing views of the Construction of Highways in Oregon including the Columbia River Highway and John Day Highway. Prentiss also documented the life and works of people of Oregon. See also: Gifford, Benjamin A. Active in Arkansas City and Kansas. Prettyman (1858-1932) studied under a civil war photographer, I.H. Bonsall. He found that the studio darkroom was not adventurous enough for him, and following some of the paths that no other white man had been, other than Lewis & Clark, he went out into Native American Indian territories disguised as a hunter on vacation. He hid his camera equipment in his custom built buggy. Some Indian nations had never seen a white man before. He quickly became known as “picture man”, (to the natives) whom he soon began to have friendships with. He is known for his work including the motion photography of the Cherokee Outlet, 1893, (also known as the Cherokee Strip) where he had a 3 story platform erected for the occasion. William made over 10,000 pictures, and is said to be responsible for creating the news photography genre. Frank La Roche was proprietor of The Rainier Studios and active at 707 Second St., Between Columbia and Cherry, Seattle, Washington, circa 1885-91. La Roche (1853-1936), arrived in Seattle just after the great fire of June 1889 to find the city in ashes, but soon opened a gallery in the Kilgen block on 2nd Avenue. His studio, in addition to high-class portrait photography, specialized in scenic and industrial views of western Washington state. He produced extensive views of the Seattle waterfront, streets and buildings, early Everett land speculation, ships, logging activities, and American Indians. In addition, he traveled in Alaska, California, the western United States, and along the line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, taking scenic views which he produced for sale to travelers. See also the Frank La Roche Photograph Collection. Reid (1859-1944) was an American geophysicist. He was notable for his contributions to seismology, particularly his theory of elastic rebound that related faults to earthquakes. In 1890 & 1892, Harry Fielding Reid traveled to Glacier Bay, Alaska. During the expedition, Reid mapped Glacier Bay, collaborated with John Muir, measured the movement of the glaciers, created sketches and made photographs of the glaciers, and produced 24 notebooks. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has transcribed his expedition notebooks. Through his mother, Harry Fielding Reid was a great-great-grandnephew of George Washington. He earned a B.A. in 1880 as part of the second graduating class of John Hopkins University. In 1885 he was granted his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the spectra of platinum. 1886 Reid accepted an appointment at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. He taught physics and mathematics there for eight years before being appointed an Associate at Johns Hopkins. Charles Roscoe Savage (1832-1909) met and partnered with painter Charles Ottinger, who tinted Savages photographs, in Great Salt Lake City, Utah, 1859-1864. Charles R. Savage and George Ottinger operated the Savage and Ottinger Studio in Salt Lake City, Utah., circa 1860s. Ottinger left and ended their short and tumultuous business partnership in 1864 to pursue acting and the photo studio was renamed Pioneer Art Gallery. Savage continued running the studio and traveled through Utah, California, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming photographing landscapes and documenting Native Americans and pioneer life. In 1883 the Pioneer Art Gallery burned down, and many negatives were lost in the fire. Savage reopened the studio as the Art Bazar. Savage was also a mentor to several successful photographers including George Edward Anderson. He ran the studio until 1906 when his sons, Ralph and George Savage took over. Savage was awarded prizes for his photographs in several World Fairs including Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco. Sadly much of Savages photographic work was destroyed when a fire struck his studio in 1883. Al Smith never considered himself a photographer, merely someone who enjoyed taking photographs. After sailing around the Pacific Rim as a steward on merchant vessels as a young man, Smith returned to Seattle with a new camera and a desire to capture his home city on film. Over the course of several decades, Smith amassed tens of thousands of prints and negatives with his On the Spot photography side business, many finding their way to the Museum of History & Industry (where he was a volunteer for more than a decade), the Northwest African American Museum and in a traveling exhibit that chronicles Seattle’s Jackson Street night scene from the 1920's to the 1960's. His love of the early nightclub scene in Seattle led to photographs of such iconic performers as Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. Smith is considered by many to have been responsible for single-handedly chronicling African-American community life in Seattle for a half-century, a brilliantly expressive documentary photographer whose work celebrates the neighborhood and people who inspired him. Never without a camera around his neck, Smith also shot birthday parties and family reunions, pickup basketball games, boxing matches and countless weddings in his spare time. Al Smith died on August 28, 2008, at the age of 92. J.P. Soule (1828-1904) was active at 528 Broadway, Seattle, Washington, and was a publisher in Boston, Massachusetts. Soule maintained studios on Washington Street in Boston, circa 1861-1882. His subjects in Boston included buildings, the 1869 National Peace Jubilee, the great fire of 1872, and carte-de-visite portraits, and published stereoviews. He photographed mountains in New Hampshire, and the 1866 fire in Portland, Maine. He exhibited works in the Charitable Mechanics exhibitions of 1850, and 1874, winning a bronze medal. In 1888, Soule moved to Seattle, and photographed the ruins from the 1889 Seattle Fire and the rebuilding thereafter. He continued to live in Seattle and occasionally took photographs of the growing city until his death. Gilbert Morris Taylor was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on May 12, 1894 and studied photography in 1923. He moved to Atlin, British Columbia in 1924 where he set up a photography studio. Due to a similar photographer stamp and style, it is likely Gilbert Morris Taylor bought photographer L.C. Read's photography studio in Atlin shortly before Read's death. He stayed in Atlin until 1930 when he transferred his studio to Jasper. In 1936 he built his own studio at #630 Connaught Drive. This studio he sold to Tom Johnston of Saskatoon, SK in 1948 and moved with his wife, Helen Emelyn Hickey, to Santa Barbara, California. He had two sons, R. Loring and W. Morris Taylor. He died in 1967. L.C. Read's photographs of similar style are located in the Lyman Cary Read Photographs of Mountains near Atlin, B.C., Canada; PH Coll 1121. Jesse E. Thomas (1859-1928), was born in Bloomington, Wisconsin. Shortly after his marriage to Rosa Hampton he moved to Iowa where he opened a photograph gallery. He returned to Wisconsin and then went to Nebraska for a year. After than he spent time in Minnesota and then in 1886 he moved west to Washington where he set up a gallery in Cheney, Washington. On February 23, 1890 his studio burned down and he lost all of his equipment and negatives. He rebuilt his business again but in 1891 he picked up an moved his family to Port Angeles. He made family portraits, Port Angeles scenes, portraits of navy personnel. When the Pacific Squadron held maneuvers offshore, he photographed the ships from a small boat. He had a serious illness and his doctor recommend that he work out in the open air rather than in a darkroom. He became a lighthouse keeper and his first station was the Cape Flattery Light on Tatoosh Island. He photographed the lighthouse, the landscape, and the Mahah Indians at their summer camp at Tatoosh. He later worked at the Ediz Hook Light Station, Port Angeles, Washington. Most of his negatives were destroyed over the years. Thompson (1864-1929), was active at Columbia St., opposite Colonial Hotel, Port Hope, Ontario, New Westminster, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1886 with the Bovill Brothers (Thompson & Bovill). Later on his own at 620 Columbia St., 1887-1890, and 610 Granville St., 1890-1898. He established a branch studio in Vancouver in December 1897. For a while after the New Westminster studio had been destroyed by fire on September 11, 1898, he maintained a Vancouver and a New Westminster studio. Thompson was a prolific and versatile photographer equally at home in portrait and landscape work. He photographed extensively along the Canadian Pacific Railway throughout the 1890s. Thompson visited the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893. Two years later he was commissioned to obtain views of farms around Edmonton. In 1898 he accompanied an official expedition to northern British Columbia and Wrangel led by the Deputy Minister of Marine and Fisheries, Louis Coste. John A. Winter (1860-1916) was active in Eugene, Oregon, 1864-1869 and again 1891-1905; Portland, Oregon, 1911-1917 and Vancouver, Washington between 1920-1926. He also operated photography businesses in Albany, Brownsville, and Jefferson; all towns in Oregon. Imprint on verso states the Winter Photo Company is successors to Winter & Brown, Eugene City, Oregon, U.S.A. The Winter Photo Company was first located in Eugene, Oregon and was operated by Clarence L. Winter and Sue Dorris in 1891. From 1888-1900, Winter was the photographer of Oregon State University. In 1902, Clarence became partners with his wife, Frances D. and together they worked in Eugene until 1905. The studio moved to Portland, Oregon around 1911 and operated there till 1917. Winter was associated with the Kiser Photo Company between 1911-1914, and became its successor in 1917. Winter and his wife also ran a studio in Vancouver, Washington between 1920-1926. A number of times during his career, Winter was plagued with poor health. At one point he owned a sheep ranch in addition to a photography studio. Winter employed the bartering system in his business. One of his ads promises to trade portrait taking for firewood.
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[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Jon Wilks", "www.facebook.com" ]	2023-09-24T16:05:49+00:00	From Paul Simon to Billy Bragg to Stewart Lee; from Peggy Seeger to Eliza Carthy, some of Martin Carthy's biggest fans line up the questions.	en	https://i0.wp.com/tradfo…it=32%2C32&ssl=1	Tradfolk	https://tradfolk.co/customs/customs-interviews/not-so-rapid-fire-questions-with-martin-carthy/	Ahead of Martin Carthy’s ‘Remember Me to One Who Lives There’ tour, a selection of celebrity folk fans, family, and former collaborators put questions to the great man himself. Scroll down for minor interrogations from Paul Simon, Billy Bragg, Richard Thompson, Martin Simpson, Angeline Morrison, Eliza Carthy, Anaïs Mitchell, Stewart Lee, Peggy Seeger and so many more. It’s the life I’ve loved. I really did love that life. Martin Carthy Do you have a question you’d like to ask Martin on the tour? Click here, fill in the form and we’ll see what we can do… Billy Bragg: “You bought Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and Lonnie Dongan’s ‘Rock Island Line’ on the same day in 1957. Which of these two artists had the greater influence on your career?” Oh, certainly Lonnie. Probably because he wasn’t middle-aged and fat [laughs]. Although, mind you, Bill Haley had a fabulous lead guitarist called Franny Beecher. And he could play. He was way beyond my capabilities. But there was a real fire in what Lonnie did. A lot of people who know a lot about this stuff still can’t stand what he did to ‘Rock Island Line’, but I just say a great big thank you to him because he’s the one who launched that massive guitar explosion that happened in the mid-to-late 50s. Literally, millions of guitars were sold as a direct result of ‘Rock Island Line’ and the skiffle boom, which he was responsible for. There were others, too – people like the Chas McDevitt group with Nancy Whiskey. I used to live just across the road from Nancy Whiskey and would occasionally, accidentally, have my guitar in my hand as she walked past the house [laughs]. She was living with this very good boogie-woogie pianist called Bob Kelly. He swung like mad. Did you know Lonnie? No, I didn’t meet him until much later. He dismissed anything that I had to say, so I just let him be. He thought folkies were rubbish. He did a very good album much later on in his career, and the best track on it was ‘Diggin My Potatoes’. A fabulous version, which Brian May [and Elton John] played on. It’s very good indeed – the best version of ‘Diggin My Potatoes’ that ever was. It was very rude and the guitar on that was just sensational. Paul Simon: “Martin, who influenced your finger-picking style of guitar playing?” It would certainly be Elizabeth Cotten, or Libba Cotten as she was known. She had this wonderful way of playing that I could never understand. Her guitar playing was only discovered because she worked in the Seeger household. They only found out about it when they walked into the house and heard this gorgeous guitar playing. “Who’s put a record on? Who’s that a recording of?” And they sort of crept in and there was Libba sitting there with her back to them with the guitar the wrong way around. She was dreadfully embarrassed but they realized they had a find in their midst… I’m presuming. Maybe I’m over-romanticising it, but I think that’s the size of it. There was this person who lived in their midst that they didn’t know anything about. I think I figured out she played left-handed, but I didn’t understand that she played upside down. So you had to use your imagination to get a similar sound because everything’s upside-down and there are things that she can do that a right-handed person can’t do. How did you come across her? Was it ‘Freight Train’? Yeah, it was ‘Freight Train’. I read the article in the Daily Herald which said that Chas McDevitt had lost a lot of money because he claimed authorship of ‘Freight Train’ and it was registered to Elizabeth Cotten. He lost an awful lot of money from that. After reading that, I went into Dobell’s Record Shop on Charing Cross Road and there were millions of jazz records. Wonderful. Doug Dobel was great. He always had one box on the counter which was full of folk records. And I’m flipping through this and, “Oooh, a Folkways record. What’s this? Negro Folk Songs and Tunes sung by Elizabeth Cotten.” I knew she was the ‘Freight Train’ person, so I immediately snapped it up and took it home and then had a bit of a struggle playing it because we didn’t have a proper record player [laughs], but I think my parents borrowed one or something. I thought she was utterly wonderful and the guitar playing was totally enchanting. It was all in the touch and all in the feel. I think of her as my great influence. What’s your earliest memory of seeing Paul Simon? Do you remember watching him in any of folk clubs and coffee bars? I was told about him by this bloke, Paul McNeill. Paul had heard about Paul Simon, and he was admiring him because he was a proper songwriter. Paul Simon had phoned up the man who ran Brentwood Folk Club, a bloke called Dave, and had offered his services as a resident at his club. That’s the story, anyway, for five pounds a week. And Dave was going around saying, who is this man? Who’s this Paul Simon? Paul McNeill had seen him and he came to me and said, “Do you know anything about him? He’s a songwriter.” And I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of him.” He sang one or two of Paul Simon’s songs to me, and they were well-made songs. One of them might even have been ‘The Sound of Silence’, I don’t know. But he sang a couple of the songs and I was intrigued. It was very American thinking, but that’s no bad thing because the Americans could always perform. And I so said that to Paul McNeill, I said, “There’s a really good chance he’ll be a good performer because American kids learn to perform at school” – they learn to stand up in front of an audience and talk to them and sing and do a tap dance or whatever the hell they want to do. It’s part of the learning process at American schools and colleges. And he said, “What do I tell Dave?” I said, “Well, what you do is you tell him to accept it. If he’s good, keep him on. If he’s rubbish, sack him [laughs].” It seemed obvious to me. And he was a very good performer. I mean, very good, very solid. And he wrote all the time. He worked hard on his songwriting. I think I might have found out later that he had some sort of a deal with CBS and he’d been sent away to disappear so that he could then be launched on an unsuspecting world. Do you remember him having any interest in the traditional stuff, in the way that Bob Dylan was, or was he mainly a singer/songwriter? My feeling was that he was interested in the stuff we were all doing because traditional music was a part of his life, I suppose. He was well-equipped to sing in British folk clubs. Richard Thompson: “Martin was pretty much in at the ground floor when the folk club scene started up in the UK. I’d love to know his take on the various schools of thought at the time – Ewan McColl’s dogma, skiffle, clubs with no instruments allowed, socialism/communism, etc – and how that evolved through the decades to where we are now.” When I first saw Ewan, I went along to what was known as the Ballads and Blues Club. It was interesting because it was way before blues cut itself off from [pauses]… well, it depends how you view it… I think the blues people were kicked out of the folk revival, which is a shame because there were some great players. People like Wizz Jones had a huge repertoire that went across from trad English stuff to written stuff. He sang a few of Ewan’s songs and went right across into blues and jazz. He was a big fan of Ray Charles, as we all were, and of course Big Bill Broonzy. Blues was recognized by the left as a folk music, which was unusual at the time. Not to me, because I felt it was all folk music. I was pleasantly startled when I saw that there was a live recording of Pete Seeger with Big Bill Broonzy in a New York Club. But then Big Bill had a very wide repertoire. How did you feel about that dogmatic style that Ewan MacColl was known for? Well, it was just drawing a line somewhere that didn’t need to be drawn. I went and watched him do a show at the Cora Hotel which was home to Ballads and Blues for a short while. It was very self-absorbed, and I didn’t enjoy it at all. Somebody shouted from the audience, “Tell us a Charlie Penderleith story”. And he started talking about Charlie Penderleith and he told his story, which I just simply did not get. [It was like these people were] worshipping at someone’s altar. I didn’t take to it at all. And later on came this whole notion of only singing songs from your area and that skifflers were rubbish; all the younger generation of musicians were rubbish. And he beat that drum for quite a few years, famously on the BBC when he said that if you put electric instruments to folk music it’s rather like having a Beethoven quartet with three electric guitars and bongo drums, and that might be okay, but it’s not Beethoven. And I remember thinking, “doesn’t that rather depend on how good the bongo players and electric guitar players are?” Did Ewan ever come around to what you were doing? Well, the thing was that I took the guitar very seriously [but] we were all rubbish. All the guitar players apart from Wizz Jones, Steve Benbow and Davey Graham were rubbish players. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I could sometimes use the Big Bill Broonzy knowledge I’d picked up when I was in the Thameside Four in the backup guitar department. But when it came to singing, I wasn’t very good. I was very enthusiastic. In the very early days, I had that “Around the World on the Magic Carpet of My Guitar” repertoire, because that’s what people did. And then I disappointed a lot of people by suddenly ditching all of that and going for trad English, and that was on having heard Sam Larner. That was a serious moment in my life. That was a life-changing thing. And Ewan was in the driving seat for the whole evening and he never sang once. He wanted everybody to hear his number one working-class hero, who was this 80-year-old man – Sam – who had been singing with Ewan for the last two or three days. Sam’s voice was tired, but was not tired was the spirit and the passion of the whole thing. I was completely blown out of my chair by what he did. Ewan was very skillful and very, very good at showing what this person could mean. He’d heard him sing at his very, very best, which he still could do. I think Ewan was too excited to have his favorite next to him and they just sang to each other for a couple of days, maybe three days, I don’t know how long, but Sam was staying with him and he was a stone cold gas. He was utterly wonderful the whole way. Ewan would suggest a song and I would think, “Oh, I know that because I know my English Folk Songs for Schools.” And he would start to sing the song and it was nothing like English Folk Songs for Schools. It was much more rough and tumble and a lot more fun. Fascinating, musically, because I had a good sense of pitch. And when he finished up with his ‘Henry Martin/ Lofty Tall Ship’ song, I was absolutely thunderstruck. I thought, what kind of a tune is that? I was suddenly faced with this idea that just because you’re English, it doesn’t mean you’re going to understand English music. Martin Carthy You have to remember, this is the 1950s and pop music was, god bless him, Dicky Valentine or anybody like that – “I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue toothbrush, will you marry me one day?” and crap like that. It was a wonderful growing-up moment when I first heard Sam Larner sing and doing stuff with all that complexity. I remember walking down the street singing bits of the tune that he had just sung. God, how many tunes were there? There were two distinct tunes to ‘Lofty Tall Ship’ [Roud 104], and with the second one, there were variations that just left me gasping. There was a shape there, but I was damned if I could get it. I didn’t get it until much later on. I’d sing a bit of a line myself, saying, “What kind of a tune is that?” This is a tune – this is a traditional tune – this is an old tune. And there was a complexity there that bewildered me, and I was suddenly faced with this idea that just because you’re English, it doesn’t mean you’re going to understand English music. This was an utterly different beast. I was completely turned upside down by Sam Larner and I wanted it; I wanted that. I knew that was the fountainhead, if you like. Did you get to speak to Sam? I was much too shy. What was I going to ask him? “Where did you learn that song?” [fakes a goofy laugh]. He just gave everything he’d got to the evening and it was a lesson in passion. Ewan joined in, to a certain extent, but never tried to overshadow Sam. So I had seen two entirely separate and utterly confusing versions of Ewan: this person who was preening himself in front of an audience at the Cora Hotel and made me angry and just dismissive, and this man who gave the whole evening without allowing any kind of ego in the way. To go back to Richard’s question, he asked also about the introduction of instruments into folk clubs. The likes of Ewan were very strict about there being no instruments in those early days. Were there certain musicians on the scene who were like, “We’re going to bring our instruments in”? Well, there was me! I was one of them. I had fallen in love with the guitar. Everything I did, everything I learned, I would eventually perform when I could play it. And sometimes I had to wait 20 years. ‘Lofty Tall Ship’ was always there. ‘Dream of Napoleon’ [Roud 1538] was always there. ‘What was the other one? ‘Bonny Woodhall’ [Roud 3778], which I learned from Geordie Hamilton. He had this wonderful high, tenor voice. When he sang ‘Bonny Woodhall’, he came to me and he said, “You should learn this song, son. Learn it! Learn it!” [Prods the air with a finger] And then he sat down. I swear to God, that’s what happened. I’d seen him doing the same thing to other people. He loved to give his songs away. He’d sing his songs at someone, you’d get one shot and he would just drive the song into your brain. This was probably 1961. I always had that song in the back of my mind. When you took that guitar into the folk clubs in the early days, was there quite a lot of shock and horror? Well, you were ignored. I couldn’t really play. I remember I actually sang at the Cora Hotel one night and I hadn’t taken a guitar with me. And Bruce Dunnet, the man who sat on the door at the Ballads and Blues and later on at the Singers Club, said, “You’re singing your song tonight.” I said, “I haven’t got a guitar.” “Fitzroy will lend you his.” This is Fitzroy Coleman, who was a fabulous jazz guitarist, and Ewan would have him at his side accompanying some of his songs. He wrote his own calypsos and some of them were hilarious. He’s just a very funny man and a really gorgeous guitar player with a really light touch. So I went up and I looked at Fitzroy and I said, “Can I use your guitar?” And he looked at me and he grinned. And I should have been warned by the grin. He handed me the guitar and I played this song that was a sailor’s return song that was so romantic, and I had this way of playing it. And he sat there and he watched me, and on the last verse I did one little guitar change and I couldn’t get it right. I saw his head drop down and he started to laugh very quietly to himself. I managed to finish the song and Ewan was very dismissive of it. He wasn’t nasty, he just dismissed it. And I handed the guitar back to Fitzroy and he just turned the neck towards me and he pointed. And between the first and third strings there was his plectrum, just parked on the first fret. I was doing all right until I had to play that last chord. “What the hell?” I couldn’t understand what was going on. And of course, he found it hysterical. Why didn’t I feel it straight away? I was just too busy concentrating. I think I was deafened by the sound of my own knees knocking [laughs]. Martin Simpson: “I’m thinking of influences that you have absorbed, which may not be generally known nowadays. Would you talk a little bit about Bill Broonzy’s thumb? And Hedy West’s ‘Kate and the Cowhide’?” Big Bill Broonzy was the person who made me want to play the guitar in the first place. Play it, as I thought, properly. I could never get my tonsils around the singing but I could do a pretty good Big Bill Broonzy imitation on the guitar. He would do that wonderful hard-driving blues; he used to do that thumb thing and tramp down on the low strings. He swung like mad. But he could also do extraordinarily subtle stuff, too. His timing was absolutely exquisite. He never dropped or gained a beat. He was fabulous. Did you see him live, Big Bill? No, I never saw him. I just heard him on record. I knew people who’d been to see him. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know where to look for anywhere that he might be. I knew that he’d been in England and he would, in all probability, come again. But I didn’t know how to ask. I would have gone. But Big Bill Broonzy’s thumb… I took that into my playing and consciously used it when I was singing ‘Gallant Poacher’ [Roud 793]. And I had a way of playing it and then I started to actually use the thumb as a beat, using the fingers to play the melody. So that comes from Bill? Yeah. So, every time I play a tune and I’m using that thumb thing and I think, “Damn it, I’m ripping off Martin Carthy again,” I’m actually ripping off Big Bill Broonzy? Yeah! It wasn’t exactly the same, but that’s his derivation, certainly. I’m always delighted when I go and watch Wizz Jones because, just occasionally, he’ll drop into it. He could do Big Bill Broonzy like that [clicks his fingers]. Still can. And he does it very occasionally because he has this fabulously wide repertoire. I’m still full of admiration for Wizz because he soldiered on throughout, busked when he needed to, gave up gigging when there wasn’t anything around and drove trucks for a living. He never gave up the guitar Is there a Big Bill Broonzy song that people should go and listen to as an example of where you got that idea from? ‘Guitar Shuffle’ was one, or ‘When I Been Drinking‘. That’s one of his. What about the Hedy West influence? Where does that come in? The ‘Kate and the Cowhide Story’… yes. When Swarb and I joined up in 1966, one of the first things we did was this little tour around Sheffield, then he went off to Denmark to be with his new true love, and then he brought her back. We started working together and over a week we constructed a repertoire. One of the early gigs we got was a British Council gig to Skopje in what’s now known as North Macedonia. There had been a very serious earthquake and the countries that had sent aid were invited to a festival every year to say thank you. Britain had sent aid so we were selected. We were the new boys on the block as far as the British Council was concerned. They knew that Swarb could play, and I was one of the young guitar players who was around, but they didn’t know whether I was any good or not so they consulted with Fontana Records, who had signed me, and I had made an album for them which was very highly thought of. Anyway, we were in a theatre, and I was looking across because it was semi-dark – it was the auditorium, so the lights were on on the stage – and I remember looking across a couple of rows and I thought, “I know that face”. There was a moment of silence, and I yelled, “Hedy!’ And this person jumped and looked across and it was Hedy West. She had just made the journey from Sofia in Bulgaria because she used to spend quite a lot of time in Eastern Europe because she loved the music. She had a habit of playing with the time signatures of songs that she was learning from the Appalachians. One of the songs she was playing at the time was a version of the ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ [Roud 1], and there was a chorus at the end of it that had an extra beat. She always used to play the extra beat and I was really excited by that because I thought most people would have regularized it. But she was really hooked on this. She loved the idea that you could do that, and it was an American tradition. The guy who sang it did that every time. We just chummed up – Swarb, myself and Hedy – and we went out and spent some time by the river. There were these big rock pools full of frogs, and occasionally they poked their heads above the water. I was absolutely fascinated by this. I was spending time trying to see where the next one would come up. Hedy was hugely impressed by my patience [laughs]. But there was one tune that she was playing because I asked her about this ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ song. I can’t remember if it had a 5/4 bar at the end of it or a 7/4 bar. Could have been a seven. Whatever it was, it was the same every time and sounded absolutely wonderful. And it was natural. It hadn’t been forced on it in any way. That was the way the song went, and she was being faithful to it. So, then she started talking about this album that she and Cyril Tawney were planning of unthought-of songs, because there was a whole lot of stuff in the American repertoire that people wouldn’t touch because it’s hard, and she wanted to do this album of some of the lesser-known Child ballads. Cyril went straight to Baring-Gould and dug out some songs and there was this song that she knew as ‘Kate and the Cowhide’, and Cyril knew it as ‘The Maid of Colchester’. But it was the melody that Hedy was messing with, which she’d learned from a little collection of songs from Utah. The tune was not very interesting but what Hedy did was to take it and start messing with its time signature. She started off in 2/4 and went through 3/4 and it’s not interesting, then 4/4, and then she just started going into the fives and the sixes, which can be fascinating, and the sevens. She got through them and she thought they were all right and she’d reached nine. So what she actually played was the tune that Swarb used, eventually, for Fairport Convention’s version of ‘Matty Groves’ – that tune they used as a playout, which I used for ‘Famous Flower of Serving Men’. And I played the right! [Laughs] With Swarb’s version, the last measure was not nine, it was eight or something. I sang it to Hedy five years later. She said, “You use that tune! You play it!” So I played it and she said, “That’s not the way I play it now.” I think she did it in a twelve – a very odd twelve from somewhere in the Balkans. Ian A. Anderson: “We once sat up half the night trying to transcribe Lord Buckley’s, ‘The Gasser’. How did you first come across his recordings, and would you recommend a thorough grounding in his works to the youth of today?” Yes, indeed I would. It’s the beginning of jive talk! I first heard of Lord Buckley through Redd Sullivan. He knew bits and pieces of it. I believe that what he knew ended up driving, I think ended up driving Billy Connolly’s version of Jesus and the disciples, where they were all from the Gallagate, instead of Galilee. I’ve never asked him, but I bet he knows Lord Buckley, because Buckley’s version of the Jesus Christ story is just extraordinary: ‘The Nazz’! Where does one start with Lord Buckley, then? Well, ‘The Nazz’. That’s one way. That’s one of his signature pieces. There was one called ‘Nero‘, which was wonderful. It’s sensational. I’ve got a couple of his albums. One of them, one I love, is slightly damaged. It’s heartbreaking. He also did one called ‘The Hip Gahn‘, which was about Gandhi. He would expand it all the time, improvising. I’ve still got the records. I’ve forgotten most of it, but anything by Lord Buckley is worth investigating. Lisa Knapp: “When it feels right, where do you go when you sing? Where is your head at?” Well, these days it goes to the words; what the words can do to the melody. And it’s not anything particularly radical. Sometimes I get the notion to have some fun and it’s details more than anything when you’ve got that freedom; when everything is going dead right and you really do get the feeling that anything can happen, everything sits down properly. Anaïs Mitchell: “Some old songs fall by the wayside, while others will be sung forever. What do you think gives a song its staying power?” It’s honesty. It’s straightforwardness. It’s an insistence on the truth, whatever you think the truth is. It never compromises. You must tell the truth. And I suppose, when people say to you, “Oh, you can’t sing about those things anymore”, then not to sing those things is to not be telling the truth, right? Yeah. Absolutely. [But] I’ve sung songs with tunes that I’m not terribly happy with because I enjoyed playing it. I used to enjoy playing ‘Lucy Wan’ [Roud 234], and I’ve really messed about with that a lot. Swarb and I did a version of it that I think is pretty good. And I think Bert Lloyd, who, in my view, made that tune or made the basis of that tune because I messed about with it a lot – a fierce amount of variation on his basically very simple tune, which I don’t think he was ever happy with. He might well have been as dismayed at my messing with his ‘Lucy Wan’ as I am with the people who messed with my ‘Famous Flower of Serving Men’ [Roud 199], introducing the irrelevance of a stepmother. It’s irrelevant. The truth of the matter is that a mother did it. It’s the cruel mother. It’s not the cruel stepmother. And I’ve angered a couple of guys by trying to insist that because they simply won’t accept it, saying it’s got to be the stepmother. Well, that, for me, is a huge step along the path towards panto – the horrible stepmother and ugly sisters. They can’t be pretty. They’ve got to be ugly. Yeah? Go away. Emily Portman: “I’d love to hear what your current favorite songs to play are. I’m interested to know if they’re long-standing favorites or newly unearthed songs.” The one I’m battling to get back is ‘Bill Norrie’ [Roud 53]. I have to get that back. I’ve just got to be brave and stand up and do it. I lost it during three years of lockdown when I lost gigs right, left and centre… which I never canceled. I canceled no gigs at all unless I was ill. When you say you have to be brave and get on with singing a song, is the bravery in the feeling that you might mess it up? Well, it’s a complex tune. It’s in 12/8, which absolutely knocked Andy Irvine out when he heard it. He said, “My God, you’re doing a 2-2-3-2-3, aren’t you?” And I said, “Hang on a minute…” [counts on his fingers] “Yes, I am, that’s right!” [Laughs] Because I just made up this tune and I tried it in 7/4 and I tried it in 5/4 and I couldn’t make up my mind. So I just basically stuck the two together and then enjoyed it enormously because it’s wonderful to play. But on a whim one night, I cut out most of the guitar playing. I just simplified it right down to as close to nothing as I could get, and it worked wonderfully well. So I did it that way from then on, and then just when I got used to it, the pandemic happened. How many years did it take before it embedded itself then, do you think? 10 years, I’d say. Maybe longer. I was just simplifying it all the time. And what you’re doing all the way through is basically hypnotizing yourself, and then you find you simply cannot lose time. But when doubt comes in, then you are screwed. I’ve just got to get past that and just do it. Anyway, that’s the one I love. In a sense, I was given that one because I had volume three of Child out and it fell open on this page. I looked at the top right-hand corner, and I saw this line. It said, “If I hadn’t known him as your son, he would not have been killed by me.” And I said, “Who the hell are you?” I flicked back a few pages and thought, “I’m having you” [laughs]. “How did I miss you?” It was just a wonderful moment. And when you have these magic moments, you’ve got to follow them. Peggy Seeger: “When you’re committing a long ballad to memory, do you ever add words, phrases or whole verses of your own composition?” And every time I sang that verse, I got that little prickle up the back of the neck, thinking, “You lucky, lucky sod”. Martin Carthy Yes. I can think of one straight away: ‘Sir Patrick Spens’. The really extraordinary thing is, I was quite sure that there was a single-verse version, which I needed, and I knew where it was. And I went to Bronson and I turned the pages, I found the one-verse version, and this other verse came into my head and I wrote it down and shut the book. I couldn’t find my verse after that. I went looking for it just so I could be honest and say, “Yeah, I pinched this verse”. The verse was, “And there come a girl from the north-northeast/ So loud, so loud it weep/ It cried, Patrick Spens and all of his men/ Are drowning in the deep”. It just came as a piece and I went looking for it but it wasn’t there. That’s the sort of thing that happens: little moments of magic when you’re desperately looking. It doesn’t always happen. You bang your head against a brick wall for ages sometimes, but when it arrives, it’s a moment of triumph. And every time I sang that verse, I got that little prickle up the back of the neck, thinking, “You lucky, lucky sod”. It’s one of those wonderful things that can happen when you believe. John Kirkpatrick: “Some of the long ballads that you’ve done were supported by massive guitar parts full of huge chords and tonnes of energy. I’m thinking of ‘Prince Heathen’. ‘Long John, Old John and Jackie North’, ‘Famous Flower’. How do you feel when you listen to those recordings again? Do you wish that you’d done any of them differently at the time? And do you feel that you’re doing them more in a more laid-back manner these days?” Swarb was a tune magnet. The human magnet. Martin Carthy I’d say I do all of them much more slowly now. That’s partly to do with being an old git, I think, because it’s bloody hard work playing at that speed. I’m always astonished at how quick ‘Prince Heathen’ [Roud 3336] was on the album. I did it with Swarb. That was a magic moment because, in those days, Swarb and I never rehearsed. I remember with ‘Prince Heathen’, I leaned it and we were playing at Chelmsford Folk Club. I leaned in and said, “Well, it’s in a sort of D-minor but there’s a G in the bass – you’ll get it, you’ll see it”. And he tuned a couple of strings down and we started to play. He stopped after a bit and he adjusted the tuning and I carried on playing. He could pick up a tune easily. He was a tune magnet. The human magnet. He never had any problem learning a song or tune. Further into the song, he stopped again, tuned a bit, and at the end of the song, he said, “Write these notes down”, which was the tuning he was in. I wrote them all down. I said, “Is that right?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s it. Don’t lose that piece of paper”. So I put it in the guitar case, nice and safe. And I think the next day we did it. He altered one string very slightly – that’s my memory of it, anyway. He had found the tuning during the nine minutes, or whatever it was it took to sing that song. You’ve got different versions of songs that you did in the past, like ‘Scarborough Fair’, which is a newer version now, and ‘Geordie’ versus ‘Georgie’. Is that partly due to getting older and choosing slower versions, or is it a matter of taste; do you still find inspiration in finding these alternative versions? It’s a bit of both, really. I heard Jim Eldon sing a version of ‘Georgie’ [Roud 90]. As a result of hearing it like that, I still called it ‘Geordie’. It was something about the pace at which he took the song that really spoke to me. So I tried that and always credited him with the idea. It became something particularly radical because I started hearing other things and trying to include them. But it was hearing Levi Smith sing ‘Georgie’ was one of those revelatory moments, like Sam Larner. That melody that he sings… [shakes head in wonder]. And then I heard his brother doing it, and there were a couple of variations that he slung in that just spoke loud and clear. “Go on, have a go at that. Try and play that.” I just love Jasper’s version. A fabulous, gorgeous piece of music. I sang that a couple of times to Sheema Mukherjee. She went bananas and was like, “What’s that? What’s that? Play it again!” She was knocked sideways by it. She’s a fabulously sophisticated musician. There’s a sophistication in what a sitar player does that is beyond anything you and I do. I just love her. She understands. I played her ‘Lofty Tall Ship’. I think of that as a complex tune but she got it straight away. Going back to John’s list of songs… ‘Long John, Old John and Jackie North’ [Roud 3100]. I made that up. I was sitting in bed thinking, “I want to do ‘Long John’. When I first heard it sung, it was Robert Williamson who sang it, and it was just fabulous. Different melodies, all that, but it was the story that was so fabulous and I just started messing with the Francis James Child version on the inside back page of Child. I actually wrote down a version of the song and looked at it and decided just to do it. But at some point after I’d recorded it, I was never satisfied with it. And at one point Roy Palmer phoned up and he wanted to print ‘Long John’ in a book of British ballads, and I said, “I’ve now got a last verse”, which is the way it’s printed in the book – I don’t sing it on the recorded version because it came later. It just completes the whole thing, and it’s lovely. I love to sing it and, giving it that last verse, it just wraps the whole thing up with a nice tidy bow, and it became a real favorite. I have loved doing it and I will start doing it again. It’s an absolutely enchanting song to sing. It really is, because it’s such fun. Everybody has such a good time. Yeah, I was very pleased with that one and slowed it down slightly, I think. Peter Knight: “Back in the day, we both found ourselves in Steeleye Span at the same time. When I look back at my time with the band, I think mainly about the music. Please to See the King… that was not bad at all. We worked hard. Your guitar riff that brought out the beauty of ‘Lovely on the Water’ – I remember the moment you came up with it to this day. Thank you. When you look back at your time with the band, as a man and a musician, what sort of thoughts and memories do you have, and where does Steeleye figure within your life’s journey?” Well, Please to See The King was a magic moment and remains for me a magic moment. Sometimes I think some of it is a tad clumsy, but nah, I just remember the magic. ‘Cold, Hailey, Windy Night’ [Roud 135]… the version that we did on that record is the best version I’ve ever done of that song. And it was because of Maddy Prior’s harmony. She’s a miraculous harmony singer. She just produced this mind-blowing second part. That’s why we’ll always be mates [laughs]. We just came together like that and produced the goods. My time in that band was incredibly happy and incredibly productive. I am delighted whenever I look back on it. We had Peter! I said it to at least one member of the band, it might have been Ashley, “When we’re singing on stage and we’re having trouble hearing, I always look across to Peter and I listen to what he’s doing.” His intonation was just about perfect. Want to be in tune? Follow Peter. I told him that just the other week at Sidmouth Folk Festival and he was all Mr. Bashful. But it’s true. He had all that drilling from the Royal College and he drilled himself when he was learning Irish music. He had a wonderful understanding of the complexity of trad music and he just went for it. I just remember him standing there, absolutely bolt upright, never leaning over the fiddle, just playing. Reg Hall heard that band at the National Festival one year and I walked past him and he looked at me and he said, “God, that’s fabulous.” Jim Moray: “When you joined Steeleye Span, you played a bright blue Telecastler through a huge Fender amp. Had anyone suggested going electric before then? And have you been tempted to play electric guitar since? I can imagine an electric version of Brass Monkey sounding really good.” Well, by the time I got into Brass Monkey, I’d run into a brick wall on the guitar and I started playing mandolin a lot, which is why some of those arrangements are so very different. John and I would work them out beforehand. Our signature piece, ‘The Maid and the Palmer’ [Roud 2335], John and I worked out as John drove and I was messing around on the mandolin. I was producing little bits. “How’s that, John?” “I can play that. It’s easy for me. I can do that. We’ll have a go at it.” It was a development of the version that we did on that live album that Steeleye did [Live at Last] towards the end of my second time around with them. What we did in Brass Monkey was a development of that. By that time we had the brass, we had two fabulous players, and we had people who were actually hungry for it. We were all of us, really hungry for the possibilities that Brass Monkey was offering us. We were doing something that nobody had tried before. I’ve been having a great time just learning, learning and learning, and I’m a much better player for it. Martin Carthy Have you ever been tempted to go back to the electric? Do you ever get it out or are you purely acoustic now? I did briefly. I think it’s on Because It’s There. I think that’s the one where I did a version of ‘Lovely Joan’ and I did it on the guitar because I’d recently started playing the guitar in the tuning I’m using now. At one point I picked up the electric guitar and worked out something that I could play. And it’s momentary. Momentarily, I revisited the electric guitar, and played something in a particular way that I’d not thought of before. Had anyone suggested, or had you thought of using an electric before you joined Steeleye? Well, it was the fact that I was joining an electric band and it seemed the right thing to do. I went into Sound City and I bought that blue electric guitar. I asked Ashley, “What should I play? Should I play a Stratocaster?” And he said, “No, I think you should play a Telecaster. You and the Telecaster seemed to go together.” And I just took his advice and I spent £110 on this bright blue secondhand Telecaster, and I bought a lead with it. I just turned up and just turned it on and tuned it to my tuning. Stefan Grossman said, “Ah, within six months, you’ll be in normal tuning, playing just like everybody else”. I said to myself, “No’. But I did a very disappointing teaching album. I didn’t know enough about this tuning. I didn’t know enough about the electric guitar. I didn’t know enough about anything on this particular trip I’ve been on for the last 40 years, or whatever it is. I’ve been having a great time just learning, learning and learning, and I’m a much better player for it. Do you still have that blue Telecaster? No, it ended up with Steeleye. I left it with Steeleye and they assumed that it was theirs. I left it behind because the band was skint. Daragh Lynch: “Martin once told me that he came up with a tuning that was one or two steps away from DADGAD, which he then showed to Davey. And then Davey ended up devising DADGAD. So I guess my question is, (A) what was that original tuning, and (B) how does he feel about being somewhat responsible for a guitar style in an entire genre of music (traditional Irish)?” Actually, I could never get on with DADGAD. It just drove me nuts. If I wanted to change the key, I had to stick on a capo. There are people who can make it make sense, but I’m not one of them. So what I did was I went all mechanical. The thing about Davey, I said to myself, is he loves to play on the top four strings and you like to play on the middle four strings. So let’s mess about with that tuning, shall we? What I did was to shift the whole thing over so that 123456 became 2345, and 6 is no good because it’s way down your boots somewhere. I ended up with DADEAE and I started messing about with it and, whoa, I could play in two keys. Actually, Davey took this tuning for a recording he did for Stefan Grossman. I played like that for a while. In fact, that’s how I played in Steeleye both times and enjoyed it enormously. But then I got obsessed with learning how to play ‘Lovely Joan’ [Roud 592], because it always nagged at me that I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Swarb sort of said, “Oh, we’ll just do it. Just play some chords and we’ll just do it anyway.” And I did that on the first album but I was never satisfied with it and we never did it in public. Swarb used to love the tune, so when I could play it [in a way that I liked it] I’d often just throw it in for fun. By that time I’d gone to work on it. I’d had an all-nighter tuning the guitar, and I found out that I could play DADEAB and I could actually play ‘Lovely Joan’. And I played it to myself, got up on stage and immediately strangulated myself because I couldn’t sing that high. We had Chris Foster staying with us around that time, and he always practiced every morning. I remember asking him, “What have you done with your fifth string? Is that tuned down to G?” And he said, “Yeah”. I said, “Heavy gauge string?” And he said, “Yeah”. And I thought, “Oh” [laughs]. So I went, I tuned my guitar, everything down a whole step. So instead of being DADEAB, I was in CGCDGA. And I could sing it. I was absolutely ecstatic. Answer to all my prayers! Wonderful. I figured that out in the late 70s and that’s where I’ve stayed ever since. Finn Curran-Carthy: “Grandad, is your guitar tuning for professional purposes or do you just want to be special?” [Sits speechless for a minute, mouth agog, then roars with laughter]. Yeah, I like the idea of being different. I do. I heard about DADGAD in the 1960s and found it impossible. I started working on something that worked very well for a while and then didn’t work. It needed adjusting and then readjusting, and that became absolutely exciting. It was exciting to want to be different. And this actually seemed to work. And it has become your tuning, hasn’t it? When I came and visited you in Yorkshire recently, you were showing me your tuning and you were saying, “I show this to a lot of people and I hope that they can take it and do something with it.” But the trouble is, the second that you actually put your guitar into that tuning, there’s only one person you’re copying. I’ve had my guitar in your tuning for a few weeks recently and I’ve been playing around with it and enjoying it. But really, it’s your tuning. It belongs to the boss. [Laughs] There must be other things that can happen in that tuning. There must be. Actually, it’s like telling a cello player that you can only do things in CGDA. I just happen to have another C and another G. Eliza Carthy: “Can we have a new washing machine, please?” [Laughs] Yes, my darling. Yes. Just go out and buy it. Wave a piece of paper at them and they’ll rush to deliver it. Eliza Carthy: “The serious question is this: people always ask me what advice you gave me when I was starting out and my response is always a silly one. You and I both know what the answer to that was. But now that Finn is starting to play music, what piece of non-silly advice would you offer him?” Never stop. There’s always something else around the corner that will jump up and bite you on the bum. It will happen. And I think Finn is hungry. He’s playing one of the electrics – a bit on the acoustic, too, but he does like the electric. Are you showing him stuff? No, he’s messing about himself and finding out things that fascinate him. He’s got great taste in music. Do you think he’s starting to realize that the family has a bit of a legacy that he can explore? Oh, God, yeah. I think he is. There’s a musician in there. There really is. And he wants it. Peggy was telling me that I ought to be teaching him this, the tuning. He’ll go his own way. He’s fascinated by music. If he ever comes to a gig with me, I watch him. And he’s got a wonderful stillness about him. He really does. And if he’s got that, that’s precious. If he wants me to show him anything that I do, I will do it. I’m feeling that he’s waiting for the beast to come and bite. I’ve got high hopes for him. I started out with no idea, you know, and I just did it. See where it takes you. It’s a fabulous journey. Nick Hart: “Your particular approach to accompanying traditional songs has inspired countless musicians over the years (myself included). How easily do you spot your influence in other peoples’ playing? Do you mind that we’re all ripping you off?” [Laughs] No, I’m delighted! I think I found something, and what I really love is if people take the idea and run with it. That’s when it gets exciting. Also, you’ve got to start learning somewhere. So if people are learning things exactly… maybe I can help. Because there are certain technical tricks that make life easier. Such as? What I what I would say to anybody is, don’t play too much. Do an instrumental if you want to show off a bit, but [these traditional songs] are not really show-off stuff. It’s meant to intrigue. In terms of your approach, then, although you have a very kind of idiosyncratic guitar style, it’s always the song that comes first rather than the guitar playing. Oh, yeah. I cut back on things and made all sorts of discoveries on the way. I’m very fond of unison, so I love the idea that part of the guitar work is an occasional interjection, if you like, playing what’s being sung. It sort of underlines, hopefully, how clever the song is, how clever the tune is, because some of them are astonishing. I’m sort of still working on ‘Creeping Jane’ [Roud 1012] because, for me, it’s very exciting to play. But I don’t want to get too excited because you can end up with a great tangle, which doesn’t help anybody. You seem to be reducing and reducing and simplifying your guitar all the time. Isn’t there a danger that you end up with no guitar at all? [Laughs] Yeah. But keeping it simple can be fascinating. And do you spot your influence in other people? When you hear other people playing in your style, are you like, “I know where you got that from.” I think I’ve noticed it a couple of times. And I just think, “That’s somebody who actually gets it.” Which is great. Somebody’s been listening closely. Yesterday, I had a visit from a young guitarist called Henry Parker. He wasn’t in my tuning; he was in a sort of DADGAD, I think. But the guitar was ringing so much that it sort of started to interfere. And I sort of said, as nicely as I could, “I think you need to simplify that.” And he basically said, “I don’t know how.” I said, “Well, use your left hand more.” I was watching him do it and I thought, “You’re a clever bugger, but I enjoy the silences as well.” What I forgot to say to him was to go off and steal from fiddle players. Watch their left hand. It’s fascinating because you nick stuff off their bowing technique as well. There’s all sorts of stuff you can take from fiddle players, but you’ve got to turn it upside down. You can’t always do it with one hand, you have to do it with some of the other hand, too. Get in there and see what you can imitate in their bowing hand, too. The person I always think of is Kevin Burke. Norma and I went to see him in Boston (I think), and he was playing in a small place. I was watching his left hand and it was just fantastic – the things he was getting out of the fiddle. It’s always in my mind when I think about my left hand; Kevin Burke is there in my mind. Debbie Armour: “You are such a prolific artist and collaborator. Which of your albums or projects do you think gives the best overview of who you are as a musician? On which album do you get to do and say all the important stuff?” The first album. I love it. I would do most of the stuff happily still, and a lot of it will be different because I’m older. I think you should follow your heart. I mean, it’s just a dumb thing to say but trust yourself. That said, I made some terrifying mistakes. When I think about Shearwater, the album on which you’ll find ‘Famous Flower’, it’s also the album on which you’ll find the worst version of ‘William Taylor’ [Roud 158]. I think about it now and I think, “Why on earth did you let that go? You should have worked a bit harder on that one.” I always stand by the first album, though. And a lot of the second one, because there was a bit of adventure creeping in there. I’d taken DADGAD and I’d given it a great kick up the bum and produced ‘Peggy and the Soldier’ [Roud 907], which I’ll stand by. But the first album I love because I’d had all that time. Five years of work had gone into that. Mind you, I think I’m singing far too fast. Why do you think you were doing that? Were you nervous in the studio? Well, there’s always more than one take. And as I did more than one take, it did tend to speed up a bit. But I did sing a lot faster in those days. The version of ‘High Germany’ [Roud 904] is really quite fast. I sing it now at a snail’s pace. It gives it a different gravitas, doesn’t it? Yeah. It’s an old fella singing it now. And I’m very happy with it these days. I love variation, melodic variation especially because I took to heart the fact that Cecil Sharp did not like recording. He did a bit of recording but his remark about it, which is really very revealing about his thinking, was that writing things down is much better because you always get a better sense of the tune. And the thing about a lot of those old-fashioned singers is that there isn’t a [single] tune. Every verse is often very slightly and sometimes quite phenomenally different. And if you want proof of that, go and listen to that wonderful version of, ‘The Banks of the Nile‘ [Roud 5386; early 20th, recorded by Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, singer unknown, archived at Cecil Sharp House]. My cylinder recording of it breaks off and I made something up for the last verse, which I think I did a fairly good job of. I’m very happy with that. But it’s incredibly complex and it goes from a minor key into the major at one point. In fact, I think it’s in the last verse that he sings. It’s a fabulous piece of music. Your first album is coming out again, isn’t it? Yes, it is. They’re doing it on vinyl. And how does that make you feel? I’m proud of that first album because it reflects what I was thinking at the time. I was very excited at being in that Phillips Fontana recording studio, over by Marble Arch. Was it your first time in a studio? In a big studio, yes. My producer was a fellow called Terry Brown, who was the most long-suffering and good person, and he’d retired from music. He’d got out of gigging and gone into recording. And he was, at his time, the foremost bebop trumpeter. If I sang anything that was weird, he loved it. It was fascinating for him. And he was the most hands-off producer I ever had. He left you to get on with it. He produced everything up to and including Prince Heathen, which was when I was doing a bit of a tiny bit of multi-tracking, and I was ever so pleased with that. I did ‘Famous Flower of Serving Men’ in one take. My memory of it is that it was the first time I’d ever sung it straight through. Martin Carthy Have you always enjoyed recording? Is it a process that you like? Yeah, it’s really quite exciting. The fact that you can do what the hell you like… although it meant that, eventually, I made some colossal mistakes. But I also took fabulous risks. I mean, I did ‘Famous Flower of Serving Men’ in one take. My memory of it is that it was the first time I’d ever sung it straight through. When I hear it now, it seems to me that the tempo is absolutely solid all the way through. It doesn’t speed up or anything. Incredible. Any other albums you remember well? I’m very happy with Because It’s There, and I’m pretty happy with Skin and Bone because it reflects what Swarb and I were doing at the time. I’m very fond of bits of Signs Of Life, because I was playing with Eliza, and I love playing with Liza. Also, the opening line of that Bee Gees track [‘New York Mining Disaster, 1941’] we do, “In the event of something happening to me”. Woah! What a way to introduce a song! Sorry, Debbie… that’s such a long list! Stewart Lee: “In the late 80s, early 90s, when I started touring and doing gigs, I waited on the same wintery railway platform as you at Doncaster on a couple of occasions, but did not bother you as I would have looked like a mad fan. I saw an itinerant folksinger in the wild. You always had on a big coat and a guitar on your back, and looked to me the romantic ideal of the compact travelling artist, veteran and legend, which I found very inspiring. Of course, you were still in your 40s probably, younger than I am now! But I wonder if you had a sense of that being the life you dreamed of, and any tips for keeping on keeping on?” Any tips for keeping on keeping on? Don’t forget the words and don’t get run over! Martin Carthy Number one, don’t even think about retiring! That is something I’m dealing with right now. My problem is that I do love a live audience. That is why I’ve always backed the folk clubs, because they might be little and scruffy (or slightly larger and scruffy), but it’s the real thing. It’s the real deal in front of real people. And you can’t go wrong. You’ve just got to engage them and lay stuff on them that they’d never thought of listening to before. And ‘Prince Heathen’ was one of those. I remember first standing up and singing ‘Prince Heathen’ and saying to people, “This isn’t a jolly chorus song, so I’m asking you not to join in the chorus – it’s trying to say something quite important.” I didn’t use those words, but that was where my head was at then. Other than that, it’s a great life. It’s a huge privilege. All you’ve got to do is get [to the venue] and just do your job. Don’t forget the words and don’t get run over [Laughs]! It’s a fabulous privilege. At the beginning of all that, I was living in London and then when [first wife] Dorothy and I moved out, we moved to Warminster, which meant I spent more time on other people’s spare beds or on their sofas. And you still do, don’t you, amazingly? You’ll still quite happily be hosted by people when you gig. I get put in hotels these days. OK, it’s certainly a change of life, but I much prefer to be hosted. You like the chat? Well, yeah, that was always a thing. But you were all on the same level. People trusted you to do your best. It’s where Billy Connolly came from, and Mike Harding. So, the first part of Stewart’s question was, did you have a sense of that being the life you dreamed of? It’s the life I’ve loved. I really did love that life. Angeline Morrison: “You’re one of the group of folk revivalists of the 1960s who are so deeply influential on our generation. Do you ever think about what it would be like if that generation of 60s folk musicians were falling in love with the old songs now in today’s world?” Well, they are. That’s one of the nice things about it. The young people do like those old songs. It puzzles me, though, that I can’t change the mindset of the ones I look on as the younger singers. They look on me and my mates as the examples to follow. So a lot of them are not interested in who I think of as the old singers. OK, I’m an old singer now, but you know what I mean. People like Joseph Taylor, Sam Larner, Harry Cox. All those people. Frieda Palmer, Jeannie Robertson, Belle and Sheila Stewart. Sheila sang ‘The Mill O’ Tifty’s Annie’ [Roud 98], and she sang the pants off it. Her timing was exquisite. When you were starting out, all your mates were into it. You were all obsessed with these songs, weren’t you? Presumably, you were showing each other what you’d found. Our generation can find all of this on the internet, but when you lot found a new song it must have been like finding gold. Well, if somebody sang a song that you thought of as a new song, what the other musicians would then do would be to go and find another version of it. Those who had anything about them would go and find another version of it and swear that theirs was the original [laughs]. But when I found ‘Peggy and the Soldier’, I was absolutely blinded by it. I thought it was utterly wonderful. I rang Bert Lloyd up and said, “Do you know any extra verses?” And he sent me another four verses – maybe he made him up himself, I don’t know. He could have done. But I changed the tune. I found another tune that I loved. And those words seem to sit astride that melody that I picked out for it. Back in the 60s, in the early days, when you were playing around Soho and the coffee bars and folk clubs, were there any other musicians that you thought had a particularly good ear for finding good songs? Well, there were people like Tony Rose, but he would often do my version of ‘Scarborough Fair’ because he thought it was wonderful. And to begin with, I got very protective about my repertoire. Tony was doing my song! That was really daft of me. Later on, when we became mates, I was able to let go. I love the idea that what we all did was spur each other on to go looking for more songs, other versions, because in a different version, there’d always be a couple of lines that would make you cross that you didn’t find them first! But that was the way it worked. We were all really excited by some of the stuff and irritated by what other people did. Who were the standouts, though? I always loved the Watersons because they were so very different. Other folk groups at that time always obeyed the Weavers’ rule: a group had to have a girl singer, had to have a banjo player, and a guitarist. That was the model. The Watersons changed all that. To begin with, they had a banjo and a guitar, but very quickly it was dispensed with. And they sang in weird keys. They sang in keys that suited the girls. Mike had developed this massive range. He could go right from the dungeon right up to where the birds sing. He had a huge range, and he used it. The other singer was John Harrison, and he had a really fabulous bass voice. ‘Rap Her to Bank’ was one of the songs they used to do. It was from the Elliots of Berkeley. The Watersons did an astonishing version of that and I became responsible for that being on a record. Norma and I were married by that time and I was talking to [former Topic Records boss] Tony Engle and he said they were going to re-release the red album. I said, “The Watersons have a different version of that album. They’ve got a couple of extra tracks. One of those tracks is absolutely fabulous. And I could never understand why Topic took that track off.” Tony said, “Oh, I must have a copy of that. I’d better go and listen to it.” And he went and listened to it and he called me back and he said, “You’re right, it’s sensational. Why did they take it off?” Goblin Band: “What do you think folk music could do to help us in this country now?” It can give us some of the energy that Goblin Band have got, because they’re the ones who can re-energize English group singing and playing. They can play and they can sing and they’re fearless. That’s what’s so good about them. They did a version of one of the songs I think of as one of my songs. I grumbled to myself a little bit. “You changed it.” No, what they did was actually what I’m always droning on about: they ran with the idea. Because that’s what tradition is. Run with the idea. You never know what’s going to happen. What they did was better than what I did with ‘Willie’s Lady’ [Roud 220]. It’s slightly trimmed, but it’s absolutely brilliant. It tells the story. That’s all you’ve got to do. They also did ‘Widdicombe Fair’ [Roud 137] when I saw them. They did the old war horses. They’ve messed with ‘Widdicombe Fair’ and it’s just this great, wonderful stomp. When I saw them singing, all I could think of was, “This is what happened in Ireland when Lankum started.” They’ve just taken stuff and shaken it, given it a good clip around the ear. When I saw Goblin Band singing recently, I just thought, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Because you were busy looking somewhere else, you silly fool [laughs]. Thanks to Eliza Carthy, Martin Simpson, Alex Merry, Jim Moray, Jon Lewis and Jude Rodgers for their help in reaching out to some of the people involved in this interview. Martin Carthy and Jon Wilks will be on the road with Martin’s talking/singing tour between October and December. Do you have a question you’d like to ask Martin on the tour? Click here, fill in the form and we’ll see what we can do…
4334	dbpedia	0	83	https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2019/11/	en	Not a Blog	http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IMG_5353-e1573950945310-768x1024.jpg		[ "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/themes/dark-shop-lite/images/facebook.png", "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/themes/dark-shop-lite/images/twitter.png", "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/themes/dark-shop-lite/images/westeros.png", "https://georgerrmartin.com/notablo...	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/MKD0zdM_G5I?feature=oembed" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	The last stop on my October travels was Asbury Park, New Jersey, where I was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. I was born and raised in Bayonne, as most of my readers probably know by now, but I left New Jersey in 1966 for Evanston, Illinois, to start my college education at Northwestern University. I never really returned, except for visits… but I do visit often, since almost all of my family is still in Jersey, along with a few old friends, a lot of memories (mostly good, some less so), and a big piece of my heart. Also, New Jersey still has the best pizza in the world (New York and Connecticut are very close, though). You can take the boy out of Jersey, I guess, but you can’t take Jersey out of the boy. Asbury Park is one of the iconic Jersey shore towns. When I was growing up, a lot of my friends and schoolmates spent their summers down on the Jersey Shore. If not at Asbury Park, then at Atlantic City, Seaside, Tom’s River, Keansburg, or one of the other shore towns. Splashing on the beaches, eating salt water taffy, strolling the boardwalks, riding roller coasters and other rides in the old amusement parks. Not me. We were projects kids, we did not even own a car, so we spent our summers in Bayonne, mostly. Water all around, but no beaches (though once or twice each summer we’d get to take an excursion boat from Brady’s Dock across the street from the projects to Rye Beach or Far Rockaway). The only amusement park I got to visit was Uncle Milty’s, right down First Street, where I could blow my allowance playing Skee-Ball… and would eventually land my first job, running the Tubs O’ Fun for the kiddies one summer. I think I got paid twelve dollars a week (in a pay envelope, with a ten and, yes, a two-dollar bill). I had never been to Asbury Park before this visit, but I have to say, I was charmed by the place. The sand, the surf, the boardwalk… iconic old bars like the Stone Poney and the Wonderbar… lovely grand houses and old hotels, a downtown that felt like stepping back in time… all in all, a cool town to visit. And of course the awards ceremony was great fun. As a Mets fan, it was a great honor for me to be inducted by Ed Kranepool of the Amazin’ Mets of 1969, and Todd Frazier of the current squad… and to share the night with Jason Alexander, Harry Carson, Bart Oates, Martha Stewart, Bon Jovi, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and many more incredible Jerseyites. Before the ceremony, I was also thrilled to be able to meet a couple of my favorite Giants from the Superbowl champions of 1986, Harry Carson and Bart Oates. Bart actually let me try on his Superbowl ring! And Harry showed me his Hall of Fame ring, which was big enough for four of my fingers. Having my family present for the induction ceremony made it even more special. I am told the permanent home of the New Jersey Hall of Fame will be in American Dream, the new mega-mall that just opened in the Meadowlands across the parking lot from Giants Stadium. Yes, the former Xanadu, decades in the building. Meanwhile, there are plaques of us at Newark Airport. That’s cool. I like the idea of being on an airport wall down from the Boss. Current Mood: bouncy I try to get to New York City once or twice a year. It’s one of my favorite cities in the world, and my visits there are always half business, half pleasure. On the business side, I check in with all my publishers (I have several), my agents (I have several), with my editors (past and present), with my friends and colleagues at HBO (past and present). I often do a signing, an interview, or some other sort of public event. On this most recent visit, Raya Golden and I did a signing down at Midtown Comics for her wonderful graphic novel of my unproduced pilot, STARPORT. We scribbled in hundreds of books, and afterwards sat down for a short interview. Autographed copies of STARPORT may still be available from Midtown Comics in Manhattan. Or not. We signed a lot of stock, but I am not sure how long they will last. In any case, copies are certainly available from Santa Fe: https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product/starport-graphic-novel-pre-orders/ On the pleasure side… well, we often try to get to a Broadway show or two, but I was too busy this year. I did find time to get together with my friends Ellen Datlow and Mr & Mrs X for a pizza crawl through the wilds of Jersey in search of bar pies. This year we managed to hit the Landmark Tavern in Livingstone and the Star Tavern in Orange, both of which were amazing. ((And if you don’t know what a bar pie is, you don’t know pizza)). I also combined business and pleasure with a dinner at the historic Keens Steakhouse with Kay McCauley, queen of agents, and my friends from Tor, publisher Tom Doherty and our Wild Cards editor, Diana Pho. http://www.keens.com/ Keens has been a Manhattan mainstay since 1885, famous for their fabulous steaks and mutton chops… and for the hundreds of clay pipes that adorn their ceilings and walls. In ye older times, no meal was considered complete without a bowl at its conclusion, and the regulars at Keens traditionally left their long, fragile “churchwarden” pipes at the restaurant, to be called for at need. Keens still displays the pipes belonging to Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers,, Albert Einstein, George M. Cohan, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, John Barrymore, David Belasco, Adlai Stevenson, Douglas MacArthur, “Buffalo Bill” Cody… and now me. At the conclusion of the meal, Keens presented me with my own pipe and had me sign it. My pipe will now join the other celebrity pipes in Keens display cases. And presumably I can call for it at need, the next time I visit New York City and have a hankering for a mutton chop and a bowl. Not that it’s likely to happen, since I don’t smoke. Never have. And for that matter, Keens Steakhouse does not allow smoking these days, no more than any other Manhattan restaurant. But it’s still a cool, and unique, honor. My thanks to Tom Doherty and Kay McCauley, who arranged it. Current Mood: calm Hard to believe (at least for me), but it’s been twenty years since A CLASH OF KINGS was first published, in 1999. That being the case, however, we wanted to do something special to mark the occasion. And we have. The anniversary edition of CLASH from Bantam is gorgeously and lavishly illustrated by Lauren K. Cannon, with black and white line drawings and full color plates. The new edition also contains a special introduction by Bernard Cornwell, father of Richard Sharpe and Uhtred son of Uhtred, a giant of historical fiction. You should be able to find a copy at your favorite local bookstore or from any good online bookseller. If you’re an autograph collector, signed copies are available for $50 from https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product/a-clash-of-kings-the-illustrated-edition-pre-orders/ This new edition to A CLASH OF KINGS is a matched companion volume to the 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of A GAME OF THRONES, released in 2016. That one is also available, signed, from Beastly Books at the Cocteau. With the holidays coming up fast, you might also wanted to check out some of the other goodies available from the Cocteau, where you’ll find titles by Diana Gabaldon, John Scalzi, Lee Child, Mary Robinette Kowal, Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass, the late great Victor Milan, Leonard Maltin, Marko Kloos, Carrie Vaughn, Erica Jong, Janis Ian, Dennis Lehane, Richard Kadrey, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, the Suicide Girls, and many many many more. And remember, ALL of our books are autographed. https://jeancocteaucinema.com/shop/ Current Mood: happy You cannot build a house all alone. Especially not a HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. HBO recently announced a full-season ten-episode pickup for HOUSE, the first GAME OF THRONES successor show to go to series. The show is based on material from my imaginary history, FIRE & BLOOD. Ryan Condal wrote the pilot script and the series bible, and will serve as showrunner for the series, together with director Miguel Sapochnik. Even Aegon the Dragon couldn’t conquer the Seven Kingdoms all by himself, however. He needed the help of his sisters Rhaenys and Visenya. Ryan and I had some great assistance as well, and I wanted to give a tip of the crown to three talented and hard-working young writers who helped to bring this one home. WES TOOKE was Ryan’s right hand man on COLONY, where he served as an executive producer and wrote thirteen episodes. CLAIRE KIECHEL is a young playwright out of New York who came to HOUSE OF THE DRAGON after stints on Netflix’s THE OA and HBO’s new WATCHMEN series. TI MIKKEL came to the show from my own Fevre River Packet Company, where she’s served as a writer’s assistant, helped in the development of a series of short films I hope to produce, and is spearheading the development of TUF VOYAGING as a television series… when she’s not working on her own novel. Those unfamiliar with the way television works may wonder… if Ryan Condal wrote the pilot and the bible, what did Wes and Claire and Ti do? The answer is: a lot. They sat with Ryan every day in a writer’s room at HBO for months, talking story, going over drafts, giving notes, correcting errors (not that Ryan or I ever made any, no sir, not us), catching inconsistencies, discussing character and plot, offering ideas and suggestions, filling in gaps, breaking down the episodes to come and drawing up a roadmap for the first season and all the seasons to follow. The HOUSE OF THE DRAGON could never have been built without the help of Ti, Claire, and Wes, three terrific young storytellers. They have my thanks, and Ryan’s. Current Mood: pleased After Chicago, I moved on to Washington, D.C. with my faithful minion Sid. There, on the evening of October 17, the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation presented me with the 2019 Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination Award. Scott Shannon of Random House, my publisher, came down from New York to introduce me and help present the award, to my delight. (It should be noted that there is another Arthur C. Clarke Award. That one is a juried award given in the UK for the best novel of the year. This award is not that award, though both of them are sponsored by the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation). I never had the honor of meeting Sir Arthur C. Clarke, but of course I read his work… pretty much all of his work, to the best of my recollection. Clarke was one of the giants of science fiction, and his stories and books had a profound influence on generations of writers who came after him. CHILDHOOOD’S END, A RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” “The Star,” 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT… the list goes on and on, a body of work that has few equals. He was also an articulate and progressive voice on the issues of the day, and an unfailing champion of science… something sorely needed in these troubled times. I am pleased and proud to be the winner of an award bearing his name. Imagination is also sorely needed in these times, a subject I spoke about after receiving the award, while being interviewed by Alyssa Rosenberg, the arts and culture columnist for the Washington Post. This was the first time I’d met Alyssa, but I’ve been reading her for years; her columns about GAME OF THRONES were always accurate and insightful, and she conducted a terrific interview… albeit one that got somewhat dark towards the end, as I contemplated the future of our planet. Not a lot of laughs there, truth be told, but I hope we gave the audience some things to think about. Clarke was all about thinking. I did not attend any baseball games in Washington, but it was a kick being in town when the Nationals won the pennant and punched their ticket to the World Series. The whole town was giddy. And we also enjoyed our visit to the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum. It’s being renovated at the moment, so some exhibits were closed… but the remainder was just as wondrous as I recalled it from my last visit, years ago. The curators seemed somewhat surprised that I knew so much about the Bell X-1 and Friendship 7 and the various rockets on display. Hey, long before I set foot in Westeros, I was writing SF about starships, aliens, and distant suns. Pinto Vortando loves his rocket ships! Thank you, Washington, for the warm reception, and thank you, Clarke Foundation. Current Mood: thoughtful On October 10, in the City of Big Shoulders, I was presented with the Carl Sandburg Literary Award at the annual gala sponsored by the Chicago Public Library Foundation. It’s a lovely award, and quite an honor. Last year’s winners were Judy Blume and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Previous winners have included such luminaries as Alice Walker, Larry McMurtry, Margaret Atwood, Scott Turow, Isabel Allende, Roger Ebert, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, and many many others. That’s a club that I am thrilled and proud to belong to. I was also happy to share the evening with the amazing Dr. Eve Ewing, who won the foundation’s 21st Century Award, along with 82 other writers from Chicago and the surrounding area, all of whom were brought on stage for a bow (among them were several folks from the SF world, including Mary Robinette Kowal and Alec Nevala-Lee). The gala was lovely and the award prestigious, and I also got to meet Chicago’s new mayor. But the very best part of the evening was being told afterward that we had raised two-and-a-half million dollars for the Chicago Public Library. https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment-and-culture/2019/10/9/20906847/george-r-r-martin-sandburg-award-chicago-public-library-game-of-thrones-humanities-festival The day after the Sandburg dinner, I appeared at the Chicago Symphony as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. One of the most amazing things about that event was the way they sent out the invitations to it — by raven. The birds did their job admirably, and a huge crowd attended. Once again I shared the stage with the incredible Eve Ewing, who did a terrific interview of me. But the fun started with our entrance. They took us down into the basement and stood us on a riser, and as the Spektral Quartet played the theme to GAME OF THRONES, Eve and I rose up dramatically from below through clouds of dry ice mist. Now if only I could persuade CoNZealand to do the same next August, when I emcee the Hugo Awards. http://https://depauliaonline.com/43361/artslife/george-r-r-martin-gives-candid-look-at-what-informs-his-craft-during-chicago-humanities-festival/ After the two big events, I went up to Evanston one day to meet with the dean of the Medill School of Journalism on the Northwestern campus (quite a few changes since my day), and talk to some current Medill students, all of them impossibly young and formidably smart. Back in the Loop, I also met with some M.F.A. candidates from the Communications department about writing for television and film, and even sat down with the VISTA Volunteers now serving with Chicago Legal Aid… where I served as a VISTA from 1971-1973. And of course I had to make a couple of visits to Greektown for saganaki and moussaka. Opaa! Opaa! Nobody sets fire to cheese better than the good folks at the Greek Islands. Chicago remains one of my favorite cities in the world, and it was wonderful to return there for a few days. While I failed to find my lost youth, it was fun to revisit the scenes of the crimes and meet some of my successors. My thanks to the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and Northwestern University for all their hospitality. Current Mood: pleased Tags: awards, writing
4334	dbpedia	2	75	https://kpfa.org/episode/the-hear-and-now-july-30-2015/	en	Barbara Higbie & Teresa Trull visit The Hear and Now - July 30, 2015	https://kpfa.org/wp-cont…0801-352x230.jpg	https://kpfa.org/wp-cont…0801-352x230.jpg	[ "https://kpfa.org/wp-content/themes/kpfa-1.6/assets/images/mobile-logo.png", "https://kpfa.org/wp-content/themes/kpfa-1.6/dist/images/KPFASince1949Logo.png", "https://kpfa.org/wp-content/themes/kpfa-1.6/dist/images/KPFA_Area941PodcastsLogo_3-05.png", "https://kpfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/150801-352x230...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2015-07-31T05:00:00+00:00	In anticipation of their Saturday, August 1, concert at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, longtime musical partners Barbara Higbie and Teresa Trull shared music they’ve recorded together and separately, and chatted with host Derk Richardson. After that, a lot of classic West Coast folk-rock and some wild-card jazz and experimental musical selections.	en	/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png	KPFA	https://kpfa.org/episode/the-hear-and-now-july-30-2015/	In anticipation of their Saturday, August 1, concert at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, longtime musical partners Barbara Higbie and Teresa Trull shared music they’ve recorded together and separately, and chatted with host Derk Richardson. After that, a lot of classic West Coast folk-rock and some wild-card jazz and experimental musical selections.
1646	dbpedia	2	7	https://musicbrainz.org/artist/4d777d12-059c-4406-9a0e-f21509b7676a	en	Elena Gerhardt	https://musicbrainz.org/…avicon-32x32.png	https://musicbrainz.org/…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://static.metabrainz.org/MB/header-logo-1f7dc2a.svg", "https://static.metabrainz.org/MB/search-52f8034.svg", "https://static.metabrainz.org/MB/filter-a7c3d16.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	German mezzo-soprano, Type: Person, Gender: Female, Born: 1883-11-11 in Leipzig, Died: 1961-01-11 in London, Area: Germany	en	/static/images/favicons/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png		null	~ Person Discography Album + Compilation YearTitleArtistRatingReleases2009The Record of Singing: The Very Best of Volumes 1-4: 1899-1952Various Artists1 Showing official release groups for various artists (Show official release groups) Artist information Sort name: Gerhardt, Elena Type: Person Gender: Female Born: Born in: Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany Died: Died in: London , England, United Kingdom Area: Germany Rating Editing Subscriptions Collections
1646	dbpedia	1	58	https://alchetron.com/Elena-Gerhardt	en	Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia	https://alchetron.com/cd…-resize-750.jpeg	https://alchetron.com/cd…-resize-750.jpeg	[ "https://alchetron.com/cdn/private_file_151723927487797835984-5138-49e5-ad10-bb78f28f1bc.jpg", "https://alchetron.com/cdn/elena-gerhardt-fd2df086-ec6c-452c-88fc-e0017e52c8a-resize-750.jpeg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2017-08-18T08:30:48+00:00	Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883 11 January 1961) was a German mezzosoprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. Elena Gerhardt was born at Connewitz n	en	/favicon.ico	Alchetron.com	https://alchetron.com/Elena-Gerhardt	Training, and first recitals with Nikisch Elena Gerhardt was born at Connewitz near Leipzig, the daughter of a Leipzig restaurateur. She studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1899 to 1903, first with Professor Carl Rebling and then with Marie Hedmondt (d. 1941), who remained her friend and vocal adviser for many years. After a year of only technical study, she began work on operatic roles, such as Cherubino, Dorabella, the Mignon of Ambroise Thomas and Hermann Goetz's Katharina, interspersed with Lieder. She won the Carl Reinecke Scholarship. Leipzig provided many opportunities to hear international artists and to hear the early masters. In 1902, Arthur Nikisch became director of the Leipzig Conservatory, and approved her to sing publicly in Leipzig, which she first did in November 1902: he also gave her a solo in Franz Liszt's "Choruses from Herder's Entfesselter Prometheus" (S. 69). On graduating in 1903 and with many engagements, she mentioned her wish to give a lieder recital, and Nikisch offered to be her accompanist, their first (victorious) performance being at the Kaufhaus in Leipzig on her twentieth birthday. Concert engagements poured in, and she sang lieder in almost every university town as supporting artist to names such as Eugene Ysaye, Teresa Carreno or Max Reger. By 1905 she made her first appearances (with Nikisch) in Hamburg and Berlin (the Bechsteinhall), and in Berlin made the friendship of Richard Strauss. From summer 1905 she spent holidays with the Nikisch family near Ostend. London, Europe, Russia, and USA before 1914 Gerhardt first appeared at the Leipzig Opera as Mignon, in June 1905, and also performed Charlotte in Massenet's Werther there, under Nikisch, being coached by his student Albert Coates as Korrepetitor. Nikisch arranged and accompanied her 1906 London debut, first in a Mischa Elman concert, and then in a Lieder recital (songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, etc.) at the Bechstein Hall. In April 1907 she first sang at the Royal Albert Hall, with an orchestra under Nikisch. Thereafter she returned to England annually until 1914 for autumn seasons, including regular tours of the provinces with Hamilton Harty or her loyal accompanist Paula Hegner. The partnership with Nikisch was preserved in two series of records made in 1907 and 1911, made in Berlin. A particular triumph was their appearance in the 1908 season of the Philharmonic Society in London. She sang by invitation to entertain royal guests to the Coronation of George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Nikisch introduced her into the highest circles, including the Villa Wahnfried. She sang in many European capitals - Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Copenhagen, Christiania (Oslo) - and with old musical Societies at Cologne and Frankfurt, annually in Paris and London, and under Mengelberg at The Hague. Nikisch usually accompanied the first Lieder concert at each centre, after which other accompanists took over. Alexander Siloti arranged her first visit to Russia (to Moscow) in 1909, and until the War she sang there and in St Petersburg. Gerhardt made her American debut at the Carnegie Hall in January 1912, with Paula Hegner, and was then in Cincinnati and Philadelphia with Leopold Stokowski (singing the Wesendonck Lieder), and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Max Fiedler, before finally combining there with Nikisch and the London Symphony Orchestra tour. In London in 1912 she performed the Angel in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, a role more associated with her 'rival' and friend Julia Culp. Her second American tour was in early 1913, opening with the Boston Symphony under Karl Muck, and with Erich J. Wolff as accompanist, who died during the tour. They visited Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Next season she sang in Paris, Moscow, Scandinavia, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Scotland and England, culminating in London in July 1914 at the Queen's Hall under Richard Strauss - her last appearance there for eight years. The First World War Returning from Ostend to Leipzig in August 1914, her English tours were impossible to fulfil, but she sang from Hamburg to Vienna and Budapest and returned triumphantly to America in 1915, and that winter sang in Denmark and Norway. In August 1916 she sang to German troops on the Western Front at Laon, through efforts of her brother the singer Reinhold Gerhardt, a pupil of Karl Scheidemantel. Meanwhile in late 1916 she returned to the USA to give the east coast tour with Karl Muck, and in April 1917 was singing in Los Angeles and San Francisco. As America entered the war she was shipped back to Germany with many other artists. She visited the Front again in summer 1918 with Wilhelm Backhaus (in uniform) as accompanist and concert partner. She continued to tour, from Norway to Hungary, through the chaos following the armistice, and was in Munich when Kurt Eisner was assassinated. Between the wars In early 1920, she made a prolonged tour of Spain with Paula Hegner, and later that year to the USA again, where her collaboration with the model accompanist Coenraad V. Bos began. This partnership was renewed in the winter season of 1921-22 in New York. In March 1922 (soon after the death of Nikisch) she braved the return to London (Queen's Hall) with Paula Hegner, where her German art was received with an ovation. That was the start of an unbroken tie with England, which later became her home. The following years saw annual winter tours in USA (and the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver in 1925), with extensive tours in UK, Europe and Germany. There were further Spanish tours, including one in winter 1928 with Bos. She was then singing Schubert's Winterreise which, as a female singer, she made particularly her own. At the start of 1929 she became head teacher of singing at the Leipzig Conservatory, and after October 1930 she discontinued her American tours, though still touring intensively in Britain and Europe. In 1928, she met and fell in love with Dr Fritz Kohl, Director of Administration of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk in Leipzig, and they married in November 1932. In London she reappeared before the Royal Philharmonic Society in January 1931, under John Barbirolli, to perform Wolf songs with orchestral accompaniment, and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Her Hugo Wolf Song Society recordings were made in 1932. Following Hitler's rise to power, Kohl was arrested and imprisoned, and not until June 1935 was he released, the only one of the German Broadcasting Directors to be acquitted by the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. With the help of Landon Ronald at the Guildhall School of Music, Elena meanwhile got a foothold in London in 1934, and after a last visit to Bayreuth to see Strauss conduct Parsifal ('It was no longer Richard Wagner's Bayreuth, but Hitler's'), London became the settled home of the couple. Over the following years, as the storm gathered, Elena gave recitals in the Netherlands, France and Britain, often with Gerald Moore accompanying, and developed a circle of singing pupils. Wartime recitals in England With the outbreak of war, Gerhardt expected that her singing career was at an end as there should be no taste for German music in Britain, especially as she would only sing in German, and the broadcast of the German language was forbidden on the BBC home programmes. However, Myra Hess insisted upon involving her in the National Gallery mid-day concerts, where she first appeared in December 1939, and afterwards in twenty-two concerts with Myra Hess or Gerald Moore, being very greatly appreciated. With Myra Hess and Lionel Tertis she sang the Brahms viola songs and other Lieder recitals in many parts of England and Scotland, including a complete Winterreise in Reading, and in 1942 gave BBC Lieder broadcasts to Argentina. Her teaching picked up again after 1941. With Myra Hess she sang at Haslemere for Tobias Matthay and his pupils. She gave a sixtieth birthday concert in the Wigmore Hall in 1943, and further National Gallery and Wigmore Hall concerts in 1944. News of the destruction of Leipzig and Dresden, of course, filled her with deep sadness. Late career In 1946, when the BBC Third Programme (i.e., Radio 3, the classical music station) was inaugurated, she gave three broadcasts, including Lieder recitals and talks about her career and the interpretation of Winterreise. She also recorded Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben in that year. She made a broadcast on Brahms's songs in May 1947. That was soon after her formal retirement from the platform in March 1947. Her husband Dr Kohl died in May 1947 and the remainder of her professional life was devoted to teaching in London. She managed to arrange the escape of her brother Reinhold and his family from Eastern Germany, and he joined the staff of the Guildhall School of Music. Gerhardt was one of the very great interpreters of German Lieder, a singer who made her career almost entirely in this genre. She published her autobiography in 1953. She died on 11 January 1961 aged 77, in London. Recordings (See discography by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, with titles and number listings. Dates may be of recording or of issue.) Acoustic recordings: 1907 G&T recordings with Arthur Nikisch (Wolf, Bungert, Brahms, Strauss, Rubinstein) - six 10" and one 12" record/seven songs. 1911 Red Label German HMV recordings with Arthur Nikisch (Wolf, Brahms, Bungert, Strauss, Schumann, Schubert, Wagner) - ten 10" and seven 12" records/seventeen songs. 1913-1914 as above, with Bruno Seidler-Winkler (pno) - eleven 10" records/songs. (Strauss, Brahms, Schubert, Wolf). 1913-1914 as above, with orchestra cond. Seidler-Winkler - five 12" records/songs. (Strauss, Wagner, Gluck, Wolf). 1915 American Columbia, about 7 titles with orchestral accompaniment. (J. Strauss, Schulz, Gruber, and folk-songs) 1923 Aeolian Vocalion with Ivor Newton (pno) - six 12" records/songs. (Schubert, Grieg, Schumann, Strauss, Brahms) 1924 as above, with Harold Craxton (pno) - six 12" records/songs. (Schubert, Strauss and Brahms) 1924-1925 HMV red label, with ?Harold Craxton (pno) - seven titles (three 10" 2-sided records and one side unissued). (Schubert, Schumann, Wolf and Brahms) Electric recordings: 1926 HMV red label, with Paula Hegner - eight songs, three 10" and two 12" records. (Brahms, Schubert) 1927 HMV red label, with Coenraad V. Bos - three songs, two 12" records. (Brahms, Reger) 1928 HMV Black Label Schubert Centenary Album - seven 12" and one 10" record (eight items from Winterreise, and ten other songs). 1929 HMV black label, with Harold Craxton - one 12" record, three songs (Brahms). 1929 HMV black label, with Coenraad V. Bos - two 12" records, six songs (Brahms). 1929 HMV red label, with Bos - one 10" record, three songs (Schubert and Wolf). 1929 HMV red label, with Bos - one 12" record, two songs (Schumann): another two sides of Schumann were recorded at this time (Wer machte dich so krank, and Alte Laute), but were not issued. 1932 HMV red label Hugo Wolf Society Volume I, with Coenraad V. Bos - six 12" records, nineteen songs. 1939 HMV White Label, privately published, with Gerald Moore - six 10" records, GR16-GR21. (Brahms, Complete Zigeunerlieder (eight songs), three other songs; Schubert (four), Wolf (two)).
1646	dbpedia	3	41	https://www.dunedin-consort.org.uk/artist/sarah-anne-champion/	en	Sarah Anne Champion – Dunedin Consort	https://www.dunedin-cons…8afMVe-36x36.png	https://www.dunedin-cons…8afMVe-36x36.png	[ "https://www.dunedin-consort.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/dunedin-logo-340-300x129.png", "https://www.dunedin-consort.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Web_DC_2560x1020_chance-180x180.jpg", "https://www.dunedin-consort.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Web_DC_2560x1020_chance-180x180.jpg", "https://www.d...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://www.dunedin-cons…8afMVe-36x36.png		https://www.dunedin-consort.org.uk/artist/sarah-anne-champion/	Sarah Anne Champion is a British mezzo-soprano and an established soloist and consort singer. She began singing with the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain in 2003, as an undergraduate she read Music at Durham University before going on to the University of Cambridge to train as a Secondary School Music Teacher. After working in Oxford for five years she moved to begin her singing career in London where she then completed her Masters, with distinction, at the Royal Academy of Music and was awarded the Nancy Nuttall Early Music Prize. Sarah now sings with critically acclaimed group The Marian Consort, championing works by lesser known composers such as Vicente Lusitano and Raffaella Aleotti alongside new commissions. Highlights include a recent tour to Japan and performances live on Radio 3’s In Tune, for the BBC proms and at The Wigmore Hall. Sarah also sings with the Fieri Consort who, in 2022, premiered the lost works of Maddalena Casulana, newly-discovered after 400 years, alongside those of Barbara Strozzi live on BBC Radio 3 – soon to be released on commercial disc. Sarah has worked with Waterperry Opera Festival since their inaugural season in 2018, performing Julia Bertram in Mansfield Park. After sell out audiences and five star reviews the production has been continually revived for summer seasons and, in 2022, toured various stately homes and opera houses around England. Mansfield Park is touring again this year, residing back at Waterperry for their current season in August 2023. Other roles include Second Witch ~ Dido and Aeneas (The Vache Baroque Festival), Dorabella ~ Così fan tutte (London Young Sinfonia), Cherubino ~ The Marriage of Figaro (St Peter’s College Opera), Mercedes ~ Carmen (Durham Opera Ensemble) and The Sandman ~ Hansel and Gretel (Durham Opera Ensemble), the title role in Jonathan Dove’s Pinocchio and Le Prince in Massenet’s Cendrillon for the Royal Academy of Music’s VF Opera Scenes. During her time at the Academy Sarah realised her love of Art Song and storytelling, and successfully competed in various competitions including the Elena Gerhardt Lieder Prize, the Major Van Someren-Godfrey Vocal Prize for English Song, the Historic Women Composer Prize and the Flora Nielsen Prize for French Song. More recently, she took part in Oxford Lieder’s Spring Song as a finalist for the Young Artist Programme and is delighted to be giving a recital of French Song this August as part of a new festival at the National Musicians’ Church, Holy Sepulchre London.
1646	dbpedia	0	14	https://polifonia.disi.unibo.it/portal/card%3Ftitle%3DElena%2520Gerhardt%26cat%3Dartists%26uri%3Dhttp://dbpedia.org/resource/Elena_Gerhardt	en	Polifonia	https://polifonia.disi.unibo.it/portal/favicon.ico	https://polifonia.disi.unibo.it/portal/favicon.ico	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Web site created using create-react-app	en	/portal/favicon.ico		null
1646	dbpedia	0	43	https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/mccormack-patrician	en	Marston Records	https://cdn.shopify.com/…jpg?v=1551651203	https://cdn.shopify.com/…jpg?v=1551651203	[ "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0614/0837/files/m-banner-preferred-1.png", "https://www.marstonrecords.com/cdn/shop/products/mccormack-patrician_large.jpg?v=1551651203", "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0614/0837/files/FindUs-FB-RGB-1024.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "gramophone recording", "phonograph cylinder recording", "classic recording reissue", "historic piano recording", "historic opera recording", "historic voice recording", "Pathe opera recording", "Pathé opera recording", "Edison recording" ]	null	[ "Marston Records", "Takeshi Takahashi" ]	null	Home page of Marston Records. New release, promotions, and the latest information of the company.		//www.marstonrecords.com/cdn/shop/t/2/assets/favicon.ico?v=136588477034757280881416780421		https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/mccormack-patrician	The John McCormack Electric Edition Foreword Of all the great singers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era commonly referred to as the Golden Age, perhaps John McCormack was the most worthy of emulation by future practitioners. Part of his particular genius was to combine the sterling virtues of a rigorously perfected technique with consummate musical taste and scrupulous attention to detail. Ernest Newman wrote of McCormack that “He was a supreme example of the art that conceals art, the sheer hard work that becomes manifest only in its results, not in the revolving of the machinery that has produced them.” While many musicians, both vocal and instrumental, are gifted to the extent that they may be described as virtuosi, in only the greatest is there the awareness and humility to place their talent entirely at the service of the music: to act as a conduit for the wishes of the composer, rather than using the music as a vehicle for self-aggrandisement. In McCormack’s case, however, there is a further gift that sets him apart; one that cannot be taught, nor perhaps adequately described. It seems to manifest itself in his ability as a communicator, and to transcend even music itself in the directness with which the listener is connected to the heart of the message. Something in the nature of the greatest creative artists appears to be liberated to speak directly from the core of their being through the medium of their art, however fallibly human they may be in other areas of their lives. Edward Elgar, for instance, so notoriously prickly and sensitive to the opinions of others, wrote to his friend, August Jaeger, of his setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, that, in composing it, he had written out his “insidest inside.” Beethoven himself, in a dedication above the Kyrie of the Missa solemnis, inscribed “Von Herzen—Möge es wieder—Zu Herzen gehn!” (“From the heart—may it return to the heart!”) Of the musicians whose work has been captured by the gramophone, itself an invention so imperfect and capricious in the early decades of sound recording, something transcendent in the greatest artists still shines through and touches us directly and individually. Names such as Casals, Kreisler, Caruso, and Rachmaninoff are often mentioned in this regard. What artists such as these seem to share, beyond their undisputed technical prowess, is an unconstrained openness of spirit and, in the words of Caruso, “something in the heart”. John McCormack’s art places him firmly in this company. Furthermore, while all singers may have something in the heart, McCormack also possessed a keen musical intelligence. As Gordon Ledbetter has written: “McCormack’s gifts lay in both heart and head. Instinct alone would not have enabled him to handle with such idiomatic certainty the vast range of music he had at his command. Other singers take on music outside their native instincts at their peril—everything sounds the same. That certainly was not true of McCormack. You see his intelligence, too, in how he illuminated the text as much as the music; and how, as his voice aged, he could match his repertoire to his resources, thus retaining the freshness of his communication and the immediacy of his art. Toscanini once said to him: “You know, John, if you weren’t a singer, you would still be a great musician.” While his vocal technique, with its evenness of line, mastery of breath control, and purity of tone may have equipped him to be worthy of the accolade “the true redeemer of bel canto”, as reportedly bestowed by the great Polish tenor Jean de Reszke, such attributes would remain little more than vocal scaffolding were it not for McCormack’s supreme gift of communication. It is this above all—art rather than artifice, sentiment rather than sentimentality—that elevated him to become what Newman was inspired to describe as “a patrician artist, dignified even in apparent undress, with a respect for art that is rarely met with among tenors.” On the demise of any great person, what lives on after them to benefit future generations? Reputation and biography survive, certainly, and in the case of everyone from statesmen to artisans, their various works. Happily, in the world of the arts, composers leave their scores to be performed, writers leave their books, poets their verse and painters their canvases. In the case of musical interpreters, however, those of the distant past are but footnotes in history: we know of the reputations of great singers such as Farinelli in the Court of Spain, of the celebrated Mrs. Cibber in Handelian London and Dublin, and of figures such as Giovanni Battista Rubini, Maria Malibran, and Jenny Lind in the opera houses of the 19th century. Numerous tributes exist detailing the extraordinary talents of these performers, with meticulous descriptions of their voices, their singing style, and their often colourful lives. Of their great art, however, not a note survives. Elsewhere in this booklet, excerpts are quoted from a tribute written, following McCormack’s death, by the Irish concert pianist Charles Lynch. He concluded his piece: When, on a train journey from Cork to Dublin, I read of his death in the newspaper, I realized that not only had Ireland lost the greatest musician it had ever produced, but that the world of music had lost one of the greatest artists of all time. To those of us who were lucky enough to hear him at the height of his powers he is not, and can never be, dead, for he will live in our memories as long as memory lasts. It is now over seventy years since those lines were penned, and there can be few, if any, still living who retain such a memory. In the end, all we have are the recordings. For this reason alone, the task of restoring and preserving for posterity the existing legacy of one as seminally important in the history of vocal art as John McCormack is too vital to be left to chance. We owe it to future generations to ensure that these fragile sound documents are afforded the highest possible quality of expertise in transferring them to a permanent medium, and we could not have asked for the services of one more qualified or more passionately committed to this work than Ward Marston. John McCormack: A Patrician Artist (Complete Electrical Recordings, 1925–1942) follows our issue of Mr. Marston’s restorations of the complete Odeon recordings of 1906–1909, on the Marston Records label, and his earlier restorations of McCormack’s complete acoustic Victor and HMV recordings of 1910–1924, for the Naxos label. With its publication, Ward Marston has reached the end of a journey begun over twenty-five years ago—a journey that has secured part of Ireland’s national heritage, but also the heritage of everyone who rejoices in the life-enhancing qualities of great musical artistry. It has been made possible by the generosity of the many subscribers and supporters named in this booklet. We hope that all who assisted will feel they have been part of something worthwhile. Jeremy Meehan, 2019 John McCormack—A Brief Sketch John McCormack was the beau idéal of the lyric tenor, possessing a voice of exquisite purity and limpid phrasing hardly matched by any other. He was Ireland’s first superstar. Max de Schauensee, the esteemed Philadelphia-based critic, remarked that “A McCormack Red Seal record was as usual in the average American home, during the second and third decades of the century, as father’s slippers by the fire or the family ice-cream freezer.” Insofar as generations can be compared, in his day he was fêted as much as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley were in theirs. But with this distinction: McCormack could be described equally as a “serious” or classical singer as a popular one, the best of his career occurring at a time before so-called classical music and popular music had diverged and gone their separate ways, the microphone doing much to produce a new kind of singer. Audiences had not diverged either; McCormack appealed to all classes and conditions of both men and women. Given the international and indeed historical achievements that lay ahead of him, McCormack’s origins were hardly promising. He was born in Athlone in the Irish midlands, on 14 June 1884, the fourth of eleven children born to mill workers, Andrew and Hannah McCormack. Athlone, at the time, was a British garrison town, through which the majestic and picturesque River Shannon flows. Historically, the town had importance as a strategic (and much bloodied) crossing point between the east and west of Ireland. The tenor was born in a little terraced house in The Bawn in the County Westmeath part of Athlone (the western half of the town, which straddles the river, is in County Roscommon). The house is still there, marked with a plaque, and is now a Chinese restaurant. When I paid it a visit and expressed an interest in the tenor, the enthusiastic owner hurried off and to my surprise came back with CDs of McCormack—singing German Lieder. Andrew and Hannah had come to Athlone via Antrim in the North of Ireland but originally came from Galashiels in Scotland. Both were Scottish. Hannah was raised as a Scottish Presbyterian, but became a Roman Catholic on her marriage. Her background may have contributed to her son’s conspicuous tolerance and openness to all religious persuasions, when religion was such a divisive issue in Ireland. Andrew’s father, the tenor’s paternal grandfather, Peter McCormack, was Irish and had emigrated in the opposite direction, moving from County Sligo to Scotland. With steady jobs at the mills, McCormack’s parents were relatively secure. Although not wealthy enough to own a piano, music making was a feature of their family life. The old man sang in the local church choir. (Inevitably, there were those who were to say in later years that Andrew had the sweeter voice.) Poverty was endemic in Athlone and much of the population could not write when McCormack was growing up. Hannah would not have felt out of place in that regard. She could read but not write, apparently, at the time of her marriage and so signed her marriage certificate with an “X”. Education, however, was improving and Hannah’s fourth child was well placed to avail of it. The very year the tenor was born, 1884, the French order of Marist Brothers established a fine school in the Market Square of Athlone, a short distance from The Bawn, which the boy attended. Not only was he an able student, there was something about his voice that attracted attention, even as a boy soprano. An elderly past pupil told me that he made a point of attending chapel at the school just to hear McCormack sing. Something about the voice: as he began, so he continued. Through scholarships, McCormack completed his education at Summerhill College, Sligo. On leaving school, thoughts of entering the priesthood were replaced by notions of a singing career. He had a brief stint in the civil service in Dublin, before snapping up an invitation to join the Palestrina Choir of the Pro-Cathedral under Vincent O’Brien, who coached and coaxed the excessively nervous boy for the Feis Ceoil (the national music competition) of 1903 in which he easily won the gold medal in the tenor section. James Joyce was also a pupil of O’Brien’s (as was the fêted soprano Margaret Burke Sheridan or ‘Maggie from Mayo’, as she called herself) and it is often thought that Joyce competed in the same Feis as McCormack. In fact, Joyce competed the following year. Unable to attempt the sight-reading exercise, which at the time was compulsory, he was awarded only the bronze medal. It is often repeated that he threw the medal into the River Liffey in disgust, and that it was never seen again. In fact, the medal remains in private hands. What have been long lost, “borrowed” or mislaid are the copies of Ulysses that Joyce gave to McCormack and Vincent O’Brien. As both copies were inscribed by the author they should be readily identifiable if they ever come to light. It is a great pity that Joyce’s singing voice was never recorded. Vincent O’Brien thought highly of it. McCormack and Joyce appeared in public in the same concert on at least one occasion, along with the baritone JC Doyle, a local matinee idol and avuncular friend of McCormack’s. The occasion was a concert at the Antient Concert Rooms in what is now Pearse Street, then Great Brunswick Street, on 27 August 1904. All three, McCormack most prominently, make appearances in Joyce’s monumental novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While Joyce’s singing ambitions faded somewhat after his Feis Ceoil appearance, he remained an avid fan of McCormack, following his career closely, and writing to him in 1920 having recently heard him: I have lived in Italy practically ever since we last met but no Italian lyrical tenor that I know (Bonci possibly excepted) could do such a feat of breathing and phrasing to say nothing of the beauty of tone in which I am glad to see, Roscommon [actually Westmeath] can leave the peninsula a fair distance behind. (I Hear You Calling Me, Lily McCormack, Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, 1949, p. 135) It was a compliment that may only have gone so far with McCormack, who was not generally well disposed towards other tenors, even Alessandro Bonci, whom he dismissed by token of having a “white voice” at the top. Immediately following his Feis Ceoil success, McCormack set about raising funds to study in Italy. There seemed no end to the numbers of well-wishers prepared to contribute. Concerts given by the tenor and his confrères were another source of money, and there was another option open to him that would not be available today: sound recording, although invented almost a generation earlier, in 1877, was still very much in its commercial infancy in the early nineteen hundreds, and the industry was a haphazard, informal affair. McCormack went to London and made approaches to several recording companies, making records for each, often duplicating what he had already sung, ballads all the way through. This was in 1904. He was twenty years old. He would continue to make recordings, year after year, up to and indeed after his retirement, until 1942, a span of thirty-eight years. Thus, uniquely among the great singers, we can trace McCormack’s development from even before he received any training in Italy right through to his final recordings. So what are we to make of these first recordings? They are usually dismissed out of hand. The tenor himself thought little of them. He enjoyed playing one to friends and then asking them to identify the singer, saying it was by a youngster intent on a singing career, and what did they think? On their aghast response, McCormack, laughing uproariously, would admit to it being himself. His very first recording session was a series of two-minute wax cylinders made for Edison’s National Phonograph Company. His spoken introductions are as revealing as the actual singing. What you hear is a very flat midlands accent with minimal articulation and not a hint of the rich, rounded vowels that were so characteristic of his singing a few years hence. As with his speaking voice, so with his singing. This is all of a piece with the impression he made on Josie Hoyle (herself the wife of a professional musician). She heard McCormack sing for the Dalkey Coal Fund, about 1903, and described him to me as “like a ploughboy”, hands and arms hanging awkwardly by his side. One can imagine his mouth lolling open. For all that, is it fanciful to imagine that, while he dismally fails to make much of the enunciation of the text of his songs, the words are actually important to him, but it has yet to dawn on him how to share them with his audience? There is no question to my mind, that McCormack cultivated his “rural Irish accent.” The accent he developed bore no similarity with how he sounded as a boy growing up in Athlone, if we may judge from those spoken introductions. I would surmise that, while learning Italian in Milan, he realised the advantage of Italianate vowels that could be applied, with modification of course, to an Irish rural accent when singing in English. That, and even more his desire to come across in America and elsewhere as quintessentially Irish. So, he worked hard on cultivating his Irish image, not least through his accent. McCormack made disc recordings at this time too, for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company, and met for the first time the recording engineer Fred Gaisberg. The young singer left firm impressions. Gaisberg insisted he do something about his teeth, have them extracted, in fact. His dental hygiene may not have benefited from a penchant he had for carrying around boiled sweets with him, as Perceval Graves, who shared digs with him at a later date, remembered. Dentures, however, were not to interfere with diction, unless you point to the occasions that he pronounced “thee” as “dee”, as in the song “Love Thee Dearest, Love Thee.” Some observers would argue that this was not a fault at all, “dee” being a characteristic Irish way of pronouncing the fricative. Gaisberg’s other observations that have come down to us concerned the man himself: He struck me as an over-grown, under-fed, unkempt youth—loosely built, pale-faced, disorderly dark hair, untidy clothes, very bad teeth, and worn down shoes…and he was drinking too much… His eyes were piercing dark and he had a very little to say, but that little showed him decidedly confident of himself—almost aggressive… We all took an interest in this rough diamond… We recorded the very popular Irish songs, and I recall the difficulty he had when singing Fs and Gs… I was particularly struck with this defect, and thought what a pity in so promising a voice—for the quality was truly beautiful… While making his records he revealed to me that he would shortly be leaving for Italy to study with the well-known Maestro Vincenzo Sabatini [in Milan]. Unquestionably, McCormack was his own man even in those early days. It was also on this trip to London that McCormack first heard Caruso. The Italian left a life-long impression on the young Irishman. In a fascinating collection of letters to the Dublin baritone JC Doyle, written between 1905 and 1909, the young tenor wrote breathless accounts of his student days, his early professional career and the singers he was able to hear. He writes enthusiastically about this singer and that, but every tenor falls short of his abiding hero, as he tells Doyle repeatedly: Caruso remained the touchstone, although McCormack himself in no way resembled him. McCormack arrived in Milan in 1905 to be trained by Vincenzo Sabatini. It is remarkable that a singer who developed such an exceptional vocal technique spent less than a year with the maestro, all the formal training he would ever have. His operatic debut took place in the Teatro Chiabrera in Savona in the title rôle of Mascagni’s L’amico Fritz, on 13 January 1906, hardly a rôle to suit him even had he been a mature singer. Still, he was received well enough. Some further engagements in minor opera houses followed, an audition at La Scala came to nothing, and McCormack found himself out of work. He had married Dubliner and Feis Ceoil winner Lily Foley on 2 July 1906 and he writes coyly to JC Doyle in a letter postmarked 8 October: “I suppose you have seen Lil in Dublin. She has been home the last week on a holiday. She did not feel too well for reasons and I thought a week or two of change would help her”, which was another way of saying that his wife was pregnant. For what would turn out to be the last time in his career, McCormack was short of money. He took the decision to up sticks, put Italy behind him and look for work in London. In no time, he picked up concert work in London and the provinces, work which would not have been available to him in Italy. He shared digs in 12a Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, with Perceval Graves, then a law student, who remembered McCormack for his moth-eaten fur coat and more significantly for his “immense powers of concentration”, an observation repeated elsewhere, including by Lily McCormack in her biography of her husband, I Hear You Calling Me. Opera was what he really wanted to do, and kid though he was, he was bursting with self-confidence. He thought nothing of writing to JC Doyle from London that he was “keeping an eye out to good old Covent Garden” while boasting that he expected “a 3-years contract for the big summer season playing second to our mutual ideal Caruso.” He was then all of twenty-two. His route to Covent Garden was through the Boosey Ballad Concerts held at Queen’s Hall. These were organised by the music publisher Arthur Boosey and, despite the title, were prestigious events at which some of the most celebrated singers appeared and where new music was tried out. Charles Marshall, a struggling songwriter, turned up at Torrington Square with just such a song for McCormack, indicative of his growing reputation. McCormack introduced Marshall’s song at one of Boosey’s concerts and from that point “I Hear You Calling Me” remained to all intents and purposes the tenor’s own property, his most famous encore. At one of these concerts the young man was admired and taken up by Sir John Murray Scott, a man of influence in the highest circles. Scott got McCormack an audition with Harry Higgins, the general manager of the Royal Opera House. The story is well known: Higgins said he liked the voice but thought it too small for an auditorium the size of Covent Garden. Then make your orchestra play more softly, Scott is said to have retorted, a piece of advice that might not go amiss today betimes. So it was that on 15 October 1907, in the rôle of Turiddu in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, that McCormack became, at twenty-three years of age, the youngest tenor ever to sing a major rôle at Covent Garden. Perceval Graves joined a contingent at the Irish Club at Charing Cross and marched down to the opera house to support their fellow countryman. Scott’s influence may have provided the young tenor with his first opportunity; thereafter, he had to sink or swim on his own merits. Swim he did, appearing in each subsequent year in the more prestigious summer seasons until the opera house closed down during the First World War, when it became, temporarily, a warehouse. Remarkably for such a young man, in all that time at the Royal Opera House, he only once sang a secondary rôle. That was when he sang the rôle of Cassio to the Otellos of Giovanni Zenatello and Leo Slezak, who alternated in the eponymous rôle in Verdi’s opera. Otherwise, McCormack sang only lead rôles, a primo tenore from the start, singing with the greatest luminaries of the day, including Nellie Melba and Luisa Tetrazzini. His standing may also be judged by the fact that he was chosen to sing in two gala performances, in 1908 when the French President Armand Fallières was in London, and in 1911 when he sang in the gala to mark the accession to the throne of King George V. These were gilded days for the tenor, both inside the opera house and out. This, after all, was the age of the salon and soirée. Perceval Graves remembered McCormack singing for the ageing Duchess of Devonshire who, despite using an ear trumpet, was a good judge of the human voice. In his repertoire was: Stephen Adams’s impassioned ballad “Roses” in which McCormack gave out a ringing A natural with tremendous conviction. This, with other numbers…did the trick. The old lady was so delighted that she told all her friends and influential acquaintances all about the young minstrel, who soon became swamped with lucrative engagements. (RTÉ radio broadcast) Golden days, indeed. Mrs Claude Beddington, a great admirer of the Irish tenor, left this evocative account of Edwardian musical life, and McCormack’s place in it, among the privileged: In 1907 and 1908 Mr and Mrs McCormack lived at a picturesque, old-world country house, “New Copse”, in Surrey, and there entertained week-end parties, including great singers like Vanni Marcoux (to my mind the king of diction on the operatic stage), Sammarco and Scotti. McCormack, always keen about exercise, played a great deal of lawn tennis, also hand-ball, which may be described as the Irish equivalent of fives. Another favourite recreation was “putting the shot”, a weight of 16 lbs. One of the charms of these week-end house-parties was that all the guests were free to do as they liked. Breakfast began at 10 am; luncheon was missed out, and at 3 pm a sumptuous tea was served—on the lawn in fine weather; dinner, accompanied by the choicest wines (of which John is a real connoisseur) was eaten at 7.30 pm, and then music was made, the like of which had never been heard in the Surrey Hills. Queen Alexandra was a frequent visitor at Lady de Grey’s house at Kingston-on-Thames, and nothing delighted Her Majesty more than to hear McCormack sing on the many informal occasions arranged there by the artistic hostess. In every instance, Lady de Grey, with her usual thoughtfulness, sent her motor to Netherhall Gardens in Hampstead to fetch McCormack and to send him home again. He thus had the honour of singing to Queen Alexandra every summer from 1908 to 1914. (All That I Have Met, p. 161) McCormack was “well got” with the British establishment and no doubt he revelled in it as did Lily. But a few short years hence his standing would cause him enormous trouble. His recording career continued with the Odeon label, for which he recorded more than eighty discs between 1906 and 1909. Consisting of opera and song, they make up a very specific period of the tenor’s artistic development, from when he had just become a professional singer to the point at which he was just about to reach his vocal maturity. He starts as a duckling taking to the water; he ends by taking flight. The Odeons were among the favourite recordings of the avid McCormack collector, the late Robert L. Webster, and it is easy to see why. Youth has its own particular charm. We hear and feel the tenor revelling in newfound powers, the strengthening of the voice, the increasing clarity of the words, the exuberance and newfound confidence. The rapid development of the voice and his personality during these few years is quite astonishing. Inevitably, McCormack was dubbed the “Irish Caruso”, and it is said that Sir John Murray Scott had to warn his young friend not to try to emulate his hero. Perhaps he did overdo things in the opera house on occasion, but there is little evidence among the Odeons that he tried to copy the great Italian. One instance occurs in his recording of “Celeste Aida”. The manner in which he vigorously attacks and holds the high B-flat at the beginning of the phrase “Ergerti un trono vicino al sol”, the placement of the voice is reminiscent of Caruso and suggests conscious imitation. It is worth considering for a moment how much Caruso’s style of singing differed from what had gone before him. Gilbert-Louis Duprez (1806-1896) had changed singing forever, and audiences’ expectations with it, by taking his top C and the notes immediately below in the chest register rather than in falsetto or head voice. We simply take that for granted now, to the point that resorting to falsetto is regarded as a cop-out. Caruso was an innovator too, and his innovation is now so commonplace that we are unaware of how much of an innovation it once was. The innovation that Caruso introduced consisted of singing top notes while pulling the larynx emphatically down, and so providing a massive climax to his top notes. His prime, according to William James Henderson of the Sun was 1905 to 1909, but his voice became more characteristically Carusoesque as the years moved on, and perhaps from expediency the emphatic pulling down of the larynx became more pronounced, covering the tone of his top notes with a thrilling degree of girth and resonance. No one had sung like this before. Thrilling, indeed, but it is easy to overlook how much of an infraction of a purely instrumental style of singing it is, the Bs and Cs having a degree of resonance disproportionate to the notes below them. McCormack’s voice was configured quite differently. The girth of the tone tapers, thins out, with imperceptible smoothness through the registers, from the lowest to the highest notes, in the manner of a stringed instrument such as a violin. That flawless tone he combined with acutely judged portamenti and phrasing of extraordinary clarity. His Odeon recordings have their beguilingly youthful charm and exuberance, and while mastery over his voice and technique are not yet complete, the direction in which he is heading is clear. In 1909, McCormack began his international opera career, crossing the Atlantic for the first time since his abortive visit to the Irish Village at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Luisa Tetrazzini had developed a grá for the young Irishman and put his name to Oscar Hammerstein, who was running his Manhattan Opera House in direct opposition to the Metropolitan. “An Irishman singing Italian opera in New York?” Hammerstein is said to have replied, dubiously. “I don’t think so.” He had second thoughts when considering how the Italian factions in the city had their native favourites, none more so than Caruso. So it was that McCormack made his debut opposite Tetrazzini in La traviata on 10 November 1909. The “broth of a boy”, as the New York Herald put it, made an immediate impression. New York took the young Irishman to their hearts and McCormack took New York to his. The following year, 1910, he was singing in the largest opera house in the world, the mighty Metropolitan Opera, opposite Nellie Melba. The same year the Victor Talking Machine Company bought out his Odeon contract. The records he made that year, 1910, of Donizetti in particular, are among the greatest recorded documents of their kind, if not for their dramatic interpretation, for their unalloyed purity of sound and phrasing. Had McCormack recorded nothing else, these discs alone would put him among the finest of so-called bel canto exponents. And even if he did not infuse Verdi and Puccini with the same dramatic possibilities as some of his Italian counterparts, the same flawless vocal finish and phrasing are to be found in his recordings of these composers, and in arias by Bizet, Gounod, and Delibes. In 1916 he made the recording of which he said that, if only one of his discs could be chosen for him to be remembered and judged by, this would be it. Legend has it that it was only on the suggestion of a recording engineer that McCormack was prompted to record “Il mio tesoro” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for which he was justly celebrated when he sang the rôle of Don Ottavio on stage. The record is a masterful piece of singing, each note exactly in its place, the attack and line endings absolutely clear, the breath control exemplary. The voice never swerves. There is more to this recording. Take a Puccini aria: it does not much matter how the singer makes the journey upwards so long as he nails the note at the top, nor for that matter how he makes the descent. This would not do with Mozart. What makes McCormack’s recording of “Il mio tesoro” unique, is that throughout, unerringly, his vocal line rises and descends with perfect symmetry. McCormack was indeed the apostle of balance and proportion. He was to make another record which in a way was the very antithesis of this, and equally historic. If “Il mio tesoro” is a bravura aria, “Care selve” from Handel’s Atalanta, sung in translation as “Come, my beloved” and recorded in 1924, is, for want of a better term, all quiescence. The great arching phrases float and curve over our heads like the vaulting of some great Gothic cathedral. The economy of means, the focus of the tone, the effortlessness of it all is unique to McCormack. One can say more: the aria ends with the line “Guide me safely to her arms”. McCormack makes an octave leap from the A-flat on “her” to the A-flat above on “arms”. He drops a semi-tone, rises again, rolls the ‘r’, murmurs the ‘m’ and just intimates the sibilant, all of it done on a mere thread of sound and yet all executed with perfect vocal security. The sheer virtuosity of this feat is perhaps unsurpassed in the entire history of sound recording and yet its brilliance may make us overlook what I believe is an even greater McCormack virtue: the fact that despite this technical feat, this octave leap, McCormack still maintains both the melodic and verbal cohesion as a whole. These recordings are at the high-water mark of singing on record. Equally, in this period when his voice was in its prime, 1910-1920 or thereabouts, he made of Victorian songs and ballads polished works of art, in a way that his successors have never succeeded in doing. And how he ranged over that repertoire: from Liza Lehmann’s “Ah, Moon of My Delight” and Balfe’s “Come Into the Garden, Maud”—just listen to how he makes light of such a tongue twister as “…For the black bat, night, has flown”—to Samuel Liddle’s “A Farewell” and Sterndale Bennett’s “Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away”. This is a singer at the height of his powers and in complete control of his resources, the musical line and the text perfectly married, rubato exquisitely applied, drama and sentiment keenly felt. We have not heard, nor are we ever likely to hear, Victorian balladry and Irish song sung like this again. Why should we? The age is past. However, there is a paradox here. The repertoire is old-fashioned, yet his singing is not. Period quirks and unnecessary embellishments are absent, his art is always direct and immediate. Communication is the thing. Economy of means is a given. Precision and spontaneity are brought together here in a manner that occurs only rarely. Hardly had McCormack established himself as an international opera singer than his career changed direction. While singing in recital in America, he was heard by the impresario Charles L. Wagner. Wagner was convinced the tenor was being badly handled by his agents, the Wolfsohn bureau, and Wagner believed he could do better. In his autobiography Seeing Stars, Wagner wrote of McCormack in a chapter entitled “Cashing High Notes Into Bank Notes” and recalled with disapproval how he had been handled by Wolfsohn: He had been badly managed, both as to his concert appearances under the opera contract and under this farmed-out management. In the first case, on one tour he was sent out with five other singers, all more or less known in grand opera and called the International Company. McCormack himself, who was outstanding in the group, was not properly exploited. These early managers emphasised his nationality—an unnecessary tactic. John McCormack never belonged solely to the Irish race; he belonged to the entire musical world… During the 34-date Wolfsohn-Quinlan tour, they announced him with green ink and heralded an Irish ballad singer. I came to the conclusion when I noted these maneuvers that shamrocks were no more necessary in exploiting McCormack than carving a polar bear on an ice pitcher… I stayed with John most of the time he was making the Wolfsohn-Quinlan tour so was able to gauge the effects of these improper managerial moves… Business was only fair on tour. It looked as though the local managers felt this tenor was good for only one appearance, but I was sure I knew better; that the poor houses were caused by poor management. I had reason to make these close studies of my golden-voice artist. My entire fortune was tied up in his fortune… It would be unrealistic to expect the importance Wagner attaches to his own contribution to McCormack’s success to lose anything in the telling. But there is little doubt Wagner was an astute operator and during the early years of McCormack’s concertising, promoted his prize singer shrewdly: Always I have contended that it is not solely the artist who draws. The exploitation of his artistry is equally as important. Americans are so busy that they need to be reminded again and again. Even when our houses sold out, out advertising continued, for everyone turned away at the box office probably told a dozen friends that that was the one thing he had wanted to hear all season. The public always craves that which is hard to get. In 1912, Wagner got his chance when the tenor’s existing contract had run its course. Under Wagner’s management, McCormack sang sixty-seven concerts in that year as against a mere twelve opera appearances, and his reputation as a recitalist quickly began to overshadow his career in opera. Between 1914 and 1918, he appeared in only nine opera performances in America and none after that. When McCormack appeared at the Metropolitan Opera House, on 4 February 1918, in Madame Butterfly with Geraldine Farrar (daughter of an Irish-American baseball player) and the baritone Antonio Scotti, the soprano Amelita Galli-Curci was in the audience: …waving an ostrich feather fan of vivid emerald green, appropriate to the greatest cast the Emerald Isle ever furnished an opera in New York, [and] was a distinguished spectator last night at the Met, where she and her husband occupied orchestra chairs well back on the north side of the house, and at times divided attention with the stars on the stage. (The New York Times, 5 February 1918) When McCormack sang the rôle of Pinkerton again, on 26 December 1918, it was his last appearance at the Metropolitan Opera. The success of his 1912 tour with Wagner was such that the experiment was repeated the following spring and from that point McCormack’s reputation in the States as a recitalist simply snowballed. You have only to turn to newspaper clips of the time to get a flavour of the impact he was having right across America: “McCormack’s Fifth Greater New York Recital of Season—huge audience seems insatiate”; “McCormack furore in San Francisco—great tenor attracts clamoring throngs”; “St Paul box-office records broken”; “Record Richmond audience greets McCormack, return engagement of Irish tenor”. Such newspaper headings are typical. By the war years, the tenor had become a phenomenon of his times. Not only standing room, but seats on stage grouped around the singer became the norm. San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium he filled twice over in one week; in Boston, a great Irish stronghold, of course, he would appear up to four times at Symphony Hall inside a single week. This is the kind of thing you might expect with a modern pop singer. With his opera days behind him, McCormack had no compunction in saying that he was the world’s worst actor. Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème, he confessed, was his favourite rôle because he could put his hands in his pockets. But why should McCormack’s lack of acting ability have mattered so much? The separation of eye from ear is an opera goer’s way of life. Take the two prima donnas with whom McCormack was most closely associated, Melba and Tetrazzini. It was said of Melba that if she wanted to signify anger she raised one arm, if rage then she raised both. An opportunity to hear Melba at Covent Garden, provoked this response from McCormack in a letter to JC Doyle: Melba on Saturday was the greatest disappointment I ever got. She sang the Bohème & when she came to the gulp [presumably in the death scene] I thought I would be put out, I laughed so much. (13 October 1905) Tetrazzini, on entering the stage, was apt to acknowledge anyone she recognised in a box with a friendly wink or wave; she thought nothing of stepping out of character to join in the applause for another performer and even crossing the stage to pat a colleague on the back by way of encouragement—McCormack naturally received this treatment, being a favourite of Tet’s. And the diminutive lady, almost as wide as she was short, would have stretched credibility somewhat wasting away from consumption as Mimì or Violetta. Adopting the persona of another personality may well have eluded all three, but Melba as Queen of Song knew how to act that rôle; she had a regal deportment and could dominate the stage. Tetrazzini may have treated the opera a bit like cabaret, but she too knew how to make the stage work for her. The simple fact was that McCormack did not. He lacked a sense of stagecraft and never found a means of developing it. He was awkward and ill at ease on the opera stage and it showed. Besides, melodrama was outside his range. Charlie Wagner in an amusing, if not entirely PC, discussion of the great Caruso, made this comparison between him on the opera stage and concertising: Caruso, for all his greatness on the operatic stage, was not a recitalist… One day I mentioned concerts and it startled him. “Never!” he cried. “I am for the opera—in costume I am in character and comfortable—in a dress suit—what would I do with my hands?” When, several years later, Coppicus offered him double and triple fees, like a good foreigner he soon found out what to do with his hands—he held them out! Caruso always was ill at ease on the concert platform. He would take a dozen songs to the piano on each appearance scheduled on the program. After each one, he would look around, measure the distance to the wings, and then sing another song. He seemed to be worried as to how to get on and off stage. Many times he would sing six or eight songs to a group, so as to obviate the necessity of making those dreaded entrances and exits. (Seeing Stars, pp. 144-145) McCormack was the opposite. Where Caruso needed a mask to function effectively, McCormack, clothed with an operatic rôle, found his personality muted. By comparison, on the concert platform, by himself as himself, McCormack could hold an audience in the palm of his hand as hardly another singer. When he appeared at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo in 1926, this was the impression he made on the reviewer for the English-language Japan Times: When he first came in, I sort of expected him to act as if he were “the World’s Greatest Tenor”. He did not. He just went and leaned up against the piano, and if he’d been in his own parlor at home, he couldn’t have been more simple. It seemed as though we were all one big family, and he was just talking to us, quietly, with his head a little on one side, and his eyes closed, telling us fairy tales as they came into his mind, making us smile and sigh by turns, weaving spells about us, and sometimes wringing our hearts by the pathos of his tones… Once he got settled by the piano he’d not shift his position at all, hardly; and you’d find yourself listening to that quiet soothing voice, that just came with no apparent effort, and seemed to be talking confidentially to each individual in the theatre. (5 May 1926) The closest we can get—and it is very close—to what appealed to the Japanese reviewer is the concert sequence in the one full-length feature film McCormack made: Song o’ My Heart (1930). All credit to the director Frank Borzage, who had the concert sequence filmed with the camera entirely focused on McCormack and his faithful accompanist Teddy Schneider, while they performed song after song without the distraction of the tearful or rapt lover in the wings, or some such thing, which was well-nigh universal in films of the time. Before the end of the First World War, McCormack had become an American institution. For the Fourth of July celebrations of 1918, at Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, he was invited to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while President Wilson reviewed representatives of thirty-three nations as they filed past to lay wreaths at Washington’s tomb; after the President’s address he sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. The honour was all the greater in that McCormack was not yet an American citizen. He had applied in April 1914, a process that would take five years and which required the renunciation of all previous loyalties. In McCormack’s case this meant renouncing his allegiance to King George V. Feelings ran very high during the war and in some circles this was seen as an act of gross disloyalty. From McCormack’s point of view, he was Irish and a nationalist by conviction, a subject of the monarch only by default. However one viewed the matter, there was no gainsaying how well he had done by the British establishment and he found himself persona non grata, the subject of abuse and threats such that he dare not sing in London. On America entering the war in 1917 he offered his services to President Wilson, who told him he would be of most service staying put in the States. McCormack rallied to the cause and raised countless thousands of dollars for the war effort with a coast-to-coast tour for the Red Cross and other charities. His war recordings were immensely popular. “Mother Machree” was a particular favourite with the troops, for young men facing the prospect of death inevitably think of the fireside at home and of their mothers. Despite being idolised in America and on the continent, he remained deeply troubled by being unable to sing in London. He was despondent when he wrote to Wagner on 5 December 1920: The London business was a farce. Quinlan [his agent] is a dreamer, and dreams bad dreams. I knew by the look of him that things were not well and after five minutes talk with him I gave him his £1,000 back and cancelled everything. The bitterness against me is very strong and with the present state of things in Ireland is it hopeless… It was not only England. A concert tour of Australia in 1920 had to be aborted after a protest in Adelaide: Owing to the omission of the National Anthem at Mr John McCormack’s, the Irish tenor’s, concerts, a large crowd made a demonstration. Hundreds remained behind at the conclusion. Someone shouted “Sinn Fein”. “God Save the King” was sung while the tenor was preparing to depart. Mr McCormack was visibly affected by the imputation of disloyalty, and has refused to appear in further concerts at Adelaide. It may involve the abandonment of the rest of his Australian tour. He is reported to be hurrying back to America. (The Times, 11 September 1920) He never sang in Australia again. He thought he might get into England by the back door, so to speak, writing to Charlie Wagner: …I see it reported that the Met. intend to have a season of Opera at Covent Garden next summer. Tell Gatti I would very much like to sing there with the Company and that the fee I will leave to himself. Of course the Covent Garden crowd do not want me there now but I would love to put one across them by appearing with the Metropolitan Co. Some [?illeg.] stunt boy put it over! Nor was he to sing in Covent Garden again. Instead, he turned to the continent where he was enthusiastically received. His last operatic performances took place in Opéra de Monte-Carlo, a five hundred-seater, ideal for a singer with McCormack’s moderate-sized voice and nuanced phrasing. He got some of the best reviews of his theatre career from André Corneau, critic of the Journal de Monaco. McCormack participated in what was Monte Carlo’s first production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Sadly, he recorded nothing from it. Among other operas he performed at Monte Carlo was Puccini’s Tosca, which might not have been regarded as ideally suited to him, but here is Corneau on the tenor as Cavaradossi: The voice of M. MacCormack [sic] is not large, it is the voice of a light tenor, extraordinarily well placed, to which study has given an incredible suppleness, a voice which the artist uses to perfection. M. MacCormack singing without trying for effect and without permitting himself the slightest blemish of bad taste, he does not just produce volume for volume’s sake. He neither rushes nor retards the tempi according to caprice, and he does not hang on to high notes for interminable periods in order to win applause. Never does he transgress the most elementary law of song, that is, absolute respect for the music as it is written, nor does he modify the contour or the significance of a piece—and what a marvellous feeling for nuance and what clear articulation. In a word, the singer with his good method and always distinguished and classic style is simply admirable. Also, the manner in which he sang the last act of Tosca was a real feast of delicacy. (André Corneau, Journal de Monaco, 1 March 1920) That is surely McCormack’s vocal art, where opera is concerned, to a ‘T.’ The repudiation of caprice: is there another tenor on record of whom that could be written to the same degree? McCormack was the least self-indulgent of singers. McCormack’s very last operatic performance was on 25 March, in a rôle he had created on 17 March, that of Gritsko in A. N. Tcherepnin’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s La foire de Sorotchintsy. Corneau again: “The romance in Act 1, ‘Pourquoi mon triste coeur’, he sang divinely with a sigh of exquisite melancholy, tinged with tenderness, quivering with nostalgic Slavonic charm.” Dmitri Smirnov, the Russian tenor with attributes not dissimilar to McCormack, followed him in the rôle and made an outstanding recording of this aria in 1924. McCormack never did. Another opportunity lost. Thereafter, McCormack devoted himself entirely to the concert platform. Yet, at the height of his celebrity in the twenties, he had misgivings. He was sensitive to the charge that his talents were being squandered on music that was beneath him. Never one to understate matters, the tenor feared that as a singer of ballads he was not a “real singer” as he put it, and there were certainly critics who thought just that. O. L. Whalen in the Detroit Journal, for example, argued that: John McCormack, being from Athlone in the very heart of Ireland, and knowing the entrancing folk art of his land, could stand with Yeats and Lady Gregory as an exponent of it, and the encouragement which his audiences give should make it wonderfully agreeable, yet he chooses to sing dozens of foolish ditties and places himself only a little higher than Mary Pickford and Harold Bell Wright, who exploit the art of no country but merely purvey cheap sentimentality. In one sense, he was a victim of his own success. His overwhelming popularity, singing the chaff of the day, never mind that he sang it with the same vocal finish and compelling musicality as he did everything else, detracted from his reputation both during his lifetime and subsequently. The myth remains of McCormack as a singer who prostituted his greater accomplishments for commercial and sentimental material. The fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians went even further than O. L. Whalen by providing a date as to the tenor’s decline in repertoire. By 1924, the dictionary, asserted: He could no longer be taken altogether seriously as a musician, since in his later years he devoted his extraordinary and unimpaired gifts to largely sentimental and popular ditties, not to be listened to with patience by critics or with enjoyment by true music lovers. This is patently untrue. The very year Grove’s chose for his decline in his repertoire was the same year the tenor outlined for Musical America just how he prepared his concert programmes: The first group of songs which I give, on any programme, are songs which I sing to please myself. They represent my musical taste. The second group is made up of art songs, that is to say, fine songs which the public should like and which it will like once they are heard a sufficient number of times to become familiar. The third group I give contains the beautiful Irish folk-songs which have survived the ages because ovf the deathless appeal they make to the hearts of men…The fourth group of songs represents the fine work of modern American and English composers… (December, 1924) Contrary to what is still sometimes believed, he never at any time in his career, not even at the end when there was little voice left, confined himself to the songs to which Whalen et al. took such exception. Grove should have known better. He varied the format described for Musical America but he typically began with a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century aria, as often as not with Handel. He had a particular affinity with the songs of Rachmaninoff (a personal friend, incidentally), which he frequently sang, and German Lieder with original texts appeared from the mid-twenties on. Art songs by modern English and American composers were also a prominent part of his repertoire. His concerts would be rounded off with a selection of Irish folk songs and work in a similar vein the strength of his Irish personality and his Irish accent made it all sound Irish even where it was not—“I Hear You Calling Me”, after all, was written by an Englishman, but who could listen to it other than in the context of the singer being by an Irish graveside? It is said the Irish listened through the classics of song “in impatient silence”. No doubt many others did so too. Such was the tenor’s popularity in such music that it overwhelmed his reputation in what was an almost uniquely wide repertoire. There was always plenty of material by which he might be judged a “serious” musician or not. Yet the criticism stung him. Compton Mackenzie, the writer and founder of the Gramophone magazine, met McCormack in Dublin in 1924 and wrote of the encounter: One of the keenest pleasures in an artist’s life is to be able to tell another artist quite sincerely that he admires his work. “Yes, but I expect you think I sing a great deal of rubbish”, said McCormack to me. I agreed and suggested that for this side of the Atlantic he had sung enough. “Yes, but I’m going to sing Wolf and Brahms now, and all sorts of songs that I really want to sing.” “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time,” I assured him. The date chosen by Grove, 1924, marked not the shrinking or deterioration of the tenor’s repertoire but rather the expansion of it. He had sung Lieder for some time but in the early twenties had now studied it in earnest and in German. His German he learnt on tour from his accompanist, Teddy Schneider, Chicago-born but of German parentage, and he turned to Sir George Henschel, a famed polymath, conductor and singer for coaching in Lieder. Henschel was probably invaluable to McCormack as he had actually received tuition from Brahms on the interpretation of Lieder. In a letter to Charlie Wagner, written from England where he could take vacations but not sing in public, he wrote feelingly: I have made arrangements to study German Lieder with Sir George Henschel this fall and Teddy and I are then going in the spring to sing in Berlin and other large German cities and Vienna and I am going to find out once for all whether I am just a Ballad singer or a real singer. If you were an artist you would know that to sing always for the same public is very tiresome for the singer and makes him inclined to be lackadaisical and slipshod in method. I want to jack myself up as it were, so that I can if possible give more to my American public that I dearly love, and I want my American public to be proud of their American singer, and to share in any successes that may be mine over here. (24 June 1922) McCormack’s reading into the German repertoire was far wider and deeper than is generally recognised. The critic and composer, Deems Taylor, retained a golden memory of an evening when “John sang straight through two volumes of Hugo Wolf’s songs, with Rachmaninoff at the piano and Ernest Newman turning the pages…” (I Hear You Calling Me, p. 156) Such evenings in the McCormacks’ apartment in New York were far from rare. Gerald Moore is on record as saying McCormack was one of the two best sight-readers in his experience, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau being the other. In 1923, he recorded Lieder with their original German texts for the first time. He is every inch the broken-hearted lover in Schubert’s “Die Liebe hat gelogen”, which he recorded in 1923 and 1927, an interpretation Herman Klein singled out for praise while adding: “I don’t greatly admire his German accent, because it has an American flavour; but it sounds fluent, while the dark colour of the voice is welcome”. Others commented on the problem he had with umlauts that he never fully overcame. However, his versatility in Lieder was evident from the start. In Brahms’s “In Waldeseinsamkeit”, we find the tenor at his most tender and elegiac, savouring remembered, enraptured love. Interestingly, the English critic, Desmond Shawe-Taylor thought the tenor insufficiently responsive to Schubert’s “divine spontaneity”, although he made an exception for “Die Liebe hat gelogen” and he had unbounded praise for his singing of Brahms’s “Die Mainacht” and “In Waldeseinsamkeit” which: …are sung with a beautiful lightness and smoothness, and with an easy phrasing. The interpretation of “In Waldeseinsamkeit” is notable for the three-fold upward phrase (like a distant echo) on the word “ferne” and for the final pianissimo rise on the last syllable of “Nachtigall”—one of McCormack’s most famous vocal effects turned to the most exquisite account. It is hard to think of the German tenor who could rival either of these performances. (World Record Club LP, WRC H110, sleeve notes) McCormack also included French art songs in his concert programmes, even on the continent, although his French was indifferent and if he was sometimes stiff in his rendering of French music it is hardly surprising. He had Teddy Schneider to “bounce” German off on a daily basis if he wished, but not French. Nevertheless, in “Champs paternels, Hébron douce vallée” from Méhul’s Joseph en Égypte (1917), the voice, as one would expect, soars. In Gabriel Fauré’s “L’automne” (1932), the French is laboured and so is the voice, with an awkwardly executed interval near the end. It is mood rather than idiomatic French that impresses: he captures the regret of passing time with poignancy. César Franck’s sacred song, “La procession” (1927), taken with softness and delicacy, suits the tenor better still. With England out of bounds, McCormack’s forays into Europe in 1923 proved to be all that he had hoped for, indeed perhaps even more. His manager, Denis McSweeney, wrote to Lily McCormack: We have witnessed great demonstrations at the Hippodrome, Symphony Hall in Boston, Sydney and elsewhere, but I can truthfully say that the ovations in both Berlin and Prague were greater. Had the crowd here in Prague been as large as a Hippodrome audience they would have been heard in Paris almost. It was a different kind of enthusiasm. In New York they usually wait for the favourites before they get going; here they started after the first number, sung in Italian, a language which perhaps not a dozen people in the hall understood. Triumph followed triumph, including his singing of the aria from Beethoven’s oratorio Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the Mount of Olives), which he sang with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter in Berlin. He had previously sung it in Paris. McSweeney recalled: The ovation following the Beethoven Aria in Berlin was simply colossal. I don’t think I have ever seen our tenor so deeply touched. I am happy and very proud and very glad that I got over on time to witness it all, but the joint regret of the Three Musketeers [McSweeney, Schneider and the tenor himself] is that you are not here. By 1924, a decade had passed since he had last sung in London. With time moving on he must have felt it was now nor never. Playing safe, he booked Queen’s Hall, a much smaller venue than the massive Royal Albert Hall, which under normal circumstances would have been the natural choice for a singer of his celebrity. As soon as the date of the concert was announced, for 6 October 1924, McCormack was again targeted with threats of disruption of the concert and worse. This time, however, he was determined to proceed with it. Henri Deering, the pianist, opened the concert and was, apparently, a model of composure. Then came the moment when John and Teddy Schneider appeared on the platform. The packed house simply rose to him and in Lily’s words: “From that moment the day was John’s… John knew he was once again in the hearts of the British public. We heard nothing more from the writers of the letters and telegrams and never found out who had instigated the ‘war of nerves’”. Compton Mackenzie recalled: He did me the honour of inviting me to sit between the Countess and his daughter in case there was an unpleasant demonstration. I had just grown a black beard about that time and looked a bit fierce. John himself spent the whole day in church after communicating at early mass, and from the church he came straight to Queen’s Hall. The place was packed. I sat between the great tenor’s wife and daughter in the middle of the front row of the circle. I can see now John’s face, chalk white as he came on to the platform. There was a moment’s silence and then the audience broke into mighty applause and cheering. John’s face grew whiter, if possible. A silence fell. Then as if from another world he started the aria “O Sleep” on that high opening note without the ghost of a tremolo in it. The return to London was a triumph, and not one of the gallant band of anonymous letter writers ventured as loud a hiss as a moulting gander. We had a wonderful supper party that night and a few days later John played over to me the records he had just made of Brahms and Wolf. Herman Klein summed up his reception in one word: “magnificent.” Also in the audience was the Irish pianist Charles Lynch, whose recollections of the concert deserve quoting at length: I still remember the peculiar feeling of tense excitement which emanated from the absolutely crowded house. The concert opened with a pianoforte solo—Bach’s A Minor Prelude and Fugue for Organ, arranged by Liszt. This was played by the pianist Henri Deering. After this there was an interval of a few minutes and then John McCormack stepped on to the platform. When the huge crowd caught sight of him it broke into shouts and applause, and when this finally died away there was another minute or so of silence. Then John McCormack nodded to his accompanist, who began to play the opening symphony of a Handel aria. When McCormack’s voice entered I realized that I was listening to the most perfect voice I had yet heard, taken as an example of sheer vocal sound. The performance of this aria by Handel was well-nigh flawless from start to finish. But even greater things were still to come. During the course of that afternoon’s recital many songs were sung, but the performance of three others, besides the Handel aria, remains immovably fixed in my memory. These were Schubert’s little masterpiece “Der Jüngling an der Quelle”, Frank Bridge’s “Go Not Happy Day” and “The Next Market Day” by Herbert Hughes. The thrill I felt when I heard Toscanini conduct the New York Symphony Orchestra in the Albert Hall, and Sir Thomas Beecham conduct the Delius Festival Concerts in 1929, was equalled by the thrill which John McCormack’s performance of these songs gave me. It was not merely the perfect vocal sound. That was something one took for granted. Rather it was the consummate art which lay behind this, and which turned the mood of each song into a real, living world, in which each person and image in the poems seemed to become endowed with a life of its own. The voice literally floated through the hall, with the words, seemingly floating on top of it. This had the effect of making the words seem separate from and, at the same time emotionally one with, the vocal line. Consequently the simultaneous perfection of both vocal and verbal articulation was truly memorable. The public evidently shared my views, for they insisted on his giving a repeat performance of these three songs. As I came out of the concert hall into the London streets on that autumn evening, I heard a ringing cheer from the crowd in Ridinghouse Street, gathered around the great singer’s car as it drove him away. To this, Charles Lynch had a postscript: I heard John McCormack on other occasions, but, as it happened, never again at Queen’s Hall. It was always in the Albert Hall, that vast, gloomy building with the monstrous echo, yet McCormack’s voice filled that huge place from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall with effortless ease. It was indeed the only voice I ever heard sound really well in that building. The Times, having noted the ovation he received, went on to compliment him on his: …very substantial programme. He did not propose the three hackneyed arias with a few ballads, which famous singers often think, no doubt correctly, are good enough for such an audience, but gave a scheme of song in four groups, calculated to show very different sides of his art which, in the years since he was heard here, he has developed considerably. [Presumably the contributor to Grove’s Dictionary was not present!] He began with Scarlatti and Handel. The former’s “Caldo sangue” from the cantata Re di Gerusalemme is an intensely moving piece of pure melody as he sings it, and his Handel selection in English and Italian, “O Sleep” from Semele, and “Vanne sì, superba, và”, a vigorous aria from Giustino, showed two distinct aspects of Handel, as well as the intelligence in interpretation of the singer. … His second group was made up of German Lieder, Schubert, Brahms and Wolf, his third of Irish folksongs, and his fourth was a miscellaneous selection of things he likes to sing. His study of German song is comparatively recent. If we are not mistaken, he began singing it in public in America only a year or two ago. “Der Jüngling an der Quelle” (Schubert) had to be repeated, and Wolf’s “Wo find’ ich Trost?”, the longest of the group, was splendidly given, though once or twice in the climaxes here one realised that the voice has not quite the inexhaustible quality it used to have. After this group he added as an encore Rachmaninov’s “To the Children” (in English), which he makes extraordinarily appealing through his spontaneous singing. Spontaneity is the very essence of his singing of Irish folksongs. We heard five, and wondered how many more the audience would get from him. Obviously they could not get enough to satisfy them. In these things the diction is perfect. You hear every word across Queen’s Hall, but are not made conscious of the art which produces the result. “The Next Market Day” (arranged by Herbert Hughes) was specially captivating to the audience for this reason, but in “Una Baun” the singer sings his heart away, which is better still… McCormack’s repertoire was huge. Compare his Queen’s Hall return with the five concerts he gave at the Imperial Theatre, Tokyo, in 1926. He made a tour of the Orient on the advice of his friend Fritz Kreisler. McCormack’s proposed concert programmes were announced in advance. They make interesting reading as an indication of how much wider McCormack’s repertoire was—particularly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, in the baroque and classical periods—than his discography or reputation would suggest; and once again it nails the mistaken belief that McCormack ever confined himself to familiar ballads. In the first concert, Handel’s “O Sleep Why Dost Thou Leave Me?”, one of his favourite concert arias and one he did record, was followed by a rare piece by Leonardo Vinci (c.1690–1732), “Sentirsi il petto accendere” from his opera Artaserse. His second concert opened with the aria “Gioite al canto mio” from one of the very earliest of all operas, Euridice, by Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), followed by Handel’s “Enjoy the Sweet Elysian Groves” from Alceste; and his fourth and fifth concerts featured, respectively, Mozart’s “Per pietà, non ricercate” and from Handel’s little-known opera, Giustino, “Vanne sì, superba, và”. The third concert opened with the recitative and aria from Beethoven’s oratorio Christus am Ölberge, then continued with Schubert and Wolf. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century music was represented throughout, along with a collection of Irish songs. Writing of the second concert in the series the Japan Times noted that: “His voice, always sweet and warm, last night partook of the finer qualities of liquid expression and soulful interpretation… The very first number showed Tokyo the superb lyric mastery of his voice”. Notwithstanding what was on the concert programmes, the Japan Times announced his imminent arrival by describing him as the singer of “Mother o’ Mine”. It is sometimes said that the recording industry reached maturity with the advent of electrical recording. That took some time. Only in the face of a declining market was the complacency of the record companies breached and the microphone and electrical amplification, invented years before, introduced to the recording studios, in 1925. Strange to relate, the eager anticipation of the new process was matched by an equal reaction of gnashing of teeth when the first electrical records came off the press. Compton Mackenzie had written in the January edition of the Gramophone: We enter our third year at a season when the vitality of the gramophone is popularly supposed to be at its lowest ebb. In spite of that the atmosphere buzzes with whispers of coming excitements. HMV announce a new method of recording electrically. Come November and he did not mince his words: The exaggeration of sibilants by the new method is abominable, and there is often a harshness which recalls some of the worst excesses of the past. The recording of massed strings is atrocious from an impressionistic standpoint. I don’t want to hear symphonies with an American accent. I don’t want blue-nosed violins and Yankee clarinets. I don’t want the piano to sound like a free lunch counter. Correspondents were equally dismayed. The new realism took some getting used to. Even today, collectors of early records feel nostalgic about acoustic records for their mellowness. But pre-electric records do not have the same harmonic range or detail. As a rule, they do not separate the voice from background instruments as successfully, nor provide the instruments with the same amount of detail as even early electrical recordings did. Incidentally, the electric process in the studio did not generally extend to electrically amplified gramophones or phonographs, which remained acoustic and often hand-cranked into the forties and beyond. McCormack reached the age of forty-one in 1925. Over his long career, he had almost as many years making electrical recordings as he had acoustic. Through most of the 1920s his voice remained a potent instrument, with its youthful bloom fading only slowly. Some of his repertoire, but by no means all, he recorded both acoustically and electrically, and some songs he recorded several times. So often, when a singer repeats his work, especially where there is an interval of years, it is found that lapses in style and technique intrude, sloppiness creeps in or corners are cut. In McCormack’s case the scrupulous technique remained intact, while at the same time his vocal personality became more expansive, the text of songs more to the fore. The broadened vowels sometimes provide the words with more emphasis. Many a McCormack fan will tell you that when they think of his voice on record the words come to mind no less than the melody. His ability to converse on a musical line became more developed in the latter part of his career, as for example in three of his most popular encores, which he re-recorded in 1927: “I Hear You Calling Me”; “Kathleen Mavourneen”; and “Mother Machree”. Simple though the texts of these songs might seem in print, the words became embedded in the collective Irish memory—along with many others—by the poignant caresses McCormack imparts to them: Though years have stretched their weary lengths between And on your grave the mossy grass is green I hear you calling me and in “Kathleen Mavourneen”: It may be for years and it may be forever Then why art thou silent, the voice of my heart? and Sure, I love the dear silver That shines in your hair, And the brow that’s all furrowed, And wrinkled with care. I kiss the dear fingers, So toil-worn for me, Oh, God bless you and keep you, Mother Machree. Listening to them now, approaching a century since they were recorded, the words still ring fresh and heartfelt. How often has McCormack’s diction been applauded, but it was much more than diction: it was his feel for words, and the manner in which he could point up words and whole phrases that made him the singer he was. It is a hoary old chestnut as to which should come first, the words or the musical line. There is, after all, an inherent conflict between the rhythms of speech and the rhythms of music. McCormack resolved the issue as if there was no issue to resolve. He was uncompromising in pursuing the rhythms of speech, moving across bar lines without compunction. Yet, such was his musicianship, he still maintained the essential contours of the vocal line as written. Perhaps the very essence of his art lay in his sense of timing, over and above the written score, manifest in sparingly-used pregnant pauses, in rubato of course, in lengthening and shortening phrases or parts of phrases to highlight what was important and diminish what was less so, in telling a story in song, as in “Terence’s Farewell to Kathleen” (one verse only in 1907; complete in 1934) and in bringing out the searing drama in such a song as Rachmaninoff’s “To the Children” (1922/24/25). By such means, on record no less than in live performance, he had the ability to reach out to his unseen audience with a rare intimacy and connection. These elements of communication were nurtured by his Edwardian roots. They may have been losing ground to changing stylistic fashions and the pedantry of “fidelity to the score” by the late twenties, if not before. When his recording of Quilter’s “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” (1927) was reviewed in the Gramophone magazine in July 1930, the anonymous writer had this to say: When one of our most famous critics…has said that a singer has by his consummate style performed the feat of making him listen to poor songs, one can’t, when the songs are of any value, dismiss a record of that singer with a “very charming, though all wrong.” McCormack seems to be completely forsaking any sustained singing; indeed, his conversational style seems to be hardly recognisable as singing proper any longer. Can he possibly have been influenced by the talkie atrocities? Into the bargain, in Quilter’s “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal”, he makes the four shortest notes of the song, set so expressively to the first four syllables of “Slip into my bosom”, into the four longest; being guilty of one of the lowest tricks of singing. One can only admire and enjoy the rare perfect simplicity and ease of singing… Lengthening the phrase in question seems fully justified: the meaning of the phrase is heightened, and while the melodic contour is elongated it is not perverted; McCormack’s rhythmic sense sees to that. It makes no sense to squeeze words uncomfortably to adhere to a prescribed pattern if a greater freedom provides a greater naturalness, as the reviewer would appear to recognise: “… rare simplicity and ease of singing.” It is not parlando. The emission of a sustained and homogenous tone runs through each phrase—which is as good a definition of singing as any other. The gentle, imaginative interplay that McCormack brings to the text and the melodic line makes this a gem of a recording. Who has sung it more eloquently? Let us dwell for a moment on the distinction between parlando—heightened speech—and singing tone, so-called. Singing tone has little to do with actual timbre and everything to do with rhythm. Blues and jazz singers, not necessarily noted for “beautiful tone”, are said to “swing” when they are ahead, behind and on the explicit beat of their music, but always in contact with the beat. It is this which provides their vocal line with buoyancy—swing—no matter how raucous the voice or how limited the vocal range. The singer, classical or jazz, who dutifully plods along the beat never gets the vocal line airborne. It is no different in classical music other than that the beat is usually implicit rather than explicit. McCormack’s imaginative use, and acute sense, of rhythm was without peer among singers. His use of rubato runs through his work, but is most brilliantly illustrated in songs with overt rhythms. Well I remember the late Dr. Tom Walsh, founder of the Wexford Opera, enthusing in a lecture over the exquisite rhythmic buoyancy in “By the Short Cut to the Rosses”. One might equally point to the Ballynure Ballad, which so evokes “Old Ireland” and his late recording of “The Star of the County Down” (1939), which shows the freshness of his art undiminished by age. Writing of this song in “Am I Too Loud?”, Gerald Moore observed: The claim that very little music is performed in strict time with a slavish observance of bar lines is not an empty one. I found that John McCormack used natural speech rhythms in his songs. This kept me on the alert for sometimes he would try to catch me napping, particularly in The Star of the County Down where he used every sort of elasticity of rhythm. This song had one particular line which was a real tongue twister for him: “No pipe I’ll smoke and no horse I’ll yoke, till my plough is a rust coloured brown”. I will swear I once heard him declaim: “No horse I’ll smoke, and no pipe I’ll yoke till my plough...” and then the phrase dwindled away into an indistinguishable mumble. A mishap like this was clearly noticeable when it overtook McCormack. Any other singer would have bluffed his way out of it. But John was not another singer, nor have I ever heard enunciation such as his. You could hear every syllable he uttered, no matter how softly he sang, and you could almost see his consonants. How often do you hear “The Star of the County Down” sung today with the singer sticking relentlessly to the written rhythm, like a train stuck on tracks, the words hopelessly enervated? Where else but in McCormack’s recording of Stephen Foster’s lilting “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” (1934) would you find the wonderful movement of the line, with such a sense of improvisation, every touch of rubato just so and sounding so natural? An important part of McCormack’s repertoire was songs of a religious nature, of which he recorded many throughout his career. One becomes aware of just how accurate was McCormack’s intonation in both the Bach and Schubert settings of the “Ave Maria”, which he recorded several times. Perhaps the broad vowels are used with a little too much emphasis in the Schubert. But how well paired are McCormack and Kreisler, here as in so much else they recorded. Listen to Strauss’s “Morgen!” for its elegiac eloquence in both the vocal line and violin obbligato. The influence of Kreisler on his younger friend—there was ten years between them—was considerable, and freely acknowledged by McCormack. His recording of César Franck’s “Panis angelicus” (1927) was among his most popular religious recordings. In 1928, for his indefatigable work for charities, McCormack was raised by Pope Pius XI to the papal peerage, the honour being all the greater for being made hereditary. And it was at the Pontifical High Mass in Phoenix Park, Dublin, which concluded the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, that McCormack had the largest live audience of his career, with an estimated million attendees in the park. On the steps of the high altar, resplendent in his papal uniform and accompanied by his tutor of old, Vincent O’Brien, conducting the Palestrina Choir, McCormack sang Franck’s “Panis angelicus”. For many who heard him on that occasion, as their reminiscences testified, it was one of the highlights of their lives, an experience to be recounted to their children and their children’s children. The greatest of his religious recordings, undoubtedly, was the aria from Beethoven’s Christus am Ölberge, recorded in English, with its recitative recorded in both English and German. His singing of the aria was greatly admired on the continent as we have seen, yet he did not record it until 1930—why so late? Any later and he would not have the vocal resources to handle it. The manner in which the text is projected in high relief against the musical line is a consummate achievement. Yet despite the textual urgency, the smoothness of his legato is never compromised. The religious fervour and pleading are expressed entirely by musical means and the vocal line is never smudged. Nor at any point, this being all the more remarkable given the date of the recording, does McCormack overreach himself while he builds up the drama, climax upon climax, right until the pleading, climactic conclusion on the lines: “Lord, arise! Deliver me!” A small part of the score, but who today sings arpeggios with the accuracy McCormack did? This recording is a tour de force. Inevitably, in the thirties the voice darkened and showed evidence of ageing, yet some of the tenor’s most notable recordings, including German Lieder, were yet to come. With Hugo Wolf McCormack had a special affinity, responding to the questioning, searching nature of Wolf’s work, its religious allusions; and to Wolf’s organic fusion of music and language. He had introduced to America some of the orchestral settings that Wolf had made for his songs. The Hugo Wolf Society was formed in 1931 by HMV with the purpose of producing limited editions to be sold by subscription. Elena Gerhardt (1883–1961) was the first singer approached, and over a period of years some fourteen singers recorded for the project. Six volumes of Wolf’s songs, in all, were published. For the Wolf Society he is accompanied by Teddy Schneider. His recording of “Ganymed”, made in 1932, is regarded as one of the high points of McCormack’s recording career. The critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote of it: He does supreme justice to one of the greatest of all German songs. It is somewhat mysterious that McCormack seldom (if ever) sang in public a song of which his interpretation is so memorable, indeed haunting, as to seem definitive. This is one of those rare performances which may properly be called inspired. A gentle pulsation enters the voice at the new access of emotion on the words “Du kühlst den brennenden/ Durst meines Busens,/ Lieblicher Morgenwind!”, a wondering assent at “Ich komm! Ich komme!”, a rapturous excitement at the phrase “Mir! Mir!/ In eurem Schoße/ Aufwärts!”, while the long final phrase floats upward and out of sight, from the oft-repeated D to the high F-sharp, in a manner of which this singer alone knew the secret. In contrast to “Ganymed”, McCormack recorded Wolf’s “Schlafendes Jesuskind”, a poetic meditation on a painting by Francesco Albani, no fewer than three times, in 1925, 1930 and 1936. If the voice is inevitably older sounding in the last recording, it is also the one in which the singer is most deeply committed; and his recording of “Herr, was trägt der Boden hier” (1935) has the powerful stamp of a singer who not only understands mortality, but anticipates it. In a different vein altogether, yet still the work of maturity, is the unforced, spontaneous charm he brings to “Auch kleine Dinge”, also recorded in 1935, an existential savouring of the passing moment, the observation that “Auch kleine Dinge können uns entzücken”—even small things can delight us—is relished and pondered upon in a way that tends to escape youth. These recordings, made in the autumn of his career, are remarkable in showing that the singer, even as his voice declined, did not cease to develop experientially. His abiding affinity with miniatures is heard in such as Vaughan Williams’s “Silent Noon” (1941) and such Irish airs as “She Moved Thro’ the Fair” and Thomas Moore’s “Love Thee, Dearest, Love Thee”, his wistful charm becoming more plaintive with the passing of the years. John McCormack retired from the concert circuit in America at Buffalo in 1937 and a farewell tour of the British Isles and Ireland culminated in a tearful farewell at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 27 November 1938. He came out of retirement during the Second World War to sing on behalf of the Red Cross. He finally retired to the Shelbourne Hotel in the centre of Dublin and then, on account of the onset of emphysema, to “Glena”, Booterstown, along the coast, where Lily hoped the sea air would help him. A nursing nun who looked after him at this time recalled him saying to her impishly: “Do you know, Sister, if Christ ever sang I am sure it was with a tenor voice.” His own voice was now reduced to a whisper. Charles Lynch remembered the last occasion he visited him at “Glena”: During the course of that evening Count McCormack showed me his fine library of music. Amongst many other absorbingly interesting things was a facsimile manuscript full-score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Eventually he brought out a score of Die Walküre, which I commenced to play on his magnificent Steinway piano. For the next couple of hours I played large sections of this opera, while Count McCormack stood beside the instrument, turning over the pages and occasionally singing. When we came to the final notes of the incomparable work, we were both of us deeply moved at the beauty of Wagner’s music. As I stood on the steps of the house saying goodbye to him that night, I little thought that six weeks later he would no longer be with us, but so it was to be. He died from pneumonia on 16 September 1945, aged sixty-one, and was buried, as he wished, in his Papal uniform, in Deans Grange Cemetery. It is said that in the west of Ireland, when word spread of his passing, there were people who drew down the blinds in their houses, a traditional mark of respect more usually reserved for a family member. I am old enough to remember that when the name of John McCormack came up in conversation among old timers, a faraway look would come over their faces and they would speak of him with reverence. For McCormack was more than an entertainer. He defined the Irish experience. Sunt lacrimae rerum: tears lie at the heart of things. It was a time of grinding hardship and poverty; when tuberculosis was rampant; when families might share a single room; when emigrants were waked as the dead were waked: for those who departed for far-flung places were not expected to return. His voice and art embodied the struggle, the sense of loss and heartbreak of those times. He was an icon of the age, and the humanity in his art brought solace and consolation to countless numbers the world over. Not only with tears, for McCormack’s art encompassed gentle humour too. In the song “Off to Philadelphia”, the unfortunate emigrant was often interpreted as a figure of fun, a stage caricature. By contrast, McCormack, in his 1941 recording, identifies with the hapless traveller. The self-deprecating fun he pokes is all at himself, forlorn figure that he is, but the hope of one day returning home, though we are made to think it unlikely, is made in earnest. In “Molly Brannigan” (1913), one of the most beguiling of all Irish folk songs, McCormack brings out the underlying truth that tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin. His recorded output was immense. Posterity, however, cannot but regret what he never recorded. Perhaps the greatest singer of Mozart and Handel of his day, it is pitiful that he recorded less than a handful of their compositions. His concert programmes reveal a vast repertoire of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century songs, almost none of which he brought to the recording studio. Bach is barely represented; Scarlatti and Vivaldi not at all. One could go on. That said, his discography, for its idiomatic security, its consistency and versatility, and for the number of definitive recordings it contains, stands as one of the towering achievements in the history of sound recording. His records make the case for describing him as the greatest musician among singers of his time. John McCormack had a voice of exquisite purity and a consummate vocal technique, yet perhaps his greatest gift was something else: for above the beauty of the voice and the technique, and even when the voice was no longer young and flexible, McCormack remained always a vividly communicative artist, among the most compelling vocal personalities of the twentieth century. © Gordon T. Ledbetter, 2019 The passages quoted from the article by Charles Lynch are reproduced with permission from the Capuchin Annual (1946-1947). The Capuchin Annual was published every year in Dublin by the Capuchin Franciscans from 1930 to 1977. It contained articles (mainly in English but also in Irish) on a variety of subjects: poetry, cartoons, illustrations and photographs. Its circulation was international as it was frequently sent to Irish emigrants particularly in North America and in Australia. The Singing of John McCormack “I cannot place your voice, because God did that.” —Vincenzo Sabatini My hope is to draw a portrait of the artist and the man: singer, patriot, musician, talker, mimic, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, an Irishman with a rough side to his tongue as well as a smooth and with vitality enough to make enemies as well as friends. To this end I have wherever possible let him speak in his own words.” (L.A.G. Strong, John McCormack, Peter Nevill Limited, 1949, p. 7.) In this design Mr. Strong was remarkably successful. Pierre Key did not have quite the same skill in transcribing McCormack’s speech in his book (John McCormack, His Own Life Story, Small, Maynard & Co., 1918). Key conceived this biography as a long conversation between himself and his subject, but it cannot be said that he consistently captured a credible echo of McCormack’s chatter. Can we really believe that John said things like “Sabatini did not immediately speak, but he rose slowly from his seat as though cogitating something important and not to be prematurely divulged?” (p. 108.) However, this same chapter does contain some interesting information about McCormack’s vocal studies with Vincenzo Sabatini in Milan (pp. 110 –111): Two objects engaged the chief attention of Sabatini in our work: the acquiring of a mezza-voce, which I did not have by nature, and the freeing of my high tones. The voice was not what is called a “long” voice (by which I mean plenty of compass, from bottom to top) and the top notes were in my throat; but to get them out with freedom, so that a high A or B-flat had the same relative quality as the lower part of the voice, required constant, painstaking teaching on Sabatini’s part and practice on my own. The mezza-voce (singing with half the volume of the full voice, or with less than half) was a slow process; often I grew discouraged over it… But my endeavors, as may be apparent, so far as Sabatini is concerned, lay in the direction of acquiring an evenness of the vocal scale; of making the voice smooth in every note, and in gaining ease of production and certainty—in short, a technique which in time would become so perfect mechanically as to allow me to forget technique, while I sang, and devote my attention exclusively to the interpretation of the music and the text. The biographies of Count John McCormack trace the life story of the shy garsún who rose to the exalted ranks of papal dignity and worldwide recognition as a star performer among international concert artists. Like Tito Schipa, a tenor whom he in many ways resembles, McCormack was able to fix on wax a permanent memento of his entire career, from 1904 to 1942 when the distinguished tenor emerged from retirement with a voice no longer boasting the high notes of yore but still—frequently—of pearly freshness and with a technique only partially eroded by time. In forty years of singing, very little of great significance was ever lost to McCormack the minstrel. L.A.G. Strong quotes a perspicacious review by Julian Johnson from the Los Angeles Times following McCormack’s first concert in that city in 1912: Such limpid use of the voice, such a delicate command of portamento, such mezza voce, such round, luscious, appealing, ringing tone, floating on the breath and formed apparently without the slightest physical limitation or throaty pressure—to tell the truth, all these things do not seem logical or even sane in these days of passion-tattering…of the expiring Bonci race only McCormack appears to upbear the white standard of bel canto pure and undefiled. What Mr. Johnson wrote in 1912 could scarcely be improved upon as a description of the singing of John McCormack, but all of it could equally be said of Edmond Clément (1867–1928) and Hirwen Jones (1857–?), to name but two tenors more or less contemporary with him, exquisite singers who, however, never gained the immortal fame of John McCormack. Clément exemplifies the high achievements of the French school of singing as reformed by Paër, Rossini and the many Italian singers who taught in Paris, like Bordogni and Sbriglia, while the records of the forgotten Welsh tenor Hirwen Jones, who enjoyed a successful career in Victorian England in concert and oratorio, reveal one of the finest singers of a now extinct English school of singing that was also modelled on the Italian. All three of these light lyric tenors recorded the “Berceuse” from Godard’s Jocelyn, all of them displaying the qualities admired by Mr. Johnson (only McCormack, however, enjoying the privilege of a violin obbligato by Fritz Kreisler). These qualities were once demanded of all singers by discriminating audiences: small wonder that McCormack stood out in comparison with the “passion-tattering” complained of by Mr. Johnson. Small wonder, also, that such vocal paragons as Melba and Tetrazzini repeatedly asked for McCormack to sing with them. Where any rivalry with Bonci is concerned, it seems to me that, so far as gramophone records can be trusted, only in “Giunto sul passo estremo” from Mefistofele does Alessandro Bonci offer any serious threat to McCormack. In 1906 Bonci was hailed by the New York critics, then the best in the world, as a paragon of vocal technique and style: curiously, they never mentioned his rather irregular vibrato, which is strikingly prominent on all his records. (Bonci was a pupil of Felice Coen at the Pesaro Conservatory: two other tenor pupils of Coen were Umberto Macnez and my teacher, Vincenzo D’Alessandro (1876–1968) neither of whom had a marked vibrato. At the age of ninety-two D’Alessandro still sang perfectly, very much in the Bonci style.) You could not describe Bonci’s tone as “round and luscious” though it does seem to be “appealing and ringing”, nor could you apply to Bonci the age-old Italian dictum “Il cantante non ha gola”—the singer has no throat—whereas you may certainly apply it to McCormack in 1912, when he recorded the two arias from Mefistofele. His beautifully-sung record of “Giunto sul passo estremo” ends with a ravishing ascent, pianissimo, to the high A-flat, held at length—to tell the truth, a rather vulgar addition to the score, but McCormack is not the only tenor on records to perpetrate this embellishment (often yelled fortissimo), which had probably become traditional, and he may even have learned it from Sabatini. (Caruso, in his 1902 recording, does not introduce an unwritten high note, probably because he had sung the opera at La Scala conducted by Toscanini, no friend to singers’ interpolations.) In the main, McCormack’s interpretation is “modern”, a fairly straightforward reading of the music, once so popular, now rather looked down upon. To place Bonci’s 1905 record on the turntable is to enter a completely different world: although McCormack finds at once the colour of voice appropriate to the song, striking a suitably mournful, regretful, dreamy (“trasognato”) tone, it is Bonci who is truly eloquent, in a very old-fashioned but vivid and fascinating manner. Bonci savours each phrase, lingers lovingly on the words and notes and gives the same kind of poetic “interpretation” that Fernando De Lucia, of the previous generation, does in his strikingly pictorial reading (1917). In each strophe Bonci teaches us how to place the ascending scale up to the high A-flat, upon which note, both times, he effects a spectacular diminuendo, avoiding any interpolation in the finale, where he sings only the written notes—magically—with a diminuendo on the F of “esistenza”. However! While Bonci is singing our hearts are in our mouths because the silvery, trembling voice sounds as if it might crack at any moment: in this thrilling record it never does, though in some other recordings he is not so fortunate. McCormack’s audiences (in the concert hall or on the gramophone) were spared this agonising suspense, so solid and secure was his technique. Although Bonci was by no means a better actor onstage than McCormack (Lilli Lehmann describes him as cutting a ridiculous figure), like a true Italian he manages to turn the Fonotipia acoustic recording studio into a theatre, whereas McCormack’s “Giunto sul passo estremo” is very much a refined, somewhat staid, concert performance. Unlike Maria Malibran, he did not have “il diavolo in corpo”, one of Verdi’s basic requirements for an opera singer (he was not “possessed by the devil”). This probably explains why, in the midst of the verismo ferment, Italian theatre audiences seem to have received him with respectful admiration rather than rapturous ecstasy—although subsequently they bought his records in considerable quantities. It is interesting to compare McCormack in his golden period with, for example, two fine and popular contemporary English tenors, who, like McCormack, also recorded Liza Lehmann’s great song “Ah, Moon of My Delight”: Sydney Coltham and Hubert Eisdell. Both have fresh, attractive voices, with a sound technique on which to base their polished and detailed interpretations. They are scrupulous in following the composer’s indications in the score—Lehmann was herself a singer, a pupil of Jenny Lind, and knew what effects she wanted. Both tenors have a complete command of the piano, the pianissimo, the crescendo, and the diminuendo and Coltham even manages to take the final upper G pp as written, and then fine the note down even further in a virtuoso diminuendo! But if we then turn to John McCormack’s record, made in his sumptuous prime in 1911, Eisdell and Coltham are trumped: without paying any great attention to the composer’s markings, McCormack turns an already compelling song into a thing of pure magic. Naturally, he makes a special feature of the sustained pianissimo G at the end, and despite Sydney Coltham’s spectacular diminuendo and Eisdell’s brilliant high A, it is always going to be McCormack’s voice that I hear in my mind as I prepare to teach this song to a pupil. McCormack on Acoustic Recordings Before beginning his contract with Odeon in 1906, and, indeed, before having had the benefit of lessons from Sabatini in Milan, the twenty-year-old McCormack made over fifty recordings for various companies. One of the most pleasing and most promising is the 1904 ten-inch G&T of Balfe’s “Killarney” (better recorded than the cheaper, seven-inch version) that lingered long in the catalogues. Although McCormack used to poke fun at these primitive recordings of his, there is nothing at all to be ashamed of in this particular performance of a difficult and brilliant song—Balfe was a friend and pupil of Rossini. The young lad negotiates the difficult intervals with surprising aplomb and accuracy.
1646	dbpedia	1	19	https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/Photographer-German/1019305/Elena-Gerhardt,-German-Opera-Singer.html	en	Elena Gerhardt, German Opera Singer by Photographer German	https://www.meisterdruck…cke-1019305).jpg	https://www.meisterdruck…cke-1019305).jpg	[ "https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/images/logo_white.min.svg", "https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/kunstwerke/headerscarousel/85602.jpg", "https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/images/flags/flags.svg#de", "https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/images/flags/flags.svg#gb", "https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/images/flags/flags.svg#it", "http...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Buy Elena Gerhardt, German Opera Singer by Photographer German as fine art print. ✓ High-quality museum grade. ✓ Perfect reproduction	en	/favicon.svg	MeisterDrucke	https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/Photographer-German/1019305/Elena-Gerhardt,-German-Opera-Singer.html	Undated · black and white photograph · Picture ID: 1019305 Nonclassified artists Elena Gerhardt, German Opera Singer by Photographer German. Available as an art print on canvas, photo paper, watercolor board, uncoated paper or Japanese paper. Add to favorites Remove from favorites Select wall color View painting in a room View in 3D / AR 0 Reviews
1646	dbpedia	2	60	https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/janssen	en	Marston Records	https://cdn.shopify.com/…jpg?v=1635294552	https://cdn.shopify.com/…jpg?v=1635294552	[ "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0614/0837/files/m-banner-preferred-1.png", "https://www.marstonrecords.com/cdn/shop/products/56005_large.jpg?v=1635294552", "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0614/0837/files/FindUs-FB-RGB-1024.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "gramophone recording", "phonograph cylinder recording", "classic recording reissue", "historic piano recording", "historic opera recording", "historic voice recording", "Pathe opera recording", "Pathé opera recording", "Edison recording" ]	null	[ "Marston Records", "Takeshi Takahashi" ]	null	Home page of Marston Records. New release, promotions, and the latest information of the company.		//www.marstonrecords.com/cdn/shop/t/2/assets/favicon.ico?v=136588477034757280881416780421		https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/janssen	HERBERT JANSSEN (1892–1965) by Iain O. Miller, ©2017 PREFATORY NOTE: Anyone who writes about Janssen must first acknowledge a debt to the excellent 1965 article by Ted Hart (1921–1970) in the “Record Collector”. Ted Hart was himself a singer and an accomplished musician; he was also a friend of Janssen’s and may even have studied with him. After Janssen’s death, his wife gave Hart access to whatever recordings and scrapbooks of reviews remained in their flat at the Ansonia Hotel in New York. In addition to material gathered during his own research, the present compiler has drawn extensively on Hart’s article for information that is currently unavailable elsewhere. • • • • • JANSSEN’S EARLY LIFE AND VOCAL STUDIES Even during what is now looked back on as one of the ‘Golden Ages’ of singing, there was always an air of exceptional distinction around the name of the German baritone, Herbert Janssen. This distinction was remarked by critics and audiences very early in his career and now, a hundred and twenty-five years after his birth, it remains, undiminished, in the judgment of anyone with a love of fine singing. According to his birth certificate, Herbert Janssen was born on the 23rd of September, 1892, at 59 Brabanterstrasse in Cologne, the son of one Hermann Janssen and his wife, Anna Luise Sophia, née Siewert. On this certificate, Hermann Janssen gave his profession as ‘Merchant’ and according to his son’s account he was the owner of a coal mine and a coal merchant. Janssen used to say that he was of Frisian origin. The family was not only well-to-do, but also extremely cultivated, with several writers, sculptors, and painters amongst its members. In fact, the well-known painter Johann Peter Hasenclever was Herbert Janssen’s great-grandfather. Janssen’s mother was very musical and was herself a gifted amateur singer. Naturally she saw to it that her son and her daughter Anna should, as children, take singing lessons from a Cologne voice teacher, a Madame Batz-Kalender. Even as a child, the young Janssen enjoyed giving performances of operas before family and friends using his model opera house and singing all the parts of, say, Oberon, or Undine, in a high soprano. He was also so talented a pianist that at one time he dreamt of becoming a professional pianist. Cologne was musically and artistically very lively and the Janssen family fully enjoyed the city’s cultural life. As he grew up, Janssen began to think of becoming a singer, but he kept these ideas to himself and the intervention of military service and a full four years of active service as a cavalry officer in the Great War delayed any decision. At the end of the War, Janssen’s thoughts on the matter had matured and he announced to his family his wish to become a professional singer. They were absolutely appalled, and to subsequent generations, who know Janssen’s great artistry, their attitude will seem benighted. But one must remember that though they really were culturally enlightened people and took genuine and profound pleasure in music, from their point of view it was one thing for them to enjoy these things as gifted amateurs or as listeners of good taste, and quite another for their son to become a professional on the stage and to be paid to sing for the enjoyment of others. Janssen’s father had died when he was quite young, and when Janssen announced his intentions, his mother and various uncles immediately gathered round and exhorted him to study the law or go into the church, as befitted a member of his family; they pointed to his elder brother, Ernst, who had studied medicine, as the example to follow. But during the War, Janssen had thought constantly and profoundly about his career and was absolutely determined to study singing. His family, on the other hand, was equally adamant that he should forget such outlandish ideas, come to his senses, and enroll in a law school. Eventually a conditional compromise was reached: his family proposed that they would arrange for him to sing an audition before a famous voice-teacher from Karlsruhe, chosen by them, and if this teacher should give his approval, then the family would agree to finance Janssen’s voice lessons. If, on the other hand, he ruled against his prospects as a singer, then Janssen would abandon singing as a career and study law. At the audition, Janssen was certain he had sung well and expected that his singing would be praised. But to his great astonishment, the teacher gave judgment against him: he had no voice and no hope of cultivating it into anything that would support a career. Fortunately, Janssen remained quite unconvinced by this but, in accordance with the agreement, he duly went to Berlin and enrolled in the university there, ostensibly to study law. In fact, he used to say, he never went near the law school. Instead, he sought out a singing teacher and began to study. Throughout his career, reviewers, no matter what other virtues they mentioned, constantly commented on how “well-schooled” Janssen’s voice was. Comments to that effect crop up again and again to this day when his singing is discussed. Ted Hart quotes Janssen as answering the inevitable question about how he acquired this technical prowess with the quietly teasing remark, “Constant study and training—but in the right way”, this last phrase added “as if in subtle afterthought”, says Hart. The “right” way for Janssen was the way of the Berlin voice teacher he had chosen to study with, the great Dr. Oskar Daniel. This extraordinary man, though often given passing mention in singers’ biographies, deserves a central place in an account of Janssen’s career. He was born in Oedenburg (now Sopron, in Hungary) in 1879. His mother tongue was German and he received a doctorate in law from Vienna in 1906. Because he was extremely musical, he had been studying singing at the same time and had become a protégé of Gustav Mahler. A student of Janssen’s quotes him as saying that Daniel had studied with the younger Lamperti, who taught in both Dresden and latterly in Berlin. I have not been able to confirm this with independent evidence. What is definitely known is that he studied singing in Milan with Vincenzo Lombardi (1856–1914) teacher of de Lucia and Caruso, and also with Vittorio Vanzo (1862–1945). He was taken on as a “jugendlicher Heldentenor” at the Trier Opera for the 1911 Season and seems to have remained there until the outbreak of the Great War. Apart from having an unusually beautiful voice, Daniel soon showed himself to be an extremely gifted teacher of singing and, as a person, he is described as being lively and friendly. He quickly rose to the top of his profession as a teacher and, by the time Janssen went to study with him, he was already famous and had many celebrated pupils. A list of his pupils would be too long to include here, but in fairness to his memory, one can scarcely neglect to mention that amongst singers who studied with Daniel at some stage of their careers were Maria Cebotari, Frieda Hempel, Göta Ljungberg, Margherita Perras, Erna Sack, Lotte Schöne, Paul Schöffler, Elisabeth Ohms, as well as Herbert Janssen. Famous actors or theatre personalities also studied voice production with him, either privately or at the Berlin Hochschule. Marlene Dietrich, Elisabeth Bergner, Erika Mann, and Klaus Mann were among them. When Dr. Daniel was appointed professor of voice training at the Berlin Hochschule in 1922, he was already so famous that the Berlin newspapers were extraordinarily enthusiastic. In fact, such was his fame that the noted Viennese psychologist Dr. Leopold Thoma came to observe his classes and afterwards published an account of what he’d seen at the lessons and what he had discussed with the man he calls ‘The Master’. The article, journalistic, not scholarly in style, has as its title one of Daniel’s exhortations to his pupils: “The core of the tone at the point between the eyes” and underneath, “Draw the tone in from outside, not from inside!” Beneath this is a sketch, showing the pupils seated in a line, a pianist at a grand piano and ‘The Master’ standing beside the piano with his hand on his throat saying, “Not here! Concentrate the tone between the eyes!” Dr. Thoma goes on to describe the lesson and explains Daniel’s practice of group lessons (Lamperti did this too) and describes how each singer in turn gets up, with thumb or finger on the forehead, and sings before the others and then submits to the comments of the teacher and his fellow pupils. When he asks Professor Dr. Daniel why he has the singers hold their finger on the place between their eyes, Daniel replies with what, at first, must seem a perfect example of explaining obscurum per obscurius. He says: The best way to explain is with a comparison. If you light a carbon-arc lamp, a point of light emerges at the point where the carbon rods meet, from which light rays are emitted. It is the same with the voice and the point between the eyes. This is my opinion regarding the building of the core of the vocal tone. Oskar Daniel held an important position in Berlin’s cultural life and the artists and intellectuals of Berlin often met at his beautiful house in the Kaiserallee. Heinz Tietjen, Bruno Walter, whose daughter also took singing lessons from Daniel, Leo Blech, both Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Otto Klemperer, Emil Ludwig, and Max Reinhardt were all among the many regular distinguished visitors to the Daniels’ hospitable salon; years later, several recalled their visits to his house, the evenings of conversation and music surrounded by the beautiful furnishings, the wonderful Persian carpets, and the lovely paintings on the walls. The house and the life within it were to vanish, of course, with so much else of German high culture, in 1933. • • • • • Janssen used all the money sent to him by his family for his voice lessons. For almost two years he kept these studies from them, but a sudden visit by his mother revealed to the family what had been going on. Of course, they were furious and funds were abruptly cut off. He was told that there would be no further support from them until he abandoned singing and began to study law. For Janssen, such a course was more than ever out of the question and he was obliged to finance his continuing studies with Dr. Daniel by giving voice lessons to beginning singers and by accepting such support as his sympathetic brother-in-law was able to give. He studied diligently and in 1922 went for his first audition: remarkably, he was immediately engaged by Max von Schillings at the Berlin Staatsoper. He telegraphed a message to his family in Cologne: “Engaged Berlin Staatsoper” and was amazed to have a grand piano delivered to his flat almost within hours. It was a present and a declaration of peace from his mother. There was more to be revealed, however. It was only eight years later, in the afterglow of Janssen’s engagement to sing at Bayreuth, that his mother dared to tell him a terrible truth about the crucial audition she and the family had arranged years before: the teacher from Karlsruhe who had told him he had no voice had been given a large sum of money in advance, with instructions from the family that he must discourage Janssen from ever attempting to become a professional singer. JANSSEN’S RECEPTION AS A SINGER Of course, Janssen’s triumphant success at his audition before Max von Schillings did not mean an instant advance into taking major roles. He made his debut, on horseback, on May 5th, 1922, in Schrecker’s Schatzgräber. Despite his years in the cavalry, he had to twist himself sideways in the saddle to sing, as the nervous animal refused to face the audience. Leo Blech, the conductor, remonstrated with him afterwards for not ‘singing out’! He then began the usual ‘cursus honorum’ as a comprimario, singing Melot, Montano, Silvano in Ballo in Maschera, as well as small roles in Tiefland and Palestrina. It is obvious, however, that even in his first season Blech, and others, were already aware that with Janssen, they had exceptional material. Oskar Daniel’s training was telling, and Janssen was given the important and highly declamatory role of the Heerrufer in Lohengrin as well as the lyrical role of Silvio in Pagliacci. The critics wrote: “A fine baritone, full of character”; “Mighty and noble toned”; “well-schooled and sonorous”. It was a remarkable first season. In fact, Janssen’s first season was so successful that already, in his second season, he was entrusted with the major role of Wolfram in Tannhäuser. His performance of this role was immediately recognized as being of exceptional beauty and finish; so much so, indeed, that as early as December 1923 he was invited to the Odeon Studios to record two excerpts from the opera, his only acoustic recordings. He also added to his repertoire the roles of Sharpless, the Count di Luna, and that of Liebenau in Waffenschmied. Janssen used later to say that he thought that perhaps it was his singing of Wolfram that had enabled him so quickly to leave the comprimario repertoire and become a singer of major roles. Even now, nearly a century later, his singing of Wolfram’s music is held up as a standard of how well that role can be sung. Hart, using Janssen’s own archive, gives an illuminating list of roles performed by Janssen at the Berlin Staatsoper in his first years. It is a daunting and demanding repertory. In the 1924–1925 season, he added Renato, one of his favourite and most successful roles, Iokanaan, the Tsar in Zar und Zimmermann, and the Count in Schrecker’s Die Ferne Klang. In the 1925–1926 season, he added Gunther, Kurvenal, Albert in Werther, the Secretary in Boris Godunov, and Lothario in Mignon. And, incredibly hard work though it was, in 1926–1927 he added no fewer than eight new, major roles: Escamillio, Tonio, Valentin, Orest, the Count in Figaro, Amonasro, Amfortas, and Carlo in Forza del Destino! After his retirement, he recalled having once sung Silvio in a performance of Pagliacci in which Battistini sang Tonio. When and where can this have been? Janssen’s guest appearances are hard to trace: they began early on, first in and around Berlin itself, but eventually in Paris, Barcelona, Prague, Copenhagen, Antwerp and The Hague, Kiel, Geneva, Lyons, and in Dresden, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Kassel, and Vienna—all over Europe, in fact, except Italy. Janssen’s appearance with his great predecessor could have occurred in many places, but so far, it has not been possible to trace such an occasion. In any case, Janssen’s admiration for Battistini’s singing knew no bounds and I mention this because the German critics and audiences, from the beginning, found Janssen’s own singing “Italian” in character and highly idiomatic for Verdi and other Italian composers. One German critic wrote of him as “a German singer who has the Italian quality, the lyricism, the flowing, fresh vocalism ...” In Berlin, he was described as “Janssen, the Belcantist”, this familiar epithet no doubt referring to his ‘instrumental’ flow of beautiful tone. Janssen himself once said that he had spent nearly an entire year singing “Il balen” every day, until he felt that he had this demanding aria perfectly under control. He would also recall how, when he was beginning his studies, he wanted to sing nothing but Arie antiche. It must be emphasized that within Germany, Janssen sang Verdi and Italian opera a great deal and that he always felt a special affinity towards this repertoire. In addition to the Verdi roles already mentioned, he was a famous Rigoletto and Iago. He also sang Charles V in Ernani and Posa in Don Carlo with great success. It’s a great shame that he was able to record almost nothing of his preferred repertory. There is the Rigoletto duet with Lotte Schöne of which one critic remarked, “Nearest the art of the Italian comes Herbert Janssen with his smooth baritone”, and of which recording Herman Klein wrote that Janssen was first class and had “the right sort of appealing voice for Rigoletto.” Two takes under Blech of “Si pel ciel” from Otello with Melchior were never published but three takes of the singers’ much later recording of the same music have survived. There is the duet from Butterfly with Margherita Perras, but nothing else to help one imagine Janssen’s voice and art in Italian music. Among contemporary operas in which Janssen performed, by far the most important was the 1927 Berlin premiere of Busoni’s masterpiece, Doktor Faust under Blech, whom Busoni had always especially admired. The great Friedrich Schorr was in the title-role, Frida Leider was the ‘Duchess of Parma’, and Janssen was the ‘Maiden’s brother, a soldier’. Janssen’s scene, with its pealing organ music, and its grandly declamatory line, must have been glorious to hear. Certainly, he enjoyed singing it, as he told Oskar Daniel, who had little sympathy with the music and had come backstage to commiserate with “poor” Janssen for having to sing in the opera. Reviews of his performance, however, were full of the highest praise and several critics thought Janssen’s performance was some of his best work to date. Other less commonly performed operas were also in Janssen’s repertory. He took part in Karol Rathaus’s Fremde Erde, Moniuszko’s Halka, and Herbert Windt’s Andromache. For the May-to-June season of 1926, Janssen came to Covent Garden for the first time. He was to appear there every year until the outbreak of the War and was highly esteemed from his very first appearances. In his first season he sang Gunther and Kurvenal only, and the critics were enthusiastic. In the Covent Garden of 1926, Janssen immediately stood out even where singers of an older generation such as Melba, Chaliapin and Journet were still performing, and where Schorr, Leider, Lotte Lehmann, Melchior and Schumann were also singing. His Gunther was called “a remarkable piece of singing” and “unusually convincing” and his Kurvenal “combined power and sympathy”. Indeed, throughout his career, his singing of Gunther always provoked surprised delight at what Janssen could make of that unsympathetic role. It was as though the critics were noticing, were hearing Gunther’s music for the first time. I think that the surprise and the delight of those audiences can be shared by us unusually well in the excerpts recorded live at Covent Garden under Beecham: although we cannot see Janssen’s acting of the role, there is something instantly arresting about the way his voice takes charge of the entire stage and commands attention. In fact, this is always true of Janssen’s singing and it is one of the more striking virtues of his art. It stems, I think, from the stance which Janssen takes up towards the music. It is a question of address, of bearing, of tremendous presence: Janssen used to call this quality “Heil”. It is also, of course, to do with the voice itself, its placement, its firm tonal core, and, not least, its great beauty. Even after the high drama of Hagen’s summoning of the Vassals, the almost magical effect of Janssen’s voice in the brief solo which follows, recalls Homer: he begins to sing “and down the shadowy halls, all were silent, seized by rapture.” Yes, it’s like that. Janssen remained an honoured guest at Covent Garden until the close of the 1939 season. And, while he was indispensable in the Wagnerian roles, he was occasionally given the opportunity to display his talents outside Wagner: as Hidraot in Gluck’s Armide with Leider and Widdop, where he “sang finely” and where his “fine, resonant voice was a joy to hear”; as Prince Igor, where, in a cast that included Kipnis, Janssen was the only singer praised for his style, while the remaining singers were thought “too German”; as Orest in Elektra; Don Fernando in Fidelio; and as the Speaker in the Zauberflöte, where Herman Klein found him “simply perfect” and Cardus thought there was “more wisdom in one syllable of Janssen’s Speaker” than in all of Sarastro’s role. The air of wisdom in Janssen’s singing is something that comes back repeatedly when critics try to describe its effect. It was in Wagner, however, that he left his stamp most definitely at Covent Garden. He sang Donner in Rheingold, as well as the major roles for which he is chiefly remembered: the Dutchman, Wolfram, Telramund, Gunther, Kothner, Kurvenal, and Amfortas. His Dutchman was considered one of his finest achievements: Ernest Newman wrote of it that it was “one of the truly great things of the operatic stage today; here is a sufferer who carries on his shoulders not only his own but the whole world’s woe.” And Legge, writing as ‘Beckmesser’, wrote: “As in all his work, he stood apart from all the rest of the company by reason of his exquisite singing and his complete absorption in the character.” Finally, many years later, Will Crutchfield, referring to the live recording of one of these Covent Garden performances of Holländer, would write of the “almost unbelievably beautiful singing from Flagstad and Janssen.” Wolfram was a role that suited Janssen’s style and aesthetic perfectly. When Siegfried Wagner and Tietjen invited him to make his debut as Wolfram at Bayreuth in 1930, he went to his first rehearsal with Toscanini and sang through the role without interruption from the conductor. When they reached the end, Toscanini simply closed the score and said, “I see that it will not be necessary for us to see one another until the first full dress rehearsal.” When the recording of this production, under Elmendorff, was released by English Columbia, Herman Klein wrote an ecstatic review of it. Warning himself, at the start, not to use up all his superlatives too soon, and having praised the entire production, he comes to the Tournament of Song which he says is performed on the ‘grand scale’ and then he adds: “I think the supreme touch of beauty … comes from the singing of the part of Wolfram by that admirable artist Herbert Janssen; it is not less replete with poetic than vocal charm.” It was much the same with Tristan. Berta Geissmar, the learned and highly musical secretary, first to Furtwängler and later to Beecham, tells us that no matter where in Europe the opera was to be sung, Leider, Melchior, and Janssen were secured first, as a team, and the Brangäne and King Mark allowed to vary according to availability. Neville Cardus wrote of Janssen’s Kurvenal that it was “one of the most movingly beautiful pieces of work I have ever known … his singing and acting alike were wounding to the heart in Act 3.” Janssen’s Amfortas, too, received extraordinary praise from the critics—indeed it still does. Walter Legge, writing as ‘Beckmesser’ once again, wrote of a 1937 Parsifal: “He still stands immeasurably superior to other German baritones, tenors and basses in vocal culture, and without sacrificing any beauty of tone, he conveys even more vividly than before the drained weariness of a man racked by spiritual and physical suffering.” Friedelind Wagner records that when Janssen had suddenly to substitute for a Bayreuth Amfortas who was indisposed, the famously demanding conductor Karl Muck called from the orchestra, “That’s the first Amfortas I’ve heard since Reichmann”, the creator of the role and a pupil of the elder Lamperti. The indelible impression left by Janssen’s Amfortas and Wolfram comes across well in an article written for Opera by the music critic, Alec Robertson (1892–1982), just after the singer’s death. Robertson says that he had been a ‘regular’ at Covent Garden since 1910 and first heard Janssen there in 1927 as Amfortas. At the end of the first act, he and his fellow regulars had decided that they had been listening to a “great” singer and Robertson adds that for him, Janssen’s was the most beautiful baritone voice he had ever heard. Nearly forty years after the event, he can still vividly recall the singer as a stage presence and how, even after the “revelatory experience” of Chaliapin’s acting, he was “greatly impressed by the power of Janssen’s acting in his various roles.” I recall, especially, his economy of gesture. In the Act I Grail scene of Parsifal, he did not flail his arms about in Amfortas’s anguished solo, so that when he did raise them up at the impassioned cry of ‘Allerbarmer, ach! Erbarmen!’, the supreme gesture conveyed all the terrible suffering of the penitent knight. Equally moving, in a quite different way, was his tender gesture to Elisabeth in the last act of Tannhäuser, asking to accompany her up the mountain side, and the way [his] eyes followed her up the path. The poignant beauty of his tone in ‘O Star of eve’ is something I shall never forget. He remembers, too, Janssen’s “touching” Kurvenal and how his portrayal of Kothner was “the very spit of a petty official anxious to make the most of a moment of power and the display of his vocal virtuosity.” These snippets of reviews and memories don’t, of course, tell us all we want to know but they do, I think, give a glimpse of what was special about Janssen’s art: the beautiful and very individual voice, instantly recognizable; the perfectly even emission and Italianate legato; the sensitive response to the words as set to music—what Ernest Newman called “that fine jeweller’s art of his”; and an extraordinary ability to make, through his singing, each character entirely distinct. Legge, writing about a 1936 Meistersinger, sums up this last talent with characteristic vigour: Janssen’s Kothner was the best individual figure on the stage … The Isolde and Brünnhilde of Flagstad are patently one woman, and Bockelmann’s Wotan is disturbingly like his Sachs, but there are no points of similarity between Janssen’s genial Kothner, his suffering Amfortas, his stupid, frustrated Gunther, and his rugged, devoted Kurwenal. There is only one feature common to the characters Janssen creates—they invariably sing as well, if not better than, anyone else on the stage. The fact that this ability to give life to a character arises not only from his skill as an actor, but from the way Janssen sings and colours his voice, means, I think, that we can still collect a good deal, if not all, of what Legge is talking about from Janssen’s records. But what records? The question arises because Janssen’s recording career has certain oddities which have been remarked by all of his admirers. After all, when one considers his operatic successes and popularity in Berlin, in the summer festival at Zoppot, at Bayreuth, Covent Garden, Paris, Prague, and Barcelona—where, incidentally, he sang Kurvenal to Melchior’s first Tristan— one would have expected a rich and varied operatic discography. Instead, one is confronted with relatively few recording sessions for continental European companies and a patchy repertoire curiously unrepresentative of his most famous stage roles apart from that of Wolfram. There are the two duets previously mentioned from Butterfly and Rigoletto, Valentin’s Cavatina and Death from Faust, an aria from each of Lortzing’s Waffenschmied and Zar und Zimmermann, a duet with Ljungberg and a solo from the Benatzky operetta Die drei Muskatiere, and some solo scenes from Tannhäuser. From the other Wagner operas, in which, after all, he had major successes, the only prewar studio recording is the unissued trio from Act II of Götterdämmerung. There was an attempt by Electrola in 1928 at a live recording from the Staatsoper of a complete Cavalleria rusticana with Janssen as Alfio, but the masters no longer exist and no excerpts were issued. One can only wonder why the European companies recorded so little. It seems that from 1930 onwards, all Janssen’s prewar records were produced by (or for) English Columbia, or HMV. Janssen himself seems to have minded that opportunities were being lost: in a letter from him to his English producer, Walter Legge, in early 1936, he actually writes, “I would of course be only too happy to make some new Lieder records but I regard it as much more important at the moment to make orchestral recordings (Amfortas or suchlike) which would indeed sell fabulously well in London during the season and equally in Bayreuth.” But Lieder were at the centre of Legge’s interests just then. In 1932 he had founded the London Lieder Club, in part, at least, to provide support for the Hugo Wolf Society records, which had just been launched. Recitals at the London Lieder Club were very grand affairs altogether: they took place in the Dorchester Hotel—and later at the Hyde Park Hotel—on Sunday evenings over two months and subscribers paid a fee of three guineas for the series and wore evening dress. The patrons included ten ambassadors and even royalty. (One hopes that the atmosphere of the concerts was one of intelligent pleasure rather than the devotional one which often prevails at such gatherings.) Certainly, the audience heard the greatest Lieder singers of their age, amongst them Gerhardt, Tauber, McCormack, Hüsch, Schorr, and Janssen. A programme of one of these concerts tells us that Janssen, accompanied by Ivor Newton, sang a group of Brahms, followed by Schubert, ending the first half with Die Allmacht, a recording of which is published here for the first time. The second half began with songs by Schumann and ended with Wolf. The programme prints the words of each Lied but only in German, which the audience was evidently expected to understand. It is likely that Janssen appeared in every one of the Lieder Club’s annual series of concerts, but I have found no certain corroboration of this. In March of 1938, he took part in the second Serenade concert at Sadler’s Wells, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Menges and sang the three Harfenspieler Lieder, in Wolf’s own orchestrations, with great success. (He also sang the Count’s third act aria from Figaro in the second half of the concert.) Hart mentions that as early as 1924 Janssen had become eminent as a concert artist and that he would include opera excerpts on these occasions. He quotes a critic who praises Janssen for his “joyful song-art”. But despite the obiter dictum attributed to Janssen to the effect that he “only sang opera so that [he] could sing Lieder”, I have only definitely traced one Lieder concert in Germany: a concert of Richard Strauss’s music, with the orchestra conducted by the composer, at which Janssen sang four of the larger songs: Pilgers Morgenlied, Hymnus, Notturno and Nächtlicher Gang. Later performances of the first two of these, taken from recordings in Janssen’s own collection, have recently appeared on Marston’s edition of Strauss songs. Whatever his concert activity in the field of Lieder may have been, Janssen’s recordings of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss continued to appear throughout the 1930s. But, despite Janssen’s pleas to Walter Legge, no opera recordings were made in the studio in this period. Live recordings were made as “technical tests” from performances at Covent Garden and included parts of performances of Götterdämmerung with Leider and with Flagstad; a complete Tristan with Melchior and Flagstad; Janssen’s part in Holländer, again with Flagstad; and most of his wonderful performance as Amfortas in Parsifal. But of these, the only record issued at the time was a brief excerpt of his previously mentioned singing of Gunther under Beecham, and Janssen’s dream of making further operatic recordings remained unfulfilled for the time being. The London Lieder concerts and records formed a sort of parallel career for Janssen. The records were extremely well received at the time of their release and have remained ever since among the great classics of the gramophone. Ernest Newman dubbed Janssen the “Prince of Lieder singers” and, in due course, Legge, in a letter to the Gramophone, raised him to “King of Lieder singers” and when Elgar brought Delius an album of the Wolf Society Lieder to listen to, Delius, although he disliked Wolf’s music, nevertheless wrote, “Herbert Janssen sings [the songs] beautifully with the deepest feeling, every syllable declaimed perfectly, with just that graveness of voice that gets to the very heart of the words”. In our own time, J.B. Steane, a great admirer of Janssen’s singing, was still wishing that it had been Janssen who had recorded the Winterreise complete for HMV. Years later, Legge wrote a description of how he remembered the preparation that went into the recording sessions of Lieder with Janssen and Gerald Moore, describing them as some of their happiest working hours: Time did not matter. Day after day, at Abbey Road, or in Gerald’s charming studio, we worked at Wolf and Schubert songs, phrase by phrase, bar by bar, nuance by nuance. Then, after an evening’s recording at Abbey Road, there was the excitement of hearing the first pressings and, in the light of that experience, more rehearsal before recording again. In some cases the production of what we considered a satisfactory recording of a song was spread over years. And when we were satisfied, there was the pleasure of taking the records down to Ernest Newman for his approval. JANSSEN FLEES HITLER’S GERMANY In her book, The Baton and the Jackboot, Berta Geissmar gives a detailed picture of how very quickly things deteriorated in Germany after Hitler came into power in early 1933. Oskar Daniel was one of the first to be dismissed from his post at the Hochschule, on “racial” grounds, to the great dismay of his students and to the outrage of people like Janssen. This event, together with what his friend, Ted Hart, calls his independent judgment and high principles fixed a gulf between Janssen and the Nazis and having a certain esprit, he was given to making derogatory remarks about the regime and its supporters in a dangerously public manner. In spite of this, Janssen’s international prestige was such that, for the time being, he was kept on at Bayreuth and the Berlin Staatsoper and also allowed to continue to sing outside Germany. But his known attitude towards the Nazis, together with his satirical and biting remarks about them, made him an obvious target for their revenge. Stories circulate with different versions of what precipitated the final fall of the axe, but entries in Goebbel’s diary in the summer of 1937 make it clear that the Nazis were determined to find some pretext for arresting Janssen and only waiting for the opera season to end before they acted. One story has, I think, the ring of truth: Janssen, after singing before Hitler in 1937, had been summoned to dine with him and had said too publicly, “I may sing for that man, but I will not eat with him” and had ignored the invitation. Whatever the immediate cause may have been, Geissmar makes it clear that years of jealousy and gossip in opera circles, and the constant spying, which is part of daily life in dictatorships, probably all played their part. At the end of October 1937, the Gestapo pounced, but not before Janssen was warned—in all likelihood by Winifred Wagner or Heinz Tietjen—that they were on their way to arrest him. He escaped in the nick of time, and made his way to Berta Geissmar in England, arriving penniless and looking gaunt, according to Friedelind Wagner. Geissmar took him straight to the BBC to see Toscanini, who was rehearsing for his broadcast of the Beethoven Ninth on November the 3rd. The sympathetic Toscanini could offer him engagements for the next Salzburg Festival and Janssen gladly accepted them. HMV provided him with some money owed from his record royalties and Beecham, with characteristic kindness, immediately included him in a concert scheduled for November the 7th, where the resilient Janssen sang “Die Frist ist um” from Holländer, of all taxing scenes. Back in Germany, Erna Carstens, his companion of many years, was picked up and interrogated by the Gestapo. She handled herself with great intelligence, pretending to hate Janssen, and was finally released. She, too, made her way to England where she and Janssen soon married. Janssen’s life and career were obviously now in a state of crisis. All his savings, German and international, were locked in Germany. Furthermore, his refugee status put an end to certain recording projects already under way and planned. Legge had assembled a team of singers to record the complete Schwanengesang, the second volume of the Brahms Song Society set, and to complete the sixth and start the seventh volume of the Wolf Society sets. Before he fled Germany, Janssen, together with Gerald Moore, Marta Fuchs, Rosewaenge, Karl Erb, Hüsch, and Legge had all met in Berlin for recording sessions, and Janssen had made what were to be his last Berlin recordings at the end of August of 1937. (Some of these sides are published here for the first time.) Further sessions had been planned for September 1939 in London, but the outbreak of war put an end to these plans, and the Brahms volumes and the Schubert cycle were never completed. As for the opera recordings Janssen was so anxious to make, he had, in fact, been wanted for the Speaker in Beecham’s projected Berlin recording of Zauberflöte, together with Tauber and others. But by this time both Tauber and Janssen were refugees from Hitler’s Germany and the recording had to be made without them. After his arrival in England as an exile, Janssen had to start a new career wherever he could find engagements. He was, of course, very busy at Covent Garden throughout the 1938 season, had several good engagements in Paris in Figaro, and he had been engaged immediately and with much joy by the Vienna Opera in December 1937. There, between early December and the first days of March, he sang Telramund, Scarpia, Don Fernando in Fidelio, Tonio, Scarpia again, Amonasro, and a repeat of Telramund. On the 19th of December, 1937, Janssen wrote from Vienna to Walter Legge: Everything is marvellous here. The audience idolizes me and the newspapers are full of the highest praise. Nevertheless, I do not want to stay here permanently… Yesterday, I sang Scarpia here with tremendous success and after that have 12 evenings with the Opera here up to the 12th of May. It was not, of course, to work out like that: the Anschluss took place on the 12th of March, 1938, and once again Janssen and his wife, who had joined him in Vienna after clearing out as much as she could from his Berlin flat, were barely in time to escape the Nazis’ clutches, on this occasion, it is thought, with the help of the distant Toscanini, through connexions set up by him. In addition to his definite engagements at Covent Garden, Janssen was also considering offers from an agent to sing in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, at the Metropolitan, and in Buenos Aires and “as many concerts as [he] wanted”. But despite his Vienna success and the hope of work in America, he wrote to Legge in January that his nerves were in shreds with tension and begged him to remember that they were not made of steel and also that it was in their common interest for him to remain “fit enough to work as long as possible.” Obviously, he was conscious that he was at a turning-point in his career. His life savings were gone and, clearly, finding engagements in Europe was getting ever more precarious owing to the political situation and his refugee status. Nazi sympathizers among the singers brought to Covent Garden from Germany created tension there by attacking their anti-Nazi colleagues. There was also the major problem of his repertoire: outside Germany and Austria, nearly all his engagements were for Wagner, not for the Verdi or the other Italian and French operas he loved, and Janssen must have realized that unless he took rather drastic steps, his repertoire would be limited to only a very few operas. I think it was at this point that Janssen began to consider attempting other, heavier Wagner roles. The change in Janssen’s thinking about repertoire is evident in his surviving correspondence. In the January 1938 letter to Legge mentioned above, he reminds Legge that the previous September, he had told both Beecham and Legge that he would not sing the role of Sachs in Meistersinger, adding that Tietjen must already have told them that the part was unsuitable for him to sing and would harm him, if he tried it. Yet as early as December 1939, having spent the previous summer studying the role, he was to undertake Sachs twice at the Metropolitan in New York. Furthermore, after singing the Wanderer in Siegfried in four performances at the Teatro Colón in October of 1938, he was evidently heartened enough to go firmly against the advice of both Legge and Beecham, writing to the former in May of 1939 that “after mature reflection and for many pertinent reasons, I am sticking to the decision I have already given you to sing a Wanderer or Wotan this season—come what may.” He actually asks Legge to stop “tormenting” him on the subject and says that he has written a similar request to Beecham. JANSSEN’S AMERICAN CAREER Janssen arrived in America, where he would live for the rest of his life, on the 17th of January 1939. In the light of the above remark concerning the heavy Wagner roles he undertook there, it is clear that we must try to make a more carefully balanced report of his career in the Americas than the summary one so often found in encyclopaedic sources. This account states baldly that Janssen was “induced”, “persuaded against his will”, even “forced” to sing these roles owing to the gradual withdrawal of Friedrich Schorr, his incomparably great predecessor at the Metropolitan, and the lack of any more suitable substitute. As we can see from Janssen’s own words quoted above, at least at first, the decision to sing these roles was very definitely his own. The ‘standard’ account goes on to say that the singing of these roles did, in fact, harm his voice and, though he retired at the perfectly reasonable age of sixty after a career of thirty years, that by singing these roles he significantly shortened his career. Both the written evidence of the reviews, however, and the aural evidence of live recordings of Janssen’s singing of the Wanderer, Wotan, and Hans Sachs in New York and Buenos Aires, suggest once again the need for a distinctly more nuanced understanding of what actually happened. So, to get this matter cleared up before embarking on a chronicle of his reception and career in America, let us see what this evidence shows. As we have already noted, Janssen sang his first Wanderer in Buenos Aires in October of 1938. Erich Kleiber was the conductor and his fellow singers included Konetzni, Max Lorenz, and Rise Stevens as Erda. A recorded excerpt from Act I of the Wanderer’s scene shows that Janssen sounds just wonderful and sings his part very beautifully, as one would expect. The first performance of which I’ve seen reviews, however, took place unexpectedly, and with the Metropolitan Opera in Philadelphia on January the 24th, 1939, before his official debut in New York as Wolfram, four days later. Of his performance in Siegfried (under Leinsdorf and with Flagstad and Melchior) Henry Pleasants wrote: There was a new Wanderer in the person of Herbert Janssen who was making his American debut and who seems to be about the best German baritone to have trod the boards of the Academy since Friedrich Schorr’s voice lost its glow. Mr. Janssen rejoices in a mellow instrument not extraordinary in size but rather more extensive in range than is customary in German baritones and easily, if not faultlessly, produced. His conception of the part was along conventional lines and suggested a good deal of previous experience. Another reviewer remarked that “Mr. Janssen brought breadth of style to his characterization, sang with a voice fresh and resonant and was well received by the audience.” Of a later performance in the same role, in February 1944, Oscar Thompson wrote that Janssen’s performance was a “highly creditable achievement and one soundly based on the traditions of the past”, but also remarked that his voice was “scarcely heavy enough for the Erda scene”. [Italics added.] Turning to his performances of the Walküre Wotan, one has the added advantage of two splendid recordings of live performances: the first is the Metropolitan’s own issue of the opera from 1944 and in this performance Janssen is in superb voice and never sounds over-parted. His brilliant high range actually sheds a new light on the music, which is, of course, more usually sung by darker and heavier voices, which emphasize and give weight to the low-lying parts of Wotan’s music. And despite the “lighter” character of his voice, Daniel’s training ensures that even when singing on the same stage and to the same microphones as Helen Traubel, his voice never sounds too small or out of balance. A later live performance, this time of (a somewhat cut) Act III alone, again with Traubel, but under Rodzinsky, took place in Carnegie Hall in November of 1945. It is a great pity that this performance, in superb sound, is less well-known than the studio recording made with the same forces the previous May after a tiring season and when Janssen was in noticeably less-good voice. Once more the impression on today’s listeners is of a Wotan one would love to hear in a contemporary performance: again, the music is beautifully and feelingly sung. How did contemporary reviewers find Janssen’s Walküre? Well, Jerome D. Bohm says this, for example: “Mr. Janssen’s Wotan […] is an impressive delineation, both in song and action, suggesting with plastic gestures the various qualities, noble, tender, and wrathful of the ruler of Walhalla. Some portions of the music lie too low for his high baritone voice to encompass resonantly, but for the most part he sang admirably, often with dramatic intensity, as in the climatic “Das Ende” of the second act narrative, or with touching tenderness in the second half of the ‘Abschied’”. Of another performance, the same reviewer writes that Janssen’s Wotan “was not only voiced with unfailing tonal sumptuousness and full realization of the many-faceted musical aspects of the role, but ... distinguished dramatically as well.” Olin Downes, too, was impressed, finding Janssen’s Wotan “beautifully sung with all the essential sonority and bigness of line”. Of his Rheingold Wotan, the same critic observed that “the finest singing of the evening was Mr. Janssen’s, and it was paralleled by his histrionic excellence”. Turning to the other heavy role supposed to have been too much for Janssen, that of Hans Sachs, once again, in a live recording and in the reviews, we find something rather different from the ‘standard’ account. In those early, rather unexpected performances of the role in December 1939, after he had been singing Kothner to great applause, the critics, while acknowledging much beautiful singing, found his characterization not yet fully evolved and wondered if his lyric baritone would ever acquire the power to do the music full justice. By 1945 though, the year from which we have a live performance from the Met, things had changed. Janssen had been working hard at his conception of the role and the critics were now impressed. The distinguished critic, Max de Schauensee, a connoisseur of opera who had a long experience of both European and American performances, gave a glowing review of the whole performance that he heard in January of 1945. Of its Sachs he writes: Herbert Janssen’s voice may lack some of the weight and depth for the music of Hans Sachs, but his singing is so beautiful in quality, his style so noble and distinguished, just to hear him was a constant pleasure. Mr. Janssen’s interpretation of [Hans Sachs’] character was also a matter of rejoicing. Sachs’ human and affectionate traits were vividly portrayed. The character was never heavy or stale. By November 1947, Bohm, in the Herald Tribune, wrote that for him, The most satisfactory aspect was the moving assumption of the role of Hans Sachs by Herbert Janssen. It has taken this distinguished barytone [sic] several years to achieve the complete insight into the many-faceted character attained at this performance. Now he has succeeded in blending the cobbler poet’s manly tenderness, his mordant humor and philosophical resignation into a well-rounded, expressively voiced portrait. A week later, even Irving Kolodin, who was not usually well-disposed towards Janssen, described Janssen’s Sachs as “vocally magnificent”! And that most thoughtful commentator on the Met broadcasts, Paul Jackson, considered that the previously referred-to broadcast from 1945 was, of the many surviving opera broadcasts with Janssen, the performance which most “fully reveals Janssen’s artistry.” In his wonderfully evocative description of this performance, he begins by saying that “Janssen is an able successor to Schorr” and I do not think that there can be any higher praise than that. Jackson is particularly emphatic about how Janssen’s tone, though unsparingly spent throughout the opera, remains opulent. One can hope, as we suggested above, that these letters, reviews, and sound documents will provide a more balanced version of Janssen’s venture into heavy roles. From now on, I think, the emphasis should be put on the fact that Janssen described himself as less temperamentally sympathetic towards these roles than he was towards others in his repertoire. No doubt, too, pressure was applied by the Met management to have him sing the heavy roles more often than he would himself have chosen to. But that he himself first, deliberately, and in the teeth of three of his mentors’ advice to the contrary, chose to study and sing Wotan and Sachs, and that he came to do so with critical and popular success and great distinction, these are indisputable facts. None of this, of course, alters the fact that Janssen’s voice did darken with time, but this is unsurprising in a hard-working singer who is approaching the age of sixty. Turning now to the chronicle of Janssen’s career and its critical reception in the Americas, we can see a further restriction in repertoire, especially in the case of his roles at the Metropolitan Opera. Just as the very large number of roles that he sang in continental Europe was reduced to a much smaller number when he went to Covent Garden, so, when he joined the Metropolitan, his repertoire was reduced even further: apart from a few appearances as the Speaker in Zauberflöte, as Don Fernando in Fidelio, and as Jokanaan in Salome, he was really limited to his Wagnerian roles. In Buenos Aires, he had a rather wider choice: in addition to his appearances in Wagner, he sang Homonay in Johann Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron in 1940 and in the same year the title role in Weinberger’s Svanda Dudak. In 1941, he was back to his role of Papageno in the Zauberflöte, and sang Doktor Falke in Die Fledermaus, a role he greatly enjoyed. In 1943 he sang Don Fernando in Fidelio and Orest in Elektra. But in 1946 and 1947, his last two seasons there, he sang only Wagner. At the Metropolitan Opera Janssen was esteemed by critics and audiences from the first. Of what was only his second appearance as Wolfram there, in company with Melchior, Branzell, and Jessner, Oscar Thompson wrote: Lyricism of a kind that never yet made an opera or a music drama less enjoyable played an enlarged part in the beginning of the Metropolitan’s Wagner cycle yesterday afternoon, thanks to the participation of the company’s new German baritone, Herbert Janssen. His beautifully sung Wolfram was an important factor in the success of a sturdy and in many respects admirable, performance of Tannhäuser conducted by Eric Leinsdorf. […] Mr. Janssen treated the several airs of Wolfram much as the highest type of song interpreter might treat Lieder of Schubert or Brahms. That is to say, he sang them with affectionate regard for their poetic feeling as well as their musical qualities. His tone was warm and unforced, his style that of one who knew and respected the uses of legato. Singing so poised, so smooth, so expressive, and of such technical excellence will always be welcomed by the discriminating. When Janssen first sang the very different role of Telramund at the Metropolitan together with Flagstad and Melchior, the same critic wrote: …The baritone sang the role with the lyricism that had distinguished his Wolfram in Tannhäuser, but also with the dramatic weight necessary to carry conviction in the charge against Elsa and the long colloquy with Ortrud in the second act. His production remained that of a well-schooled vocalist who has no need to force the tone and who aspires to preserve rather than shatter a melodic line. As usual, his Gunther was always found “miraculous”, “unusually distinguished” and “vocally admirable”. His Kurvenal, too, was found to be “moving and expressive” and was singled out from time to time as being some of a performance’s “finest, and most touching singing and acting”. Among the roles for which he was so especially admired at Bayreuth, Berlin, or Covent Garden, only his Dutchman seems to have disappointed American audiences, although critics still praised the fine singing. In the Dutchman’s case the reason for this appears to be simply that audiences were used to the role’s being sung by burlier, darker, bass-baritone voices. As for Parsifal, Noel Straus writes that Janssen “delivered the music of Amfortas with his accustomed richness of tone and keen understanding of the needs of the role” and this reaction recalls Janssen’s European reception as Amfortas. Of Janssen’s Kothner in Meistersinger there was no doubt that it was masterful, Quaintance Eaton finding it a “magnificent portrait, unctuous, condescending, pompous”. Against those who argue that Janssen’s voice suffered from significant deterioration as the years passed, two last comments about performances from nearer the end of his career may serve as assessments that give us a more balanced picture of critical opinion in his own time and in ours. If the singing of the heavier Wagner roles had really greatly damaged his voice, it is hard to understand how his singing of the lyric role of Wolfram could provoke the following review—almost an echo of Herman Klein’s review of the 1930 Bayreuth recording—from Noel Straus as late as November 1947, when Janssen sang with Torsten Ralf, Thebom, and Varnay: The most completely satisfying singing was provided by Herbert Janssen, who delivered Wolfram’s music with rich, mellow, finely controlled tones and gave a really distinguished portrayal, one that was both deeply felt and nobly projected. Rarely is Wolfram’s aria at the song contest in the ‘Wartburg’ made as interesting and vital a part of a Tannhäuser performance as Mr. Janssen found possible to achieve with it, and all of his other work was on an equally high plane. The scrupulous and reflective commentator on the Met broadcasts, Paul Jackson, found Janssen’s 1950 performance of the very demanding role of Telramund, only two years before his retirement, to be, like the previously mentioned Meistersinger, among the very best surviving recordings of his Met career: Janssen is in marvelous form…. Though his unique qualities are little served by Telramund’s surly grumblings, the fifty-[eight] year-old baritone sings with complete vocal freedom, his top voice (which could be recalcitrant) particularly resplendent. He prefers passion to self-pity, relying on quantity of tone to convey the miscreant’s anger and despair. And there are always those sensitive Janssen moments […] Yet when Telramund must rage, […] Janssen hurls his mighty mix of declamation and sustained tone with unrelenting force. And in the same year Olin Downes wrote that he was still singing Amfortas “admirably and with feeling”. In addition to his work for the Metropolitan Opera in New York and elsewhere and his appearances at the Colón opera in Buenos Aires, Janssen took part in a good deal of concert work: we have reports of concerts with Barbirolli, Reiner, Rodzinksy, and Walter, as well as much charity work for causes as diverse as the Met Opera Fund, toys for poor children, Danish relief, animal welfare, and so on. Live recordings exist of a St. Matthew Passion under Walter, as well as of a St. John Passion under Kleiber, a wonderful Brahms Requiem under Toscanini, an Elektra under Mitropoulos and a Fidelio from 1944, also under Toscanini, where Janssen is—rather oddly—cast as Don Pizarro. Reviewing the latter recording in 1956, the very sensitive critic Dyneley Hussey writes: “There is a good Pizarro too, Herbert Janssen, whom it is a pleasure to hear again. The singer must have been near the end of his career when this performance was given but his voice sounds strong and he avoids the snarling villainy which has to make do for malevolent power.” A Lieder recital at Town Hall in 1941, with Otto Seyfert as accompanist, was, according to Noel Straus, “fervently welcomed by an audience that punctuated the recital with ovations after every song and insisted on a number of encores.” Straus himself, however, thought the recital a failure and Janssen completely unsuited to the singing of Lieder! He lists as missing from Janssen’s art exactly those virtues for which his Lieder-singing was so highly esteemed in Europe, commends him for his “brilliant work” in opera and suggests that it is there that Janssen is in his element. After his retirement from the Metropolitan in 1952, we find references to at least two more public appearances, one at a Fritz Busch memorial concert in Carnegie Hall in 1953 and, a month later and again at Carnegie Hall, a recital with Erna Berger, where he sang five Lieder. His recording career in America was, once again, curiously intermittent. There are only a few published, studio recordings: a set of a cut Act III of Tristan with Melchior, recorded in 1942 and 1943; four sides from Parsifal available only in the Argentine; two excerpts from Tannhäuser; the Act III of Walküre already referred to; and finally, between 1945 and 1947 three scenes from Meistersinger. In 1945, there were a few sessions of Lieder recordings: nine songs by Grieg on eight sides and two sides each of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf. Although these were all to remain unpublished, fortunately it had been documented that Janssen had had test pressings in his possession and that after his death his widow had guarded his records with the care of a curator. (Vinyl pressings of most of them were later deposited with the Library of Congress by A. F. R. Lawrence.) Before coming to Janssen’s work as a teacher we must briefly review his first postwar appearances in Europe, where he returned to his non-Wagnerian repertoire. In June of 1950, Janssen appeared in six performances at the Vienna Opera: two as Amonasro, two as Don Fernando, and one each as the Speaker and Jokanaan. Then, in October of the same year, he made his only postwar appearance in London. The concert took place in the context of the Philharmonia Society’s chamber concerts and looks as if it may have been a somewhat improvised affair, with Janssen and Gerald Moore sharing the stage with the Pasquier Trio. Furthermore, Janssen seems to have been rather out of voice that night. The Times reviewer wrote that it was a pleasure to welcome him back after some dozen years, but added: Since we last heard him, his vocal tone seems to have lost some of its roundness in the middle register. And the upper partials over-power the fundamental frequency of the note. This was not so in mezza voce singing, which brought moving tenderness to Wolf’s setting of ‘Anakreons Grab’, nor at the top of his compass (he crowned the interpretation of Strauss’s ‘Zueignung’ with a nobly ringing top F sharp). But above all, Mr. Janssen had lessons to teach every aspiring singer of lieder, lessons of enunciation, breath-control, variation of colour, and musical style. An interesting and thoughtful review in the Scotsman is in basic agreement with the Times reviewer. Its author thought Janssen was fifty-four—in fact, he had recently entered his fifty-ninth year—and he added that Janssen’s voice seemed “a little past its prime”. He mentions a “lack of various shades of tone quality” and an occasional lack of resonance. At other times, however, “These faults faded into the background and, in his final encore for example, ‘Zueignung’ by Richard Strauss, the singer achieved perfection and a powerful F sharp that all but cracked the chandelier.” In general, he thought Janssen’s singing was “Not only a delight, but a lesson in the art of Lieder singing …” and he concludes his review: “Above all, there was a complete identification with each song: this was a test of musicality, character, and histrionic ability that Janssen passed with honours.” JANSSEN’S TEACHING CAREER Janssen retired from the Metropolitan in 1952, his last Met broadcast being, surely deliberately, in the role of Kothner in Meistersinger, just as his first 1939 Met broadcast had been. From now on, apart from the odd public appearance as noted above, his professional life would be devoted to the teaching of singing. Actually, even when he was singing professionally himself, Janssen had always been glad to give advice or even vocal coaching to his colleagues, who respected his knowledge of the subject. This continued after his retirement: he is known to have coached Astrid Varnay and even a singer from a very different aesthetic world, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, for example, would occasionally consult with Janssen about matters of technique. Theodore Uppman, too, while carrying on with his career at the Met in the mid 1950s, came regularly to Janssen for vocal coaching in connexion with method: for as Ted Hart points out, it was method that came first for Janssen the teacher. A student recalled how Janssen used to say that he thought it was stupid of his pupils to rely on their youth and stamina as long as they felt well and to want to use ‘method’ or ‘technique’ only when they were ill! When we first mentioned Janssen’s early move to Berlin, we deliberately said that Janssen chose to study with Dr. Oskar Daniel. It was already a choice actually based on Janssen’s musical aesthetic and it seems that he chose his teacher in the belief that method and aesthetic would interact with one another to help him to express the artistic effects he envisaged. He was to prove one of Daniel’s most eminent pupils and throughout his teaching career he would always begin to teach a new student by referring to his teacher; furthermore, with gifted pupils he would use the same, very demanding Daniel exercises that had caused him difficulty when he was a beginner. There are a few more scraps of historical information that have come down to us through students about Janssen’s own understanding of his teacher’s method and we will run through them briefly. The well-known record historian, Dr. John Stratton, himself a gifted and accomplished singer, did a period of intensive study with Janssen in the mid-1950s. In 1966, Dr. Stratton published a long article in Recorded Sound, in which he put forward a hypothesis—not a thesis—about how a study of the different “schools” of singing method, as manifested in early recordings, might explain the rise of the sort of singing that gave birth to opera. To one of the schools he analyses he gives the name of Lamperti and he describes it as a “shrewd reappraisal” of the classical Italian method. Amongst its distinctive features are a minimum dependence on breath-pressure, and what Stratton describes as a growth of tone through a “quickening of nerve-awareness in the cavities of the upper face, particularly those between the eyes.” He goes on to describe two phases, or what Janssen called ‘movements’: for cantilena, the ‘sniff,’ “a sort of drawing up and sucking in of the sound” and, for fioritura or for declamatory music, a more assertive nerve-action, “a ‘stroke’ outwards from between the eyes”. The echoes of Oskar Daniel’s remarks in 1922 to the interviewing psychologist are obvious. The vibrancy of the voices trained in the “Lamperti” method, says Stratton, is not derived from increased breath-pressure, but is the “counterpart of the amount of determination with which the primary nerve-action … the ‘sniff’, is made.” The enthusiasm that had always characterized Janssen’s singing and gave it the exultant quality of a singer who relishes the physical sensation of producing beautiful sounds, survived in his teaching: he was a genial instructor and would occasionally join in with a suitable student, singing with him right up to a full, high A natural. Furthermore, just like his teacher, he would have his pupils sing with thumb to forehead and call to them as they sang, “Sniff life into the voice!” And more mysteriously still, using, as he said, the ipsissima verba of one of Oskar Daniel’s mantras, he would instruct a student to “Sniff the butter from the bread, but not the bread!” These are acroamatic matters and they are only too obviously very difficult to explain clearly in words. Nevertheless, the family resemblances between Janssen’s placement and method and those of other well-known contemporaries of his are plain to attentive listeners: Schorr, whose sublime voice had been trained by Adolf Robinson, a Lamperti pupil, and Schlusnus, whose teacher, Louis Bachner, was a colleague of Oskar Daniel at the Berlin Hochschule, come to mind. Despite differences in timbre and weight of voice, the wonderful “shimmer” of light that appears to play over the surface of their voices, the instrumental concentration of tone and the gleaming high notes are common to all these singers. Other singers of the same “school” are cited in John Stratton’s fascinating article, mentioned above. • • • • • Janssen and his wife had been granted American citizenship on December the 9th, 1946 and they continued to live in their handsome suite at the Ansonia hotel, surrounded by their extensive library and by their music, until Janssen’s death there on June the 3rd, 1965, after a short illness. According to the New York Times obituary, published the next day, it was at Janssen’s own request that he was cremated with no service other than a reciting of the Lord’s Prayer. Erna Janssen returned to Germany where she died, it seems, in about 1981. As a person, Janssen was very nearly the opposite of the roles he was most famous for singing. He was described in a 1937 English profile as looking like “the most cheerful member of an Old Boy’s cricket side”, and his sense of play, together with his satirical, irreverent wit gave his colleagues, with whom he was very popular, much pleasure. Although he took his teaching seriously, he was modest about it and liked to describe himself as merely a “vocal plumber”. He was also a loyal friend: after Oskar Daniel had been forced out of Germany and was living in cruelly straitened circumstances with his family, first in Paris and later in Switzerland, Janssen kept up what amounted to a running conversation with him through constant correspondence and, until his emigration to America, would meet up with him whenever possible. There are indications, too, that after his arrival in America, Janssen had been at the centre of an attempt by Daniel’s friends and admirers to rescue him from his penurious Swiss exile and bring him to America for treatment of his leukemia. Before this could be arranged, however, Daniel had died in March of 1940. After the end of the war and in spite of their profound political differences, out of gratitude for the warning that had saved him from the Gestapo, Janssen and his wife also sent food parcels to the beleaguered Winifred Wagner. • • • • • Notwithstanding his great reputation as a singer, there was also an element of sadness in Janssen’s American career. Out of a repertoire of an estimated seventy-four roles, he was allowed, in accordance with the unyielding policy of the Met management, to sing only fourteen at the Met. And half of these fourteen he sang fewer than eight times, some not more than twice. Being limited to repetitions of the same few roles over and over again, year after year, was disheartening and stiflingly restrictive for a sensitive, versatile, and musically cultivated singer like Janssen. There is little doubt that despite the acclaim of audiences and critics, he was occasionally overcome by melancholy and a sense of being undervalued. A SUMMING-UP When talking of Janssen’s singing, one must emphasize that the cultivation of a particular type of voice is itself an act of interpretation, of aesthetic choice. The plangent quality of Janssen’s voice (which recalls Wagner’s remark about “the melancholy that lies at the heart of all tone”) expresses an element of Janssen’s aesthetic. This is equally true of the changing colours of the inflexions of his voice. Such qualities were not only esteemed throughout Janssen’s career, but are mentioned again and again by critics of our own generations. Will Crutchfield’s remarks about “unbelievably beautiful” singing have already been quoted and again, referring to a reissue of a live Tannhäuser performance from the 1940s, he says how Janssen’s Wolfram is “balm for sore ears”. Alan Blyth, writing of some of his Lieder recordings, describes how the singer catches “the inner mood of his chosen songs through his aching, introspective voice” and his “insightful” singing. But it is of course J. B. Steane who has some of the most vivid descriptions of what it is that makes Janssen a very special singer, a singer who inspires not only respect and admiration, but also our affection. Comparing him to two of his outstanding contemporaries, Schlusnus and Hüsch, he writes that Janssen, “Even in his prime, was probably a little more risky, but his singing went deeper, was of a richer, softer texture and had a greater capacity for both tenderness and anxiety.” I like this description: it seems to me to suggest the sense of human vulnerability that Janssen’s aesthetic often expresses, for this is a vital part of the particular way he captures the emotional tone of the words and music he is singing. Method and aesthetic are constantly intertwined in Janssen’s singing, and Steane, great critic that he was, sees this clearly: referring to the recording of ‘Die Lotusblume’, he points out how it is Janssen’s “secure breath control” that supports the “evenness of line and texture”, but which, at the same time, does not deprive the voice of its “natural, humanizing degree of vibrato.” [Italics added] The elegiac timbre of his voice has often been remarked on by critics and in his interpretation of Wotan for example, it gives a wonderfully—if paradoxically—human quality of fatherly tenderness and suffering to his interpretation of the god’s farewell to his daughter. It is the voice of the wisest and saddest of men. That is perhaps the most striking difference between Janssen and Schorr in this music: the greater weight and controlled but formidable power of the latter’s voice give other-worldly nobility to his singing of the same music so that it seems to come from a transcendent distance. In Lieder singing, Janssen’s great strength is, I think, his ability to keep the words and musical line of the Lied in a fine balance. There is never manipulation of the words at the expense of good singing: he responds to the words with a thoughtful and intelligent sensitivity and he never allows them to ‘take charge’ of the performance and induce the voice to resort to crooning, bulging, or barking, all of which he would have considered ‘un-singerly’ devices. What he expresses so memorably, he does always through beautiful singing, by assimilation of the words into the musical line so that they become part of it, rather than excrescences on it: for after all, words are not our only means of expressing meaning or significance and often what is most wonderful or moving in a performance is achieved through a musical gesture or the expressive shaping of a phrase. In 1922, Oskar Daniel wrote an article on singing in which he says that a singer should not assemble a performance as a mosaic of mere nuances: for that can only stimulate the audience intellectually. Instead, he says, the singer should concentrate on the ‘Grande Ligne’ of the music, and then, being “under the singer’s spell”, the listeners themselves participate and form their own nuances. I think Janssen will have found these thoughts highly congenial to his own aesthetic. • • • • • In 1936 in the Gramophone, Legge summed up Janssen’s art: “His voice is of ravishing quality, he is musically and mechanically a faultless singer, and a magnificent actor … Janssen, I make bold to say, is the greatest artist on the contemporary operatic stage.” When one thinks of the singers who were on the operatic stage in 1936, it becomes clear that Legge is making an extraordinarily strong claim for Janssen and that, far from anticipating challenges from his readers, he is expecting their agreement. In fact, a later correspondent wrote a long letter to the Gramophone in which, invoking many years of experience of opera performances at Covent Garden and elsewhere, he contrasts the singing of Plançon, Battistini, de Reszke, Journet, Scotti, Bonci, de Luca, Melba, Schumann-Heink, Sembrich, and others of the ‘Golden Age’ with the lesser art of many of their modern counterparts, but goes on, however, to say: “As proof…that music today can be tackled with a beauty of technique and a vocal colouring of the highest order, one has only to hear Herbert Janssen. Here indeed is the standard set by those of the last generation and handed down … to those who, like Janssen, can uphold it.” When we reflect on the names listed above (together with all the other names we might like to add) we realize that these are not the names of those we invoke simply as examples of great singers; these names belong to those whose various ways of singing are what we mean by great singing: they are touchstones of the art and their records are what we point to as standards, models, or ideals, when we want to show just what singing of the highest order is. Janssen’s art is one of these touchstones. Although more than fifty years have passed since his death, we still find the noble distinction of his singing movingly, even urgently present the moment we put on one of his records and hear that unmistakable and beautiful voice begin to sing. It is a pleasure for the compiler of the above notes to give warm thanks to the following for their help with research and with advice: Professore Dottore Osvaldo Alemanno; S.R.M. Beauroy; Stephen Clarke; T.E. Currier; Antje Kalcher of the Archiv der Universität der Künste, Berlin; D. L. Matthews. JANSSEN ON RECORDS by Michael Aspinall, ©2021 The phonograph documents an impressive flowering of great German singing in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, a golden period not only for operatic baritones but also for concert artists. Three baritones in particular demonstrate that a well-managed career as an operatic vocalist can be a fruitful foundation for Lieder singing. Heinrich Schlusnus (1888–1952), Herbert Janssen (1892–1965), and Gerhard Hüsch (1901–1984) were near contemporaries who had in common the artistic integrity and the technical command to be able to reproduce in their Lieder singing all the interpretation marks indicated by the composer, as well as additional refinements of their own. The slightly older baritone Joseph Schwarz (1880–1926) sings in a recognizably earlier nineteenth-century style, closely modeled on Battistini: rich indeed in glorious detail of expression, but, in Lieder, tending not to observe note values so meticulously as the singers of the next generation. They had all learned to sing in a basically “Italian” vocal style, with a sinuous legato line based on portamento di voce and including a certain amount of rubato not written in by the composer, though each one had cultivated his own personal manner. They had been trained in the blending of registers to the extent that they were able to rise effortlessly to brilliant high notes and even to declaim long phrases in a high tessitura without fatigue. They had developed perfect control of the breath, enabling them to “bow” the musical line like a fine string player. None of them seems to have ever recorded an ugly sound. PERSONAL PECULIARITIES OF JANSSEN’S TECHNIQUE Although Janssen’s voice may have lacked the burnished richness of Schlusnus or the plush warmth of Hüsch, it is a lovely, limpid, and firmly focused baritone voice freely produced with no sign of throatiness. Even the imperfect quality of surviving live performance recordings cannot blur our immediate impression of listening to a distinctly individual, authoritative, and nobly eloquent voice, sometimes exposing, by contrast with his easy, unfettered vocal emission, the limited technical training of his colleagues. A very light, unobtrusive vibrato seems to be under perfect control for it only presents itself when the singer calls upon it. After about 1930 he had to be careful about tackling the passaggio, the blending of the chest and head registers, for in this range Janssen is not always able to maintain the purity of tone on certain vowels, where we can detect a breathy sound, mostly when he is singing softly. For example, on the first page of Wolf’s “Denk’ es, o Seele!” he sings two short phrases set entirely on the C above the bass stave: “Ein Rosenstrauch, … wer sagt”. In the published recording (DB2706), the attack on “Ein” is not well placed and supported, but “Rosenstrauch” comes out with perfectly focused tone on the “O”, which then slips into a hoarse sound on “Strauch” (CD 2, Track 14). The attack on “wer” is perfectly clean and focused, but the following “A” in “sagt” is hoarse. These technical points, so fascinating to the vocal student, will not worry the listener who falls under the spell of this great artist’s voice, mind, and art. Janssen is very individual; certain phrases of his haunt the memory, and sometimes even the faintly hoarse notes strike home emotionally. The singing of Herbert Janssen is distinguished by a clear and refined pronunciation of the German language that is a delight to hear, an echo of a vanished age of elegance and refinement. His precisely articulated but never exaggerated consonants do not interfere with the vocal line, which is formed from perfectly equalized vowels. Final consonants are never harsh, separated off, or over-prolonged, but simply and neatly mark the end of a phrase. All is eloquence, but this eloquence is tempered by the singer’s sensitivity to words and music and by his flawless taste. He does not bother to color or stress individual words though the voice always seems to catch the mood of the song. He expresses his meaning without overloading the songs with “interpretation” while his delightful manner and delicate sensitivity to poetry and music make him a good storyteller, his carefully trained voice seeming to spontaneously reflect his thoughts. The vocal range seems to be from a resonant low A to a ringing high G. Other writers have noted that Janssen sometimes does not manage to tune certain notes precisely: this occurs mainly when he is singing in a tessitura uncomfortably low for him. OPERA It is disappointing to find how few operatic records Janssen was called upon to make—strange, too, when copies of the Ultraphone disc of two pages from Act III of Tannhäuser are regularly to be found in German flea markets, meaning that it must have been a best seller. His various recordings from Tannhäuser find him at different stages of his career and vocal development. The acoustic Odeon record of Wolfram’s lovely arioso from the first act, “Als du in kühnem Sange”, is a masterpiece of legato singing, a truly persuasive interpretation of the friendly Wolfram’s urging (CD 1, Track 7). At this stage of his career Janssen seems not to have used the glottal stop, which was frowned upon in classical German singing in the nineteenth century, and he omits the “H” in such phrases as “ihr Herz”, a singers’ mannerism that would soon disappear from German singing. In the abridged recording of Tannhäuser made at Bayreuth by Columbia in 1930, he manages to preserve a general sense of the flow of the musical line, though the fatal Bayreuth tradition has partly influenced his style: a certain over articulation of the consonants leads to a more marcato effect (CD 1, Track 9). Of this recording, Herman Klein wrote: “I think the supreme touch of beauty, individually at any rate, comes from the singing of the part of Wolfram by that admirable artist Herbert Janssen; it is not less replete with poetic than vocal charm.” (William R. Moran, ed. Herman Klein and the Gramophone, Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 1990.) His three recordings of Wolfram’s lovely recitative from Act Three, “Wohl wußt’ ich hier sie im Gebet zu finden”, might serve forever as lessons in how Wagner’s music should be sung: with a majestic solemnity, a pure and warmly human tone (CD 1, Tracks 8 and 11; CD 5, Track 3). Janssen takes his cue from Wagner’s instruction pp in the accompaniment and sings practically all the scene in a reverently hushed voice, with noble line, limpid enunciation of the words and careful attention to the composer’s indications. The Aria “O du mein holder Abendstern” is also a model interpretation, the sensitive singing replete with charm and deep feeling, the voice vying with the cello (CD 1, Track 12; CD 5, Track 4). The 1928 Electrola record of Valentin’s two big scenes from Faust (or rather, Margarethe) is also successful: we hear the golden voice of a “youthful heroic” baritone (young indeed) declaiming these famous melodies with superb dignity and eloquence (CD 1, Tracks 3 and 4). The duet from Madama Butterfly, generously covering both sides of the original 78, goes on to include Butterfly’s aria “Che tua madre” (some cuts are made to fit it all in) (CD 1, Track 2). Janssen, in flawless voice, is worthily partnered by the enchanting Greek soprano Margherita Perras (1908–1984), also a student of Oskar Daniel, who might well have been very proud of both of them. They capture perfectly the alternating of “conversational” passages with those of emotionally charged singing, their enunciation of the excellent German translation perfectly musical and distinct. He is the most gentlemanly Consul imaginable, an aristocratic presence, his voice always elegantly flowing in the higher passages without any shouting. Perras has a beautiful and perfectly produced voice with a brilliant head register: a true Italian dramatic soprano might produce more volume at the top when Butterfly enters holding her child triumphantly aloft, but the soaring head tones of Perras are deeply moving. The orchestra plays well, with a sensitive first violin working hard emotionally; unfortunately, either some orchestral parts were not delivered in time or some players forgot to turn up, because important chords are missing in the hysterical finale of Butterfly’s aria. This great record reminds us that there are many others from the period offering familiar Italian numbers in French, German, Russian, and even English that might be better known. In another duet, from Rigoletto, with the enchanting Lotte Schöne as a delicately expressive Gilda, Janssen is not quite in his best voice, sounding a trifle hoarse, but in compensation he is able to reproduce all the shadings that Verdi demands but which we rarely hear (CD 1, Track 1). A German baritone in those days could not ignore the operas of Albert Lortzing (1801–1851), and Janssen recorded an unusual, short Andantino con espressione sung by the Graf von Liebenau in the Act One Finale to Der Waffenschmied, “Du läßt mich kalt von hinnen scheiden”, in which the composer’s indebtedness to Bellini and Donizetti is highlighted by Janssen’s beautifully poised singing, especially in the exquisite piano passages (CD 1, Track 5). The same may be said of the other side of the record, featuring two strophes of the Tsar’s well-known aria “Sonst spielt’ ich mit Zepter”, a piece of unashamed nostalgia carefully and feelingly sung (CD 1, Track 6). Although German opera singers attached by contract to a particular theater were, and sometimes are still, expected to “help out” by appearing in operettas, musicals and even straight plays, Janssen’s first appearance in an operetta (Die Fledermaus) did not happen until he was singing in Buenos Aires. However, early on Electrola invited him to record an aria and duet from Ralph Benatzky’s Die drei Musketiere, tuneful music if not Benatzky’s most memorable. In his song “Ich liebe dich” the voice seems a trifle throaty, but Janssen sings well, rhythmically and fluently, with really lovely high notes (CD 1, Track 14). In the duet “Du schmeichelst in mein Herz dich ein” (“You insinuate yourself into my heart!”) he competes successfully with the lovely voice of Göta Ljungberg: his high notes are more secure than hers and, again, he throws himself into this gay music with verve and charm (CD 1, Track 15). While singing at the Teatro Colón in 1943, Janssen recorded two souvenirs of his famous interpretation of Amfortas in Parsifal. The surviving multiple takes of each of these two scenes are all remarkable for the appeal and dignity of Janssen’s singing. The extract from Act One, “Nein! Lasst ihn unenthüllt!”, offers an interesting example of the mingling of two different vocal styles: Janssen had been “raised”, through Oskar Daniel, in the school of Lamperti, but when he sang at Bayreuth he seems to have partially adopted the notorious tradition of the “Bayreuth bark” (CD 5, Track 5). He tends towards a too emphatic delivery in some of the more dramatic passages, reserving his beautifully flowing legato for the more tuneful parts of this noble page of declamation. In take 1 he is particularly eloquent in the phrases that describe the piercing of the Saviour’s side. In all three takes, but perhaps specially in the second, he rises easily to the uncomfortably placed high G at “daraus es nun strömt hervor”, producing a brilliant head note of tenor quality to which, understandably, he clings triumphantly for rather longer than prescribed by the composer! Two similar takes of the Act III scene “Ja, Wehe! Weh’ über mich” are equally moving for their beauty and sincerity: Janssen’s touching pronunciation of the word “Wehe” (Woe!) is inimitable and in the last bars he offers a parade of easily taken Fs, F-sharps and another G (CD 5, Track 6). Together with Lauritz Melchior, Janssen recorded three takes of the duet “Sì, pel ciel marmoreo giuro!” from Verdi’s Otello, in the second of which Melchior’s voice is reproduced in all its thrilling intensity as he sails up to the high A and B-flat (CD 5, Track 7). Where Verdi has written molto sostenuto at the beginning of the oath, Melchior does indeed sustain a formidable legato. Janssen begins with a wonderfully insinuating pianissimo, demonstrating his technical mastery as he plants in Othello’s mind the wicked hints about the handkerchief, and in the duet proper maintains a smooth line in the difficult triplet passages, taking the high F and F-sharp in his stride. This is a satisfying version of the great duet (cruelly written for both voices) and one only wishes that both singers had worked harder at their Italian pronunciation. In 1945 Janssen was still in almost unimpaired vocal form when he recorded Sachs’s two monologues from Die Meistersinger for Columbia in New York, sensitively conducted by Paul Breisach. In the Fliedermonolog we hear that Janssen has mostly discarded portamento di voce but will dutifully execute this ancient grace when Wagner has written it in, as at “nun sang er, wie er musst’” (CD 6, Track 17). The style of this monologue owes much to the Italian buffo traditions, and thanks to his fine training Janssen shows true eloquence in his articulation and phrasing. He takes in his stride awkward phrases such as “was unermesslich mir schien”, rising to D above the stave and then descending to the low A. His D is still a model that any baritone might sigh to emulate, a brilliantly placed note that he can modulate into a variety of colors, thanks to his expert blending of the registers. His singing is beautiful throughout and he occasionally gives us his lovely pianissimo. In the “Wahn, Wahn” monologue Wagner tempts him into a too staccato delivery, but relief comes with the soft high E of “Johannisnacht” (CD 6, Track 18). Admirably conducted by Max Rudolf, the Quintet from Die Meistersinger includes the introductory passage “Mein Kind, von Tristan und Isolde” in which Sachs ties up all the loose ends, invites Eva to sing and the American soprano (of Lithuanian parentage) Polyna Stoska opens the Quintet with an appealing performance of Eva’s lovely solo, even managing a genuine trill; later, when the going gets heavier, she occasionally becomes rather tremulous, though her high B-flats are brilliant and steady (CD 6, Track 19). Torsten Ralf manages an attractive pianissimo at Walther’s entrance, and Herta Glaz is a reliably solid Magdalene. Janssen is mostly only distantly audible as he is singing softly, but we can hear how neatly he executes the florid passages and how trustworthy is his legato. JANSSEN “LIVE” There are numerous live performances of opera surviving with Janssen, and one of the most mouthwatering is a set of unpublished records from a performance of Die Götterdämmerung at Covent Garden on 14 May 1936, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham (CD 2, Tracks 16 and 17). Beecham’s conducting is vigorous and exciting, occasionally too loud, but mostly he observes Wagner’s dynamic instructions, lovingly caressing the soft sections and, in the main, he is not inconsiderate of the needs of his singers. Poor Gunther was not an obvious role for the refined art of Janssen, but he does bring the character to life in the second act, especially in his proud presentation of his bride to his folk: “Brünnhild’, die hehrste Frau”, declaimed with beauty of tone and elegant line. Later, in the passage leading up to the blood-brotherhood trio, he shows Gunther’s noble reluctance to act in a cowardly fashion. Regrettably, his part in the scene is shorter than that of Hagen, sung by Ludwig Weber, a fine bass apparently having an off night, his rich voice sounding gruff and hoarse—but perhaps he was simply overacting the villain’s part? I wonder if Janssen’s changing “die dich auch ja gebar!” into “die mich auch ja gebar!” is a Bayreuth tradition correcting a possible misprint in the score? Janssen seems to be further away from the microphones then the others, but we get glimpses of his lovely style, as in the legato of “Blutbrüderschaft schwuren wir uns!” or the moving passage in which Gunther fears to kill his sister’s husband: “Doch Gutrune, ach! Der ich ihn gönnte!” Frida Leider dominates the whole scene with her thrilling and radiantly lovely singing; her solid vocal training is always in evidence, and the only sign that she was nearing the end of her great career is the obvious effort to reach the high B-natural, but it should not be overlooked that on the high B-flat of “Gutrune heisst der Zauber”, Leider executes in her excitement and enthusiasm what the Italians call a suono ribattuto, repeating the note so that we get a double B-flat! Also from Covent Garden comes a recording of lengthy excerpts from Der fliegende Holländer (1937) in which we can admire the glorious singing of Kirsten Flagstad in her first essay at the role of Senta (CD 2, Tracks 18 and 19). Janssen’s performance, in a role too low for his high baritone voice, is outstanding from beginning to end. (In the nineteenth century a high baritone singing this part would have resolved the problem by singing the lowest notes an octave higher; Battistini used to sing the entrance aria in concert, in Italian, transposed a tone up.) Janssen does not shun any of the low notes, however weak his voice may be in that range, and he even contrives to make some kind of vocal sound on the low F! His Dutchman has all the nobility required to justify Senta’s perplexingly capricious choice and to contrast with the vulgar jollity of Daland. His singing of the Dutchman’s doleful entrance aria “Die Frist ist um” is perhaps a little too staccato, though the voice is never rough and the eloquence of the phrasing is frequently arresting in its beauty. There is never a hint of forcing in his easy negotiation of the higher-lying passages, while the drama of the narrative is fully recreated. Singing with Flagstad in the great duet “Wie aus der Ferne” Janssen becomes more lyrical. Both of these accomplished singers suffer from a weak lower register, for Flagstad’s chest register was never properly developed; this is a grave disadvantage in Wagner’s music but, needless to say, she can compensate with floods of lovely and noble tone in her medium register and in 1937 she still had a certain command of her head register, giving some lovely soft singing around the upper F. Some of the frequent high B-naturals in Senta’s part were removed by judicious cuts, but it must be said that she attacks this note bravely every time and mostly hits it dead center. It is in the medium range that we hear her developing her irritating habit of attacking notes from below. Despite what might have been an unequal match between soprano and baritone where sheer volume of voice is concerned, Janssen holds our attention by the loving care he lavishes on his music, which he clearly knew backwards (she didn’t, not yet); his soft singing is lovely, his phrasing distinguished by its elegance. Although they rush the great double cadenza, shamelessly copied by Wagner from Les Huguenots, they should have brought the house down with their enthusiasm and brilliance, but the Covent Garden audience was too disciplined to applaud—even though the composer had cunningly left some sort of an orchestral pause to accommodate eventual public enthusiasm. This recording is a prize indeed. We have decided to include the guessing game (usually more grandly referred to as the “Riddle Scene”) between the dwarf Mime and Wotan (“The Wanderer”) in Act One of Siegfried from a live performance at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires in 1938 (CD 5, Track 2). Despite imperfections in the amateur recording, we can hear at once that Janssen’s is the voice of a god (how could Mime possibly have been fooled as to the identity of his rather encroaching visitor?). When the Wanderer asks that a weary traveler might rest by the evil blacksmith’s hearth—“Dem wegmüden Gast gönne hold des Hauses Herd!”—the tone of the voice is solemnly majestic, nobly sympathetic. Later in the scene Wotan makes Mime jump out of his skin with some imperious declamation in the upper register, at “Hier sitz’ich am Herd”, but Janssen carefully observes Wagner’s pp marking at “Auf wolkigen Höh’n wohnen die Götter” and how nobly the great artist molds this grateful, arching phrase in his smoothly flowing legato. There are two extensive cuts in the music, and considering the painful performance of Erich Witte, quacking and barking, almost talking Mime’s music, this was not such a bad idea, robbing us, however, of many expressive phrases of Wotan’s that we should have liked to hear from this supremely distinguished singer. A patchy recording of a broadcast of Bach’s St. John Passion gives us a unique and revealing glimpse of Janssen as a singer of eighteenth-century religious music (CD 5, Track 1). The disappointingly short role of Jesus was conceived for a bass, rather than a baritone voice, but Janssen sings smoothly, with his usual model legato and clear, unmannered pronunciation of the words, making a noble thing of the aria with chorus “Mein teurer Heiland” (My beloved Savior), which includes some agility passages and uncomfortable intervals; we forgive him for not attempting the trills. The classical Italian vocal technique in which Janssen was trained allows his voice to float so freely on the breath that the artist can lightly swell or diminish any tone in his scale, and as we have noticed before, his clarity of enunciation is perfectly integrated into his flowing legato. (This recording testifies also to Janssen’s masterly handling of the recitatives, most beautifully sung, with moving eloquence: he finds exactly the right tone for the last word on the Cross, “It is finished—Es ist vollbracht”.) We are fortunate to be able to join the audience at a 1945 concert by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under their conductor Artur Rodzinski that included Act III of Die Walküre with Helen Traubel and Herbert Janssen as Brünnhilde and Wotan. We have chosen “Wotan’s Farewell” as the closing item of this set (CD 6, Track 20). It was often said that Janssen had never wanted to sing the heavier Wagner roles and that only the retirement of Friedrich Schorr led him reluctantly to undertake them. He sang his first Walküre Wotan at the Met in 1943, eventually chalking up 18 performances of the role there. Janssen’s careful study of Wotan’s music is a revelation. The voice is easily emitted and responsive to every dramatic nuance, while we hear how the excellence of the basic technique he had learned helps him overcome every possible obstacle. Wagner asks a lot from his Wotan: in the angrier, expostulatory parts of the confrontation between father and daughter Janssen tends to a now sadly familiar staccato emission, but whenever a singable melody pops up he rejoices in the opportunity to demonstrate his mastery of legato singing. He opens the “Farewell” with a lovely, tenorish high E on “Leb’wohl”, continuing with smoothly flowing tone to the end of the page: on the last repeat of “Leb’wohl” he executes a beautiful diminuendo on the sustained C. The next phrase begins “Muss ich dich meiden” and Wagner has marked it molto appassionato: Janssen remains truly godlike (or is he just being a German gentleman of the old school?) and expresses the deep feelings of the Farewell in two pages of model legato singing. The voice is so immediately responsive to the artist’s intention that he is able to execute a diminuendo wherever it is indicated by the composer, or where Janssen thinks it might be appropriate, all leading most movingly to Wotan’s regretful “Freier als ich, der Gott!”. Now Wagner leaves the culmination of this great scene, the last embrace of father and daughter, to the overwhelming crescendo in the orchestra. A peaceful contrast ensues: Wotan’s “Der Augen leuchtendes Paar” is marked pp and lento, and all this passage is most beautifully sung. Perhaps as a result of overindulgence in the famous “bark” earlier in the evening, the great singer’s timbre is now not of pristine freshness, though still pleasantly warm as he lovingly molds these touching phrases, drawing upon endless shadings of piano and pianissimo singing. These two pages of supremely eloquent singing end with the almost unbearable moment when Wotan clasps Brünnhilde’s hands and kisses the godhead from her. Wagner must have hoped for, but could hardly ever have heard, such an exquisite realization as Janssen offers in his deeply felt and quietly sung interpretation. What a singing lesson! The scene ends with Wotan summoning Loge in a declamatory page, rather taxing after what has gone before, but Janssen is able to call once more on his head register to end on a well-placed high E. Apart from the glorious recording by another high baritone, Lawrence Tibbett, who enjoys the priceless advantage of Leop
1646	dbpedia	0	5	https://www.popsike.com/1928-ELENA-GERHARDT-Schubert-CENTENNIAL-FISCHERWEISE-FISCHERMAEDCHEN78/111068082101.html	en	1928 ELENA GERHARDT Schubert CENTENNIAL FISCHERWEISE/ FISCHERMAEDCHEN78	https://www.popsike.ch/p…111068082101.jpg	https://www.popsike.ch/p…111068082101.jpg	[ "https://www.popsike.ch/pix/20130506/111068082101.jpg", "https://www.popsike.com/images/site/app_store_badge.svg", "https://www.popsike.com/images/site/google-play-badge.svg", "https://www.popsike.com/images/anniversary_popsikecom.webp" ]	[]	[]	[ "vinyl", "records", "results", "auction", "ebay", "price", "value" ]	null	[]	null	check the value of your vinyl records by searching our archive	en	../assets/ico/apple-touch-icon-144-precomposed.png		null	WEEK 2 of two weeks of great auctions ending May 11. I will send you a bill after close of auctions May 11. Due to the high volume of records, pls allow 2 - 3 days for packing and invoicing IF you are a non-US buyer or if buy multiple records, pls do not use EBAY check out. Send me an invoice request (click on MORE ACTIONS to the right of the item), I can probably get you better shipping rate. **** I am currently selling a series of great Richard Wagner and classic European 78 rpm orchestral recordings on all the great European labels: Elena Gerhardt, considered a singers singer, and the pioneer of intelligent Lieder interpretation in the line of Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau is considered by critics to be the singer with greatest subtlety and variety of impression. Her concert evenings with Artur Nikisch at the piano in the Pre WW I Berlin were the toast of town Here from her unfortunately incomplete recording of Schubert's Winterreise: Like Tauber in 1927 and Hans Duhan in 1928, Gerhardt took a crack at the complete Winterreise, unfortunately, only 8 sides from the 1928 session were recorded. Issued originally as 1928 HMV Black Label Schubert Centenary Album - seven 12" and one 10" record (eight items from Winterreise, and ten other songs). From the Schubert Centenary Album: FISCHERWEISE/ FISCHERMAEDCHEN - GEHEIMES w Coenraad van de Bost Piano early electric 12" 78rpm Condition: EXCELLENT minus rubbed, light scratches on Weise, Plays quiet w lightest crackle Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883, Connewitz (nr. Leipzig) – 11 January 1961, London) was a German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. Training, and first recitals with NikischElena Gerhardt, daughter of a Leipzig restaurateur, studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1899 to 1903, first with Professor Carl Rebling and then with Marie Hedmondt (d. 1941), who remained her friend and vocal adviser for many years. After a year of only technical study, she began work on operatic roles, such as Cherubino, Dorabella, the Mignon of Ambroise Thomas and Hermann Goetz's Katharina, interspersed with Lieder. She won the Carl Reinecke Scholarship. Leipzig provided many opportunities to hear international artists and to hear the early masters. In 1902 Arthur Nikisch became director of the Leipzig Conservatory, and approved her to sing publicly in Leipzig, which she first did in November 1902: he also gave her a solo in Liszt's Entfesselte Prometheus. On graduating in 1903, and with many engagements, she mentioned her wish to give a lieder recital, and Nikisch offered to be her accompanist, their first (victorious) performance being at the Kaufhaus in Leipzig on her twentieth birthday. Concert engagements poured in, and she sang lieder in almost every university town as supporting artist to names such as Ysaye, Teresa Carreño or Max Reger. By 1905 she made her first appearances (with Nikisch) in Hamburg and Berlin (the Bechsteinhall), and in Berlin made the friendship of Richard Strauss. From summer 1905 she spent holidays with the Nikisch family near Ostend. [edit] London, Europe, Russia and USA before 1914Gerhardt first appeared at the Leipzig Opera as Mignon, in June 1905, and also performed Charlotte in Massenet's Werther there, under Nikisch, being coached by his student Albert Coates as Korrepetitor. Nikisch arranged and accompanied her 1906 London debut, first in a Mischa Elman concert, and then in a Lieder recital (songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, etc.) at the Bechstein Hall. In April 1907 she first sang at the Royal Albert Hall, with an orchestra under Nikisch. Thereafter she returned to England annually until 1914 for autumn seasons, including regular tours of the provinces with Hamilton Harty or her loyal accompanist Paula Hegner. The partnership with Nikisch was preserved in two series of records made in 1907 and 1911, made in Berlin. A particular triumph was their appearance in the 1908 season of the Philharmonic Society in London. She sang by invitation to entertain royal guests to the Coronation of George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Nikisch introduced her into the highest circles, including the Villa Wahnfried. She sang in many European capitals - Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Copenhagen, Christiania (Oslo) - and with old musical Societies at Cologne and Frankfort, annually in Paris and London, and under Mengelberg at The Hague. Nikisch usually accompanied the first Lieder concert at each centre, after which other accompanists took over. Alexander Siloti arranged her first visit to Russia (to Moscow) in 1909, and until the War she sang there and in St Petersburg. Gerhardt made her American debut at the Carnegie Hall in January 1912, with Paula Hegner, and was then in Cincinnati and Philadelphia with Leopold Stokowski (singing the Wesendonck Lieder), and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Max Fiedler, before finally combining there with Nikisch and the London Symphony Orchestra tour. In London in 1912 she performed the angel in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, a role more associated with her 'rival' and friend Julia Culp. Her second American tour was in early 1913, opening with the Boston Symphony under Karl Muck, and with Karl Wolff as accompanist, who died during the tour. They visited Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Next season she sang in Paris, Moscow, Scandinavia, Hungary, Austria, Holland, Italy, Scotland and England, culminating in London in July 1914 at the Queen's Hall under Richard Strauss - her last appearance there for eight years. [edit] The First World WarReturning from Ostend to Leipzig in August 1914, her English tours were impossible to fulfil, but she sang from Hamburg to Vienna and Budapest and returned triumphantly to America in 1915, and that winter sang in Denmark and Norway. In August 1916 she sang to German troops on the Western Front at Laon, through efforts of her brother the singer Reinhold Gerhardt, a pupil of Karl Scheidemantel. Meanwhile in late 1916 she returned to the USA to give the east coast tour with Karl Muck, and in April 1917 was singing in Los Angeles and San Francisco. As America entered the war she was shipped back to Germany with many other artists. She visited the Front again in summer 1918 with Wilhelm Backhaus (in uniform) as accompanist and concert partner. She continued to tour, from Norway to Hungary, through the chaos following the armistice, and was in Munich when Kurt Eisner was assassinated. [edit] Between the warsIn early 1920 she made a prolonged tour of Spain with Paula Hegner, and later that year to the USA again, where her collaboration with the model accompanist Coenraad van Bos began. This partnership was renewed in the winter season of 1921-22 in New York. In March 1922 (soon after the death of Nikisch) she braved the return to London (Queen's Hall) with Paula Hegner, where her German art was received with an ovation. That was the start of an unbroken tie with England, which later became her home. The following years saw annual winter tours in USA (and the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver in 1925), with extensive tours in UK, Europe and Germany. There were further Spanish tours, including one in winter 1928 with van Bos. She was then singing Schubert's Winterreise which, as a female singer, she made particularly her own. At the start of 1929 she became head teacher of singing at the Leipzig Conservatory, and after October 1930 she discontinued her American tours, though still touring intensively in Britain and Europe. In 1928 she met and fell in love with Dr Fritz Kohl, Director of Administration of the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk in Leipzig, and they married in November 1932. In London she reappeared before the Royal Philharmonic Society in January 1931, under John Barbirolli, to perform Wolf songs with orchestral accompaniment, and the Kindertotenlieder of Mahler. Her Hugo Wolf Song Society recordings were made in 1932. Following Hitler's rise to power Kohl was arrested and imprisoned, and not until June 1935 was he released, the only one of the German Broadcasting Directors to be acquitted by the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. With the help of Landon Ronald at the Guildhall School of Music, Elena meanwhile got a foothold in London in 1934, and after a last visit to Bayreuth to see Strauss conduct Parsifal ('It was no longer Richard Wagner's Bayreuth, but Hitler's'[1]), London became the settled home of the couple. Over the following years, as the storm gathered, Elena gave recitals in Holland, France and Britain, often with Gerald Moore accompanying, and developed a circle of singing pupils. [edit] Wartime recitals in EnglandWith the outbreak of war, Gerhardt expected that her singing career was at an end as there should be no taste for German music in Britain, especially as she would only sing in German, and the broadcast of the German language was forbidden on the BBC home programmes. However, Myra Hess insisted upon involving her in the National Gallery mid-day concerts, where she first appeared in December 1939, and afterwards in twenty-two concerts with Myra Hess or Gerald Moore, being very greatly appreciated. With Myra Hess and Lionel Tertis she sang the Brahms viola songs and other Lieder recitals in many parts of England and Scotland, including a complete Winterreise in Reading, and in 1942 gave BBC Lieder broadcasts to Argentina. Her teaching picked up again after 1941. With Myra Hess she sang at Haslemere for Tobias Matthay and his pupils. She gave a sixtieth birthday concert in the Wigmore Hall in 1943, and further National Gallery and Wigmore Hall concerts in 1944. News of the destruction of Leipzig and Dresden, of course, filled her with deep sadness. [edit] Late careerIn 1946, when the BBC Third Programme (i.e., Radio 3, the classical music station) was inaugurated, she gave three broadcasts, including Lieder recitals and talks about her career and the interpretation of Winterreise. She also recorded the Frauenliebe und -leben in that year. She made a broadcast on Brahms's songs in May 1947. That was soon after her formal retirement from the platform in March 1947. Her husband Dr Kohl died in May 1947, and the remainder of her professional life was devoted to teaching in London. She managed to arrange the escape of her brother Reinhold and his family from Eastern Germany, and he joined the staff of the Guildhall School of Music. Gerhardt was one of the very great interpreters of German Lieder, a singer who made her career almost entirely in this genre. She published her autobiography in 1953 and died in 1961. [edit] Recordings(See discography by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, with titles and number listings. Dates may be of recording or of issue.)[2] Acoustic recordings: 1907 G&T recordings with Arthur Nikisch (Wolf, Bungert, Brahms, Strauss, Rubinstein) - six 10" and one 12" record/seven songs. 1911 Red Label German HMV recordings with Arthur Nikisch (Wolf, Brahms, Bungert, Strauss, Schumann, Schubert, Wagner) - ten 10" and seven 12" records/seventeen songs. 1913-1914 as above, with Bruno Seidler-Winkler (pno) - eleven 10" records/songs. (Strauss, Brahms, Schubert, Wolf). 1913-1914 as above, with orchestra cond. Seidler-Winkler - five 12" records/songs. (Strauss, Wagner, Gluck, Wolf). 1915 American Columbia, about 7 titles with orchestral accompaniment. (J. Strauss, Schulz, Grüber, and folk-songs) 1923 Aeolian Vocalion with Ivor Newton (pno) - six 12" records/songs. (Schubert, Grieg, Schumann, Strauss, Brahms) 1924 as above, with Harold Craxton (pno) - six 12" records/songs. (Schubert, Strauss and Brahms) 1924-1925 HMV red label, with ?Harold Craxton (pno) - seven titles (three 10" 2-sided records and one side unissued). (Schubert, Schumann, Wolf and Brahms) Electric recordings: 1926 HMV red label, with Paula Hegner - eight songs, three 10" and two 12" records. (Brahms, Schubert) 1927 HMV red label, with Coenraad van Bos - three songs, two 12" records. (Brahms, Reger) 1928 HMV Black Label Schubert Centenary Album - seven 12" and one 10" record (eight items from Winterreise, and ten other songs). 1929 HMV black label, with Harold Craxton - one 12" record, three songs (Brahms). 1929 HMV black label, with Coenraad van Bos - two 12" records, six songs (Brahms). 1929 HMV red label, with van Bos - one 10" record, three songs (Schubert and Wolf). 1929 HMV red label, with van Bos - one 12" record, two songs (Schumann): another two sides of Schumann were recorded at this time (Wer machte dich so krank, and Alte Laute), but were not issued. 1932 HMV red label Hugo Wolf Society Volume I, with Coenraad van Bos - six 12" records, nineteen songs. 1939 HMV White Label, privately published, with Gerald Moore - six 10" records, GR16-GR21. (Brahms, Complete Zigeunerlieder (eight songs), three other songs; Schubert (four), Wolf (two)). 1947-1948 HMV White Label, privately published, with Gerald Moore - (Schumann, Frauenliebe und -leben Complete, three 12" records). Also Schumann's Meine Rose was recorded, on one 12"" side, but was not issued. * * *<?xml:namespace prefix = o /> Quick NOTE ON GRADING AND SHIPPING: As you can see from my feedback, I try hard to earn your POSITIVE FEEDBACK and FIVE STAR RATINGS. If for any reason your transaction was NOT SATISFACTORY, pls contact me and I will work something out with you. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE A REASON TO GIVE ME A NEGATIVE RATING or a LOW STAR RATING. Quick note on grading: The Grade (Excellent to Fair, I don't give Mint) refers to the WEAR of the record. Any other defects, like cracks, chips and scratches, are stated separately When I listen to a record, I may also make a SUBJECTIVE judgment of the pressing quality for hiss and surface noise. "SUPERQUIET" is basically noiseless, like a vinyl pressing. "VERY QUIET" is an exceptionally quiet record for a given pressing. "Quiet" is a record that is a great example without undue noise for a given pressing. These judgments are SUBJECTIVE and will depend one the styli, phonograph etc. you use on your own equipment. Pls check my other auctions for more great records and phonograph items: http://stores.ebay.com/carstensf http://stores.ebay.com/carstensf ==== Multiple item shipping: I am happy to combine items for shipment in one parcel. If you win multiple items, pls send me an INVOICE REQUEST to calculate the correct postage. Ebay check out will not give you the multiple item discount! Records will be packed safely between corrugated cardboard in a sturdy box with plenty of padding for safe shipment. Shipment is usually Media Mail, unless another service is requested. Shipping is at your risk. If you are in the San Francisco area, I encourage pick-up in person. US Domestic Shipping: Here is a guideline for US Media Mail Shipping: Prices below are for regular 78 rpm records. Up to about 5 records, I will ship Edison Discs for the same rates. Albums from Album Sets count as 1 record. Above that and for international shipments, it will be actual weight plus a small packing charge (1-3$ depending on size of shipment) 1 record: 4.50$ 2 records: 5.50$ 5 records: 7.50$ 10 records: 9.50$ MANY MORE RECORDS: Don't worry. I safely ship 40 - 50 pounds of records double boxed in moving boxes, and even then Media Mail will probably not exceed 30$. Please send me a message if you would like to lower your shipping rates! International Buyers: All'attenzione degli acquirenti italiani: ATTENTION TO ITALIAN BUYERS: Due to rare problems with delivery in ITALY, I will NOT GUARANTEE delivery of parcels sent by US Postal Service First Class and Priority Mail. If you prefer secure delivery, I will be happy to quote you either Registered Mail or shipment by FEDEX I am very happy to ship records worldwide. The US POSTAL SERVICE has increased international shipping rates in 2013. A single record ships for around 25$ worldwide, depending on the weight. There are some great options available for shipping multiple records at excellent rates. Pls contact me if you plan to buy multiple records, and I will be happy to give you an estimate for best rates on USPS or Fedex. Pls let me know your country, home town and postal code for an estimate ===== As always, I would appreciate any suggestions and corrections from you, pls contact me with any question. Thank you very much, and good luck bidding !!!
1646	dbpedia	1	62	https://rutube.ru/video/ce3cfdd770f9f257c17a39eb781b0689/	en	Elena Gerhardt; "Gretchen am Spinnrade"; Franz Schubert	https://pic.rutubelist.r…bf8becce333c.jpg	https://pic.rutubelist.r…bf8becce333c.jpg	[ "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/f8/b7/f8b74ee02b3d12b1fe70c4bbee27a10a.jpg?width=48", "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/0d/51/0d513ac6d114896d6e4cbb31d688cae3.jpg?width=48", "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/63/b1/63b170295217ecd62401284571fbbd3f.png?width=48", "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/0c/88/0c88d500af...	[]	[]	[ "RUTUBE", "видео", "клипы", "сериалы", "кино", "трейлеры", "фильмы", "мультфильмы", "онлайн", "рутьюб", "рутуб" ]	null	[]	null	This channel is the re-establishment of previous channels that have been sadly terminated. =============== Elena Gerhardt--mezzo-soprano Paula Hegner--piano 1926 ================ "Elena Gerhardt (11 N... Смотрите видео онлайн «Elena Gerhardt; "Gretchen am Spinnrade"; Franz Schubert» на канале «Звездные истории: любовь сцена» в хорошем качестве и бесплатно, опубликованное 15 мая 2024 года в 19:03, длительностью 00:03:33, на видеохостинге RUTUBE.	ru	https://static.rutube.ru/static/favicon.ico	RUTUBE	https://rutube.ru/video/ce3cfdd770f9f257c17a39eb781b0689/	This channel is the re-establishment of previous channels that have been sadly terminated. =============== Elena Gerhardt--mezzo-soprano Paula Hegner--piano 1926 ================ "Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883 – 11 January 1961) was a German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. Elena Gerhardt was born at Connewitz near Leipzig, the daughter of a Leipzig restaurateur. She studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1899 to 1903, first with Professor Carl Rebling and then with Marie Hedmondt (d. 1941), who remained her friend and vocal adviser for many years. After a year of only technical study, she began work on operatic roles, such as Cherubino, Dorabella, the Mignon of Ambroise Thomas and Hermann Goetz's Katharina, interspersed with lieder. She won the Carl Reinecke Scholarship. Leipzig provided many opportunities to hear international artists and to hear the early masters. In 1902, Arthur Nikisch became director of the Leipzig Conservatory, and approved her to sing publicly in Leipzig, which she first did in November 1902: he also gave her a solo in Franz Liszt's "Choruses from Herder's Entfesselter Prometheus" (S. 69). On graduating in 1903 and with many engagements, she mentioned her wish to give a lieder recital, and Nikisch offered to be her accompanist, their first (victorious) performance being at the Kaufhaus in Leipzig on her twentieth birthday. Concert engagements poured in, and she sang lieder in almost every university town as supporting artist to names such as Eugène Ysaÿe, Teresa Carreño and Max Reger. By 1905 she made her first appearances (with Nikisch) in Hamburg and Berlin (the Bechsteinhall), and in Berlin made the friendship of Richard Strauss. From summer 1905 she spent holidays with the Nikisch family near Ostend. Gerhardt made her American debut at the Carnegie Hall in January 1912, with Paula Hegner, and was then in Cincinnati and Philadelphia with Leopold Stokowski (singing the Wesendonck Lieder), and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Max Fiedler, before finally combining there with Nikisch and the London Symphony Orchestra tour. T Between the wars In early 1920, she made a prolonged tour of Spain with Paula Hegner, and later that year to the USA again, where her collaboration with the model accompanist Coenraad V. Bos began. This partnership was renewed in the winter season of 1921-22 in New York. In March 1922 (soon after the death of Nikisch) she braved the return to London (Queen's Hall) with Paula Hegner, where her German art was received with an ovation. That was the start of an unbroken tie with England, which later became her home. The following years saw annual winter tours in USA (and the Pacific Coast from San Francisco to Vancouver in 1925), with extensive tours in UK, Europe and Germany. There were further Spanish tours, including one in winter 1928 with Bos. In 1928, she met and fell in love with Dr Fritz Kohl, Director of Administration of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk in Leipzig, and they married in November 1932. In London she reappeared before the Royal Philharmonic Society in January 1931, under John Barbirolli, to perform Wolf songs with orchestral accompaniment, and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Her Hugo Wolf Song Society recordings were made in 1932. Following Hitler's rise to power, Kohl was arrested and imprisoned, not being released until June 1935, the only one of the German Broadcasting Directors to be acquitted by the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. With the help of Landon Ronald at the Guildhall School of Music, Elena meanwhile got a foothold in London in 1934, and after a last visit to Bayreuth to see Strauss conduct Parsifal ('It was no longer Richard Wagner's Bayreuth, but Hitler's'[2]), London became the settled home of the couple. Over the following years, as the storm gathered, Elena gave recitals in the Netherlands, France and Britain, often with Gerald Moore accompanying, and developed a circle of singing pupils. Late career In 1946, when the BBC Third Programme (i.e., Radio 3, the classical music station) was inaugurated, she gave three broadcasts, including lieder recitals and talks about her career and the interpretation of Winterreise. She also recorded Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben in that year. She made a broadcast of Brahms's songs in May 1947. That was soon after her formal retirement from the platform in March 1947. Her husband Dr Kohl died in May 1947 and the remainder of her professional life was devoted to teaching in London, where one of her earliest pupils was Marina de Gabaráin. Gerhardt was one of the very great interpreters of German lieder, a singer who made her career almost entirely in this genre. She published her autobiography in 1953. She died on 11 January 1961 aged 77, in London. Wikipedia (edited) '
1646	dbpedia	3	82	https://parterre.com/2023/09/16/white-hot/	en	parterre box	https://parterre.com/wp-…idsen-header.jpg	https://parterre.com/wp-…idsen-header.jpg	[ "https://parterre.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/1920x0.jpg 1100w, https://parterre.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/1920x0-300x102.jpg 300w, https://parterre.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/1920x0-720x245.jpg 720w, https://parterre.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/1920x0-768x262.jpg 768w, https://parterre.com/wp-conten...	[ "//www.youtube.com/embed/ZvNFUX7M8Gw?wmode=transparent&fs=1&hl=en&modestbranding=1&iv_load_policy=3&showsearch=0&rel=0&theme=dark&hd=1", "//www.youtube.com/embed/oY6touwRxN8?wmode=transparent&fs=1&hl=en&modestbranding=1&iv_load_policy=3&showsearch=0&rel=0&theme=dark&hd=1" ]	[]	[ "lise davidsen", "review", "Parterre Box", "parterre.com", "opera", "opera news", "opera blog", "opera singer blog", "opera gossip", "opera scandal", "Anna Netrebko", "Jonas Kaufmann", "Joyce DiDonato", "Yannick Nézet-Séguin James Levine", "Metropolitan Opera", "Met Opera", "MetOpera...	null	[ "Callum John Blackmore", "parterre box" ]	2023-09-16T00:00:00	The great archetypal image of an opera singer is a towering Wagnerian soprano who shatters entire panes of glass the moment she opens her mouth.	en	https://parterre.com/wp-content/themes/parterror-2020/favicon.ico	parterre box	https://parterre.com/2023/09/16/white-hot/	I always thought this window-busting archetype was little more than a cliché. That is, until I saw Lise Davidsen’s recital with pianist James Baillieu at the Met on Thursday evening. I’m surprised the auditorium is still standing after the sonic battering it received from Davidsen’s earth-splitting voice—a veritable nuclear weapon, even in a hall as large as the Met. Perhaps the only thing louder than Davidsen’s voice was the whooping ovation she received after a tremendous mainstage recital, balancing operatic set-pieces with familiar favorites from the Northern European art song repertory. Davidsen’s star has been on the rise for a while now. I saw her Met debut in Pikovaya dama back in 2019. Even then, I was impressed by the raw power of her voice, but skeptical of her ability to shape it into something beautiful. However, since then, Davidsen has appeared in several roles on the Met stage, each time proving herself a consummate musician and a captivating performer. A particular highlight, for me, was her Rosenkavalier, which revealed a sparkling maturity in both voice and interpretation. Indeed, Davidsen is at her best in this high Romantic repertoire—music that gives her voice room to maneuver. The Grieg set which opened the recital was perfect in this regard. At its loudest, Davidsen’s voice has a white-hot quality: It can be arresting, breathtaking, even piercing, but not always particularly subtle. But Grieg’s lieder found a warmth in her voice that I’ve not heard before. At once playful and restrained, Davidsen approached these songs (three in her native Norwegian, and three in German) with a welcome levity—a cultivated effortlessness that allowed her to show off corners of the voice otherwise unexplored on the grand operatic stage. This frank interpretation lent a refreshing simplicity to the otherwise turgid 19th-century poetry. Davidsen’s voice was at its most direct when it is at its softest. Anything loud and high tended to distort vowels and obscure consonants. It’s the kind of voice where even the smallest musical gesture has immense resonance. And Grieg’s music gave her plenty of opportunity to take her foot off the gas and lean into the text: her “Drømme” had a floating quality that was particularly well suited to Grieg’s fly-by-night harmonic shifts. Davidsen released this same set of Grieg songs on 2022 album for Decca. I must confess that I was not particularly impressed by this recording. Frankly, I found it a little dull. But Davidsen’s voice is truly best in live performance. Half the experience is the sheer presence of the instrument—its luminous effect in the space—paired with an endlessly endearing stage presence. Hearing these songs fill the hall—at once tender and sonorous—was a much more rewarding experience than hearing them on CD. Davidsen is a natural entertainer. Even in the recital format, she remained an uncommonly expressive actor, gesturing and even perambulating with relative ease. There was something unaffected or unpretentious about her performance: she never mugged or hammed, bubbling with a kind of naïve energy that made the (relatively well-known) repertoire feel funky and fresh. Between sets, she conversed freely with her audience, dispensing a charming mix of humble brags and self-deprecating jokes. The high points of the concert, for me, were all in the first half of the program. A pairing of Verdi arias brought a touch of high drama to the proceedings. Her “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” from Un ballo in maschera offered a thrilling sense of intimacy, balancing luscious melodic sweep with moments of quiet reflection. But it was her performance of the “Ave Maria” from Otello that was the real showstopper. Here, she allowed her voice to take on a vulnerability, especially in the high register, lending an elegant arc to the ascent to the final A flat. But the spell was cast at the very beginning of the aria, her sotto voce chanting at once crisply articulated and lustrously intoned. Davidsen is due to headline the revival of Forza del destino at the Met in the spring. If this recital is anything to go by, Davidsen will prove a gifted Verdian, with a strong command of the Italianate style. A set of four Sibelius songs formed a compelling complement to the Verdi fare. Here, her voice took on a newly hardened veneer, her phrasing more roughly hewn, her execution more fiery. Baillieu and Davidsen emphasized (even exaggerated) Sibelius’s musical contrasts—dynamic shifts were pushed to extremes, registral jumps were outrageously emphasized, tempo changes were consistently jarring. And while some passages felt a tad rushed (her “Den första kyssen” surged forth with almost irrepressible vitality), I did enjoy the restless energy of the interpretation—the quickfire emotional shifts, the sudden musical upheavals. These were particularly prominent in “Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte,” which began with a honeyed naïvété and culminated in a guttural growl. Davidsen did not shy away from the darkest emotional recesses of the lyrics, relishing their moody depictions of heartache and death. Sitting on the snarling edge of the soprano’s voice, her performance had a paroxysmal quality—each song treated like three-minute trauma dump. Her “Dich, teure Halle,” by contrast, was unapologetically upbeat, delivered with a beaming smile and arms flung wide—as if to embrace her (particularly adoring) audience. Here, the size of her voice worked to her advantage, projecting the grandeur of the eponymous hall by its sheer capacity to fill the space. This rendition was sullied only by Baillieu’s rather muddy accompaniment, which felt at once mannered and indistinct. The second half of the concert (with some notable exceptions) was somewhat less successful. After an icy (but rather effective) “Akh! istomilas ya gorem,” Davidsen launched into a dreary set of Schubert lieder—for me, the low point of the concert. Davidsen introduced her Schubert set by making a point about the malleability of Schubert’s musical style: These songs, she argued, could be sung by any singer of any fach, with each voice bringing something new to these “timeless” melodies. Davidsen herself proved this wrong. Davidsen is a generous performer, certainly, but not always a particularly creative one, and her Schubert interpretation lacked the zest necessary to breathe life into these songs. Davidsen sang best in repertoire with a degree of inbuilt melodic and harmonic complexity: from Sibelius’s moody dissonances to Strauss’s labyrinthine melodic contours. In these cases, Davidsen was very good at bringing out the interest already in the music, accentuating contrasts, finessing their thorny edges, and lending them a necessary weight. But Schubert’s lieder were simply not written for such a voice. Intended for salon performance, they favor a singer who can trade effectively on both their intimacy and their simplicity. I felt that Davidsen’s interpretation—while technically faultless—lacked the kind of daring essential to any good Schubertiade. The strophic lieder, “An die Musik” and “Aller Seelen,” were particularly colorless: Davidsen offered little variation between verses, instead offering a beautiful (but rather monotonous) pianissimo. But it was “Erlkönig,” Schubert’s great polyvocal micro-drama, which proved most disappointing. This song can be a real tour-de-force for the chameleonic vocalist; but Davidsen’s rendition offered little distinction between screaming child and bloodthirsty demon. Rather, it was Baillieu who stole the show during this set, dispensing the churning accompaniments to “Erlkönig” and “Gretchen am Spinnrade” with electrifying panache. Her Strauss set fared much better, with particularly impassioned renditions of “Zueignung” and “Cäcilie.” Here, her voice took on a blooming quality that she seemed to be working hard to repress during the Schubert: phrases felt expansive, soaring, with a radiant gleam in the middle register. If her “Morgen” felt a tad over-indulgent in its rubato, Davidsen had surely earnt it after a yearning, dreamy “Befreit.” Her final set—“Heia, in den Bergen ist mein Heimatland” from Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin and “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady—were too ham-fisted for my taste, although Davidsen was clearly having a marvelous time, gleefully dancing along to the music (one wonders what Henry Higgins would have made of her prominent Nordic vowels!). I was particularly taken by the warm, almost celebratory atmosphere in the hall on Thursday night. Judging by the cries of “We love you Lise” which accompanied the soprano’s first encore (a bracing, haughty “Vissi d’arte”), Davidsen has clearly built up a special rapport with the Met audience over the last few years. We can only hope that this amity translates into robust ticket sales for Forza del destino in the new year. Photos: Karen Almond / Met Opera
1646	dbpedia	1	23	https://www.amazon.com/Favorite-German-Songs-Elena-Gerhardt/dp/1342313194	en	Amazon.com			[ "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/captcha/druexhzz/Captcha_zqaxndjxvj.jpg", "https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/oc-csi/1/OP/requestId=94E6E4TGX30T432JZ7AQ&js=0" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Enter the characters you see below Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies.
1646	dbpedia	1	54	https://www.gettyimages.no/photos/elena-%3Fpage%3D8%26sort%3Doldest	en	Getty Images			[ "https://www.gettyimages.no/sign-in/assets/static/white-f114c2d21e50f9b239ac.svg", "https://www.gettyimages.no/sign-in/assets/static/black-dd9588e3db810afab0eb.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Getty Images. Find high resolution royalty-free images, editorial stock photos, vector art, video footage clips and stock music licensing at the richest image search photo library online.	en			null
1646	dbpedia	2	56	https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/audio-2%3Fsort%3DreferenceCode%26sortDir%3Ddesc%26page%3D47%26sf_culture%3Dta%26listLimit%3D75	en	Discover Archives			[ "https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca/images/logo.png", "https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca/uploads/r/thomas-fisher-rare-book-library-university-of-toronto/6/d/9/6d980473225d717a3ea7bd384001b77bf00307e2dd8121a93fd8dca158d72ac8/redhill103A_142.jpg", "https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Discover Archives, a shared portal for exploring archival holdings at the University of Toronto and its federated colleges	en	/favicon.ico		null	In his “Introduction” to this finding aid, Professor Friedland states that this series contains “some [my emphasis] of the research material collected over the past five years”; then describes the arrangement of the files. “Sub-series 7.1 consists of the spiral binders I used to make notes of what I was reading and how I planned to handle the material. Sub-series 2 contains the notes I made as I tackled each chapter. Sub-series 3 is the most extensive collection of material. In it, the subjects are set out in alphabetical order and include persons, places, institutions, and concepts. Individual files may include newspaper articles, research notes, obituaries, academic writings, and many other matters.” Professor Friedland threw out a large quantity of material before transferring his files to the University Archives: “Material that is bulky and easily found elsewhere has been excluded from the files. The series thus provides a unique source of information on topics which would take individual researchers many long days or weeks or months to gather themselves. University of Toronto publications, such as the University of Toronto Monthly, the Bulletin, and the various alumni magazines, were systematically gone through during the course of the project and copies of this material have been included in the relevant files.” In sub-series 7.2, “Rough research notes”, the files are arranged by chapter (1-42). In sub-series 7.3, “Research materials”, the arrangement is alphabetical, “Abols – Zoology”. The files, in whole or in part, that contain information not readily found elsewhere and that illustrate the process of research and writing have been retained. The large volume of photocopied material in the files when Professor Friedland turned them over to the University Archives has been substantially reduced. Much of it is already readily accessible in the University Archives, especially the identified textual records, indexed periodicals, and items from its biographical files (especially A1973-0026 and the ‘people files’) and ‘subject files’. Entries from the widely available Dictionary of Canadian Biography have also not been kept, although entries from some difficult to locate biographical sources have been. Significantly annotated material and references to sources have been retained (some sources were added when the photocopies were culled), as has photocopied material from sources that would be otherwise very difficult for researchers to locate. In the course of his research Professor Friedland made careful and extensive use of the files assembled by Robin Harris in the 1970s in his ultimately abandoned attempt to write the second of a proposed two-volume history of the University. Much of the material Professor Friedland’s researchers photocopied from this accession (A1983-0036) had earlier been copied from administrative and other sources in the U of T Archives. While references to files in this accession (and others) have been retained, the photocopies themselves, unless annotated, have been removed. Researchers should, in any case, ultimately refer to the original sources, where they are identified, in the University Archives. Where deemed appropriate, photocopied material in volume has been retained. There are two principal occasions where this was done. First, Professor Friedland had copied the complete run of Claude Bissell’s diaries and journals from 1934 to 1971, the year he stepped down as president of the University. These Friedland marked for further copying (the resulting elements were then used to bolster files about individuals, events, groups and organizations that were created by his researchers). Only the pages that were earmarked for further copying have survived culling; they contain the entries that were actually used throughout the manuscript and, with the ‘elements’ described above, provide a rough index to the diaries. In the second instance, where indices do not exist items have largely been retained. Journals that are indexed in the University Archives include the student newspaper, the Varsity (1880-1931,1953-1973), University of Toronto Quarterly (up to 1937, thereafter in the Canadian periodicals index), University of Toronto monthly (1901-1948) and its successors, the Alumni Bulletin (1948-1956), Varsity Graduate (1948-1967), and the University of Toronto Graduate (1967-1972). The last’s successor, University of Toronto Magazine, has been searchable online since 1999. The Department of Development maintains a card index for the University of Toronto Bulletin, a journal about the activities of faculty and staff and events on campus, for the years 1980 to August 2000. As the card index to the Bulletin is not readily available to users, dated items from the years it covers have been kept, along with entries from earlier years. Recent years of the Bulletin are now available online. Some of the files also contain research material, including correspondence, reports and publications, that were forwarded by individuals; these files are identified as discrete units and the material therein has, with few exceptions, been retained in its entirety. George Connell, for example, gave Professor Friedland two large binders of memos, reports, and addresses – some are original handwritten versions – from his years as president (see box 045). Some research material forwarded for use by the History Project has been scattered throughout this series. The principal example here is the index cards compiled by James Greenlee while writing his biography of Sir Robert Falconer, president of the University from 1907 to 1932. These cards have been retained in their entirety and may be found in boxes 051 to 053 and in those files where the notation in the ‘date(s)’ field is [198-]. -Cassette audiotapes of an oral history interview by James Greenlee with Vincent Bladen have been removed from B2002-0022/042(03) to 001S and 002S; -Cassette audiotapes of interviews by James Greenlee with Robert D. Falconer, dated 13 July and August 1979 have been removed from B2002-0022/050(12) to /003 - /010S -A cassette audiotape has been removed from B2002-0022/077(14) - /011S File consists of an interview with Wim Wolters interviewed by Peter Naus in the Netherlands. Wolters is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist living in the Netherlands; he was a friend of Nouwen's. There is an envelope and note in the file from Wolters to Joe Vorstermans that accompanied the photograph. Two interviews were conducted by Naus. The interviews are transcribed and available electronically or in hard copy; two hard copies of the April 27, 2005 interview are available. All recordings and transcriptions are in Dutch. Brief English notes from the interviewer are in the file. They include: 15/06/04 "This was for me the most fascinating of the interviews because of the rather extensive analysis Wim put forth regarding Henri's personality and work. He is clinical psychologist with a psychoanalytic background who knew Henri for a long time and considered himself a close friend. He also knew Henri's family very well. Before the interview started we discussed briefly his ethical concerns about discussing impressions of Henri. I told him that in interviews and pieces I had written about Henri I had been guided by two considerations: not to divulge anything about Henri that was not already in the public domain and to protect as much as possible the privacy of Henri's family". 24/04/05 "Wim is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology. He is still active as a therapist and he is a member of a number of advisory boards a governing councils. I interviewed him last year as well because he and his wife, Milene, are long-time friends of Henri. This time around I wanted to focus on Henri's homosexuality because he had not said much about it in the first interview. He believes rather strongly that the emphasis should be on Henri's impact on people and how he changed the lives of many. As he stated in the tape, Henri's homosexuality as such is not a big issue, but that he did not come to grips with it is. Yet, it would be entirely inappropriate to interpret Henri's writing as the expression of a frustrated, neurotic gay person. One should not hide his homosexuality nor draw undue attention to it". File also includes letters between Wim Wolters and the Nouwen family in Dutch from 1962-1997.
1646	dbpedia	0	9	https://www.popsike.com/1911-ELENA-GERHARDT-Artur-NIKISCH-PIANO-SChubert-Du-Bist-die-Ruh-Monarch-Recor78/121296797850.html	en	1911 ELENA GERHARDT Artur NIKISCH PIANO SChubert Du Bist die Ruh Monarch Recor78	https://www.popsike.ch/p…121296797850.jpg	https://www.popsike.ch/p…121296797850.jpg	[ "https://www.popsike.ch/pix/20140317/121296797850.jpg", "https://www.popsike.com/images/site/app_store_badge.svg", "https://www.popsike.com/images/site/google-play-badge.svg", "https://www.popsike.com/images/anniversary_popsikecom.webp" ]	[]	[]	[ "vinyl", "records", "results", "auction", "ebay", "price", "value" ]	null	[]	null	check the value of your vinyl records by searching our archive	en	../assets/ico/apple-touch-icon-144-precomposed.png		null	WEEK 1 of 3 weeks of great auctions - A whole range of great records, pls have a look at the banner below the Item Description. More good stuff to come. I will be happy to hold your items until the end of these auctions, and pack them in one economic parcel Shipping prices have gone up again, I am trying my best to keep your shipping as affordable as before. For International Buyers - I have great rates for international shipping, especially large parcels to Japan and Western Europe, but of course I will ship WORLDWIDE. IF YOU WIN MULTIPLE ITEMS DO NOT USE EBAY CHECK OUT in order for me to get you low combined postage. Send me an invoice request instead. A series of great early Opera performances: From 1902 G&Ts to 40s wartime German records: The internationally successful couple of ELENA GERHARDT and Artur NIKISCH at the PIANO I AM OFFERING A SERIES of HISTORIC MASTER VINYL PRESSINGS - Rare and unpublished recordings repressed in LP grade Noiseless vinyl 10" 78 RPM RECORD HM HM 194 194 Gerhardt, Elena Gerhardt, Elena Brahms Brahms O Liebliche Wangen Der Schmied Nikisch piano Nikisch piano 77 76 1911 1911 Berlin London 606ak ab13736e nice forceful Artur Nikisch, piano Artur Nikisch, piano Condition: All Historic Masters are MINT condition. Any clicks or extraneous noises are contain in the stamper. Elena Gerhardt Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883 – 11 January 1961) was a German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. Contents 1 Training, and first recitals with Nikisch 2 London, Europe, Russia, and USA before 1914 3 The First World War 4 Between the wars 5 Wartime recitals in England 6 Late career 7 Recordings 8 Notes 9 Sources 10 External links Training, and first recitals with Nikisch Elena Gerhardt was born at Connewitz near Leipzig, the daughter of a Leipzig restaurateur. She studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1899 to 1903, first with Professor Carl Rebling and then with Marie Hedmondt (d. 1941), who remained her friend and vocal adviser for many years. After a year of only technical study, she began work on operatic roles, such as Cherubino, Dorabella, the Mignon of Ambroise Thomas and Hermann Goetz's Katharina, interspersed with Lieder. She won the Carl Reinecke Scholarship. Leipzig provided many opportunities to hear international artists and to hear the early masters. In 1902, Arthur Nikisch became director of the Leipzig Conservatory, and approved her to sing publicly in Leipzig, which she first did in November 1902: he also gave her a solo in Franz Liszt's "Choruses from Herder's Entfesseltem Prometheus" (S. 69). On graduating in 1903 and with many engagements, she mentioned her wish to give a lieder recital, and Nikisch offered to be her accompanist, their first (victorious) performance being at the Kaufhaus in Leipzig on her twentieth birthday. Concert engagements poured in, and she sang lieder in almost every university town as supporting artist to names such as Eugène Ysaÿe, Teresa Carreño or Max Reger. By 1905 she made her first appearances (with Nikisch) in Hamburg and Berlin (the Bechsteinhall), and in Berlin made the friendship of Richard Strauss. From summer 1905 she spent holidays with the Nikisch family near Ostend. London, Europe, Russia, and USA before 1914 Gerhardt first appeared at the Leipzig Opera as Mignon, in June 1905, and also performed Charlotte in Massenet's Werther there, under Nikisch, being coached by his student Albert Coates as Korrepetitor. Nikisch arranged and accompanied her 1906 London debut, first in a Mischa Elman concert, and then in a Lieder recital (songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, etc.) at the Bechstein Hall. In April 1907 she first sang at the Royal Albert Hall, with an orchestra under Nikisch. Thereafter she returned to England annually until 1914 for autumn seasons, including regular tours of the provinces with Hamilton Harty or her loyal accompanist Paula Hegner. The partnership with Nikisch was preserved in two series of records made in 1907 and 1911, made in Berlin. A particular triumph was their appearance in the 1908 season of the Philharmonic Society in London. She sang by invitation to entertain royal guests to the Coronation of George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Nikisch introduced her into the highest circles, including the Villa Wahnfried. She sang in many European capitals - Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Copenhagen, Christiania (Oslo) - and with old musical Societies at Cologne and Frankfurt, annually in Paris and London, and under Mengelberg at The Hague. Nikisch usually accompanied the first Lieder concert at each centre, after which other accompanists took over. Alexander Siloti arranged her first visit to Russia (to Moscow) in 1909, and until the War she sang there and in St Petersburg. Gerhardt made her American debut at the Carnegie Hall in January 1912, with Paula Hegner, and was then in Cincinnati and Philadelphia with Leopold Stokowski (singing the Wesendonck Lieder), and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Max Fiedler, before finally combining there with Nikisch and the London Symphony Orchestra tour. In London in 1912 she performed the Angel in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, a role more associated with her 'rival' and friend Julia Culp. Her second American tour was in early 1913, opening with the Boston Symphony under Karl Muck, and with Erich J. Wolff as accompanist, who died during the tour. They visited Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Next season she sang in Paris, Moscow, Scandinavia, Hungary, Austria, Holland, Italy, Scotland and England, culminating in London in July 1914 at the Queen's Hall under Richard Strauss - her last appearance there for eight years. Quick NOTE ON GRADING AND SHIPPING: As you can see from my feedback, I try hard to earn your POSITIVE FEEDBACK and FIVE STAR RATINGS. If for any reason your transaction was NOT SATISFACTORY, pls contact me and I will work something out with you. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE A REASON TO GIVE ME A NEGATIVE RATING or a LOW STAR RATING. 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1646	dbpedia	0	75	https://classicalpippo9.blogspot.com/2024/06/karel-ancerl-czech-philharmonic.html	en	Diabolus In Musica: Karel Ančerl & Czech Philharmonic Orchestra	https://blogger.googleus…-no-nu/cover.jpg	https://blogger.googleus…-no-nu/cover.jpg	[ "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0YrIokqnFGuxMSyLiYp3W1K1iBPsdfzaOcjmZ-o2vC6hAuW8hl3HmHez0AiiZPQaGDd1XI2us9i8Ut3JSK1mJRaInytDJ5VF80cBTs2WndEqEdndcpDGkqrxySWygtmzUIV2vWWALH9FY66T1nTgbqn0TzVkZIlqfmXVECPT88TYghRo8jKm4JbFesJQ/s320/cover.jpg", "https://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Thang Nguyen" ]	null	Label: Tahra Format: Flac (image + cue) Cover : Yes		https://classicalpippo9.blogspot.com/favicon.ico		https://classicalpippo9.blogspot.com/2024/06/karel-ancerl-czech-philharmonic.html
1646	dbpedia	0	22	https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/opera-singer-soprano.html	en	res stock photography and images	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	[ "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy-black.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy-black.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/mastercard.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/visa.svg"...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Alamy Limited" ]	null	Find the perfect opera singer soprano stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. Available for both RF and RM licensing.	en	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	Alamy	https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/opera-singer-soprano.html	Alamy and its logo are trademarks of Alamy Ltd. and are registered in certain countries. Copyright © 11/08/2024 Alamy Ltd. All rights reserved.
1646	dbpedia	3	77	https://rutube.ru/video/ce3cfdd770f9f257c17a39eb781b0689/	en	Elena Gerhardt; "Gretchen am Spinnrade"; Franz Schubert	https://pic.rutubelist.r…bf8becce333c.jpg	https://pic.rutubelist.r…bf8becce333c.jpg	[ "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/f8/b7/f8b74ee02b3d12b1fe70c4bbee27a10a.jpg?width=48", "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/0d/51/0d513ac6d114896d6e4cbb31d688cae3.jpg?width=48", "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/63/b1/63b170295217ecd62401284571fbbd3f.png?width=48", "https://pic.rutubelist.ru/links/0c/88/0c88d500af...	[]	[]	[ "RUTUBE", "видео", "клипы", "сериалы", "кино", "трейлеры", "фильмы", "мультфильмы", "онлайн", "рутьюб", "рутуб" ]	null	[]	null	This channel is the re-establishment of previous channels that have been sadly terminated. =============== Elena Gerhardt--mezzo-soprano Paula Hegner--piano 1926 ================ "Elena Gerhardt (11 N... Смотрите видео онлайн «Elena Gerhardt; "Gretchen am Spinnrade"; Franz Schubert» на канале «Звездные истории: любовь сцена» в хорошем качестве и бесплатно, опубликованное 15 мая 2024 года в 19:03, длительностью 00:03:33, на видеохостинге RUTUBE.	ru	https://static.rutube.ru/static/favicon.ico	RUTUBE	https://rutube.ru/video/ce3cfdd770f9f257c17a39eb781b0689/	This channel is the re-establishment of previous channels that have been sadly terminated. =============== Elena Gerhardt--mezzo-soprano Paula Hegner--piano 1926 ================ "Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883 – 11 January 1961) was a German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. Elena Gerhardt was born at Connewitz near Leipzig, the daughter of a Leipzig restaurateur. She studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1899 to 1903, first with Professor Carl Rebling and then with Marie Hedmondt (d. 1941), who remained her friend and vocal adviser for many years. After a year of only technical study, she began work on operatic roles, such as Cherubino, Dorabella, the Mignon of Ambroise Thomas and Hermann Goetz's Katharina, interspersed with lieder. She won the Carl Reinecke Scholarship. Leipzig provided many opportunities to hear international artists and to hear the early masters. In 1902, Arthur Nikisch became director of the Leipzig Conservatory, and approved her to sing publicly in Leipzig, which she first did in November 1902: he also gave her a solo in Franz Liszt's "Choruses from Herder's Entfesselter Prometheus" (S. 69). On graduating in 1903 and with many engagements, she mentioned her wish to give a lieder recital, and Nikisch offered to be her accompanist, their first (victorious) performance being at the Kaufhaus in Leipzig on her twentieth birthday. Concert engagements poured in, and she sang lieder in almost every university town as supporting artist to names such as Eugène Ysaÿe, Teresa Carreño and Max Reger. By 1905 she made her first appearances (with Nikisch) in Hamburg and Berlin (the Bechsteinhall), and in Berlin made the friendship of Richard Strauss. From summer 1905 she spent holidays with the Nikisch family near Ostend. Gerhardt made her American debut at the Carnegie Hall in January 1912, with Paula Hegner, and was then in Cincinnati and Philadelphia with Leopold Stokowski (singing the Wesendonck Lieder), and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Max Fiedler, before finally combining there with Nikisch and the London Symphony Orchestra tour. T Between the wars In early 1920, she made a prolonged tour of Spain with Paula Hegner, and later that year to the USA again, where her collaboration with the model accompanist Coenraad V. Bos began. This partnership was renewed in the winter season of 1921-22 in New York. In March 1922 (soon after the death of Nikisch) she braved the return to London (Queen's Hall) with Paula Hegner, where her German art was received with an ovation. That was the start of an unbroken tie with England, which later became her home. The following years saw annual winter tours in USA (and the Pacific Coast from San Francisco to Vancouver in 1925), with extensive tours in UK, Europe and Germany. There were further Spanish tours, including one in winter 1928 with Bos. In 1928, she met and fell in love with Dr Fritz Kohl, Director of Administration of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk in Leipzig, and they married in November 1932. In London she reappeared before the Royal Philharmonic Society in January 1931, under John Barbirolli, to perform Wolf songs with orchestral accompaniment, and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Her Hugo Wolf Song Society recordings were made in 1932. Following Hitler's rise to power, Kohl was arrested and imprisoned, not being released until June 1935, the only one of the German Broadcasting Directors to be acquitted by the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. With the help of Landon Ronald at the Guildhall School of Music, Elena meanwhile got a foothold in London in 1934, and after a last visit to Bayreuth to see Strauss conduct Parsifal ('It was no longer Richard Wagner's Bayreuth, but Hitler's'[2]), London became the settled home of the couple. Over the following years, as the storm gathered, Elena gave recitals in the Netherlands, France and Britain, often with Gerald Moore accompanying, and developed a circle of singing pupils. Late career In 1946, when the BBC Third Programme (i.e., Radio 3, the classical music station) was inaugurated, she gave three broadcasts, including lieder recitals and talks about her career and the interpretation of Winterreise. She also recorded Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben in that year. She made a broadcast of Brahms's songs in May 1947. That was soon after her formal retirement from the platform in March 1947. Her husband Dr Kohl died in May 1947 and the remainder of her professional life was devoted to teaching in London, where one of her earliest pupils was Marina de Gabaráin. Gerhardt was one of the very great interpreters of German lieder, a singer who made her career almost entirely in this genre. She published her autobiography in 1953. She died on 11 January 1961 aged 77, in London. Wikipedia (edited) '
1646	dbpedia	3	2	https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gerhardt-elena-1883-1961	en	Gerhardt, Elena (1883–1961)			[ "https://www.encyclopedia.com/themes/custom/trustme/images/header-logo.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Gerhardt", "Elena (1883–1961)German-born British mezzo-soprano universally recognized and honored as one of the greatest lieder singers of the 20th century and a master interpreter of the great cultural tradition embodied in the German Romantic song. Born in Leipzig", "Germany", "on November 11", "1883; di...	null	[]	null	Gerhardt, Elena (1883–1961)German-born British mezzo-soprano universally recognized and honored as one of the greatest lieder singers of the 20th century and a master interpreter of the great cultural tradition embodied in the German Romantic song. Born in Leipzig, Germany, on November 11, 1883; died in London on January 11, 1961; married Fritz Kohl. Source for information on Gerhardt, Elena (1883–1961): Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia dictionary.	en	/sites/default/files/favicon.ico		https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gerhardt-elena-1883-1961	German-born British mezzo-soprano universally recognized and honored as one of the greatest lieder singers of the 20th century and a master interpreter of the great cultural tradition embodied in the German Romantic song. Born in Leipzig, Germany, on November 11, 1883; died in London on January 11, 1961; married Fritz Kohl. Born in Leipzig in 1883 into a family that loved music but had produced no professional musicians, Elena Gerhardt exhibited remarkable talent from an early age. While still a student at the Leipzig Conservatory, she was discovered by the renowned conductor Arthur Nikisch, with whom she began to present song recitals. Her first recital, given on her 20th birthday in November 1903, was a huge success and her future was assured. At first, it was assumed that she would become an opera singer, and Gerhardt did in fact appear briefly on stage as an opera singer. She quickly decided, however, that her strength was not in the spectacular theatricality found in standard operas or in the vast music dramas of Richard Wagner. Instead, she chose to explore the infinite variety of human experience to be found in the miniature universe of lieder, the psychologically and emotionally complex German art song. For the remainder of her long and successful career, Elena Gerhardt sang only lieder, mastering to perfection the vast repertory of songs by Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Schumann, as well as songs by Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf, composers who were her contemporaries. After achieving a spectacular success with her Leipzig debut, Elena Gerhardt toured throughout Germany and Central Europe. Her singing elicited the highest praise, including a compliment from the Italian-born British composer Francesco Paolo Tosti that he believed her to be almost unique among German singers in her ability to sing in the "bel canto" style (she began her singing career as a soprano, but her voice deepened to mezzo-soprano during her maturity). In 1906, she made a profound impression on British music lovers during her first tour of the United Kingdom. One of Gerhardt's British recitals, which included Queen Alexandra of Denmark in the audience, was so wildly successful that she had to encore every one of the 15 songs on the program. During the next years, before the start of World War I in 1914, Gerhardt concertized not only in her native Germany, but in most European countries, including Spain, and in Russia. In January 1912, she made her American premiere in New York City, earning glowing critical reviews. The New York Times praised her for having given a performance that "penetrated deeply into the essence of the German song," going on to state that she was "in fact, a mistress of variety and characteristic interpretation of a wide gamut of moods and emotions." The New York Tribune joined in the chorus of critical praise, describing Gerhardt as "an artist of the finest grade calibre" and pointing out that her phrasing "was truly exquisite." At a subsequent New York recital two weeks later, the Times again commented on the young German singer's "versatility and variety of expression," as well as her ability to project charm and vivacity by means of a voice that combined with rare artistic excellence the attibutes of "beauty, power, and sympathetic quality." Although she continued to concertize in Germany and Austria-Hungary during World War I, Elena Gerhardt was cut off from her admiring audiences for a number of years because of the war and the period of chaos that followed it. By the mid-1920s, however, she was again an international musical celebrity, performing not only in the major cities of Europe but in the United States as well (by the time she retired, Gerhardt had made 16 tours of the U.S.). In 1928, when she toured the States to commemorate the centennial of Franz Schubert's death, Gerhardt's loyal and enthusiastic audiences, many of whom had been introduced to her artistry through her numerous recordings, now showed up in sold-out recital halls for virtually every one of her appearances. Olin Downes, music critic of The New York Times, reported that the net effect of one of her recitals "was one of uncommon satisfaction and pleasure for an audience which packed the hall." Several weeks later, another enthusiastic New York audience heard Gerhardt give a memorable performance of Schubert's song cycle "Die Winterreise," a setting of 24 lyrics which include some of the Austrian composer's most hauntingly beautiful creations including "Der Lindenbaum," "Die Post," and "Der Leiermann." That evening and on countless other occasions, audiences and critics alike felt that they had experienced what Desmond Shawe-Taylor has described as a performance "of memorably exalted and tragic character." Although "Die Winterreise" is more often than not performed by a male singer, Gerhardt was able to project this tragic figure so effectively that her audiences completely ignored her gender. The world economic crisis of the early 1930s and the rise of Nazism in Germany resulted in dramatic changes in Elena Gerhardt's life and career. In 1932, on the eve of the establishment of the Hitler dictatorship, she married Dr. Fritz Kohl, director of Radio Leipzig. In 1933, with the onset of Nazi rule, Kohl was arrested for having encouraged broadcasting policies that were "un-German." After Kohl's release from incarceration, Elena Gerhardt and her husband immigrated to Great Britain and found a country where personal security and artistic freedom were assured. Already highly acclaimed by British audiences, Gerhardt continued her concert career. At the same time, she began teaching advanced pupils, both through classes at London's Guildhall School of Music and by giving private instruction. Soon after arriving in London, Gerhardt continued to make recordings. The most important of these, in the 1930s, were her renditions of the lieder of Hugo Wolf, the Austrian composer whose reputation was still on the rise in the English-speaking world and many of whose songs had not yet been transcribed. In 1931, even before she fled Germany, Gerhardt had been approached by the His Master's Voice recording firm to sign up for a recording project of Hugo Wolf lieder. When she asked for an advance royalty of 300 guineas, a substantial sum, the company replied it was impossible in the midst of a world depression and an uncertain market for the music of a relatively obscure composer. Nevertheless, she went ahead without payment, and recorded the discs as the first installment of the limited-edition subscription set known as The Hugo Wolf Society. When the first Wolf set sold out immediately after release, many recording executives were astonished but also gratified, and The Hugo Wolf Society recording project continued until 1937 with the issuance of five additional volumes (an additional 20 lieder were recorded in 1937–38, but the projected seventh volume was never issued because of the start of World War II). The Wolf project enlisted other noted singers besides Gerhardt, including John McCormack, Alexander Kipnis, Tiana Lemnitz , and Elisabeth Rethberg , but Elena Gerhardt's recordings remain incomparable in their interpretation of the art of Hugo Wolf. Many critics continue to regard Elena Gerhardt's recordings of Hugo Wolf songs from this phase of her career as the best imaginable introduction to his lieder, and indeed to the art of the German lied in general. Deeply grateful to her adoptive country for having granted her and her husband refuge from Nazism, Gerhardt performed on many occasions during World War II at the National Gallery concerts in the heart of London. Organized by the renowned pianist Dame Myra Hess , these lunchtime recitals played a crucial role in maintaining the morale of London's population during the worst days of the Blitz. Although the British nation found itself in a life-and-death conflict with Nazi Germany, Elena Gerhardt's wartime audiences were as appreciative as ever of the artistry of a German-born singer who sang the greatest of German lieder in such a heartfelt fashion. Despite her international celebrity, Elena Gerhardt never took on the airs of a prima donna. As pointed out by her accompanist, Gerald Moore, she was "charming and unpretentious as most great artists are." Before a concert, she would sit quietly, chatting with Moore or others about any subject other than music. In a career than spanned more than four decades, Gerhardt was able to entrance many thousands of music lovers who experienced her ability to dramatically change moods from song to song. In Brahms' "Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer," she was an ailing woman, while in the same composer's "Feldeinsamkeit" she could produce a tone so dematerialized that the world seemed to have stood still. Elena Gerhardt enjoyed a recording career of extraordinary length, making her first recordings in 1907 and her last in 1953, when she was 70. Even in her earliest discs, Gerhardt revealed an astonishing level of artistry, being able to express not only many different moods, but virtually transforming herself into a different personality within each lied. Elena Gerhardt was, in the words of Gerald Moore, "an instinctive singer, born to sing." Her audiences sensed that all of her subtle effects of tone color, mastery of rhythm and structure of phrasing were not the result of probing analysis or coldblooded calculation, but flowed directly out of her deeply artistic personality. Although she was by any standard a great artist, Gerhardt was at the same time able to remain in many ways a remarkably normal human being. A physically attractive woman, she possessed a lively sense of humor and was extremely sociable, becoming an expert practitioner of the games of bridge and poker. A no-nonsense person who disliked sentimentality, in March 1947 she simply informed her longtime accompanist Gerald Moore, "Gerry, this next concert at Liverpool is going to be my last." Unbeknownst to her Liverpool audience, she simply gave her last recital without any prior announcements, ending her extraordinary performing career of 44 years by partying afterwards with close friends, exhibiting neither melancholy nor tears, displaying instead laughter and high spirits. After the death of her husband in 1947, Gerhardt continued to live in the charming house they had purchased in the Hampstead district of London, and where she taught pupils from all over the world. She lived her last years "with the same simplicity and dignity" that had marked her long and acclaimed singing career. By the time of her death in London on January 11, 1961, few would dispute the fact that Elena Gerhardt had been successful in her life's mission of converting "the English-speaking world into worshippers of Schubert and his royal succession." sources: Downes, Olin. "Elena Gerhardt Sings," in The New York Times. February 1, 1928, p. 30. "Elena Gerhardt, Singer, 77, Dead," in The New York Times. January 12, 1961, p. 29. "Elena Gerhardt's Recital," in New York Tribune. January 10, 1912, p. 7. Gerhardt, Elena. My Favorite German Songs. Boston: Ditson, 1915. ——. Recital. St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1972 (reprint ed.). ——, et al., eds. The Hundred Best Short Songs. 4 vols. London: Paterson, 1930. "Miss Gerhardt's Recital," in The New York Times. January 25, 1912, p. 11. Moore, Gerald. Am I Too Loud? Memoirs of an Accompanist. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979. ——. Furthermoore: Interludes in an Accompanist's Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983. "Opera Has No Lures for Elena Gerhardt," in The New York Times. January 15, 1912, p. 13. Radford, Winifred. "Elena Gerhardt," in Recorded Sound. No. 40. October 1970, pp. 671–677. "Recital by Elena Gerhardt," in The New York Times. February 19, 1928, p. 27. Steane, John. "The Art of Elena Gerhardt," in International Classical Record Collector. Winter 1996. related media: The Christmas Album: Holiday Melodies from Around the World [Sony MHK 63309]. Gerhardt/Nikisch: Lieder Recordings [HMV HLM 1436031]. Hugo Wolf Society, 1931–1938: The Complete Edition [EMI CDHE 66640/2, five CDs].
1646	dbpedia	1	81	https://www.commentary.org/articles/samuel-lipman/singing-wolf/	en	Singing Wolf	https://www.commentary.o…/img/favicon.png	https://www.commentary.o…/img/favicon.png	[ "https://www.commentary.org/wp-content/themes/beck-and-stone/assets/img/commentary_logo_black.svg", "https://www.commentary.org/wp-content/themes/beck-and-stone/assets/img/commentary_logo_black.svg", "https://www.commentary.org/wp-content/themes/beck-and-stone/assets/img/commentary_logo_black.svg", "https://w...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Samuel Lipman" ]	2015-09-03T01:39:14-04:00	Like so many other forms of serious music, the German Lied—a musical setting of a short poem, often about love or suffering and their various combinations—can now be seen as	en	https://www.commentary.o…/img/favicon.png	Commentary Magazine	https://www.commentary.org/articles/samuel-lipman/singing-wolf/	Like so many other forms of serious music, the German Lied—a musical setting of a short poem, often about love or suffering and their various combinations—can now be seen as having a completed history. Originating in the tentative, if touching, efforts of Mozart and Beethoven, the Lied as we know it found its first full artistic expression and its greatest fame in Schubert’s unsurpassed outpouring of pure melody. The works of Schumann and Brahms, though distinguished and beautiful, neither rivaled Schubert’s lyricism nor occupied as central a place in each composer’s oeuvre, and by the time of even such a master as Richard Strauss, the Lied seemed to display restrospection and nostalgia rather than its original freshness. For all these composers the beginning was not the word, but the melody. The greatness of their songs was in the music and was often unrelated either for better or worse to the value of the words being set. There was, however, one 19th-century composer of whom this was not the case. For Hugo Wolf, in the beginning was the poem, and the poem dictated its own treatment. The result was a music different for each poet and for each song. The transcendence which was achieved—as it must be in all successful works of art of mixed origins—was not of the poetry but of the music. At their greatest Wolf’s songs are poems enriched and writ large. _____________ The gods who are thought to grant happiness scattered as little of it on Hugo Wolf as they did on any other major musical figure of the Romantic era. He was born in 1860 in Windischgraz—a small bastion of German culture then part of Austria but now in Yugoslavia—the son of an impecunious petit-bourgeois family. His leather-merchant father was something of an amateur musician, and he saw to it that his son received music lessons. The boy, though obviously gifted, was hardly a prodigy, and nothing suggested that he possessed preternatural ability. Indeed, the young Wolf was expelled from the Vienna Conservatory on a (presumably unfounded) charge that he had threatened the life of its director. He did contrive a personal contact with Richard Wagner, who was at the time taking Viennese musical life—or at least that part of it not committed to his great rival and antagonist Brahms—by storm. But Wagner put Wolf off with personal kindness and an evident lack of musical interest. The elder Wolf was clearly in no position to do more than send his son the barest minimum of financial support; even this insufficiency was accompanied by doleful letters which now, a century later, still seem heartrending. Yet during this period of poverty and ignominy, a peculiar combination of musical talent, nervous intensity, heightened enthusiasm, and self-absorption brought the budding composer a small but devoted circle of friends and patrons. Together they found him a few piano pupils, in whom Wolf took only a desultory interest. More helpful to his income was the interest of the Köchert family, court jewelers in Vienna and important advertisers in a prominent local society weekly. That paper, needing a music critic, was induced to try Wolf. For three years he thus joined the ranks of such composer-critics as Berlioz and Debussy. What his criticism lacked in breadth and objectivity—he was by now a confirmed member of the anti-Brahms faction—it made up in Wagnerian fire and brimstone. Not surprisingly, the enemies he made in his writing continued to oppose him and his music for the rest of his life. As a composer, his career was starting to assume its lifelong character of small successes and large failures. He had a burning desire to write for a large orchestra, and his main effort along this line was a symphonic poem (1883-85), titled after Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. Its preliminary reading by the Vienna Philharmonic, which Wolf had reason to hope would end in a performance, instead resulted in public embarrassment and rejection. His incidental music to Ibsen’s The Feast at Solhaug (1890-91), performed under unsatisfactory circumstances, fizzled. And his lifelong search for a viable opera libretto, though it produced Der Corregidor (1895), a setting of Alarcón’s The Three-Cornered Hat, brought him neither the fame nor the profit of which he had dreamed. The fate of his songs was, on the whole, happier. Thanks to the efforts of his friends and also two powerful Wagner Clubs, then flourishing in Austria and Germany, the songs began to be performed even during his short lifetime. He wrote them in spurts, long fallow periods being followed by intense creative activity. By the time he died in 1903, he had composed close to three hundred songs, almost all of them to good poetry and some, indeed, to the greatest masterpieces of German literature. _____________ In 1888 Wolf set 53 poems of the then little-known Eduard Mörike; these appeared the next year, along with settings of twenty poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Fifty-one Goethe settings were published in 1890, followed by the 44 songs of the Spanisches Liederbuch, written to poems and folksongs translated from the Spanish by Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse. The same year he started the Italienisches Liederbuch, settings of Heyse’s translations of short Italian lyrics. He finished 22 of these by 1891 and another 24 in 1896. His last three works were written in 1897 to poems by Michelangelo. The title of the second of these, Alles endet, was entstehet (“All Things Created Come to Dust”), serves fittingly to express not only the despair which marked so much of Wolf’s life but also the wisdom he was able to extract from his suffering. This suffering was at once physical and mental. What could only be hinted at in Ernest Newman’s 1907 biography was made fully clear in Frank Walker’s 1951 extended study: Wolf’s death was due to syphilis marked, in its final form, by six years of insanity and progressive paralysis. The circumstances of venereal infection are hardly the ordinary stuff of music criticism. Yet Wolf’s case is of great interest to students of both music and fin-de-siècle culture. Such evidence as we have about how Wolf contracted syphilis comes from the writings of Alma Mahler, the composer’s widow. Alma Mahler is not always reliable, but what she says about the matter in the 1940 edition of her reminiscences has special force because Mahler had been a fellow student of Wolf at the Conservatory, shared an apartment with him, disagreed with him on an abortive opera project, and then became a major character in his psychotic fantasies. According to Alma: Hugo Wolf as a very young man was taken by Adalbert von Goldschmidt into the so-called Lehmgrube (a brothel) where Goldschmidt played dance music, for which he received each time a young woman without charge. He presented his honorarium once to his friend Wolf, and Wolf took away with him “the wound that will never heal.” Whether or not this lurid anecdote is literally true, it has the ring of symbolic truth. The dark side of the Romantic era was an obsessive concern with disease and death, and in particular with tuberculosis and syphilis, both of which were believed to have some connection with creativity. Among musicians Chopin, with his pallor and evident physical weakness, was the very model of the consumptive artist. Schubert and Schumann—and even Beethoven—were widely thought to belong to the ranks of the syphilitic. The idea that sensual indulgence brings both the punishment of insanity and demonic insight survived into the 20th century with Brunold Springer’s Die genialen Syphilitiker (“The Inspired Syphilitics,” among whom he of course includes Nietzsche, but also Wood-row Wilson and Mussolini). Indeed, Thomas Mann’s great novel Doctor Faustus is about just such a diseased composer; significantly, Mann uses material from the life and letters of Wolf to flesh out the figure of his own fictional Leverkühn. _____________ The relationship between an artist’s life and his work is never easy to understand. In Wolf’s particular case the facts of his biography have had a strong influence on how his art has been perceived and performed. The morbid psychological pathology and physical disease from which he suffered have served both as a key to the understanding of his art and, perhaps, as a bar to a surer appreciation of his achievement. To see why, we must first examine the breadth and depth of Wolf’s musical output. At an initial glance, these hundreds of short vocal compositions, all save one performed with piano rather than orchestral accompaniment, express a wide range of human emotions and make significantly varied demands on both performers and listeners. There are, in Wolf, simple songs and charming ones, light pieces and witty conceits. Some songs take an Olympian view of the universe and some indulge in a kind of publicly proclaimed emotion verging on what can only be called bathos. As pure music—melody, harmony, and rhythm considered without any reference to the text—Wolf’s songs seem highly competent without at the same time possessing immortal distinction. The overall musical impression is of melodic shortwindedness, of tunes which begin promisingly and lack either continuation or conclusion, of brief motives reiterated countless times. Thus unlike the great songs of Schubert—among them the Erlkönig, Gretchen am Spinnrade, and Ungeduld— which have been widely played in beloved piano transcriptions, the songs of Wolf are unknown in any other than their original, vocal, form. But to treat Wolf’s songs as pure music is to miss the core of his achievement. That achievement—based technically on the careful and felicitous matching of word to note—was the projection of text and music as a unity, a unity in which the text, not the music, was primus inter pares. Had his music been, by itself, more memorable, that unity would have suffered; had his melodies, carried by a consistent and distinctive style, been able to survive in our collective musical consciousness, his name would have been vastly more famous, and his achievement less remarkable. For it is the very plainness of his music that enables the words to be heard not only as the vowels and consonants necessary to clothe the vocal line, but also as the bearers of detailed and connected meaning. According to current received opinion, whatever emotion Wolf expressed he caught deep and whole. Such an attribution of universality seems unfounded. A coy note of preciosity is often present in the smaller songs; Wolf’s treatment of love and passion seems all too stylized, all too dependent upon the artificial elements of jealousy and scorn associated in the popular mind with Mediterranean forms of courtship. Where Wolf’s greatness cannot be questioned, however, is in his many settings of poems which deal with human suffering, the urge for deliverance, and man’s drive to be as a god himself. At the head of these stand the Harfenspieler-Lieder, settings of the verse in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister given to the pathetic old harp player. The three songs—Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt (“He Who Gives Himself to Solitude”), An die Thüren will ich schleichen (“To the Doors Will I Creep”), and Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass (“He Who Has Never Eaten His Bread with Tears”) are adequately summed up in Carlyle’s free rendering of the final poem: Who never ate his bread in sor- row, Who never spent the darksome hours Weeping and watching for the morrow, He knows ye not, ye gloomy powers. To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us, To guilt ye let us heedless go, Then leave repentance fierce to wring us; A moment’s guilt, an age of woe! Wolf’s music to these gloomy words serves as frame and background, support and wrapping. Though the content is the poet’s, the total effect is heightened and made permanent as much by the music’s restraint as by its presence. Wolf’s directly religious songs are concerned with the figure of Christ as evoked by the two powerful images of birth and crucifixion. The songs describing the infant Jesus are immensely appealing, whether the words being set are from the Spanish Songbook or from Mörike. Here the simplicity of the music evokes something of the simplicity of childhood, and the attitude of the composer is one of rapt wonder. Gripping indeed is his larger-scaled treatment of verse describing Christ as the comforter. In Herr, was trägt der Boden hier (“Lord What Will the Soil Bring Forth”), one of Wolf’s most starkly powerful songs, the poem from the Spanish asks whether the fate of the sinner is thorns; it ends with Christ taking the thorns and giving the sinner flowers in their place. Here the music is stark and sometimes brutal; the same simplicity which for Wolf enhances a childlike religiosity now emphasizes human nakedness before God. _____________ Perhaps the two greatest songs Wolf ever wrote—settings of Goethe’s masterpieces Ganymed and Prometheus— are both about man’s arrogance in thinking himself divine, and the punishment for such hubris. In Ganymed, Goethe describes the unashamed love of a beautiful youth for Zeus, and Wolf’s repetitious, almost monotonous, chromaticism achieves an ineffable ecstasy by its very incessance. Ganymed is, of course, about a quasi-human love. By contrast, Prometheus deals with a Titan’s defiance of Zeus himself. Goethe’s poem describes in symbolic terms man’s grudge against heaven and ends with a pledge of eternal defiance regardless of the penalty. To clothe these words Wolf has written a dramatic scene resembling in all ways but one Wagner’s very similar treatment in the Ring of Wotan. In Wolf’s song—brilliantly orchestrated by the composer and thus capable of even greater impact than in the original piano version—all Wagner’s gestures of fist-shaking and thunderclaps are present; only lacking is the independent power of the music which incorporated Wagner’s metaphysical flights, profound and windy alike. As he consistently does, Wolf finds motives which he states in the piano (or the orchestra), and arrays these short groups of notes against the declamatory line in the voice. The total result is again the triumph of the poetry, a triumph which the music supports and perhaps even makes possible, but hardly shares. Here as elsewhere in Wolf there is a kind of denial, at once extended both to the audience and to himself. It is as if the composer, in his greatest songs, were reminding his listeners that they had not come to him for pleasure. _____________ The singing of Wolf has always been a great specialty, a gift possessed by few. In Schubert, the demands are simple, albeit difficult to satisfy: a beautiful voice, musical phrasing, and a talent on the part of the singer for ingratiating himself with the audience. In Wolf, on the other hand, the problems to be solved and the talents needed belong to the domain of the speaker—and possibly even to that of the sage. While a few of Wolf’s songs have always found their way into Lieder recitals, they have mainly been heard through phonograph recordings made by those dedicated to this recherché art. Indeed, Wolf’s reputation today is largely due to the pioneering efforts, extending throughout the 1930’s, of the late Walter Legge, the English record producer who was responsible for getting His Master’s Voice to record large chunks of the then unrecorded musical repertory. Legge also developed the concept of selling records through subscriptions pledged in advance, rather than through the more normal method of over-the-counter purchase. The most successful of these ventures were the Schnabel performances of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas and the Glyndebourne recordings of Mozart operas. Already by 1931 Legge had put forward the idea of a Hugo Wolf Society, to record (on 78 RPM discs) large numbers of the songs, most of them still unknown and certainly unrecorded. He received powerful public help from Ernest Newman, not only a Wolf biographer but also one of the most prestigious English music critics of the day. (To make his scheme commercially viable, Legge needed only 500 subscribers; though they were slow coming in, he was able to go ahead with a scant 470.) The singers Legge garnered for his records were among the leading—and also the most intelligent—Lieder interpreters of the period. Almost all of them were either German or German-speaking. They included the historic figure Elena Gerhardt, who had recorded some Lieder as early as the first decade of the century with the great conductor Artur Nikisch at the piano. Gerhardt did the first album of the six which ultimately appeared. She was followed by such important singers as Herbert Janssen (a Wagnerian baritone with a distinguished career at Bayreuth and later, after Hitler, at the Metropolitan), and the tenor Karl Erb. Another historic figure included in the project by Legge was Elisabeth Rethberg, the creator of the title role in Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena (1928). Still another was the Russian-Jewish bass Alexander Kipnis, a unique artist with a rock-solid voice and a radiant musical intelligence. Legge also arranged the participation for one song only—Prometheus—of the great Wagnerian bass Friedrich Schorr (famous for his portrayals of Hans Sachs and Wotan). An equally important catch for two songs—including Ganymed—was the celebrated Irish tenor John McCormack. While the other artists participating in the Wolf Society records may not be on quite this distinguished level, the whole set has stood up amazingly well, and fully deserves the honor of its recent LP transfer and reissue in England.1 In this reissue, the original six 78 RPM albums, each now with an LP record to itself, have been joined by a seventh LP composed mostly of performances unissued upon the outbreak of war in 1939. The importance of Walter Legge in establishing the songs of Hugo Wolf hardly ends here. He continued his work for EMI, the parent company of HMV, after the war, now producing records also for Columbia (England), another branch of the conglomerate. Here, in addition to sponsoring the international career of the conductor Herbert von Karajan, he oversaw the work on records of the then young soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whom he later married. In his capacity first as record producer and finally as husband, he not only supervised her career but also formed her vocal and musical personality. Just how he went about being a musical Svengali (the term is Schwarzkopf’s own) is clear from an article he wrote about his wife: First I set out to widen by recorded examples her imaginative concept of the possibilities of vocal sound. Rosa Ponselle’s vintage port and thick cream timbre and noble line; the Slavic brilliance of Nina Koshetz; a few phrases from Farrar’s Carmen . . . one word only from Melba . . . some Rethberg and large doses of Meta Seinemeyer to show how essentially Teutonic voices can produce brilliant Italianate sound. Then Lehmann’s all-embracing generosity, Schumann’s charm and lightness, McCormack’s incredible octave leap in “Care Selve,” Frida Leider’s dramatic tension. . . . From the analysis of what we found most admirable in these diverse models we made our own synthesis. . . .2 The result of all this picking and choosing in the cafeteria of vocal success was Schwarzkopf’s career, fabled not only in opera and recorded operetta, but also in Lieder. Of the work of Hugo Wolf in particular she has made numerous recordings, including a two-record set of the Goethe songs with pianist Gerald Moore, and one record, from the 1953 Salzburg Festival, with Wilhelm Furtwängler as keyboard partner. A famous vocal colleague on her Wolf records has been the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; with him she has recorded the complete Italian and Spanish Songbooks, dividing the individual songs according to their appropriateness for a specific vocal gender. Together, they have Legge’s imprimatur: they are, for him, “Wolf’s greatest living interpreters.” Fischer-Dieskau is himself the most recorded singer of Wolf—and for that matter of almost everything else—to emerge since 1945. His discs are numberless, and it appears to be his conscious ambition to record every serious work, whether classical, Romantic, or contemporary, which can be sung by the male voice. Of Wolf alone he has recorded (in addition to those with Schwarzkopf) three sets of three records each with Daniel Barenboim at the piano for Deutsche Grammophon; on HMV there is a seven-LP set with Gerald Moore. If Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau may be taken as the new wave of Wolf singing, and the Wolf Society recordings as the older tradition, what can be said about the character of each approach? And just as important, what can the answer to this question tell us about the course of vocal and musical performance in this refined part of the repertory during the last half-century? _____________ In listening to all these records, it immediately becomes evident that the older and newer styles, despite their both being linked by the figure of Walter Legge, are quite different. The best of the older performances give an impression of simplicity combined with grandeur, of sensitivity to each poem’s mood combined with a clear, unforced, and restrained projection of the individual words. Among countless examples must be mentioned Gerhardt’s searing cry on the first word of Herr, was trägi der Boden hier, a cry all the more terrifying for the self-control guarding its expression. Similarly, Schorr’s performance of Prometheus manages always to be sung rather than barked—even during the moments of the poem’s greatest stress. John McCormack’s Ganymed is neither effeminate nor sentimental, neither cloying nor piteous; even the final astounding falsetto slide upward on the word “father” never loses either the integrity of the character or the detachment with which Goethe could view the extremities of feeling. In Herbert Janssen’s singing of the overtly Christological Schlafendes Jesuskind and Auf ein Altes Bild, the straightforward character of both poetry and music is never sacrificed for momentary effects of dramatic virtuosity. And the same holds true in the Harfenspieler-Lieder, where Janssen expresses utter desolation without any show of special pleading. To go from this to Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau is to leave an atmosphere of what now seem like classical limits and to enter a world of blossoming details, of an infinite series of dramatic takes dwarfing their wider contexts, of feeling chosen over understanding, of turns of phrase emphasized at the expense of the orderly progression of the poetic idea. Here, it seems fair to say, is a vulgar rather than a refined art. In the case of Schwarzkopf, it is difficult not to feel that, in this repertory, she is simply overmatched as an artist. However magnetic her stage personality may have been in opera and on the concert platform, the evidence of these recordings is that she has little to bring to the performance of the most profound works of Wolf other than a coyness more at home in Der Rosenkavalier and a crooning more suitable for the singing of lullabies. And even there, in Wiegenlied in Sommer (“Summer Lullaby”), one of Wolf’s best non-weighty songs, her preciosity destroys the necessary feeling of tenderness so marvelously conveyed by Tiana Lemnitz in the Society recording. Elsewhere, where the great emotional chips are down, Schwarzkopf proves entirely inadequate. In her performance of Anakreons Grab (“Anacreon’s Grave”), a setting of Goethe’s poem about the final, protected resting place of the Greek poet, vocal imitations of turtledoves cooing and grasshoppers jumping only detract from the idea of a divine reward for one fortunate artist. In Schlafendes Jesus-kind, what is for Janssen a picture of wonderment becomes for Schwarzkopf merely another lullaby. Her Herr, was trägt der Boden hier communicates, instead of Gerhardt’s nobility under suffering, nervousness and self-pity. Ganymed, under Schwarzkopf’s ministrations, fares as badly; the beautiful, doomed youth of Goethe’s poem emerges rather as a sophisticated lady quite conscious of her own attractiveness. With Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, we face an artist at once more penetrating and more troubling. By no means as vocally gifted as Schwarzkopf—or as most of the singers on the Wolf Society discs—he has made a career out of substituting guileful thought for physical strength. It is an important part of his achievement that when he sings, no word goes unillustrated by a twist of vocal color, dynamics, or phrasing; it is as if he had developed some special gift for musical onomatopoeia, enabling him to act out the words rather than merely deliver them. The effect of all this artfulness is an overwrought absorption in the material. Everything seems to verge on the hysterical, an impression unavoidably heightened by Fischer-Dieskau’s lack of vocal amplitude which frequently—and in Prometheus unpleasantly—reduces him to a mere shout. In quieter moments, he too, like Schwarzkopf, croons; indeed, both singers often seem all too aware of the potential of the microphone as an aid to vocal color and contrast. Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings of the Harfenspieler-Lieder are, it must be said, attractive on first hearing. Together with pianist Barenboim, he projects a concern with each note and each word; here, one feels, are performers who really care. Compared to Fischer-Dieskau and Barenboim, Janssen and his pianist, Coenraad Bos, seem at first—but only at first—a bit cautious and unbending. Then, as the second song follows the first, and the third the second, the plenitude of Fischer-Dieskau’s emotion becomes a surfeit, and Janssen’s restraint can be experienced as a form of wisdom. In other songs, too, the contrast is unfavorable to the younger singer. In Anakreons Grab, Fischer-Dieskau seems uncertain as to whether he is expressing Goethe’s view of life or singing about the dissolute minor poet of the title; Ganymed is tortured and mannered, verging occasionally on rhythmic unsteadiness; Auch kleine Dinge (“Even Little Things”), another of Wolf’s most successful lighter songs, is done in the stylized manner of the best cabaret singers with no trace of the gentility which marks the performance of Gerhardt. _____________ Such a negative judgment of perhaps the two most highly regarded German singers of the post-World War II era cannot fail to provoke objections in general and a particular question concerning their performance of Wolf. How can anything vital be lacking in artists who have sung Wolf’s songs in concert or on records so successfully to an audience vastly larger than any who heard this music in the preceding fifty years? The answer, I believe, is that a basic constituent in the success of these artists in this repertory is precisely the flaws in their approach to it—the charming shallowness of Schwarzkopf and the overwrought, fussy delivery of Fischer-Dieskau. Describing Hugo Wolf’s audience, Walter Legge himself has written: Nowhere today is there a society like that Wolf moved in. His Vienna circle was a mixture of up-and-coming conductors, writers, doctors, university professors, government officials, and fairly rich business people all interested in the arts—particularly music—and nearly all of them capable amateur performers. It goes without saying that this audience was German-speaking, not only able to understand the words being sung and the musical idiom in which the songs were written, but also alive to the literary nuances and context of the poetry Wolf was setting. In important ways this enclosed cultural milieu lasted well into our century. But the past 35 years have seen the rise of a new kind of audience for high culture—wider, thinner, less knowledgeable, less discriminating. To please such an audience performers must become more approachable and more immediately comprehensible. Legge himself admits as much in speaking of Schwarzkopf (though he draws a different conclusion): At performances I sat whenever possible in a stage box to watch both what she was doing and how the audience reacted—the exact moment when women fumbled in their handbags for handkerchiefs and men tugged them from their breast pockets. This is not calculation; it is in my view obedience to composers’ intentions, to involve the audience in the action. With Schwarzkopf, this emphasis on manipulating the audience’s emotions results in the charm and coquetry that mar her performances of Wolf. With Fischer-Dieskau, a more intelligent performer in command of great histrionic gifts, playing to the audience has involved fastening on the one part of Wolf’s art that is most readily accessible to the contemporary listener—the pathology which so marked the composer as a man. But the hysteria and instability that Fischer-Dieskau thus communicates is not all, or even the best part, of what Hugo Wolf’s art is about. At their greatest, Wolf’s songs are about the victory of Wolf as an artist over his madness as a man, not about his capture by it. Wolf is so important because in some obscure way—made even more enigmatic by the sparse nature of his music—he sublimated his madness in his songs, just as he sublimated his despair, his suffering, and his hope. This miracle produced, in the end, a detached wisdom, gloriously exemplified in the Michelangelo Lieder. Kipnis on the Society records could communicate this spirit because he had confidence in the ability of his audience to understand and appreciate it. Fischer-Dieskau lacks such an audience and such confidence, and therefore his art is lacking as well. 1 His Master's Voice (England) RLS 759.
1646	dbpedia	3	61	https://countermelody.blubrry.net/tag/dorothy-maynor/	en	Dorothy Maynor	https://countermelody.bl…obbs-300x228.jpg		[ "https://countermelody.blubrry.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Olivia-Fremstadia-220x300.jpg", "https://countermelody.blubrry.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Young-Martina-over-the-shoulder-220x300.png", "https://countermelody.blubrry.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Dorothy-Maynor-sepia-print-velvet-gown-238x300.j...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2023-12-09T12:58:34+00:00		en			null	In the midst of our recent move, I came across a stash of old “mixtapes” (actually CDs and much other archival material. One such item which particularly moved me was one entitled “A Golden Age Christmas 2003” which I handed out to my colleagues and friends twenty years ago. Looking over the tracklist, I realized that this was a sort of early iteration of Countermelody: me sharing music that I particularly loved with people that I cared about. Today’s podcast uses as its basis that same CD (slightly trimmed in length) and features performances by a glorious group of singers ranging from Olive Fremstad, Charles Gilibert, and Margarete Matzenauer from the early years of the twentieth century to such later favorites as Elly Ameling, Beverly Sills, and Leontyne Price. I can’t guarantee that this episode will put you in the holiday spirit, but I sure hope it does! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Last week on Feburary 2, the beloved African American soprano Martina Arroyo turned 86 years old. Although the Countermelody birthday tribute to Ms. Arroyo is a week late, it is nonetheless profoundly heartfelt. I have always valued the artistry and voice of this artist who often referred to herself as “The Other One” (because she was so frequently confused with today’s birthday diva, Leontyne Price). In preparing this episode, however, I flipped over into fan girl mode: was there anything that Martina Arroyo could not do? Of course she was celebrated as one of the premiere Verdi sopranos of her day (or, indeed, of the twentieth century), and there are ample examples on the episode that give testament to her supremacy in that repertoire. But she was also an intrepid performer of contemporary music, creating important works by both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Samuel Barber. Her performances of baroque music, while very much following an earlier style of performance practice, are vivid and insightful. Her affinity with French grand opera style is off the charts, as evidenced by an excerpt from Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. She also could have pursued a path as a Mozart and Strauss singer, and selections by both of these composers prove her mastery of this genre as well. She also had the power to be a full-fledged dramatic soprano, as shown by her live performances of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder and the title role in Puccini’s Turandot. And yet her subtlety as a recitalist is shown in live and studio Lieder performances. And the fervor and vigor of her performance of spirituals is a thing of joy. This episode is full of surprises but one thing is not surprising at all: the degree of dedication and commitment of this artist, which continues to this day with the performance and education initiative of the Martina Arroyo Foundation. (The episode begins with a brief tribute to Burt Bacharach, who died yesterday at the age of 94.) Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. I lead off my new episodes for Black History Month 2023 with one of the most glorious voices ever captured on recordings, Dorothy Maynor (03 September 1910 – 19 February 1996), one of the most glorious lyric soprano voices ever captured on recording. Discovered by Serge Koussevitzky in the late 1930s and championed by him and a host of other conductors (including Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy), she became renowned as a recitalist but, because of restrictions of the era placed upon Black singers, never sang on any operatic stage. Nevertheless, her studio recordings of arias by Mozart, Debussy, and Charpentier are legendary. Our appreciation of Maynor the singer is greatly enhanced by the presence of live radio recordings as well as a recently-issued live 1940 song recital from the Library of Congress. It is one of the great injustices of musical history that gifted Black singers of Maynor’s caliber from that era were outrightly denied the opportunity to perform in staged opera performances at venues like the Metropolitan Opera. Dorothy Maynor nonetheless persevered and left an incredible legacy, and not just a vocal one: in 1963, the year of her retirement from singing, she founded the Harlem School of the Arts, for which, before she stepped down as President in 1979, she raised more than $2 million dollars for the construction of a new facility for the institution. She also was the first African American singer to perform at a presidential inaugural (both for Harry S. Truman in 1949 and Dwight D. Eisenhower four years later), as well as the first African American to sit on the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera. This episode features Maynor in live, studio, and radio recordings of repertoire by Bach, Handel, Schubert, and Mendelssohn, as well as some of the finest recordings of spirituals ever made. Also heard are the songs of three Black composers, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Cecil Cohen, and R. Nathaniel Dett, the latter of which Maynor studied with at the Hampton Institute, whose work Maynor frequently programmed on her recitals. The episode opens with a joyous birthday tribute to next week’s subject, Martina Arroyo, whose 1974 album of spirituals was backed by the Choir of the Harlem School of the Arts conducted by Maynor herself. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. This is the second part of my final episode of Black History Month 2022, continuing the exploration of the legacies of more than two dozen mostly underrecorded African American artists. Each piece of this aural mosaic fills in gaps in the recorded history of these artists. After opening memorial tributes to Josephine Veasey, Antonietta Stella, and Betty Davis, the episode is broken into several sections: first, recordings of Baroque music by Aubrey Pankey, Carmen Balthrop, Adele Addison, Betty Allen, Seth McCoy, Marvin Hayes, and a rare live recording by Marian Anderson, whose 125th birthday was observed this past week. There follow recordings of concert repertoire sung by Dorothy Maynor, Louise Parker, and Grace de la Cruz, with William Pearson and Julius Eastman leading us briefly into the bizarre world of the extended vocal techniques of the 1960s. There follow recorded performances of art song by Helen Colbert, Rhea Jackson, John Riley, Clamma Dale, Ellabelle Davis, Marvis Martin, and Cynthia Haymon, whereupon the episode concludes with some rare performances of operatic repertoire with Gwendolyn Killebrew, Claudia Lindsey, Dagmar Průšová, and Gwendolyn Walters, capped by an exquisite a cappella performance of “A City Called Heaven” by the great Mattiwilda Dobbs. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. This week I offset the gloom of last week’s music with straight-up joy. No gimmicks, no goofiness, no weird accents. Whether the composer is Giuseppe Verdi, Ralph Benatzky, Aaron Copland, Oleta Adams, or Harold Arlen, and whether sung by Nancy Wilson, Dorothy Maynor, Tina Turner, Maria Callas, Max Hansen, Conchita Supervia, Barbra Streisand, Mahalia Jackson, Lisa Della Casa, or the Pointer Sisters, all today’s selections are guaranteed to make you feel a little lighter, a little more joyous. And in today’s continuing climate of pandemic uncertainty, who doesn’t need a little more of that? Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” Occasional guests from the “business” (singers, conductors, composers, coaches, and teachers) lend their distinctive insights. At Countermelody’s core is the interaction between singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. At Countermelody’s core is the interaction between singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. Please visit the Countermelody website (www.countermelodypodcast.com) for additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. And please head to my Patreon page at www.patreon.com/countermelody to pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available only to Patreon supporters are currently available. This week’s subject is one of the towering figures of 20th century music: the African American bass-baritone William Warfield (1920–2002). Though he sprang to prominence as Joe in the 1951 MGM remake of Show Boat and as Porgy opposite his then-wife Leontyne Price in the US State Department-sponsored 1952 international tour of Porgy and Bess, in my opinion his greatest accomplishments were as a concert singer. This episode focuses on his performances of Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs, his interpretations of German lieder, and, from later in his career, his narration of Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait and the poetry of Langston Hughes. I knew William Warfield, universally known to his students and younger colleagues as “Uncle Bill,” when I was one of the accompanists in his vocal studio at the University of Illinois where I was obtaining my master’s degree. His kindness and his dedication to his craft inspired us all to give of our best. It is my privilege to celebrate the unique and multi-faceted artistry of this unforgettable and treasurable man. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” Occasional guests from the “business” (singers, conductors, composers, coaches, and teachers) lend their distinctive insights. At Countermelody’s core is the interaction between singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. At Countermelody’s core is the interaction between singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. Please visit the Countermelody website (www.countermelodypodcast.com) for additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. And please head to my Patreon page at www.patreon.com/countermelody to pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available only to Patreon supporters are currently available. Due to a last minute change of plans, I have decided to bring you the first in what I hope will be a series of episodes devoted to excerpts from LP recordings in my collection which have either never been reissued on CD or have had only limited availability. This first episode includes a tribute to the late Jessye Norman, with a nod to some of the great African American singers who paved the way for her in her career. In addition, my special guest the theatre scholar David Savran speaks about the significance of her collaborations with director Robert Wilson. Other singers heard include Gérard Souzay, Elisabeth Söderström, Dorothy Maynor, Camilla Williams, Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, and Leontyne Price, none of which have received widespread release beyond their initial appearance on LP. I conclude the episode with a special greeting from the balcony of my Air B&B in Napoli, where I am celebrating my birthday. Countermelody is a new podcast devoted to the glories of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great classical and opera singers of the past and present with the help of guests from the classical music field: singers, conductors, composers, coaches, agents, and voice teachers. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the interaction between singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. Please also visit the Countermelody website for updates, additional content, and to pledge your support. www.countermelodypodcast.com
1646	dbpedia	1	78	https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/14/5/496	en	Frequent Lucid Dreaming Is Associated with Meditation Practice Styles, Meta-Awareness, and Trait Mindfulness	https://pub.mdpi-res.com…0.jpg?1715935555	https://pub.mdpi-res.com…0.jpg?1715935555	[ "https://pub.mdpi-res.com/img/design/mdpi-pub-logo-black-small1.svg?da3a8dcae975a41c?1724334283", "https://pub.mdpi-res.com/img/design/mdpi-pub-logo-black-small1.svg?da3a8dcae975a41c?1724334283", "https://pub.mdpi-res.com/img/journals/brainsci-logo.png?8600e93ff98dbf14", "https://www.mdpi.com/bundles/mdpiscip...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Elena Gerhardt", "Benjamin Baird" ]	2024-05-14T00:00:00	Lucid dreaming involves becoming aware that one’s current experience is a dream, which has similarities with the notion of mindfulness—becoming aware of moment-to-moment changes in experience. Additionally, meta-awareness, the ability to explicitly notice the current content of one’s own mental state, has also been proposed to play an important role both in lucid dreaming and mindfulness meditation practices. However, research has shown conflicting strengths of associations between mindfulness, meditation, and lucid dreaming frequency, and the link between lucid dreaming and meta-awareness has not yet been empirically studied. This study evaluated the associations between lucid dreaming frequency and different meditation practice styles, mindfulness traits, and individual differences in meta-awareness through an online survey (n = 635). The results suggest that daily frequent meditators experience more lucid dreams than non-frequent meditators. However, weekly frequent meditators did not have a higher lucid dreaming frequency. A positive association was observed between open monitoring styles of meditation and lucid dreaming. The findings also indicate that meta-awareness is higher for meditators and weekly lucid dreamers. Furthermore, frequent lucid dreaming was commonly associated with a non-reactive stance and experiencing transcendence. Overall, the findings suggest a positive relationship between specific meditation practices and lucid dreaming as well as the importance of meta-awareness as a cognitive process linking meditation, mindfulness, and lucid dreaming.	en	https://pub.mdpi-res.com…d7013?1724334283	MDPI	https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/14/5/496	by Elena Gerhardt 1 and Benjamin Baird Benjamin Baird Benjamin Baird is a Research Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He received a [...] Benjamin Baird is a Research Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014. He completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Baird’s research spans several areas in human cognition, including metacognition, sleep and public health. He uses a range of methods, including behavioral testing and multimodal neuroimaging techniques to study the brain basis of human cognitive processes. Dr. Baird is an Austin native who received his BA from UT Austin in 2006. 2,* 1 Institute of Psychology, Osnabrück University, 49076 Osnabrück, Germany 2 Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Brain Sci. 2024, 14(5), 496; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14050496 Submission received: 15 April 2024 / Revised: 3 May 2024 / Accepted: 8 May 2024 / Published: 14 May 2024 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Dreaming and Sleep-Related Metacognitions) Abstract : Lucid dreaming involves becoming aware that one’s current experience is a dream, which has similarities with the notion of mindfulness—becoming aware of moment-to-moment changes in experience. Additionally, meta-awareness, the ability to explicitly notice the current content of one’s own mental state, has also been proposed to play an important role both in lucid dreaming and mindfulness meditation practices. However, research has shown conflicting strengths of associations between mindfulness, meditation, and lucid dreaming frequency, and the link between lucid dreaming and meta-awareness has not yet been empirically studied. This study evaluated the associations between lucid dreaming frequency and different meditation practice styles, mindfulness traits, and individual differences in meta-awareness through an online survey (n = 635). The results suggest that daily frequent meditators experience more lucid dreams than non-frequent meditators. However, weekly frequent meditators did not have a higher lucid dreaming frequency. A positive association was observed between open monitoring styles of meditation and lucid dreaming. The findings also indicate that meta-awareness is higher for meditators and weekly lucid dreamers. Furthermore, frequent lucid dreaming was commonly associated with a non-reactive stance and experiencing transcendence. Overall, the findings suggest a positive relationship between specific meditation practices and lucid dreaming as well as the importance of meta-awareness as a cognitive process linking meditation, mindfulness, and lucid dreaming. 1. Introduction Being explicitly aware of one’s own mental state and maintaining present-centered awareness—paying attention to moment-to-moment changes in thoughts, emotions, and perceptions with a non-judgmental stance—are essential elements of the definition of mindfulness [1,2]. Becoming aware that one is dreaming while still being asleep defines the nocturnal state of lucid dreaming [3,4]. In both mindful awareness and lucid dreaming, there is an explicit awareness of one’s current mental state that characterizes meta-awareness [5,6]. This awareness can be either propositional (“I am dreaming” or “I am mind-wandering”) or non-propositional, sustaining a peripheral awareness of engagement with a chosen object or the ongoing realization of being in a dream [7]. Mindfulness can be cultivated through the practice of meditation, while the ability to induce lucid dreams can be trained through various methods, including cognitive practices, induction devices, or the use of substances [8,9,10]. Scientific research has focused primarily on meditation practices within Buddhism, which is divided into numerous lineages [11]. In Tibetan Buddhism, the achievement of continuous conscious awareness during all stages of sleep and dreaming is highly valued [12,13]. Tibetan “Dream and Sleep Yoga” teachings, a set of daytime and nighttime practices for gaining awareness during dreams and using lucid dreams as a platform for various meditation practices, were reserved for advanced practitioners [14,15]. Lucid dreaming and dreamless sleep awareness are seen as pathways to spiritual growth and enlightenment [14,15]. Meditation consists of deliberate actions such as observing, concentrating, letting go, generating, visualizing, and shifting attention from one mental object to another, all anchored in conscious awareness. Central to this practice is meta-awareness that integrates these various activities. Such a practice is diversely implemented across cultural traditions and secular settings [16]. Meditative practices may be differentiated depending on the direction and dynamics of attention. For instance, focused attention (FA) meditation involves practices that narrow the scope of attention and cultivate one-pointed concentration on a single object, such as the observation of the breath. Open monitoring (OM) meditation involves the non-reactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment [17]. FA meditation requires the stability of attention on an object or activity, whereas OM meditation is based on the openness and expansiveness of awareness, monitoring changes over time [18]. Hence, meditation practices cultivate specific mental skills, including enhanced attentional stability and the monitoring of one’s mental state (i.e., meta-awareness) [18]. Meta-awareness is an essential cognitive capacity discussed as the primary cognitive component for the state shift of non-lucid to lucid dreams [19]. Non-propositional meta-awareness is considered particularly relevant to lucid dreaming [7]. Meta-awareness becomes crucial at the moment of becoming aware of the bizarreness of the dream plot, recognizing the dream signs, or passively observing the ongoing dream [20,21,22,23]. Even in a stable lucid dream, one has a sustained awareness of the dream state while experiencing events in the dream [7,24]. Building on the idea that not just the waking state offers self-reflective thought and cognition but that self-reflective awareness can also be achieved in the dream state, a theoretical consideration of connecting lucidity with mindfulness influenced by meditation was made, placing waking experiences, dreams, and several stages of lucidity on a continuum of self-reflectiveness [25]. Taking this idea further, enhancing mindfulness during the day is thought to also increase mindfulness during the night [26]. This is derived from the continuity hypothesis that waking memories, dispositions, and habits are incorporated and transferred into the dream state [27]. Despite strong theoretical linkages, the degree of associations between meditation, mindfulness, and lucid dreaming have been conflicting in empirical studies. Overall, findings suggest an increase in the frequency of spontaneous lucid dreams in frequent or long-term meditators [28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. Moreover, evidence suggests that the extent of meditation experience can alter the strength of the association between mindfulness and lucid dreaming [33]. One recent investigation did not report an increase in lucid dreaming frequency due to meditation experience. However, it did find that certain facets of mindfulness were positively correlated with lucid dreaming frequency [35]. In a recent study by Geise and Smith [36], the Transcendence subscale of the Relaxation, Mindfulness, and Meditation Experience Tracker was found to be a significant predictor of lucid dreaming frequency. However, the total score on the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, both subscales, Presence and Acceptance, and measures of meditation frequency or experience did not show significant correlations with lucid dreaming frequency [36]. A positive association between an estimate of the number of lucid dreams during one year and the total number of years of meditation experience has also been observed [31]. Gackenbach et al. [29] found that intensive and frequent meditators rooted in Transcendental Meditation, on average, experience lucid dreams once or more per week. Despite the methodological issues regarding the potentially biased selection of participants for the study, the evidence for higher lucid dreaming frequencies in populations of long-term and frequent meditators should be considered. Previous findings from Baird et al. [28] indicated that long-term meditators have more spontaneous lucid dreams compared to inexperienced meditators. Furthermore, the associations between aspects of trait mindfulness measured by the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, such as Acting with Awareness and Observing, and the Decentering subscale of the Toronto Mindfulness Scale, were higher in long-term meditators with frequent lucid dreams. However, meditation novices did not show an increase in lucid dreaming frequency after 8-week mindfulness meditation training. A recent study validated an indirect lucid dream experience questionnaire in Spanish and examined, among other dream-related constructs, meditation practices, experience, and aspects of mindfulness [34]. The results suggested that time spent in OM meditation was positively correlated with higher scores on the lucid dream aspects of insight and control. The study did not examine lucid dreaming frequency, nor did it validate whether participants ever had a lucid dream. These results are in line with the interpretation that meditation training improves metacognitive skills with the enhancement of dispositional mindfulness, which in turn could increase nighttime meta-awareness in order to promote the state shift of the onset of lucid dreaming. Research shows that different meditation techniques within various frameworks and traditions have different effects [37,38]. Furthermore, there has not been any study investigating which meditation technique is associated with higher lucid dreaming frequency. This study therefore explored the connection between meditation practices, meditation frequency, dispositional mindfulness, and lucid dreaming frequency. First, we sought to replicate the empirical findings that frequent meditators exhibit higher lucid dreaming frequencies. Second, we evaluated individual differences between frequent meditators and non-meditators on all mindfulness facets and dreaming variables to further explore the relationship between trait mindfulness and lucid dreaming. Third, we studied the relationship between lucid dreaming frequency and specific meditation techniques/practice styles. The main hypothesis was that particularly open monitoring (OM) meditation, and possibly focused attention (FA) meditation, would have a positive association with lucid dreaming frequency, as both practices emphasize the cultivation of meta-awareness and sustained attention monitoring. Moreover, it was expected that meta-awareness would be higher in frequent meditators compared to non-frequent meditators, but also in weekly lucid dreamers compared to non-weekly lucid dreamers. Lastly, we explored the role of meta-awareness in the association of meditation frequency and lucid dreaming frequency. 2. Methods 2.1. Participants In total, 635 participants completed the online survey. Only persons who met the following criteria were asked to complete the survey: all participants (1) must be at least 18 years and no more than 75 years old, and (2) must be fluent in English. The upper limit of age was set, as lucid dream incidences and cognitive capacities have been shown to decline over age [39]. The convenience sample splits up into a German student population from Osnabrück University (Uos, n = 72) and students from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, n = 272), as well as a general mixed international sample of 291 respondents. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Texas at Austin (STUDY00003582). Notably, all participants who claimed to have experienced at least one lucid dream had to verify their understanding of the lucid dream experience. Participants who did not pass the verification were not eligible and were thus excluded. All respondents were grouped depending on their meditation frequency [40,41]. Participants were either classified as non-frequent meditators (i.e., meditating less than once per week), as weekly frequent meditators (WFMs; meditating once or more per week), or as daily frequent meditators (DFMs; meditating at least twice per day or multiple times daily). Within the Osnabrück University sample, 66 participants were eligible (49 females, 16 males, and 1 non-binary; age = 22.94 ± 5.6 (M ± SD)). Based on meditation frequency, 2 students were classified as DFMs, 11 meditated weekly, and 53 were non-frequent meditators. Within the student population from UT Austin, 241 were classified as eligible (156 female, 81 male, and 4 non-binary; age = 19.43 ± 1.89 (M ± SD)). Based on meditation frequency, 1 student was classified as DFM, 29 meditated weekly, and 211 were non-frequent meditators. Within the general mixed population, out of 291 initial respondents, 270 were eligible, more male respondents completed the survey (112 females, 149 males, 4 non-binary, and 5 self-described, e.g., “Genderfluid”), and their ages ranged from 18 to 75, with an average of 37.74 ± 16.16 (M ± SD). Within the general mixed sample, 35 participants were DFMs, 117 were WFMs, and 118 were classified as non-frequent meditators. 2.2. Procedure The survey was internationally distributed, with a focus on Europe and the United States. Recruitment started in January 2023 and ended in July 2023. Data collection and the entire recruitment process were conducted online. All study materials were provided in English and implemented using Qualtrics software (https://www.qualtrics.com) (accessed on 1 January 2023). The survey completion took, on average, 54.8 (Mdn) minutes in the general sample, while the student populations needed between 20.9 (UT Austin; Mdn) and 35.7 (Uos; Mdn) minutes. The platforms for distributing the survey varied. The link and an invitation protocol were sent out to several lucid dreaming experts, institutes, and other researchers. Additionally, placement on several social media platforms, starting with Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Forums, and other websites like Dream Views, YouTube, and LinkedIn, achieved a wide reach. Furthermore, meditation and wellness centers facilitated study participant recruitment by distributing materials through email lists. Students from UT Austin were reached via the SONA system. Psychology and Cognitive Science students from Osnabrück University were contacted via mailing lists. All student populations were compensated with one credit, which corresponds to an hour of participation, for their research participation sheets. Respondents in the mixed general sample did not receive any compensation. All participants were provided with the informed consent document and a short introduction. After the agreement, all participants received the following sections in the same order: Demographics, Dream Survey, and Meditation Experience Questionnaire. For these instruments, branching allowed the researchers to efficiently present participants with in-depth questions based on their previous experience. The following instruments were presented to all in a randomized order: Multidimensional Awareness Scale, Toronto-Mindfulness Scale, Relaxation, Meditation, and Mindfulness Experiences Questionnaire, and Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, along with two other scales which were part of another research scope (Mysticism Scale and Indirect Realism Scale). 2.3. Measures In order to achieve a comprehensive assessment while maintaining time efficiency, shortened versions of many instruments were implemented. For internal consistency of the scales, McDonald’s omega total was preferred over Cronbach’s alpha. Since it can be assumed that not all items contribute equally to their score, McDonald’s omega is a more accurate reliability estimate, especially for multidimensional or ordinal scales [42,43,44]. Omega can be described as the proportion of variance in observed scores that can be attributed to a single underlying factor or to the common variance among the items on a scale [45,46]. As with Cronbach’s alpha, larger values indicate a higher reliability [47]. Dream Recall and Lucid Dreaming Experience. Lucid and ordinary dream experiences were recorded with an adapted dream survey. The original questionnaire developed by Baird et al. [48] was modified to fit the specific aims of this study. All participants reported dream recall frequency and lucid dreaming frequency on a 16-point Likert scale, extending the established scales by Schredl and Erlacher [49]: 0 = never; 1 = less than 1 (lucid) dream per year; 2 = 1 (lucid) dream per year; 3 = 2 (lucid) dreams per year; 4 = 3–5 (lucid) dreams per year; 5 = 6–8 (lucid) dreams per year; 6 = 9–11 (lucid) dreams per year; 7 = 1 (lucid) dream per month; 8 = 2 (lucid) dreams per month; 9 = 3 (lucid) dreams per month; 10 = 1 (lucid) dream per week; 11 = 2 (lucid) dreams per week; 12 = 3–4 (lucid) dreams per week; 13 = 5–6 (lucid) dreams per week; 14 = 1 (lucid) dream per night; 15 = more than 1 (lucid) dream per night. Based on the methodology of Stumbrys, Erlacher, and Malinowski [33], class means transformed the ordinal scores into metric frequencies either as units per month (0 → 0, 1 → 0.0714, 2 → 0.0833, 3 → 0.1667, 4 → 0.3333, 5 → 0.5833, 6 → 0.8333, 7 → 1, 8 → 2, 9 → 3, 10 → 4, 11 → 8, 12 → 13.5, 13 → 23.5, 14 → 30, 15 → 33) or units per week (0 → 0, 1 → 0.0185, 2 → 0.0192, 3 → 0.0385, 4 → 0.0769, 5 → 0.1346, 6 → 0.1923, 7 → 0.25, 8 → 0.50, 9 → 0.75, 10 → 1, 11 → 2, 12 → 3.5, 13 → 5.5, 14 → 7, 15 → 9). The same class means-recoded 16-point scale was given for lucid dream induction frequency per month. Participants received a written definition along with the scales: “Lucid dreaming is a special sort of dream in which you know that you are dreaming while still in the dream. Typically, you tell yourself “I’m dreaming!” or “This is a dream!”. In some cases, you may also control the content of the dream and alter the dream events as well as your actions voluntarily”. Respondents who had previously experienced lucid dreams were asked detailed questions regarding their lucid dream experiences, their ability to control lucid dreams, and their training in lucid dream induction techniques. In addition to the monthly lucid dreaming frequency, the number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period was assessed, which is a summative measure (i.e., an overall measurement taken after a period of time has passed) of lucid dreaming frequency as opposed to a formative approach (i.e., a measurement at shorter time intervals for each week or month). All items were presented either as an open text field or as a Likert-type format. The following single items were used: success of the lucid dream induction: “If you decide to have a lucid dream on a given night, how likely will you succeed?” (0 = very unlikely; 4 = very likely); wake-initiated lucid dream occurrences (0 = never; 4 = always); and how often one experiences a detached observer stance in the lucid dream (0 = never; 4 = always). To verify participants’ understanding of the lucid dream state, they were required to provide a brief report of one of their lucid dreams, detailing how they realized that they were dreaming. As all scales were adapted or created for this study, traditional reliability measures were not applicable. Nonetheless, a strong correlation was found between the frequency of lucid dreams per month and the number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period (rsp = 0.93, p < 0.0001). Participants who reported experiencing lucid dreams at least once per month were categorized as monthly frequent lucid dreamers (MFLDs), while those who reported experiencing lucid dreams at least once or more per week were classified as weekly frequent lucid dreamers (WFLDs), extending the standard classification convention [9,29,50,51]. Meditation Experience and Frequency. A revised version of the Meditation Experience Questionnaire [28] was utilized to assess the quantitative experience of meditation practices. To cover various meditation frameworks, three options of Buddhism (Theravadan, Tibetan, or Mixed) were extended to 18 different meditation frameworks: 9 religious/spiritual-oriented traditions (Theravadan, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism; Daoism; Yoga; Sufism; Judaism; Christianity; and Shamanism) and 9 secular-oriented frameworks were included (app-guided, online-based, Vipassana, self-guided, Yoga, Thai Chi/Qigong, MBSR-based, non-dual meditation, and Transcendental Meditation), plus the option to specify an individual framework and tradition. Two items assessed previous meditation experience (yes/no), and meditation frequency. Meditation frequency was measured with a 16-point scale (0 = never, 15 = more than 1 meditation per day). Class means transformed the ordinal scale into metric units per week (0 → 0, 1 → 0.0185, 2 → 0.0192, 3 → 0.0385, 4 → 0.0769, 5 → 0.1346, 6 → 0.1923, 7 → 0.25, 8 → 0.50, 9 → 0.75, 10 → 1, 11 → 2, 12 → 3.5, 13 → 5.5, 14 → 7, 15 → 9). If participants meditated at least once per week, they reported how many different techniques they used in their meditation practice on a regular basis. In addition to questions about the quantitative meditation routine, they reported on the styles practiced while meditating, as well as meditation training and retreat experience. For each regularly practiced meditation framework, respondents provided an estimate of the length of an average meditation session in minutes, the frequency per day, the number of days per week, and the number of years of practice within the meditation framework. Based on this account, the total number of hours spent in meditation for each framework per week was calculated: M i n u t e s p e r S e s s i o n ∗ F r e q e n c y p e r D a y ∗ D a y s w i t h P r a c t i c e 60 . Moreover, the participants indicated the percentage of the total time they dedicated to each meditation framework in which a specific quality was facilitated: “Please indicate what percentage of your average meditation time you spend on a specific meditation technique”. Respondents were presented with six options: open monitoring (OM) meditation, focused attention (FA) meditation, loving-kindness/emotionally toned (LK) meditation, meditation to recognize the nature of the mind, non-dual meditation, and one option for an individually specified technique. Meta-Awareness. The Meta-Awareness subscale of the Multidimensional Awareness Scale (MAS) captured the cognitive ability to recognize one’s current mental state based on self-assessment [52]. The item “I am aware of my thoughts and feelings as I experience them” reveals the direct aim of measuring the trait aspects of the cognitive process, as the instruction asked participants to indicate the extent to which the given statements represent the typical experience of their thoughts or feelings. The MAS-MA subscale consists of 7 items selected from the original 25-item MAS scale. The items were rated on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). Reliability was found to be good, ωt = 0.89. Trait Mindfulness. The measurement of trait mindfulness was performed using multiple instruments: the Toronto-Mindfulness Scale (TMS) [53,54], a short version of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) [55,56], and the Relaxation, Meditation, and Mindfulness Experience Questionnaire (RMMtm) [36,57]. The TMS is a 13-item mindfulness inventory constructed as a 5-point Likert-scale (0 = not at all; 4 = very much). The original scale measured state mindfulness and the survey incorporated the trait version of the TMS, asking for experiences during the previous 7 days [53]. The scale was derived from a two-component definition of mindfulness: Curiosity and Decentering [1]. Curiosity includes 6 items and refers to the openness to explore one’s internal states as they occur. Decentering, measured by 7 items, refers to the ability to maintain a stance of detachment from one’s thoughts and emotions, with the capacity not to be carried away by thoughts and emotions [54]. The scales were found to be reliable, with ωt = 0.91 for Curiosity and ωt = 0.85 for Decentering. Drawing from various definitions of mindfulness, a psychometrically validated trait mindfulness measure, the FFMQ, was developed. It combines five mindfulness instruments, and factor analysis on a large sample revealed five factors [58]. Its condensed form has 20 items rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = never or rarely true, 5 = very often or always true) [56]. The brief version measures five distinct but related components of mindfulness, with 4 items for each scale: (1) Observing: the ability to notice and attend to internal and external experiences, ωt = 0.76; (2) Describing: the capacity to articulate one’s experiences in words, ωt = 0.77; (3) Acting with awareness: as opposed to “being on autopilot”, the degree of presence and awareness while engaged in activities, ωt = 0.88; (4) Nonjudgment of inner experience: the ability to refrain from judging inner experiences as neither good nor bad, ωt = 0.88; (5) Nonreactivity to inner experience: the attitude of allowing thoughts and feelings to arise and pass without being caught up in or swept away by them, allowing these experiences to exist without interference, ωt = 0.77. The psychometric properties of the short version of the FFMQ by Tran et al. [56] demonstrated moderate to strong reliability. The Relaxation, Meditation, and Mindfulness Tracker (RMMtm) by Smith [59] comprises a self-reported broad-spectrum inventory for assessing dispositional mindfulness. The 7-point Likert scale with 32 items captures trait mindfulness (1 = never, 2 = not this month, but once or twice this year; 3 = about once this month; 4 = about once a week; 5 = about 2 or 3 times a week; 6 = about every day; 7 = several times daily). The RMMtm includes various experiences associated with the practice of mindfulness meditation techniques that manifest as characteristics over time. The instrument was derived from third-wave mindfulness theory to capture all essential phenomenological states of mindfulness, represented on a continuum with varying levels of mindfulness [60]: (1) Mindful Relaxation, which assesses initial mindful relaxation experiences; (2) Mindful Quiet Focus, which captures the stillness and observational nature of meditation; (3) Mindful Engagement, which measures the ability to remain present and compassionate during activities; and (4) Mindful Transcendence, the deepest level observed in long-term practitioners in spiritual or non-secular contexts [61]. Due to expected variations in levels of mindfulness among long-term and frequent meditators compared to other groups, separate component analysis for each population sample is recommended [36,57]. A principal component analysis identified 2 distinct factors. Items 1–24 loaded on the first factor; this dimension is interpreted as Mindful Relaxation and Focus, ωt = 0.97. The first dimension includes aspects of physical relaxation but also cognitive and emotional aspects of mindfulness: “I was living in the present moment, not past or future concerns” or “I felt selfless/caring/compassion”. Items 25–32 loaded on the second factor, compromising Mindful Transcendence, ωt = 0.93. Self-transcendence, in general, is defined as the capacity to expand self-boundaries [62]. The subscale refers to transpersonal self-transcendence: “I had a sense of what is timeless, boundless, infinite”. Due to the sample-specific component analysis, reliability measures were not comparable to previous research. However, reliability analysis indicated satisfying internal consistencies. 2.4. Statistical Analysis Statistical analyses were performed using R, version 4.3.1, and SPSS, version 29. For the primary data analysis, only the general mixed sample was utilized, following manual validation of each participant’s lucid dream report. The student populations were not included in the data analysis for the research questions addressed in this study, since there was an insufficient number of participants per group. Data management was based on the functions of the tidyverse package in R [63]. A total of 270 participants out of 291 were considered eligible for data analysis. The more liberal Shapiro–Wilk tests revealed significant deviations from normal distribution for most of the measures, e.g., lucid dreaming frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.590, p < 10−14), dream recall frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.855, p < 10−15), lucid dream induction frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.540, p < 10−22), and meditation frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.813, p < 10−16). Therefore, non-parametric independent two-sample permutation tests were utilized for assessing overall group differences. For each group, a set of multiple tests with adjusted p-values based on Benjamini and Hochberg and the False Discovery Rate (FDR) correction were reported [64]. Monte Carlo permutation tests with R = 10,000 permutations were implemented for group comparisons [65]. For most group comparisons, the Monte Carlo permutation test of the mean was calculated. All variables besides the ordinal scaled WILD frequency and the ordinal variable related to the detached observer stance were continuous variables. When comparing the total hours of meditation per week and the largest number of years for a meditation practice, a Monte Carlo permutation test of the median was used. In addition to that, Spearman’s correlation was preferred over the Pearson correlation due to the influence of the largest values in the weekly hours of meditation for each meditation practice style. Prior to this, an exploratory principal component analysis found the sample-specific RMMtm scales [36]. Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (X2 = 8357.33, df = 496, p < 0.001), indicating that the variables were sufficiently intercorrelated to proceed with principal component analysis (PCA). A PCA with Kaiser normalization and an Oblimin rotation method yielded a two-factor solution in the general population with tools from the psych package [66]. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin Measure was 0.953, which indicates good sampling adequacy. Factor extraction was based on the scree plot, indicating two factors, while parallel analysis yielded two factors and Kaiser–Gutman criteria indicated four factors. The two-factor solution accounted for 62% of the cumulative variance, compared to 67% for the three-factor and 70% for the four-factor solution. The tools from the MBESS package calculated omega total (ωt) estimates instead of the psych tools for a more conservative reliability measure [43,47]. Multiple regression analysis for the monthly lucid dreaming frequency, predicted by the RMMtm Mindful Transcendence subscale, the TMS Decentering and Curiosity subscale, the MAS-MA subscale, weekly meditation frequency, and age, was implemented with the Boot and LessR package in R (i.e., Table S1, Figures S1 and S2) [67,68]. Due to violations of heteroscedasticity and normal distribution, examined by means of the visual plotting of the predicted values against the standardized residuals, the coefficients were tested based on 10,000 bootstrapped bias-corrected confidence intervals. Assumptions were investigated via the LessR package: no VIF values exceeded 5, and none of Cook’s distance indexes was larger than 1, with the highest VIF being 3.634 and the largest Cook’s distance index being 0.12. The exploratory analysis of the relationship between lucid dreaming, meditation, and meta-awareness was performed with model 4 of the PROCESS macro for R [69]. In this model, meta-awareness was used as a mediator, meditation frequency as the independent variable, and the number of lucid dreams in the previous six months was used as the outcome variable. The model controlled for covariates including lucid dream induction frequency, dream recall frequency, and age. It must be stated that for this analysis, 25 participants who did not have prior experience with lucid dreams were excluded, due to missing data. Bias-corrected accelerated (BCa) confidence intervals for the coefficients were bootstrapped with R = 10,000 replicates, as was the confidence interval for the indirect effect. Standard errors were computed using heteroscedasticity-consistent estimates due to the heteroscedasticity of the residuals and the nonnormality of the dependent variable (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.381, p < 10−22). The model parameters were standardized, and the random seed was fixed to 9999 to ensure the reproducibility of the results. 3. Results In the general sample spanning all groups, participants reported an average of 5.92 ± 3.03 [M ± SD, n = 270] dreams recalled weekly and 4.26 ± 7.65 [M ± SD, n = 270] remembered lucid dreams per month. A crucial number of participants had at least one lucid dream (90.74%), induced 3.74 ± 7.72 [M ± SD, n = 245] lucid dreams each month, and indicated an average of 27.80 lucid dreams over the previous half year (SD = 71.90, Range = 0–720). A total of 143 participants (52.96%) had at least one lucid dream per month, with an average of 7.80 ± 9.16 [M ± SD] lucid dreams per month, defined as monthly frequent lucid dreamers, whereas 73 experienced at least one lucid dream per week (27.04%), with an average of 13.70 ± 9.67 [M ± SD] monthly lucid dreams, and thus were classified as WFLDs; see Table 1. Across the whole general sample, bivariate correlations between dream variables yielded a significant positive correlation between weekly dream recall and monthly lucid dreaming frequency (rsp = 0.44, p < 0.001) as well as lucid dreams in the previous six months (rsp = 0.36, p < 0.001). In addition, monthly lucid dream induction frequency correlated with the monthly lucid dreaming frequency (rsp = 0.46, p < 0.001) and the estimated lucid dreams in the previous six months (rsp = 0.47, p < 0.001). Furthermore, self-reported meta-awareness correlated positively with monthly lucid dreams (rsp = 0.23, p < 0.001), while less strongly with the summative measure of lucid dreams in the previous six months (rsp = 0.14, p = 0.012). Weekly meditation frequency and age were not significantly associated with either the monthly lucid dreaming frequency or the total number of lucid dreams in the most recent six-month period (all p > 0.05, Table 2). However, weekly meditation frequency was significantly associated with age (rsp = 0.38, p < 0.001), meta-awareness (rsp = 0.25, p < 0.001), and the frequency of wake-initiated lucid dreams (rsp = 0.15, p < 0.001). Out of 270 respondents, 243 (90.01%) meditated at least once, of which 91 (33.70%) meditated infrequently, with 0.22 ± 0.26 [M ± SD] weekly meditations. A total of 152 respondents (56.30%) reported meditating at least once a week; the average weekly meditation frequency was 5.58 (SD = 2.72, Range = 1–9). Among the frequent meditators, 35 practiced up to multiple times daily (12.96%), termed DFMs. A total of 13 WFMs and 4 DFMs violated the instructions of the survey, leading to an unrealistic meditation practice time (i.e., 0 minutes of meditation or more than 50 hours per week). Hence, they were excluded from specific analyses. A total of 135 weekly meditators stated a median experience of 7.1 years (SD = 13.7, Range = 0.5–55) in their most consistently practiced meditation framework and a median of 4.67 practiced meditation hours weekly (SD = 7.3, Range = 0.133–45). When looking at the specific meditation styles and techniques, the average total hours per week were divided into six different meditation techniques. The highest practiced minutes averaged over frameworks and traditions was non-dual meditation with 47.44 ± 107.27 [M ± SD], and then OM meditation with 47.01 ± 96.22 [M ± SD], closely followed by FA meditation with 42.07 ± 80.14 [M ± SD], meditation to recognize the true nature of the mind with 17.82 ± 72.32 [M ± SD], LK meditation to cultivate emotional capacities with 20.5 ± 50.3 [M ± SD], and other contemplative techniques with 8.34 ± 25.75 [M ± SD]. Meditation frameworks diverged, falling either within traditions with spiritual and religious backgrounds or within secular frameworks. On average, participants engaged in 2.65 ± 1.96 [M ± SD, n = 141, Range = 1–11] traditions or frameworks for their meditation practices. Most participants meditated in a self-guided (69) and an online-based (40) setting, followed by meditation included in secular Yoga practices (29), app-guided meditation (27), Vipassana (24), Transcendental Meditation (15), non-dual meditation (15), meditation included in secular Thai Chi/ Qigong practices (12) and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) meditation (8). Within the non-secular traditions, most practitioners were rooted in Tibetan Buddhism (34), Zen Buddhism (29), and religious or spiritual Yoga practices (15), as well as Theravadan Buddhism (14), followed by Shamanistic (9) and Christian (5) meditation techniques, concluding with meditation rooted in Daoism-based (2) and Sufi traditions (2). Notably, Judaistic meditation practices were not represented. Participants also had the flexibility to specify an additional tradition (10) or secular approach (14). 3.1. Lucid Dreaming in Meditators All frequent meditators together (collapsing DFMs and WFMs) had an insignificantly higher monthly lucid dreaming frequency compared to non-frequent meditators. In addition, the numbers of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period revealed insignificantly higher numbers of lucid dreams in frequent meditators compared to non-frequent meditators (see Table 3, right panel), whereas the dream recall frequency was significantly higher in frequent meditators than in non-frequent meditators. All frequent meditators had significantly more wake-initiated lucid dreams compared to the WILD occurrences in non-frequent meditators, while also being more often in the role of a detached observer in the lucid dream compared to non-frequent meditators. Having control in the lucid dream, as is possible in waking life, showed no significant difference between frequent meditators and the rest of the participants (p > 0.05; Table 3, right panel). Among the weekly meditators, 45 practitioners reported experiencing lucid dreams once or more per week. When correcting for the hours spent in meditation, 38 WFLD frequent meditators dedicated significantly more time to meditation each week (Mdn = 5.29, SD = 9.29) in comparison to their NWLD frequent meditating counterparts (Mdn = 3.67, SD = 6.32, n = 97) [p = 0.039; Monte Carlo permutation test]. The number of years of meditation experience for WFLD frequent meditators (Mdn = 7.00, SD = 13.84) did not differ significantly from NWLD frequent meditators (Mdn = 6.00, SD = 13.50) [p = 0.400; Monte Carlo permutation test]. When looking at the group with more intensive meditation practice, DFMs had significantly more lucid dreams per month compared to non-frequent meditators; see Table 3, left panel. In addition, there were significantly higher numbers of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period in DFMs compared to non-frequent meditators. Dream recall frequency differed significantly from non-frequent meditators. DFMs were less often controlling in the way that is possible during waking life compared to non-frequent meditators. Moreover, DFMs were significantly more often in the detached observer stance in a lucid dream than non-frequent meditators. Furthermore, DFMs experienced significantly more compared to non-frequent meditators; see Table 3, left panel. After excluding the non-valid cases, DFMs reached significance with a median of 9.33 ± 7.52 [Mdn ± SD, n = 31] hours of weekly meditation compared to 3.50 ± 6.80 [Mdn ± SD, n = 104] practiced hours in WFMs [p < 0.0001; Monte Carlo permutation test]. There was no significant difference in meditation experience in years (p > 0.05). A total of 12 DFMs who were classified as WFLDs engaged in 3.58 ± 2.35 [M ± SD] meditation frameworks or traditions: self-guided meditation (5), Transcendental Meditation/TM (5), meditation from Shamanistic traditions (4), Vipassana meditation (4), Tibetan (4), Zen (4), and Theravadan (2) Buddhism, non-dual meditation (3), and meditation in secular Thai Chi/ Qigong practices (4). There was no significant difference in the total hours of meditation per week between WFLDs and NWLDs in daily frequent meditators (p > 0.05). DFMs who lucid-dream weekly had significantly more meditation experience, with a median of 25 ± 16.85 years [Mdn ± SD, n = 11], compared to non-weekly lucid dreaming DFMs, with a median of 5 ± 14.66 years (Mdn ± SD, n = 19) [p = 0.029; Monte Carlo permutation test]. 3.2. Lucid Dreaming and Meditation Practices The assessment of the varied qualities cultivated during meditation, based on specific meditative practices, was accomplished by distributing the total weekly practice hours across the percentage of the techniques each participant practiced, and then averaging the practice time for these qualities/techniques across all traditions for each participant. As hypothesized, the open monitoring meditation practice exhibited a significant positive bivariate correlation with the number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period (rsp = 0.16, p = 0.037). Hence, more weekly practiced hours of OM meditation were associated with more lucid dreams per month. Other techniques did not show any significant relationship: FA meditation (rsp = 0.08, p > 0.05), meditation related to the nature of the mind (rsp = 0.08, p > 0.05), nondual meditation (rsp = 0.06, p > 0.05), and LK meditation (rsp = 0.03, p > 0.05) showed insignificant bivariate correlations with the number of lucid dreams during the previous six months. Furthermore, when looking at the association between meditation practices and monthly lucid dreaming frequency, there was no significant bivariate association (all p > 0.05). 3.3. Lucid Dreaming and Mindfulness Instruments Weekly frequent lucid dreamers descriptively scored more highly in all mindfulness measurements, except for the Describing facet of the FFMQ. If collapsing participants across all groups (DFMs, WFMs, and non-frequent meditators): WFLD (M = 3.55, SD = 0.79) exceeded NWLD (M = 3.23, SD = 0.77) in the Nonreactivity subscale of the FFMQ [p = 0.018; Monte Carlo permutation test with FDR correction]. Furthermore, the sample-specific Mindful Transcendence subscale was also higher in WFLDs (M = 3.59, SD = 1.69) compared to NWLDs (M = 3.05, SD = 1.56) [p = 0.027; Monte Carlo permutation test with FDR correction]. Within non-frequent meditators, no differences reached significance after controlling for multiple testing when comparing WFLDs and NWLDs (all p > 0.05; Table 4, right panel). Within the frequent meditators, WFLDs scored descriptively higher in all mindfulness measurements but none of the differences reached statistical significance after controlling for multiple testing (all p > 0.05; Table 4, middle panel). In contrast, within the DFMs, WFLDs surpassed NWLDs in the FMMQ mindfulness aspects of Nonreactivity, Describing, and Observing (Table 4, left panel). 3.4. Individual Differences in Meta-Awareness Meta-awareness differed significantly between meditators: DFMs scored highest at 6.06 ± 0.68 [M ± SD] compared to WFMs at 5.7 ± 0.91 [M ± SD] (p = 0.0224) and non-frequent meditators at 5.34 ± 1.04 [M ± SD] (p = 0.0007). In addition, meta-awareness scores between WFMs and non-frequent meditators reached significance [p = 0.0035; Monte Carlo permutation test with FDR correction]. Separately, across the general sample for the lucid dreaming groups, meta-awareness was highest in WFLDs, scoring 5.90 ± 0.98 [M ± SD], compared to monthly frequent lucid dreamers, who scored 5.56 ± 0.90 [M ± SD] (p = 0.0247), and non-frequent lucid dreamers, who scored 5.44 ± 0.98 [M ± SD] (p = 0.0032) [Monte Carlo permutation tests with FDR correction]. However, monthly frequent lucid dreamers could not reach significantly higher scores in meta-awareness compared to non-frequent lucid dreamers [p = 0.2256; Monte Carlo permutation test with FDR correction]. Within the non-frequent meditators, WFLDs also showed higher values with 5.82 ± 0.91 [M ± SD] in meta-awareness compared to NWLDs with 5.20 ± 1.03 [M ± SD] [p = 0.0047; Monte Carlo permutation test with FDR correction]. In contrast, WFLDs within the weekly frequent meditators could not reach significantly higher values, 5.73 ± 1.13 [M ± SD], than NWLDs who meditate once a week, 5.71 ± 0.83 [M ± SD] (p = 0.4346). However, DFMs who are weekly frequent lucid dreamers scored significantly higher, 6.44 ± 0.48 [M ± SD], compared to non-weekly lucid DFMs, 5.83 ± 0.69 [M ± SD] (p = 0.0079) [Monte Carlo permutation test with FDR correction]. 3.5. Meditation Frequency, Mindfulness, and Meta-Awareness for Lucid Dreaming Mindful Transcendence, measured using the RMMtm, and the two dimensions, Decentering and Curiosity, of the TMS, as well as the MAS subscale measuring meta-awareness, in addition to weekly meditation frequency, were utilized to predict monthly lucid dreaming frequency. Therefore, a multiple linear regression model with BCa bootstrapped confidence intervals was performed, given the violation of the assumptions of normality and homoscedasticity of the residual. All predictors accounted for R2 = 0.098, F (6, 263) = 4.780, p < 0.001. Transcendence [b = 1.228, BCa 95% CI (0.423, 1.219)], in addition to the MAS-MA subscale [b = 1.420, BCa 95% CI (0.633, 1.405)], had significant predictive regression coefficients for the monthly frequency of lucid dreams (Table 5). Age was statistically controlled for and did not have a significant coefficient. Therefore, higher scores on the Transcendence subscale, as well as higher scores on the MAS-MA meta-awareness subscale, are associated with a higher frequency of lucid dreams per month. Two regression models and one mediation analysis were conducted to further elucidate the relevance of meta-awareness for the association between meditation frequency and lucid dreaming frequency. Specifically, the relationship between weekly meditation frequency and the number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period (Lucid Dreams 6M) was tested with meta-awareness as the mediator. Weekly dream recall frequency, age, and monthly lucid dream induction frequency were included as covariates. Considering the violations of normality, homoscedasticity, and concerns with leverage and outliers, the coefficients’ confidence intervals from both regression models, as well as the test of the indirect path, were bootstrapped with R = 10,000 runs, and a heteroscedasticity-consistent standard error was used. The first model, with meta-awareness as the outcome variable, explained a total of R2 = 0.124 variance, F (4, 240) = 9.836, p < 0.0001. Age, dream recall, and meditation frequency significantly predicted meta-awareness (Table 6). More frequent meditation was associated with higher meta-awareness (b = 0.048, BCa 95% CI [0.009, 0.086]). Dream recall frequency (b = 0.047, BCa 95% CI [0.004, 0.091]) and age (b = 0.013, BCa 95% CI [0.004, 0.091]) were both significantly positively correlated with meta-awareness. Predicting lucid dreaming frequency (Lucid Dreams 6M) explained R2 = 0.305 variance, F (5, 239) = 4.778, p < 0.0001. The mediator analysis of the coefficient product of the indirect path, the coefficient of predicting meta-awareness based on meditation frequency, and Lucid Dreams 6M based on meta-awareness resulted in a significant positive indirect effect (b = 0.303, BCa 95% CI [0.013, 1.009]; see Figure 1. The direct effect of meditation frequency on Lucid Dreams 6M revealed an insignificant positive effect (b = 0.703, 95% CI [−2.030, 3.435]; p = 0.613). Two covariates, higher lucid dream induction frequency (b = 4.913, BCa 95% CI [2.357, 8.296]) and younger age (b = −0.357, BCa 95% CI [−0.857, −0.037]), were significantly associated with higher numbers of lucid dreams in the previous six months. 4. Discussion The present study explored the link between lucid dreaming, dispositional mindfulness, and meditation practices, emphasizing the role of meta-awareness. The results from this study indicate that individuals who meditate more than once per day have more lucid dreams compared to infrequent meditators. Therefore, the hypothesis that frequent meditation is associated with more lucid dreams was supported, adding to the already existing body of work [28,33]. The results also partially confirmed the hypothesis that open monitoring meditation was positively associated with increased lucid dreaming. In addition, meta-awareness was found to be highest in daily frequent meditators and was also elevated in weekly lucid dreamers without meditation experience. Together, these findings indicate a link between lucid dreaming, meta-awareness, and OM meditation. As OM meditation is known to enhance sustained open awareness, this supports the idea that non-propositional and sustained meta-awareness could be a key capacity for lucid dreaming [7]. Exploratory analyses highlighted the mediating role of meta-awareness in the relationship between weekly meditation frequency and lucid dream occurrences during the previous six months. Furthermore, the evidence that aspects of trait mindfulness are associated with frequent lucid dreaming points towards the continuity of mindful awareness from waking consciousness to sleeping consciousness [70,71]. In addition to meta-awareness, transcendence also emerged as a positive predictor of monthly lucid dreaming frequency across all groups, replicating previous research [36]. Several conceptual links have been made between lucid dreaming and meditation practices, postulated to be influenced by regulating attention and meta-awareness [19,28,33]. A meta-analysis looked at meditation practices across various traditions and backgrounds and extracted the various effects of different meditation styles and their influence on cognitive capacities [72]. Several meditation practices influence the dynamics and direction of attention: in FA meditation, attention is directed towards one object, e.g., focusing on the breath and keeping the concentration on the same object up to the whole session of meditation [17]. This process involves meta-awareness to recognize the wandering mind. Once the inner focus is distracted, e.g., by thoughts about the future, meta-awareness can detect the distraction and thus return to the initial object of focus [8,18]. In some practice styles, OM meditation is postulated to evolve from FA meditation [17]. As individuals progress in their meditation practice, they cultivate monitoring skills that become the crucial point to the practice of OM meditation. The practitioner attempts to remain in a state of pure observation, vigilantly attending and monitoring each moment-to-moment event in awareness without anchoring the focus on any particular object [17]. Existing studies have not examined the specific meditative practices that might lead to more frequent lucid dreams. The purpose of this study was to study the link between specific meditation practices and lucid dreams by investigating the time spent on five different meditation styles per week. The results partially confirmed the main hypothesis that FA meditation and OM meditation would correlate with an increased number of monthly lucid dreams, with a positive association observed only between the duration of averaged weekly OM practice and the number of lucid dreams over the previous six months. However, it should be noted that there was a discrepancy between the formative and summative measurement of lucid dreaming frequency. Specifically, in contrast to the lucid dreams in the previous 6 months, there was no significant association between the average time spent in OM meditation and average monthly lucid dreaming frequency among meditators. One reason for this discrepancy may be that the 6-month measure is a more accurate assessment of lucid dreaming frequency as it is more precise (it requires that participants report a specific number of lucid dreams) and over a proximal, well-defined time interval (the previous 6 months). Another possibility is that meditation experience and practice could influence lucid dreaming, but possibly only in individuals who have already had lucid dreams. This is consistent with research where meditation has been successfully integrated as a complementary technique in combination with cognitive and substance-enhanced lucid dream induction methods [73]. Only a handful of studies have examined the relationship between meditation experience and lucid dreaming frequency [26,28,29,31,33,34,35,36,74]. Baird and colleagues [28] observed a higher frequency of spontaneous lucid dreams per month among long-term meditators compared to those with less meditation experience. The current study supports these findings, with daily frequent meditators reporting a greater number of lucid dreams per month than infrequent meditators. Consequently, this study supports the notion that regular and intensive meditation is associated with an increased incidence of lucid dreams [28]. In particular, it was found that meditating several times a day was associated with a weekly occurrence of lucid dreams, a finding that is consistent with results observed in practitioners of Transcendental Meditation [29]. On a cognitive, psychological, and neuropsychological level, researchers have suggested that the link between lucid dreaming and meditation could be an increase in self-reflectiveness and meta-awareness [28,31,33,75]. Given that no earlier research has examined individual differences in self-reported meta-awareness within and between lucid dreamers and meditators, this study analyzed individual differences in meta-awareness using the MAS-MA scale. Daily frequent meditators reported the highest self-rated meta-awareness on this scale within the general sample. Furthermore, weekly lucid dreamers showed higher meta-awareness scores compared to both monthly and infrequent lucid dreamers. Monthly frequent lucid dreamers showed only a marginal increase in meta-awareness compared to infrequent lucid dreamers across the sample. Notably, even among non-meditators, weekly lucid dreamers expressed higher meta-awareness than non-weekly lucid dreamers. Only within the DFM subgroup was weekly lucid dreaming associated with higher meta-awareness compared to non-weekly lucid dreamers. These results implicate an effect of meditation on meta-awareness, as well as an effect of meta-awareness on lucid dreaming, pointing towards a mediating effect of meta-awareness on lucid dreaming frequency. Indeed, the results of an exploratory mediation analysis supported the hypothesis that meta-awareness fully mediates the positive association between meditation frequency per week and the number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period. However, it has to be noted that a mediation model with this study design cannot imply a causal relationship since the variables were assessed simultaneously, and there might be other variables and cognitive mechanisms involved that were not captured. Nonetheless, the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that higher meta-awareness is associated with more lucid dreams [7,19]. Consistent with previous findings by Stumbrys et al. [33] and Baird et al. [28], the results suggest that lucid dreaming is associated with specific aspects of mindfulness that differ depending on whether an individual has experience with meditation. WFLDs reported higher scores on the Non-reactivity subscale of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) than did non-weekly lucid dreamers. Nonreactivity involves the ability to experience thoughts and feelings without becoming caught up in them [1]. Higher scores in this area for WFLDs may indicate a more developed ability to observe experiences without immediate reaction, which may be advantageous for recognizing the dream state and becoming lucid, without being caught up in the event and thereby losing lucidity. Further analysis showed that WFLDs also had significantly higher scores on the RMMtm Mindful Transcendence subscale compared to NWLDs. This facet reflects a heightened awareness of the present experience and a more transcendent perspective that may facilitate the detachment necessary for dream lucidity. Mindful Transcendence measured in this study is comparable to the transcendence subscale found in the sample of students in the study by Geise and Smith [36]. We replicated that feeling more self-transcendent, like “I felt connected. I felt at one with everything and humanity. I felt in harmony with the world. I felt a sense of belonging. A part of something larger”, positively predicted lucid dreaming frequency per month [36]. In contrast, there were no significant differences in mindfulness facets found between WFLDs and NWLDs within the group of non-frequent meditators and all frequent meditators, DFMs and WFMs together, after adjustment for multiple comparisons. This is in contrast with the study of long-term meditators, where non-frequent meditators scored higher on the Describing scale of the FFMQ [28]. There has been no other study to date that investigated aspects of lucid dream experiences in meditators. Here, we found that daily frequent meditators reported having more wake-initiated lucid dreams, were more often in the observing stance in a lucid dream, and were less often actively exerting ordinary forms of control of the dream compared to infrequent meditators. Overall, these results support the notion that consistent, intensive meditation practice may enhance one’s ability to maintain a nonreactive, observing stance, and, by extension, enhance the state shift from ordinary to lucid dreams. The results indicate that the frequency and depth of mindfulness practices are linked to the experience of lucid dreaming and underscore the importance of considering individual differences in meditation practice and experience for lucid dreaming. 5. Limitations and Future Directions It is crucial to highlight that the general mixed sample included a substantial proportion of frequent meditators, 56% of respondents, as well as an extremely high number of monthly frequent (53%) and weekly frequent (27%) lucid dreamers. This distribution does not reflect the general population, a discrepancy that is highlighted when compared to student populations or representative cohort studies [49,51]. Meta-analytic research suggests a 23% prevalence of monthly lucid dreams and a 55% likelihood of having at least one lucid dream [76]. The overrepresentation in this study is likely due to self-selection bias, disproportionately including individuals interested in lucid dreaming, dreaming, and meditation [77]. The introduction of a 16-point Likert scale marked a major advance in the assessment of lucid dreaming frequency, providing more variability but making direct comparisons with responses from previous studies more difficult. Many studies operationalized lucid dreaming frequency based on the scale developed by Schredl and Erlacher [78] as a formative measure (giving an estimate of how many lucid dreams one has per month), but few studies also incorporated a summative approach to measuring lucid dreams [31]. The correlation analysis related to the hours spent in OM meditation showed a discrepancy between the two measures of lucid dreaming frequency, although the association between the two frequency measures was high. The discrepancy needs to be considered when interpreting the relationship between lucid dreams and meditation practices. The cross-sectional nature of the study with a single data collection point limits conclusions to correlational and associative implications. Biases such as social desirability and performance bias, particularly prevalent in a convenience sample likely to be interested in meditation and (lucid) dreaming, may bias self-reported measures of meta-awareness and mindfulness [79]. This potential response bias and selective sample underscore the need for caution when interpreting the results. Recall bias presents a major challenge in retrospective assessments, potentially distorting the accuracy of participant reports of their experiences of lucid dreaming and meditation practices [80]. This bias can be particularly problematic when relying on individuals to estimate the frequency of events over extended periods of time. Along this line, dream recall is usually underestimated in retrospective measurements compared to daily log-books [81]. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) could mitigate this problem by collecting data in real time, thereby providing more accurate and immediate reports of experiences as they occur [82]. Implementing EMA in future studies would not only increase the reliability of self-reported data but also provide greater insight into the dynamic interplay between mindfulness practices and lucid dreaming. Future investigations should include a wide scale for lucid dreaming frequency, encompassing the higher end of variability in lucid dreamers. Also, it could be fruitful to compare different meditation practices within different frameworks and traditions (e.g., app-based meditation vs. Transcendental Meditation). 6. Conclusions The findings of this study validate the association between frequent meditation, specifically open monitoring (OM) meditation, and increased lucid dreaming frequency, and support a role of meta-awareness in enhancing lucid dream experiences. These results suggest that OM meditation enhances sustained meta-awareness, which is essential for recognizing and maintaining lucidity in dreams. It would be worthwhile in future research to test this hypothesis through a random-assignment meditation intervention pre-post design study. In addition, the experiences of expert meditators and those practicing dream Yoga should be explored to further understand consciousness in different sleep states. Longitudinal studies and intensive retreats may prove valuable in assessing the effects of meditation on lucid dreaming. Complementary methods, such as sleep diaries and EMA, could allow for the detailed tracking of lucid dreams and meditation practices. Investigating neurophysiological changes of expert meditators during sleep might also shed light on the neural underpinnings of meditation-related changes in consciousness. Supplementary Materials The following supporting information can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/brainsci14050496/s1, Table S1: Factor loading matrix of RMMtm using PCA and Oblimin rotation; Figure S1: Scree plot of PCA result; Figure S2: Scree plot of parallel analysis of PCA result. Author Contributions Conceptualization, E.G., B.B.; methodology, E.G., B.B.; software, E.G., B.B.; formal analysis, E.G., B.B.; investigation, E.G., B.B.; data curation, E.G., B.B.; writing—original draft preparation, E.G.; writing—review and editing, E.G., B.B., supervision, B.B.; visualization, E.G; project administration, E.G., B.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Funding This study did not receive specific funding from public, private, or nonprofit sources. Institutional Review Board Statement The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the IRB Review Board of The University of Texas at Austin (STUDY00003582, 11 July 2022). Informed Consent Statement Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. Data Availability Statement The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors on request. 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Sci. Rep. 2023, 13, 7102. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] Figure 1. Complete mediation model for the relationship between meditation frequency and the total number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period with age, weekly dream recall, and monthly lucid dream induction frequencies as covariates. Note: n = 245. Bootstrapped BCa with R = 10,000. The model includes only standardized coefficients and effects; = significant effect; grey dotted line = the insignificant direct effect; large dashed grey line = the insignificant effect of the covariate on the mediator; small grey dashed line = the effect of the covariate on the dependent variable; small dashed black lines = the significant effects of the covariates on the dependent variable; large dashed black lines = the significant effects of the covariates on the mediator; solid black lines = the indirect path. Table 1. Number of participants in groups based on lucid dreaming and meditation frequency. Frequent MeditatorsNon-Frequent MeditatorsDFMsWFMsInfrequent MeditatorsNever Have MeditatedNWLDs2285721810790n = 197WFLDs13321994528n = 73351179127n = 152n = 118n = 270 Table 2. Descriptive statistics and bivariate intercorrelations of important variables. M (SD)DRFM LDF6M LDFLDIFInduce S.WILDMETAMediWeekly Dream Recall5.92 (3.03)Monthly LDF4.26 (7.65)0.47 6-Month LDF a27.79 (71.89)0.35 0.93 LD Induction F a3.74 (7.72)0.45 0.47 0.47 Induction Success a1.5 (1.12)0.32 0.66 0.62 0.42 WILD Freq a1.31 (1.15)0.080.53 0.51 0.28 0.57 MAS-MA5.60 (0.97)0.19 0.23 0.15 0.090.28 0.22 Weekly Meditation Freq3.24 (3.36)0.14 0.06−0.020.060.090.15 0.25 Age37.74 (16.16)−0.07−0.01−0.06−0.070.020.130.25 0.38 Table 3. Group comparisons for lucid dream experience variables between different meditation groups. DFMs > Non-Frequent Medi.Frequent Medi. > Non-Frequent Medi.(n = 35)(n = 118)(n = 152)(n = 118)M (SD)M (SD)M Diffp aM (SD)M (SD)M Diffp aFrequencyLDF 6M56.7 (156.6)20.4 (41.9)33.10.03 33.3 (87.7)20.4 (41.9)12.840.11LDF monthly6.44 (9.1)3.55 (7.0)2.890.03 4.80 (8.1)3.55 (7.0)1.250.11DRF weekly7.04 (2.5)5.40 (3.1)1.650.01 6.33 (2.9)5.40 (3.1)0.920.02 WILD1.64 (1.4)1.14 (1.1)0.500.03 1.44 (1.2)1.14 (1.1)0.290.04 ControlControl PWL2.03 (1.1)2.57 (1.1)−0.540.03 2.38 (1.2)2.57 (1.1)−0.190.11ExperienceDetached observer1.52 (1.0)1.10 (1.0)0.420.03 1.56 (1.0)1.10 (1.1)0.460.0006 * Table 4. Group comparisons for all instruments between frequent and non-frequent lucid dreamers within meditation groups. DFMsFrequent MeditatorsNon-Frequent MeditatorsWFLDsNWLDsWFLDsNWLDsWFLDsNWLDsM (SD)M (SD)M Diff ap aM (SD)M (SD)M Diff ap aM (SD)M (SD)M Diff ap aFFMQObserving4.50 (0.07)3.94 (0.6)0.560.02 4.16 (0.8)3.96 (0.7)0.200.123.9 (0.7)3.8 (0.8)0.100.25Describing4.31 (0.8)3.80 (0.6)0.510.04 3.60 (1.04)3.61 (0.71)−0.010.473.38 (0.8)3.11 (0.9)0.270.23Actaware3.40 (0.9)3.38 (0.9)0.020.463.22 (0.9)3.12 (0.8)0.100.332.91 (0.9)2.67 (0.8)0.240.23Nonjudge4.27 (1.1)3.74 (0.9)0.530.143.93 (0.8)3.89 (0.8)0.040.463.54 (1.0)3.35 (1.0)0.190.24Nonreact4.02 (0.7)3.47 (0.7)0.550.04 3.6 (0.7)3.42 (0.7)0.260.143.32 (0.9)3.00 (0.8)0.320.23TMSDecentering2.59 (1.0)2.53 (0.7)0.070.462.54 (0.8)2.32 (0.8)0.220.141.73 (1.0)1.60 (0.8)0.140.25Curiosity2.41 (1.1)2.27 (0.7)0.140.422.30 (1.0)2.15 (0.8)0.140.261.86 (0.7)1.65 (1.0)0.150.24RMMtmTranscend4.52 (1.2)3.80 (1.8)0.720.184.01 (1.7)3.56 (1.6)0.550.142.78 (1.4)2.45 (1.3)0.330.23 Table 5. Multiple regression model for the relationship between lucid dreaming frequency and aspects of mindfulness, transcendence, meditation frequency, and meta-awareness, controlled for age. ModelbBias aSE a95% BCa CI aLowerUpperConstant−4.1360.0582.552−9.3460.727Mindful Transcendence1.228 −0.0070.4230.4742.146Decentering TMS−0.303−0.0090.835−1.9211.367Curiosity TMS−0.4410.0040.792−2.0251.059Meta-Awareness MAS1.420 −0.0060.6330.2272.684Weekly Meditation Freq0.0290.0020.171−0.3050.369Age−0.055−0.00030.029−0.1130.0003 Table 6. Regression models for complete mediation of the relationship of lucid dreaming occurrences in the previous 6-month period and weekly meditation frequency mediated by meta-awareness. Outcome VariablebSE a95% BCa CI aR2FhcLowerUpperMETA-AWARENESS0.1249.836 *Intercept4.661 0.2214.2155.085Meditation Freq0.047 0.0200.0090.086Induction Freq0.0020.009−0.0170.018Dream Recall Freq0.048 0.0220.0040.091Age0.014 0.0040.0060.021LUCID DREAMS 6M0.3054.778 *Intercept−17.84920.459−62.9469.033Meditation Freq0.7021.366−1.6103.904Meta-Awareness6.481 3.6260.12214.650Induction Freq4.913 1.4852.3588.296Dream Recall Freq0.3050.939−1.6052.125Age−0.357 0.201−0.857−0.037 Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
1646	dbpedia	3	36	https://www.facebook.com/photo.php%3Ffbid%3D3241570582638162%26id%3D531270340334880%26set%3Da.817561008372477%26locale%3Dru_RU	en	Facebook	https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/B8BxsscfVBr.ico	https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/B8BxsscfVBr.ico	[ "https://facebook.com/security/hsts-pixel.gif?c=3.2" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Sieh dir auf Facebook Beiträge, Fotos und vieles mehr an.	de	https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/B8BxsscfVBr.ico		https://www.facebook.com/login/
1646	dbpedia	3	37	https://jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net/topics/elena%2Bgerhardt	en	Public Domain Media Search Engine Public Domain Search	https://cdn4.picryl.com/…-da3efe-1024.jpg	https://cdn4.picryl.com/…-da3efe-1024.jpg	[ "https://cache.getarchive.net/Prod/thumb/cdn4/L3Bob3RvLzE5MTMvMDEvMDEvZWxlbmEtZ2VyaGFyZHQtZGEzZWZlLTEwMjQuanBn/40/66/jpg", "https://cache.getarchive.net/Prod/thumb/cdn4/L3Bob3RvLzE5MTUvMDEvMDEvZWxlbmEtZ2VyaGFyZHQtNDEzMjVhLTEwMjQuanBn/40/57/jpg", "https://cache.getarchive.net/Prod/thumb/cdn16/L3Bob3RvLzE5MTgvMDE...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Download Images of - Free for commercial use, no attribution required. From: Elena Gerhardt, George Grantham Bain Collection, to Public domain studio portrait, NFB.05192, Gustav Borgen. Find images dated from 1913 to 1918.	en	/favicon.ico	PICRYL - Public Domain Media Search Engine	https://jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net/topics/elena%2Bgerhardt	Elena Gerhardt, George Grantham Bain Collection Photo shows German mezzo-soprano singer Elena Gerhardt (1883-1961). (Source: Flickr Commons project, 2009) Title and date from data provided by the Bain News Service on the negative. Forms part of: George Gran ... More Elena Gerhardt, George Grantham Bain Collection Title from unverified data provided by the Bain News Service on the negatives or caption cards. Forms part of: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress). General information about the George Grantha ... More Public domain studio portrait, NFB.05193, Gustav Borgen NFB.05193 Public domain photograph - Gustav Borgen studio male portrait, the 1900s Norway, free to use, no copyright restrictions image - Picryl description
1646	dbpedia	3	76	https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/national-gallery-commemorates-second-world-war-with-special-day-of-events-and-new-online-resource	en	National Gallery commemorates Second World War with special day of events and new online resource	https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/favicon.ico	https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/favicon.ico	[ "https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/v3/img/icons/white/hamburger-menu.svg", "https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/v3/img/icons/white/close.svg", "https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/v3/img/logos/ng-plus-ng200-logo.svg", "https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/v3/img/icons/white/search.svg", "https://www.nationalga...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "The National Gallery" ]	null	Press release for the 2010 Dame Myra Hess Day and the new online archive	en	/favicon.ico		https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/national-gallery-commemorates-second-world-war-with-special-day-of-events-and-new-online-resource	Issued July 2010 Supported by The Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation "I think that the National Gallery concerts will be among the things that people will remember about this war…they were the first sign we were recovering from some sort of numbness..." Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery, 1933–45 In the year which commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the National Gallery is launching an online resource dedicated to the history of the National Gallery during the Second World War. A series of special concerts will also be held at the Gallery on 5 October 2010, celebrating Dame Myra Hess, the pianist who conceived the idea to turn the National Gallery into a venue for musical concerts during the Blitz. The National Gallery is delighted to have secured a rare appearance from Ida Haendel, a world-renowned violinist who performed in the original wartime concerts when she was just a teenager. In a lunchtime concert she will perform a varied programme of music by Romanian, German and French composers, with her colleague Misha Dacic at the piano. The online resource focuses largely on Myra Hess and the wartime concerts, which boosted the morale of ordinary Londoners during a time of ‘cultural blackout’. Images show the queues which formed outside the Gallery in Trafalgar Square for the concerts, which were attended by a total of 750,000 people. The website takes the visitor behind the scenes of how these events were brought to fruition, and also into the canteen that functioned in the backrooms of the Gallery during the war. In addition, the site tells the story of what happened to the nation’s collection of paintings in 1939. As widespread bombing of London was predicted, director Kenneth Clark oversaw the evacuation of some of the world’s finest masterpieces to places of safety deep in the cavernous chambers of a disused Welsh slate mine. He also instigated ‘Picture of the Month’ – when just one work was returned to the walls of the National Gallery each month, giving Londoners a chance to see something from the permanent collection during wartime. The special celebratory events in October include Piers Lane in conversation with Ida Haendel and Stephen Kovacevich, a pupil of Myra Hess. An evening concert showcases three Germanic composers from the Romantic era and Britain’s foremost 20th-century composer, Benjamin Britten. It includes both German Lieder and English song. The repertoire for the evening concert was inspired by a touching story from the Second World War concerts: "In May 1940, as news reached London of the German advance on the Netherlands, the celebrated German Lieder singer, Elena Gerhardt, telephoned Myra Hess to cancel her appearance at the Gallery. 'Myra', she told her friend, 'I cannot sing today. Nobody will want to hear the German language'. Hess reassured Gerhardt this wasn’t the case and offered to accompany her. As the two women walked on stage, Gerhardt was still concerned, when the audience, sensing her nerves, responded with an ovation warm enough to dispel any doubts that music was what mattered’." John Amis, classical music critic and friend of Dame Myra Hess For Myra Hess, the concerts offered a wonderful opportunity "to give spiritual solace to those who are giving all to combat the evil". Kenneth Clark described the people who attended the concerts thus: "All sorts. Young and old, smart and shabby, Tommies in uniform with their tin hats strapped on, old ladies with ear trumpets, musical students, civil servants, office boys, busy public men; all sorts had come." It is hoped the new online resource and the modern-day concerts will give people an insight into the National Gallery during this monumental and fascinating period in history. For press information and images, please contact Nicola Jeffs nicola.jeffs@ng-london.org.uk or 020 7747 2532 Notes to editors For more information about the National Gallery in wartime please visit http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/myra-hess-concerts Full programme for Dame Myra Hess Day, 5 October 2010 Lunchtime concert, 1pm, The Barry Rooms (Room 36) Ida Haendel, violin Misha Dacic, piano Georges Enesco Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor ‘dans le caractère populaire roumain’, Op. 25 Robert Schumann Violin Sonata No. 2 in D minor, Op. 121 Camille Saint-Saens Rondo, Capriccioso, Sarasate, Ziguneweisen or Carmen Fantasy Free ‘In Conversation’ event, 3pm, Sainsbury Wing Theatre Piers Lane in conversation with Ida Haendel and Stephen Kovacevich Evening concert, 7.30pm, The Barry Rooms Piers Lane, piano Markus Schäfer, tenor Radovan Vlatkovic, French horn Jack Liebeck, violin Robert Schumann Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano in A flat major, Op. 70 (Piers Lane, piano; Radovan Vlatkovic, horn) Franz Schubert A selection of Lieder (Piers Lane, piano; Markus Schäfer, tenor; Radovan Vlatkovic, horn) Benjamin Britten Canticle III, Op. 55, ‘Still Falls the Rain’ (Piers Lane, piano; Markus Schäfer, tenor; Radovan Vlatkovic, horn) Johannes Brahms Horn Trio, Op. 40 (Piers Lane, piano; Radovan Vlatkovic, horn; Jack Liebeck, violin) The evening concert will be followed by a wine reception in Central Hall for all guests. For more information on buying tickets visit http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/dame-myra-hess-day The Ernest Hecht Chartiable Foundation The Myra Hess Concerts online resource and the Dame Myra Hess Day are supported by The Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation. The foundation was set up some years ago by Ernest Hecht, one of England’s major independent book publishers, with the aim of helping the disadvantaged and promoting the advancement of the arts and education. For public information on National Gallery exhibitions and events please contact 020 7747 2885 / information@ng-london.org.uk, or visit www.nationalgallery.org.uk
1646	dbpedia	1	80	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/2015/01/	en	Voix des Arts: A Voice for the Performing Arts throughout the World	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/favicon.ico	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/favicon.ico	[ "https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d5E6wcjMiXk/VrY7v7gCLcI/AAAAAAAAGMc/TrIVMj7EB1A/s1600-r/MET_VdA.jpg", "https://lh4.ggpht.com/-0Zw3UYCR5IQ/VM2vti74ziI/AAAAAAAAEJY/AtFioIg3OF8/Winterreisen_Covers_20155.jpg?imgmax=800", "https://lh4.ggpht.com/-mAVVFTnWgck/VM2vuNTq91I/AAAAAAAAEJg/L-lKpx7pYfc/Franz-Schubert%25255B5%2525...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Joseph Newsome" ]	null	Founded in 2008, the primary goal of VOIX DES ARTS is to supplement the ever-decreasing—and, in terms of quality, the ever-deteriorating—coverage of the Performing Arts by mainstream media outlets. All content is written and copyrighted by Joseph A. Newsome.	en	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/favicon.ico		https://www.voix-des-arts.com/2015/01/	FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Winterreise, D. 911—(1) Zvi Emanuel-Marial, male alto; Philip Mayers, piano [Recorded in b-sharp Studio, Berlin, Germany, on 17, 21, and 23 October 2013; Thorofon CTH2615; 1 CD, 67:36; Available from ClassicsOnline, Amazon, jpc, and major music retailers] and (2) Daniel Behle, tenor; Oliver Schnyder Trio [Recorded in Zürich, Switzerland, 15 – 19 June 2013; Sony Classical 88883788232; 2 CDs, 125:56; Available from Amazon, jpc, iTunes, and major music retailers] Since the publication of the cycle in 1828, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise has been one of the benchmarks by which a singer’s fluency in Lieder repertory has been assessed. The array of voices by which the cycle has been sung and the range of interpretations to which the individual Lieder in Winterreise have been subjected are exceptionally broad. Winterreise on records will likely always be associated in the minds of many listeners, even those who never heard him otherwise, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, but among male interpreters of the cycle memorable accounts have been recorded by low voices as diverse as Gerhard Hüsch, Karl Schmitt-Walter, Hans Hotter, Kurt Moll, and Hermann Prey, as well as by tenors such as Peter Anders, Anton Dermota, Julius Patzak, Sir Peter Pears, Ernst Haefliger, and Ian Partridge. The first female singer to set her sights on Winterreise—in near-complete form on records, at least—seems to have been the magnificent German soprano Lotte Lehmann, whose idiosyncratic 1940 – ‘41 recording with her regular accompanist, Paul Ulanowsky, paved the way for notable later efforts by Lois Marshall, Brigitte Fassbaender, Christa Ludwig, Christine Schäfer, and Alice Coote. [Sadly, Elena Gerhardt’s famed interpretation of the cycle was not preserved in full.] The autograph keys suggest that Schubert intended Winterreise for tenor voice, but his fondness for the baritone voice of his friend Johann Michael Vogl is extensively documented. Vogl was the foremost interpreter of Die Schöne Müllerin, Schubert’s earlier cycle utilizing poetry by Wilhelm Müller, in the years between the completion of the cycle and his death in 1840, and though his relationship with Winterreise is less known to history he sang the complete cycle to great acclaim shortly before he died on the twelfth anniversary of Schubert’s death. In the generations since the first publication of Winterreise in two parts, a near-infinite progression of transpositions has altered the individual songs and the cycle as a whole. The Winterreisen on these new releases from Thorofon and Sony Classical present new perspectives on this endlessly enchanting trek through love, uncertainty, and resignation. Whatever novelties a recording of Winterreise proposes, it is the singing that must ultimately be the raison d’être. The voice is the only conduit for the emotional deluge of this music: without it, where can a Winterreise go? However the twenty-four Lieder in Winterreise are transposed, arranged, re-ordered, or reconfigured, they are fraught with difficulties for any singer regardless of Fach. Many singers have discovered that approaching Winterreise as an extended operatic scena is folly, as is tiptoeing through the music as though each Lied is a holy relic. It is a cycle that requires attention to its basic construction and cognizance of the ways in which Schubert utilized restrained musical structures to further the dramatic impetus portrayed in the texts. As an exhibition of unexaggerated sentiments expressed in song, Israeli male alto Zvi Emanuel-Marial’s Winterreise on Thorofon is a very personal journey that never descends into tasteless hyperbole. Possessing a lovely, soft-edged timbre, Mr. Emanuel-Marial must be applauded for singing the cycle without taking shortcuts or cautiously crawling through the music. Ably accompanied by Australian pianist Philip Mayers, whose playing instinctively matches the emotional nuances of his colleague’s interpretations of each song, the singer builds great cumulative force by approaching each song in succession with clear-headed simplicity. This is not a reading of grandiose philosophical aggrandizing: instead, it is a look—indeed, almost an intrusion—into a bare but not despondent explication of sentiments too ambivalent for expression via words alone. Mr. Emanuel-Marial opens his journey through Winterreise with an especially lovely account of 'Gute Nacht,' and there is a simple, boyish fascination at the heart of his voicing of 'Wetterfahne.' In 'Gefrorne Tränen' and 'Erstarrung,' the tessitura makes demands that Mr. Emanuel-Marial's voice can meet only with discernible effort, but what his performance costs him in the expenditure of vocal capital is handsomely repaid by the sagacity of his elucidation of text. His singing of 'Der Lindenbaum,' a song too often flippantly delivered, is endearing, the warmth of his enunciation of the vowels combining with the fluidity of Mr. Mayers’s pianism with rare grace. The imagery of ‘Wasserflut,’ ‘Auf dem Flusse,’ and ‘Rückblick’ is powerfully conveyed by Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s unaffected diction, and the stark but soft-edged realism of his performances of ‘Irrlicht,’ ‘Rast,’ and the sublime ‘Frühlingstraum’ is very effective. ‘Einsamkeit’ is executed with bleakness, all color drained from the voice. The anxiety of hearing the distant post-horn and the bitter disappointment of realizing that it heralds no news from the object of the narrator’s passion are palpably imparted by Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s agitated singing of ‘Die Post,’ and the restlessness of ‘Der greise Kopf’ finds a meaningful outlet in the singer’s and Mr. Mayers’s rhapsodic performance. The growing perceptions of natural phenomena as harbingers of psychological upheaval in ‘Die Krähe,’ ‘Letzte Hoffnung,’ ‘Im Dorfe,’ and ‘Der stürmische Morgen’ are pointedly translated into sound by Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s sparse vocalism. The taunting beacons of ‘Täuschung’ and ‘Der Wegweiser’ are decried with fervor, and the deceptive haven encountered in ‘Das Wirtshaus’ is denounced with heartbreaking hopelessness. The biting cold of the wind and snow in ‘Mut!’ shiver in the voice and piano, and the symbolic trinity of ‘Die Nebensonnen’ draws from singer and accompanist an expression of spellbound religiosity. There is unmistakable significance to Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s pronouncement of the final line of ‘Der Leiermann,’ ‘Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier dreh’n?’: the question is delivered directly to the listener, as if to say, ‘Will you walk with me, wherever this journey leads?’ The ambiguity in Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s tone, poised between romanticized masculinity and poetic androgyny, facilitates a construal of Winterreise that reverberates with melancholy and manic energy, and the singer and his accompanist give a performance of the cycle that is memorable for far more than its unconventionality. As in his Capriccio recording of Brahms's Die schöne Magelone, tenor Daniel Behle offers a pair of performances, one of Winterreise in its traditional form and another in an intriguing adaptation of his own composition. Many—perhaps most—of the instrumental arrangements of Winterreise that have been attempted in past have been egotistical endeavors, the primary goals of which were not to pay homage to Schubert’s genius but to provide opportunities for ambitious musicians to hone their compositional skills by tinkering with music of proven appeal. This emphatically is not the case with Mr. Behle’s reimagining of Winterreise. An artist of uncompromising integrity, Mr. Behle has looked very deeply into the most minute details of Schubert’s settings of Müller’s texts and extracted threads that he then reassembled in expanded form, neither disrupting the lyrical flow of Schubert’s thematic development nor imposing harmonic complexities that the basic structures of the music cannot sustain. This also is not vapid salon music, however, and it is not a wholesale restatement of Schubert’s piano accompaniments with decorative violin and cello obbligati. Instead, Mr. Behle has essentially transformed Winterreise into profoundly emotive chamber music for quartet, with the voice being the instrument charged with speech. Hearing him sing the cycle in this form, it seems virtually impossible that any other artist could do it justice, but Mr. Behle’s arrangement is one of a handful of loving adaptations that deserves attention from other singers and musicians undertaking Winterreise. Whether accompanying Mr. Behle in the traditional performance of the cycle or anchoring the trio in the tenor’s arrangement, pianist Oliver Schnyder is an attentive, unflappable source of grounded strength who plays as though he were singing the Lieder himself. Reveling in Schubert’s sometimes very wittily contrasted harmonies, he collaborates with Mr. Behle in the adoption of tempi that enable rhythmic precision without inhibiting dramatic flexibility. Violinist Andreas Janke and cellist Benjamin Nyffenegger play entrancingly, their phrasing informed by obviously multi-layered comprehension of the texts and an uncanny sensitivity to the subtleties of Mr. Behle’s interpretations. Individually and in ensemble, the instrumentalists respond to one another, to the singer, and to the ever-changing facets of Schubert's music with consummate artistry and the thrill of exploration missing from so many performances of the cycle. Solely in terms of vocalism, Mr. Behle is among the most successful performers of Winterreise on disc. He shares with Mr. Emanuel-Marial an unwonted freshness of approach, a sense of having come to the music without preconceptions or prejudices. It is only natural that a singer should give of his best when performing music that he arranged, but Mr. Behle possesses an ideal voice for Schubert’s vocal lines. His burnished lower register is heard to potent effect in the opening ‘Gute Nacht,’ both in the ‘traditional’ performance and in that of his arrangement. In fact, the singer’s exegesis of the songs remains strikingly consistent in both performances. The squeaking of a rusted weathervane is evoked in Mr. Behle’s ‘Wetterfahne,’ particularly in his own arrangement, and the crystalline beauty of tone that he devotes to ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ is inspiring. His singing of ‘Erstarrung’ has a deadened quality, the voice hollow with the disenfranchisement of a man who finds no trace of his beloved. Both with piano and with the trio, his ‘Der Lindenbaum’ glows with serene recognition. Like Mr. Emanuel-Marial, he unleashes startlingly vital tone painting in ‘Wasserflut,’ ‘Auf dem Flusse,’ and ‘Rückblick,’ and his handling of ‘Irrlicht’ exudes confusion and chagrin. Mr. Behle makes of ‘Rast,’ ‘Frühlingstraum,’ and ‘Einsamkeit’—three of the finest songs in the cycle—a strangely vivid triptych, closing the first half of Winterreise with an acutely erudite, almost sensual voicing of the line, ‘War ich so elend nicht.’ Mr. Behle begins ‘Die Post’ with a burst of optimism that quickly fades into anguish. A marvel of Mr. Behle’s performance is that he heightens the impact of the desolation of the text by intensifying the attractiveness of his singing. The prevailing sentiment of his account of ‘Der greise Kopf’ is the suggestion that suffering purifies human desires, and he transforms this conceit into an acceptance of the conflicting implications of nature manifested in ‘Die Krähe,’ ‘Letzte Hoffnung,’ ‘Im Dorfe,’ and ‘Der stürmische Morgen.’ The flickering light mentioned in Müller’s text in ‘Täuschung’ shines in Mr. Behle’s voice and in the instruments that support it. His wide-eyed contemplation of nature’s trickery in ‘Der Wegweiser’ contrasts with his recognition of the pain of human denial in ‘Das Wirtshaus.’ ‘Mut!’ bristles with irony, but, like Mr. Emanuel-Marial, he lends ‘Die Nebensonnen’ an atmosphere of hard-won tranquility. In the final song, ‘Der Leiermann,’ the lingering impression of Mr. Behle’s interpretation differs markedly from Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s: rather than seeking the companionship of the listener, Mr. Behle addresses his concluding query to himself, quietly appraising the ability of the narrator of Winterreise to carry on. Whether accompanied by piano in Schubert’s settings or by piano trio in his own noteworthy arrangement, Mr. Behle’s Winterreise is one of struggle endured with insurmountable grace. With so many superb song cycles, especially those by Czech, Polish, and Spanish composers, still virtually unknown beyond the ranks of the most conscientious connoisseurs of Art Song, why does Franz Schubert’s Winterreise remain a central pillar in the temple of song? Why, nearly two centuries after the shy composer’s death, are his songs still the standards by which singers’ abilities as Lieder interpreters are measured? In her book More Than Singing, the soprano Lotte Lehmann wrote that in Winterreise ‘the lover has come to realize the worthlessness of his beloved and knows at last that the love which was the greatest experience of his life, has been squandered on one who was incapable of appreciating the unique gift of true love and faith.’ It is the dichotomy of expressing the narrator’s realization of that worthlessness and maintaining at least a muted faith in love that makes performance of Winterreise one of the most fearsome experiences in lyric art. Each in his own way, Zvi Emanuel-Marial and Daniel Behle make the journey hauntingly, proving anew that the spectrum of emotions explored in the songs of Winterreise is limited only by the imaginations of the artists who perform them. Franz Peter Schubert (31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Der fliegende Holländer—Terje Stensvold (Der Holländer), Anja Kampe (Senta), Christopher Ventris (Erik), Kwangchul Youn (Daland), Jane Henschel (Mary), Russell Thomas (Der Steuermann); Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, WDR Rundfunkchor Köln, NDR Chor; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Andris Nelsons, conductor [Recorded during concert performances in the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 24 and 26 May 2013; RCO Live RCO 14004; 2 CD, 135:57; Available from ClassicsOnline, Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Few composers have been as successful at creating and perpetuating the impression of having emerged fully mature, Athena-like, from artistic infancy as Richard Wagner. To the observer acquainted with the scores that remain in the repertories of the world’s opera houses, it must indeed seem that the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal was at work even at the dawn of the composer’s career. Admittedly, unlike the works of almost all other composers but Monteverdi and Mozart [Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and complete Il trittico still are not performed as often as they deserve to be], all of Wagner’s mature operas remain in almost continuous circulation, but his early operas, those apt to be unknown to casual Wagnerians (and not without the composer’s tacit approval), only sporadically show the obvious handiwork of the genius of the Green Hill. Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi, all enjoyable works when appropriately performed, might justifiably be said to lack nothing needed to be typical grand operas except Auber’s, Halévy’s, or Meyerbeer’s signatures on their manuscripts. At its first performance in 1843, then, Der fliegende Holländer must have seemed incredibly radical even to those in the Dresden audience acquainted with the young Wagner’s style. In Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner embraced the ephemeral emotions of larger-than-life mythic characters that would guide the course of his creative development throughout his career, and his pioneering—but not altogether original, as is often suggested—use of leitmotivs took a major step towards Der Ring des Nibelungen. Celebration of the bicentennial of Wagner’s birth was the occasion for the concert performances in Amsterdam’s storied Concertgebouw that produced this recording on the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s house label, and a celebration it is: presented in clear, spacious sound with finer balance than has been achieved in many studio recordings, RCO Live’s performance of Der fliegende Holländer exults in the profuse musical and dramatic capacities of Wagner’s score. The quality that makes this performance of Der fliegende Holländer especially interesting, however, is its pragmatism. Rather than being a stilted, tumefied obeisance to a musical leviathan, this performance takes Der fliegende Holländer on its own terms, treating it as a living, sentient work, not a frigid artifact that must be admired only from a distance. In presiding over this or any performance of Der fliegende Holländer, Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons faces the enormous weight of history. In addition to a legacy shaped by notable performances and recordings guided by virtually every conductor with an affinity for Wagner repertory, Der fliegende Holländer has the provenance of having been conducted at its Dresden première by Wagner himself, a circumstance repeated only in the first performance of Tannhäuser two years later. In this performance, Maestro Nelsons exhibits a thorough grasp of the young Wagner’s idiom, marshaling the musical forces at his disposal with clear-sighted focus on the opera’s lofty climaxes, but the most impactful element of his approach to the score is the way in which he grants meticulous attention to small details without distorting the overall structure of the opera. There is more bel canto in Der fliegende Holländer—indeed, in all of Wagner’s mature operas—than many Wagnerians are willing to admit, and Maestro Nelsons does not hesitate to caress phrases with Italianate warmth. He is fortunate to have in the players of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra an ensemble of musicians whose versatility enables them to bring stylistic pertinence to virtually any repertory. Employing the three-act construction with the Norwegian setting rather than the composer’s original concept with the drama playing out in Scotland in a single act, this performance finds the RCO on representatively excellent form. From the first chords of the Ouvertüre, crucial brass and woodwind lines are delivered with near-perfect intonation, and the string playing is as sinewy as the music requires without being ponderous. The same might be said of the performance as a whole: muscle is never lacking when it is needed, but passages that benefit from delicacy receive it. The choristers of the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, NDR Chor [both directed by Martin Wright], and WDR Rundfunkchor Köln [led by David Marlow] sing sonorously whether portraying Senta’s friends, the hearty Norwegian sailors, or the Holländer’s eerie crew. In their seagoing duties, Wagner gave the chorus quite a lot of exclamations of ‘Hojoje,’ ‘Johohoe,’ and the like, and it is to the choristers’ credit that these do not sound as silly in this performance as they often do. The tenors are troubled by the tessitura, which often suspends them in the passaggio with frequent top Fs and Gs, but they cope without embarrassing themselves. In the Norwegian sailors’ ‘Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer,’ the gentlemen sound appropriately weary of the sea, and the ladies’ singing of the Spinning Chorus, ‘Summ’ und brumm’, du gutes Rädchen,’ is charmingly chatty. Then, however, they respond to Senta’s ballad with bracing immediacy in ‘Ach, wo weilt sie, die dir Gottes Engel einst könnte zeigen?’ The Norwegian sailors’ drinking song, ‘Steuermann! Laß die Wacht,’ is raucous, and the choruses’ voicing of the Holländer’s crew’s ‘Johohoe! Johohoe! Hoe! Hoe! Hoe!’ is chilling. There is audible diligence in every line sung by the choristers; a commitment not just to producing pleasing sounds but, equally importantly, to believably enacting their parts in the drama, as well. The presence of American mezzo-soprano Jane Henschel as Mary is the very definition of luxury casting. A true artist can make the smallest of parts significant, and Ms. Henschel makes more of Mary than almost any other recorded exponent of the rôle. Her interactions with Senta and the girls in the first minutes of Act Two are playfully scolding but genuinely concerned, and she creates a character who seems to live vicariously through Senta. Her singing of ‘Du böses Kind, wenn du nicht spinnst’ is both vivid and secure, traits that few singers have brought to Mary’s music on records. Moreover, Ms. Henschel’s timbre is always attractive, and she heightens the apprehension generated by the drama by sounding like an unnerved confidante rather than a superannuated duenna. Having rising American tenor Russell Thomas on hand as the Steuermann is also an example of the care with which these concert performances of Der fliegende Holländer were prepared. In his song, ‘Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer mein Mädel, bin dir nah,’ Mr. Thomas sings splendidly, rising to the top B♭ with ringing freedom. Aside from a few lapses in pitch, which were likely results of the difficulty of placing tones against the din of Wagner’s orchestra in full cry, his performance is striking. Like Ms. Henschel, Mr. Thomas sets a new, exalted standard in a rôle that has endured much poor singing on stage and on records. With extensive experience in a wide repertory under his belt, Korean bass Kwangchul Youn has grown into a cogent Wagnerian. As Daland in this performance, he starts uncertainly but quickly gains confidence as the performance progresses. In ‘Kein Zweifel! Sieben Meilen fort trieb uns der Sturm vom sichren Port,’ the repeated Cs, Ds, and E♭s at the top of the staff tax him, but the voice has appealing gravitas. In the duet with the Holländer, Mr. Youn evinces paternal affection for Senta in ‘Wie? Hör ich recht? Mein Tochter sein Weib?’ The subsequent scene with Senta, ‘Mein Kind, du siehst mich auf der Schwelle,’ inspires him to singing of pointed intensity, and he gives a firm, well-phrased account of his aria, ‘Mögst du, mein Kind, den fremden Mann willkommen heißen,’ handling it as a moment in the drama rather than a concerted number. Mr. Youn voices ‘Verzeiht! Mein Volk hält draußen sich nicht mehr’ in the trio with Senta and the Holländer with feeling, and he imparts a sense of understanding that his daughter is lost to him even before the opera’s final scene. The amalgamation of heft and finesse in Wagner’s music for Erik, Senta’s rejected suitor, complicates casting the rôle. The traditional tendencies have been either to give the part to a Heldentenor whose brute strength bruises the music or to cast a lighter, more lyric voice that cannot compete with the power of the orchestra. British tenor Christopher Ventris possesses a voice of logical proportions for Erik, and he sings the part capably without completely conquering the music’s difficulties. His delivery of ‘Bleib’, Senta! Bleib’ nur einen Augenblick!’ is ardent, and his ‘Senta! Laß dir vertrau’n’ conveys the sting of unrequited love. Mr. Ventris gives Erik’s cavatina, ‘Willst jenes Tags du nicht dich mehr entsinnen,’ a zealous reading, negotiating the turns and top B♭ with impressive composure. His top notes are generally solid, but the timbre sometimes takes on an unpleasant stridency. He is ultimately a skillful but not an ideal Erik, but this is a part in which honorable efforts are particularly commendable. German soprano Anja Kampe is one of the world’s preeminent Sieglindes in Die Walküre and, as she proved at Glyndebourne, an unconventional but unusually sensual Isolde. With the exceptions of Marjorie Lawrence, Kirsten Flagstad, Astrid Varnay, and Dame Gwyneth Jones, who also excelled as Brünnhilde, Senta has most often been best served by Sieglinde voices. Ms. Kampe is thus as natural a fit for the part as might be found today. Still, the voice that is not challenged by Senta’s music has not yet been heard, and Ms. Kampe faces some of the most murderous vocal lines in opera. In Senta’s ballad, ‘Johohoe! Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an,’ she manages the difficult intervals imposingly, and she brings great warmth to the section marked più lento by Wagner, ‘Doch, daß der arme Mann noch Erlösung fände auf Erden,’ Her singing sizzles with the fire demanded by the composer in the allegro con fuoco, ‘Ich sei’s, die dich durch ihre Treu’ erlöse!’ The exposed top A in Senta’s duet with Erik, ‘Er sucht much auf,’ soars, and she rises to the top As and Bs in the duet with the Holländer with abandon. The opera’s final scene is a formidable test for a soprano, and it is one that Ms. Kampe passes with voice and dramatic instincts to spare. With her poetic phrasing of ‘Wohl kenn’ ich Weibes heil’ge Pflichten,’ the top B launched heroically, she lends her Senta the aura of romanticized tragedy. The radiance of her ‘Von mächt’gem Zauber überwunden reißt mich’s zu seiner Rettung fort’ is complemented by the potency of her ‘Preis’ deinen Engel und sein Gebot! Hier steh’ ich, treu dir bis zum Tod!’ The final top A and B♭ are hurled out defiantly: this Senta does not accept her destiny: she seizes it. Vocally, Ms. Kampe sings Senta with far fewer compromises than many sopranos have found necessary, but it is the histrionic sovereignty of her interpretation that lingers in the memory. Sixty-nine years old at the time of the concert performances that yielded this recording, Norwegian baritone Terje Stensvold is a stern, commanding Holländer. There are instances in which loosening of the singer’s vibrato and approximations of pitch are evident, but Mr. Stensvold gives a more durable performance than many singers half his age might manage. He energetically constructs an imaginative account of ‘Die Frist ist um,’ traversing the aria’s wide range with enthusiasm. The top F in ‘Wie oft in Meeres tiefsten Schlund stürtz’ ich voll Sehnsucht mich hinab’ is a trial, but the zeal of his delivery of ‘Durch Sturm und bösen Wind verschlagen’ is rousing. Mr. Stensvold imparts suggestions of burgeoning tenderness in the duet with Senta, ‘Wie aus der Ferne längst vergang’ner Zeiten spricht dieses Mädchens Bild zu mir.’ His vehement utterance of ‘Verloren! Acht! verloren! Ewig verlor’nes Heil!’ and ‘Erfahre das Geschick, von dem ich dich bewahr’!’ is grandiose, and his ‘Du kennst mich nicht’ explodes with frustration and disappointment. Mr. Stensvold portrays a pessimistic Holländer who clings to hope of redemption despite his distrust of humanity. The voice is not always projected without effort, but it meets the requirements of the music with authority. 171 years after the opera’s first performance, it is easy both to overestimate the extent to which Der fliegende Holländer ushered in Richard Wagner’s artistic maturity as if by magic and to underestimate the quality of the score when considering it alongside the epic music dramas of the last fifteen years of the composer’s career. There is validity to the assertion that Der fliegende Holländer is a good introduction to Wagner’s singular gifts for those listeners for whom the later, considerably longer works are hard going, but Der fliegende Holländer is not—and should not be—‘light Wagner.’ RCO Live’s recording brings together an excellent cast, impeccably-prepared choruses, a responsive conductor, and one of the world’s great orchestras in a performance of searching zeal. This is a Der fliegende Holländer recommendable to novice Wagnerians, but it should also be heard by those curmudgeonly aficionados who argue that all truly momentous Wagner singers are dead and buried. Traft ihr das Schiff: Anja Kampe as Senta in Tim Albery’s production of Der fliegende Holländer at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2011 [Photo by Mike Hoban, © The Royal Opera House] JOHANN ADOLF HASSE (1699 – 1783): Siroe, rè di Persia (1763 Dresden version)—Max Emanuel Cenčić (Siroe), Franco Fagioli (Medarse), Julia Lezhneva (Laodice), Mary-Ellen Nesi (Emira), Lauren Snouffer (Arasse), Juan Sancho (Cosroe); Armonia Atenea; George Petrou, conductor [Recorded in Parnassos Hall, Athens, Greece, 21 – 31 July 2014; DECCA 478 6768; 2 CD, 170:28; Available from Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] When Johann Adolf Hasse's Siroe, re di Persia was first performed at Bologna's Teatro Malvezzi on 2 May 1733, the cast included a quintet of the most widely-celebrated singers of the Eighteenth Century: Vittoria Tesi, Anna Maria Peruzzini, Filippo Giorgio, and the castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli as the title monarch and his younger brother Medarse. Three years later, Farinelli reprised his rôle in performances at London's Haymarket Theatre, and Tesi and Caffarelli returned to their parts at the famed Teatro di San Carlo in Naples in 1747. In defiance of the hardship and devastation suffered by the Saxon capital during the Seven Years' War, Hasse was commissioned to adapt his setting of Metastasio's libretto for performance at the rejuvenated court of Elector Friedrich August II, who died two months after the revised Siroe was first performed on 3 August 1763. The extent of Hasse’s alterations to Siroe is difficult to ascertain 250 years later, but the Dresden score recorded by DECCA and Parnassus Arts Productions is a progressive work, its prevailing musical language being that of the formative utterances of Classicism. Supplementing the surviving music with material from Carl Heinrich Graun’s 1751 opera Britannico and Händel’s setting of Siroe, as well as from another of Hasse’s operas, Giovanni Andrea Sechi [handling arias] and Renzo Bez [responsible for Sinfonia, recitatives, and final chorus] have recreated the opera in an approximation of the form that, in 1763, distracted its composer from the misfortunes of war, which included the razing of his house. Comparing the results of their labors with the few surviving accounts of the 1733 Bologna première and subsequent revivals, the Dresden version of Siroe is a tauter, faster-moving work, though it is acknowledged that the present recording makes use of extensive cuts to secco recitative. Hasse’s extraordinary imagination is fully in evidence, however. As recorded here, Siroe lacks the expressive potential of the composer’s Artaserse, Cleofide, and Piramo e Tisbe, but the quality of the music is undeviatingly high. With only a few reservations, this recording—a release that upholds DECCA’s storied traditions of technical expertise and thoughtful presentation—preserves an account of the opera that advocates strongly for the justification of its revival. Most valuably, it is another small glimpse of the mosaic of Hasse’s creativity that remains mostly obscured by the grime of two-and-a-half centuries of neglect. As in their previous collaborations with DECCA and Parnassus, Armonia Atenea and George Petrou prove to be musicians of the highest order whose contributions construct excellent-quality frames for the musical portraits created by the singers. Leading from the harpsichord, Maestro Petrou exhibits an innate comprehension of Hasse’s musical-crossroads style, a trait that here expands on its airing on the previous DECCA release Rokoko. The conductor has an affinity for challenging both singers and instrumentalists without overwhelming them, and he proves especially adept in Siroe at propelling the drama excitingly. In a few of the bravura arias, however, Maestro Petrou’s tempi rush the singers unduly, which jeopardizes the potency of their efforts and increases the tension on their techniques. Assistant Conductor Markellos Chryssikos shares harpsichord duties with Maestro Petrou, and their efforts combine with the theorbo playing of Theodoros Kitsos to fashion a largely logical but lively continuo. Zacharias Tarpangos’s and Nikos Dimitratos’s sweet-toned playing of the transverse flutes is complemented by the lovely, appealingly stylish playing of oboists Yannis Papagiannis and Dimitris Vamvas, bassoonist Alexandros Economou, and horn players Costas Siskos and Spyros Kakkos. The string playing is wonderfully animated within the boundaries of period-appropriate practices. All of the musicians bring to the performance a sense of close cooperation, and, on the whole, this provides the singers with the support that they need to brave the perils of Hasse’s score. Among the sextet of gifted soloists, young American soprano Lauren Snouffer makes a magnificent major-label début with a splendidly-sung performance as the Persian general Arasse. Composed in 1733 for a lower voice, it is likely that Hasse substantially altered the tessitura of the part for the Dresden production in 1763 in order to make the music more congenial for a higher voice. In the Act One aria ‘Contente non siete d'un povero core,’ Ms. Snouffer discloses a strong technique that never fails her as the opera progresses. Allying a genuinely lovely, silvery timbre with dazzling fluidity in the bravura writing and a particularly attractive upper register, she delivers Arasse’s music, arias and recitatives alike, with the assurance of a veteran singer twice her age. Her singing is unabashedly feminine, but she conveys a suggestion of machismo with the confident swagger of her phrasing. Ms. Snouffer sings both of her subsequent arias, ‘Se pugnar non sai col fato’ in Act Two and ‘L'alma a goder prepara’ in Act Three, with such conviction that Arasse himself seems destined for the throne. Deeming a young singer promising has become a cliché, but this performance confirms that Ms. Snouffer, already an impressively finished singer, is an artist of exceptional promise, both in Baroque repertory and beyond. The rôle of Laodice, Arasse's sister, was specially crafted for Elisabeth Teyber, Hasse’s pupil, and the composer undoubtedly sought to give his student plentiful opportunities to cover herself—and him—in glory. In fine operatic fashion, Laodice is Cosroe’s mistress but is in love with his son Siroe, and her predicament—and the identity of her portrayer in Dresden, to be sure—prompts some extravagantly difficult music. Young Russian soprano Julia Lezhneva, already a mainstay of DECCA’s releases in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, is a Laodice of icy integrity, her accuracy in coloratura awe-inspiring but also slightly off-putting. Ms. Lezhneva’s bravura technique is phenomenal, but there are instances in this performance in which it sounds as though she is dangerously forcing the voice in the upper register. In Laodice’s aria in Act One, ‘O placido il mare lusinghi la sponda,’ she establishes herself as a central focus of the drama, and she perpetuates Laodice’s significance with electric performances of ‘Mi lagnerò tacendo’ in Act Two and ‘Se il caro figlio vede in periglio’ in Act Three. It is also in Act Three that the foremost mystery of this recording of Siroe is encountered. In both the track list and the libretto accompanying the CD release, the aria ‘Di tuo amor, mio cor è indegno’—a number borrowed from Act Two of Graun’s 1751 opera Britannico, in which it was set as an aria for Agrippina with the text ‘Mi paventi il figlio,’ in which form it was popularized in Berlin and Dresden in the Eighteenth Century by Gertrud Elisabeth Mara, in Vienna in the Nineteenth Century by Sophie Löwe (the creator of Donizetti’s Maria Padilla and Verdi’s first Elvira in Ernani and Odabella in Attila), and in London in 1856 by Pauline Viardot, who owned a manuscript score of the aria—is attributed to Emira, but there is no question that the aria is sung on the recording by Ms. Lezhneva, who has also sung Graun’s aria with its original text in concert. The text of ‘Di tuo amor, mio cor è indegno’ appears neither in Metastasio’s original libretto for Siroe when it was first set to music by Domenico Sarro in 1721 nor in the surviving materials from Hasse’s versions of the opera, so the most logical conclusion is that the aria was custom-fit with a newly-invented text in order to provide Ms. Lezhneva with a suitably fiendish bravura aria in which to further exercise her formidable technique. The aria fits that bill perfectly, and Ms. Lezhneva sings it staggeringly well if rather coldly, but not even the white-knuckle pyrotechnics display justifies the aria’s inclusion, especially as the source of the performing edition of the music is of questionable provenance. Musically and dramatically, the aria—very effective in its proper position in Act Two of Britannico, in which Agrippina bemoans her son Nero’s treachery—adds nothing but a flurry of notes to Siroe, and its interpolation is frankly an affront to Hasse, whose writing for the Dresden Siroe is already in danger of seeming superfluous. Why the aria is attributed to Emira but sung by Ms. Lezhneva is a conundrum. Furthermore, could an equally daunting piece not have been found in another of Hasse’s operas? Emira, the Princess of Cambay disguised during much of the opera as Idaspe, is sung by Greek mezzo-soprano Mary-Ellen Nesi, a fantastic singer who in this performances sounds slightly out of sorts. In Emira’s Act One aria, 'D'ogni amator la fede,' Ms. Nesi immediately commands attention with the boldness of her singing, but she does not sound completely comfortable with the rôle’s tessitura. In her aria in Act Two, 'Sgombra dall'anima tutto il timor,' Ms. Nesi is on more solid vocal ground, and the familiar strength of her singing is evident. The pinnacle of her performance is the aria ‘Non vi piacque, inguisti dei,’ which she sings with the concentration of an Olympic athlete and the dramatic intensity of a woman whose life seems on the brink of collapse. The ferocity of ‘Che furia, che mostro,’ Emira’s aria in Act Three, is palpably conveyed, but Ms. Nesi would have benefited from greater support from Maestro Petrou. She must push the voice in order to keep up with his tempo: keep up she does, but the hectic pace deprives her singing of a measure of its dark beauty. Ms. Nesi is always heard with pleasure, and it is indicative of the extraordinary quality of her artistry that a performance as accomplished as this one falls just short of her own standard. Sung in the 1763 Dresden production of Siroe by Angelo Amorevoli, a singer considered one of the greatest tenors of the first half of the Eighteenth Century who also created rôles in Hasse's Attilio Regolo and Solimano, Cosroe is assigned in this performance to Spanish tenor Juan Sancho. In recitative, Mr. Sancho is sometimes over-emphatic but always involved in the drama. His accompagnato with Siroe and Medarse in Act One, ‘Figli, di voi non meno che del regno son padre,’ is vigorously declaimed, and he brings tireless aplomb to the aria ‘Se il mio paterno amore,’ detonating one flashing tone in the vicinity of top C after another in his adventurous embellishment of the da capo. Cosroe has another powerful accompagnato in Act Two, ‘Più dubitar non posso, è Siroe l'infedel,’ and Mr. Sancho again spits out the words with vehemence. His singing of the aria ‘Tu di pietà mi spogli’ is robust, and the vulnerability that he infuses into the red-blooded urgency of the Act Three aria ‘Gelido in ogni vena scorrer mi sento il sangue’ enhances the impact of his shapely singing. Mr. Sancho creates a winsomely dispirited, vengeful monarch whose ultimate magnanimity is the culmination of a process of personal growth evinced through song. As sung by Argentine countertenor Franco Fagioli, Medarse is an iron-willed usurper whose ambitions overcome his innate decency. It was to Medarse that Hasse entrusted the final number of Act One, the coloratura showpiece ‘Fra l'orror della tempesta,’ which Mr. Fagioli sings majestically. Here and throughout the performance, Mr. Fagioli is stressed by Maestro Petrou’s tempi, and this results in an over-prominence of vibrato. His range extends to B♭5 and occasionally higher with few hints of strain, and even when cruelly tested by the music the voice is a first-rate instrument. Medarse’s arias in Acts Two and Three, ‘Tu decidi del mio fato’ and ‘Torrente cresciuto per torbida piena’ receive sterling performances, Mr. Fagioli’s technical composure enabling him to bring off incredible feats of virtuosity. In this sensitive singer’s performance, Medarse’s final confession and capitulation are unexpectedly touching: Mr. Fagioli manages to make the character one who seems truly contrite and deserving of forgiveness. His advocacy for Hasse having been expertly established with Rokoko, his recital of Hasse arias for DECCA, Croatian countertenor Max Emanuel Cenčić expands his familiarity with the composer’s engaging gallant idiom with a subtle, richly expressive performance of the wrongly-accused title character in Siroe. Mr. Cenčić’s Siroe is a prince of legitimate nobility who proclaims his innocence without resorting to harshness or hysterics. In the Act One aria ‘La sorte mia tiranna,’ Mr. Cenčić unleashes the very best of his artistry: singing the exquisite cantilena with firm, rounded tone, he phrases expansively. In Act Two, he differentiates the sentiments of the arias ‘Mi credi infedele’ and ‘Fra dubbi affetti miei’ imaginatively, all while singing with the rapt absorption that is his hallmark. His aristocratic utterance in the Act Three accompagnato ‘Son stanco, ingiusti Numi di soffrir,’ borrowed from Act Three of Händel's Siroe, is communicative of profound emotions, and his performance of ‘Vo disperato a morte,’ an aria extracted from Act Three of Hasse's 1738 Tito Vespasiano, is sensational. Most impressive is the sincerity with which Mr. Cenčić sings Siroe’s final aria, ‘Se l’amor tuo mi rendi.’ On stage and on disc, Mr. Cenčić has continually proved himself to be an artist of uncommon perceptiveness. In Siroe, too, he finds the soul of his character in the music and inhabits it unforgettably. That Johann Adolf Hasse was an important composer is a fact that is finally gaining acceptance beyond the ranks of musicologists and well-informed musicians. As recently as a decade ago, the notion of any of Hasse’s operas being recorded by DECCA would have seemed ridiculous. Siroe, re di Persia is not the most persuasive of Hasse’s operas, but it receives a persuasive performance on this recording despite decisions that diminish the rectitude of the enterprise. Qualms aside, this Siroe, re di Persia is a valuable addition to the expanding Hasse discography and a documentation of the work of some of today’s best period-adept singers. Hasse by Hand: the manuscript of the Sinfonia from the 1733 version of Hasse’s Siroe, re di Persia in the collection of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Stats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden GIOVANNI BONONCINI (1670 – 1747), GIOVANNI BATTISTA COSTANZI (1704 – 1778), FRANCESCO FEO (1691 – 1761), NICOLA PORPORA (1686 – 1768), DOMENICO SARRO (1679 – 1744), ALESSANDRO SCARLATTI (1660 – 1725), and LEONARDO VINCI (1690 – 1730): Arias for Domenico Gizzi – A star castrato in Baroque Rome—Roberta Invernizzi, soprano; I Turchini; Antonio Florio, conductor [Recorded in Sala del Vasari, Chiesa di Santa Anna dei Lombardi, Naples, Italy, 3 – 8 February 2014; Glossa GCD 922608; 1 CD, 56:49; Available from Glossa Music, ClassicsOnline, Amazon, fnac, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Born in Arpino in the Lazio region of Italy in 1687, Domenico Gizzi is familiar to Twenty-First-Century observers primarily as an acclaimed pedagogue whose pupils included the composer Francesco Feo and fellow soprano castrato and Arpino native Gioacchino Conti, who ultimately adopted the stage name Gizziello in homage to his tutor. It was as a singer that Gizzi conquered the aristocratic and archiepiscopal courts of Italy in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, however, and such were his accomplishments in opera that he could share the stage with his slightly younger colleague Farinelli with equal billing. Possessing a range that extant music composed for him suggests extended at least from C4 to B♭5, Gizzi was a celebrated exponent of a style of singing that in his lifetime was already falling victim to the caterwauling of shallow virtuosi. His own technique was undoubtedly extraordinary, but the high salaries that he commanded are surely evidence of gifts that extended beyond mind-boggling execution of bravura passagework. Indeed, it was for the expressive use of his voice rather than coloratura prowess that Gizzi's artistic namesake Gizziello was most praised during his tenure under Händel's management in London, and at least some of the credit for this must have been owed to Gizzi's example. Now not as renowned as a singer like castrati such as Farinelli, Caffarelli, Carestini, and Senesino, he was esteemed during his time before the public as one of the finest singers in Europe, the peer of the most talented of his colleagues. The thirteen arias on Arias for Domenico Gizzi – A star castrato in Baroque Rome, all of them extracted from operas that figured in Gizzi’s Roman career, facilitate the creation of a portrait of a singer who was obviously adept at delivering vocal pyrotechnics and evincing the emotional contexts that instigate them. Italian soprano Roberta Invernizzi is also such a singer, and she summons Gizzi’s spirit in this performance with singing of taste and pizzazz. He was unquestionably an important teacher, but if he sang these arias as well as Roberta Invernizzi sings them on this disc, he was indeed a true ‘star castrato.’ Ms. Invernizzi is one of the most stylish singers making a home in Eighteenth-Century repertory today, and her performances on this disc match the highest levels of achievement in recreating music composed for castrati. She is supported with elegance that complements her own poise by the superb musicians of I Turchini: concertmaster and noted musicologist Alessandro Ciccolini; violinists Patrizio Focardi, Paolo Cantamessa, Marco Piantoni, Claudia Combs, and Massimo Percivaldi; violist Rosario Di Meglio; cellist Alberto Guerrero; double bassist Giorgio Sanvito; and harpsichordist Patrizia Varone. Under the leadership of Antonio Florio, they give surprisingly robust performances of the Sinfonie from Alessandro Scarlatti’s 1718 Telemaco and Domenico Sarro’s 1720 Ginerva principessa di Scozia, proving that size of ensemble is not as important as the breadth of the interpretation. In each of the arias on the disc, Maestro Florio and I Turchini concoct a musical atmosphere that fosters the adventurous expressivity of Ms. Invernizzi’s singing. Ms. Varone’s harpsichord continuo is noticeably free of the over-complicated meandering that is often billed as period-appropriate continuo realization, and this closer adherence to stylistic accuracy as it is presently understood is considerably more imaginative than more fanciful efforts. Mr. Ciccolini has an exceptional historically-informed bowing technique but likewise lacks nothing in passion. Following Ms. Invernizzi and Maestro Florio with flawless attention, the instrumentalists produce sounds that seem extensions of the singer’s voice. In Rome at the time of Arcangelo Corelli’s reign as the Eternal City’s presiding instrumental genius, Gizzi likely enjoyed the finest musical support available in Italy: in a project in which nothing was left to chance, Ms. Invernizzi can make a similar claim in the context of this disc. A tendency to accentuate the downbeats in coloratura passages notwithstanding, Ms. Invernizzi’s performance of Mirene’s aria ‘Amore inganna, e piace’ from Giovanni Bononcini’s 1719 L’Etearco is a magnificent feat of Baroque singing, the divisions tossed off with élan and the vowels on the breath as they must be in music of this nature. Insightfully used to her advantage, occasional edginess at the top of the range sharpens the focus of Ms. Invernizzi’s phrasing. The same character’s aria ‘Barbari siete, o Dei,’ perhaps the finest single piece on the disc, is engrossingly sung, the greater simplicity of the melodic line prompting Ms. Invernizzi to singing of engaging subtlety. The pair of beautiful eyes evoked in the text shine like sapphire pools in winter sunlight in Ms. Invernizzi’s expansively-shaped singing of Farnace’s aria ‘Per due pupille belle’ from Giovanni Battista Costanzi’s 1730 L’Eupatra, and the wide intervals in Pirro’s ‘Prima 'l vorace fulmine,’ the first of the two arias from Francesco Feo’s 1730 Andromaca included on the disc, are negotiated with consummate artistry. In all of the selections on Arias for Domenico Gizzi, Ms. Invernizzi’s ornamentation is bold without being vulgar, and she makes frequent use of the bright sheen of her upper register in a manner that avoids taking the voice out of the range that was likely comfortable for Gizzi. Pirro’s subsequent aria ‘No, non mi basterà bocca vezzosa’ draws from Ms. Invernizzi vocalism that throbs with emotion. Feo having been Gizzi’s pupil, it must be assumed that he knew his teacher’s voice intimately: he might have known Ms. Invernizzi’s just as well. ‘Volo il mio sangue a spargere,’ an aria sung by Idelberto in Nicola Porpora’s 1723 Adelaide, is dashingly delivered, every tone placed with dramatic impact and the words fizzing like sparkling wine. The pair of Ariodante’s arias from Sarro’s Ginerva principessa di Scozia, an homage to the native Britain of James Francis Edward Stuart, the deposed Prince of Wales and a prominent patron of the Arts at his Italian court-in-exile, ‘Povero amor tradito’ and ‘Cieca nave, infidi sguardi,’ are powerfully traversed. It was in a secondary rôle in Sarro’s Il Valdemaro that the fifteen-year-old Caffarelli made his professional début in 1726, alongside Gizzi’s performance of the rôle of Sveno. If Gizzi sang the aria ‘La brama di regno si unisce ad amore’ as engrossingly as Ms. Invernizzi sings it on this disc, Caffarelli cannot have failed to have been inspired by the experience. The soprano’s beautiful sustained tones in ‘Crude Parche, deh, accrescete’ from Scarlatti’s Telemaco afford great pleasure, and she manages to make something very unique of the formulaic coloratura in ‘O a morire, o a goder.’ His participation in the creation of Leonardo Vinci’s 1726 Didone abbandonata was one of the great triumphs of Gizzi’s Roman sojourn, and Ms. Invernizzi’s fantastic coloratura in Araspe’s aria ‘Amor che nasce colla speranza’ channels the vivacity with which Gizzi must have sung the music. Here and in the aria ‘Su la pendice alpina,’ her upper register glistens, and her embellishing of the vocal lines is unfailingly intelligent. Without overextending the music, she reveals what an inventive, resourceful singer she is. It is impossible to know how any of the revered castrati of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries sounded. Contemporary accounts of their voices are often contradictory, and many of the artistic representations of their stage presences are unflattering caricatures. A prevalent debate in the Baroque revival during the past half-century has concerned whether operatic rôles composed for castrati are more effectively cast in modern times with female or male singers. There are no sure answers for questions about the general suitability of certain types of voices for music created by castrati, but Roberta Invernizzi here makes a persuasive argument for her supremacy in performances of rôles originated by higher-voiced castrati. Her singing on Arias for Domenico Gizzi is distinguished by technical finesse and an laudable lack of attempts to affect masculinity. Like Kirsten Flagstad in the music of Wagner, Maria Callas in bel canto, and Magda Olivero in verismo, Roberta Invernizzi approaches this collection of arias sung by Domenico Gizzi with pure musicality. It is an approach that yields glorious results. Looking Back: A tribute to 60’s music and dedication to my best friend—Rich Stephen, all vocals and instruments [Recorded in 2014; Private release, DVR 2014; NOTE: Looking Back is not available commercially. All arrangements are the intellectual property of Rich Stephen. Copyrights are held by the original artists and/or songwriters, and no performance rights are stated or implied.] There are many extremely talented musicians active in all genres of music today, and that is a fact that is acknowledged far too infrequently. Today’s musicians are, on the whole, better educated, better equipped, and better prepared for careers than their counterparts in any previous generation, but this progress is not consistently rewarded with better music-making. The well-schooled musician is not necessarily the well-informed musician, and a musician with a haphazard knowledge of the roots in his own musical garden may achieve technical perfection without ever attaining a level of connection with the life force beyond lyrics and melodies. Whether in recordings of Beethoven piano sonatas, Verdi operas, Mahler symphonies, jazz riffs, R&B ballads, or pop hits, what is sadly so seldom heard on albums now is true, discernible affection for music itself. Clinical precision is perhaps its own kind of love, but it is one that is perceived by the listener only with the greatest difficulty. Where are today’s Dave Brubeck, Eric Burdon, and Glenn Gould, artists whose recordings seemed to say, ‘This is who I am, this is what I do, and if it does not appeal to you, listen to something else’? This is the spirit of Rich Stephen’s Looking Back. This disc is not an egotistical commercial exercise, a stepping stone in a quest for stardom, or a venture with ulterior, non-musical motives. Rich Stephen loves music and the incredible power that it has to immortalize people, places, and emotions in our lives in ways that memories cannot replicate. Looking Back is not meant to be a chart-topping effort from a neglected star singer: rather, it is one man’s journey through songs and experiences shared with friends. That is the purest essence of music and the quality that makes Looking Back a vastly more fulfilling experience than the over-processed endeavors of musicians whose artistic achievements are measured in dollars and cents, not hours with friends and unforgettable jam sessions that no other ears will ever hear. Providing lead and harmonizing vocals and playing a dizzying array of instruments—Fender Stratocaster, Lead III, and Mustang guitars, Prestige electric guitar, Yamaha acoustic guitar, Ibanez bass guitar, Casio CT-700 keyboard, Kurzweil Mark 3 digital piano, Zoom RhythmTrak RT-123, Olds Ambassador trumpet, Starmaker Garimet cornet, Buescher alto saxophone, and Huang Silvertone deluxe harmonica!—on the cuts on Looking Back, Mr. Stephen takes the listener on a chronological journey through some of his favorite songs from the 1960s. A member of a successful band called The Right Ways, active in metropolitan Chicago during the latter half of the ‘60s, he pays homage to an era that he experienced first-hand during his own musical infancy. Along with his best friend Art Gall (1951 – 2012), to whose memory Looking Back is dedicated, he launched his career as an avid concertgoer in 1965 with a performance by The Beatles—as auspicious an introduction to contemporary Rock ‘n Roll as any aspiring musician might desire. The Beatles medley is one of the most enjoyable tracks on Looking Back. Beginning with a boyishly spirited account of ‘Love Me Do’ (1962), he traverses the too-little-heard ‘Boys’ (1963), previously recorded by The Shirelles in 1960, ‘Slow Down’ (1964), and George Harrison’s tremendous ‘If I Needed Someone’ (1965), also a hit for The Hollies, all sung with heart and surer pitch than is sometimes heard on the original recordings. Mr. Stephen appropriately closes the disc with the The Beatles’ 1965 ‘In My Life,’ one of the finest numbers in the Lennon – McCartney songbook: the combination of wistfulness and optimism in Mr. Stephen’s vocals honors John Lennon’s inimitable style without attempting to emulate it, and he exhibits a winsome lightness of touch in his rendering of Sir George Martin’s Bach-inspired piano ritornello. Mr. Stephen’s performances of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Fire’ (1967) and The Doors’ ‘Touch Me’ (1969) incorporate recordings of Art Gall’s vocals from 1989 rehearsal footage, seamlessly integrated into the 2014 tracks. Here, as in The Beatles covers, Mr. Stephen does not attempt to replicate Hendrix’s and Jim Morrison’s unique vocals, but his own singing, combined with the archival sampling of Mr. Gall’s vocals, is rousingly effective. Fellow Illinois band The American Breed’s ‘Step Out Of Your Mind’ receives particularly fresh treatment from Mr. Stephen, his confident performance of the melodic line improving upon Gary Loizzo’s vocals in the original 1967 recording. Sam Cooke’s 1960 ‘Wonderful World,’ one of the truly emblematic songs of the ‘60s that was also successfully recorded by Herman’s Hermits, is delightfully and imaginatively sung by Mr. Stephen, and he soars through The Drifters’ 1961 ‘Sweets for My Sweet,’ the original recording of which featured a then-undiscovered Dionne Warwick as a backup singer, and Martha and the Vandellas’ 1963 ‘Heat Wave,’ in which he provides Motown styling that Martha Reeves would surely applaud. Mr. Stephen unites his Chicago roots and the British Merseybeat with his performance of The Searchers’ 1963 ‘Sugar and Spice,’ a number-two hit in the UK that was also a success for Illinois band The Cryan’ Shames in 1966, and his accounts of The Zombies’ ‘She’s Not There’ (1964)—a rare minor-key number with which Santana also charted more than a decade later—and The Yardbirds’ rhythm-driven ‘For Your Love’ (1965) confirm his credentials as a razor’s-edge rocker. Sam and Dave’s 1966 classic ‘Hold On, I’m Comin’’ and Brenton Wood’s 1967 ‘Gimme Little Sign’—a great song now more familiar, for better or worse, via Peter Andre’s later version—give Mr. Stephen the opportunity to flex his impressive soul muscles, and his fantastic rendition of ‘Kind Of A Drag’ (1966) is a brilliant tribute to fellow Chicagoans The Buckinghams. Mr. Stephen’s way with Todd Rundgren’s 1968 ‘Hello It’s Me,’ originally recorded by his band Nazz, revels in the funk vibes that made the song so attractive to Mary J. Blige and John Legend. Musically, the pinnacle of Looking Back is Mr. Stephen’s stirring performance of The Grass Roots’ ‘Midnight Confessions’ (1968), in which his vocals give the arching melody the gleaming freedom it demands but seldom receives. [I heard the then-current incarnation of The Grass Roots perform ‘Midnight Confessions’ in Westbury, New York, in 2013: Mr. Stephen sings it markedly better.] In all of the tracks on this disc, Mr. Stephen adapts his laser-bright timbre to the stylistic nuances of the music without abandoning the singular vocal signature that he imprints on each song, and his skills on all of the instruments at his disposal are splendid. ‘Looking Back,’ the disc’s title track, is Mr. Stephen’s self-penned tribute to Mr. Gall, and it serves both as a moving remembrance of a beloved friend and fellow artist and a fitting overview of Mr. Stephen’s musical upbringing and accomplishments. The song’s hook is immediately alluring, and the depths of emotion that Mr. Stephen conveys in his vocals and accompaniment are evidence of the compelling sincerity of the song’s message. Both its eponymous track and Looking Back as a whole epitomize the ethos missing from so many of the ridiculously-hyped albums churned out by the commercial recording industry. They also remind the listener that one man with a pervasive, unaffected love for music can make a recording that shames the phony efforts of labels with deep pockets and legions of cynical would-be ‘stars.’ To learn more about Rich Stephen and his work as a musician, please visit his website. PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY / Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский (1840 – 1893): Iolanta (Иоланта), Op. 69—Anna Netrebko (Iolanta), Sergey Skorokhodov (Count Vaudémont), Alexey Markov (Robert), Vitalij Kowaljow (King René), Luka Debevec Mayer (Bertrand), Lucas Meachem (Ibn-Hakia), Junho You (Alméric), Monika Bohinec (Martha), Theresa Plut (Brigitta), Nuška Drašček Rojko (Laura); Slovenian Chamber Choir; Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra; Emmanuel Villaume, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during concert performances at the Philharmonie Essen, Germany, in November 2012; Deutsche Grammophon 479 3969; 2 CDs, 93:02; Available from Amazon, iTunes, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Premièred in St Petersburg on 18 December 1892, less than a year before its composer’s death, Iolanta was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s final opera and, in many ways, one that summarized his career as a composer for the operatic stage. Setting a libretto by his brother Modest, Tchaikovsky peeled away the artifice of the aggrandized tale of Yolande de Lorraine, who almost certainly was not blind, and replaced it with an idealized but red-blooded humanity. As in Yevgeny Onegin and Pikovaya dama, the central theme of individual isolation lends Iolanta depth that heightens the sense of connection among the princess who does not know that she is blind, the man who loves her in spite of her trials, and the audience, and, as in Nutcracker and Swan Lake, even the happy ending is not without suggestions of ambivalence. To modern ears, some of the sentiments expressed in Iolanta seem quaint, perhaps even misogynistic, but to the extraordinarily sensitive Tchaikovsky, a genius perennially at odds with the society into which he was born, Iolanta must have seemed a kindred spirit. For her, blindness—the barrier to her complete acceptance by society, by which she is pitied and shielded—is not a disability, disease, or disorder: it is a reality of which she is aware despite not knowing that her blindness separates her from her physical and social surroundings. This surely resonated with Tchaikovsky, whose correspondence from the final year of his life discloses a despondent weariness with the necessity of false conformity. Recorded during concert presentations in the Philharmonie Essen with the sonic excellence for which Deutsche Grammophon titles have been renowned throughout the label’s history, this recording of Iolanta allows this wonderful score to resonate with a new generation of listeners. Perhaps much of the interest in this recording will be prompted by the famous name at the head of the cast. So be it. In this case, the bearer of that name justifies its prominence and must be thanked for giving Tchaikovsky’s endearing heroine an opportunity to transport listeners beyond what can be seen. Conducted with persuasive Gallic refinement by Emmanuel Villaume, the Slovenian Chamber Choir and Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra approach Tchaikovsky’s music with energy and sophistication. There is in Iolanta a pervasive kinship with the music of Jules Massenet, and Maestro Villaume instinctively responds to the melancholic Francophile undercurrents in the score, exercising a firm control on thematic development in ensembles. Massenet and Tchaikovsky shared a great affection for Mozart, and even in this final opera of his career there is a Mozartean grace in Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations. Maestro Villaume avoids inflating any phrase or scene to dimensions greater than the music can sustain. Starting with strongly-sung accounts of ‘Vot tebe lyutiki’ (‘Вот, тебе, лютики’) and ‘Spi, pust' angelï krïlami navevayut snï’ (‘Спи, пусть ангелы крылами навевают сны’), the choristers convincingly portray the differing rôles assigned to them, sounding comfortable with Tchaikovsky’s most stringent demands. The orchestral players leave no doubt that the musical glories of Slovenia’s past, when Ljubljana was a jewel in the diadem alongside Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, have been lovingly maintained. The strings produce formidably sure intonation that complements the earthy wind playing, combining Germanic rectitude with Mediterranean flexibility. This is an ideal formula for playing the music of Tchaikovsky, whose unmistakably Russian musicality was spiced with doses of French cosmopolitanism, Teutonic ruggedness, and Italianate rusticity. Those who assume that Iolanta is an inferior score because it is performed less frequently than Yevgeny Onegin or Pikovaya dama do Tchaikovsky a great disservice: Maestro Villaume and the Slovenian Philharmonic forces affirm that Iolanta is smaller in stature than her siblings but equally effective, musically and dramatically. As Iolanta’s companions Brigitta and Laura, Canadian soprano Theresa Plut and Slovenian mezzo-soprano Nuška Drašček Rojko sing attractively, bringing delightfully unique touches to their performances and combining flawlessly with Slovenian mezzo-soprano Monika Bohinec’s Martha in their sumptuous little trio. Ms. Bohinec is an alert singer with a distinctive voice, and she aptly conveys affection and concern for Iolanta. Singing Bertrand with a robust timbre and apparent dramatic instincts, bass-baritone Luka Debevec Mayer is a suitable consort for Ms. Bohinec’s Martha. His slightly imperious demeanor is appropriate for the castle doorkeeper who, like Raimondo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, is the de facto guardian of King René and his family honor. South Korean tenor Junho You makes a similarly positive impression in his duties as Alméric, King René's armor-bearer. Few performances, whether on stage or on disc, enjoy such consistently fine work in supporting rôles: great indeed were the vocal riches of medieval Burgundy! American baritone Lucas Meachem is here given a vehicle in which to display his virile, brusquely beautiful voice in music that enables this tremendously gifted young singer to show what he can do. There are in his interpretation of the Moorish physician Ibn-Hakia unexpectedly noble sentiments. Far too often, this rôle is enacted as an uncomfortable stereotype, but Mr. Meachem finds in his music sympathetic threads of sincerity and feeling. The celebrated monologue ‘Dva mira’ (‘Два мира: плотский и духовный’) is the cornerstone of the part, and Mr. Meachem manages its sixteenth-note triplets and sustained top F♯ with absolute freedom and panache. Hearing his performance, it is unusually obvious that Ibn-Hakia plays a crucial part in the emotional transition that accompanies the physical restoration of Iolanta’s sight. Frequently merely a conjurer, Ibn-Hakia is in Mr. Meachem’s hands a true healer. This brilliantly-sung performance raises hopes that, in time, recordings of his Onegin and Yeletsky will follow. As Robert, the man torn between his duty to honor an arranged betrothal to Iolanta and his passionate love for another woman, Russian baritone Alexey Markov exudes chivalrous masculinity in singing of power and security. In Robert’s aria extolling the virtues of his true love, ‘Kto možet sravnit'sya’ (‘Кто может сравниться с Матильдой моей’), he negotiates the high tessitura—the second note of the aria is a sustained top E, leading quickly to a sustained top F♯—with refreshing ease, and his fortissimo top G is a thrilling tone. Like Mr. Meachem, Mr. Markov eschews all vestiges of conventional operatic preening and sings his rôle with compelling honesty. The scene in which Robert agrees to honor his commitment to Iolanta though his heart belongs to another is strangely moving thanks to Mr. Markov’s forthright performance. It is impossible not to think of Tchaikovsky himself feeling forced to wed, contrary to his desires, in order to keep up appearances. Vocally, Mr. Markov’s Robert is a marvel, and it is heartening to hear a young singer trusting a composer’s music so implicitly. A fusion of Verdi’s Rigoletto and Simon Boccanegra, Wagner’s Wotan, and Tchaikovsky’s own Kochubey in Mazeppa, King René in Iolanta is a flawed but earnestly protective father whose actions are inspired by recognition of even a king’s inability to thwart social stigmas. As sung by Swiss-Ukrainian bass Vitalij Kowaljow, he is a warmly sonorous presence whose good nature does not prevent a streak of iron from showing when his daughter’s wellbeing seems jeopardized. Though his vibrato occasionally loosens slightly, Mr. Kowaljow’s command of the range required by René music is appreciable. In the king’s arioso, ‘Gospod' moy, esli grešen ya’ (‘Господь мой, если грешен я’), the singer unperturbedly traverses the two octaves from F2 to F4 and exhibits no fear in the repeated ascents to top E♭. The gruffness of his threats of execution does not fully disguise a basic geniality, and he enhances the dignity of his performance with his clear, unaffected enunciation of text. It is a pity that Russian is notoriously difficult for non-native speakers because it is a gorgeous language for singing, something that Mr. Kowaljow makes particularly noticeable in this performance. King René launches the opera’s finale with ‘Prosti menya, ya obmanul tebya’ (‘Прости меня, я обманул тебя’), and Mr. Kowaljow sings it confidently. His well-supported, dark-hued sound brings to mind the voices of Feodor Chaliapin and Mark Reizen, and even when René’s decisions are misguided this singer’s deliveries of them are assured and appealing. For excitement, intensity, and golden tone, the performance of Russian tenor Sergey Skorokhodov as Count Vaudémont is astounding. To date, this young singer’s repertory at the Mariinsky ranges from Donizetti's Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor and Nemorino in L'elisir d'amore to Wagner's Lohengrin and the Shepherd in Szymanowski's Król Roger, and his experience with these rôles prepared him to impersonate a Vaudémont of ringing ardor. He begins his romance, ‘Net! Čarï lask krasï myatežnoy’ (‘Нет! Чары ласк красы мятежной’), with an endearing aura of lovesick wonder, and he is little bothered by the high tessitura of the aria proper, which opens on top A♭. He rises to the long-held top B♭ with total security. In the wonderful duet with Iolanta, ‘Čudnïy pervenec tvoren'ya’ (‘Чудный первенец творенья’), the outpouring of firm, youthful tone is encouraging. Throughout his performance, Mr. Skorokhodov sings with a very welcome lack of traditional tenor posturing, credibly portraying a young man near to bursting with new love. This sometimes leads to a sameness of approach and bluntness of phrasing, but the lyric splendor of the voice disarms complaint. Mr. Skorokhodov is clearly an invaluable treasure of the Mariinsky, one whose 2010 Metropolitan Opera début in Shostakovich’s The Nose continued the legacy of great Russian tenor singing in New York exemplified in the 1990s by Vladimir Atlantov, and this performance confirms the legitimacy of his place in the tradition of the legendary Ivan Kozlovsky. In her performance of the title rôle in Iolanta, a portrayal that she brings to the Metropolitan Opera in the current season, soprano Anna Netrebko displays the full panoply of the qualities that elevated her to the top of her profession. One of the most acclaimed sopranos of her generation, Ms. Netrebko is an important singer who has not always sounded like one. In her—or her management’s—quest for stardom on the world’s stages, she has appropriated bel canto and Verdi rôles to which the voice is not ideally suited by nature, and her musical success has been sporadic. Even in her native Russian, her diction is imperfect, but as Iolanta she offers an example of the Anna Netrebko of worldwide adulation. In Iolanta’s arioso, ‘Otčego ėto prežde ne znala’ (‘Отчего это прежде не знала’), its tessitura centered in the lower octave of the voice, Ms. Netrebko sings lusciously, the tone focused and caressing the line cresting on top A♭. The duet with Vaudémont, ‘Čudnïy pervenec tvoren'ya’ (‘Чудный первенец творенья’), finds her interacting with Mr. Skorokhodov with unforced chemistry, and she takes the profusion of top As and the exhilarating top B♭ at the duet’s end in stride, the voice remaining secure and capably-projected. Her phrasing of ‘Gde ya? Kuda vedyoš' menya tï, vrač!’ (‘Где я? Куда ведешь меня ты, врач!’) and ‘Blagoy, velikiy, neizmennïy’ (‘Благой, великий, неизменный’) in the opera’s final scene is masterful, and the immediacy of the dramatic profile that she creates for Iolanta is specific but nuanced. In every scene in which she appears, she matches an insightful understanding of her rôle with an authoritative grasp of the music. The intermittent blowsiness of her tone here seems to result from the increased weight and amplitude of the voice rather than from hard use, and the solidity of her intonation throughout the range is wonderful. Iolanta is a near-perfect fit for Ms. Netrebko, and it is a joy to hear her sing the part so meaningfully and with such uncompromising musicality. With Ms. Netrebko and Mr. Markov reprising their rôles in this season’s Metropolitan Opera première of Iolanta, opening on 26 January, the opera’s familiarity will hopefully expand exponentially. An eloquent, strangely bewitching product of Tchaikovsky’s mature genius, the score is worthy of the respect and recognition devoted to Yevgeny Onegin and Pikovaya dama. In this recording, Iolanta is superbly performed by an ensemble of musicians who understand its worth and potential, and in the company of dedicated colleagues the leading lady proves that she is a significant artist, not just a cleverly-managed approximation of one. Iolanta is an opera that reminds the listener that each of us is blind to some aspect of life, and Deutsche Grammophon’s recording provides an eye-opening experience. Coming soon to a Forbidden City near you: soprano Othalie Graham, leading lady of Opera Carolina’s 2015 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot [Photo © Othalie Graham; used with permission] The individual fortunate enough to have heard any of the very few truly great interpreters—Dame Eva Turner, Gina Cigna, Gertrude Grob-Prandl, Birgit Nilsson, Dame Gwyneth Jones—or, to an even greater extent, unfortunate enough to have experienced the legions of under-prepared, undernourished, and simply bewildered exponents cannot possibly dispute the assertion that Puccini’s Turandot is one of the most demanding, destructive, and mistreated rôles in the soprano repertory. Perhaps the most damning mistake a potential Turandot can make is thinking that the foremost challenge of the part is the tessitura. Few things in opera are more terrifying than the pair of top Cs that Turandot must fire over the chorus in Act Two, and the profusion of top Bs and Cs is throat-numbing, but the Turandot who primarily focuses on the exposed high notes—something that she should not have to do in that musical utopia in which singers only sing rôles for which their voices are suited and reliably possess the required notes with being forced to rob Tosca to pay Turandot—deprives both herself and the audience of the true glories of the part. These glories—the insecurity masquerading as cruelty, the blissful discombobulation of true love, the gritty self-preservation and marvels of self-discovery—are indelible traits in the Turandot of soprano Othalie Graham. In a production opening on 24 January 2015, she brings her acclaimed portrayal of Puccini’s most granitic heroine to Charlotte’s Opera Carolina opposite the Calàf of Carl Tanner and the Liù of Dina Kuznetsova: courtesy of Opera Carolina, a bona fide princess will be enthroned in the Queen City. Canadian by birth and American by adoption, Ms. Graham is Italian by nature—musical nature, at least. She is an artist with a rare gift not just for singing Puccini heroines but for inhabiting them, for finding within the pages of the composer’s scores fully-formed women whose emotions she feels, not feigns. As Minnie in La fanciulla del West, a rôle in which many sopranos seem to focus almost obsessively on the climactic exposed top C in ‘Laggiù nel Soledad’ while the nuances of the part are neglected, Ms. Graham surrenders herself completely to the golden-hearted girl’s predicament, shaping the narrative with attention to dramatic verisimilitude rather than individual notes. Of course, this is an easier task when, as in her case, the notes are in the voice and the singer knows it. Similar insightfulness is at the core of her interpretation of Turandot. Complete cognizance of one’s own voice is rare enough, but the ability to translate one’s vocal capabilities into a lushly-realized spectrum of emotional colors is even more precious. These traits define Ms. Graham’s singing in any repertory, but in Puccini’s music for Turandot they initiate her into the exalted company of the handful of sopranos whose portrayals of the ‘principessa di gelo’ melted the frosty separation between the character and audiences. Principessa altera: soprano Othalie Graham in the title rôle of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot [Photo used with permission] In practical terms, Turandot is a rôle without precedent in the Italian repertory, and Ms. Graham views her as both one of the greatest challenges and an uncommonly rewarding opportunity for a soprano. ‘I love to play a character that has such an incredible arc,’ she says. ‘For Turandot to start off so icy and imperious while having a continually-running undercurrent of vulnerability makes it a lot more fun!’ More than many Turandots, for whom trumpeting out the notes is the paramount concern, Ms. Graham is particularly attentive to the subtler nuances of the part. ‘I think that she has to have that soft underbelly that she continually covers with her rhinoceros hide! It makes Act Three much more believable,’ she suggests. This philosophy is evident in her approach to the opera, which combines indefatigable musicality with an exceptional degree of sensitivity. It is a philosophy that extends to many aspects of life and Art, Ms. Graham feels. If she could give Turandot advice, she muses, ‘I would tell her that it’s okay to be such a strong woman but that she has to allow herself to open enough to let love in. I think that’s true of many women.’ The relationship between Turandot and her father, Emperor Altoum, is of great but often overlooked significance to the plot of Turandot. Because of her own life experience, Ms. Graham is uniquely responsive to this element of the drama. ‘Before I head to makeup,’ she confides, ‘when I arrive at the theater, I always walk out to the stage and kneel down and ask God to help my father hear me sing. I lost my father, the great love of my life, when I was twenty-five years old and he was forty-eight. There is nothing more important to me than knowing that he hears me.’ As she faces Turandot’s father on stage, her thoughts fly to her own father, and love for him soars in her voice as she sings ‘In questa reggia.’ ‘Right before I sing that fiendishly difficult aria, I always look up, knowing that he’s there and that he hears me,’ she shares. The intensity of her connection with her father is paralleled by the bond between Turandot and her imperial sire, and it is indicative of Ms. Graham’s commitment to her artistry that, even from behind the curtain, she shares such an intimate aspect of herself with audiences via song. For many sopranos bold enough to sing Turandot, the foremost goal of a performance is survival. For Ms. Graham, the goal is and must always be beauty. Her abiding objectives are to honor Puccini’s requests and to do so in ways that draw audiences into the innermost depths of Turandot’s heart. ‘I always want them to remember the beauty of my voice and the beauty of my portrayal of a woman who is incredibly strong yet beautifully vulnerable,’ she states. That she achieves these objectives so exquisitely is the hallmark of a great artist. What Ms. Graham brings to Turandot is precisely what the character lacks in so many performances: humanity. Here, at last, is a Turandot worth losing one’s head for! ♪ ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ To learn more about Othalie Graham, visit her Official Website. She is represented in the United States by Uzan International Artists. Opera Carolina’s production of Puccini’s Turandot opens on Saturday, 24 January. Additional performances are scheduled for 29 January and 1 February. For more information and to book tickets, visit Opera Carolina’s website. Sincerest thanks to Ms. Graham for her kindness, candor, and time in responding to questions during rehearsals for Opera Carolina’s Turandot. Photos are reproduced with Ms. Graham’s permission. FRANCESCO MARIA VERACINI (1690 – 1768): Adriano in Siria—Sonia Prina (Adriano), Ann Hallenberg (Farnaspe), Roberta Invernizzi (Emirena), Romina Basso (Sabina), Lucia Cirillo (Idalma), Ugo Guagliardo (Osroa); Europa Galante; Fabio Biondi, conductor [Recorded in conjunction with a concert performance in the Grosser Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, Vienna, Austria, 17 – 19 January 2014; Fra Bernardo fb 1409491; 3 CD, 172:00; Available from Amazon (USA), Amazon (UK), jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Thanks to the efforts of artists as diverse as Luisa Tetrazzini, Richard Tucker, Maurice André, and Frans Brüggen, the name and music of Francesco Maria Veracini have never fully disappeared as have those of many composers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Accounts of Veracini’s life are almost certainly blends of fact, fiction, and the ridiculously fanciful: different sources suggest that, based upon their chronologies of the composer’s life in the public eye, he possessed the admirable ability to be in two distant parts of Europe simultaneously. The son of an affluent family of musicians and artists, Veracini was one of the most admired violinists of his generation, one whose bowing technique allegedly shamed even the great Tartini. As a composer, his reputation among his contemporaries seems to have been more variable: Charles Burney, who was never more prolific or imaginative than when being nasty, thought Veracini’s music unimpressive and his temperament even less attractive. What he lacked in charm he surely had in artistic merit, however, and the enduring presence of his work, albeit a minute fraction of his output, is suggestive of musical craftsmanship of the first order. In this performance of his opera Adriano in Siria, recorded by Fra Bernardo with clarity that combines the precision of recording in studio with the verve of live performance, the neglected brilliance of Veracini is polished to diamond-brightness by the efforts of a team of extraordinary musicians. In truth, the cast assembled for this performance could make the most banal music seem important, but in Adriano in Siria they find music worthy of their best efforts. Rediscovered and meticulously prepared for performance by insightful musicologist Holger Schmitt-Hallenberg, Adriano in Siria is a fascinating score, this recording of which is a considerable milestone in the appreciation of Veracini’s artistry. Premièred by the Opera of the Nobility at the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1735 by a cast that included Farinelli, Senesino, and Francesca Cuzzoni, the opera enjoyed acclaim that, like that of many celebrated operas in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, was short-lived. Even superb scores were shelved as tastes changed, and this was particularly true in London, where, by the time of the first performance of Adriano in Siria, interest in Italian opera was already waning. In the case of Veracini’s opera, this was perhaps fortuitous: it is difficult to fathom a cast in subsequent generations matching the musical prowess attributed to Farinelli, Senesino, and Cuzzoni. Mr. Schmitt-Hallenberg has produced a performing edition of the opera that reveals the splendor that it surely possessed when it was first heard in 1735. His thoughtful management of the surviving musical material provides a score with impressive consistency of inspiration and dramatic impetus that, in the hands of alert singers, generates excitement and organic continuity even in the contexts of concert performances and a recording. Vitally, Mr. Schmitt-Hallenberg has given Veracini the gift of a performing edition of Adriano in Siria in which not one note seems superfluous. A rejuvenated Baroque opera could not hope for better handling than Adriano in Siria receives from Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante. Many of Maestro Biondi’s baton-wielding colleagues have intriguing ideas about infusing Baroque scores with historically-informed practices, but Maestro Biondi has confirmed in a progression of lauded performances and recordings that his guiding philosophy as a conductor is that, whether a score was composed by Bononcini or Bellini, the fundamental element of any piece is rhythm. In this performance, the commitment to following the lead of the composer’s rhythmic patterns is especially apparent, and Maestro Biondi and the Europa Galante musicians follow Veracini’s blueprints expertly, constructing a compelling musical edifice. Giangiacomo Pinardi’s playing of the theorbo and the harpsichord playing of Paola Poncet give the continuo variety and unflagging momentum, and the Europa Galante string and wind players produce sounds of stylish beauty that complement the kaleidoscopic emotional colorations of the music. As ever, Maestro Biondi and Europa Galante collaborate to create a musical environment in which the composer’s requirements and the singers’ needs, both musical and dramatic, are fused in a way that preserves the integrity of historically-informed performance values without jeopardizing the vitality of the performance or the freshness of the dramatic feast prepared by the cast. Unfortunately, many singers seemingly still believe that successful performances of music of the vintage of Adriano in Siria require special vocal modifications. While it is a gross oversimplification to suggest that a singer either can or cannot sing music like Veracini’s, there is a measure of truth in the assertion that a singer either has or has not the technical acumen needed for Baroque opera. The mistaken assumption made by a number of singers is that artificially altering the inherent qualities of voices trained to sing other repertories constitutes approaching Baroque music informedly. Whitening the tone and gingerly pecking at notes do not render a performance stylistically appropriate: rather, these devices make a performance dull and unfocused for both artists and audience. In terms of fostering a successful international career with aspirations to longevity, specialization is dangerous in today’s opera environment, but the unnaturally broad versatility forced on young singers is even more perilous for vocal health. The singers engaged for Adriano in Siria offer examples of the most intelligent blends of specialization and versatility. Just as Maestro Biondi understands that the bones that support musical flesh are rhythms, these artists truly understand that successfully singing Baroque music does not depend upon singing nothing else. The key is technique, which until the last performance of a singer’s career should be a work in progress. What these singers comprehend is that building the technical foundation needed to sing Baroque music is not restricting: wrapping the voice around music like Veracini’s unlocks artistic doors that singers with less cognizance of their own voices can only force open with great risk. Bass Ugo Guagliardo brings to his portrayal of the Parthian king Osroa a sturdy voice with an imposing presence that does not inhibit flexibility in coloratura. In Osroa’s aria in Act One, ‘Sprezza il furor del vento,’ he sonorously imparts the majestic power of the elements described by the text. The regal authority of the character is grandly served by Mr. Guagliardo’s singing of Osroa’s aria in Act Two, ‘Se mai piagato a morte.’ The vigor of his singing of ‘Non ritrova un'alma forte’ in Act Three is very effective, the singer clearly almost tasting the words. It is often dismaying to observe how lazy singers are when singing in their own languages, but Mr. Guagliardo enunciates the Italian text with brio. He shares with all of the singers in this cast a flair for animating secco recitative. Rousingly as he sings his arias, Mr. Guagliardo’s most valuable contribution to this recording is perhaps his leadership of the cast in their creation of a credible drama in which characters interact and respond to one another. The captive Parthian princess Idalma receives from mezzo-soprano Lucia Cirillo one of this excellent singer’s most enjoyable recorded performances. She, too, makes much of the text, coloring her native Italian vowels to reflect the moods of the words. ‘Per punir l'ingrato amante,’ Idalma’s aria in Act One, is sung with great depth of feeling, and her aria in Act Two, ‘Saggio guerriero antico,’ inspires Ms. Cirillo to particularly effective singing, her technique making light of the difficulty of the music. In Act Three, the power of her singing of the aria ‘Più bella al tempo usato’ is startling. Ms. Cirillo shepherds her resources very shrewdly, saving the most arresting hues of her vocalism for moments of greatest dramatic significance. This singer has graced a number of valuable recordings with her singing, but in this performance she achieves new heights of technical and histrionic excellence. In Veracini’s music for Sabina, Italian mezzo-soprano Romina Basso uses her smoky timbre like a dagger, penetrating the heart of the drama with her every utterance. The fire that she ignites in her accompagnato in Act One, ‘Io piango? Ah, no,’ and the aria that follows, ‘Numi, se giusti siete,’ blazes until the last note that she sings in this performance, and she exploits every facet of her remarkable musicianship to portray the wronged woman with depth and dignity. Sabina’s aria in Act Two, ‘Ah, ingrato m'inganni nel darmi speranza,’ receives from Ms. Basso a performance of tremendous musicality and spine-tingling intensity. In Act Three, her account of ‘Digli ch'è un infedele digli che mi tradì’ boils with justified indignation, and she resplendently blends her voice with that of her Adriano in their duetto ‘Prendi, o caro, mio sostegno.’ Ms. Basso is the kind of singer whose performances reveal unexplored aspects of familiar music. In performance of a rediscovered score like Adriano in Siria, she makes new magic with each subsequent phrase. She is a busy singer but one who could never be heard often enough. In the part created by Francesca Cuzzoni, Emirena, soprano Roberta Invernizzi provides singing of a quality that furthers her reputation as one of today’s preeminent leading ladies of Baroque opera. Hers is singing that is unfailingly stylish without being a pretentious display of exaltedly artful vocalism. Rather, she sings what the composer has given her—sings at all levels, musical, emotional, and psychological. She is unafraid of occasionally producing an unlovely sound if the drama of her rôle demands it, but this only increases the beauty of her performances. In Emirena’s music, she provides a glorious exhibition of appropriately-scaled singing that highlights the intelligence of Veracini’s vocal writing. The wrenching ‘Prigioniera abbandonata’ in Act One is sung with the sort of vehemence that leads many singers to destroy their voices: Ms. Invernizzi tears the passion from the words, not from her throat. Emirena ends Act One with ‘Un lampo di speranza,’ one of the finest numbers in the score and one that Ms. Invernizzi sings movingly. Both of Emirena’s arias in Act 2, ‘Per te d'eterni allori’ and the stirring ‘Quell'amplesso e quel perdono,’ are given traversals worthy of comparison with Renata Scotto’s singing of Puccini heroines. The concentration of her singing of ‘Quel cor che mi donasti’ in Act Three is unflappable, and her performance of this aria crowns a subtle but sparkling characterization of a rôle in which Cuzzoni herself could hardly have been more memorable. Any singer with Baroque or bel canto inclinations, no matter the progress of the career, should adopt as a critical component of her (or his) training regimen frequently listening to Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg. In Farinelli’s rôle of the Parthian prince Farnaspe, she demonstrates in this recording of Adriano in Siria what a great voice in its prime allied with a technique continually subjected to refining can achieve in Baroque music. Her rôle’s association with Farinelli raises expectations of feats of bravura gallantry, and Ms. Hallenberg does not disappoint. Not even her most extravagant bursts of coloratura are mere displays of her formidable technique, however: she manages to find the dramatic significance of every run, roulade, and trill. Farnaspe’s arias in Act One, ‘Già presso al termine de' suoi martiri,’ ‘Parto, sì, bella tiranna,’ and ‘Ascolta idolo mio dell'alma il bel desio,’ make daunting but widely varying demands upon the singer’s vocal resources, and Ms. Hallenberg responds with uncompromising expertise, differentiating her negotiations of the vocal lines according to Veracini’s requirements but always maintaining dedication to upholding the nobility of the character. After giving a beguiling recital of her abilities in ‘Quel ruscelletto va mormorando,’ she closes Act Two with a heart-stopping performance of ‘Amor, dover, rispetto, nell'agitato petto.’ She, too, soars to the summit of her artistry in Act Three with her singing of ‘Son sventurato ma pure, o stelle,’ in which she paints melodic landscapes with the shimmering emerald and sapphire tones of her voice. Sadly, it is impossible to know how Farinelli might have sounded in this part, but it is possible to imagine that he might have preferred to listen to Ms. Hallenberg sing Farnaspe rather than singing the rôle himself. It was to Senesino that Veracini entrusted the title rôle of the opportunistic Roman emperor Adriano in 1735, and the part receives from contralto Sonia Prina an interpretation in this performance that honors the great castrato’s legacy. In a pair of arias in Act One, ‘Dal labbro che t'accende’ and ‘E' vero che oppresso,’ the singer throws herself into the part with febrile energy and dexterity, conveying the emperor’s masculinity without resorting to unmusical growling. The darkness of the voice’s timbre gives Adriano an immediately-identifiable persona, and Ms. Prina’s technical acumen enables her to bring laudable authority to the sometimes awkward vocal lines customized by the composer for Senesino’s singular capabilities. ‘La ragion, gli affetti ascolta,’ the first of Adriano’s arias in Act Two, is sung with intriguing simplicity, and the bracing sentiments of ‘Tutti nemici e rei’ are expressed in an explosion of bravado. The emotions of the aria ‘Va', superbo, e del tuo fato’ in Act Three are also resolutely communicated through song, but the apogee of Ms. Prina’s realization of Adriano is the duetto with Sabina, ‘Prendi, o cara, in questo amplesso,’ in which she and Ms. Basso—ladies possessing voices so alike yet so different—unite in absolute stylistic and expressive synchronicity. Like her colleagues in this performance, Ms. Prina is not exclusively a Baroque-specialist singer, but her endeavors in Veracini’s music are exclusively adroit. It is rare that a recording of an opera composed in any era in the genre’s history can boast of a cast with no weak links, but Fra Bernardo’s world-première recording of Francesco Maria Veracini’s Adriano in Siria can do just that. The cast of singers for whom the composer created the six rôles in his opera brought together on the stage of the Haymarket a sextet of the most celebrated singers of the Eighteenth Century: the Twenty-First-Century equivalent electrified the storied environs of Vienna’s Konzerthaus with a magnificent performance of Adriano in Siria. The singing preserved on this recording warrants many words of praise, but the two words that are ultimately the most precious are those that this performance inspires for Veracini and Adriano in Siria—welcome back.
1646	dbpedia	0	23	https://issuu.com/editionpeters/docs/ep_vocalhighlights_2022	en	Edition Peters: Vocal Highlights Catalogue 2022	https://image.isu.pub/22…4/jpg/page_1.jpg	https://image.isu.pub/22…4/jpg/page_1.jpg	[ "https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/31d186ba39f38e8c4fac.png", "https://static.issuu.com/fe/silkscreen/0.0.3042/icons/gradient/icon-canva-gradient.svg", "https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/1e794a8c4ec65e549678.png", "https://photo.isu.pub/editionpeters/photo_large...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2022-07-28T00:00:00+00:00	Selected highlights from the extensive range of music for voice published by Edition Peters since 1800 from its three offices in Leipzig, London an...	en	/favicon.ico	Issuu	https://issuu.com/editionpeters/docs/ep_vocalhighlights_2022	Welcome to Issuu’s blog: home to product news, tips, resources, interviews (and more) related to content marketing and publishing. Here you'll find an answer to your question.
1646	dbpedia	1	38	https://helsinginkaupunginorkesteri.fi/en/concerts/weinbergs-history	en	Helsingin kaupunginorkesteri	https://helsinginkaupung…5d&itok=yjvT0G8m	https://helsinginkaupung…5d&itok=yjvT0G8m	[ "https://helsinginkaupunginorkesteri.fi/themes/custom/hko/images/icons/hko-icons_navicon-red.svg", "https://helsinginkaupunginorkesteri.fi/themes/custom/hko/images/icons/hko-icons_navicon-red.svg", "https://helsinginkaupunginorkesteri.fi/sites/default/files/2021-10/1920x1080_elena_schwarz_1_credit_priska_ketter...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Conductor Elena Schwarz has ticked several boxes that herald a brilliant career: competition victories, a season as a Dudamel Fellow of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, co-appearances with music legends, and a slew of invitations to conduct the world’s most notable orchestras. The programme for Schwarz's debut in front of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra probes the Slavic theme of the orchestra's concert season.	en	/themes/custom/hko/images/icons/favicon.ico	Helsingin kaupunginorkesteri	https://helsinginkaupunginorkesteri.fi/en/concerts/weinbergs-history	Elena Schwarz Unlike tonight’s solo cellist, Swiss-Australian conductor Elena Schwarz (b. 1985) does not come from a family of musicians; her parents are doctors. “That’s why I’ve tried to be involved in places that are less privileged than where I grew up,” she says. She makes her debut with the HPO tonight, though Finnish audiences may remember her as the winner of the second prize in the 2015 Jorma Panula Competition. She had already won the first prize in the Princess Astrid Competition in Norway, and would later be accepted for the Fellowship programme of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra led by Gustavo Dudamel. Appearances have followed with prestigious orchestras across the world, in Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Australia and the USA. Schwarz’s repertoire knows no bounds. She is equally at home with Brahms as she is with Boulez, yet she is perhaps best known as a conductor of contemporary music, having specialised in this during her studies at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland. She also studied musicology and the cello in Geneva before taking up conducting and has experience of opera, too. Alban Gerhardt “The calm authority and probing insight that Alban Gerhardt brings to his performances make him one of the finest cellists around,” wrote The Guardian in 2011. He has been the soloist with practically all the world’s great orchestras, so listing them is pointless, yet he has also even performed on German local trains. “When I was four years old,” says the son of a coloratura mother and violinist father, “my Dad tried to make me play the violin – an experiment that failed miserably not only with me but with all my four younger siblings. Frustrated by our father’s perfect command of his instrument, all of us got started with the piano, which I still think is the best way to “meet” music in practice. And one day, my mother asked me if I was interested in playing another instrument besides the piano, and ‘how about the cello?’” A mere ten years later, Gerhardt was the soloist with a chamber orchestra at the Berlin Philharmonie, and in 1991 with the Philharmonic. Gerhardt also feels it is his duty to help those in need, by offering a home to an Afghan refugee, for example, and by performing in schools, hospitals and youth institutions. He plays a Matteo Gofriller cello from 1710. Vito Žuraj: Api-danza macabra Where have all the insects gone? The bee population has plummeted; 40% of bee species are already endangered, yet without them, our crops will not grow. We can do all sorts of amazing things like flying to the moon, but as far as Nature is concerned, we humans are just a nuisance. When Westdeutsche Rundfunk asked Slovenian Vito Žuraj (b. 1979) to compose a short work for orchestra as part of a series of ‘contemporary miniatures’, he wrote Api-danza macabra lasting just under six minutes about the bees’ dance of death. It was premiered in Cologne in 2021. Žuraj not only bewails the busy bees’ demise; he also misses the soundscape they create. We cannot imagine a flowering summer meadow without their steady hum in the background. Api-danza macabra is both descriptive and abstract. It begins with zest, as swarms of insects flit hither and thither from flower to flower. The violins use pencils instead of bows, and the winds only their instruments’ mouthpieces. The percussions predict disaster. Will we grasp what is happening before it is too late to do anything about it? Mieczysław Weinberg: Cello Concerto, Op. 43 Mieczysław Weinberg (1918–1996) was a Polish Jew and had just completed his studies when, in autumn 1939, Germany attacked his country and he fled to the Soviet Union. This may seem a strange choice, but he had no alternative. Left at home, his family was soon murdered. He then proceeded to Tashkent, where for once he had a stroke of luck when his first symphony fell into the hands of Dmitri Shostakovich, who managed to get permission for him to travel to Moscow. The two would become life-long friends. But life under Stalin was not easy. In 1953, Weinberg was even sent to prison on charges of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” with a death sentence hanging over him. He was only saved by the intervention of Shostakovich, whose own fate hung by only a thread. Weinberg composed a wide range of music, including 26 symphonies and 14 string quartets, and everything from dodecaphonic avant-garde to theatre and circus music, but not until this century has his star really been rising, long after his death. He wrote his four-movement Cello Concerto in 1956. Bohuslav Martinů: Symphony No. 1
1646	dbpedia	1	43	https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.opera/c/YJ_jIvind1I	en	Great Lieder Singers of the 20th Century	https://www.gstatic.com/…/groups_32dp.png	https://www.gstatic.com/…/groups_32dp.png	[ "https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/i/productlogos/groups/v9/web-48dp/logo_groups_color_1x_web_48dp.png", "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/default-user=s40-c", "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/default-user=s40-c", "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a-/ALV-UjVxHJEMxpbB0xujKzBbzSYMJFDwcz2zGnj-eN6bRFI1tiVGyQ=s4...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	//www.gstatic.com/images/branding/product/1x/groups_32dp.png		https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.opera/c/YJ_jIvind1I	I trust by your choices you mean the subject line literally, I.e. singers of German lieder. Certainly there are a raft of great singers of art songs (Tourel, Simoneau, Schipa, Valletti, Dolukhanova, Pears, Lisitsian, de los Angeles, Bernac, Souzay, Gramm, Curtin, de Gaetani, etc.) who are principally associated with another repertory, though some of them programmed some lieder with great success as well. What about Elly Ameling? Aksel Schiotz? Arleen Auger? And I heard a Schreier Beethoven/Schumann recital in San Jose CA (!) that remains among my greatest of all concert experiences. Three of the most influential touring recitalists in the early part of the century were Marcella Sembrich (one of the first opera singers to do what we would call "serious" lieder programs), David Bispham and Julia Culp. To my mind they deserve higher honors than that archfraud Elena Gerhardt, though her disastrous influence is undeniable. To me she is a self-mythologizing High Priestess figure on the order of Wanda Landowska and Nina Koshetz, and while I get some pleasure from certain of their records, I get none at all from Gerhardt's, and wonder if anyone else would had they not been told by generations of Walter Legges that she was A (The?) Great Lieder Singer. Nice to think about this repertory, which I love. David Shengold ---------- In article <FEM5w...@oswego.Oswego.EDU>, sg...@news.oswego.edu (Celia A.  > Add Janet Baker. Victoria De Los Angeles..... Well here we get into the usual apples/oranges discussion of whether one is moved by one singer over another. I think Janet Baker is one of the great artists of all time. Her Gluck, Monteverdi, Mahler and Elgar are just sublime. I just have never felt that she is at her best in recital repertoire with piano... I always get the feeling of an opera/concert singer taking a day off by doing some lieder and chansons..... I just don't put her in the same class as Lehmann or Dieskau or Hotter in terms of the total investment in the poetry and the stylistic "rightness" for lieder. I also find her French chanson singing mannered.... very musical and every note in place, but just not "right" somehow... And again, I adore her... I just think she's untouchable in early music and English song and not in the same leagues as the ones mentioned. de los Angeles in Spanish song is perfectly charming. Her lieder and chanson work has always been marred by her imperfect technique and her poor ear for German, IMHO. I winced when I heard her sing a lieder recital in Vienna, and she only JUST redeemed herself by singing Falla, Turina and Granados at the end. When Lehmann sings, you can literally visualize the story she's telling, with Dieskau, one gets exquisite musicianship and virtually flawless technique, and Hotter... well you get Hotter.... not the best voice or technique, but it all falls together somehow.... especially in music with tragic or nostalgic themes, he's well nigh unbeatable. One could argue that they couldn't hold their own in Spanish against de los Angeles or against Baker in Elijah, and I would concede the point. But if we're strictly talking about German lieder, I don't think either artist is in the top 20, though they are admirable in many ways... there's just too much competition! >To your list, which I think is absolutely correct, I would add Peter >Schreier. His Liederabends in Europe were a hot ticket for years, especially >when he sang Schumann or Schubert. Guten Tag! WELL, of course you are right, but as you know there always music lovers who don`t like some singers for different reasons. I have to confess that Schreier was/is a singer who(m?) I`m always found boaring, really boaring always.Maybe to the backgound of finding him soooooooo boaring belongs his very naive way of singing the Lieder of Schumann and Schubert like many adults did it to/for their children with German Volkslieder after WW II. I am part of that second genaration after the war who never trust that "naivity" of my parents generation any more.(and Schreier) Another singer (who was the most popular Lieder singer in Germany, much more popular then DFD, was Hermann Prey). I am not the only one who had problems with his way of singing too, because his priority was emotion in singing Lieder. Like "naivity" this seemed to me too "onesided". (for my taste too "schmaltzy". Dieskau was the RIGHT one, he was able to differenciate in many ways BUT "he couldn`t stop singing. His later "Winterreise" with Barenboim and Murray Perrahia" were too late. After he left, there are suddenly a whole dozen of wonderfull German Lieder singer. >> >> Given all the interest in end-of-the-century list-making, I propose a list >> of the great Lieder singers of the 20th century, by which I mean those who >> had the greatest impact on the art form, whether I happen to enjoy >> listening to them or not. BTW, the order of the list is more chronological >> than anything else. >> >> Elena Gerhardt >> Lotte Lehmann >> Alexander Kipnis >> Gerhard Huesch >> Karl Erb >> Elisabeth Schumann >> Heinrich Schlusnus >> Hans Hotter >> Elisabeth Schwarzkopf >> Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau >> >> Comments are welcome, of course. << Wonderfull choice, I agree totally. My favorits are also Kathleen Ferrier, and Julius Patzak. Baker, Ludwig and Gerard Souzay following behind them only a liitle bit. "Liebeslieder Walzer" by Brahms from the Edinghburgh Festival with Ferrier/Patzak and Bruno Walter at (on?) the piano is the very best I ever heard. I have to mention two tenors from England and Denmark whose "Dichterliebe" are the very BEST, Axel Schiotz and Peter Pears. Especially Schiotz has to be in my TOP TEN . Last not least I would like to mention Mathias Goerne of the younger Generation because I was impressed by his Winterreise more then by Dieskaus, Prey`s Wunderlich`s and Pear`s (heard them all LIVE with "Winterreise") Last not least I wanne suggest to hear Henry Plunket Green with "Leiermann" from 1937, at the age of 69. It`s greatt irony that an older irish singer sang the most touching "Hurdy-gurdy man" in English (EMI 5661502 (2 CD Lieder on Record 1898-1952, SCHUBERT, vol I ) Best.................wolf(j) Celia A. Sgroi wrote in message ... >Given all the interest in end-of-the-century list-making, I propose a list >of the great Lieder singers of the 20th century, by which I mean those who >had the greatest impact on the art form, whether I happen to enjoy >listening to them or not. BTW, the order of the list is more chronological >than anything else. > > Elena Gerhardt > Lotte Lehmann > Alexander Kipnis > Gerhard Huesch > Karl Erb > Elisabeth Schumann > Heinrich Schlusnus > Hans Hotter > Elisabeth Schwarzkopf > Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau > >Comments are welcome, of course. > >Celia A. Sgroi Historically I think it should begin with two great pioniers: the Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich (1858-1935) and the Dutch baritone Johan Messchaert (1857-1922) Sembrich was probably the first famous opera singer who gave Lieder recitals everywhere. Sometimes she acompanied herself on the piano. She left a few Lieder recordings. Messchaert didn't make recordings (as far as I know), but there are several reports about his performances and DFD considered him as his great predecessor. About ten years ago I made a study of the musical life in Amsterdam in the 1880's and 1890's and read a lot of reviews of Messchaert's recitals, which gave a good idea about how revolutionary Liederrecitals were at that time ("Messchaert amazed the audience singing all the twenty songs of Schubert's Die Schoene Muellerin..." "It were especially `Morgengruss', `Mein' and `Der Jaeger' which received much applause...", etc. Another famous Dutch Lieder in the first quarter of the century was Julia Culp (1880-1970). She made a large number of aucoustical and some electrical recordings (Frauenliebe und -lebe, alas). Purely vocally she was a better singer than Gerhardt, and paid more attention to te music and less to the words than her contemporary. Other singers who might be included as having rather much impact on the history of Lieder singing are Gerard Souzay, Peter Schreier and perhaps Brigitte Fassbaender. It's difficult to make a choice from the new generations: there are very good Lieder singers (Baer, Quasthoff, Goerne, Holzmaier, etc.,etc.) but I don't think any of them is meeting the standards to be included on the list. Benjo Maso
1646	dbpedia	1	55	https://search.proquest.com/openview/4c15e54e5ea48574/1%3Fpq-origsite%3Dgscholar%26cbl%3D2567	en	Gramophone Notes	https://search.proquest.…roQuest_logo.gif	https://search.proquest.…roQuest_logo.gif	[ "https://search.proquest.com/assets/ctx/51be0a5b/images/icons/blank.gif", "https://search.proquest.com/assets/ctx/51be0a5b/images/icons/blank.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.	en	/apple-icon-57x57.png		null	This is a short preview of the document. Your library or institution may give you access to the complete full text for this document in ProQuest.
1646	dbpedia	2	77	https://www.musica-reanimata.de/en/0050.review.html	en	musica reanimata			[ "https://www.musica-reanimata.de/image/Logo Zukunft neu.png", "https://www.musica-reanimata.de/image/Logo Siemens klein.jpg", "https://www.musica-reanimata.de/image/Bareva Logo klein.jpg", "https://www.musica-reanimata.de/image/Logo Stabi.jpg", "https://www.musica-reanimata.de/image/Bareva Logo klein.jpg", ...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null	Lecture Recitals: "Persecution and Rediscovery" and other events 2024 + 14.-16. June 2024: Music as resistance against the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". Three Czech composers who suffered Nazi persecution In March 1939 German troops took over what was left of the Czech Republic after the Munich Agreement and Hitler named the region "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". Allegedly, this meant that the Third Reich would protect the country. In fact it deprived its inhabitants of many rights. Most severely it affected the Jews. Jewish musicians were banned from their profession and some time later they were forbidden even to own a musical instrument. The assasination of Reinhard Heydrich was the most sensational act of resistance. In a more secret way, there was also resistance amongst musicians. This was demonstrated in our four concerts, featuring three different composers. Kindly supported by: Deutsch-Tschechischer Zukunftsfonds, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and Bareva Foundation Co-operation partners: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche Berlin and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library) + 14. June, 18 h: Concert for organ and choir in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin Leoš Janáček: Solo for organ from Glagolitic Mass Miloslav Kabeláč: Two Fantasies for organ, Op. 32 (1958) Four Preludes for organ, Op. 48 (1966) Six Choruses after Jiří Wolker, Op. 10 (1939-42) and Lullaby (1945) - World premieres Petr Eben: from Musica dominicalis (Sunday music) for organ: III. Moto Ostinato - IV. Finale Sebastian Heindl, organ Male chamber choir ffortissibros; Benedikt Kantert, conductor + (163) 15. June, 15 h, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Wilhelm-von-Humboldt-Saal Lecture recital featuring Rudolf Karel (1880-1945) Rudolf Karel was part of the political resistance movement. In 1943 he was arrested and he died as a prisoner in the Gestapo prison in Terezín small fortress. Píseň svobody (Song of Freedom), Op. 41a Ivo's aria from the opera Ilses Herz, Op. 10 (1906-09) Tema con variazioni, Op. 13 for piano (1910) Song cycle In the Glow of the Hellenic Sun (1921), Lyrics: Josef Svatopluk Machar Pankrácký valčík (Pankrác waltz), Op. 42c for piano Pankrácký pochod (Pankrác march), Op. 42a for voice and piano Žena, moje štěstí (A spouse, my happiness), Op. 41b Jan Dušek, piano; Ondrej Holub, tenor Albrecht Dümling talked with Magdalena Živná + (164) 15. June, 18.30 h, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Wilhelm-von-Humboldt-Saal Lecture recital featuring Petr Eben (1929-2007) Petr Eben was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp because of his part-Jewish ancestry. After the war, he returned to Czechoslovakia and became one of the country's leading composers. Elegy and Toccata from Suita Balladica for cello and piano Biblical Fresco Saul bei der Prophetin in En-Dor for violin and piano String quartet Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart Martinů Quartet: Lubomír Havlák and Adéla Štajnochrová, violins / Martin Stupka, viola / Jitka Vlašánková, cello Robert Kolinsky, piano; Markéta Janoušková, violin; Simone Drescher, cello Bettina Brand talked with David Eben + (165) 16. June, 11 h, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Wilhelm-von-Humboldt-Saal Lecture recital featuring Miloslav Kabeláč (1908-1979) Miloslav Kabeláč had studied with Alois Hába and Erwin Schulhoff. He had already been a successful composer when he was banned from his profession because his wife was Jewish. Between 1939 and 1942 he composed six pieces for male chorus on poems by Jiří Wolker which had strong political implications, and several chamber pieces. Two pieces for violin and piano, Op. 12 (1942) Music for a Puppet Show for violin, cello, and piano (1944) Lullaby for violin and piano (1944) Movement for violin, cello, and piano (1944) Movement for violin and piano (Slow) (1944) Sonata for cello and piano, Op. 9 (1941-1942) Markéta Janoušková, violin; Simone Drescher, cello; Robert Kolinsky, piano Stefan Lang talked with Elisabeth Hahn (162) 11. April 2024 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + "Les portes de la nuit" - the composer Joseph Kosma (1905-1969) Kosma's most famous song is Autumn Leaves, in French: Les feuilles mortes. It could be heard in the movie Les portes de la nuit, sung by Yves Montand. Joseph Kosma was born in Budapest, he studied with Béla Bartók and became a proponent of modernism. While living in Berlin he joined the circle around Eisler, Brecht and Weill. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris. He co-operated with the poet Jacques Prévert and together they were formative for the chanson of their time. During the war under German occupation, Kosma composed music for films, while his name didn't show up in the credits but instead those of some of his friends. Stefanie Wüst, soprano Christopher Arpin, piano Krisztian Palagyi, accordeon Habakuk Traber talked with Prof. Manuela Schwartz This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (161) 11. January 2024 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + Maria Herz (1878-1950) - Composer between Germany and England Maria Herz, pianist and composer from Cologne, emigrated to England already around 1900 because of strong anti-semitic tendecies in Germany. In England she organised concerts, sometimes also performing her own music. When WWI broke out she happened to be in Cologne. It was meant to be just a visit but because of the war she could not return, and even after the war she stayed in Germany. When her husband died in 1920 she had to struggle to earn a living but nevertheless resumed composing. For some time she studied with Philipp Jarnach. In 1935 she fled to England for the second time. Four Little Pieces for string quartet, Op. 5 String quartet, Op. 6 Asasello Quartet: Rostislav Kozhevnikov and Barbara Streil (violins), Justyna Sliwa (viola), Teemu Myöhänen (cello) Albrecht Dümling talked with Albert Herz (the composer's grandson) and Heinrich Aerni (Zentralbibliothek Zurich) and Christiane Silber (conductor, Berlin). This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation 2023 (160) 9. November 2023 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + "A life without compromises". The composer and cellist Joachim Stutschewsky (1891-1982) "A life without compromises" - that's the title Joachim Stutschewsky gave to his memoirs which have not yet been published. He was born into a family of Klezmorim in what is now Ukraine, playing the violin from early childhood, but as a teenager he took up the cello. In the 1920's he was a founding member of the Kolisch Quartet and thus stood in the center of the musical avant-garde. He also was the key person in the society for the promotion of Jewish music ("Verein zur Förderung jüdischer Musik") in Vienna. In 1938 he fled to Palestine. There however he gained little recognition for his uncompromising commitment to Jewish music. In his own music Stutschewsky amalgamated the traditional Klezmer tone with, in places, modernist stylistic elements. Schir Jehudi / Jewish Song (1937) Andante religioso (1942) M'chol kedem / Oriental Dance (1923) Four Jewish dance pieces for piano (1929) Israeli Suite (1942) Joel Blido, cello Jascha Nemtsov, piano Jascha Nemtsov talked with Walter Labhart This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (159) 26. October 2023 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + Repeatedly uprooted - the Polish-Jewish composer Jerzy Fitelberg Jerzy Fitelberg (1903-1951) was born in Warsaw. His father was the conductor and composer Gregorz Fitelberg. Jerzy F. studied in Berlin with Franz Schreker and quickly became one of the most successful young composers in the German capital. He was also connected internationally. His string quartet No. 2 war performed at the ISCM festival in Geneva in 1929, his second violin concerto in Vienna 1932. Also in later years his music was performed at the ISCM festivals several times. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris and in 1940, just in time before Paris was occupied by the Germans, he fled to New York. He became a citizen of the United States in 1947. In 1951 Jerzy Fitelberg died in New York. 5 string quartets have major importance in Fitelberg's varied, mostly instrumental oeuvre. String quartet No. 1 (1926) from String quartet No. 4 (1936): Theme, excerpts from variations No. 1-6, Coda from String quartet No. 5 (1945): 2. movement Tema con variazioni and 3. movement Vivace Fitelberg Quartet (Krakow): Aleksander Daskiewicz, Nikola Frankiewicz, Paweł Riess, Jakob Gajownik Gottfried Eberle talked with Christoph Slowinski This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (158) 15. June 2023 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + Bronislaw Huberman - Violinist and campaigner for a united Europe Bronislaw Huberman (1882 - 1947) started an early international career as a violinist at age 11. He was born in Czestochowa in the Russian Empire (now Poland). The outbreak of WWI meant a great shock to him. He campaigned for the unification of Europe which he considered the only way to achieve peace. Later he made great efforts to rescue German Jews from Hitler. He was influential in founding an orchestra in Palestine which later turned into the world-famous Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The program of our concert included pieces which had been regularly performed by Huberman. His own violin playing was heard on historical records with music by Schubert, Brahms and Sarasate. Johannes Brahms: Scherzo c minor WoO 2 (1853, from FAE-Sonata) Niccolò Paganini: Caprice No. 24, arr. for violin and piano by Karol Szymanowski Max Bruch: Kol Nidre (arr. by Huberman) Ludwig van Beethoven: Andante con variazioni from sonata in A Major, Op. 47 ("Kreutzer sonata") Judith Ingolfsson, violin Vladimir Stoupel, piano Albrecht Dümling talked with Harald Eggebrecht and Habakuk Traber This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (157) 19. May 2023 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + Prodigy, enfant terrible, early completed - the fantastic story of Polish-Jewish composer André Tchaikowsky André Tchaikowsky has been known mainly as a pianist. Among connoisseurs, his performances of Bach, Chopin and Ravel were legend. When his opera "The Merchant of Venice" received its posthumous world premiere at Bregenz Festival in 2013, people began to recognise Tchaikowsky the composer, too. He was born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer in Warsaw in 1935. At the age of 5 he and his mother were forced to live in the Ghetto. She perished in the Holocaust, but the boy survived thanks to his daring grandmother, who provided a false identity and secret hiding places for him. After the war, he kept his acquired name Czajkowsky. Artur Rubinstein, among others, promoted him in the first years of his career as a pianist. Over the years, Tchaikowsky put more and more effort into composing. He produced a small number of impressive works which show some influence from the Second Viennese School and which are steeped in virtuosity, subtle irony and deep melancholy. He died of cancer in London in 1982 at the age of 46. Sonata for clarinet and piano Inventions for piano op. 2, No. 1-8, 10 Seven Sonnets of Shakespeare, No. 2, 4 und 5 Katarzyna Wasiak, piano Ania Vegry, soprano Ruben Staub, clarinet Peter Sarkar talked with Frank Harders-Wuthenow and Katarzyna Wasiak This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (156) 23. March 2023 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + Ursula Mamlok and Black Mountain College. To the composer's 100th anniversary When Hitler came to power in 1933, the multidisciplinary art school "Bauhaus" was forced to disband itself. Many of its former members followed an invitation to the newly founded Black Mountain College in Asheville (North Carolina). From 1944 BMC offered summer classes. Quite a number of the music instructors were immigrants, e.g. Ernst Krenek, Eduard Steuermann, Heinrich Jalowetz, Stefan Wolpe, and the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. The composer Ursula Mamlok (1923 - 2016) who had been born in Berlin, visited the first of these summer classes. There she composed her "Three Part Fugue", under Krenek's supervision. Our concert is dedicated to Mamlok to commemorate her 100th anniversary. Music by Ursula Mamlok: Three Part Fugue for piano (1944) The Birds Dream Six Short Pieces for piano (1944) Variations for flute solo (1960) Ernst Krenek: 3. Sonata for piano op. 92/4 (1943), movements 1 and 4 Roger Sessions: From my Diary for piano (1937-1940) Stefan Wolpe: Part 1 from Piece in Two Parts for flute and piano (1960) Klaus Schöpp, flute Holger Groschopp, piano Bettina Brand talked with Habakuk Traber This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation and Dwight und Ursula Mamlokstiftung (155) 12. January 2023 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Musikclub + A survivor from Warsaw. The composer and conductor René Leibowitz René Leibowitz (b. Warsaw, 1913 - d. Paris, 1972) was one of the key personalities in 20th century music, as a conductor, composer and music theorist. For a short while he lived in Berlin before moving on to Paris by the end of the 1920's. There he met Rudolf Kolisch, who introduced him to the performance style of the Second Viennese School. Erich Itor Kahn taught him the principles of dodecaphony and Paul Dessau conducting. Dessau had also fled to Paris. The three men formed a close partnership which is mirrored in several pieces they dedicated to each other. During the German occupation in France, Leibowitz tightened his ties to Schönberg. Music by René Leibowitz: Deux Mélodies (after Fr. Hölderlin and H. v. Kleist), Piano sonata, Op. 1 (1939) Picasso-songs, Op. 9 (1943) Trois poèmes de Georges Bataille (1962) Trois Études Miniatures for piano, Op. 64 (1965) Songs on poems by Carl Einstein, Op. 80 (1967). Paul Dessau: Guernica for piano (1938) - dedicated to René Leibowitz Erich Itor Kahn: Bagatelle for piano (ca. 1940) - dedicated to René Leibowitz Peyee Chen, soprano Jan Marc Reichow, piano Albrecht Dümling talked with Walter Nußbaum This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation 2022 (154) 9. November 2022 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Werner-Otto-Saal + Genius and modesty - Ignace Strasfogel in Berlin and New York Ignace Strasfogel was born in Warsaw in 1909. He grew up in Berlin and showed extraordinary gifts as a musician early on. Franz Schreker took him as a student of composing at the age of 14. Strasfogel also joined Leonid Kreutzer's piano master class, and he studied conducting with Julius Prüwer. For 2½ years he worked at Berlin State Opera, but in 1933 he was dismissed. In December 1933 he found a new home in the United States and he was lucky to find a good position: He joined the New York Philharmonic Orchestra as Official Pianist (1935-1945). 1946 he made an attempt to re-establish himself as a composer, but he didn't get any response. Thus he continued to work chiefly as répétiteur and conductor, at Metropolitan Opera (1951-74) and later in Strasbourg. Only in 1983 he began to compose again, after 35 years of silence. In 1991 Kolja Lessing initiated Strasfogel's re-discovery as a composer. Duet for Violin and Piano (1991, dedicated to Kolja Lessing and Rainer Klaas) Prélude and Elegie for guitar (1946) from: Prélude, Elegie and Rondo for guitar (dedicated to Andrés Segovia) Rondo (Variations) for piano (1988/89) Variations on a Well-known Tune (A Child's Day) (1946, dedicated to Ian Strasfogel) Franz Schreker: Wiegenlied der Els (from the opera Der Schatzgräber), Piano transcription by Ignace Strasfogel (1926) Performers: Kolja Lessing, piano Daniella Strasfogel, violin Johannes Monno, guitar Kolja Lessing, Ian Strasfogel and Johannes Monno talked with Peter Sarkar. This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (153) 22. October 2022 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Werner-Otto-Saal + "... I owe Webern my purpose in life ..." - The composer Philip Herschkowitz As a private tutor he was most sought after - in the 1980's his apartment in Moscow became a place to go for musicians like Elisabeth Leonskaja, Dmitri Smirnov or Elena Firsova. Philip Herschkowitz was born in Iași (Romania) in 1906. After finishing his studies at the conservatory in his home town he moved to Vienna. Anton Webern made a huge impression on him in those years in Vienna. After the Austrian "Anschluss" in 1938, the Romanian authorities refused to let him move back into his country under the pretext that he was a Jew who had been living abroad. The following odyssey brought him as far as Tashkent. After the war, he settled in Moscow. Since his music didn't conform to the doctrine of "Socialist Realism", he was nearly completely excluded from public musical life. He had to earn a living giving private lessons. Finally, in 1987, he was allowed to move to Vienna, but a few months later he died there. Most of his compositions have never been published. Arnold Schönberg: Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 Ph. Herschkowitz: Klavierstücke in vier Sätzen (1969) Anton Webern: Sonata for cello and piano (1914) Ph. Herschkowitz: Three pieces for cello and piano Elena Firsova: Two Inventions for flute solo (1977) Dmitri Smirnov: The Music of the Spheres, Op. 86 for piano (1995) Elena Firsova: Meditation in the Japanese Garden, Op. 54 for flute, cello and piano (1992) Elisabeth Leonskaja, piano Ulrike Anton, flute Friedemann Ludwig, cello Elisabeth Leonskaja, Ulrike Anton and Elena Firsova talked with Bettina Brand. This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation and by ExilArte (Vienna) (152) 26. May 2022 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Kleiner Saal + Escape in the very last moment: Hans Heller (1898-1969), a pupil of Franz Schreker The German-Jewish musician Hans Heller could no longer pursue his career as a pianist when he got injured in WWI. Thus he decided to become a composer. He studied as a private pupil with Franz Schreker. He made quick progress, as can be seen in his piano sonata, written in 1926 for the pianist Inge Eichwede who later became his wife. Together they escaped the Nazi regime to Paris. Here Heller composed a couple of major works, despite unsatisfactory living conditions. When France fell under German rule he was interned and coerced to forced labour. In the very last moment he escaped being deported to a termination camp. After the war the Hellers lived in the US but returned to West Berlin in 1955. Piano sonata Op. 3 (Berlin 1926) Vom kleinen Alltag op. 8. Four songs after Anton Wildgans (Berlin 1930) Les Aveugles (Charles Baudelaire) for mezzo-soprano and piano (Paris 1938) Little Suite for piano (New York 1951) Performers: Jascha Nemtsov, piano Tehila Nini Goldstein, soprano Albrecht Dümling talked with Wolfgang Eichwede, the composer's nephew, and Jascha Nemtsov This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (151) 10. March 2022 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Kleiner Saal + The Austrian Victor Urbancic's (1903-1958) key role to Iceland's music scene When Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, Victor Urbancic tried in vain to emigrate to Switzerland or the US. In his desperation he took a post in Iceland. In the end he stayed there for the rest of his life. In these 20 years he played an important role in different fields of music in Iceland, e.g. by conducting the first opera performances at the newly founded National Theatre of Iceland. Through his teaching he formed a full generation of Icelandic composers. From Trio A major (1921): movements no. 1 and 5 Selection of songs: Elisabeth, 3 poems by Hermann Hesse, Op. 8 (1936) "Ebene im Vorfrühling", "Ist alles zu lernen" and "Blume auf dem Acker meines Herrn" on lyrics by Melitta Grünbaum/Urbancic Performers: Trio Magos Maxi Hennemann, clarinet Sebastian Hennemann, cello Goun Kim, piano Kristín E Mäntylä, voice Manami Honda, piano Melina Paetzold talked with Sibyl Urbancic, the composer's daughter This concert was supported by Bareva Foundation (150) 6. January 2022 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus Berlin, Kleiner Saal + Ödön Pártos - one of the founders of Israeli art music Ödön Pártos, born in Budapest in 1907, studied with Jenö Hubay (violin) and Zoltán Kodály (composition). At the age of 20 he moved to Berlin. There he founded a string quartet ensemble. Being Jewish, he didn't get any concert engagements from 1933. Thus he enrolled as concertmaster of the newly founded orchestra of the "Kulturbund Deutscher Juden". Bronisław Huberman invited him to join the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, so Pártos played solo viola in this orchestra from 1938 to 1956. Composing was of equal importance to him. In his music Pártos intended to merge European avantgarde with oriental tonality. Yizkor (in memoriam) for viola and piano (1946) Trauermusik (Oriental Ballad) for viola and piano (1955) Agada for viola, piano and percussion (1962) Kina for viola solo (1973). Performers: Itamar Ringel (viola), Thomas Hoppe (piano), Henrik Magnus Schmidt (percussion) Habakuk Traber talked with Albrecht Dümling. This concert was supported by: 2021 (149) 22. October 2021 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Grunewaldkirche Berlin-Wilmersdorf + Ernst Bachrich (1892-1942) - a strong voice in the 2. Viennese School The Second Viennese School was a cornerstone within the multitude of musical tendencies of the 1920's. The Schoenbergians did share some fundamental beliefs but they were individualists nevertheless. Ernst Bachrich, who studied with Schoenberg 1916-19, was one of them. In the following years Bachrich played a vital role in Schoenberg's "Society for Private Musical Performances" (as pianist and secretary). As a composer of songs, chamber and piano music he found his own voice. He conducted at the Vienna Volksoper and later (1928-32) in the Rhineland. In 1932 he returned to Vienna and contributed to the city's musical life as pianist, conductor and co-organiser of the concert series "Musik der Gegenwart". In 1938 he was blacklisted but he continued composing and promoting his music. He was deported to Izbica Ghetto (Poland) in May 1942 and killed in Majdanek concentration camp a few weeks later. Psalm op. 10,1 (Lyrics: Emil Arnold Holm) Osterblüte op. 10,2 (Greta Bauer-Schwind) Portraits: Three piano pieces op. 6 - Vivace impetuoso - Lento con abandono - Improvisation on an American folk tune L'Angelus (folk tune from Brittany) Three songs op. 3 - Bestimmung (Christian Morgenstern) - Schlummernd im schwellenden Grün (Friedrich Hebbel) - Winter (Theodor Däubler) Piano sonata op. 1 Die frühen Verse op. 15 (Melodrama, Emil Arnold Holm) Anna Christin Sayn, soprano Alexander Breitenbach, piano Frank Harders-Wuthenow, Anna Christin Sayn and Alexander Breitenbach talked with Peter Sarkar Supported by the Harald Genzmer Foundation (148) 10. September 2021 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Grunewaldkirche Berlin-Wilmersdorf + A difficult legacy: the Czech-German composer Hans Winterberg (1901-1991) After WW I the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke apart and in 1918 the Czchoslovak Republic was founded. 9 million Czechs ans Slovaks and 3 million Germans lived within its borders. Not all of them wanted to become Czchoslovak citizens. Viktor Ullmann remained Austrian, whereas Hans Wintergberg's family chose the Czech citizenship, although they were Jewish and spoke German. In 1944, Winterberg was divorced from his non-Jewish wife and subsequently he was deported to Terezin. After the war he settled in Bavaria. Peter Kreitmeir, the composer's grandson, talked with Albrecht Dümling about Winterberg's difficult legacy and the recent rediscovery of his music. Adagio from piano sonata No. 1 (1936) Theresienstädter Suite 1945 for piano Sonata for cello and piano (1951) From Impressionistic Suite for piano (ca. 1973): 1. Prestissimo leggiero molto 2. Con moto moderato (alla gondoliera) Performers: Adele Bitter (cello) and Christophe Sirodeau (piano) Peter Kreitmeir talked with Albrecht Dümling Supported by the Harald Genzmer Foundation (147) 10. Mai 2021 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Ballhaus Walzerlinksgestrickt, Berlin-Kreuzberg + Irma and Stefan Wolpe's Odyssey This concert is available on youtube: [https://youtu.be/QxcqacIKBQU] The composer Stefan Wolpe, born in Berlin, was endangered in three ways after the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933: as a Jew, communist and composer of degenerate music. His wife Irma Wolpe Rademacher was one of the most important interpreters of his compositions. She performed in Bucharest, Berlin, Paris and Palestine and was internationally highly regarded. Both were active members of the left-wing cultural organisation "Novembergruppe". The couple lived in Berlin until March 1933, when the Nazis made a large-scale raid. Being Jewish, Irma was aware of the danger. Her political foresight and her network saved her husband's and her own life. The odyssey of their escape took them through Cheb (Czechoslovakia), Bucharest, Vienna and Zurich, as far as to Jerusalem, and finally to New York. In our days both musicians are little noticed in the music history. This concert has been dedicated to the memory of Austin Clarkson (1932 - 13. March 2021). He was musicologist, professor at York University, Toronto, and chairman of the Stefan Wolpe Society. He had studied with Wolpe and became his friend. Clarkson dedicated his life to editing and analyzing Wolpe's music. Music by Stefan Wolpe Tango for Irma (1927) for accordion from: Cinque marches caractéristiques op. 10 (1928-1934) (piano) - Andante tranquillamente / Marcia Funebre / Vivo e sereno from: Two Songs for Alto and Piano from the Song of Songs op. 24 (1937) - Smolo Tahat Roshi (His left hand is under my head) "If it be my fate" (1938) Hebraic: from Rachel; English: Hilda Morley "Epitaph" (1938) Hebraic: anonymous; English: Hilda Morley Palästina-Notenbuch (piano/accordion), 1939 - Turque - Yemenite dance No. 1 - Yemenite dance No. 2 - Yiddish wedding - Lullaby - Hora from: Two Pieces for Piano (1941): Con fuoco from: Toccata (1941), dedicated to Irma Wolpe: Too much suffering in the world Form IV (1969) for piano Ursula Mamlok: Variations for flute solo 1961 Performers: Irmela Roelcke, piano solo Brynne McLeod, mezzo-soprano Klaus Schöpp, flute solo Ina Henning, accordion Moderation: Bettina Brand Guest: Nora Born, expert and editor of the correspondence between Irma and Stefan Wolpe Kindly supported by: Dwight und Ursula Mamlok-Stiftung [www.mamlokstiftung.com/] Stefan Wolpe Society [www.wolpe.org] and our hosts Ulrike and Jojakim Balzer [https://walzerlinksgestrickt.de/kultur] (146) 10. April 2021 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Ballhaus Walzerlinksgestrickt, Berlin-Kreuzberg + "Text und Musik von mir". Willy Rosen (1894-1944), cabaret artist, pianist, composer. This concert is available on youtube: [www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i0nORz7p88] Willy Rosen was born in Magdeburg, his name at birth was Wilhelm Julius Rosenbaum. As a solo entertainer at the piano he travelled all round the world. In 1924 he settled in Berlin and performed in various theatres, finally ending up in the "Kabarett der Komiker". When he was banned from the stage in 1933 he started peforming together with Max Ehrlich in the Jewish Cultural Association (Jüdischer Kulturbund). He emigrated to the Netherlands and founded there the "Theater der Prominenten" in 1936. He was deported to Terezín in 1944 and killed in Auschwitz. Ensemble Zwockhaus: Maria Thomaschke and Andreas Jocksch, voices Nikolai Orloff, piano Timofej Sattarov, accordeon Volker Suhre, double bass Winfried Radeke (dir.) and Klaus Völker (guest expert). 2020 (145) 6. October 2020 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Werner-Otto-Saal + Ruptures in the history of the Julius-Stern-Institute. Julius Stern's 200. anniversary 170 years ago, the Musikschule für Gesang, Klavier und Komposition (Music school for voice, piano and composition) was founded in Berlin. Julius Stern was one of the founders. In 1857 the institution was renamed Stern'sches Konservatorium. Stern also founded the choir Stern'scher Gesangverein, which together with the court orchestra (Königliche Kapelle) had its first appearance 1851 at the "Schauspielhaus" (which is nowadays Berlin Konzerthaus). In 1935 Stern'sches Konservatorium was "Arianised" by ejecting all Jewish teachers and students. Some of them then founded the Jüdische private Musikschule Hollaender on their own premises. There Ruth Schonthal, Ursula Mamlok and other gifted youths could continue their musical education, even in the field of composing. Julius Stern: Variations op. 42 on Sanctissima! - Sizilianisches Schifferlied Simon Zhu, violin; Klemens Elias Braun, piano Ruth Schönthal: "Manchmal" and "Eine rote Rose" from Wildunger Liederzyklus Julius Stern: "Tröstliche Verheißung" and "Dein auf ewig" from Gesänge für hohe Stimme op. 26 Aiko Christina Bormann, soprano; Maria Rumyantseva, piano Ursula Mamlok: From My Garden Elias Sturm, viola Erwin Schulhoff: Sonata for flute and piano, 1st movement Dascha Schuster, flute; Maire-Claire Indilewitsch, piano Bettina Brand talked with Prof. Anita Rennert and Dr. Cordula Heymann. (144) 10. September 2020 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Werner-Otto-Saal + Toch, Hindemith, Ullmann. Nazi-persecuted composers and their publisher Schott music Quite a number of composers who were published by Schott were hit by the persecutive measures against musicians of Jewish descent. For example, Ernst Toch lost his income because his music would not be performed any more in Germany. Like him Paul Hindemith was driven into exile. In his talk with Albrecht Dümling Peter Hanser-Strecker explained how his long-standing publishing house reacted to the pressure from the Nazi regime and why, later, they made an effort to publish and to distribute Viktor Ullmann`s music. Ernst Toch: The Juggler for piano solo, op. 21 (1923) and four songs from: Neun Lieder op. 41 (1928) Paul Hindemith: Sonata for Oboe and piano (1938) Viktor Ullmann: Abendphantasie after Friedrich Hölderlin for Soprano and piano (1943) and first movement of Piano sonata No. 6, op. 49 (1943). Performers: Anna Maria Pammer (soprano), Viola Wilmsen (oboe) and Holger Groschopp (piano). Albrecht Dümling talked with Peter Hanser-Strecker (143) 20. February 2020 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + A multi-talented musician: Ingolf Dahl (1912-1970) In the music community of Los Angeles everybody knew Ingolf Dahl, who was a composer, pianist and conductor. But only his wife knew his true identity: He was Jewish German and his birth name was Walter Marcus. Dahl was born in Hamburg and studied with Philipp Jarnach in Cologne. He became assisting conductor at Zurich Stadttheater at the age of 26. In 1939 he emigrated to Los Angeles. There he became one of the formative personalities in the avantgarde music scene. As professor at the University of Southern California he gave lectures on Igor Strawinsky, on music for film and radio et al. Michael Tilson Thomas coined the phrase "musicians' musician" for his teacher Dahl. Sonata Pastorale (1959) for piano Divertimento for Viola and piano (1948) Five Duets for Clarinets (1970) Carolin Krüger, viola Imke Lichtwark, piano Melina Paetzold and Vanessa Klöpping, clarinets Melina Paetzold talked with Volker Ahmels 2019 13./14. December 2019 Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung Berlin, Curt-Sachs-Saal Symposium and concerts Torso eines Lebens. Gideon Klein (1919-1945), composer and pianist + Symposion Friday, 13. December 2019, 14-18 h and Saturday, 14. December, 10-18 h Lectures with David Fligg, Wolfgang Rathert, Paul Schendzielorz, David Vondracek, Lubomir Spurny, Jascha Nemtsov, Michael Beckerman, Lukas Michaelis, Beatrix Borchard, Wolfgang Rüdiger, Gottfried Eberle, Albrecht Dümling, Winfried Radeke. "Gideon Klein. Portrait of a composer" for three speakers and string quartet (EA). Original texts and music, arranged by David Fligg Friday, 13. December 2019, 20 Uhr Speakers: Blanche Kommerell, Carolin Kipka and Robin Bohn Music by Klein, Mozart, Janáček and Hindemith, performed by Martinů Quartet. Concert containing chamber music, songs, madrigals and the piano sonata by Gideon Klein Saturday, 14. December 2019, 20 Uhr Jascha Nemtsov, piano Tehila Nini Goldstein, soprano Martinů Quartett Sara Saviet and Ernst-Martin Schmidt, Duo violin-viola Vocal ensemble: Joachim Buhrmann, Susanne Langner, Anja Petersen, Hildegard Rützel and Andrew Redmond. This musica reanimata project is a collaboration with Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung Berlin and Martinů Quartet. Kindly supported by and ............................................................. Media partner: (142) 21. October 2019 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Edvard Moritz (1891-1974) and the saxophone - a search for traces Eduard Moritz, son of a mearchant from Hamburg, settled in Paris at an early age to study with Louis-Joseph Diémer (piano) and George Enescu (violin). He resumed his tuition in Berlin with Georg Bertram (piano), Carl Flesch (violin) and Paul Juon (counterpoint). Moritz had a promising start: In 1919 the Berlin Philharmonic premiered his "Burleske" op. 9, conducted by Arthur Nikisch. His rise came to an abrupt halt when all his activities were confined to the "Jüdischer Kulturbund" after 1933. In 1937 he escaped to the US, but he had to start anew. Our lecture concert presented early piano pieces and works written for saxophonist Cecil Leeson in New York. Four piano pieces op. 1 (1917) Three Intermezzi for piano op. 12 (1918) Sonata for E flat alto Saxophone and Piano op. 96 (1939) Intermezzo for E flat alto Saxophone and Piano op. 103 (ca. 1940) Christoph Enzel, saxophone Holger Groschopp, piano Albrecht Dümling talked with Christoph Enzel (141) 12. September 2019 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Walking upright. Hanning Schröder - although defamed himself, he rescued a persecuted couple Hanning Schröder and his wife Cornelia (born Auerbach), who had studied with Max Reger and who was the first woman in Germany to get a PhD in musicology, had common interests in music: neoclassicism, historically informed performance, music for amateurs and the working classes. The Nazis found justification to ban him from his profession in nothing more than his inclination towards the left. Schröder sent his Jewish wife and their daughter to the countryside, away from Berlin. Meanwhile, in his Berlin home, he gave shelter to a Jewish couple, who could therefore survive. After the war, the Schröders worked in the eastern part of Berlin but were cut off when the wall was erected. In his later days Schröder adopted the twelve-tone technique and he became a paternal friend of the network "Gruppe Neue Musik". Sonata for violin and piano (1922) "Letters" after Christian Morgenstern for Soprano and piano (1931) Suite for piano (1927) Excerpt from "Music for 4 Instruments in memoriam: Lied der Moorsoldaten" (1953) Seven Miniatures for string quartet (1971) Akos Quartet: Alexis Gomez and Aya Murakami, violins; Théo Delianne, viola; Cyrielle Golin, cello Yvonne Friedli, soprano Fidan Aghayeva-Edler, piano Nele Hertling, the composer's daughter, talked with Gottfried Eberle. (140) 25. June 2019 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Stateless, chased, deported. The musicians Paul Hermann and Géza Frid Our concert featured two Jewish Hungarian composers and instumentalists who studied with Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály: the cellist Pál Hermann (1902-1944, picture above) and the pianist Géza Frid (1904-1989, below). At first, each of them started an international career, but it was cut short when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Pál Hermann found refuge in Brussels and in Paris, but in 1944 he was interned in Drancy concentration camp and deported to a place somewhere in the baltic states, which were occupied by Germany at the time. Here his track gets lost. Géza Frid survived in a hideout in the Netherlands. After the war, he could continue composing and conducting. His son Arthur Frid and Pál Hermann's daughter Corrie Hermann gave testimony to their parents' life and work. Paul Hermann: Andante for piano trio (1924); Allegro (1920) and Toccata (1935) for piano Géza Frid: Capriccio concertante for Flute and piano (1930), piano trio op. 27 (1947) Eleonore Pameijer, flute Burkhard Maiß, violin Bogdan Jianu, cello Andrei Banciu, piano Arthur Frid and Corrie Hermann talked with Bettina Brand Kindly co-funded by the Kingdom of the Netherlands (139) 21. February 2019 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Expelled from Frankfurt conservatory: Bernhard Sekles and Mátyás Seiber Bernhard Sekles studied at Hoch's Conservatory in Frankfurt, and later, in 1924, he himself was appointed director of the same institution. He inaugurated a class for jazz, which was taught by Mátyás Seiber. One of the students in this class was Walter Würzburger. When the Nazis came to power, all three composers' careers where quickly disrupted. Bernhard Sekles: Hafis-Songs op. 11, Suite for piano op. 34, Little Shimmy Mátyás Seiber : Rhythmical studies, 2 Songs Walter Würzburger: 2 jazz quartets for 4 french horns Jascha Nemtsov, piano Jörg Gottschick, voice Horn quartet: Cristiana Neves Custódio, Rebecca Luton, Christopher Williams, Ricky Lee Albrecht Dümling talked with Jonathan Wipplinger (138) 10. January 2019 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Defamed as a forger: The violinist Fritz Kreisler Fritz Kreisler was famous not only as a violinist, but also as a composer. With some of his pieces he played a game of camouflage and declared them rediscovered pieces by Couperin, Boccherini or Dittersdorf. The nazis blamed him for this, saying that he deliberately deceived the public. Harald Eggebrecht, author of the benchmark publication Große Geiger ("Great Violinists"), talked with Albrecht Dümling to explore the less well known sides of Kreisler's story. Judith Ingolfsson and Vladimir Stoupel played music by Kreisler and also Rachmaninov's sparkling arrangement of "Liebesfreud" for piano solo. Judith Ingolfsson, violin Vladimir Stoupel, piano Albrecht Dümling talked with Harald Eggebrecht and Vladimir Stoupel 2018 (137) 4. October 2018 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + A new start after the "Anschluss"? Vally and Karl Weigl After the Annexation of Austria in 1938, according to the racist law Vally and Karl Weigl were labelled "jewish". They found refuge in New York. Until then, Karl Weigl's (1881-1949) music had received regular performances by famous conductors and ensembles. While in exile, he continued composing, but did not succeed in starting a new career in the US. Vally Weigl (1894-1982) composed with increasing intensity and created an extensive ouvre. Vally Weigl: New England Suite for flute, cello and piano Bird of Life for flute Karl Weigl: Pictures from Childhood for flute and piano Sonata in G for cello and piano Rosy Wertheim: Trois Morceaux for flute and piano Performers: Ulrike Anton, flute Friedemann Ludwig, cello Russel Ryan, piano Ulrike Anton talked with Bettina Brand This concert has been supported by Karl Weigl Foundation (San Rafael, California) and Österreichisches Kulturforum Berlin: (136) 13. September 2018 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Committed to Jewish music. The composer Hans Krieg in Holland Hans Krieg was born 1899 in Haynau (Silesia, now Poland). He studied in Leipzig and Berlin. In 1928 he moved to Breslau to conduct the choir at the synagogue and different workers' choirs. In 1933 he fled to Amsterdam, but he was arrested in 1943, together with his wife and the two daughters Susanne and Mirjam. They were deported to Westerbork and later to Bergen-Belsen. They were among the few survivors of the "Lost Transport" to Terezín which was liberated by the Red Army after a 13-day-odyssey through Germany. The Kriegs returned to the Netherlands. Hans Krieg made a career as composer, singer, choirmaster and musicologist. He died in Amsterdam 26. November 1961. Mirjam Krieg became a prominent singer. She talked about her father and their shared experiences. Preghiera for violin and piano op. 38 (1923) Kennst Du das Land, wo die Kanonen blühn? op. 39/2 (Erich Kästner) Ohne Himmel und Erde op. 41/2 (Hans Seiffert) Ein unvollendetes Thema op. 39/5 (Christoffer Rex) Purim-Ballade for piano (1937) Tsaddik katamar op. 63 (Psalm 92, 13-16) (1936) Een lied van heimwee op. 57/1 (Pieter G. Buckinx) (1937) Waar bleven de Joden van ons Amsterdam (Lyrics and music: Hans Krieg 1947) Jiskor for piano (1949/50) Abendtrauer op. 8/1 (Stefan Zweig) (1946) Suite for violin and piano (1948), 1. Satz: Adagio Georg Streuber, baritone Katja Kulesza, violin Johanne von Harsdorf, piano Mirjam Krieg, the composer's daughter, talked with Peter Sarkar (135) 21. June 2018 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Werner-Otto-Saal + Building bridges with music: The German-American composer Samuel Adler Samuel Adler was born in Mannheim, his father was hazzan at the synagogue. At the age of ten he fled to the US in 1938. He came back to Germany in 1951, wearing the uniform of the US Army. He founded the 7th Army Symphony Orchestra and contributed thus to the German-American reconciliation. Adler is one of the most prominent composers and teachers of composing in the United States. He was our guest in the year of his 90th birthday. "Songs of Innocent Love" for soprano, violin and piano, on poetry by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (2016) Sonata for violin and piano No. 4 (1989) Choral Trilogy for choir and organ or piano (2012) Sabine Goetz, soprano Noah Bendix-Balgley, violin Phillip Moll, piano Vokalensemble sirventes berlin, conductor: Stefan Schuck, piano: Patrick Walliser Albrecht Dümling talked with the composer. (134) 3. May 2018 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + A Jew from Vienna in Buenos Aires: Guillermo Graetzer (1914 - 1993) Musical life in both northern and southern America benefitted from the expulsion of Jewish musicians from central Europe, especially if they had the chance to become fully integrated. This was the case with Wilhelm Grätzer (Guillermo Graetzer in Argentinia). He had studied with Ernst Lothar v. Knorr and Paul Hindemith in Berlin, and later with Paul Amadeus Pisk in Vienna. 1938 he fled, together with his close family, to Buenos Aires. He became an influential teacher and a well respected composer. His music encompasses different styles from Post-Hindemith to serialism. No. 3 from 3 toccatas (1938) for piano Grave for violin solo (1945) 5 bagatelas (1946) for piano Sestina for violin and piano (1976) Epitafio para J. J. Castro for clarinet and piano (1982) Melina Paetzold, clarinet Clemens Linder, violin Holger Groschopp, piano Carlos Graetzer (the composer's son, himself a composer) and Antonio Spiller (Argentinian born violinist) talked with Peter Sarkar (133) 8. March 2018 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + "It was a beautiful fairy-tale - now it's over". Paul Abraham's (1882 - 1960) fate Paul Abraham from Hungary spent just about three years in Berlin. In this short time he became the most popular composer of operettas, e.g. "Blume von Hawaii", "Ball im Savoy", "Märchen im Grand Hotel", "Viktoria". When he fled from Nazi Germany he finally arrived at New York. But he could never gain ground in the US, he fell ill and became mentally deranged, a "tragical king of Operetta" - this is the title of Klaus Waller's biography on Abraham. Ensemble Zwockhaus: Maria Thomaschke and Andreas Jocksch, voices · Nikolai Orloff, piano · Karola Elßner, saxophone · Sven Kalis, percussion · Volker Suhre, double bass Winfried Radeke talked with Klaus Waller This concert was sponsored by: GEMA-Stiftung (132) 25. January 2018 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Pioneer for modern music in Sweden: Composer Hans Holewa (1905-1991) When the proto-fascist Austrian government forbade the Social Democratic Party in 1934, Holewa lost most of his income, because he had been conducting Socialist choirs. So the reason for his flight to Sweden, long before Austria became part of Nazi Germany, was not due to his Jewish ancestry, but to politics. In Sweden Holewa had a difficult start, but later he made an impressive career as one of the country's foremost composers of modern music (mainly chamber and orchestral). Still, he is hardly known in Germany. Three pieces op. 3 No. 1 for 2 violins (1931) Suite No. 1 for violin and piano (1945) Sonata for violin and piano (1985) Duo Gelland: Cecilia and Martin Gelland, violins Ute Gareis, piano Albrecht Dümling talks with Michael Kube 2017 (131) 26. September 2017 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + From Saarbrücken to Tel Aviv. The composer Tzvi Avni (1927) Tzvi Avni (2.9.1927), honorary citizen of both his birthplace Saarbrücken and his later home Tel Aviv, is one of the most famous Israeli composers. Together with his parents he arrived there in 1935, fleeing from Nazi persecution. Now, at the age of 90, Tzvi Avni is still active in different fields: he is composing, teaching and building bridges between Israel and Germany. Dedication for piano solo (2016), German premiere Echoes From The Past for clarinet solo (1970) Kol for violin solo (2011), dedicated to Kolja Lessing Gesharim (Brücken) for 2 violins (2004) Kolja Lessing, violin and piano Holger Koch, violin Melina Paetzold, clarinet Tzvi Avni talks with Bettina Brand and Kolja Lessing. (130) 29. June 2017 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Oscar Straus - from "Überbrettl" to Hollywood and back The composer Oscar Straus (1870-1954) kept travelling from Vienna to Berlin and back. Together with Ernst von Wolzogen he founded the Cabaret theatre "Überbrettl" in Berlin (1901). Quite a number of these "Überbrettl"-songs have not been performed ever since. Straus, who was Jewish, escaped from Nazi Germany to the US. When he finally returned to Austria in 1948, he had an American passport. Valse Hypermoderne (Instr.) Altes Ghettoliedchen / lyrics: Hugo Salus Der lustige Ehemann / Otto Julius Bierbaum Radlers Seligkeit / Richard Dehmel Müde / Detlev Freiherr von Liliencron Das Herz in der Linde / Otto Julius Bierbaum Das Blumenmädel / Leo Heller Didel - Dudel - Dadel / Rideamus Das nüchterne Mädchen / Rideamus Herr Duncan / Georg Kleinecke Der Äppel-Seppel / Rideamus Moderne Treue / Marie Madeleine Das Kamm-Lied / Rideamus Couplet Schnidibumpfel / Rideamus Donnerwetter / Rideamus Ensemble Zwockhaus: Maria Thomaschke, Andreas Jocksch (Voices) Olaf Taube (xylophone, percussion) · Volker Suhre (double bass) · Nikolai Orloff (piano) Dr. Stefan Frey (Munich) talks with Winfried Radeke. (129) 6. April 2017 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + The composer Konstanty Regamey (1907-1982) in Warsaw and his part in the Anti-Nazi underground When Poland was occupied by the Germans in WWII, all cultural activities by Poles were prohibited (except the most trivial ones). Still, there were a number of "illegal" concerts in private homes. In one of them, the great Quintet for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano by Regamey received its first performance. The conposer was also active in the resistance movement. After the Warsaw Uprising Regamey was imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp, but because he was of Swiss descent, he was released and sent to Switzerland. There he worked in the fields of indology, linguistics and music. At the university of Fribourg he met the musicologist Jürg Stenzl. modern art ensemble: Helge Harding, clarinet · Alexander Hase, bassoon Jean-Claude Velin, violin · Anna Carewe, cello · Yoriko Ikeya, piano Prof. Dr. Jürg Stenzl talks with Peter Sarkar. This concert was sponsored by Harald Genzmer Stiftung and Pro Helvetia (128) 16. March 2017 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Exile as rescue and dead end. The composers Leopold Spinner and Julius Schloss portrayed by Juan Allende-Blin Until the moment when Leopold Spinner had to flee to London in 1939 he took lessons from Anton Webern. In London he entered the publishing company Boosey & Hawkes, and over the years he advanced to Chief Editor. Julius Schloss, who had studied with Alban Berg, was less lucky. His career in exile ended in a blind alley. He was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp for a couple of weeks, then he managed to find exile in Shanghai (1939) and later in the United States (1948). He did survive, but never gained a remarkable position as a musician after 1938. Juan Allende-Blin is one of the pioneers in the field of research on exiled musicians. He described these two most different biographies and gave an introduction to the music. Julius Schloss: String quartet in one movement (1928) Leopold Spinner: Sonatina for piano op. 22 Tomas Bächli, piano Ensemble Zeitlos: Claudia Sack and Wolfgang Bender, violins · Kirstin-Maria Pientka, viola · Gabriella Strümpel, cello Albrecht Dümling talks with Juan Allende-Blin. 2016 (127) 22. November 2016 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Escaped - fallen silent - rediscovered. The composer Berthold Goldschmidt Berthold Goldschmidt's career began promising. In 1932 his opera "Der gewaltige Hahnrei" was premiered successfully in Mannheim. When his music was banned in 1933 he fled from Berlin to London. Some time after the war he fell silent as a composer for many years and he nearly fell into oblivion. In 1987, the music festival "Berliner Festwochen" gave him the stage for a great comeback. Not only did he achieve international acclaim for his pre-war compositions, he also composed new works which were performed by young musicians. Little Legend for piano (1923/57) Time for voice and piano (1943) Two songs after Chr. Morgenstern op. 27 (1933): Nebelweben / Ein Rosenzweig Piano sonata op. 10 Kolja Lessing (piano) Martin Bruns (baritone) Bettina Brand talks with Kolja Lessing and Albrecht Dümling (126) 20. October 2016 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Ernst Krenek - A creator of "degenerate" music Ernst Krenek's opera "Jonny spielt auf" (1927) was an immediate success, but it also provoked severe reactions from Nazis. Jonny, the protagonist, a coloured jazz musician, was shown on the posters of the Nazi exhibition "Entartete Musik" in 1938 as epitome of "Rassenschande". When Austria was taken over by the Germans, Krenek fled to the United States, although he was not jewish. During his long life (which evoked the saying "one-man history of 20th century music"), he dealt with all tendencies in contemporary music. Ernst Krenek: Tanzstudie op. 1b for piano (1920) Excerpts from Italienische Balladen op. 77b (1934): Il Cavalier di Francia und La Monachella e il Demonio Kafka-Songs op. 82 (1937/38) The Flea op. 175 after John Donne (1960) Piano sonata No. 7 op. 240 (1988) Gladys Krenek: Zeit XXIV (after Renata Pandula) (1976) Holger Groschopp (piano) Anna Maria Pammer (soprano) Albrecht Dümling talks with Prof. Claudia Zenck (125) 23. June 2016 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Even Paris was no longer safe. Alexandre Tansman between Poland, France and the USA Alexandre Tansman left his native Poland at the age of 22. He had just won the national composer's competition. He found a new home in Paris and got in contact with the "Groupe des Six". In 1932/33 he toured the world, including East Asia. When German troops invaded France, Tansman fled to the USA. In response to anti-semitism and the loss of his French citizenship he looked into the Jewish tradition. He spent five years in California, earnich his living through music for the movies. In 1946 he returned to Paris. A special feature of his rich musical output are huge chords ("Skyscraper-chords") and a pronounced feeling for rhythm, which shows some influence from Strawinsky. Suite pour Trio d´Anches Sonatina for bassoon and piano (1952) Frederique Brillouin (oboe) \| Susanne Pudig (clarinet) Wolfgang Bensmann (bassoon) \| Petra Schnier (piano) Winfried Radeke talks with Andrea Brill (124) 14. April 2016 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Avantgarde and worker's song - How Imre Weisshaus turned into Paul Arma Imre Weisshaus, born in Budapest in 1904, studied there with Béla Bartók (piano and composing). Henry Cowell invited him to the US in 1927 to introduce the European avantgarde piano music to the American public. Cowell labelled Weisshaus' own music "abstract". In 1930 Weisshaus settled in Berlin. In those final years of the Weimar Republic he got involved with the workers' music movement, and for some time he worked as Hanns Eisler`s assistant. 1933 he fled to Paris and changed his name to Paul Arma. He stayed in France and died there in 1987. Deux Recitatifs for violin solo (1925) Transparence for piano (1928) Das Rote Saar-Lied (1933, Erich Weinert) Song vom Strick (1933, Fritz Hoff /Louis Aragon) Sonate for violin and piano op. 138 (1949) * World premiere ** Judith Ingolfsson (violin) Vladimir Stoupel (piano) Jörg Gottschick (Baritone, recitation) Albrecht Dümling talks with Tobias Widmaier (123) 3. March 2016 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + forbidden - persecuted - dispossessed. The dramatic story of Edition C. F. Peters One of the most famous music publishers is C. F. Peters, founded in Leipzig in 1800, and it is one of the eldest which still exist. In 1900 Henri Hinrichsen became director of the company. During Nazi rule the Hinrichsen family was disowned and the company "Arianized". Walter Hinrichsen fled to the United States, his brother Max to London. Both founded new publishing houses there. Henri Hinrichsen was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. Irene Lawford-Hinrichsen, Henri's granddaughter, was our guest. She talked with Bettina Brand about the changeful history of the family-owned enterprise which finally returned to its original building in Leipzig in 2013. Albrecht Dümling and Ursula Mamlok also contributed to the discussion. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Variations concertantes for cello and piano op. 17 (1829) Arnold Schönberg: Phantasy for violin with piano accompaniment op. 47 (1949) Hanns Eisler: Piano sonata No. 3 (1943) Ursula Mamlok: Panta Rhei (Time in flux) for violin, cello and piano (1981) Johanna Pichlmair, violin Adele Bitter, cello Holger Groschopp, piano Irene Lawford-Hinrichsen, Ursula Mamlok and Albrecht Dümling talked with Bettina Brand. (122) Thursday, 28. January 2016 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + He refused to play in Nazi Germany: The violinist Adolf Busch For numerous musicians the establishment of Nazi rule in central Europe meant a severe blow to their career. One of them was Adolf Busch (1891-1952), but his is an exceptional case. He was not forced to leave Germany, because he was neither a jew nor a communist nor a modernist. But after he witnessed the planned riots against jewish-owned shops in Berlin (1. April 1933) he cancelled all his concerts in Germany, and in 1938 he stopped performing in Austria and Italy, too. In 1939 he left Europe for the United States. Busch was a prolific composer. He studied composition in Cologne with Fritz Steinbach. Later Max Reger had a great influence on his style. Chamber music has a prominent place in his output, but he also composed for organ, for orchestra and for vocal ensmbles. Serenade for string quartet op. 14, (1st movement) Suite for viola solo op. 16a (movements 1 and 4) String quartet in b minor op. 29 No. 1-3 from Nine pieces for string quartet op. 45 Ensemble Zeitlos: Claudia Sack and Julia Prigge, violins· Francesca Zappa, viola · Gabriella Strümpel, cello Carlos María Solare, Viola (Suite op. 16a) Prof. Dominik Sackmann (Basel/Zurich) and Julia Prigge talked with Peter Sarkar 2015 (120, 121) 24. and 25. November 2015 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Werner-Otto-Saal 25 years of musica reanimata + Artur Schnabel - Composer and performer The famous teacher Theodor Leschetizky once said to his pupil Artur Schnabel: "You will never become a pianist - you are a musician". This was not meant as criticism, but as a compliment. Throughout his life Schnabel found composing his most rewarding activity. He disapproved of musical narrowness and, like few others in his time, retained the unity of composer, teacher and performer as it had been common in the 19th century. musica reanimata paid respect to this eminent artist who had been expelled from Berlin in 1933. Albrecht Dümling and Stefan Litwin moderated the concerts together. 24. November Artur Schnabel: Piece in seven movements (1936/37) Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata for piano and cello D major, op. 102, No. 2 Artur Schnabel: Quintet for piano, 2 violins, viola and cello (1915/16) Stefan Litwin, piano Mario Blaumer, cello Irmela Roelcke, piano Bennewitz Quartet (Prague): Jakub Fišer, violin · Štěpán Ježek, violin · Jiří Pinkas, Viola · Štěpán Doležal, cello 25. November Franz Schubert: Trio in E flat for piano, violin and cello (Notturno) D 897 Four songs (Im Frühling, Der Einsame, Die Sterne, Der Wanderer) Artur Schnabel: Notturno (Richard Dehmel) for low voice and piano (1914) Franz Schubert: Sonata No. 1 D major for violin and piano D 384 Artur Schnabel: Sonata for violin and piano (1935) Lena Neudauer, violin Mario Blaumer, cello Frank Wörner, voice Irmela Roelcke, piano Stefan Litwin, piano Co-operation partners: Akademie der Künste Berlin and Hochschule for Musik Saar (119) 1. November 2015 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Werner-Otto-Saal 25 years of musica reanimata + Master of all styles. Erwin Schulhoff, the inexhaustible Erwin Schulhoff, born in Prague, won quite a reputation in the German "Weimar Republic" through his varied chamber music and pieces inspired by jazz. Following the establishment of Nazi rule in 1933, none of his compositions were performed in Germany any longer. In 1942 he died in an internment camp in Bavaria. In recent years, a substantial part of Schulhoff's output has been rediscovered, but his numerous songs have remained neglected up to now. Things may change soon, because a complete edition of Schulhoff's songs is under the way. Zigeunerlieder op. 12, WV 10 1. Rings ist der Wald 2. Als die alte Mutter Five songs from the early years 1. Ida (Hermann Hesse) op. 13,4, WV 11 2. Lass mich an deinem stillen Auge (Max Dauthendey), WV 12a, (World premiere) 3. Sommerabend (Otto Falckenberg), op. 14,2, WV 12 4. Tanzlied (Otto Julius Bierbaum) op. 19a, WV 15, (World premiere) 5. Sonnenschein! 2. Version (Hans Steiger), WV 19a, (World premiere) Five pieses for string quartet "à Darius Milhaud" Four songs for baritone and piano op. 9 on words by Hans Steiger, WV 26, (World premiere) 1. Freude hab ich geschlürft 2. Wir gehen im lauten Novemberwind 3. Tiefblau funkelnde Sommernacht 4. Das alles wieder 5 "Gesänge" with piano accompaniment(author of the lyrics unknown), Werk 32, WV 52 1. Langsam wandle ich dahin 2. Lass mich, da ich glauben will 3. Ruhe der Fläche 4. Schmerz, der lastend liegt 5. Nun versank der Abend String quartet No. 1, WV 72 Performers: Hans Christoph Begemann, baritone Klaus Simon, piano Klee-Quartet: Naoko Senda and Emi Otogao, violins; Jun Ohta, viola; Ruri Kuroda, cello Moderation: Gottfried Eberle The radio station Deutschlandfunk will broadcast this concert on 14. March 2016 at 21.05 h (in "Musik-Panorama") This concert was sponsored by: Harald-Genzmer-Stiftung (118) 3. June 2015 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Expelled to the underground. The fate of the Dutch composer Rosy Wertheim (1888-1949) Rosy Wertheim was born into a well-respected jewish family in Amsterdam. She studied composing in her home town and, some years later, in Paris. Her Paris home quickly became a meeting-point, Ibert, Jolivet, Messiaen and Milhaud were among her guests. After returning to Amsterdam in 1937 she started a promising career as a composer. But when German troops occupied the Netherlands in 1940, all her public apperances came to a standstill. She did survive in hiding, but after the war she didn't get the chance to continue as sucessfully as before. She died in 1949 after a brief yet severe illness. In addition to music by Wertheim our concert contained a piece by Leo Smit (1900-1943), a dutch composer who knew her since his studies. Smit was murdered in Sobibór concentration camp. Rosy Wertheim: Trois Morceaux for flute and piano Two songs: "Es rauscht and rauscht...", "Die Insel der Vergessenheit" Six Morceaux for piano Trois Chansons after Li Tai Po for soprano, flute and piano Leo Smit: Sonata for flute and piano Irene Maessen, soprano / Eleonore Pameijer, flute / Andrei Banciu, piano Eleonore Pameijer and Dr. Mathias Lehmann talk with Bettina Brand. (117) 5. March 2015 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + "Heute nacht oder nie...". Mischa Spoliansky's (1898-1985) years in Berlin Mischa Spoliansky was born in the eastern part of Poland which was then ruled by Russia. When he was a child the family moved to Vienna; later he improved his abilities as a pianist and a composer in Dresden. At the outbreak of WW I he moved to Berlin. There he did further studies and earned himself a living by playing in coffee houses. 1919 he was invited by Friedrich Hollaender and Werner Richard Heymann to join them in the famous Berlin cabaret "Schall and Rauch". Spoliansky's pieces were performed widely, especially those on texts by Marcellus Schiffer: Alles Schwindel, Es liegt in der Luft, Wie werde ich reich and glücklich, Zwei Krawatten ... just to mention a few. 1933 he went into exile in England. He acquired British citizenship and never returned to Germany. Songs by Mischa Spoliansky from movies, revue and operetta Ensemble Zwockhaus: Maria Thomaschke and Andreas Joksch, voices Volker Suhre, double bass Nikolai Orloff, piano Olaf Taube, vibraphone and percussion Winfried Radeke talks with Boris Priebe (116) 15. January 2015 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Marcel Rubin and Karl Alwin in Mexico, the only country that welcomed exiles When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, only on country protested officially: Mexico. In the following year the left-wing Mexican governement gave exile to communist and socialist refugees from Europe, especially those who had fought in the Spanish civil war, and also to a smaller number of Jews. Alwin arrived in Mexico in 1940, after having spent some months in the USA. Rubin had lived in France, before he came to Mexico in 1942. They both worked at the opera in Mexico city. When Rubin embarked in Marseille for Mexico, he already had made an odyssey: Right on the day when Hitler marched into Austria (12. March 1938) Rubin fled to his sister who lived in Paris. In September 1939 he was interned as "enemy alien", together with thousands of other Germans and Austrians, regardless of them being persecuted by the Nazis or not. In one of the camps he composed three songs on poems by Jura Soyfer. One of them was the "Dachau-Lied", but Rubin didn't know that it had already been set into music by Herbert Zipper. When the internment camp was closed down, Rubin found his way back to his sister´s family, who then lived near Marseille. Karl Alwin had also left Vienna in 1938. He died in Mexico in 1945. Rubin returned to his native Austria in 1947, where he was active as a composer and music critic and in cultural politics. Marcel Rubin (1905-1995): Piano sonata No.2 (1927, 3. and 4. movement) Sonatina for oboe and piano Winter (1940, words: Jura Soyfer) Wenn der Himmel grau wird (1940, words: Jura Soyfer) aus: Nocturnes. Seven songs by Josef Luitpold (1962): Nr.1 Hier lebt ein Mensch Nr. 3 Erlebnis Nr. 2 Harlemer Nachtlied Dachau-Lied "Arbeit macht frei", words: Jura Soyfer Music: 1. stanza Herbert Zipper (1904-1997), 2.-4. stanza Marcel Rubin Karl Alwin (1891-1945): Three songs after Heinrich Heine (1914) Vergiftet sind meine Lieder... Lieb' Liebchen Nachtstück Performers: Daniel Wohlgemuth, oboe Jörg Gottschick, baritone Holger Groschopp, piano Richard Schnell, recitation of texts by Rubin Prof. Dr. Hartmut Krones talked with Peter Sarkar 2014 (115) 4. December 2014 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Puccini's rival: The opera composer Alberto Franchetti (1860-1942) Alberto Franchetti's start as a composer was promising: Giuseppe Verdi conveyed a commission for an opera celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America to him. Only one other opera was as successful as this one, Germania, premiered in 1902 (this opera was staged again a few years ago at Deutsche Oper Berlin). But in general, his achievements were overshadowed by the enormous success of Puccini. Thereafter, Franchetti composed only a small number of pieces. In 1938 Italy took over the racial laws from Germany, thus Franchetti was forced to go into inner emigration. Arias and excerpts from the following operas: CRISTOFORO COLOMBO (1892): È la luna! (Guevara) / Dunque ho sognato? (Colombo) / Si,cosi, vicina sul tuo capo veglierò (Isabella/Colombo) / M`odi! L´estrema è questa ora della mia vita (Colombo) GERMANIA (1902): Studenti! Udite (Federico) Ferite, Prigionier (Worms) GLAUCO (1922): Un´alba serena (Scilla) / È una fanciulla della mia Sicilia (Glauco) / Splendan per te nel cielo dell´ebrezza (Circe/Glauco) / Avevi un usignuolo (Pastorello) / Morta! No! Tu non sei morta, è vero (Glauco) / No! Piange ancora! (Pastorello) ASRAEL(1888): Quando lo sguardo mio nel volto tuo si bea (Loretta/Asrael) DON NAPOLEONE (1941): Mi voglion´ tanto bene (Don Geronimo) Performers: Kristin Ebner, soprano Angelo Raciti, tenor Jeongwhan Sim, baritone Scott Curry, piano Gottfried Eberle talked with Helmut Krausser (author of a double biography of Franchetti and Puccini) and Richard Erkens (musicologist, author of a detailed study on Franchetti). (114) 23. October 2014 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + "The world's most forgotten composer of the 20th century": Ernst Toch (1887-1964) During the Weimar Republic, few composers were as widely performed as Ernst Toch, but in 1933 he had to flee from Berlin because he was Jewish. Via Paris he emigrated to Los Angeles: There he felt isolated and bereft of his audience. His string trio, written in 1936, was the central piece in our concert. Habakuk Traber and Albrecht Dümling shed a light on this eminent artist, who remained neglected and who regarded himself as "the world's most forgotten composer of the 20th century". Ernst Toch died in California in October 1964. Burlesques for piano op. 31 (1923) String trio op. 63 (1936) Selected movements from the Impromptus op. 90 a/b/c for solo instruments (1963). Performers: Vladimir Stoupel (piano) Tanja Becker-Bender (violin) Itamar Ringel (viola) Mikayel Hakhnazarian (cello) Albrecht Dümling talked with Habakuk Traber (113) 26. June 2014 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + "Good to have friends everywhere." Brigitte Schiffer - Correspondent of modern music Brigitte Schiffer was forced to leave Germany im 1935 because she was Jewish. She had studied composition with Heinz Tiessen and ethnomusicology with Curt Sachs in Berlin. She spent more than 20 years in Cairo, after that she settled in London and reported for "Melos" and other music magazines from there. Prominent musicians like Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Carla Henius, Wladimir Vogel and Hermann Scherchen exchanged letters with her over a long period. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt: Expression Violett for piano (1919/21) Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt: March of Alexander the Great over Hamburg's bridges for piano (1919/21) Heinz Tiessen: Weltstadtrhythmus op. 45b for piano (1939) Brigitte Schiffer: String quartet Performers: Gottfried Eberle (piano) Klee-Quartet: Naoko Senda and Emi Otogao (violins), Jun Ohta (viola), Ruri Kuroda (cello) Blanche Kommerell and Bernd Neunzling read letters to and from B. Schiffer Prof. Dr. Dörte Schmidt talked with Dr. Matthias Pasdzierny (UdK Berlin) (112) 24. April 2014 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Deported to Australia as "enemy aliens": Felix Werder (1922-2012) and Walter Würzburger (1914-1995) The two composers both left Germany as early as 1933. Werder went to London, Wuerzburger to Singapore via Paris. When WW II broke out, both were arrested and sent to Australia as "enemy aliens". They were kept behind barbed wire for over a year. But there, in internment, they emerged as composers. Felix Werder became one of the leading figures in the realm of modern music in Australia, whereas Walter Wuerzburger was active in England. Boas Bischofswerder (1895-1946): Phantasia Judaica for violin and piano (written 1940 on "Dunera", excerpts) Walter Würzburger: Streichtrio Nr. 1 for 2 violins and cello (1940/41, St. John's Island and Tatura camp) Walter Würzburger: Vereinsamt (F. Nietzsche) for voice and piano (1941, Tatura camp) Walter Würzburger: For Anne Gregory (W. B. Yeats, 1948); The Art of Losing (Emily Jackman, 1991); Elevation (Franz Werfel, 1993) Felix Werder: Fantasias for String Trio (1956) Performers: Kristin Ebner, soprano; stefanpaul, piano Members of Ensemble Zeitlos: Claudia Sack, violin; Julia Prigge, violin and viola; Gabriella Strümpel, cello In conversation with Albrecht Dümling: Manfred Manasse, Hannah and Irmela Würzburger. (111) 9. January 2014 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Eduard Steuermann (1892-1964) - Piano genius and unrecognised composer Steuermann is one of the most prominent performers within the Second Viennese School. His legacy as a composer, however, is mostly unknown. Since Schoenberg, Eisler and other composers entrusted him with the first performances of their piano music, Steuermann had made a name for himself before he had to emigrate to the United States in 1936. Michael Gielen, internationally renowned conductor and composer, and Eduard Steuermann's nephew, and the composer Ursula Mamlok, who studied with Eduard Steuermann in the 1940s, contributed their recollections to our lecture concert. Arnold Schoenberg: Pieces for Piano op. 11 Eduard Steuermann: Piano sonata (1926) Hanns Eisler: 3rd Sonata for Piano (movements 1 and 3) Michael Gielen: Excerpts from Piano Piece in 7 Movements: recycling der glocken Performers: Stefan Litwin, piano In conversation with Bettina Brand: Michael Gielen, Ursula Mamlok and Stefan Litwin. 2013 (110) 20. November 2013 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Deported: Leo Kestenberg in Prague and Tel Aviv Leo Kestenberg had a formative influence on musical life in the Weimar Republic like few others. He was dismissed from his post as consultant for music in the Prussian Ministry for Culture and Eduction in 1932. A year later, he was labelled a "cultural bolshevist" and expelled from Germany. In Prague and later in Tel Aviv he continued to strive for his pedagogic and political visions. Excerpts from Kestenberg's writings from this time were discussed by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Mahlert (UdK Berlin). This was supplemented by performances of music by composers who were close to Kestenberg: Ferruccio Busoni: "Erscheinung aus Elegien" (1908); Sonatina seconda (1912) Franz Schreker: Chamber Symphony (1916), 1st part (piano arrangement by Ignace Strasfogel) Heinz Tiessen: Duo-Sonata for violin and piano op. 35 (1925) Performers: Antonis Anissegos (piano) Judith Ingolfsson (violin) and Vladimir Stoupel (piano) Prof. Dr. Ulrich Mahlert spoke with Dr. Albrecht Dümling (109) 10. October 2013 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Escape to Sweden in a fisherman's boat: Werner Wolf Glaser The composer Werner Wolf Glaser left Germany already in April 1933. After living in France for one year, some friends helped him to emigrate to Denmark. In 1943 he became Danish citizen, shortly before he had to move on: in the course of the rescue of Danish Jews he was brought to Sweden, together with his wife and three children. There he was active in many fields. He composed, managed the music school in Västerås, and worked as a music therapist. Piano sonata No. 1, first movement (1933) Sonata for saxophone solo (1936) Sonata for violin solo (1971) Ricordo IV for violin solo (1991) Performers: Kolja Lessing, violin and piano Frank Lunte, saxophone Jo Svend Glaser, the composer's son, and Kolja Lessing talked with Peter Sarkar. (108) 16. May 2013 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Piano music by composers from the Berlin "Novembergruppe": a dadaistic and futuristic provocation Artists from different fields met in the "Novembergruppe"; the composers in this group were among the most audacious and most talented within interwar Germany. They committed themselves to the social revolution after WW I. Pianist Matt Rubenstein rediscovered the music of these composers from Berlin, who suffered Nazi persecution. Max Butting: "Berlin im Licht"-Blues op. 36 (1928) Heinz Tiessen: No. 1, 2, 4 and 6 from: Six Pieces for Piano, op. 37 (1926-28) Eduard Erdmann: No. 4 and 5 from: Five Small Pieces for Piano, op. 6 (1915-1918) Wladimir Vogel: No. 1 and 3 from: Dai tempi più remoti (1921) Philipp Jarnach: Sarabande, op. 17 no. 2 (1924) H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Der Champagner Cobler and die Grüne Sonne (1921) Stefan Wolpe: from Six Marches, op. 10 (1928-34): March No.1, Gesang, weil ich etwas Teures verlassen muss, March No. 3 Performers: Matt Rubenstein, piano Prof. Dr. Nils Grosch talked with Bettina Brand. (107) 18. April 2013 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Exile in Japan: Chances to survive in Far East Japan was allied with Nazi Germany, but the Japanese did not follow Germany's racial policy. Thus a number of musicians, who suffered persecution as Jews in Germany, could find refuge in Japan: Manfred Gurlitt, Joseph Rosenstock, Klaus Pringsheim and Leonid Kreutzer. Together with Josef Laska, who had arrived there earlier, they made a substantial contribution to Japan's musical life. Joseph Rosenstock: Sonata for piano, 1. movement Manfred Gurlitt: Piano Quintet, 2nd movement Pieces by Klaus Pringsheim and Josef Laska Performers: Wolfgang Bender and Gisela Bender, violins Christiane Buchenau, viola Maria Magdalena Wiesmaier, cello Antonis Anissegos, piano Irene Suchy, musicologist from Vienna and expert on this subject, talked with Peter Sarkar (106) 28. February 2013 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + "Fallstudien" (case studies): Moritz, Siegfried, Leo and Richard Fall, a family of composers Our program featured the military music composer Moritz Fall (1848-1922) and his three sons: Siegfried (1871-1943), who studied with Max Bruch and who composed operas and songs. He had to earn his living by writing the piano scores for his more successful brother Leo's operettas (1873-1925). Richard (1882-1945) composed popular songs, his most famous lyricist was Fritz Löhner-Beda. Siegfried died in Theresienstadt (Terezín), Richard in Auschwitz. Siegfried Fall: Three songs for baritone and piano op. 10 Leo Fall: Songs from the operettas "Der süße Kavalier" and "Die Straßensängerin" / Die drei Mieter der Frau Schlüter / Die Ballade von der Knopfsammlung im Louvre von Paris Richard Fall: (Six) Songs after Löhner-Beda Moritz Fall: Polka Wirrwarr! / "Wehe! Wehe!" Performers: Ensemble Zwockhaus: Maria Thomaschke and Andreas Jocksch, voices Nikolai Orloff, piano / Timofej Sattarov, bajan / Volker Suhre, double bass Guest: Stefan Frey (Munich) Moderation: Winfried Radeke (105) 24. January 2013 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + A look at Germany from beyond: Paul Dessau in exile Paul Dessau fled from Germany already in 1933, denounced by a fellow musician. His first place of exile was France, where he devoted himself to his Jewishness, to socialism and to the musical avant-garde more strenuously than before. This can also be seen in his compositions. Pieces with mass impact like Thälmannkolonne are accompanied by complex piano pieces such as Guernica. The most influential personalities for Dessau were Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg; once he had finally arrived in Los Angeles, he co-operated directly with them. They also crystallised his view of Germany. Two Songs for Bass and Piano after Langston Hughes (1934) Guernica for piano (1938) Jewish Dance for violin and piano (1940) Three pieces for violin with piano accompaniment(1941/42) "Deutschland" and "Das deutsche Miserere" (Brecht, 1943) for voice and piano Eleven Jewish Folk Dances for piano (1946) Performers: Holger Groschopp, piano Max Simon, violin Johannes Schwärsky, baritone Guest: Maxim Dessau, the composer's son Moderation: Albrecht Dümling 2012 (104) 18. October 2012 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Lost and nearly forgotten: The composer Norbert von Hannenheim Only a few months after the end of World War II, in September 1945, Hannenheim died of heart failure in the hospital for euthanasia in Obrawalde. From early childhood, life had not been easy for him, but he finally made his way as a composer, producing more than 200 works. In the 1930s he was quite successful and he won several prizes. But because he had studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin, the Nazis obstructed his career. Thus he was hard-pressed for money, and this may have led to his mental disorder that in 1944 caused his committal to the lunatic asylum in Obrawalde. Suite for viola and piano Piano sonatas No. 6 and No. 3 4 songs after different poets: Die Türen (Ernst Lissauer) Glück (Ernst Collin Schonfeld) Mohn, roter Mohn (Jenny Boese) Zeitgeist (Friedrich Hölderlin) 4 songs after Rainer Maria Rilke Venedig Todeserfahrung Vorgefühl Liebes-Lied Performers: Moritz Ernst, piano Irena Troupová, soprano Jean-Claude Velin, viola Gottfried Eberle talked with Albert Breier (103) 28. June 2012 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Will Eisenmann: Avowed Pacifist and Anti-Fascist Will Eisenmann (1906-1992) despised National Socialism. He attended the anti-war conference in Amsterdam in 1932, after which he did not return to Germany but went to Paris to study composition with Paul Dukas and Charles Koechlin. Romain Rolland had helped him to get a scholarship. For the rest of his life, Eisenmann mainly lived in Switzerland, where he was supported by Hermann Scherchen and Hermann Hesse. Duo concertante for alto saxophone and piano, op. 33 From "Rubaiyat" for voice and and piano: Cycle I, op. 35 (1939-42), and II, op. 35b (1942/43), after poetry ("Sprueche der Weisheit") by Omar Khayyam Suite der Gegensätze for piano, op. 51 (1949/51) Ballade I, op. 53 (1952) and Ballade II, op. 74 (1964) for flute and piano From "Haiku" for voice and piano: Cycle I, op. 64 (1960) Capriccio for tenor saxophone and piano, op. 92 (1977) Nevermore for alto saxophone and piano, op. 28 (1940) Performers: Detlef Bensmann, saxophone and Yoriko Ikeya, piano Olivier Eisenmann, piano Kristina Naudé, mezzo-soprano Verena Steffen, flute Hanna Eisenmann and Olivier Eisenmann talked with Albrecht Dümling (102) 24. May 2012 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Aldo Finzi: A Master of Musical Refinement When the young composer Aldo Finzi (1897-1945) from Milan was just 24 years old, renowned Italian publishers began printing his music. In 1938 he wrote an opera for a competition at La Scala, which was accepted. But the performance never took place, because fascist Italy began ostracising Jews in this year. Five songs: Rondini (1920) La voix de Sélisette (1920) C´era una volta (1919) Barque d´or (1921) Serenata (1922) Four piano pieces: Valzer lento Nos. 1 and 2 (1920) Tempo di marcia (1938-1939) Tempo di Fox-trot (1930-1937) Sonata per violino e pianoforte (1919) Performers: Dörthe-Maria Sandmann, soprano Susanne Zapf, violin Holger Groschopp, piano Gottfried Wagner talked with Gottfried Eberle 8. May 2012: Charity concert for the funding of the restoration of the church organ in Terezín Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche Berlin + Organized by musica reanimata in co-operation with the Hans Krása foundation Terezín Music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Ilse Weber, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Gideon Klein, Franz Schreker Jaroslav Krček and K. Penderecki Performers: - Simon Roturier (violin), Barbara Buntrock (viola), Jakob Spahn (cello) - Ensemble Zwockhaus, cond. Winfried Radeke - Cantica Bohemica from Litoměřice - Martin Maxmilian Kaiser, organ, and Edita Adlerová, mezzo-soprano - Berliner Cappella, cond. Kerstin Behnke Patron: Norbert Lammert, president of German Bundestag (101) 29. March 2012 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Joseph Horovitz: Escape to the Island of Rescue In 1938, the twelve-year-old Joseph Horovitz fled from Vienna to England, together with his family. He studied in Oxford, London and Paris, and from 1961 taught composition at the Royal College of Music. Horovitz's String Quartet No. 5 was written 1968/1969 in remembrance of the artists and intellectuals who had sought refuge in England 30 years before. Sonatina for clarinet and piano (1981) Adagio from Violin Concerto (1951), arrangement for violin and piano String Quartet No. 5 (1969) Performers: Ensemble Zeitlos: Claudia Sack, Philip Douvier, Friedemann Wollheim & Gabriella Strümpel Tatjana Blome, piano / Matthias Höfele, clarinet Joseph Horovitz talked with Albrecht Dümling (100) 15. February 2012 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Werner-Otto-Saal of Konzerthaus Berlin + in memoriam Georg Kreisler: Composer, Emigrant Georg Kreisler was known for more than 50 years as the undisputed master of political cabaret. Less well-known is that the poet, satirist, author and composer of prose, verse, plays and musicals also composed two successful operas, that he and his family fled Vienna to Los Angeles in 1938, and that as an American soldier he interviewed Germans in preparation for the Nuremberg Trials. Entirely unknown is the fact that he composed chamber music while living in New York around 1950. Georg Kreisler had planned to take part in the event on 29 October and was looking forward to it immensely. An unexpected illness, which caused the concert to be postponed, led to his death on 22 November. 5 Bagatelles (1953) Sonata for Piano (1952) 3 Piano Pieces (ca. 1947) Performer: Sherri Jones, piano Guests: Barbara Kreisler-Peters, the composer's widow, Hans-Juergen Fink (author of Kreisler's biography), and Jürgen Keiser (music producer) Moderation: Albrecht Dümling and Albrecht Riethmüller 2011 (99) 15. September 2011 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Werner Richard Heymann: "Das gibt's nur einmal ..." Werner Richard Heymann (1896-1961), was the most successful composer for film music in the Weimar Republic. Some of his evergreens are still quite well known, for example Das gibt's nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder. Even before Heymann wrote his famous songs for the "Comedian Harmonists" and many famous actors, he had created an impressive career as a composer of cabaret songs. Our lecture recital focussed on these less well-known songs. Das Leibregiment (1922) lyrics: Kurt Tucholsky Der Umzug (1921/23) lyrics: Leo Heller Kellerleute (1921/23) lyrics: Leo Heller An den Kanälen (1921/23) lyrics: Walter Mehring Die Knöpfelschuhe (1921/23) lyrics: Leo Heller 1921/23) Der Glockenturm (1922) lyrics: Klabund Die älteren Jahrgänge (1952) lyrics: Robert Gilbert (from "Professor Unrat") Mit´m Zopp (1921/23) lyrics: Klabund O hätt´ ich doch mein Kind verkauft (1952) lyrics: Robert Gilbert (from "Professor Unrat") Die große Sensation (1921/23) lyrics: Walter Mehring Die Kälte (1921/23) lyrics: Walter Mehring Schattenfox (Dur-moll-Fox) (1922) lyrics: Hans Brennert Heut´ gefall´ ich mir (1952) lyrics: Robert Gilbert (from the movie "Alraune") Ach Maxe (1925) lyrics: Armin Robinson Des Huhnes Morgengesang (1921/23) lyrics: Walter Mehring Die Arie der großen Hure Presse (1921/23) lyrics: Walter Mehring Irgendwo auf der Welt (1932) lyrics: Robert Gilbert and Werner Richard Heymann (from the movie "Ein blonder Traum") Performers: Ensemble Zwockhaus: Maria Thomaschke and Andreas Jocksch (voices) Olaf Taube (vibraphone/percussion), Volker Suhre (double bass), Nikolai Orloff (piano) Moderation and arrangements: Winfried Radeke Guest: Elisabeth Trautwein-Heymann, the composer's daughter (98) 26. May 2011 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Musikclub des Konzerthauses Berlin am Gendarmenmarkt + More than just the "Concerto Popolare": For the centenary of Franz Reizenstein Many people know Reizenstein's Concerto Popolare, in which he staged a fight between the Tchaikovsky and Grieg piano concertos for Gerard Hoffnung's Music Festival in 1956. But who is the man behind this splendid parody? Franz Reizenstein, being Jewish, fled from Berlin in 1934, where he had studied composition with Paul Hindemith and piano with Leonid Kreutzer. During the war he was interned in England as an "enemy alien", but later he became a British citizen and gained a professorship at the Royal College of Music in London. Nevertheless, in spite of its quality his ample musical output remained unjustly neglected. David Wilde, pianist and one of Reizenstein's pupils, talked about the life and music of his teacher and played some of Reizenstein's piano music. 3 Concert Pieces for oboe and piano op. 10 (1937) Sonatina for oboe and piano op. 11 (1937) Prelude in B major, from: Preludes and Fugues op. 32 (1955) Sonata for violin solo op. 46 (1968) Performers: David Wilde, piano Ingo Goritzki, oboe Kolja Lessing, violin Albrecht Dümling talked with David Wilde and John Reizenstein (97) 24. February 2011 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Exile as a source for art: The composer Ruth Schönthal Ruth Schönthal was born in Berlin to a Jewish family, and at the age of five she became the youngest pupil at the Stern Conservatory. In 1935, under the Nazi regime, she had to leave the conservatory, so she took private lessons with the composer Walter Hirschberg, among others. In 1938 the Schönthals fled from Germany, first to Stockholm, then, in 1941, to Mexico City, where Ruth continued her studies. She has had considerable success as pianist and as composer. In 1946 she met Paul Hindemith and went to study with him at Yale University, until 1948. The outstanding feature of her music is the fusion of different stylistic elements from the traditions of Europe, Mexican folk music, and aleatoric and minimalist music. Reverberations - Nachklänge (1967-1974) Sonata in Two Movements for cello and piano (1989) Excerpts from: Sonatina(1939) Variations in Search of a Theme (1976) The Canticles of Hieronymus (1986) Performers: Adina Mornell, piano Johanna Kotschy, cello Bettina Brand talks with Adina Mornell 2010 (96) 16. December 2010 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Constancy to Vienna: The composer and musicologist Egon Wellesz Three sketches for piano, op. 6 (1911) Kirschblütenlieder, op. 8 (1912) Two pieces from: Sechs Klavierstücke, op. 26 (1917-18) Lieder aus Wien (H.C. Artmann), op. 82 (1959) Studien in Grau for piano, op. 106 (1969) Performers: Margarete Babinsky, piano Martin Vacha, baritone Nora Lentner, soprano Axel Bauni, piano accompaniment Albrecht Dümling talked with Dr. Bojan Bujic (Oxford) (95) 28. September 2010 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Between dreams and misery: Exile in Los Angeles Lecture recital with Walter Arlen, Los Angeles Los Angeles and the Hollywood Dream Factory gave refuge to many artist who fled from Hitler Germany and other facist countries. One of them was the Jewish born Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who arrived here in 1939. He composed music for over 250 movies but also concert music. Besides, he taught composing. He and Walter Arlen, born in Vienna in 1920, became lifetime friends in California. Performers: Gráinne Dunne, piano Ensemble Zeitlos: Claudia Sack and Susanne Walter (violins), Chang-Yun Yoo (viola), Gabriella Strümpel (cello) Albrecht Dümling talked with Walter Arlen 26. September 2010 Special concert "Chamber music from Terezín" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Program: Gideon Klein: piano sonata, string trio Hans Krása: songs op.4, Passacaglia and Fugue for string trio Viktor Ullmann: Hölderlin-songs, piano sonata No. 6 Siegmund Schul: Chassidic dances Pavel Haas: four songs after Chinese poetry Karel Reiner: piano trio Performers: Holger Groschopp, piano Katharina Göres, soprano Jonathan de la Paz Zaens, baritone Gottfried Eberle, piano accompaniment Trio Quodlibet (Rainer Johannes Kimstedt, violin; Regine Pfleiderer, viola; Katharina Maechler, cello) (94) 23. September 2010 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Theresienstadt, die schönste Stadt der Welt - Chansons and satires Recently rediscovered songs and lyrics by Leo Strauss, Felix Porges, Walter Lindenbaum and others, including "Kasernenlied", "Die gelben Fleckerln" and "Bad Blockhaus". The music is complemented with two short scenes depicting bizarre incidents in the ghetto. Performers: Maria Thomaschke and Andreas Jocksch, voices Manfred Schmidt, piano Timofej Sattarov, bajan Martin Genschow, db. Conductor, moderation, arrangements: Winfried Radeke Guest: Helga Kinsky (Vienna), Terezín contemporary witness ("Room 28") (93) 17. June 2010 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Last resort Shanghai. Composers Wolfgang Fraenkel and Julius Schloß in exile J. Schloß: String quartet in a single slow movement (1928, dedicated to Alban Berg); selection from "23 Studies for Piano in twelve tone style" for chuldren (1958) W. Fraenkel: 1. movement from "Music for String Quartet" (to A. Schönberg for his 75. birthday); 3 preludes for piano (composed 1945 in Shanghai) Sang Tong (who studied with Fraenkel and Schloß): "In a remote place" for piano (1947) Performers: Gottfried Eberle, piano Ensemble Zeitlos: Claudia Sack and Susanne Walter (violins), Chang-Yun Yoo (viola), Gabriella Strümpel (cello) Moderation: Dr. Ursula Krechel Guests: Sonja Mühlberger and Christian Utz. (92) 20. May 2010 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Insinuation and resentment. Heinrich Kaminski and the Nazi regime Prelude and fugue for piano from "Klavierbuch III" (1934/35) Quartet a minor (1912) for piano, clarinet, viola and cello Music for cello and piano (1938) Performers: Maria Wiesmaier, cello Wolfgang Bender, violin Christian Vogel, clarinet Antonis Anissegos, piano Dr. Manfred Peters talked with Bettina Brand. (91) 18. February 2010 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Expelled in spite of all his success. The composer and academy director Hans Gál 1. and 3. movement from Sonata for violin and piano b flat minor, op. 17 (1920) 1. movement from Sonata for violin and piano D major (1933) 24 preludes for piano op. 83 (1960): No. 3, 4, 7, 15, 16, 23, 24 Performers: David Frühwirth, violin Gottlieb Wallisch, piano The composer's daughter Eva Fox-Gál talked with Albrecht Dümling. 2009 (90) 10. December 2009 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Space and series. Wladimir Vogel and his piano music Nature vivante (1917 - 1921) Trepak (1919) Miniatures from exile: Ein wenig klagend (1933) Musette (1936) Passac'aglina (1938) In modo cantico (1941) Bells: Ad usum nativitatis (1947) Russian Bells (1978) Intervals (1980) Epitaffio per Alban Berg (1936) Performer: Kolja Lessing, piano Habakuk Traber talked with Kolja Lessing. (89) 15. October 2009 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Persecuted as a Gypsy. Oskar Siebert, violinist and jazz-guitarist from Berlin-Wedding Oskar Siebert's father belonged to a Rom family. He was a violin maker and has his own workshop, where he had Nazis among his customers. Oskar's mother was Russian Jewish. He wanted to become a professional violinist, but the Nazis arrested him as a "Gipsy" and deported him to Mauthausen and other camps. Music saved his life - he had to play for the guards. After the liberation, Oskar Siebert performed in the US as a jazz-guitarist. Later, he returned to Germany to play in different bands (e.g. at the RIAS in Berlin) and to write arrangements. 4th movement from string quartet (1963/1983) Preludes for guitar Music for the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp for string quintet, 2007 (First performance) Performers: Accordo string quartet (Nicola Borsche and Tassilo Kaiser, violins; Sabrina Briscik, viola; Regine Zimmermann, cello) Martin Genschow, double bass Jacek Ansgar Rabinski, guitar Winfried Radeke talked with Mathias Ulbricht and Tassilo Kaiser 8.-10. October 2009 Berlin Academy of Arts, Studio Hanseatenweg + In Search for Jewish Music: Composers in the Jewish Cultural League Berlin (Jüdischer Kulturbund Berlin) Concerts, documentary and panel discussion Co-operation with Berlin Academy of Arts Thursday, 8. October, 20 h: Concert I Jakob Schönberg (1900-1956) 2 Yiddish songs for soprano and piano Chassidic Suite for piano 2 hebraic songs for soprano, violin and viola 6 hebraic songs for voice and piano Quartet for violin, viola, cello and piano Friday, 9. October, 17 h: Film "Es waren wirklich Sternstunden. Der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933-1941" Documentary ba Henryk M. Broder and Eike Geisel (BR u. SFB 1988). Friday, 9. October, 20 h: Concert II Arno Nadel (1878-1943) Sabbat-Suite for string trio (with soprano) "Der Alef-Bejs". Study on Warschawski's folk song for soprano and string trio Jewish folk-song-arrangements for voice and piano Karl Wiener (1891-1942) songs from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" for voice and piano Two pieces for piano left hand op. 9 Intermezzo Impromptu Three songs op. 37 on words by Arno Nadel Saturday, 10. October, 16 h: Panel discussion Panel: Wolfgang Trautwein, Volker Kühn, Jascha Nemtsov, Albrecht Dümling, Thomas Lackmann (chairman) Saturday, 10. October, 20 h: Concert III Oskar Guttmann (1885-1943) Hafis, 13 songs for soprano and piano Alfred Goodman (1919-1999) Three Meditations on Israel for piano Hebrew folk-song-arrangements for voice and piano (Berlin, 1937-1938) Quartett for violin, viola, cello and piano (Berlin 1938) Performers: Jascha Nemtsov, piano and conception Verena Rein, soprano Sergey Malov, violin Jan Grüning, viola Jakob Spahn, cello Mathias Eysen, recitation Moderation: Jascha Nemtsov and Albrecht Dümling. (88) 28. May 2009 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + Returning to a foreign Homeland: Friedrich Hollaender Hollaender's fate is characteristic for many of those who fled from the Nazi regime and returned to Germany after the war. He was a celebrated cabaret artist, composer and pianist in the 1920's, he worked together with Tucholsky, Klabund and Mehring at the cabaret "Schall and Rauch", and he had his own stage named "Tingel- Tangel". One of his most famous titles was Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt. He emigrated in 1933. In Hollywood he failed to re-establish his "Tingel-Tangel" in 1934, but he succeeded as a composer for the movies. In the 1950's he returned to Germany. But was he well received? The lecture recital focused on Hollaender's experience as a "remigrant" in postwar Germany. - Wenn der Mond, wenn der Mond - Tauentzienmädel - Nass oder trocken - Du bist die Frau - Münchhausen (Lügenlied) - An allem sind die Juden schuld - Trinkgeld - Ja, wenn die Musik nicht wär - Das ist zu machen, mein Schatz - Emigrantenballade (excerpts) - Ich ruf Sie an - Totale Verfremdung - Wie man sich unsichtbar macht - Der Song vom Stottern - Da lumpada lumpa - Spötterdämmerung Performers: Maria Thomaschke and Andreas Jocksch - voices Manfred Schmidt - piano Olaf Taube - vibraphone/percussion Martin Genschow - double bass Winfried Radeke - Arrangements, moderation and conception Volker Kühn talked with Winfried Radeke. (87) 6. April 2009 "Persecution and Rediscovery" Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, Musikclub + "Mediterranean music": Max Brod (1884 - 1968) as a composer Max Brod is best known as a writer, as Franz Kafka's editor and as a translator for Janáček. Widely unknown is his musical output, although he composed around 40 works. In his early years he wrote mainly songs. Shortly before German troops occupied Prague he escaped to Palestine. Until his death he was dramatic adviser at the national theatre Habimah. In Palestine he also resumed his career as a composer. Now he strived for a synthesis of European and oriental music in a "Mediterranean Style". Music by Max Brod: Sankt Nepomuks Vorabend (Goethe) (1916) 126. Psalm (1921) "Tod und Paradies" after Franz Kafka op. 35 (1951) Halil, from: La Méditerranée - Rhapsodie for piano op. 28 (1945) from: Acht Lieder aus Goethes "Chinesisch-Deutschen Jahres- and Tageszeiten" op. 32 (1949) I. Moderato: Sag, was könnt uns Mandarinen II. Zart, nicht schleppen, frisch: Weiß wie Lilien, reine Kerzen IV. Langsam, ruhig: Dämmrung senkte sich von oben VII. with Heftigkeit: Hingesunken alten Träumen Music by Tzvi Avni: From There and Then. Prelude and Passacaglia for Piano (1998) Performers: Katharina Göres, soprano Holger Groschopp, piano Prof. Tzvi Avni (Tel Aviv) and Prof. Dr. Reinhard
1646	dbpedia	1	22	http://oldmusicautographs.blogspot.com/2012/07/elena-gerhardt-sings-brahms-great-lied.html	en	The Music Antiquarian Blog: Elena Gerhardt sings Brahms great lied "Von Ewiger Liebe"	https://blogger.googleus…52C+Elena+sp.jpg	https://blogger.googleus…52C+Elena+sp.jpg	[ "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJFWFi5OccTy4MtavXJPAij_WGOY7_a3zvcOzlRCGjqDGRPfhQObLPFQg7BYgT34y5YOR38zfktNXu_s7noOdnNJOiyaxh3sI_HVC5CjQMuUV9XFGbaJc6DJkrdBha6fZMYteMDCCQ12E/s320/Gerhardt%252C+Elena+sp.jpg", "https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif", "https://resour...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Harmonie Autographs & Music", "Inc. Music Antiquarians", "View my complete profile" ]	null	Elena Gerhardt may not be a name well recognized today except by record collectors. However, at one point in time, she was the most ...	en	http://oldmusicautographs.blogspot.com/favicon.ico		http://oldmusicautographs.blogspot.com/2012/07/elena-gerhardt-sings-brahms-great-lied.html	About Me Harmonie Autographs & Music, Inc. Music Antiquarians and Appraisers We appraise, buy and sell music antiquities, autographs, first edition scores, photographs, books, letters etc. etc. of famous classical musicians, composers, conductors, opera singers and big band jazz musicians. We are well known in the professional music field for our appraisal of composer, musician and professional organizations archives. View my complete profile Total Pageviews
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1646	dbpedia	2	36	https://issuu.com/melbsymphony/docs/mso_encore_issue_05	en	MSO Encore Magazine: Issue 5	https://image.isu.pub/24…age_1_social.jpg	https://image.isu.pub/24…age_1_social.jpg	[ "https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/31d186ba39f38e8c4fac.png", "https://static.issuu.com/fe/silkscreen/0.0.3042/icons/gradient/icon-canva-gradient.svg", "https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/1e794a8c4ec65e549678.png", "https://photo.isu.pub/melbsymphony/photo_large....	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00	The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Magazine	en	/favicon.ico	Issuu	https://issuu.com/melbsymphony/docs/mso_encore_issue_05	Welcome to Issuu’s blog: home to product news, tips, resources, interviews (and more) related to content marketing and publishing. Here you'll find an answer to your question.
1646	dbpedia	0	97	https://ebin.pub/rachmaninoffs-complete-songs-a-companion-with-texts-and-translations-9780253353399-9780253012593-0253012597-0253353394-9781461957676-1461957672.html	en	Rachmaninoff's complete songs: a companion with texts and translations 9780253353399, 9780253012593, 0253012597, 0253353394, 9781461957676, 1461957672	https://ebin.pub/img/rac…6-1461957672.jpg	https://ebin.pub/img/rac…6-1461957672.jpg	[ "https://ebin.pub/ebinpub/assets/img/ebinpub_logo.png", "https://ebin.pub/img/200x200/a-dostoevskii-companion-texts-and-contexts-9781618117281.jpg", "https://ebin.pub/img/200x200/valentinian-christianity-texts-and-translations-9780520969803.jpg", "https://ebin.pub/img/200x200/hellenistic-tragedy-texts-transla...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Sergei Rachmaninoff--the last great Russian romantic and arguably the finest pianist of the late 19th and early 20th cen...	en	https://ebin.pub/ebinpub…e-icon-57x57.png	ebin.pub	https://ebin.pub/rachmaninoffs-complete-songs-a-companion-with-texts-and-translations-9780253353399-9780253012593-0253012597-0253353394-9781461957676-1461957672.html	Citation preview Rachmaninoff’s Complete Songs Russian Music Studies Malcolm Hamrick Brown, founding editor Rachmaninoff’s Complete Songs  A Companion with Texts and Translations Richard D. Sylvester INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington & Indianapolis Illustration on page iv: Leonid Pasternak. Portrait of the composer S. V. Rachmaninov. Moscow, 1916. © The Pasternak Trust. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission. This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone 800-842-6796 Fax 812-855-7931 © 2014 by Richard D. Sylvester All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sylvester, Richard D., author, translator. Rachmaninoff’s complete songs : a companion with texts and translations / Richard D. Sylvester. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35339-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0253-01259-3 (ebook) 1. Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 1873–1943. Songs. 2. Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 1873–1943. Songs—Texts. I. Title. ML54.6.R18S95 2014 782.42168092—dc23 2013040934 1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14 for Nancy Ries Contents Preface Acknowledgments A Note on Dates and Spelling List of Abbreviations xi xv xvii xxi Early Years (1873–1892) Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) First Published Songs, Opus 4 (1893) Songs 10–15 Six Romances, Opus 8 (1893) Songs 16–21 Twelve Romances, Opus 14 (1896) Songs 22–33 Twelve Romances, Opus 21 (1902) Songs 34–45 Song 46, Without Opus (1900) Fifteen Romances, Opus 26 (1906) Songs 47–61 Song 62, Without Opus (1908) Fourteen Romances, Opus 34 (1912–1915) Songs 63–76 Song 77, Without Opus (1914) Six Poems, Opus 38 (1916) Songs 78–83 After Russia (1917–1943) Two Sacred Songs (1916) 1 9 28 31 46 47 61 63 88 95 124 126 137 175 178 185 232 234 243 257 259 Bibliography Index of Singers Index of Song Titles in Russian Index of Song Titles in English Index of Names 261 271 289 291 295 xi Preface The Moscow public first learned of a young composer named Sergei Rachmaninoff in the spring of 1893, when the Bolshoi Theater announced production of his one-act opera Aleko. He was known before that to insiders at the Moscow Conservatory, where he performed some of his early piano works. An opera, however, based on Alexander Pushkin’s brilliant narrative poem Tsygany (The Gypsies, 1824), was an important musical event. By the time the young composer reached his twentieth birthday, on 2 April 1893, rehearsals were already under way. Aleko was never imagined as a career-launching move, but that is what it turned out to be. It was composed in 1892 as a final diploma project at the Conservatory. The libretto, patchily contrived for pedagogical purposes by the Moscow critic and dramaturge Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, invited comparison, in its verismo plot of jealousy and murderous revenge, with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, a recent hit at the Bolshoi (for details, see Richard Taruskin: “Aleko,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 1992). Given a deadline of one month to write the opera, Rachmaninoff (the only one of the three seniors in the class to finish the job on time) submitted the score in less than three weeks (for exact dates, see T/N, 178-80). The result was quite astonishing: not only did it make good use of specifically “Russian” and “oriental” musical strategies worked out by Glinka, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, and others, but it contained choral and solo numbers with original, well-crafted melodies. The performance at the Bolshoi Theater was given on 27 April 1893, with lead singers and the Bolshoi’s principal conductor, Ippolit Altani. Some of the arias were sung and later recorded by famous singers, with Feodor Chaliapin first and foremost (Chaliapin recorded Aleko’s cavatina in 1923 in Hayes and 1930 in London). In our own day, baritone Mariusz Kwiecien included it on his compact disc “Slavic Heroes” (2011). The opera brought Rachmaninoff early fame: Tchaikovsky found him a publisher, and mentored him during rehearsals; the Kiev Opera invited the composer to conduct it there, which he did in October 1893; and in St. Petersburg, Rimsky-Korsakov himself conducted the “Dance of the Gypsy Girls” at a Russian Symphony concert in December 1894. In a special performance in St. Petersburg on the centenary of Pushkin’s birth in May 1899, Chaliapin sang the lead part, with “true suffering in his sobs at the end,” according to the composer (LN 1, 290). Beyond Russia, audiences first heard music by Rachmaninoff in December 1893, when his cousin, the celebrated pianist Alexander Siloti, performed the First Piano Concerto in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. The German reviewers heard echoes of Chopin, Liszt, and Grieg in the piano writing but failed to xii Preface grasp the “Russian” character of the music (Keldysh, 79). In 1895, Rachmaninoff was discovered in the West in a major and lasting way. That is when Siloti first played the “Prelude in C-sharp Minor” in London. Once heard, the public demanded Siloti play it without fail in every recital in England and Scotland, and later in 1898 in New York, Boston, and Chicago (Barber, 55-70). Rachmaninoff himself played it in England on his first tour abroad in 1899. Eventually he came to regret its popularity, as he was expected to play “it” (as the piece was called in the newspapers) after every piano recital. For decades in the twentieth century, this short work of 1892 was widely considered to be the best known piano composition ever written. Today Rachmaninoff is universally known as a composer of major works for piano and orchestra which have a permanent place in the concert repertoire, especially his Second Concerto (1900-01), his Third Concerto (1909), and his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” (1934). He is admired for many other works too, among them his Second Symphony with its sweeping Adagio (190608), and his singularly moving “All-Night Vigil” (sometimes called “Vespers,” for four-part unaccompanied mixed chorus, 1915). In his solo piano works he stands with Chopin and Liszt. Only his songs remain less well known, especially outside Russia, although this is changing today as younger singers discover them and learn to sing them in Russian. Rachmaninoff’s eighty-three songs, or “románsy” as they are called in Russian, include some of his finest and most memorable music. The “romances” come out of the Russian current of the great nineteenth-century stream of Romantic song that goes back to Beethoven and Schubert. Like German Lieder and French mélodies, they are songs written to be sung by one singer, with a piano accompaniment especially composed for the song. Instead of writing the words, the composer customarily chooses a lyric poem or other text and sets it to music by writing a voice part and a piano part. The success of Aleko owed something to Rachmaninoff the youthful songwriter—to his love of drama, skill in crafting melodies, originality in writing declamatory parts for voice, and supreme pianistic gifts. His best early compositions are piano pieces and songs. The purpose of this book is to collect and translate the lyrics of all the songs written by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and to comment on their musical realization. The texts are presented in their entirety, as they appear in each song, in the original Russian (there is one early song in French). These are followed by a transcription of the Russian words in the Latin alphabet, and, printed line by line alongside it, a translation into plain, unrhymed English. My translations are not “singing” versions, but they will allow a reader who does not know Russian to listen to a song and follow the words from start to finish as they are sung. Preface xiii The order of the songs and the consecutive numbering of them used here follow the 1957 Moscow edition of Rachmaninoff’s songs Romansy: Polnoe sobranie (“Romances: Complete Collection,” abbreviated PSR). A new academic edition of Rachmaninoff’s complete works in some fifty volumes is being undertaken jointly by the Central State Glinka Museum in Moscow and Russian Music Publishers (with Bärenreiter-Verlag in Germany), but as of this writing only two volumes of piano works have been issued. Valentin Antipov, the editor of these volumes, told me in Moscow in 2007 that preparation of the songs had not begun, because a “textologist” had not yet been found. The present volume is an attempt to establish the lyrics of Rachmaninoff’s songs as accurately as possible. The research was carried out over a dozen years, including visits to many libraries in Moscow and elsewhere to track down the various publications of the texts Rachmaninoff used in his songs. In my research I found a number of errors which are corrected here, including a bowdlerized lyric (Song 53), which was censored in the Soviet period and rewritten to remove religious language. I claim no originality in matters of musical interpretation. Historical and descriptive information—poets or other authors of the text, dates, other settings of the text, key signatures, voice range, and so on—is provided at the end of each song. Recordings of the song are also listed there, by the singer’s last name (or the full names of each instrumentalist, in cases of transcriptions, which are abundant in several of Rachmaninoff’s songs). At the back of the book, further information about the singers and a list of the songs recorded by each of them are placed together in an Index of Singers. Throughout the book, in lieu of footnotes, the names of works cited are given in italics, with page numbers as necessary. Information about sources will be found in the Bibliography; major sources are also described in the “List of Abbreviations” on pages xxi-xxii. Rachmaninoff’s song texts have been collected and translated into English once before, in The Singer’s Rachmaninoff, compiled by Natalia Challis (New York, 1989). That was a useful volume, but it is now out of print; it repeats some stubborn errors, and uses an inaccurate system of phonetic transcriptions. Singers who want to see a correct phonetic transcription of the songs should consult the excellent manual by Professor Laurence R. Richter, Rachmaninov’s Complete Song Texts (Leyerle Publications, Geneseo, New York, 2000). His book also contains literal and idiomatic English translations, making it a new and up-to-date singer’s manual for Rachmaninoff’s songs. My book may be used as a reference to find information about a particular song, but it can also be read as a continuous narrative. Each group of songs is preceded by a short section about Rachmaninoff’s life, ideas, and contacts in the artistic world during his twenty-six years as a composer of romansy. He had connections, sometimes very close ones, with leading figures of the xiv Preface “Silver Age” of Russian art at the turn of the twentieth century. He knew the writers Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Ivan Bunin. He knew theater people, including Savva Mamontov at the “Private Opera” and Vladimir Teliakovsky, director of the Imperial Theaters, both of whom hired him as a conductor. He knew Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater, and Sergei Diaghilev, who brought him to Paris to take part in his first “Saison Russe” in 1907. He worked with Feodor Chaliapin and other singers of his generation (to whom he dedicated some of his songs), and concert organizers like Alexander Siloti and Serge Koussevitzky. I hope some glimpses into these relationships will humanize Rachmaninoff, too often thought of as a dour and humorless man, “a six-and-a-half-foot-tall scowl” in the words of Igor Stravinsky. As in my book about Tchaikovsky’s songs (TCS), the aim of the commentary is to illuminate the composer’s professional life, his life as an artist. Both men were born into loving, extended families, but, unlike Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff had a successful marriage and was at peace in his private life. As professionals the two men were exceptionally disciplined and stood out in their insistence on the highest artistic standards. As a composer, Tchaikovsky was inexhaustibly gifted, and he accomplished more. As a musician, however, Rachmaninoff was gifted in more ways, and was torn between three callings. He wanted first and foremost to compose. When he had to learn to conduct early in his life in order to find a job, he became (like Gustav Mahler, a contemporary he greatly admired) an outstanding conductor. When he left Russia in 1917, already famous as a pianist, he honed his skills, learned new repertoire, and practiced every day to be able to give recitals to support his family. A recent assessment of his place as a pianist in his lifetime is one by Alex Ross, who wrote, in a New Yorker review of recordings of the “hundred greatest” pianists of the 20th century, “The most immediately impressive volumes are those in which a player’s personality swamps every piece on the program. The lord of them all is probably Rachmaninoff. Of the Slavic pianists who fill the twentieth-century pantheon, Horowitz may have produced more electricity and Paderewski more tears, but Rachmaninoff is the one who pins you in your chair with the force of his mind” (Ross 1999). Rachmaninoff always thought of his songs as performances coming out of and written for a specifically Russian milieu. After he left Russia, for good, at the end of 1917, he wrote no more songs. xv Acknowledgments First, I wish to thank Malcolm Hamrick Brown, founding editor of Russian Music Studies, who encouraged my work on this project from the first time we met in New York to discuss it. For his sage advice and unfailing support I am deeply grateful. My thanks extend to the wise and steady Director of Indiana University Press, Janet Rabinowitch, and to her editorial staff, whose bright and ready responses have eased my way and made the production of the book a pleasant task. Part of my research for this book was supported by travel grants from the Colgate University Faculty Research Council in October 1996 and January 2000, and a summer grant in May 1998 from the International Research & Exchanges Board, with funds provided by the U. S. Department of State (Title VIII program) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I thank them all for their generosity and trust, and I assume sole responsibility for the views expressed in this book. My colleagues at Colgate University helped and encouraged me in many important ways, especially Alice Nakhimovsky, Nancy Ries, Matt and Denise Leone, Albert and Rebecca Ammerman, Jane Pinchin, Anthony Aveni, Chris Vecsey, and Tim Byrnes. I am also grateful to the staff of the Colgate Library, especially to the resourceful Ann Ackerson, head of Interlibrary Loan. It was an inspiration to work in the hallowed reading rooms of the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the State Lenin Library in Moscow. Libraries at Stanford and Cornell, and Bird Library and the Belfer Audio Archive at Syracuse University, made me welcome and offered ready assistance. I owe a special thanks to Robert Hodge, who played rare vocal recordings for me at the Belfer Archive. In Moscow, Vyacheslav Nechayev, Director of the Library of the Union of Theatrical Workers, and his staff welcomed me during various projects for more than twenty-five years in their historic reading room on Strastnoi Boulevard located a block away from Rachmaninoff’s Moscow apartment (the room was originally the university typography, where Crime and Punishment was first printed). At the Moscow Conservatory Library, Lyudmila Dedyukina cheerfully supplied books and cuttings from journals and newspapers of the pre-1917 period. Eleonora Mamedova-Sokolova and the late Nikolai Sokolov of the Chaliapin Museum have been resourceful and valued friends in all matters pertaining to the Russian vocal scene. Irina Medvedeva of the Glinka Museum welcomed this project and allowed me access to their Rachmaninoff archive. To Alexander Abramovich Makarov, a friend of many years and son of the renowned accompanist Abram Makarov, I am grateful for personal introductions xvi Acknowledgments to Konstantin Lisovsky, Tatyana and Olga Reizen, and Zara Dolukhanova: to each of them I owe thanks for their warm hospitality and readiness to answer my questions about performing Rachmaninoff’s songs. For information about recordings not in my own collection, I am greatly indebted to Donald Seibert, Greg Audette, Victor Han, and Richard Kummins, who have been generous in sharing their records and knowledge with me. Ian Harvey, in addition to sharing recordings over many years, has faithfully kept me up to date on new recordings and performances of Rachmaninoff’s songs. Nancy Ries inspired me throughout my work, sharing her ideas and insights with me in Moscow and in Hamilton. Laurel Fay and David Cannata gave me invaluable advice at the beginning stage of my work. Donald Seibert, Ronald Rebholz, Joseph Miller, and Nancy Ries read portions of the manuscript and brought their wisdom to fundamental issues of interpretation and presentation. I was inspired by friends of many years who expressed interest and support: Edward Lobb, Charlotte Douglas, Joseph and Susan Higgins, Stuart Anthony, Will Rogers, Anne Gregory, and many of my former students. I owe very much to friends in Moscow and Novgorod who listened to the songs and shared their ideas with me: Svetlana Golybina, Nina Drozdetskaya, Olga Kazakova, Galina Krasnova, Natalia Kulakova, and my dear friend and partner Vasily Petyarkin. I am indebted to Rimgaila Salys, author of the catalogue of Leonid Pasternak’s Russian years (see Salys in the Bibliography), who put me in touch with the Pasternak family in Oxford and Moscow. Dr. Ann Slater-Pasternak, on behalf of The Pasternak Trust in Oxford, graciously permitted me to use Leonid Pasternak’s portrait of the composer as an illustration for the book. This book would not have been written had it not been for the collaboration of Joseph Miller, wisest of friends. He originally showed me the need for such a book of texts of Russian songs with parallel translations. Since then he has given selflessly of his time and companionship while reading and editing the manuscript, making each page better: il miglior fabbro. R. D. S. Hamilton, New York April 2013 xvii A Note on Dates and Spelling Before 1918, the Julian Calendar (“Old Style”) was used in Russia and is still used by the Russian Orthodox Church. The Gregorian Calendar (“New Style”) was adopted in February 1918: this moved the calendar ahead by thirteen days, or twelve in the 19th century. Dates in this book are given in Old Style if the event took place in Russia before 1918, and in New Style if outside Russia or after 1918. Except in the Bibliography, where authors and titles are transliterated according to the simplified Library of Congress system, Russian names are spelled in this book as we are used to seeing them, even if that entails some inconsistencies. For example, Tchaikovsky and Chekhov begin with the same Cyrillic letter, but I have retained the older spelling for Tchaikovsky’s name because it is more familiar than “Chaikovsky.” In cases of individual artists who adopted a non-standard spelling, I use that: Rachmaninoff (not Rakhmaninov), Chaliapin (not Shaliapin). Names of artists are spelled as they would be in a concert program or recording: Hvorostovsky (not Khvorostovski). In the narrative, first names common to both English and Russian are spelled as in English: Alexander, not Aleksandr; at the bottom of each song, however, where the author’s name is given, the full name is spelled in a more exact transliteration with stress marks: Aleksándr Sergéyevich Púshkin. To follow the words of a song as sung on recordings or in performance, a reader who does not already know Russian needs a phonetic transcription of the words rather than a transliteration. With each song, there is a phonetic transcription of the lyric in Latin letters, side by side with a translation into English. The purpose of these parallel texts is to enable readers who do not know Russian to follow the words, and what they mean, as they are being sung. My transcriptions are an attempt to show better than the LC system what the words actually sound like. In my transcription, the composer’s name would be spelled “Chajkófskij,” and the writer would be “Chékhaf.” Unlike transliteration, these spellings show the automatic changes that take place in voicing and devoicing of consonants, and in reduction of the vowel “o” to “a” when it is not stressed. They also show which syllable in the word is stressed, a feature that stands out very strongly in spoken Russian, less so when it is sung. First, and most important, is the sound “j” (called “yot” from Greek “iota”). It is exceedingly common in Russian. This is not “j” as in English or Spanish, but the sound “y” in “you,” “bayou,” or “boy.” When it begins a word, the reader should interpret the letter “j” in transcriptions of songs in this book as sounding like the German “Johann,” never like French Jean, Spanish Juan, or English John. xviii A Note on Dates and Spelling I retain the LC convention of an apostrophe for the “soft sign” used in Russian spelling. Its use has nothing to do with the meaning of an apostrophe in English, but indicates that the letter it follows is “softened” or made with the palate (“palatalized”). When following words being sung, it may be ignored. In words where spelling and speaking are at variance, the transcription shows the sound rather than the spelling for obvious reasons. There are few such cases in Russian, but they occur in some very common words and endings. I have kept the LC convention of using “y” to stand for the tense Russian vowel that is a variant of “i” as in “Bill” or “wit,” only deeper. To master this sound, one needs to work with a Russian speaker. For an amusing illustration of the facial contortions required to pronounce this vowel in a loud voice from the rostrum of the Hall of Columns in Moscow, see the photograph of Nicolas Slonimsky in his autobiography Perfect Pitch (Slonimsky 1988, plate 29). The vowel system is very easy. The vowels are a, e, i, o, u, plus the deeper variant of “i” just mentioned. Every vowel is a syllable, and every syllable has one vowel in it. Russian words are stressed on one of the syllables only; unlike English, Russian does not have secondary stress. When a, e, and o are not in the stressed syllable, they are “reduced” in spoken Russian, but “o” to “a” is generally the only reduction heard in singing, and then not uniformly. a e i y o u as in “Mahler” as in “bet” as in “beet” as in “Bill” (tense “i” explained above) as in “coat” but deepened toward “call” (as in “kot,” tomcat) as in “flute” Consonants are transcribed as in the LC system except for “j.” My transcriptions do not show the difference between plain and palatalized consonants, but it is not necessary to understand the distinction in order to follow a song. b d f g j k l m n p as in “boy” as in “dish” as in “father” as in “Gogol” as in “Johann” as in “kaftan” (but without any puff of air) as in “bull” as in “Moscow” as in “noble” as in “Paul” (no puff of air) A Note on Dates and Spelling r s t v z xix trilled once, as in Italian “Roma” as in “soul” as in “Tomsk” (no puff of air) as in “Volga” as in “Zachary” Some Russian consonants require two or more letters in transcription: ch kh sh shch ts zh as in “China” as in “Bach” or Scottish “loch” as in “shoot” as in “fresh chips” as in “bats” or “pizza” as in “azure” or French “Jean” Some examples of Russian names follow in the table below: 1) The “LC” column shows Library of Congress transliteration, used in the Bibliography of this book. 2) The “Translation” column shows the spelling used in the narrative and commentary throughout the book. 3) The “Song Text” column shows the transcription used in this book for each song, devised to approximate the way the words actually sound. Cyrillic LC Translation Song Text Петербург Peterburg Petersburg Peterbu±rk Киев Kiev Kiev Ki±jef Новгород Novgorod Novgorod No±vgarat Толстой Tolstoi Tolstoy Talsto±j Достоевский Dostoevskii Dostoyevsky Dastaje±fskij Невский Nevskii Nevsky Nje±fskij Елизавета Elizaveta Yelizaveta Jelizave±ta Федор (Фёдор) Fedor Feodor Fjo±dar Readers who want to sing these songs will, I hope, understand that these transcriptions do not teach the pronunciation; but a course in Russian, even a short one, will. Singers without Russian who want to perform these songs should have the excellent Richter 2000 in hand while working with a Russian coach. xxi List of Abbreviations Baker’s. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, ed. Nicolas Slonimsky and Laura Kuhn. Six vols. New York: Schirmer, 2001. B/L. Bertensson, Sergei and Jay Leyda with the assistance of Sophia Satina. Sergei Rachmaninoff. A Lifetime in Music. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. The best biography in English. Harrison. Harrison, Max. Rachmaninoff. Life, Works, Recordings. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. An insightful musical study, marred by erroneous transcription of Russian names (“Prokovief,” “Tioutchef,” etc.). Ianin. Ianin, V. A. and Griunberg, P. N. Katalog vokal’nykh zapisei Rossiiskogo otdeleniia kompanii “Grammofon” (A Catalogue of Vocal Recordings of the Russian Division of the “Gramophone” Company). Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2002. Lists recordings prior to 1915. Ivanov. Ivanov, Georgii K. Russkaia poeziia v otechestvennoi muzyke (do 1917 goda) [Russian poetry in music of the fatherland (to 1917)]. Two vols. Moscow: Muzyka, 1966, and Sovetskii kompozitor, 1969. LN. S. Rakhmaninov. Literaturnoe nasledie [Literary Heritage], ed. Z. A. Apetian, Three vols. Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1978–1980. Martyn. Martyn, Barrie. Rachmaninoff. Composer, Pianist, Conductor. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990. The most useful and thorough study in English. ME. Muzykal’naia èntsiklopediia [Musical encyclopedia], ed. Iu. V. Keldysh. Six volumes. Moscow: “Sovetskaia èntskiklopediia,” 1973–1982. OP. Otechestvennye pevtsy [Singers of the fatherland] 1750–1917, two vols., ed. A. M. Pruzhanskii. Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1991 (vol. 1); Kompozitor, 2000 (vol. 2). A unique encyclopedia of Russian singers to 1917, with extensive professional biographies and a photograph of each singer. PRP. Pesni russkikh poètov v dvukh tomakh [Songs of Russian poets in two volumes], ed. V. E. Gusev. Biblioteka poèta, Bol’shaia seriia. Leningrad: Sovietskii pisatel’, 1988. PRZ. Pisateli russkogo zarubezh’ia [Writers of the Russian emigration], ed. A. N. Nikoliukin. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997. PSR. Rakhmaninov, S. V. Romansy: polnoe sobranie [Romances: complete collection], ed. P. Lamm. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1957; reprinted 1963. xxii List of Abbreviations RGALI. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Moscow). RP. Russkie pisateli 1800–1917: biograficheskii slovar’ [Russian writers 1800–1917: a biographical dictionary], ed. P. A. Nikolaev et al. Five volumes to date. Moscow: Sovetskaia èntsiklopediia, 1989 (vol. 1); Bolshaia rossiiskaia èntsiklopediia, 1992–2007 (vols. 2-5). RS. Record of Singing. Recordings of vocal artists in four volumes from the earliest sound recordings to the end of the 78 rpm era, published by EMI (formerly HMV) in the 1970s. A fifth volume, from the LP to 2007, was issued in 2009. Vols. 1 and 2 are on LP sets; vols. 3, 4, and 5 are on multiple CDs. TCS. Sylvester, Richard D. Tchaikovsky’s Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002; 2004 (paperback). T/N. Threlfall, Robert and Geoffrey Norris. A Catalogue of the Compositions of S. Rachmaninoff. London: Scolar Press, 1982. Indispensable catalog of the music with dates. VOR. Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove [Reminiscences about Rachmaninoff], ed. Z. A. Apetian. Two vols. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Muzykal’noe Izdatel’stvo. First edition: 1957. Fifth, enlarged edition: 1988. Rachmaninoff’s Complete Songs Early Years (1873–1892) 1. Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born into a gentry family of modest means in the spring of 1873, on a family estate near Novgorod. He spent his early boyhood in that flat river and lake country in the far north with its long winter nights and its white nights in summer, near the Volkhov River and Lake Ilmen, the scene of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Sadko. Novgorod is the oldest city in Great Russia, a city rich in medieval churches and monasteries on both sides of the river; on the right bank stands a large walled and towered Kremlin built around the eleventh-century Cathedral of St. Sophia, with its silver domes and sonorous bells. In Novgorod, as in Moscow, where the composer later lived, the sound of church bells was a constant accompaniment to daily life. In both cities, Rachmaninoff went to hear bells and came to know master bell ringers (VOR 1, 116, and LN 3, 427). Bells are a motif in such compositions as the Easter movement of the First Suite for two pianos, Op. 5 (1893), the Second Symphony, Op. 27 (1906–7), and the choral symphony The Bells, Op. 35 (1913), which Rachmaninoff considered one of his best works. In its extended lines of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, Rachmaninoff’s family situated him within a circle of kinship and acquaintance that was decisive in shaping all the important events of his formative years—the development of his musical gifts, his education, his early friendships, and even his marriage. The Rachmaninoff clan was typical of 19th-century noble families of moderate means: they lived in the country at least part of the year, were welcome in society in town, and had a network of connections that could gain them access to just about anyone they might need or wish to meet. A century earlier, Gerasim, Rachmaninoff’s great-great-grandfather, was a soldier in the Preobrazhensky Guards of Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth, who in 1741 seized the throne with the help of her Guards. She rewarded Gerasim with officer’s rank and a “diploma of nobility, which had not heretofore been given to the Rakhmaninovs,” allowing him to buy land in Tambov province, where he and his descendants lived on their family estate called Znamenskoye (Keldysh, 18). Of his children, Nadezhda married Yury Alekseyevich Pushkin, whose sister was Maria Gannibal, the grandmother of Alexander Pushkin; his son Ivan translated Voltaire and opened a publishing house in St. Petersburg; and his other son, Alexander, Rachmaninoff’s great-grandfather, was an officer who played the violin well, but who died in 1812 at the age of thirty trying to save a man who was freezing to death in the steppe. Military service remained the traditional form of service for most of Gerasim’s sons and grandsons all the way down to Rachmaninoff’s father Vasily, who was a Guards officer. Early Years (1873–1892) Amateur music-making was another tradition that ran in the family. Rachmaninoff’s grandfather Arkady was a systematic and ambitious musician who had studied piano with John Field (1782–1837), the Irish pianist and composer. He played at musical soirées, composed romances and piano pieces, and is said to have sat down at the piano every morning of his life. Arkady’s mother, Maria, was of the Bakhmetyev family, who were landed gentry too, and very active musically; she played the piano; her cousin Nikolai was a solo violinist with the serf orchestra and choir he kept on his estate; he wrote church music and romances, and for more than twenty years was director of the Imperial Court Chapel Choir. In the Rachmaninoff family lore it was said that a good singing voice and the perfect pitch that many of them possessed were inherited from Maria Bakhmetyeva (VOR 1, 14). Rachmaninoff’s father Vasily was technically a good pianist and could play with a beautiful, soft tone. He was an inventive and whimsical improviser: his sister recalled that “he would play the piano for hours, not well-known pieces, heaven only knows what they were, but you could listen to him for hours” (VOR 1, 15). He liked a certain impish polka (written by Franz Behr, though Rachmaninoff thought his father had written it); in 1911 Rachmaninoff arranged it and published it as “Polka de W. R.”, spelling Vasily with a “W” (see T/N, 152 and 190). Rachmaninoff recorded this polka in 1919, 1921, and 1928 (this latter recording is on the Sergei Rachmaninoff volume, no. 81, of the “Great Pianists of the 20th Century” series of Philips CDs). Vladimir Horowitz also liked this polka and played it in his Moscow recital in 1986. Rachmaninoff was born on 20 March 1873 Old Style (1 April New Style) on a family estate in Novgorod province. There is disagreement about whether this estate was Oneg, near Novgorod, or Semyonovo, near Staraya Russa. The evidence for the latter is an official document, the church registry of births, marriages, and deaths, which records his baptism at Starye Degtyari, four kilometers from Semyonovo. Semyonovo was his father’s house. It is so far from Novgorod that to take an infant born in Oneg to Semyonovo for baptism would have been not just unlikely but impossible, given the season and the duration of a trip of nearly two hundred kilometers over snowy or muddy roads. The director of the Rachmaninoff Museum in Novgorod believes the family was at Semyonovo when Sergei was born. Rachmaninoff, however, always gave Oneg as his place of birth, and for that reason the matter remains undecided: in the new New Grove, Geoffrey Norris gives Oneg, while Richard Taruskin (in the Opera volume) gives Semyonovo. At any rate, it was at Oneg, near Novgorod, that Rachmaninoff had his first memories of his childhood, and that is where he lived until the family left Novgorod when he was nine. He was lucky to be born into a musical family that recognized the boy’s talent early and took steps to give him regular piano lessons, first with his mother, who started teaching him to play and read music at the age of four. Early Years (1873–1892) When his grandfather Arkady came for a visit, they played duets. When he was seven, he suggested to his sisters’ French governess that if she would sing Schubert’s “The Maiden’s Lament” (Des Mädchens Klage, D 191), he would accompany her. The piano part of this song gives the right and left hands two different repeating figures, simple but expressive; he had heard his mother play it many times. She at first didn’t take him seriously, but he pleaded, and when they had finished, he asked her to sing it again twice more; she was astonished that he played it so well, from memory, his hands not big enough to play all the chords, but without a single wrong note (B/L, 3). This performance sprang from the boy’s own imagination, and once they had gone through it, he wanted it to be repeated: the idea of the drama and even thrill inherent in a good song performance remained with him when he grew up and shaped his conception of the songs he wrote. The next morning news of this performance was dispatched to grandfather Arkady, who came by train from Znamenskoye and sent Vasily to St. Petersburg to bring back a teacher from the Conservatory. Anna Ornatskaya, a Conservatory graduate and friend of Rachmaninoff’s mother, was brought to Oneg to live in the household and teach Sergei. She taught the boy there from 1880 to 1882, when the family moved to St. Petersburg. Many years later, in 1896, Rachmaninoff dedicated “Spring Waters,” Song 32, to Anna Ornatskaya; one of his best songs, it has an especially thrilling and dramatic piano part. Rachmaninoff’s mother, Lyubov Petrovna, was the daughter of General Piotr Butakov, who taught history at the Novgorod military college. He died when Rachmaninoff was only four, but his widow, Rachmaninoff’s grandmother Sophia Aleksandrovna Butakova, was important in Rachmaninoff’s childhood. He was the third of six children—Vasily and Lyubov had three sons and three daughters—but of the six Sergei was Sophia’s favorite. She spoiled him, but did not indulge him; she let him play and encouraged his time at the piano, but she expected him to behave himself, which he did, without rebellion; he was happy being with her and came to have the highest respect and affection for her. She was a connoisseur of church choirs, and she took him to services to hear the best liturgical singing; she knew the bell ringer “Yegorka,” whom Sergei first saw in her house. When Lyubov and the children moved to St. Petersburg, she bought an estate near Novgorod, Borisovo, just so Sergei could come to live with her on his summer vacations. His time spent there was the happiest in his childhood. Her maiden name was Litvinova, and she was related by marriage to the famous soprano Félia Litvinne. Rachmaninoff and Litvinne both performed in Diaghilev’s “Saison Russe” in Paris in 1907, and Rachmaninoff dedicated one of his romances to her, Song 75, “Dissonance” (1912). Vasily Rachmaninoff planned to send his two older sons, Vladimir and Sergei, to the Corps of Pages to train as officers, but he squandered away the five estates in Lyubov’s dowry, and when the family left Oneg in 1882 the Early Years (1873–1892) marriage was breaking apart. Volodya, as eldest, did go to military school, but, for Sergei, Anna Ornatskaya arranged a scholarship to the Conservatory school, and he undertook a three-year course of study there. The move from the comfortable estate at Oneg to a crowded apartment in St. Petersburg near the Haymarket—the neighborhood of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—was a further strain on the family. Vasily and Lyubov separated, and Lyubov was left with the care of the children. For Sergei, this period went badly, because his mother had no time to supervise him; she sent him to live with the Trubnikovs, a lenient aunt and uncle and their children, but he was fiercely independent and they could not control him. He refused any kind of help and insisted on doing everything himself: “ya sam” he would say, “I can do it myself,” and this became his nickname at the Trubnikovs (B/L, 3). Instead of doing his homework, he played hooky on the streets. He liked the city and its opportunities for jumping on and off the trams and spending his carfare at the ice rink, but he was unhappy living away from Oneg, and he missed his grandmother especially. His father’s departure was a blow, because, despite his immaturity, or perhaps owing to it, the children were happier being around him than with their mother. The only thing Sergei looked forward to was summer at Borisovo. His piano playing improved, but he failed his other subjects in 1885. His mother did not punish him and allowed him to go to grandmother’s for the summer, but now something would have to be done to save him. She turned to the family for help. One of Vasily’s sisters was married to Ilya Siloti, and among their children was Alexander (Sasha) Siloti (1863–1945). Ten years older than his cousin, Siloti was embarking on a brilliant career as a pianist himself. His teachers were Nikolai Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, and Franz Liszt. Lyubov Petrovna asked him to hear Sergei play and to test his ear, which he did. He said there was only one place to send him: to Moscow to study with Nikolai Zverev, a renowned piano teacher (who had taught Siloti) and strict housemaster who tolerated no nonsense from any of his pupils, especially the boys who lived under his roof. At the end of the summer of 1885 in Novgorod his grandmother put him on the Moscow train after taking him to a convent for a special service. She had sewn a hundred rubles into an amulet she put around his neck, and gave him her blessing. When the train pulled out, he burst into tears (VOR 1, 18-19). 2. When Sergei appeared before Nikolai Sergeyevich Zverev (1832–1893) on the recommendation of his cousin Sasha Siloti, Zverev asked him to play something and agreed to take him as a pupil. He taught both boys and girls, but every year two or three of the boys lived on full room and board in his house Early Years (1873–1892) near the crowded bazaar called the Smolensk Market, a twenty-minute walk from the Conservatory. Rachmaninoff had aunts he could have lived with in Moscow, but Siloti wanted Sergei to live in Zverev’s house, as he had done in 1871 and for ten more years until he graduated (with a gold medal) from the Conservatory. Zverev, a bachelor, and his sister, a spinster, ran the house with some strict rules: no fighting and no horseplay; no ice-skating or riding or rowing or other dangerous activity that could result in injury to a hand; and obligatory piano practice three hours a day, six days a week. Zverev made good money from the many pupils he had, so he did not charge his “cubs” for room and board (zver’ means “wild animal” in Russian, so the boys were called zveryáta, “cubs”). To develop their understanding of the performing arts he took them to concerts, the opera, and the theater, always buying good seats. The first practice period was at 6 a.m., and each of the three boys had to take that period twice a week; if they had come home late from the theater the night before, that was not an excuse to miss early practice if it was their turn. But the strict regime was relaxed on Sundays, when Zverev held open house from noon till evening. Those afternoons were, in Rachmaninoff’s words, a “musical paradise,” with distinguished guests from the musical world dropping in. Guests at the Sunday soirées were not invited to play, but to listen to the boys play. Zverev was hugely pleased by these performances, as Rachmaninoff later recalled: “No matter what we played, his verdict was always ‘Fine! Well done! Excellent!’ He let us play anything we felt like playing... I cannot adequately describe what a spur to our ambition was this opportunity to play for the greatest musicians in Moscow, and to listen to their kindly criticism—nor what a stimulant it was to our enthusiasm” (B/L, 11). Among the guests at the soirées were Muscovites like Tchaikovsky and Sergei Taneyev, or visitors, like Anton Rubinstein, who came to Moscow early in 1886 to give a series of brilliant recitals that covered the history of piano music. Each of Rubinstein’s recitals was performed in the evening for ticket holders, and the next day for students at a free matinee. Zverev’s “cubs” heard every recital twice. When Rachmaninoff arrived at Zverev’s, fellow cub Matvei Presman wrote of him, “he was not well prepared technically, but what he was already playing was incomparable” (VOR 1, 152). Presman also said that the only thing Zverev taught them was to keep their hands and arms relaxed and not to saw their elbows back and forth. But there was more to it than that. It was Zverev’s task to prepare his pupils in two or three years to be turned over to the piano faculty at the Conservatory who would complete their training—Taneyev, Vasily Safonov, Paul Pabst, Siloti, and others; and they had to be so well prepared that they did not have to be retrained. Zverev’s pupils included eminent pianists like Siloti and Konstantin Igumnov; and pianists who were composers, too, like Feodor Early Years (1873–1892) Keneman and Arseny Koreshchenko, who were two of Chaliapin’s favorite accompanists; and Rachmaninoff’s contemporary of genius Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), who was in Rachmaninoff’s same class but as a day student. The “Russian pianistic method” Zverev taught was known for its “songful melody and freedom of hand movement” (Baker’s, 4046). Igumnov was admired as an artist of impeccable taste “who worked out every detail of the music to the utmost perfection” (ibid., 1659).This approach to playing the piano can be traced back to John Field, who lived in Russia most of his adult life and was an enormously influential teacher there. Of those who studied with him, two were especially important in passing on his legacy: Alexander Villoing (1804–1878), who gave lessons to the Rubinstein brothers, and Alexander Dubuque (1812–1898), who taught Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg and Nikolai Zverev in Moscow. Field’s playing had “unmatched beauty of tone,” “sweetness and shading,” “speed, evenness and purity of embellishment”; Mikhail Glinka, who took lessons from Field, admired “his forceful, gentle, and distinct playing. It seemed that he did not strike the keys but his fingers fell on them as large raindrops and scattered like pearls on velvet.” To Liszt’s charge that Field’s playing was “sleepy” Glinka answered that “Field’s music was often full of energy, capricious and diverse, but he did not make the art of music ugly by charlatanism, and did not chop cutlets with his fingers like the majority of modern fashionable pianists.” He emphasized “effortless command and equality of all fingers, slow practice, and tonal control through hand techniques far in advance of his time, the whole subordinate to musical ends” (Langley). “Feeling” is not a part of this description, and Zverev never asked his pupils to play with “feeling.” He insisted on perfect knowledge of the musical text, including the “punctuation marks”; he expected clean technique, clarity in the phrasing and precision in the execution; and the player had to pay attention to the quality and tone of the sound being produced, and to learn to control it. He passed on what Dubuque had shown him was a method to master the soft, singing line, the technical ease and elegance which characterized the strong but poetic style of John Field (Keldysh, 29). These were core attributes of the “Russian piano school” as it was understood and being taught in Moscow when Rachmaninoff began his training at Zverev’s in the fall of 1885. To widen the knowledge of music of his pupils and to cultivate their taste, Zverev employed a woman to come twice a week for two hours to play eighthand arrangements of orchestral works with them at two pianos. They played symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, and, their favorite, Beethoven. At the end of the spring exams, Zverev invited Taneyev, who was Director of the Conservatory, to hear Rachmaninoff, Presman, and two of the other boys play an eight-hand arrangement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Taneyev was amazed that they played it all the way through from memory (VOR 1, 158). Early Years (1873–1892) In 1888 Rachmaninoff finished Zverev’s piano course and was assigned to study with his cousin Sasha Siloti. He had matured during those three years, and he and Siloti became friends, playing music together not only during lessons, going to concerts, and visiting the relatives and friends they had in common. Siloti was newly married to Vera Tretyakova, a daughter of the Moscow textile magnate and art collector Pavel Tretyakov. 3. Rachmaninoff began composing in his second year at Zverev’s. It is striking that his early efforts range over several genres, not only piano pieces but also orchestral, chamber, and vocal works. He was ambitious, and in this he emulated Tchaikovsky, who was his hero at the Moscow Conservatory. In February 1887 he wrote a Scherzo for orchestra, his earliest extant composition, based on Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (T/N, 162). Over the next year he wrote his early piano pieces (ibid., 147-8). He made sketches for an opera, “Esmeralda,” a subject he took from Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (ibid., 182). He impressed his theory teacher Anton Arensky, who took him into his course in harmony for composers. By the fall of 1889 he had set his sights on composition; that spur to “ambition” he felt playing Sunday afternoons in the presence of Tchaikovsky was turning toward composing music. As we shall see, some of his early unpublished songs show him taking Tchaikovsky as a model. The living arrangements at Zverev’s house now posed a problem. He wanted his own room with his own piano to compose. He asked Zverev to do this for him, but it led to a quarrel. Whether as “ya sam” he insisted too strongly to be allowed to have his way without any interference from others, or whether Zverev was offended at what seemed a lack of gratitude for the home and schooling he had given Rachmaninoff for three years, tempers flared. Zverev could not forgive him, and broke with him as a result. Rachmaninoff tried repeatedly to ask forgiveness, but Zverev ceased speaking to him. After a month, Zverev led him on foot to his cousins the Satín family, who lived on Prechistenka Street, not far from Zverev’s house. A family council called by his two aunts, Siloti’s mother and Aunt Varvara Satiná, also a sister of his father’s, considered the matter but could not agree that Sergei was their responsibility. The next day he moved in with Mikhail Slonov, a friend at the Conservatory who was five years older, and had his own rooms (B/L, 20). Varvara Satina and her husband had four children, two girls and two boys. Of the boys one was Sergei’s age and one eight years younger. The girls, Natalia (Natasha) and Sophia (Sonya), were younger than Sergei by four and six years. Natasha played the piano and would, in 1902, become Rachmaninoff’s wife. Early Years (1873–1892) Sophia loved music and science (she eventually was a geneticist on the faculty of Smith College); she became Rachmaninoff’s faithful friend and chronicler. Their mother took Sergei’s side and, in the fall of 1889, offered him a home and family. They immediately made him feel welcome, and he showed the winning way he had with younger children, a quality he inherited from his father. He was happier with them than he had been since he moved to Moscow. In the following spring he wrote his first two songs (Songs 1 and 2, 1890). The girls’ father, Alexander Satin, managed the large Naryshkin estate southeast of Moscow and had his own estate “Ivánovka” a few hours’ ride from there, in Tambov province (VOR 1, 253). Rachmaninoff spent the summer at Ivanovka with the Satins in 1890 and again in 1891. It was in a beautiful natural setting, wooded steppe country with rivers and forest paths; he came to love it and found there the peace and quiet he needed to compose. These were exceptionally happy times in a household crowded with young people who all loved music; the Silotis were there, too. Satin’s sister was married to a man named Dmitri Skalon, a cavalry general who played the cello and lived in St. Petersburg. His three daughters Natalia, Lyudmila, and Vera, also came down to Ivanovka. Natalia Skalon, five years his elder, became Rachmaninoff’s first regular correspondent the following winter. He wrote music for them, and he and Vera, two years younger, were romantically fond of each other. He was not allowed to write her, but to Vera he dedicated his fine early song, later revised for Op. 4, “In the silence of the secret night” (Song 12). He was devoted to the Skalon sisters and corresponded with Natalia Skalon until his marriage to Natalia Satina in 1902. He finished his First Piano Concerto at Ivanovka in July 1891; the dedication read “À Monsieur A. Ziloti.” At the end of the 1890–91 academic year Siloti left the Conservatory. To avoid having to work with a different teacher, Rachmaninoff asked to take his final exams in piano that spring, a year early; he passed with a gold medal. The next year, when he asked to be examined in theory and composition a year early, his request was also granted. One of the requirements was to write an opera on the subject of Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies. This was Aleko. When he played it for the examiners on May 7, he received a grade of “5” with a plus. Then Zverev came up to him, took out his gold watch, and presented to it to him, ending their two years of estrangement. Upon graduation, he was awarded the highest honor, the Great Gold Medal. It was an astonishingly brilliant finish to his schooling, showing how well he had learned to work and to work hard. He was nineteen, on his own, with the official title of “Free Artist.” Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 9 У врат обители святой 1 At the gates of the holy abode Like several other Russian composers, Rachmaninoff was drawn to this lyric of Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) by the powerful and original way it expresses rejection, “best feelings” spurned, in the image of the beggar by the monastery gates who asks for a piece of bread and is handed a stone. It is a scene easily imagined by a Russian reader; in fact, as we know from the memoirs of Yekaterina Sushkova, a scene like this actually took place outside St. Sergius Lavra near Moscow. In August 1830 a party of young people, including the 18-yearold Sushkova and the sixteen-year-old Lermontov, made an excursion to the monastery, with Sushkova’s grandmother riding in the lead as chaperone. At the gates they gave some coins to a beggar, who thanked them and told them the story of some other young people who had dropped stones into his cup. Later, at the inn, Lermontov, instead of joining them all at dinner, found a pencil and a scrap of paper, and, kneeling at a chair, wrote out this poem, handing it to Sushkova as he sat down to his bowl of chilled fish soup with kvass (Sushkova, 114-7). This intense Romantic gesture just before the soup course is almost a parody of what Lermontov would do so well later in mature work like his novella “Princess Mary,” but this early poem already shows his authentic voice. Rachmaninoff saw the emotional power in this lyric, and his response to it is impressive. His music pays attention to the words. His own authentic voice is heard unmistakably in the piano part, which establishes the emotional terms at the outset, and supports the voice part eloquently throughout. A third of the song’s 45 bars are for piano alone. The beginning of the voice part, with its six repeated B-flats, contrasts with the emotionally strong introduction, and it can be ponderous if taken too slowly and allowed to drag. The baritone Sergei Leiferkus, who sings it in the original key, manages the right tempo, moving ahead as he rises to the high point of the song, marked con moto (with animated movement), “thus did I beg for your love, with bitter tears, with longing.” At this point the piano again has a moment all to itself, to pause for lyrical reflection and let the words sink in. The song can work with other voices, too, as the fine recording by the Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström shows. She brings an underlying sense of animation to the whole song, while her accompanist, Vladimir Ashkenazy, plays the notes in the piano part with a chaste lyricism, not adding false emotional emphasis or arpeggios that are not in the score. У врат обители святой Стоял просящий подаянья, Бессильный, бледный и худой От глада, жажды и страданья. 10 Song 1 (1890) Куска лишь хлеба он просил, И взор являл живую муку. И кто-то камень положил В его протянутую руку. Так я молил твоей любви, С слезами горькими, с тоскою; Так чувства лучшие мои Навек обмануты тобою. U vra±t abi±teli svjato±j Staja±l prasja±shchij padaja±n’ja, Bessi±l’nyj, ble±dnyj i khudo±j Ad gla±da, zha±zhdy i strada±n’ja. At the gate of the holy cloister A man stood begging for alms, Weak, pale, and thin From hunger, thirst, and suffering. Kuska± lish khle±ba on prasi±l, I vzo±r javlja±l zhyvu±ju mu±ku. I kto±-ta ka±men’ palazhy±l V jevo± pratja±nutuju ru±ku. A piece of bread was all he asked, His look revealed keen torment. And someone put a stone Into his outstretched hand. Tak ja± mali±l tvaje±j ljubvi±, S sleza±mi go±r’kimi, s tasko±ju; Tak chu±stva lu±chshyje maji± Nave±k abma±nuty tabo±ju. Thus did I beg for your love, With bitter tears, with longing; Thus were my best feelings Forever betrayed by you. Text. Mikhaíl Yúrievich Lérmontov, 1830. Title: Нищий (A Beggar); first published in 1844. Lermontov revised line 3 to read “A withered wretch, barely alive,” but this reading was not published until 1910. Set by many Russian composers, including Donaurov (1871), Shashina (1879), Nápravník (Op. 31/3, 1879), Cui (Op. 27/3, 1884), Medtner (Op. 3/1, 1904), and Alfred Schnittke (Two Songs for Voice and Piano, Early Works, 1954–5). Meter. Binary. Iambic tetrameter: A piece of bread was all he asked... Music. Dated 29 April 1890 on the manuscript. Without opus number. G Minor. 4/4, Andante. For Low Voice: A–e1 flat. Dedicated to Mikhaíl Akímovich Slónov (1868-1930), a singer (baritone), a fellow student at the Moscow Conservatory and one of Rachmaninoff’s closest friends. First published posthumously in 1947 in Lamm (see Lamm in the Bibliography). Recordings. Amaize, Burchuladze, Kharitonov, Koptchak, Leiferkus, Pirogov, Reizen, Söderström, Stepanovich, Suchkova, Verbitskaya, Vladimirov. Donaurov: Andrei Labinsky, Klavdiia Tugarinova. Medtner: Vassily Savenko. Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 2 11 Я тебе ничего не скажу I shall tell you nothing Like Tchaikovsky before him, Rachmaninoff wrote five songs to lyrics by Afanasy Fet (1820–1892). Tchaikovsky had admired Fet as a poet who could move him musically: as he wrote in a letter to Grand Duke Konstantin, “he has the power to touch strings of the soul that no artist, however great, can touch with words alone… he even avoids subject matter that can easily be expressed in words” (Romanov 1999, 52). This unusual lyric by Fet entitled “Romance” is such a poem.Tchaikovsky noticed it as soon as it was published in 1886, and chose it for one of his Opus 60 songs, which he wrote in May of that year. The subject is first awareness of being in love, when it is still an unspoken secret. The metaphor of the heart in flower is highly unusual in Russian poetry; here the feeling of love, opening like a flower, is felt, as a physical sensation. Fet used “flowers” as a metaphor for something inexpressibly beautiful and tender. That this heart is a “night flower” makes it more romantic, more mysterious. Rachmaninoff tried his hand at this text as a variation on Tchaikovsky’s song, which he admired. Tchaikovsky set his song (for high voice) in E Major, 6/8 Allegretto con moto, in an ABA form where the B section (the second stanza and first two lines of the third) slows down to più tranquillo; the rapt lead-in to the word “heart” is further held back and preceded by a series of 16 repeated notes. The A sections are a light dance, almost playful, but the B section is reflective, expressing a quiet awe. Rachmaninoff modeled his 3/4 Allegro song in C Major on this pattern, including some repeated notes, but he wrote it for low voice, with no gradations in tempo indicated. It is a youthful exercise never intended for publication, but the result is an ardent song with a strong, con moto ending. The excellent recording by the Russian baritone Sergei Shaposhnikov makes a convincing case for it by moderating and varying the tempos to give it shape. Я тебе ничего не скажу, И тебя не встревожу ничуть, И о том, что я молча твержу, Не решусь ни за что намекнуть. Целый день спят ночные цветы, Но, лишь солнце за тучи зайдёт, Раскрываются тихо листы, И я слышу, как сердце цветёт. И в больную, усталую грудь Веет влагой ночной… я дрожу, Я тебя не встревожу ничуть, Я тебе ничего не скажу. 12 Song 2 (1890) Я тебе ничего не скажу, Я тебя не встревожу ничуть, Я тебе ничего не скажу. Ja tebe± nichevo± ne skazhu±, Ja tebja± ne fstrevo±zhu nichu±t’, I a to±m, shto ja mo±lcha tverzhu±, Ne reshu±s’ ni za shto± nameknu±t’. I’m not going to say a word to you, I’m not going to alarm you in any way, And what I’m silently repeating to myself, I wouldn’t mention even with a hint. Tse±lyj de±n’ spja±t nachny±je tsvety±, No, lish so±ntse za tu±chi zajdjo±t, Raskryva±jutsa ti±kha listy±, I ja sly±shu, kak se±rttse tsvetjo±t. Night flowers sleep all day, But when the sun sets behind the clouds, Their petals softly open up, And I feel my heart flowering. I v bal’nu±ju, usta±luju gru±t’ Ve±jet vla±gaj nachno±j… ja drazhu±, Ja tebja± ne fstrevo±zhu nichu±t’, Ja tebe± nichevo± ne skazhu±. And into my aching, tired breast Flows moist night air… I’m trembling, I won’t alarm you in any way, I won’t say anything to you. Ja tebe± nichevo± ne skazhu±. Ja tebja± ne fstrevo±zhu nichu±t’, Ja tebe± nichevo± ne skazhu±. I won’t say anything to you. I won’t alarm you in any way, I won’t say anything to you at all. Text. Afanásy Afanásievich Fet, 1885. First published in Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe) in 1886, no. 1. Title: Романс (Romance). First set by Tchaikovsky in 1886, Op. 60/2. Rachmaninoff changed one word in line 6 of the poem (for woods, рощи, he substituted clouds, тучи); he repeated three lines at the end. Georgi K. Ivanov, who catalogued all the songs by Russian composers with lyrics in Russian in his Russian Poetry in Music of the Fatherland (to 1917), names 16 composers who wrote songs to this text after Tchaikovsky (Ivanov, vol. 1, 372). Only two are well known today: Tchaikovsky’s song and the “popular” version by Tatiana Konstantinova Tolstaya (for a list of recordings of these, see below). Information is hard to find on Tolstaya, but see Korabelnikova 2004, 781. Meter. Ternary. Anapest, 3-foot, with masculine endings: After sundown a breath of fresh air And my flowering heart is revived… Music. Dated 1 May 1890. Without opus number. C Major. 3/4, Allegro. For Bass Voice: c–f1. First published posthumously in Lamm in 1947. No dedication. Recordings. Del Grande, Kharitonov, Leiferkus, Shaposhnikov, Söderström, Suchkova. Tchaikovsky: Ivan Kozlovsky, Sergei Larin, Sergei Lemeshev, Jennie Tourel, Georgi Vinogradov, Sherri Weiler. Tolstaya: Boris Gmyria, Nadezhda Obukhova, Nikita Storozhev, Tatiana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Zykina. Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 3 13 Опять встрепенулось ты, сердце Again you leapt, my heart Nikolai Grekov (1807–1866) is nearly forgotten today, but in 1860 he was as well known as Fet and Polonsky, and many 19th-century Russian composers found attractive lyrics in his poetry: Mussorgsky’s fine early song “Where are you, little star?” (late 1850s) uses a shortened Grekov lyric, and Tchaikovsky wrote three of his most charming songs to lyrics by him (Songs 12, 26, and 28 in TCS). Grekov was of the landed gentry like Fet and the Tolstoys, but his small estates in Tula and Kaluga were modest and did not bring in much income. He graduated from Moscow University in 1827, served a few years in a government job, then retired to the country, supporting his family by writing and translating Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, Calderón, and others. His wife died young; this loss, and his memory of first love, inspired his best song lyrics, including “little star” and the present poem. His verse was musical; he wrote about love in outdoor settings that evoke the Russian countryside—subjects very close to Rachmaninoff’s heart. In one of his poems, he defines poetry this way: “In life, poetry is the rose in a garland of thorns.” Both those images appear in the present text, as does the word music; the lyric is about the poet’s heart reawakening to love and accepting life anew in both its beauty and its pain. In Rachmaninoff’s song, for the first time in his early songs, the voice part takes the lead, with the piano playing a strong but supporting role. The verb in the first line means the sudden rising up in flight of a bird, or sudden beating of the heart. As the voice part rises and falls, Rachmaninoff finds trembling figures in the piano to suggest flight. The song bears his own signature. It is a slight but beautiful song, recognizably by Rachmaninoff and promising original songs to come. Опять встрепенулось ты, сердце, и снова В душе моей вспыхнули грёзы, И рвётся из груди кипучее слово, И льются горячие слёзы... И снятся опять ей всё звуки да звуки, Всё музыки полные речи, Да чёрные очи, да белые руки, Да кудри, да белые плечи. И снова душа отозваться готова На всё, в чём есть тернья и розы, И рвётся из груди кипучее слово, И льются горячие слёзы… 14 Song 3 (date uncertain) Apja±t’ fstrepenu±las’ ty, se±rttse, i sno±va V dushe± maje±j fspy±khnuli grjo±zy, I rvjo±tsa iz gru±di kipu±cheje slo±va, I l’ju±tsa garja±chije sljo±zy… Again you beat faster, my heart, and again Bright dreams live in my soul, And a passionate word flies from my breast, And hot tears pour out… I snja±tsa apja±t’ jej fsjo zvu±ki da zvu±ki, Vsjo mu±zyki po±lnyje re±chi, Da cho±rnyje o±chi, da be±lyje ru±ki, Da ku±dri, da be±lyje ple±chi. And my soul dreams of sounds, those sounds, Words you spoke full of music, And black eyes, and white hands, And curls, and white shoulders. I sno±va dusha± atazva±tsa gato±va Na vsjo±, f chom jest’ te±rn’ja i ro±zy, I rvjo±tsa iz gru±di kipu±cheje slo±va, I l’ju±tsa garja±chije sljo±zy… And again my soul is ready to respond To everything that has thorns and roses, And a passionate word flies from my breast, And hot tears pour out… Text. Nikolái Porfírievich Grékov, 1850s; published 1860 (Grekov, p. 30). Untitled. Not set by any other composers. Meter. Ternary. Amphibrachs, alternating 4-foot and 3-foot lines, with feminine rhymes: Again you beat faster, my heart, and as always The passionate words are the music… Music. Date uncertain. Pavel Lamm, the song’s editor, assumes 1890; Bortnikova, 30, and LN 2, 413, date it 1893, an opinion based on ink, paper, and handwriting. Without opus number. G Minor. 6/4, [Andante sostenuto] (editor’s brackets). For High Voice: d1–a2 flat. First published posthumously in Lamm’s Unpublished Vocal Works, 1947. No dedication. Recordings. Korshunov, Piavko, Rodgers, Söderström, Suchkova, Timokhin. Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 4 15 C’était en avril It was in April Rachmaninoff found this French lyric in Amours et haines (Loves and Hates, 1889) by Édouard Pailleron (1834–99), author of comedies and editor of Revue des Deux Mondes. He was not well known in Russia, and I have not found any other Russian songs that use lyrics by him. The song is dated 1 April 1891, soon after Rachmaninoff’s eighteenth birthday. Spring—the coming of spring, sudden joy, and first love—was one of his favorite themes. He went on to write a cantata for baritone, chorus, and orchestra to a famous Nekrasov poem about the “verdant noise” of spring’s coming (“Spring,” Op. 20, 1902); and several of his best songs are celebrations of spring (Song 32 “Spring waters,” Song 38 “Lilacs,” and Song 56 “Before my window”). In the case of this early song, the French lyric is pretty in a conventional way but pale and precious compared to Aleksey Tolstoy’s exuberant celebration of spring which Tchaikovsky made into one of his most well-known songs (“In early spring,” Song 40 in TCS). The theme, however, is exactly the same: looking back and remembering the happiness of a spring morning which was also the morning of love. Rachmaninoff wrote a love song with a soaring, passionate vocal line, and then tenderness in the last words “do you remember?”. These words work better in the Russian version of the song, and indeed the whole song works better in Russian. There is a good recording of the song in French (but only one) by the tenor Sergej Larin. Everyone else sings the song in Russian. The tempo is not indicated in the manuscript and the editor has marked it “Moderato,” which gives performers some room for interpretation. The recordings vary, with a fleet performance by Elisabeth Söderström in just over two minutes, and a much slower, beautifully articulated reading of the song as an anthem of love by the baritone Pavel Lisitsian that is just under three minutes. Rachmaninoff added two words to the French original and repeated a few phrases, which I have enclosed in brackets below. C’était en avril, un dimanche, Oui, le dimanche! J’étais heureux... Vous aviez une [jolie] robe blanche Et deux gentils brins de pervenche, Oui, de pervenche, Dans les cheveux [brins de pervenche]. It was in April, a Sunday Yes, on Sunday! I was happy... You wore a [pretty] white dress And two nice sprigs of periwinkle, Yes, periwinkle, In your hair [sprigs of periwinkle]. 16 Song 4 (1891) Nous étions assis sur la mousse, Oui, sur la mousse, Et sans parler, Nous regardions l’herbe, [l’herbe] qui pousse, [Et] la feuille verte, et l’ombre douce, Oui, l’ombre douce, Et l’eau couler. We were sitting on the moss, Yes, on the moss, And without speaking, We looked at the grass, [the grass] that grows, [And] the green leaf, and the soft shade, Yes, the soft shade, And the rippling water. Un oiseau chantait sur la branche, Oui, sur la branche, Puis il s’est tu, J’ai pris dans ma main ta main blanche... C’était en avril, un dimanche, Oui, le dimanche... T’en souviens-tu? A bird was singing on a branch, Yes, on a branch, Then it was silent, In my hand I took your white hand... It was in April, a Sunday Yes, on Sunday... Do you remember it? The Russian translation was made by the Soviet poet Veronika Tushnova (1915–65) when the song was first published in 1947. Апрель! Вешний праздничный день, да, вешний день!.. Луга в росе. Ты пришла в белом платье своём и два подснежника в косе, да, два цветка, два цветка в тёмной косе. И без слов мы сели на мох, бархатный мох; в блеске лучей весь мир зеленел, каждый листок влагой блестел, в лёгкой тени, где-то у ног, журчал ручей... А в кустах звенел голосок птички лесной. Руки твои в своих я так бережно сжал в то ясное утро, весной, светлой весной... Помнишь, помнишь? Apre±l’! Ve±shnij pra±znichnyj de±n’, Da, ve±shnij de±n’!.. Luga± v rase±. Ty prishla± v be±lam pla±t’je svajo±m i dva patsne±zhnika f kase±, da, dva tsvetka,± dva tsvetka± f tjo±mnaj kase±. April! a festive spring day, Yes, a spring day!.. Dew lay on the meadows. You came in your white dress with two snowdrops in your braid, yes, two flowers, two flowers in your dark braid. Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) I bes slo±f my se±li na mo±kh, ba±rkhatnyj mo±kh; V ble±ske luche±j ves’ mir zelene±l, ka±zhdyj listo±k vla±gaj bleste±l, v ljo±khkaj teni±, gde±-ta u no±k, zhurcha±l ruche±j… And without words we sat down on the moss, the velvety moss; In the bright sunlight the whole world was green, every leaf was shiny with moisture, and in the light shade, somewhere at our feet, a brook was babbling… A f kusta±kh zvene±l galaso±k pti±chki lesno±j. Ru±ki tvaji± f svaji±kh ja tak be±rezhna zzha±l f to ja±snaje u±tra, vesno±j, sve±tlaj vesno±j… Po±mnish, po±mnish? And in the bushes rang out the sweet voice of a little forest bird. I held your hands so tenderly and lovingly that clear morning, in the spring, in radiant spring... Do you remember, do you remember? 17 Text. Edouard Pailleron, published 1889 (Pailleron, pp. 27-8). Title: “Chanson.” Russian translation by Veroníka Tushnóva. Not set by any other composers. Meter. Mixed ternary and binary lines, but the first line, an amphibrach, sets up the dominant ternary pattern of the lines. This underlying ternary rhythm is heard in the triplets of the voice part and in the piano part throughout the song. On Sunday, an April spring day, April spring day! Music. Dated 1 April 1891. Without opus number. E-flat Major. 3/4, Moderato. For High Voice: d1–a2 flat. First published posthumously in Lamm, 1947. No dedication. Recordings. Gedda, Kharitonov, Larin (in French), Lisitsian, Naoumenko, Söderström, Suchkova. 18 Song 5 (1891) Смеркалось 5 Twilight was falling Aleksei Tolstoy (1817–1875), cousin of the novelist Lev Tolstoy, is very well known in Russia as a writer of dramas in blank verse and excellent lyrics, in a variety of styles, often set to music. Tchaikovsky chose thirteen of them, with an unerring eye, for eleven of his songs and two of his duets. This is the first of six songs by Rachmaninoff to lyrics of Tolstoy’s. The theme is twilight, the passage from day to evening, in this case a hot day, which carries oppressive implications in the Russian context. So twilight brings relief, and another passage, too, from the present to a memory of the face of the woman the poet loves. Rachmaninoff made a good choice here of a lyric for a song, but he did a poor job of finding music for these words. The restless, rising phrases are at odds with the passage to stillness, to the contemplation of a bond, in this case a tender romantic bond. The long iambic hexameter phrases of the lyric do come across clearly in Rachmaninoff’s use of eighth notes for each syllable in the line until the last one, which is a quarter note, or a dotted quarter note, or a dotted half note; this design culminates in the last word of the second stanza, a whole note high B. But the song searches too strenuously for a convincing melody, and the closing phrase comes as a relief. Singers have not taken the song up: except for the four complete sets of Rachmaninoff’s songs, there are no recordings of it, making it (together with Song 77, a setting of two lines in Church Slavonic from the Gospel of St. John written for the war effort) the composer’s least recorded song. Жаркий день бледнел неуловимо, Над озером туман тянулся полосой, И кроткий образ твой, знакомый и любимый, В вечерний тихий час носился предо мной. Улыбка та же была, которую люблю я, И мягкая коса, как прежде расплелась, И очи грустные, по прежнему тоскуя, Глядели на меня в вечерний тихий час. Жаркий день бледнел неуловимо, Над озером туман тянулся полосой, И кроткий образ твой, знакомый и любимый, В вечерний тихий час носился предо мной, В вечерний тихий час. Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 19 Zha±rkij de±n’ bledne±l neulavi±ma, Nad o±zeram tuma±n tjanu±lsa palaso±j, I kro±tkij o±bras tvo±j, znako±myj i ljubi±myj, V veche±rnij ti±khij cha±s nasi±lsa preda mno±j. The hot day grew paler imperceptibly, A band of mist stretched out over the lake, And your gentle image, so familiar and beloved, Floated before me in the quiet evening hour. Uly±pka ta± zhe byla±, kato±ruju ljublju± ja, I mja±khkaja kasa±, kak pre±zhde rasplela±s’, I o±chi gru±snyje, pa pre±zhnemu tasku±ja, Gljade±li na menja± v veche±rnij ti±khij cha±s. Your smile was the smile I love so much, And your soft braid, as before, came undone, And your sad eyes, with a look of longing, Were gazing at me in the quiet evening hour. Zha±rkij de±n’ bledne±l neulavi±ma, Nad o±zeram tuma±n tjanu±lsa palaso±j, I kro±tkij o±bras tvo±j, znako±myj i ljubi±myj, V veche±rnij ti±khij cha±s nasi±lsa preda mno±j, V veche±rnij ti±khij cha±s. The light of a hot day faded imperceptibly, A band of mist stretched out over the lake, And your gentle image, so familiar and beloved, Floated before me in the quiet evening hour, In the quiet evening hour. Text. Alekséy Konstantínovich Tolstóy, 1856. Untitled. Rachmaninoff removed the first word of the poem, “Смеркалось,” and used it as the title of the song; he repeated the first stanza at the end to make it a three-part song. Set by César Cui (Op. 10/3, 1876), the cellist Karl Davydov (Op. 28/5, 1878), and many minor composers. Meter. Binary. Iambic hexameter (except for the truncated first line), with a caesura after the third foot: You smiled your lovely smile, your soft braid came undone… Music. Dated 22 April 1891. Without opus number. G Major. 4/4, [Moderato]. For High Voice: d1–b2. First published posthumously in Lamm, 1947. No dedication. Recordings. Mazurkevich, Naoumenko, Söderström, Suchkova. Cui: Valentina Sharonova. 20 Song 6 (1893) Песня разочарованного 6 Song of the disillusioned Daniil Ratgauz (1868–1937) was first noticed in 1893 when Tchaikovsky wrote his last six songs to lyrics by this young unknown poet of German descent. There was a boom in the next two decades in sentimental urban romances, and Ratgauz’s melancholy poems were the perfect expression of what Russian composers were looking for in this vein. By 1917, Ratgauz had 144 poems set to music by contemporaries like Arensky, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Grechaninov, Koreshchenko, and Glière. In the list of Russian poets whose poems were made into songs before 1917, Ratgauz is fifth, ahead of poets like Aleksei Tolstoy, Yakov Polonsky, Aleksei Pleshcheyev, and Feodor Tyutchev, and behind only the top four—Konstantin Balmont, in first place, followed by Alexander Pushkin, Afanasy Fet, and Mikhail Lermontov. As a poet he is not even close to being in the same league as any of these other poets, but Tchaikovsky chose his texts well and wrote powerful music for them. Indeed, some consider Op. 73 to be Tchaikovsky’s finest set of songs. Rachmaninoff chose less well. He found this poem in 1893, when it first appeared in print. By that time, he had written Op. 4 and Op. 8, which contain several very good songs. They include sad songs, but nothing to match the extremes of despair and impossible hopes in this text. It is hard to imagine Rachmaninoff sharing these sentiments, except maybe the penultimate line, a wish to bring back the happy summers spent at Ivanovka with the Satins and the Skalon sisters. The song is well shaped, with “portentous repeated quaver octaves” in the bass accompaniment (Martyn, 84) to the midpoint of the song, line 7, where there is a shift to a major key, then back to the minor for the last stanza; there is a strong piano postlude of seven bars. It is a big, ambitious song, but he rightly decided not to publish it. «Умри!» – твердит мне день, томительный и скучный, «Умри!» – мне шепчет ночь таинственною мглой. И в жизни тягостной, с тоскою неразлучный, Без цели я брожу усталою стопой. «Умри!» – твердил мне ум, когда в душе унылой Почуял я намёк на светлый сон любви... Но ты, мой нежный друг, мой ангел светлокрылый, Ты взором ласковым мне всё твердишь: «Живи!» О, как я жить хочу! Как страстно жажду света, Возврата пылких грёз, несбыточной мечты!.. Скажи, как возвратить умчавшееся лето? Скажи, как оживить увядшие цветы? Скажи! Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 21 “Umri±!” – tverdi±t mne de±n’, tami±tel’nyj i sku±shnyj. “Umri±!” – mne she±pchet no±ch tai±nstvennaju mglo±j. I v zhy±zni tja±gasnaj, s tasko±ju nerazlu±chnyj, Bes tse±li ja brazhu± usta±laju stapo±j. “Die!” the day keeps saying, wearisome and tedious, “Die!” whispers night in its mysterious gloom. And in a life of hardship, melancholy my inseparable companion, I wander aimlessly with weary steps. “Umri±!” – tverdi±l mne u±m, kagda± v dushe± uny±laj Pachu±jal ja namjo±k na sve±tlyj so±n ljubvi±… No ty±, moj ne±zhnyj dru±k, moj a±ngel svetlakry±lyj, Ty vzo±ram la±skavym mne fsjo tverdi±sh: “Zhyvi±!” “Die!” – my mind kept telling me, when in my downcast soul I sensed a hint of love’s bright dream... But you, my gentle friend, my bright-winged angel, With loving gaze keep saying to me: “Live!” O, ka±k ja zhy±t’ khachu±! Kak stra±sna zha±zhdu sve±ta, Vazvra±ta py±lkikh grjo±s, nezby±tachnaj mechty±!.. Skazhy±, ka±k vazvrati±t’ umcha±fshejesa le±ta? Skazhy±, ka±k azhyvi±t’ uvja±tshyje tsvety±? Skazhy±! Oh, how I want to live! How passionately I long for light, For the return of ardent wishes, the unattainable dream!.. Tell me, how can you bring back the summer that has flown away? Tell me, how do you bring to life the flowers that have faded? Tell me! Text. Daniíl Maksímovich Ratgáuz, 1893. Title: Песня разочарованного (Song of the disillusioned). First published in Ratgauz 1893, p. 104. This book was passed by the censor in Kiev on 9 July 1893, so presumably Rachmaninoff saw the poem after that date. He changed the word order in the first phrase of line 9 to make it more natural, and repeated the first word of line 12 at the end of the song. Not set by any other composers. Meter. Binary. Iambic hexameter, with a caesura (word boundary) after the third foot: But you, my gentle friend, \|\| my loving guardian angel... Music. 1893. Without opus number. F Minor – A-flat Major. 4/4, [Andante]. For Low Voice: c–f1. First published posthumously in Lamm, 1947. No dedication. Recordings. Del Grande, Koptchak, Leiferkus, Pirogov, Söderström, Suchkova. 22 Song 7 (1893) Увял цветок 7 The flower has faded In Song 7, to another lyric by Ratgauz, Rachmaninoff takes a different musical approach. The theme is the fragility of the happiness love brings, requiring the beloved’s early demise. The piano part is carefully crafted, with a laconic, but expressive accompaniment to the first stanza and the last 7 lines of the poem; this frames the impassioned music for lines 5 and 6, with forte arpeggio chords; then there is a reflective postlude to close the song. Like the preceding song, it has a conscious design, but except for the two passionate lines that speak of love, the voice part lacks really strong, defining phrases. In Russian, the verb “died” cannot be used with “flower,” but “faded” means “died” in this context, and that is how I have translated it below. The masculine pronoun “он” in the first line of the second stanza is sometimes translated as “it,” meaning the flower, but that makes no sense. This can only mean “he” who loved her, the lover named in the third person as “your poor friend” (there is no first person pronoun in this poem). Увял цветок! Лазурным утром мая Нашла гроза, сломился стебелёк... И, словно слёзы, лепестки роняя, Увял цветок! Тебя любил он с неземною силой, – Как только жрец любить богиню мог, – Но ты взята безжалостной могилой... Увял цветок! Чужой мечтам, чужой желаньям ясным, Твой бедный друг душою изнемог. Возврата нет к угасшим дням прекрасным... Увял цветок! Увял цветок! Uvja±l tsveto±k! Lazu±rnym u±tram ma±ja Nashla± graza±, slami±lsa stebeljo±k… I, slo±vna sljo±zy, lepestki± ranja±ja, Uvja±l tsveto±k! The flower died! On an azure morning in May A thunderstorm came, breaking its stalk… And shedding its petals like tears The flower died! Tebja± ljubi±l on s nezemno±ju si±laj, – Kak to±l’ka zhre±ts ljubi±t’ bagi±nju mo±k, – No ty vzjata± bezzha±lasnaj magi±laj… Uvja±l tsveto±k! He loved you with an unearthly power, As only a priest could love a goddess, But you were taken by the pitiless grave… The flower died! Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) Chuzho±j mechta±m, chuzho±j zhela±n’jam ja±snym, Tvoj be±dnyj dru±k dusho±ju iznemo±k. Vazvra±ta ne±t k uga±sshym dnja±m prekra±snym… Uvja±l tsveto±k! Uvja±l tsveto±k! 23 Alien to dreams, alien to clear desires, Your poor friend is stricken in his soul. The lovely burned-out days are gone beyond return… The flower died! The flower died! Text. Daniíl Ratgáuz, 1893. Untitled. First published in Ratgauz 1893, p. 49. This book was passed by the censor in Kiev on 9 July 1893, so presumably Rachmaninoff saw the poem after that date. Not set by any other composers. Meter. Binary. Iambic pentameter, except for the truncated final lines: The lovely days are gone beyond return. The flower died. Music. 1893. Without opus number. A Minor. 4/4, [Andante]. For Middle Voice: c1–g2. First published posthumously in Lamm, 1947. No dedication. Recordings. Borisenko, Del Grande, Popescu, Semenchuk, Söderström, Suchkova, Sumatchova. 24 Song 8 (1891) Ты помнишь ли вечер 8 Do you remember the evening? In May and June of 1856, Aleksei Tolstoy and Sophia Miller, Tolstoy’s wife and the addressee of his best love lyrics, traveled to the Crimea. There Tolstoy began a group of fourteen lyrics he called “Crimean Sketches.” Rachmaninoff found the text of this song in that cycle. Like Song 5, this lyric describes an intimate memory, this time on an evening when the poet and his lover were riding horses together by the Black Sea. Rachmaninoff shortened the poem by leaving out two stanzas not needed for the song (they are printed below). This is a straightforward song to a good text that works in performance. The ternary rhythm of the poem is brought out clearly in the placement of word stresses in the voice part and in the triple note figures in the piano part; it has a good melodic phrase that is flexible enough for variation, first with tenderness in the memory of a happy time together, then building to the repeated lines at the end of the second stanza, and finally ending in the quiet close. It has not been widely sung, but singers have noticed it, including Daniil Shtoda, a tenor from St. Petersburg, who included it on his first recording of Russian romances. There is also a fine recording of the song by Konstantin Lisovsky. Ты помнишь ли вечер, как море шумело, В шиповнике пел соловей... Душистые ветки акации белой Качались на шляпе твоей? Меж камней, обросших густым виноградом, Дорога была так узка; В молчании над морем мы ехали рядом, К руке прилегала рука! В молчаньи над морем ехали мы рядом, К руке прилегала рука. Ты помнишь ли рёв дождевого потока И пену, и брызги кругом? И нам наше горе казалось далёко, И как мы забыли о нём! Ty po±mnish li ve±cher, kak mo±re shume±la, F shypo±vnike pe±l salave±j… Dushy±styje ve±tki aka±tsii be±laj Kacha±lis’ na shlja±pe tvaje±j? Do you remember that evening, how the sea roared, How a nightingale sang in the sweetbrier? How fragrant sprigs of white acacia Swayed on your hat? Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 25 Mesh ka±mnej, obro±sshykh gusty±m vinagra±dam, Daro±ga byla± tak uska±; V malcha±nii nad mo±rem my je±khali rja±dam, K ruke± prilega±la ruka±! V malcha±n’ji nad mo±rem je±khali my rja±dam, K ruke± prilega±la ruka±. Between the rocks, overgrown with thick grapevines, The road was so narrow; We rode in silence together above the sea, Hand in hand! In silence above the sea we rode together Hand in hand. Ty po±mnish li rjo±f dazhdevo±va pato±ka I pe±nu, i bry±zgi krugo±m? I nam na±she go±re kaza±las’ daljo±ka, I kak my zaby±li a njo±m! Do you remember the roar of the pouring rain, And the foam and spray all around? And how our grief seemed so far away, And how we forgot all about it! Text. Alekséi Tolstóy, 1856. Untitled; No. 4 in “Крымские очерки” (Crimean Sketches). First set by Rachmaninoff, who removed two stanzas, repeated lines 7 and 8, and made two minor changes in wording. He was not satisfied with it but decided not to revise it (LN 1, 178-9). Cui set this same text in his late opus of 18 songs to Tolstoy’s poems (Op. 67/14, 1904). A setting was made in 1894 by G. E. Konyús (Georgi Conus, 1862–1933), composer and piano teacher of Scriabin and Medtner. Rachmaninoff knew the Conus family well; he played his trio with Julius, the violinist (see p. 46); in 1932 Julius’s son Boris married Tatiana, Rachmaninoff‘s younger daughter. Meter. Ternary. Amphibrachs, alternating lines of 4 and 3 feet: Remember the evening we rode by the sea, A nightingale sang in the brier... Music. Dated 16–17 July 1891, Ivanovka. Without opus number. E Major. 12/8, [Moderato]. For Middle Voice: e1–a2. First published posthumously in Lamm, 1947. No dedication. Recordings. Korshunov, Leiferkus, Lisovsky, Popescu, Shtoda, Söderström, Suchkova, Zimmermann. Stanzas 4 and 5, omitted from the song Ты так на седле нагибалась красиво, Ты алый шиповник рвала, Буланой лошадки косматую гриву С любовью ты им убрала; You sat forward so handsomely on the saddle, You plucked a wild rose off the brier, And lovingly you placed a corsage In the shaggy mane of your dun horse; Одежды твоей непослушные складки Цеплялись за ветви, а ты Беспечно смеялась, цветы на лошадке, В руках и на шляпе цветы. The unruly folds of your clothing Caught in the branches, while you Laughed gaily, flowers on your horse, Flowers in your hands and on your hat. 26 Song 9 (1899) Икалось ли тебе 9 Were you hiccuping? Because it was never published, this song follows the other eight unpublished songs in the Moscow edition of the Complete Romances (PSR) and is thus out of chronological order. It was written in June 1899 at the Krasnenkoye estate of the Kreutzer family, where Rachmaninoff was spending the summer (VOR 1, 292-5). Yelena Kreutzer took piano lessons from Rachmaninoff for many years and was a friend of Natalia Satina, Rachmaninoff’s future wife, by that time a student at the Moscow Conservatory. They invited Natasha to visit them in June. In this period of his life Rachmaninoff was performing and conducting, but was still recovering from the botched premiere of his First Symphony and finding it difficult to undertake any large compositions. Hence the jocular words at the top of the manuscript of the song: “No! My muse has not died, dear Natasha. I dedicate my new romance to you.” Yelena and Natasha used the large library at Krasnenkoye to look for good poems to give Rachmaninoff as texts for songs. He dropped in on them one day and started reading himself, whereupon he found this lyric in the poems of Pushkin’s contemporary Prince Vyazemsky (1792–1878). The idea behind this comic song is the notion that if you get the hiccups it means someone must be thinking about you. When Vyazemsky visited Épernay in the champagne district of France he thought of his friend Denis Davydov and wrote this poem to him while drinking champagne in the Moët cellars. Davydov, who was a cavalry officer (and a poet), had once told him the story of how he happened to be in that very place in 1812 with partisans in pursuit of Napoleon’s retreating army. Rachmaninoff used only the first three stanzas, changing the addressee to Natasha, and situating the champagne-drinking in a cellar in Voronezh, a mundane town near Krasnenkoye. He thought it was a huge joke and promised to write a song to those words, and on the next day he performed it with gusto. The song goes from romping gaiety to tender romanticism (there are musical quotes fromTchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin), and the last four words are to be sung “à la hiccup.” Barrie Martyn finds these antics “heavy-handed” and “forced” (Martyn, 121) but Max Harrison defends it as being in the vein of Stravinsky’s nonsense songs (Harrison, 88). In his spirited recording, Sergei Leiferkus reads the words of the dedication before singing the song. Нет! Не умерла моя муза, милая Наташа. Посвящаю тебе мой новый романс. Икалось ли тебе, Наташа, Когда шампанское я пил Различных вкусов, свойств и видов, Различных возрастов и сил? Nine Unpublished Songs (1890–1899) 27 Когда в воронежских подвалах Я жадно поминал тебя, Любя Наташу, поэтессу, Да и шампанское любя? Здесь бьёт кастальский ключ, питая Небаснословнoю струёй; Поэзия, – здесь вещь ручная: Пять франков дай и пей, и пой! No! My muse has not died, dear Natasha. I dedicate my new romance to you. Ika±las’ li tebe±, Nata±sha, Kagda± shampa±nskaje ja pi±l Razli±chnykh fku±saf, svo±jstf i vi±daf, Razli±chnykh vo±zrastaf i si±l? Were you hiccuping, Natasha, While I was drinking champagne Of various tastes, characteristics, and kinds, Of varied vintages and strengths? Kagda v varo±neshskikh padva±lakh Ja zha±dna pamina±l tebja±, Ljubja± Nata±shu, poete±ssu, Da i shampa±nskaje ljubja±? When in the cellars of Voronezh I was thinking about you so ardently, Loving Natasha, my poetess, And loving the champagne too? Zde±z’ b’jo±t kasta±l’skij klju±ch, Pita±ja nebasnaslo±vnaju strujo±j; Poe±zija, - zde±s’ ve±shch ruchna±ja: Pja±t’ fra±nkav da±j i pe±j, i po±j! Here flows a Castalian spring, that inspires Not like the fabled stream [of the Muses]; Here poetry comes in wine by the glass: Pay your five francs, then drink and sing! Text. Prince Piotr Andréyevich Vyázemsky, 1838. Title: Эперне (Épernay, a town in the Champagne district of France). Only Rachmaninoff has set this text. He used only the first 3 of 18 stanzas, changing the references to Davydov to fit Natasha and replacing the cellars of Moët with Voronezh. He added a note to the title which reads “Please read the verses carefully first!” Meter. Binary. Iambic tetrameter: While drinking glasses of champagne Of varied vintages and strengths. Music. Dated 17 May 1899, but this date was written in later, and is probably erroneous; the actual date of June 1899 is given by Kreutzer in her memoir (VOR 1, 292-5). Without opus number. F Major. 4/4, Быстро [Fast]. For LowVoice: c–f1. First published posthumously in Lamm, 1947. Dedicated to the composer’s wife. Recordings. Burchuladze, Crona, Del Grande, Kharitonov, Leiferkus, Nesterenko, Söderström, Suchkova. 28 First Published Songs, Opus 4 (1893) 1. Word of a new talent named Rachmaninoff spread quickly. The music publisher Karl Gutheil approached him with an offer to publish Aleko and pay him a fee of 500 rubles for it. He also bought two pieces for cello and piano, Op. 2, and the first set of songs, Op. 4. It was a large sum, but there were delays in getting the money to him, so he took a job giving piano lessons in the summer of 1892 after graduation. He received good fees and became friends with some of his pupils, like Yelena Kreutzer, but he did not like having to teach in order to support himself (VOR 1, 28). Among the works Rachmaninoff composed in 1892–3 were five pieces for piano, called “Morceaux de Fantaisie,” Op. 3, written in the autumn of 1892. The second of these, a Prelude in C-sharp Minor, made an immediate impression when he first played it in Moscow on 26 September 1892, and later that year in Kharkov. His cousin Alexander Siloti played it for the first time outside Russia in London in 1895 (Barber, 61), and first brought it to the U.S. in 1898, where it became a sensation. Rachmaninoff himself played it in England on his first tour there in 1899. It has an arresting beginning, dignified but menacing, with its three-note descending octave unison chords; there is drama in the middle section, and then a chordal climax, a “mournful tolling of bells,” and a final sequence of chords “each held in suspense as the music gradually vanishes into the distance” (Martyn, 69). In an interview published in The Delineator in February 1910, Rachmaninoff cautioned against playing it too loudly or yielding to the temptation to play the final chords as arpeggios. This three-and-a-half to four-minute Prelude in C-sharp Minor became one of the most famous piano works ever written. He sold Op. 3 to Gutheil for 200 rubles, or 40 rubles a piece (about 20 dollars, as he said in his interview for The Delineator during his North American debut in 1909–10); he regretted not publishing the work in Germany to protect his rights, as he did later with other sets of piano works. But since Russia was not a signatory to international copyright agreements, the twenty dollars he received for the Prelude was all he ever got for it. It has been estimated that, had it been protected by copyright, the composer might have made $100,000 on this work alone (Harrison, 50). At any rate, it passed into the public domain, and was played by everyone for free. Rachmaninoff’s recording of it on the Philips “Great Pianists of the 20th Century” set is played exactly as he calls for in the interview above, the melodic lines clearly articulated and the chords not pounded out showily but played with a stately restraint. The prelude became well known beyond the First Published Songs, Opus 4 (1893) 29 world of classical music. In 1918 George L. Cobb published a Tin Pan Alley instrumental version called “Russian Rag.” It was played by jazz musicians who arranged it, including Duke Ellington (“Cotton Club Nights,” 1938), Jack Teagarden (“It’s Time for T,” 1941), and Nat Cole in his early King Cole Trio period (1944); for many more curious offshoots of the prelude, see Harrison, 227-9. The piece hardly survives Teagarden’s band, but Nat Cole’s version for piano, guitar, and bass conveys a certain respect for the original. Whether Rachmaninoff would have liked it is hard to say, but it is known that he admired Art Tatum’s piano improvisations and Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and was at Aeolian Hall in 1924 when Whiteman introduced Rhapsody in Blue with George Gershwin as soloist. 2. During Rachmaninoff’s last year at the Conservatory, in late 1891 or early 1892, his friend Yury Sakhnovsky (see Song 11) introduced him to a married woman named Anna Lodyzhenskaya; she was in her mid-twenties, and of Gypsy blood. Her husband Piotr was a dilettante composer and carouser and a friend of Chaliapin’s. He wrote a song which he dedicated to Rachmaninoff, “Those fleeting dreams” (Пронеслись мимолетные грезы, 1896), which Lamm in 1947 mistakenly included in Rachmaninoff’s unpublished songs because a score of the song in Rachmaninoff’s hand was found among his papers (PSR, 326); there are several recordings of this song, including a good one by Nadezhda Obukhova. Anna’s sister Nadezhda Aleksandrova was a well-known singer of “Gypsy” songs whom Rachmaninoff certainly admired; she made recordings of two such songs (Ianin, 418), including “White and Pale (Night Flowers),” a song later in Obukhova’s repertoire and recorded by her. Rachmaninoff found this “Gypsy” company irresistible, and particularly Anna, with her deep-set, dark eyes, her kind manners, her engaged interest in the younger men. After graduation, the evenings he spent at Anna’s were frequent. He called her “Rodnaya,” a term of the closest endearment in Russian, and referred to her by that name with his friends Slonov and Sakhnovsky. In the words of Lyudmila Skalon, she was his “passionate platonic love” (VOR 1, 239). He was living with his cousins the Satins during most of these years. It is not surprising that they disapproved of Anna Lodyzhenskaya; they did not like her and found her “unattractive.” Since so much of what we know about Rachmaninoff comes to us through the Satin sisters, or through Soviet keepers of archives not curious enough to tell us anything about this woman of whom they also disapprove, we have to imagine this relationship rather than construct it out of known facts. But Anna’s hold on Rachmaninoff and his lasting devotion to her cannot be doubted: he would ask Sakhnovsky or Slonov to spend the evening with Rodnaya (“dearest heart”) when he could not go himself; he sent 30 First Published Songs, Opus 4 (1893) money to her “regularly” and, years later, sent money to Piotr after she had died (Irina Chaliapin in VOR 2, 177-8). Rachmaninoff dedicated his “Capriccio on Gypsy Themes” (1892–4) to Piotr, his song “Oh, do not grieve” (Song 29, 1896) to Nadezhda, and to Anna he dedicated the first song in Op. 4 (Song 10, 1892) and his First Symphony. In January 1893, when Rachmaninoff and Mikhail Slonov went to Kharkov to give a recital, Anna advised them to “be happy and have fun” (LN 1, 207). During this recital, Slonov, a baritone, performed two songs from Opus 4, including the song dedicated to Anna. 3. When Rachmaninoff and Slonov were in Kharkov, they stayed in the town house of a rich merchant and his wife whom Rachmaninoff had met when he gave his first recital there in December 1892. This couple, the Lysikovs, had a summer estate called “Lebedin” outside town, and they invited the two young men to visit them there in the summer of 1893. For Rachmaninoff it was a productive summer. There he wrote the last two songs of Opus 4, (he dedicated number 5 to Mrs. Lysikova); he also wrote a Suite for Two Pianos (Fantaisie-Tableaux), Op. 5, which he dedicated to Tchaikovsky; two Morceaux de Salon for Violin and Piano, Op. 6; and a Fantasy for Orchestra “The Crag,” Op. 7, which Tchaikovsky promised to include in a concert he was to conduct in January 1894. It was the last work Rachmaninoff showed to Tchaikovsky before Tchaikovsky’s untimel
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1646	dbpedia	3	17	https://charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/chap4.html	en	The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			Assets/g/i/favicon.ico		null	by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson 4. Changing Performance Styles: Singing Â¶1 Sound File 13 (wav file) is a transfer by Roger Beardsley from a 1911 recording of Elena Gerhardt singing Schubertâs âAn die Musikâ (D 547), accompanied by Arthur Nikisch. 1 Itâs worth hearing now because it helps us to focus on one of the key questions raised by early recordings. Why did people sing and play the notes on the page in ways that to us seem so strange? How can âAn die Musikâ, to take just one example, ever have made sense to people sung like this? Yet it did. Gerhardt was one of the most celebrated singers of her time, and this is now one of her most valued and valuable recordings (as I discovered when trying to acquire a copy to use for this book). For Eddy Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor in 1951, Gerhardt as an interpreter of German song âdeveloped a mastery of phrasing, enunciation and tone-colour which have set a standard difficult to approachâ, 2 and in this recording she achieved âsuperb resultsâ. 3 Yet for John Austin (of Kangaroo Ground, Australia), writing an Amazon review of a modern reissue on October 9, 2000, Conductor Arthur Nikisch and soprano Elena Gerhardt were musicians of great renown in their day, but their 1911 performance of âAn die Musikâ is frankly appalling. Nikisch plays the opening accompaniment quickly, then slows to half speed when Gerhardt enters. What follows, for nearly four minutes, is not so much a tribute to music as a travesty of it. Altogether there is little offered by the early 20th Century generation of singers that I should like young singers of today to hear. 4 Â¶2 What has changed? And what does John Austin fear might happen if young singers heard Gerhardt? Was her performance always appalling, and was everybody who so admired her wrong? Or is it just that taste has changed? If the latter, then is âtasteâ a strong enough word to describe the reshaping of responses to such an extent that a modern writer can fear for the musical health of the young? And if people have changed that much, why might hearing Gerhardt have any appeal for young singers today? What would be the danger in their hearing her? Clearly powerful emotions are involved in responses to performances like this, and one of the things weâre going to need to do in this chapter is to explain how such differences are possible. In subsequent chapters weâll begin to see why people feel so strongly about them. Â¶3 First, though, we need some context. The best way to provide this, I think, is to take a selective tour of twentieth-century performance practices, working chronologically from the earliest recordings, and taking instrumentsâvoice, violin, pianoâthat have somewhat self-contained traditions before we try to look either at what they have in common or at how performance works on a much more detailed scale. 5 With those overviews to hand, weâll be in a better position to think about the mechanisms that cause these changes in style and about the relationship between styles of music-making and writing about music. Then we can come back to the more fundamental problem of the changing nature of musicianship. Â¶4 I ought not to need to justify beginning with singing, where there is text that directs emotional responses more narrowly, and only then moving on to instrumental playing, where there is not. But the prejudice of musical academia in favour of instrumental music (âabsoluteâ music), precisely because its meaning is not reified by text, is so long and was until recently so strongly established that I probably should say something about it. Aaron Ridley has dealt with this at length from a philosophical point of view, 6 arguing that music particularises text as much as vice versa. That is so; and we shall see as we go along, especially in chapter 8 below, how multiple cues combine to particularise our sense of what any kind of music means to us: 7 text is only one source of cues, a very significant one when itâs in a language we understand, but not (as it were) the whole story. Â¶5 But my reason for starting with song is simpler than that. I want us to be able to see musical sounds in relatively precise relation to sounds from life before we move on to look at musical sounds whose relationship with anything else is much less definable. What Iâm really examining in this book are the things performers do with sound that make music (emotionally) moving. 8 My argument is that this happens from moment to moment as performers âshapeâ some aspect of the musical soundâits frequency, loudness or pitch (or a combination of those)âin relation to the musical score on the one hand and on the other in relation to associations we bring as listeners (and the performers bring similarly) by knowing what sounds like those mean in the environment and in our lives. Understanding the relationship with scores is easy; or at any rate, musicology has been doing it very well for generations and I have nothing to add. But understanding how musical sounds draw on sounds from life is much harder, because the associations are rarely crude; if they were, music would be so commonplace in its expressivity that it would bring no added value: one might as well hear the environmental sounds themselves and have done with it. If we want to make any progress towards understanding what a momentary adjustment of loudness in a Bach partita is doing for us, then we need to gain a lot of understanding by working first of all in musical situations that are much simpler. And this is why I begin with song. Words help us to understand the things singers do with the music that sets them. If we can see some coherent procedures at work there, ways in which musical sounds refer to other kinds of experiences of change over time, then we can make progress towards understanding situations in which there is no text, and no intention to emulate text, simply change in sound over time. For my purposes, aiming to find out more about how music is expressive and of what, song is a very good place to start. Â¶6 The other thing I want to doâbecause itâs a necessary preliminary to understanding how music moves usâis to propose and illustrate a variety of ways of studying musical performances, using recordings as my sources. And so as we go through the next three chapters, as well as showing how style changed Iâll be offering various approaches to finding out what performers are doing from moment to moment, before in chapter 8 we find out how to get down to the smallest details. Â¶7 I mentioned when we were looking at the limitations of early cylinders and discs that singers recorded particularly well, especially sopranos and tenors. This was due to the limited frequency response of the equipment coinciding with the most important part of the spectrum for vocal soundsâbetween about 150 and 2000Hzâand the relatively high energy that a voice could direct down the recording horn compared with other kinds of instruments. So listening to an early recording one could get a more complete sense of the sound of a voice than, say, a piano, whose sound couldnât be focussed, or a violin whose sound wasnât strong enough. The instrument most recorded, therefore, in the early years was the voice. Producers, as we now call themââexpertsâ in the Gramophone Companyâs terminologyâquite literally went out of their way to find and record as many singers as possible in order to build up a catalogue of saleable discs as fast as they could. Weâve already seen Fred Gaisberg taking a year-long trip to India and the Far East in 1902-3, and bringing close on 600 recordings back. He had made similar trips to Russia in 1900 and 1901, and before that to Italy, France and Spain in 1899, and to Italy again in 1902, focusing his search for suitable artists always on singers, albeit with excursions for popular instrumental items. 9 Consequently, most of the oldest musicians we have on record are singers. Â¶8 On the face of it, that might not seem a very promising statistic, for the oldest voices might not always be the ones we most want to hear. More interesting is that these are the musicians trained earliest in the 19th century, and for anyone trying, as many do, to extend the evidence of recordings back into a time before recording was invented, this is particularly tantalising evidence. We have to be very careful, though. Is an old voice fairly representative? Do musicians change their performance styles with the times? (Weâll come back to this later, especially in chapter 6 on piano playing: 10 broadly, some do and some, perhaps most, donât, or not very much. But of course this conclusion is based on 20th-century evidence, and patterns could have changed.) At any rate, it seems fair to assume that we know more about singing than anything else from the later 19th century , and much more than we do about, say, orchestral playing. The earliest recorded singers tantalise us, therefore, and itâs very tempting to suppose that the earliest sounds we hear from them represent a tradition going back towards composersâBrahms, Wagner, Schumann, Schubert, Beethovenâwith whom the western classical tradition remains obsessed but about whose performance we otherwise know with certainty little (Brahms and Wagner) or next to nothing (anyone earlier). Â¶9 The other tantalising factor, though it may be misleading, is that vocal performance styles changed early in the recorded era; indeed, they probably had already changed for many singers before recording began, so that only the oldest singers seem to belong to the older style. Itâs very tempting to suppose, therefore, that those few represent a tradition going back a long way. Several very interesting attempts have been made to relate their styles to earlier 19th-century writings on singing, 11 and one can certainly make a plausible argument along those lines. But arguments are one thing, and recorded sounds quite another. The former, in the end, are wishful thinking (though possibly correct wishful thinking), the latter are evidence. So if weâre to give proper weight to the evidence we do need to be cautious in arguing back. 12 That said, what we hear from these oldest recorded singers is very fascinating. Â¶10 Letâs begin with perhaps the most famous. Adelina Patti was born in 1843, and since she was already performing professionally in her teens itâs likely that her performance style was fairly well-formed by 1860. Her recordings, though, were made in 1905 and 1906 after sheâd stopped giving public performances. 13 Itâs obvious that her voice is not what it was; she finds it hard to sustain long phrases without taking a breath, high notes can screech, chest notes can be rasping, and from time to time a note breaks altogether, but these flaws due to age are less striking than the qualities that remain. 14 Outstanding among them is the ease with which she gets from note to note, even in the fastest decorative passages. The impression of fluidity this produces results from very short onsets for each note she sings; her voice hits each pitch precisely, its full tone and volume reached very quickly, so that the sequence of fully-voiced pitches is hardly interrupted at all by the formation of each new note. Partly this is a matter of forming consonants very briefly; and sometimes they can be so brief as to be inaudible, in which case diction suffers and we seem to be hearing vocalise rather than sung text. Partly it is due simply to the fast reaction time of her vocal chords. In addition, in melismas she joins notes together with rapid portamento, even on repeated pitches which she typically manages by scooping down very fast at the end of the first note and up rather less fast at the start of the second. Â¶11 Together with this goes a clear and even tone, caused by strong first and second harmonics (the fundamental and octave), a slightly less strong third harmonic (twelfth), and strong partials in the region between 2500 and 3500Hz. How bright it was we can no longer know for sure, since the recordings transmit no frequencies above 4000Hz. Hanslick, Wolf, and Emmanuele Muzio (writing to Verdi) all described it as âsilveryâ, 15 a metaphor usually associated with brightness caused by a few strong upper partials, so we may well have lost something significant (Muzio thought it already lost in 1886), but it may also be meant to convey an element of fluidity, so that we canât know the balance between their sense of her voice as limpid and as bright. But even so, we can easily agree with 19th-century critics who found it âmeltingâ, âliquidâ (Emma Eames), 16 âflexibleâ (Charles Dickens and John Cox), 17 and above all âpureâ (Eames, Camille Belaigue). 18 Her timing is relatively exact, at least from one bar to the next, although there is flexibility from note to note. 19 It is a voice that emphasises line, continuity and melody much more than drama or rapid changes of emotion. Beautiful singing seems to matter more than emphasising remarkable moments in the text. Generally, most of the expressive work is done by changes in amplitude, which are wide and surprisingly well recorded for this date, and by much more subtle variations in timing from beat to beat. Less commonly she scoops up to notesâthe technique long known in the teaching tradition as cercar la notaâin order to emphasise specific points in text or musical structure. 20 Portamento across pitch intervals she uses quite a lot, but in some songs much more than others; her vibrato is fast and by subsequent standards shallow, so much so as on occasion to be barely noticeable. In its general character her singing is unaffected and simple, and much more like modern early music singing than was the singing of the generations immediately following her. Â¶12 How much of this is really about Pattiâs voice and how much about the sound of CD reissues is a question thatâs complicated by the impossibility of knowing the speed at which the original discs were recorded. As I write I have six transfers to hand, and a vinyl pressing from the original metal, of matrix 683c (G & T 03084), a recording of âAh, non credea mirartiâ from Belliniâs La Sonnambula made at her home in Wales in June 1906. Three transfers agree on a pitch for the key-note of 414Hz (modern aâ-flat); 21 one is pitched at 407 (flat aâ-flat); 22 two (including a CD transfer of the metal) at 392Hz (modern gâ); 23 and one at 430 (a flat modern aâ). 24 There is almost a tone between the highest and the lowest, and none is necessarily correct, for reasons we saw in chapter 3. Pattiâs voice sounds very significantly different at the highest and lowest of those pitches. Itâs always tempting to accept the compromise (which is what Iâve done for the description of her voice above, based on the Symposium transfer), and as you might expect it does indeed sound less girlish than the highest transfer, and less matronly than the lowest, but there is no way of knowing which was Patti. We simply have to accept that we canât know for sure how she sounded or whether the comparisons we make with other singers are quite accurate. 25 Â¶13 Patti was taught, like many singers of her generation, by Manuel Garcia, son of the Manuel Garcia who was one of Rossiniâs singers. Garcia the younger wrote up their teaching in TraitÃ© complet de l'Art du Chant, Paris, 1841 and 1847. 26 Both here and in the later summary of his teaching, as learned at first hand by Hermann Klein, all the emphasis is on steadiness and purity of tone, managed through even breath pressure, open vowels, voice production forward in the mouth, and above all perfect legato producing sequences of equally powered and coloured notes strung seamlessly together, enhanced by lightly-sung portamento. 27 Â¶14 We can get another angle on this tradition of fluid melodic singing by listening to one of the oldest recorded musicians, Sir Charles Santley, born in 1834, so aged almost 70 when he was recorded in 1903. Though English, Santley studied in Italy in the 1850s and then with Garcia in London, and so it is not surprising to find him singing in this same legato style. A fine example is his recording of âNon piÃ¹ andraiâ from Mozartâs Le Nozze di Figaro. According to Hanslick his voice was already aging in 1886, 28 and by 1903 we are clearly listening to an old man; but vocal colour is not by any means the only factor determining our sense of a singerâs skill: among others that shine though Santleyâs performance are steadiness and consistency of tone, subtlety of rubato, and this same ability as Patti has to sing legato without being shapeless. 29 Â¶15 The steadiness comes from an even vibrato, slightly slower and considerably wider than Pattiâs, as is characteristic of male compared to female singers around 1900; consistency of tone is modified only by the darkened vowels of his pronunciation (lower and further back in the throat than one would expect today); the rubato is very slight, and corresponds to stresses in Italian rather than to meanings of words; the legato is achieved by breath control, of course, and by the ease with which notes sound, just as in Patti, but unlike Patti Santley manages what one might think an almost impossible task of articulating legato, done by decreasing the loudness of articulated notes at their ends but without stopping them entirely, and on occasion by simultaneously sliding below the next note in order to crescendo and scoop into it: the scoops are fast enough that one perceives them not as pitch change but as emphasis. When he wants something more continuous he has graded options to hand, at the first level continuing the tone without diminuendo, at the second joining notes with portamento (though he does this rarely). 30 The most expressive words are sung out, when there is time, and with more vibrato (for example, âmolto onorâ) and, when there isnât time, with a small fast scoop. Â¶16 The other fascinating detail, more discussed by the critics, is his ornamentation, which is extremely fast, flexible and integrated into the legato by widening two vibrato cycles far enough to reach an adjacent pitch. 31 Surprising only because the character of the performance is brisk and bracing (as the text suggests) is the cadenza at the end of the B-section, which uses Mozartâs pause sign to leap up a fifth, hold it, run down a scale through an octave and a half to bottom G, and then slide back up to the G from which he began, before taking a breath and launching into the pseudo da capo. By articulating the descending scale more than usual Santley manages all this without a trace of sentimentality; which is a useful lesson in the integration of ornamentation into a performance: done in the right way it has none of the sense of indulgence that is too often attributed to early 20th-century singing by writers unattuned to the stylistic context. Â¶17 Compared to our own expectations this performance seems informal, light-hearted, fluent, easily achieved (though at 69 years old it cannot possibly have been), and in a way natural. This last word is a tricky one, of course, and it can only be used as a comparativeânatural compared to what weâre used to. Untrained would be another way of putting it. But in fact thereâs nothing untrained about these singers. They simply make sounds that are less unlike amateur singing than trained singing became in the generation that followed them. And the reason for this change, above all, was orchestrally conceived opera. As singers from Verdi onwards had to make themselves heard over a growing orchestraâas Wagner, Puccini, and then Strauss requiredâvocal training had to develop a sound that would produce strong harmonics relatively high up the spectrum. The so-called âsingerâs formantâ, developed in Italian tenors and spread rapidly, carried effectively over much larger accompaniments, but at the cost of lost flexibility: the energy required from each note could not be generated so quickly; notes take longer to reach their full amplitude and they require wider vibrato to distinguish themselves from the instrumental sounds around them. The marked style change that occurred between this generation, therefore, and the nextâsingers who grew up with verismo and Wagnerâwas caused more than anything by the demands of composers. We shall see that this is far from always being the case. Â¶18 I want to look at one other elderly singer from the first decades of recordings in order to focus for a moment on the question of how texts were understood and how the meaning found in them was conveyed in the early 20th century. Texts, and especially song textsâwhose poetry was often more subtle and more capable than opera libretti of bearing a range of interpretationsâdid not always mean the same things to singers then as they mean now. And itâs possible to see how meanings have changed in line with changes in performance style. Indeed, the two are inextricably bound up together. Â¶19 Sir George Henschel, born in 1850, was a singer, pianist (he studied with Moscheles), composer and conductor, in fact the first conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 32 As a singer he accompanied himself, which gives his recordings of songs a particularly interesting quality, with coherence between voice and piano both in timing and interpretation. In his teaching Henschel laid particular emphasis on the expressive potential of vowels. â..the five vowels ... are what we may call the primary colours of the voice. By skilful and judicious mixing of these colours, a singer should be able to produce as many shades of (let us say) the vowel A as a painter can produce of (let us say) the colour red.â And he used to make his pupils sing whole songs on vowels alone âwith the object of expressing the character of the music by mere vocalisation.â 33 Â¶20 Later on in this study weâre going to look at expressivity in Schubert songs and so itâs two of Henschelâs Schubert recordings I want to focus on here, âDas Wandernâ (the first song from the cycle Die schÃ¶ne MÃ¼llerin) and âDer Leiermannâ (the last from Winterreise). The first was recorded for HMV in 1914, the year of his retirement, and again for Columbia in 1928 (we shall look at their very close similarity in chapter 8); the second was recorded as a coupling for the Columbia release. They were singled out for particular praise in the first book-length study of Schubertâs songs, by Richard Capell, first published in 1928. 34 In a list of approved recordings, without much comment, Henschelâs Columbia discs get Capellâs most enthusiastic endorsement: âThese records show, no doubt, how Schubert intended his songs to be sung. There is no show and no self-consciousness about this singing. The performance strikes the right balance between voice and pianoâ, as well it might with Henschel accompanying himself. 35 Â¶21 Henschelâs seems to us now, as it did to Capell, a straightforward approach. In âDas Wandernâ (Sound File 14 (wav file)) 36 the millerâs boy feels precisely what he sings: nothing could be more delightful than to go travelling. The jauntiness in Henschelâs sound is produced by making the notes short, attacking them hard and cutting them off early, and by raising and lowering the pitch. On a spectrogram each note is an inverted U, with a rapid crescendo to the top and equally fast decrescendo down. The sense a listener gets is of top-of-the-world good humour: there are no hidden meanings, no self-deception; the boy is looking forward to a delightful adventure. For Capell the boy at the start of Die schÃ¶ne MÃ¼llerin is âa lovesick lad in a green valley.â âSchubertâ, he says, âsimply did not know what to do with the bold and the bad of the earth. But he lent his luckless young miller tones that he could not have bettered if he had wanted them for himself. And surely just such a one would he himself have been if he had fallen to such a milleressâs charms; timid and rapturous, flower-plucking and star-gazing, a fount of tenderness, a gulf of despair.â 37 Itâs easy for us to laugh at this, just as we sometimes laugh at the singing of 90 years ago. But this is how it seemed. A poetâs love was pure, generous and honest, and it was in the same spirit that one should sing. And so at the far end of MÃ¼llerâs story, in âDer Leiermannâ (Sound File 15 (wav file)), 38 Henschel responds by narrowing his vocal cavity, holding it almost immobile, pulling all the vowels towards the [áµ] (âarrâ) position, maintaining a monotonous colour and level to suggest the stasis of profound depression. Nothing could be more obviously contrasted with his performance of âDas Wandernâ; âDer Leiermannâ becomes, as Capell recommends, âAn almost toneless songâ and Henschel âan unforgettable interpreterâ. 39 Â¶22 In relating Capell and Henschel itâs worth remembering not only that Capellâs was the first study that considered Schubertâs songs worth examining in depthâearlier writers on Schubert tended to dismiss most of them as relatively trivialâbut also that Capellâs much more sympathetic view of them comes after some thirty years of recordings which had made at least some of them better known and widely loved. 40 Itâs an interesting early example of how recordings changed the way music was understood. 41 What had been a reflection of Schubertâs superficiality was now a tribute to his integrity, thanks in large part to the manner in which his songs were being sung. Itâs not hard to see how these two attitudes fed on one another. The conviction of singers increased that of writers, and theirs in turn fed back into an increasing intensity in performances. Â¶23 So during the 1920s and 30s we tend to see a gradual inflation in the emotional intensity of Schubert song performance on record. Of course this is not an isolated style change. It happens, too, because of a general trend towards more emotionally expressive performances in all kinds of music during the first four decades of the 20th century. The change in vocal production, brought about by verismo and Wagner opera, is another factor, and together they all play a part in the manner of singing we find in the next generation. All these factorsâsinging, playing, writing, trainingâwere shaped by the general communicative norms of their time. Modernism was, to a considerable extent, a reaction against precisely this sort of emotionalism. 42 Â¶24 We can take Lotte Lehmann as a first representative of this more intense style. 43 Born in 1888, Lehmann was in her early career best known as an opera singer, especially in Strauss and Wagner. Her discography runs to well over 400 items, not including interviews and master-classes, reflecting her long life (she died in 1976) and enthusiastic engagement with recording. 44 Lehmann was appreciated not so much for the quality of her technique, which anyone could hear was flawed, as for her exceptional ability to communicate feelings through her voice. And in a way, the imperfections in her singing contribute to her effectiveness as a communicator. One of the variables is the colour of her voice, which runs from harsh at the bottom (strong in the fundamental and in dissonant upper partials) to childlike at the top (strong lower harmonics only, giving a pure tone almost like a treble). 45 In the normal course of events training evens this out, but Lehmannâs training, at least by her account, seems to have been unsatisfactory in the extreme. Together with changing tone goes a vibrato that is even in wavelength but uneven in pitch. Â¶25 To a listener the sound seems to suggest a curious mixture of stability and instability: we sense warmth (the strong consonant lower harmonics), dependability (the regularly beating vibrato combined with warmth of tone) and yet vulnerability. The pitch instability is there not just within the vibrato but also in a tendency to drift upwards very slightly during a note, too little to be perceived as sharpening, but enough to sound yearning, as if her voice is reaching towards the listener. A sense of eagerness is increased by her tendency to swoop up to notes at the start of a phrase, and to slide up from note to note in a rising melodic line, sometimes right through a note as she passes up the scale. Her approach to linear continuity comes not so much from very fast note onsets, as in Patti, as from portamento and these other kinds of pitch slides. Indeed, because her breathing was never well controlled, she breaks up lines into shorter-breathed units more than most. 46 Yet she was uncommonly valued and loved as a singer who seemed to involve her audience in every nuance of a song. Â¶26 It may be that listeners felt happier then with humanly imperfect voices than we do now after a long period in which evenness and clarity have been prized most highly. But to understand Lehmannâs effectiveness as a communicator we need to look also at the advice she gave to students on interpretation. Teaching books for singers from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were concerned almost exclusively with technique, and based around exercises. Lehmannâs, and those of a handful of other singers from the 1920s through the 40s, were much more inclined to advise on interpretation, and especially on what feelings a singer needed to convey. 47 Here she is on Schumannâs âIch grolle nichtâ: 48 Change the quality of your voice which has been dark and flowing, at âWie du auch strahlst in Diamantenprachtâ. Sing with a bright tone, disparagingly and ironically, as if you were saying: âBut donât think I donât see through you!â ... Sing broadly, with sorrowful accentuation âdas weiss ich lÃ¤ngstâ. ... Turning away from the beloved, still trembling from your outbreak of bitterness, you now speak more to yourself. ... completely absorbed with yourself you repeat, trembling, âIch grolle nichtâ. Beginning this verse with a restrained piano will also give a stronger effect in building up the dramatic climax of the song. Â¶27 What we get here is a mixing of advice on vocal colour and dynamicsâmore or less technical pointsâwith description of how the character portrayed feels within the story, but expressed as advice on how the singer himself should feel: the singer, in other words, becomes the protagonist; the more successfully, the stronger the musical result. Itâs method acting for musicians. And for Lehmann it clearly works. A recording of her reading this text (Sound File 16 (wav file)) 49 corresponds exactly to her advice to singers and makes interesting comparison with her recording of the song from June 1930 (Sound File 17 (wav file)), 50 for the similarities between them emphasise the extent to which this highly expressive, deeply felt singing, calls on styles of acting for its communicative power. Â¶28 Into this same stylistic world comes Elena Gerhardtâs recording of âAn die Musikâ with Arthur Nikisch, the recording with which this chapter began. Here again, the performance decisions are not simply musical; in this case they are not even led very directly by Schubertâs notation, whose repeated quavers look so even. In Gerhardtâs recording, quavers in the first two lines of the song vary from 0.34s to 1.04s in length, with most distributed fairly evenly between 0.4s and 0.8s. In other words a quaver can vary in length by a factor of 1:3, and quavers frequently vary across as little as a beat by a factor of 1:2. Whatever drives this performance itâs certainly not the notation. But if we understand it as Lotte Lehmann would then it makes much better sense. âAn die Musikâ is about music itself, its solace, its power to change oneâs mood from despair to ecstasy; itâs about the most profound topic of which a singer can sing. Gerhardt isnât singing the score, sheâs singing her feelings for musicâor at least, acting them out. In a performance-stylistic world in which intensity of feeling is everything, her rubato makes perfect sense. (Weâll look at this example more closely in chapter 8.) Â¶29 Heinrich Schlusnus was an exact contemporary of Lotte Lehmann, born in 1888, 51 and itâs useful to compare his singing with hers to see whether men manage this intensely expressive style differently. His voice is much more controlled, both naturally and artistically; I suppose one could say, adopting terminology of the period, more manly (strong, direct, but not insensitive). 52 The intensity is there all right, but less in tempo flexibility or pitch scoops (generally less used in male singing) than in amplitude and colour. His 1928 recording of âAn die Musikâ (Sound File 52) (wav file) makes a useful comparison with Gerhardtâs; 53 heâs really quite strict with tempo, only lengthening notes markedly right at the end, âIch danke Dirâ: and there, as he thanks Music for all itâs given him, he does adopt almost as overt an emotionalism, fervently stressing those words, as does she. But for the rest, the intensity comes less from tempo or sudden change than from increasing amplitude to the high-point of a phrase and then quickly releasing it, and from an interesting ability to change the depth of his vibrato (increasing it for expressive passages) and the balance of harmonics, bringing in harmonics not required by the vowel in order to make a note glow. The resulting impression is of stabilityâthe manlinessâcoupled with strength of feeling, with the emphasis on the strength; where Gerhardt or Lehmann are willing to let pitch or duration off the leash, Schlusnus simply adds to what he already does without any parameter ever cutting loose. Nevertheless, the effect is of an intensity that clearly belongs within the same emotionally expressive world: it could never be mistaken for a younger Henschel or an earlier Fischer-Dieskau. (Though if heâd made a more beautiful sound the younger Peter Pears might have come close.) Â¶30 If we look back at Patti, now, we can easily see that there has been a very considerable change in performance style since the beginning of the century. Many features are shared, including features we no longer hear todayâportamento and wide scoops especially, and because those are so obviously strange to us now we tend on first hearing to group all these singers together as quaint, or even tasteless. But the ways Patti and Lehmann, or Santley and Schlusnus, use their voices are actually very different. For the oldest recorded singers linear continuity is everything; beautiful singing, expressive of the general sense of a text, is much more important than following and communicating moment-by-moment changes in the emotional state of the character they represent, which for Lehmann and Gerhardt, and in a more restrained manner, for Schlusnus, was what singers were there to do. Different performance styles, and different conventions of emotional communication, go hand in hand, and music accordingly takes on different functions and to a certain extent even comes to mean different things. Â¶31 Why the Second World War marked a watershed in musical performance style remains to be investigated; but it did. After the War that intensely expressive style seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, exaggerated and unrealistic. Perhaps it was simply that naivety was impossible after the discovery of the concentration camps, so that singers of the generation whoâd come to adulthood during the Nazi period found they could no longer represent 19th-century love poetry without a degree of irony. Itâs not coincidental that Freud finally became a significant influence in popular German thought during the post-War decades. Although psychoanalytic research had continued through the state-approved GÃ¶ring Institute during the Nazi period, a new generation of German psychoanalysts considered themselves to be starting afresh in 1945. Institutes of psychoanalysis were founded between the late 40s and the mid 60s, and psychotherapy gradually established itself within the German healthcare system between the mid-50s and mid-70s. 54 Young Germans after the War were in effect the first generation for whom psychoanalysis offered an obvious way of understanding human behaviour. Itâs not hard to see how in this context, especially given the weight of guilt and insecurity about the recent past, a new generation of singers would tend to read opera libretti and song poetry less literally and less innocently than their predecessors. Â¶32 This proves to be less true of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whom I shall look at in more depth in a moment. Schwarzkopf (born 1915) grew up in the early 30s and prospered during the Nazi period, singing with Deutsche Oper in Berlin during the War and afterwards at the Theater an der Wien. Apart from the qualities of her sound, which is unusually even across the spectrum, her singing is characterised by strong expressive gestures, often using indrawn breaths and drawn-out final consonants for emphasis; and in that general sense she can be (and has been) seen as a direct successor to Lotte Lehmann. 55 On the other handâand itâs this that really marks her out as a singer from a different worldâthere is an emotional distance that would have been incomprehensible to Lehmann. She is particularly good at being skittish and slyâa side to her art that always appealed to audiencesâby using rapid swoops during notes. Â¶33 Deep emotion, on the other hand, she tends to signal rather than to live in the way that Lehmann believed was essential; and perhaps this is one response to the inhumanity of the age in which she matured. Characteristic signals include changing vibrato width from narrow when singing softly (sounding timid) to wide when loud (commanding); pitch variation within notes, especially sharpening through a note to suggest increasing intensity of feeling; gaps between notes, covered over by starting the new note on the old pitch and then very quickly gliding to the new, producing in a song a sense of an unconfident protagonist feeling her way along; and, above all, these loud and long noises for final consonants and breaths, used to suggest alarm. Her singing at these moments comes closest to speech and, because one has the strong sense that this is stage work with the voice, closest to acting. We never make the mistake of thinking that she as the singer feels any of this herself. Â¶34 At the same time, none of these effects is so spontaneous or heartfelt that it intrudes on the beauty of her sound: itâs as if sheâs happy to play a little, but never with such abandon as to risk getting muddy. And however speech-like the starts or ends of notes may be, the rest is musical through and through: there may be a lot of pitch movement within notes, and scoops between them, as in Lehmann, but the unwritten pitches used along the way tend to be scale notes, not random frequencies that happen to be nearby, so that one gets a sense of musically constrained expressivity, not like real speech; and this too may contribute to the sense that this is formalisedâactorlyâexpressivity. 56 In other words, however lovely the sound and however expert she may be at representing texts, Schwarzkopf sings with a detachment that would have been disappointing to a listener brought up on Gerhardt or Lehmann. Eddy Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, in their 1951 survey of music available on record, and still more in their 1955 revision, when more of her discs were available, give very much this impression: that she sings beautifully but has some way to go before she acquires all the abilities of Lehmann or Elisabeth Schumann. 57 Of course, they were not to knowâone never does while style is changing around oneâthat Schwarzkopfâs deficiencies were in fact central features of a new style. Â¶35 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was ten years younger, born in 1925, and so his early development as a singer came during and immediately after the War. 58 For a singer, these are the years spent finding ways of using oneâs developing voice and technique to communicate narratives and feelings in a manner that seems right for oneâs time. Normally, what seems right is likely to be fairly similar to what one hears from singers a decade or two older than oneself. But for that to be true one needs a stable context, both for study and early professional development, and also for a shared sense of how music can best represent the feelings of people around one. Itâs hard to imagine how anyone with the slightest ability to empathiseâand one can hardly be an engaging singer without itâcould grow up as a performer in Germany during the last years of the War and the first of the Allied Occupation, and sing as if nothing had happened. For a thoughtful young singer the naive expression of poetic emotion, in which Lehmann, Schumann, Schlusnus excelled, would have been almost impossible. The context surely demanded a new understanding of musicâs ability to evoke unease (at least). Â¶36 If we want to understand Fischer-Dieskauâs very characteristic performance style, thatâs one factor to consider. Another, of course, is the voice itself. Because a voice develops not just on its own, but in relation to the sounds a singer needs to make, one canât entirely separate it out from everything else. But even so it seems safe to say that Fischer-Dieskauâs voice favoured drama and dark emotions because of its exceptional dynamic range from quiet and dull (upper partials cut right down) to very loud and bright, in either case with evenly attenuated harmonics from bottom to top, which makes it sound rich and smooth, but also capable of sudden change within a wide range of colour and dynamic. Much of this would have been developed through training and preference, and preference is certainly a prime factor in his very well-known taste for what Walter Legge called âhis Aussprache beim singen [pronunciation in singing], the Prussian exaggeration of consonantsâ, which, Legge said, slightly irritated him, as it has many others. 59 Their variety is fascinating: long drawn-out consonants, both at the starts and ends of words, allow him to linger over the ideas those words represent, sometimes eerily, sometimes longingly, but always suggesting that more is to be read into them than one might think; explosive consonants give words the force of irresistible energy or a ruthless command. At the same time, the colour and character of his voice can vary from seductively female (lower harmonics only, slides into and out of significant words, consonants almost silent) to overwhelmingly alpha male (every harmonic so strongly present that the upper partials are a blizzard of noise, acoustically barely distinguishable from consonants). All these effects, itâs easy to see, borrow from the sounds of speech that carry these connotations. To extend Leggeâs phrase, Fischer-Dieskau declaims through his singing, at the same time bringing deeper and often more disturbing meanings to the words and music than singers of an earlier generation. Consequently we begin to perceive subtexts in songs and arias that would have been thought unseemly, and unhealthily imaginary, before him. Â¶37 Like Schwarzkopf, then, he uses speech sounds as expressive gestures, but uses them with less innocent intent. And it cannot possibly be coincidence that over the next twenty years, as Fischer-Dieskau becomes accepted as the gold-standard of Lieder singing, writers begin to find deeper meanings in song texts than were dreamed of by Capell, or Henschel, or Lehmann. Letâs take an example. For Lotte Lehmann, writing in 1945, Schubertâs âAm Feierabendâ should end with passionate impatience, âthe impatienceâ, she says, âof one in love, which causes the bystander some quiet amusementâ, giving way in the final bars to âdreamy yearningâ. 60 The listener, in other words, sees the story for what it appears to be, a touching instance of youthful ardour. For Fischer-Dieskau, in his own book in 1971, writing for a culture in which Freud was now ingrained, the energetic music âexpresses the ladâs fanatical desire for workâ, the return of that music at the end gives the piece âpsychological depth which clearly goes far beyond the poetâs intentionsâ, and the final bars express ânot only weariness, but also a deep yearning.â 61 See how Lehmannâs âdreamy yearningâ has become âdeepâ here: everything about this music has been ratcheted up a notch, a wide notch. Â¶38 And thatâs exactly what we hear in Fischer-Dieskauâs recordings of âAm Feierabendâ: already in 1951 (Sound File 18 (wav file)) featuring powerful contrasts (the descriptions of female/male sounds above is based on this recording); 62 by 1971 (again with Moore, and there had been another with him in the interim), the sounds are still more varied, evocative of a wider range of shifting emotions, emphasised by skilful use of the microphone which can bring moments of intimacy and of distance in unpredictably shifting patterns. 63 And itâs from the early 70s on, once Fischer-Dieskauâs view of Schubert, sounding on record and described in his book, had come to seem normal, a model even, that we begin to find commentators speaking more often about Schubert songs in terms of drama and psychological disturbance. For Graham Johnson âAm Feierabendâ shows the millerâs boy sealing himself off âinto his own world of fantasy and longingâ, his mood shifting from âmoonstruck fantasyâ to âfrustrationâ, the song as a whole characterised by âhealthy physical activity combined with unhealthily suppressed feelingâ (this in the liner notes to a recording in which the retired Fischer-Dieskau appears as a speaker, photographed giving Johnson the benefit of his experience). 64 Itâs conceptually still some way from here to Lawrence Kramerâs recent view of the miller boy as a masochist and âAm Feierabendâ as wish-fulfilling fantasy, the millerâs daughter, later in the song, âabolishing her father by reenacting his music in an emotionalized, dephallicized, ambiguous formâ, as Kramer says. 65 But could we have got there without a previous performance tradition in which psychologised readings seemed essential? Â¶39 We see especially clearly here something that may well be common, perhaps the norm: changes in musical performance style cause changes in the way listeners and then writers understand the music. For a popular, widely-performed repertory (the situation with new or rediscovered music may be different), conceptions of what composersâ work meant can hardly be kept separate from how the music sounds in concert and especially on record. And in general the influence is going to be from performers to critics, not the other way round, both because itâs easier for performance style to change unnoticedâweâll see why in chapter 7âso that critics donât even realise theyâre being influenced, and also because on the whole critics listen to more performances than performers read academic books; and this is especially true now that we have recordings. Â¶40 Fischer-Dieskau represents a particularly strong instance of this. His influence has been extraordinary not just because he had a remarkable voice, but also because he thought about texts and their musical settings in a way that reflected with unusual sensitivity currents in thinking about the emotions, and especially thinking influenced by psychoanalysis. Given his background and his intelligence thatâs hardly surprising; but one needs to see it working together with general trends in performance style away from expressivity achieved through pitch (portamento) and timing (rubato) towards expressivity through declamation and dynamics. A singer with a wide range of power and colour, a period-style inviting him to explore just those features for their expressive potential, a disposition to see the dramatic and dark side of the pieces he sang, and an interest in psychological understanding of human behaviour (which a thoughtful German of his generation could hardly avoid), would be someone with the power and motivation to change radically the way singing developed. Â¶41 Fischer-Dieskau is exceptional, of course, but fascinating for the clarity with which he enables us to see the complex interactions of factors that bring about performance style change: voice, personality, historical and intellectual context with all that it implies for the ways people tend to think about communication and the expression of feeling, the performance style of his immediate predecessors (the Schwarzkopf rather than the Lehmann generation in this case), musical performance depends on the interactions of all these, and itâs hard to say that any of them plays a less important role than another. Â¶42 There was another factor that affected performance style after the Second War, and itâs been much discussed in recent years with good reason, 66 and Iâve already hinted at it above. Itâs recording itself. The general thrust of recent discussion of the influence of recording on performance has been that recording tended to flatten out the variation that once existed between styles of performance practised in different countries. When recording began, singing by Germans was very different from singing by the French or Italians; orchestras, usually because of different traditions of wind instrument building and playing, also sounded considerably different; and so those national traditions could be heard also in solo playing. There was diversity, in other words, and as its influence spread recording began to even all this out, so that by the latter part of the 20th century orchestras sounded almost identical, save for a few local traditions deliberately maintained, and singers sounded much more alike than they used to: âinternational operaâ was now so much the norm that even Germans in Verdi or Italians in Wagner raised few eyebrows. Â¶43 Itâs become the tendency in recent years, among writers on the history of performance, to regret this homogenisation, which seems very fair. 67 But Iâd like to suggest that whatâs really happened is not quite so straightforward, nor so regrettable, sad as is the loss of a diversity of national traditions. Weâll examine this more closely in chapter 7, when we draw out of the discussions of performances in this and the next two chapters some conclusions about style change. For now itâs enough to suggest that the continuing development of style is itself a form of evolution that introduces fresh approaches to interpretation and fresh meanings to compositions as it renews performance from generation to generation. Itâs not at all clear that we should regret that. It inevitably involves losing other approaches along the way, but itâs going to take a lot more than 100 years before we can confidently say that in the medium to longer term anything is declining. Â¶44 One thing that recording has undoubtedly causedâand again we can hear it happeningâis a trend towards the literal performance of scores. Sometimes this is described as greater accuracy, but whether itâs any more accurate to be literal is a question that takes us unhelpfully back to ontology and the composerâs intentions. So letâs just say more literal. For singers and string players that means less portamento, less rubato, less ornamentation; for pianists it means synchronising the hands so as to play all the notes of a chord together, playing in stricter time, and forgoing doubling notes and the elaboration of scales and arpeggiosâremoving, in other words, all the things that musicians used to do as a matter of course in order to intensify the expressivity of a performance. As in so many other respects, the post-War generation marks a watershed in these habits too. Â¶45 So if we look at the generation of singers born ten years or so after Fischer-Dieskauâfor example Janet Baker and Elly Ameling, both born in 1933; Peter Schreier and Nigel Rogers, born 1935; Arleen Auger, born 1939âwe can easily see how the pursuit of perfection led to performances that were increasingly regular in all their dimensions. And this is probably why the speech-influenced expressivity of Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau was not much developed by their successors. Although Peter Schreier was a striking exception, using whispers and semi-spoken syllables at moments of particular intensity, on the whole the generation born in the 1930s cut down on extra-musical sounds, relying instead on vibrato and intensity to do most of their expressive work. For particularly evocative words and moments in a score Janet Baker still uses the occasional portamento (especially in opera) and shapes dynamics and timbre; but evenness and consistency of sound and manner are the norm, avoiding anything that might stand out from its surroundings andâthe horror of every modern record producerâdraw attention to itself on repeated hearing. Beauty of sound and lineâthose characteristics of very early recorded singingâagain become the main focus for attention, albeit for quite different reasons now. Â¶46 Arleen Auger is especially interesting because she changed style in the 1980s by cutting down her vibrato and narrowing her expressive range in order to conform to the ideals of the âhistorically informed performanceâ (HIP) movement. The difference is encapsulated in her two recordings of Schubertâs âGretchen am Spinnradeâ, in 1978 with Walter Olbertz, and in 1990 with Lambert Orkis playing a fortepiano, 68 and the comparison shows particularly clearly that HIP was, for singers at any rate, no more than a continuation of trends evident for decades: more literal performance of the notation, a tendency to regard anything, even vibrato, as an âimpositionâ (a much favoured criticism at the time) on the score, and the score to be identified (save for documented conventions of ornamentation or notes inÃ©gales) with the composerâs intentions. Auger had to make relatively few modifications to her way of singing in order to work with a fortepiano according to (modern) period norms, because as a child of her time she was already singing in a much plainer fashion than her predecessors. 69 In a sense, the taste for imitation boy sopranos which began in England with Emma Kirkby in the mid-70s is only a further intensification of the same trend, narrowing the sound still further, maintaining constant speeds and dynamics and the most even tone possible: modernism in sound, you might say, 70 and very late in the day. Â¶47 Among the many fascinating aspects of the HIP phenomenon was that it was probably the first occasion in the history of music when a change of style was intentionally manufactured by performers and widely adopted. Indeed it was so successful that it came to dominate several generations of musicians in an increasingly wide repertory. 71 It was a change that could never have happened without recording and the dissemination of style that it encouraged, but even so it conforms to the general principles of style change that weâve been seeing, away from expression through modifying pitch and timing, towards expression through dynamics and articulation. Weâll look at it in more detail in a moment when we examine string playing. Among singersâand Auger illustrates this very wellâthe characteristics of HIP were much less marked. Learning to play an instrument that behaves significantly differently from its modern descendant is not easy, although it is at least possible to continue the old way in order to make a living while learning the new. Only a very few singers are adaptable enough to do thatâyou canât just pick up the other voice and take it to the appropriate concertâso that on the whole singers had no choice but to be âearly musicâ or âmainstreamâ. At the time Auger was an exception, but one who showed that mainstream and early music styles were not as far apart in their general attitude to sound and score as their advocates tended to imagine. Â¶48 The last few years of the 20th century saw these distinctions blurred, first because of the mainstreamâs increasing tendency to sound HIP, and second because within HIP there began to appear the first signs of a re-emergence of expressive singing, which continues at the time of writing (2005). This, without much doubt, is also happening partly under the influence of recordings, but this time recordings from the past, the flood of reissues that have appeared from record companies struggling to cut costs by using their back catalogue instead of new issues, creating and developing a taste for pre-War performance. What used to be tasteless, self-indulgent and over-the-top now begins to seem ideally expressive once again. Â¶49 Thereâs a nice (and early) example in a 1996 recording of Messiah conducted by Paul McCreesh, using period instruments articulating sighing note-pairs in the neatest neo-baroque fashion, in which Bernarda Fink sings âHe was despisedâ with elaborate Handelian ornamentation and yet with a sound and with an intensity of expression, shaped by dynamics and rubato, that could have been made in the heyday of the massed-choir performances. Compare it to Jennifer Vivyan under Sir Thomas Beecham in 1949âthe recording with cymbals and trombones in the Halleluja chorusâand youâll see where in terms of vocal expressivity it belongs. And it works. 72 As we saw in chapter 2, music is extraordinarily flexible: styles that we imagine to be polar opposites can mix. Given enough time, musicians ensure that they do. Â¶50 What have we learnt so far about performance style? Itâs intimately bound up with expressivity. Expressivity, in turn, is achieved by changes in sound from moment to moment, over and above those demanded by the composer, chosen by the performer. What makes a style is that the options performers choose for being expressive are relatively consistent within a performance, within the work of a performer, and within a geographical locale (though this is less the case now, thanks to recordings) and within a period of time (this may be more true now than before, itâs hard to tell). So on the one hand, expressivity in the western art tradition is fundamental to music-making; itâs what makes musical performance musical. Yet on the other, over time it changes. To make sense of this paradox weâll have to bring more factors into the equation. Although Iâve provided many hints in the discussion of singing styles as to how expressivity works, and why it changes, weâre not going to start to understand the mechanisms through which it works on us as listeners until weâve looked in more detail at the analysis of expressive gestures in chapter 8. But before we go there it will be helpful to see how expressivity differs in other kinds of instruments.
1646	dbpedia	3	40	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinka_Gurewich	en	Marinka Gurewich	https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2014-03-02T19:48:23+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinka_Gurewich	Czech-American voice teacher and mezzo-soprano Marinka Gurewich (1902, Bratislava – 23 December 1990, Manhattan) was an American voice teacher and mezzo-soprano of Jewish Czech descent.[1] She is best remembered for teaching several successful opera singers, including Martina Arroyo, Marcia Baldwin, Grace Bumbry, Joy Clements, Ruth Falcon, Melvyn Poll, Florence Quivar, Diana Soviero, Sharon Sweet, Carol Toscano, Beverly Vaughn, and Mel Weingart among others.[2] Born Marinka Revész in Bratislava, Gurewich trained as a singer and pianist at the Berlin University of the Arts where she was a pupil of Lula Mysz-Gmeiner. She also studied privately with Elena Gerhardt and Anna von Mildenburg in Munich.[3] Her career as a singer in Germany was hindered by World War II and she fled Europe for the United States in 1940. Prior to the war she had appeared in concerts and recitals in Europe. After coming to the United States, she appeared in a few recitals and concerts in New York City; but ultimately began devoting her time to teaching. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught on the voice faculties of the Manhattan School of Music and the Mannes College of Music.[2] She continued to teach privately up until her death in 1990.[4]
1646	dbpedia	0	49	https://countermelody.blubrry.net/category/pop-icons/	en	Countermelody	https://countermelody.bl…er-4-300x226.png		[ "https://countermelody.blubrry.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Luxon-Wonder-Wander-4-300x226.png", "https://countermelody.blubrry.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Bledsoe-and-Freddye-on-the-boat-249x300.png", "https://countermelody.blubrry.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Odetta-1961-225x300.jpg", "https://counter...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-08-04T11:13:23+00:00		en			null	Category Archives: Pop Icons Episode 277. Benjamin Luxon In Memoriam Last week on July 25th, the music world was saddened by the death of the Cornish baritone Benjamin Luxon at the age of 87. I began collecting recordings of this exceptional artist a few years ago with the intention of producing an episode in his honor at some point. Here is that episode, albeit a posthumous effort now. In an episode I produced in the first few months of Countermelody in 2019, I featured the French baritone Gérard Souzay and called him “a modern troubadour.” There are very few singers of recent years to whom one could accurately apply that appellation, but Ben Luxon is emphatically one of them. Music and words simply flowed out of him, and he sang with equal aplomb in an extraordinary number of different styles: opera, oratorio, art song, Broadway, crossover, and, perhaps most immediately and delectably, folk. In opera alone his range was exceptional, covering key roles in Mozart, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Berg, and Britten, who wrote the title role of his television opera Owen Wingrave expressly for Luxon. In song as well he covered a vast array of repertoires, including Russian, German, and British (including Victorian ballads), including, again, many contemporary composers. Luxon’s career hit a snag in the late 1980s, when he first began experiencing hearing loss which eventually resulted in him putting a stop to his singing career. But he hardly retired: moving to the Berkshires, he became actively involved in the artistic life of the region, and founded a theatre troupe, the Sandisfield Players, while continuing to give poetry readings and spoken word performances. The program today attempts to recreate his profound versatility, and range from folk song to pop song; from orchestral song cycles to world premiere creations; art songs by Hugo Wolf, Mussorgsky, George Butterworth, Schubert, and John Ireland; to late career narration and poetry projects. Collaborators include artists such as Benjamin Britten, Bill Crofut, Galina Vishnevskaya, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Tear, Janet Baker, Seiji Ozawa, Ileana Cotrubaș, Jill Gomez, Klaus Tennstedt, Mstislav Rostropovich, and his most frequent recital collaborator, pianist David Willison. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 276. Jules Bledsoe (Listeners’ Favorites) Ten days ago I reposted an episode celebrating the life and career of Paul Robeson, legendary for many reasons, but particularly remembered for his iconic and powerful performances of “Ol’ Man River.” It is often assumed that Robeson also created the role of Joe in Show Boat, but in fact that distinction went to his near-contemporary Jules Bledsoe (1897-1943), today virtually forgotten, and unjustly so. In his time, he was also celebrated for his memorable concerts, which took place both here and in Europe, and for his operatic portrayals, most significantly, the title role in Louis Gruenberg’s opera The Emperor Jones, based on the play by Eugene O’Neill, which he portrayed both in the United States and in Europe. Barred from singing at the Met because of his race, Bledsoe took his portrayal of Brutus Jones on the road, performing it in a triumphant European tour, but also subsequently in New York in 1934 under the aegis of the short-lived Aeolian Opera Company, which was intended to provide performing opportunities for Black opera singers, but which folded almost immediately. Jules Bledsoe was also a composer who wrote many songs and arrangements of spirituals, as well as a version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin entitled Bondage, as well as his own operatic setting of O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, which may or may not have been performed at the time. Even less well-known and acknowledged (and often intentionally obscured by historians) is the fact that Jules Bledsoe was a gay man in a relationship with a Dutch white man named Freddy Huygens who at the time of Bledsoe’s premature death was referred to as either his “manager” or his “closest friend.” In this episode we hear examples of all the extant recorded material I could find by Jules Bledsoe, alongside recorded examples of work by his collaborators Abbie Mitchell, Irene Dunne, Anne Roselle, Marie Powers, Todd Duncan as well as excerpts from the work of composers W. Franke Harling, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Louis Gruenberg performed by Jeanette MacDonald, Valaida Snow, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, and Lawrence Tibbett. Billie Holiday even puts in a special appearance! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes and videos available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 274. Odetta (Listeners’ Favorites) The United States seems (if this could be possible) even more divided and challenged than it did a week ago. In spite and even because of that, I am continuing my salute to the truly great Americans in our shared past to provide us with inspiration and courage in the challenging days to come. Today I repost an episode that I initially presented on June 18, 2021, the first observance of Juneteenth as a national holiday. It honors the great folk singer and civil rights icon Odetta (1930-2008). The breadth of her influence and the scope of her accomplishment should be trumpeted from the rooftops. From her first appearance on primetime national television opposite Harry Belafonte, to her prominence as the artist at the forefront of the folk music revival, to the importance of her music as a centerpiece to the Civil Rights Movement, to her additional contributions to blues and gospel music (and even, less expectedly, jazz and soul), Odetta Felious Holmes remains one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century. Not only was Odetta an important cultural icon, she possessed one of the most striking contralto voices in the history of recorded sound, and thus is an appropriate entry in my Great Contraltos series. This episode celebrates the entirety of her cultural contribution from her first recording in 1954, to one of her final live performances, in a wide-ranging portrait celebrating the significance of an artist who, for once, merits the designation “cultural icon.” Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 273. Paul Robeson (Listeners’ Favorites) I am here visiting my family in Milwaukee this week, a time which has proven to be a landmark in the downward spiral of our country into fascism. And all right here in our own backyard! It all struck way too close to home for me when the minister at my mother’s church delivered the benediction at the opening ceremonies of the RNC on Monday and suddenly became a darling of the nutcases. I don’t have a huge platform: all I have is my podcast, devoted first and foremost to great singers. There is little that I can do to counteract the evil, hatred, and heinousness that spewed forth from the city of my birth this week. But I have occasionally let my progressive flag fly here, never moreso than when, in the second season of the podcast, I posted an episode in honor of Paul Robeson on the 45th anniversary of his death. To this day Robeson remains one of the most celebrated, and controversial, of all artists. A man of fierce intelligence and convictions, he exhibited prodigious natural gifts as a sportsman, singer, actor, linguist, and, perhaps most importantly, as an activist. This episode focuses of course on his accomplishments as a singer, but especially within the context of his political activism and activities on behalf of oppressed people the world over. He was vilified and hunted down by some factions as much (if not more) as he was revered and venerated by others. In this episode I highlight some of his most famous performances, focusing on his live and studio performances of African American spirituals and protest songs, folk songs from around the world (including Russia and China), and works that celebrated the brand of left-wing populism that was in vogue in the 1930s and 1940s, in particular his recording of the hybrid work, Ballad for Americans, by composer Earl Robinson and lyricist John LaTouche. Robeson is a man who lost everything for the principals he believed in and who had more integrity and conviction and right-mindedness in his thumbnail than the entire conference of right-wing wackos who descended on Milwaukee this week combined. Let his example be a wakeup call for those of us who do not want to witness the death of our country as a democracy, however flawed it is and has been over the course of its history. There is no better figure to light the way for us in this struggle than Paul Robeson. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 271. Muriel Smith (Listeners’ Favorites) As I embark on several weeks of vacation, I bring you the first of several episodes from the early years of the podcast in between the new episodes that I will produce with somewhat less frequency between now and September. This week I am honored to bring to you the first of two episodes from the Season One of Countermelody which introduced my listeners to the great African American mezzo-soprano Muriel Smith (1923-1985) who, among other important contributions, premiered the title role of Carmen Jones on Broadway in 1943. We examine her work in musicals and films as well as pop music and opera. Her eclecticism, her ability to color her voice in a way uniquely suited to the wide range of roles she undertook, as well as her deep connection to text and expression, mark her as an artist of the highest caliber. Featured is a rare 1955 Philips recording of spirituals represents Muriel Smith at her artistic and interpretive peak. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 269. Alberta Hunter Please join me today for this overview of the roller coaster career of Alberta Hunter (01 April 1895 – 17 October 1984), a jazz legend whose surprising and extraordinary life was shaped by a voice that simply personified the Blues. Early in her life, around the time she was 15, she fled her native Memphis for Chicago, where, with tenacity, grit, and ambition, she became the darling of the night club circuit, performing sometimes under tommy-gun-adjacent circumstances. She soon made her way to Broadway and, following the lead of her compatriots, Joséphine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills, and Elisabeth Welch, to Paris and London, where she was the toast of the town and appeared as Queenie opposite Paul Robeson in the original London production of Show Boat. Later during and after World War II she became a fixture of the USO circuit. Following the death of her mother, she abandoned her performing career and took up nursing in her sixties. After her enforced retirement twenty years later, through a set of freaky coincidences, she made a miraculous return to live performing at the age of 82 and became an overnight sensation, the toast of three continents. She always returned to her ongoing residency at a club in the Village called The Cookery, the venue where the final chapter of her career began. She continued to perform and record until shortly before her death just before her 90th birthday. Though she lived her life discreetly and never came out overtly, she nevertheless was involved with women throughout her life and formed her strongest emotional and romantic bonds with them. Sassy, raunchy, and gritty on the surface, Hunter possessed a voice and ingratiating style of such honesty, humor, and character, that masked a modesty hidden beneath that brash exterior, and a musical sensibility that dazzles with its ease, subtlety, and complexity. Featured musical excerpts, both studio and live, extend over more than 60 years and include collaborations with such jazz giants as Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, Lovie Austin, Charlie Shavers, and producer John Hammond and includes a clip from her appearance in the British film Radio Parade of 1935. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 267. A Cavalcade of Pop Contraltos My intention this week to produce a joyous new episode further celebrating contraltos, was undermined by multiple deaths this past week in the musical world, including French pop icon Françoise Hardy, Swiss tenor Eric Tappy, American art song icon Paul Sperry, and R&B diva Angela Bofill, capped by the tragic demise of young Belgian coloratura soprano Jodie Devos of breast cancer at the age of only 35. The episode, thus, begins with brief musical excerpts from all of these recently departed artists. In the main episode, I spread the contralto net even wider than last time, focusing on low-voiced doyennes of popular song. We hear jazz singers (Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae); stars of stage, screen, and radio (Marlene Dietrich, Polly Bergen, Connee Boswell, Alice Faye, Lisa Kirk, Kate Smith); purveyors of the Blues (Bessie Smith, Bertice Reading); French cabaret singers (Damia, Barbara); fado, rebetika, and tango artists (Amália Rodrigues, Milva, Maria Bethânia, Sotiria Bellou); and late-20th century pop icons (Cher, Tina Turner, Karen Carpenter, Annie Lennox); with a few delightful surprises along the way. I should also note, in honor of Pride Month, that more than a few of these artists flaunted societal norms regarding their affectional preferences, living either furtively or openly at a time when such expressions could have serious consequences. I love putting this kind of episode together and I hope that you enjoy the kaleidoscopic sounds that emerge from the throats of these deep-voiced pop divas. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 266. Sisters in Sapho (Listeners’ Favorites) It’s been a whirlwind of a week chez Gundlach and I find myself at the end of it without a new episode ready to post. In addition to that, we are already halfway through Pride Month and I realized this morning that I had no new queer material up my sleeve. So I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do: I am going to get to work on a brand new episode which will post sometime early next week. But in the meantime, I’m going to do my own Listener’s Favorite episode, one which I posted during the very first season of Countermelody, a wondrous compilation entitled “Sisters in Sappho.” It features not only two of my favorite mezzos of all time (Tatiana Troyanos and Brigitte Fassbaender – both of whom happen to have been lesbians); but also a sampling of the key figures in the Women’s Music Movement of the 1970s, including Meg Christian, Cris Williamson, Margie Adam, Holly Near, and Deidre McCalla. In celebrating these pop icons, I also pay tribute to those who, in turn, paved the way for them, including icons Janis Ian, Dusty Springfield, and Ronnie Gilbert, as well as tipping my hat to two of the queer Black singers (Toshi Reagon, Meshell Ndegeocello), that followed in the wake of these women. We all owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these extraordinary artists, who paved the way for us, their musical and artistic descendants, at the same time setting standards that will stand the test of time. Vocal guest stars include Janet Baker, Ileana Cotrubas, Cecilia Gasdia, Nicolai Gedda, Margaret Price, Gundula Janowitz, Arleen Augér, and Reri Grist. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 264. Rescue Mission (Forgotten Divas Edition) During Black History Month this year I featured a group of five exceptional singers I dubbed, for lack of a better term, “Forgotten Divas.” Each of these women, sopranos Delcina Stevenson, Annabelle Bernard, and Veronica Tyler, mezzo-soprano Gwendolyn Killebrew, and jazz singer Ethel Ennis, represents the peak of achievement in each of their respective fachs. These proved to be among the most popular and far-reaching of my recent episodes. At that time, I promised my listeners that I would continue to seek out rare recordings of each of these women and that, if and when such material surfaced, I would be sure to share it with my listeners. True to my promise, I present a brand-new episode featuring (for the most part) newly discovered material with each of these singers: a live Washington Opera Ariodante from 1971 and a live Carnegie Hall Orfeo ed Euridice from 1967, both with Veronica Tyler; live original language performances of Puccini’s Il tabarro and Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète from the stage of the Deutsche Oper Berlin which starred Annabelle Bernard; Gwendolyn Killebrew singing the Habanera from Carmen, one of her most celebrated roles, as well as the Waldtaube in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder; rare studio recordings of Delcina Stevenson singing Bach and Vivaldi from the early 1970s; and live material featuring Ethel Ennis over the course of nearly fifty years of her career, 1958 through 2005. As more of this material resurfaces, I will present further episodes of this new “Rescue Mission” series featuring both these singers and others I have already featured on the podcast, performing material that adds to our understanding and appreciation of their artistry. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 263. Contralto Central Finally, the first in my long-promised series on the contralto voice! The contralto is a rara avis in the today’s opera and classical music scene, and yet back in the day, there seem to have been more of them before the public. And of course contraltos have always been a powerful presence on the popular music scene, whether in blues, disco, jazz, or as purveyors of the Great American Songbook. There is no way that I can cover all of the great (and near-great) contraltos in recorded history, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try! Today’s selections span a wide chronological range , even for this podcast: nearly 120 years, and include voices both fleet and monolithic (and sometimes both). We begin with a tribute to the late Polish coloratura contralto Ewa Podleś and along with way we hear the most famous contraltos like Kathleen Ferrier and Marian Anderson, and jazz and pop contraltos like Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson. We also sample singers from the earlier twentieth century such as Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Cloe Elmo, Clara Butt, Eugenia Mantelli, Kerstin Thorborg, and Sigrid Onégin (about whom I spill some major tea!) Throughout the episode are sprinkled some of the most beautiful voices of any kind that I have ever heard: the Scottish Caroline Kaart, the Romanian Florica Cristofereanu, the Czech Věra Soukupová, the Dutch Aafje Heynis, the French Germaine Cernay, the British Norma Procter, and the Russian Valentina Levko. And if like me you have despaired of ever hearing another true contralto again in our lifetime, we hear in young Jasmin White cause for rejoicing. And if your favorites are not heard today, fear not, for this is the tip of the iceberg: many more great singers will follow when the series continues in two weeks. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 250. Julian Long Introduces Jorma Hynninen (Listeners’ Favorites) (Leavin’ on a jet plane this afternoon, so posting a day or so early!) It is a wonderful thing when friends share a favorite singer. Such is the case with my friend of long-standing, Julian Long (once one reaches a certain age, one no longer uses the term “old friend”). As part of this month’s series of Listeners’ Favorites episodes, Julian has been kind enough to record a new intro for a Countermelody episode that I posted three years ago as a birthday tribute to the marvelous Finnish baritone Jorma Hynninen, who on April 3 will celebrate his 83rd birthday. Unlike me, Julian heard Hynninen many times in both opera and, especially, recital. This episode focuses on Hynninen’s prowess as a singer of art song, beginning with some choice German Lieder recordings, but ultimately focusing on the songs of his native Finland. We hear Hynninen in performances across the span of his entire career, from 1968 through 2015. Needless to say, their great compatriot Jean Sibelius is foregrounded, but, there are a surprising number of fascinating composers in this magisterial country whose work also rewards exploration. If the music of Oskar Merikanto, Yrjö Kilpinen, Erik Bergman, Selim Palmgren, Fredrik Pacius, Väino Hannikainen, Taneli Kuusisto, or Toivo Kuula is not familiar to you, prepare to be delighted, surprised, and moved by the depth and variety of their creation. Soile Isokoski also joins Hynninen in an excerpt from the cantata Der Ochs und sein Hirte by Hynninen’s multi-talented pianist Rolf Gothóni, who is heard in many of the selections. The program concludes with Hynninen’s perusal of both pop standards and tango, both sung in Finnish. Don’t mind Julian and me as we go off to individually nurse our mutual crush! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 247. Sarah Pillow Introduces Eileen Farrell (Listeners’ Favorites) My dear friend and colleague soprano Sarah Pillow introduces one of her favorite Countermelody programs, which I repost as the first of this month’s Listeners’ Favorites episodes. Since Sarah is herself an enormously eclectic singer, it’s entirely fitting that she should choose to foreground Eileen Farrell. The American dramatic soprano Eileen Farrell (1920–2002) was one of the finest and most versatile singers the United States has ever produced. Her singing career lasted more than fifty years, and this episode covers the entire chronological range of that career, from her early work as a radio singer in the 1940s to her final pop albums in the 1990s. While the episode focuses on her crossover work (and includes work by, among others, Harold Arlen, Jule Styne, Alec Wilder, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, as heard on two of her lesser-known pop albums with Percy Faith and the late André Previn), we also sample her opera and concert work, with examples from Verdi and Wagner to Debussy and Charpentier, to Barber and Menotti. A late reunion with her favorite conductor Leonard Bernstein caps the episode. In all her singing Farrell combines ease of delivery and a relaxed, insouciant response to the words and music with a vocal and interpretive precision that inevitably strikes a bullseye. Bow down to the Queen of Crossover, nay, the Queen of Song! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 245. Tell It to the World – Germany Here is the second of a two part series in celebration of David Savran’s new book, Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad, a monumental study on transnationalism and the Broadway-style musical. In the first part, David and I spoke about (and played examples from) the rich culture surrounding musicals in South Korea. Today’s episode focuses on Germany and the influx of Broadway musicals since World War II. Although the German-speaking world has a long tradition of popular music theatre, most notably operetta, the arrival of American musicals (beginning in 1955 with Kiss Me, Kate) made a very big splash. In 1961, My Fair Lady opened in West Berlin, became a sensational success, and permanently changed the shape of German musical theatre. Both Kiss Me, Kate and My Fair Lady are part of the first wave of Broadway musicals that have become part of the standard repertoire in state-subsidized theatre (the others include Cabaret, Anatevka (Fiddler on the Roof), West Side Story, La Cage aux Folles, and Hair). We also look at the development of home-grown Broadway-style musicals in both West and East Germany from the 1960s through the 1980s and their subsequent impact on the work of experimental theatre makers. The next to last chapter of the book studies the musical farces directed by the great theatrical innovator, Herbert Fritsch, since 2011. The last focuses on the work of Barrie Kosky at the Komische Oper Berlin and how he turned that house into the foremost theatre in Germany for innovative re-imaginings of Broadway musicals, with emphasis on iconoclastic stagings by Kosky (and other directors) of the work of Kurt Weill. We play examples from many of the thrilling productions about which David writes which deserve to be known by a much wider audience. Along the way we also listen to nearly a century’s worth of performances by some legendary performers of German operetta and musicals, including Fritzi Massary, Olive Moorefield, Gisela May, Max Hansen, Dagmar Manzel, Horst Schulze, Ruth Rosenfeld, Julia Migenes, Julia Koci, and the late Rainer Luhn. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 243. Ethel Ennis (BHM 2024) Today’s “Forgotten Diva” takes us outside of the realm of opera and into the rich musical field of jazz. I have been in musical heaven the past few days as I’ve been savoring the output of the great Ethel Ennis (28 November 1932 – 17 February 2019). In her native Baltimore she was known as the “First Lady of Jazz,” and while this might cause some persons to look askance at such a claim, I can only say that they have not yet sampled the vocal, musical and interpretive majesty that is Ethel Ennis! Because of her superlative gifts, worldwide fame kept nipping at her heels, and yet she had no interest in being “famous.” She just wanted to make music, and that’s exactly what she did, remaining in the city of her birth, where she performed regularly at certain clubs, including one she and her husband Earl Arnett ran in the 1980s called “Ethel’s Place.” She had recording contracts with both Capitol Records and RCA, for whom she released some monumental albums in the 1950s and 1960s, and later in her career, as her artistry become more refined, burnished, and inward-looking, she also recorded a number of spectacular live recordings on small, independent labels. Recordings sampled on this episode cover the musical gamut from the Great American Songbook to quirky non-standards, to contemporary pop. If you hear Ethel Ennis interpret just one song, I predict that you will become an immediate fan for life. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 241. Tell It to the World: Korea Last month Oxford University Press published my dear friend David Savran’s Tell It to the World, a monumental study on transnationalism and the Broadway-style musical. The book focuses on two specific markets: South Korea and Germany. To help David get the word out about his book, over the next few weeks I am featuring two different episodes of Countermelody in which David and I discuss the themes and concerns of the book, as well as playing short musical examples to illustrate those points. Today’s episode focuses on South Korea and the influx of US-influenced musical styles to the country from the 1920s through to KPOP. We hear examples of the American influence on Korean popular music, from the first Korean singer to record Western-style music in the 1920s, the tragic Yun Sim-deok, through to the breezier (and occasionally psychedelic) musical stylings of such 60s pop groups as The Kim Sisters and He5, through to the folk-pop of the intense Kim Kwang-Seok and the innovative yet tradition-infused music of fusion groups Ensemble Sinawi and Jambinai. David also explains how Seoul became a center for musicals in Asia, with American musicals like Dreamgirls adapted for a specifically Korean audience, while also discussing a number of popular Korean musicals, most of them with Korean themes: Hero, The Days, Frankenstein, and Seopyeonje. This last work is based on a popular 1993 film; and both works, film and musical, spearheaded the resurgence of interest in the tradition of pansori, a uniquely Korean brand of dramatic solo theatrical performance dating back to the 18th century. Finally, and inevitably, there is a discussion of how KPOP has “infiltrated” the Korean musical, particularly with the brief appearance on Broadway of the musical KPOP. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 234. David Savran Introduces Carol Brice (Listeners’ Favorites V) This Listeners’ Favorites episode serves a dual purpose: first it is a celebration the publication this week of my partner David Savran’s new book, Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad, by Oxford University Press. (I’ll be doing two episodes with David on this book in March in conjunction with the book launch.) Second, David introduces us to one of his favorite Countermelody episodes, a 2021 Black History Month celebration of the life, voice, and career of the great African American contralto Carol Brice (1916-1985), whose career encompassed both Broadway and opera. It’s that very versatility that most attracted David to Brice’s work. He describes to us his first exposure to a variety of her recordings, from Falla to Finian’s Rainbow. I myself first heard Carol Brice in her recording of “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” which exemplifies all her musical virtues: simplicity and directness of utterance, lack of sentimentality, and deep identification with both text and music. Add to this a voice of such depth and refinement and a technique so secure that she is almost without equal. From her early career outings as the first African American to win the coveted Naumburg Award, through her appearances on the Broadway stage and in Porgy and Bess, Carol Brice brought an emotional honesty to her performances such as is rarely encountered in any field of genre. On this episode I feature her in a wide range of live and commercial recordings from Marc Blitzstein’s Regina to concert pieces by Brahms and Mahler, focusing in particular on a matchless 1947 song recital with her brother Jonathan Brice as her collaborator. Brice’s second husband, the baritone Thomas Carey is also featured in a pair of recordings. Thank you, David, for re-introducing my listeners to this great artist, and congratulations on your monumental new book! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Episode 227. A Golden Age Christmas In the midst of our recent move, I came across a stash of old “mixtapes” (actually CDs and much other archival material. One such item which particularly moved me was one entitled “A Golden Age Christmas 2003” which I handed out to my colleagues and friends twenty years ago. Looking over the tracklist, I realized that this was a sort of early iteration of Countermelody: me sharing music that I particularly loved with people that I cared about. Today’s podcast uses as its basis that same CD (slightly trimmed in length) and features performances by a glorious group of singers ranging from Olive Fremstad, Charles Gilibert, and Margarete Matzenauer from the early years of the twentieth century to such later favorites as Elly Ameling, Beverly Sills, and Leontyne Price. I can’t guarantee that this episode will put you in the holiday spirit, but I sure hope it does! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 225. Joya Sherrill This week’s episode is the first in what I hope will be a series featuring vocalists who performed with Duke Ellington, Today’s artist is the playful and sophisticated Joya Sherrill (20 August 1924 – 28 June 2010) who, by a series of happy “accidents,” became one of the best-remembered and most enduring of Ellington’s songsters while still a teenager. For she was not only a musically- and vocally-gifted singer, she was also a lyricist and composer. She herself composed the lyrics to the Billy Strayhorn classic “Take the ‘A’ Train,” as well as another Ellington standard, “Kissing Bug,” she also was the first singer to record “I’m Beginning to See the Light” and numerous other Ellington and Strayhorn standards. Though she left the Ellington Orchestra before 1950, she continued to appear with them in various projects, including his 1957 television extravaganza A Drum Is a Woman (alongside soprano Margaret Tynes), and My People, his 1963 extravaganza commemorating the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation. She also performed with the Benny Goodman Orchestra on their 1962 tour of Russia, and was the first African American host of a children’s television program, Time for Joya (later renamed Joya’s Fun School) which began in 1970 and ran in reruns until 1982 on local New York television. In this endeavor she was assisted by another powerhouse Black musician, Luther Henderson, who also arranged and conducted her altogether individual 1959 studio album, Sugar and Spice, which put a sophisticated spin on old Mother Goose rhymes. As late as 1994 she continued to perform and record the music of Duke Ellington and others. Here is an artist whose combination of élan and exuberance is well worth rediscovering and celebrating. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 220. La Fiamma (The Haunted Opera House II) A year ago, I posted an episode entitled “The Haunted Opera House” that featured a wide range of spooky, witchy, Halloween-appropriate 20th century operas from Prokofiev to Penderecki. This year I focus in on one of the works from that episode, Ottorino Respighi’s 1934 masterpiece La Fiamma, based on a 1908 play on witch hunts and witchcraft in 16th century Norway by the novelist and playwright Hans Wiers-Jenssen entitled Anna Pedersdotter, the Witch. This work also formed the basis for the Carl Dreyer film Day of Wrath. Respighi and his librettist Claudio Guastalla transferred the action to seventh-century Ravenna in the early days of Christianity. Musically the work combines Respighi’s interest with Gregorian chant, modal scales and harmonies, and the work of Claudio Monteverdi with his penchant for stunning orchestrations. The dramatically potent result was his most famous operatic work, but after an initial succès d’estime, it has only retained the slightest hold on the operatic fringes. Nevertheless, the heroine Silvana in particular is a role that great sopranos have made their own over the years, including Claudia Muzio, Gina Cigna, Giuseppina Cobelli, and Rosa Raisa (none of whom sadly recorded any excerpts) through Montserrat Caballé, Nelly Miricioiu, Ilona Tokody, Stefka Evstatieva, and Mara Coleva. I tell the story of the opera while offering substantial excerpts, which, in addition to the sopranos mentioned above, also include such operatic heavyweights as James McCracken, Carlo Tagliabue, Deborah Voigt, Giacinto Prandelli, Delcina Stevenson, Felicity Palmer, Juan Pons, Anna Moffo, and Mignon Dunn, among others. Just the thing to scare you out of your skin this Halloween! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 219. Chants d’Auvergne Another episode featuring orchestral songs, these arrangements by the French composer Joseph Canteloube AKA Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret (1879 – 1957), of elaborately orchestrated folk songs from the Auvergne region of France. From the 1960s an beyond these songs have become favorites of sopranos seeking engaging works for voice and orchestra. Canteloube made orchestral arrangements of five different series (or books) of songs published between 1924 and 1955. The songs themselves are, in turn, playful, plangent, tragic, saucy, rustic, and even surprisingly emancipated. In 1930 French soprano Madeleine Grey was the first artist to record the songs. Subsequently the Ukrainian-born Israeli soprano Netania Davrath became the first to take on the entire cycle. Cognoscenti still find her versions to be the most “authentic,” although that is a loaded term when one considers how elaborate these arrangements are. Other singers that helped put these songs on the map, as it were, include Anna Moffo, Victoria de los Angeles, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Frederica von Stade. All these singers are heard in this episode, which also includes memorable contributions from singers as varied as Dawn Upshaw, Barbra Streisand, Jill Gomez, Marvis Martin, Gérard Souzay, Marni Nixon, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Elly Ameling, Régine Crespin, Arleen Augér, Susan Reed, and others. You may also be quite surprised (I know I was!) to hear the singer that Canteloube most preferred in this repertoire, in a recording accompanied by the composer himself. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 218. Edith Piaf, storyteller Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of Edith Piaf, the greatest singer in the history of French popular music. She died on the eve of my third birthday, and since I have always allowed myself to indulge in a favorite singer or topic for my birthday episodes, I am focusing on La Môme Piaf, whose uniquely powerful voice and interpretations have been of central importance to me since the first time I heard her. When I take on such an iconic figure for a podcast episode, I try to examine them from a unique or unusual perspective. Today vis-à-vis Piaf, I focus on her unique performing style which combined subtlety and dramatic understatement alongside violent emotions and extroverted vocalism as reflected in her live performances and recordings. In this regard, I find an unusually cogent comparison with the Korean tradition of pansouri singing, which is a topic addressed by my brilliant friend, the theatre scholar David Savran, in his new book, Tell It to the World, which is being published by Oxford in early 2024. But mostly I dissect a number of Piaf’s most powerful story-songs such as “L’accordéoniste,” “Les amants d’un jour,” “Milord,” and “La foule,” written by composers and lyricists such as Marguerite Monnot, Michel Rivgauche, and Michel Emer, who were powerful allies in her search for material that best suited her extraordinary and iconoclastic gifts, which have come to personify the heart and soul of la ville de lumière, her beloved Paris. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 209. Nordic Tracks I: Orchestral Songs Inspired by my holiday in Denmark last week, today I inaugurate a new series on Countermelody called “Nordic Tracks,” featured music from Scandinavia and the Nordic countries. There has always been a wealth of vocal music from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, and in this episode I focus exclusively on orchestral songs, a genre which I also featured in a special episode last fall. Of course there are the usual standbys by Grieg and Sibelius and Nielsen, but also featured is the work of less-celebrated composers, beginning with the romantics and post-romantics (Wilhelm Stenhammar, Ture Rangström) and through to the present day (Aulis Sallinen, the late Kaija Saariaho). The singers are some of the greatest ever to raise their voices in song, including Kirsten Flagstad, Soile Isokoski, Birgit Nilsson, Hugo Hasslo, Elisabeth Söderström, Eric Sædén, Karita Mattila, Anne Sofie von Otter, and many others. It’s highly likely that you will encounter singers (Gitta-Maria Sjöberg, Kirsten Schultz) and composers (Fartein Valen, Laci Boldemann, Poul Schierbeck) that you may have never heard before (I know I did!) Oh, yes, and it’s all topped off with a bit of Björk! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 207. Henry Wright and Pals Today’s episode is first and foremost a tribute to a forgotten African American trailblazer, the pop singer Henry Wright, born in 1933, who, in the late fifties, claimed Italy as his adoptive country after touring there as a vocal soloist with Lionel Hampton. With a voice as suave and seductive as any of the great crooners of the 1950s and 1960s, Henry Wright first came to international prominence as the voice on the record to which Sophia Loren performed her legendary striptease in the 1962 film Ieri, oggi, domani [Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow]. He went on to make a great impact on Italian pop music throughout the 1960s. Your fearless podcaster discovered this fascinating singer almost by accident sometime in the past year and he (that is, I) have been collecting his rare and valuable recordings which I am thrilled to share with my listening public. Many of these songs exist in earlier versions, either from the Great American Songbook, from Italian films, from early American singers of R&B, from Italian pop stars of the 1950s, even from Viennese operetta! So I had the idea of playing those original versions alongside Henry Wright’s recordings. Thus you will encounter singers like Ricky Nelson, Peggy Lee, Tony Dallara, Peter Alexander, Mina, Petula Clark, Vittorio de Sica (who in his acting days was an Italian matinee idol!) and even opera legends Miguel Fleta and Richard Tauber. It’s a fascinating episode (if I do say so myself!) and I am thrilled beyond words to introduce the seductive, charming, compelling Henry Wright to my listeners. The episode begins with memorial tributes to recently departed pop music greats Tony Bennett and Sinéad O’Connor. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 206. Jerry Hadley Jerry Hadley (16 June 1952 – 18 July 2007) is regarded by many as the most gifted American lyric tenor of the late 20th century. Last month he would have celebrated his 71st birthday. And today is the sixteenth anniversary of his untimely death. I knew Jerry well in the early 2000s when he was dating one of my best friends. Our friendship developed separately from that: in those years in which he was working at rebuilding his voice and career we worked together on a cross-section of his old and new repertoire. At the time of his death, he was no longer romantically involved with my friend, so he and I had drifted apart. Nevertheless, it hit me very, very hard, and I mourn his loss to this day. On that front, I have quite a few things to say about singers and mental illness, and the ruthlessness, implacability, and heartlessness of a profession which so often chews up the most vulnerable of us and spits them back out. When Jerry was at his best, his art sustained him, but the challenges ultimately became too much for him to face. But this episode is primarily a celebration: my primary objective is to present my friend at his exceptional best, in performances, both live and studio, which celebrate his voice, artistry, and spirit, performances which provided his public with some of the finest tenor singing they would ever hear, in that, or any other, era. WARNING: THIS EPISODE CONTAINS A DISCUSSION OF SUICIDE AND SUICIDAL IDEATION. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 205. Eileen Farrell: Bach/Pop Eileen Farrell (13 February 1920 – 23 March 2002) was one of the finest and most versatile singers that the United States has ever produced. She began her career as a radio singer, the star of her own program, Eileen Farrell Sings, which ran from 1941 to 1945, which offered a wide range of music from the pop songs of the era to opera. In the 1950s and early 1960s Farrell was involved with the legendary Bach Aria Group, originally founded in 1946 by scholar and philanthropist William H. Scheide, which consisted of a quartet of singers (which in Farrell’s time included tenor Jan Peerce, alto Carol Smith, and bass Norman Farrow) and a group of the most gifted instrumental soloists of the era (including oboist Robert Bloom, flautist Julius Baker, and violinist Maurice Wilk). Alongside their pathbreaking performances, they made a series of celebrated recordings for RCA and American Decca, excerpts of which are heard on this episode. Though Farrell had a huge voice, it was well-suited to the music of Bach, which she performed with suppleness, flexibility, poise, and power. Farrell may have been but a reluctant opera star, but her most long-lasting musical love was probably the Great American Songbook. Years beyond her official retirement, indeed well into her 70s, she continued to record both standards and less-familiar material, and her recordings of pop songs from the 1960s through the 1990s – buoyant, playful, perceptive, often heartbreaking and always deeply musical – form a substantial component of her recorded legacy. In this episode I contrast her performances of these two disparate styles of music, recorded over the course of forty years, to shed light on her continuing supremacy among American sopranos. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 203. Jobriath and Jackie Shane (Pride 2023) Today’s Pride 2023 episode focuses on two pathbreaking pop artists from the 1960s and 1970s, who were undervalued or even reviled at the time in which they were active, but whose contribution, importance, and influence on today’s pop music scene is indisputable. In reverse chronological order, Bruce Wayne Campbell (1946–1983), a brilliant if emotionally unstable pianist, composer, and singer, was refashioned by a 1970s entrepreneur/Svengali named Jerry Brandt, into the would-be pop icon Jobriath. Brandt secured Jobriath a lucrative deal with Elektra Records and plastered Jobriath’s face (and body) all over the media, including a huge billboard at Times Square and trumpeted him as “rock’s truest fairy,” (in contrast to pretenders or closeted figures like David Bowie, Marc Almond, and Elton John). The relentless overexposure, coupled with the unapologetic homophobia of the rock music scene, led to a spectacular fall from grace, and Jobriath’s premature death ad the age of 36, one of the earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic. By contast, Jackie Shane (1940–2019) was raised in a loving supportive environment, and announced her true gender to her mother at the age of 13. She went on to become first a fixture on the chitlin circuit, performing alongside such figures as Chubby Checker, Little Richard, and Etta James, finally establishing herself as one of the premier figures on the Toronto music scene in the 1960s. Jackie’s career also had its ups and downs, its near-misses, and was marred by catastrophic associations with various toxic males. As a result, she finally walked away from her massive local celebrity in 1971 and never looked back. But throughout her abbreviated career and beyond, she kept a strong sense of self and never allowed herself to be used or abused. Interest in Jackie surged in 2014 with the release of an elaborate CD retrospective which was subsequently nominated for an Emmy. Jackie was philosophical about this new interest in her work, but was grateful that she had not, as she had previously feared, been forgotten. Both of these artists are generously represented on the episode with musical examples that highlight their historical importance as well as their influence on future generations of queer musical artists that extends to the present day. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 199. Tina and the Expats If you’re like me (and I hope that, at least in this way, you are!) you have adored Tina Turner since you first became aware of her. In my case, it was circa 1971, seeing her perform “Proud Mary” on television. At the time I was a pretty snooty (and snotty) kid much more prone to Mahler and Britten than I was to pop music. But something about Tina got to me. And when, against all odds, her star rose again in the 1980s, I was once again drawn into her orbit. So when she died last week in Switzerland, aged 83, I was really thrown for a loop. For a week I racked my brains about how I could pay proper tribute to a figure who, as one of the biggest pop stars in the world, not only changed the face of music, but also of our culture in general. Normally I prefer to stay focused on an artist’s work, but in Tina’s case, her compelling personal story also commanded attention, and in a way the two are inseparable. As much as we rightly revile Ike Turner for his inexcusable abuse and torture of his wife and everyone else around him, he was also a musical innovator in the rock ‘n’ roll scene and one who, one hopes at least, recognized the genius of Anna Mae Bullock, whom he plucked from obscurity to assume the persona of his wife and co-creator. Even if his contributions are now irreparably tainted, it was Tina who was the lifeblood of that duo, and who became known as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In my podcast I often focus on US artists, predominantly those of color, who chose to relocate to Europe and forge careers there. I have devoted a lot of time, space, and research to the Black opera singers who came here, but there is an equally fascinating story to be told about the pop singers of many eras and genres, who also chose to make Europe their home. Though this episode focuses primarily on Tina and some of the less-explored material throughout her career, I seek to contextualize her by also discussing the many African American singers, from Adelaide Hall to Joséphine Baker, from Donna Summer to Dee Dee Bridgewater, who either spent formative time in Europe or settled there permanently. Along with the aforementioned favorites, I also focus on lesser-known artists such as Beauty Milton, Vickie Henderson, Betty Dorsey, Salena Jones, and Bertice Reading (my latest mega-discovery). It has been cathartic and inspirational for me to create this episode; I hope it provides a similar experience for you. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 198. Cesare Valletti Today’s episode celebrates the Italian tenore di grazia Cesare Valletti (18 December 1923 – 13 May 2000), perhaps the last in a lineage of Italian lyric tenors. Valletti studied under his illustrious predecessor Tito Schipa and rapidly conquered first the Italian opera houses, and then the world stages, with his small-scale but superbly produced voice and his spontaneous yet exacting musicianship. From 1953 through 1960 he was a mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera and also performed at opera houses and festivals worldwide under some of the greatest conductors and at the side of the greatest singers of his day. We hear a sampling of his greatest operatic roles, including duets with Eleanor Steber, Rosanna Carteri, and Maria Callas, as well as the repertoire in which – nearly unique for an Italian singer – he excelled: art song. The combination of his Italianate timbre with his scrupulous and imaginative musicianship makes for an ineffable and deeply satisfying artistic experience. He made five LPs of recital repertoire, including two live recitals from the stage of Town Hall in New York City, excerpts of which are all offered here. The episode begins with a tribute to the beloved Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Tina Turner, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 195. Forgotten Broadway III Last summer, I produced a miniseries of episodes on Countermelody entitled “Forgotten Broadway,” the third and final segment of which was originally published as a bonus episode for my Patreon supporters. This week, my last one for the moment in New York City, is a busy one, so I have decided to pay tribute to the city by publishing that third Forgotten Broadway episode for all of my listeners. As I was preparing the series last summer, I enlisted the input and expertise of my dear pal John Coughlan. Like the first two episodes in the sequence, this one is once again, a veritable potpourri of delights, vocal, interpretive, and musical. It begins with a tribute to birthday icon Carol Burnett, who, at the beginning of her career, appeared in two different Broadway musicals, the second of which, 1964’s Fade Out Fade In, is featured. Additional shows presented include, among many others, Salvation, Raisin, Mack and Mabel, Redhead, I Had a Ball, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Baker Street, performed by such favorites as Lisa Kirk, Melba Moore, Gwen Verdon, Robert Weede, Mary Tyler Moore, Rosemary Clooney, Liz Callaway, and Peggy Lee, alongside such lesser-known lights as Diana Davila, Walter Willison, Salena Jones, and Gilbert Price. In addition, there is the “added plus” [sic] of Bea Arthur delivering a comic monologue from the 1955 Shoestring Revue that will have you in absolute stitches. And just for the gays (and all those with equally good taste), Judy and Liza each stop by, Judy to deliver a Frank Loesser show-stopper, while Liza offers more of “A Quiet Thing,” from her first Broadway show Flora the Red Menace. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 189. Marni Nixon Today, in another of my Women’s History Month episodes, I present to you the extraordinarily versatile, even chameleon-like singer and actor Marni Nixon (22 February 1930 – 24 July 2016), who is no doubt best-known today as the so-called “Ghostess with the Mostest.” Born into a musical family in California, she became involved from an early age with the movies, and by a marvelous set of circumstances became The Voice for a number of Hollywood actresses not known for their singing voices, among them Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Her skill in matching the vocal and speech characteristics of each of these performers is exceptional, but she was so much more than that. She pioneered the work of many 20th century giants, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, and Anton Webern. She hosted a local Seattled children’s television program called Boomerang that netted her four Emmy Awards. She performed on opera stages and concert platforms around the world. She recorded widely, everything from Mary Poppins to Pierrot Lunaire, and in the mid-1970s was the first singer to perform and record Schoenberg’s cabaret songs, his so-called Brettl-Lieder, works that are now standard repertoire. She studied with Viennese soprano Vera Schwarz as well as the iconic Lotte Lehmann, and actively performed and recorded for more than 50 years. Her late career saw an extraordinary return to the musical stage, where she starred in both new work and revivals both on and Off-Broadway. Guiding us along the trajectory of her career is my good friend Thomas Bagwell, currently a coach and conductor at The Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, who was a colleague and good friend of Marni Nixon’s for the last 25 years of her life. His anecdotes and reminscences are interspersed with examples (often familiar, more often rare) of Marni’s vast recorded legacy, which give testament not only to her versatility, but to her flawless musicality and depth of expression. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 185. Black Pop Icons auf Deutsch (Black History Month 2023) There are advantages to being one’s own boss, and one of those is that when Frau Corona (AKA Madame Covid) comes to visit, one can reshuffle and recalibrate one’s plans to fit the exigencies of the moment. Hence today’s episode, a watered-down version of the larger topic (Black Emigré Pop Singers) which I intended to address today. Instead, I offer you many of your favorite Black pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s performing songs in German. Some of these are versions of chart toppers with new German words; some of them are songs specifically composed for these artists for the German market. The common variable of these songs, whether they are known or unknown, is that they are all delightful, and that one of those delights is seeing how these artists come to terms with the difficulties of the German language. Featured are jazz singers (Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald), pop groups (The Supremes, The Temptations) and solo artists (Nat King Cole, Marvin Gaye, Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt, and Dionne Warwick). Ms. Warwick is further featured in a number of less-familiar classics by the late Burt Bacharach which she recorded not only in German, but also in French and Italian. (Say it with me now: Geh’! Geh’!… Geh’! Geh’!) Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 183. Martina Arroyo (Black History Month 2023) Last week on Feburary 2, the beloved African American soprano Martina Arroyo turned 86 years old. Although the Countermelody birthday tribute to Ms. Arroyo is a week late, it is nonetheless profoundly heartfelt. I have always valued the artistry and voice of this artist who often referred to herself as “The Other One” (because she was so frequently confused with today’s birthday diva, Leontyne Price). In preparing this episode, however, I flipped over into fan girl mode: was there anything that Martina Arroyo could not do? Of course she was celebrated as one of the premiere Verdi sopranos of her day (or, indeed, of the twentieth century), and there are ample examples on the episode that give testament to her supremacy in that repertoire. But she was also an intrepid performer of contemporary music, creating important works by both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Samuel Barber. Her performances of baroque music, while very much following an earlier style of performance practice, are vivid and insightful. Her affinity with French grand opera style is off the charts, as evidenced by an excerpt from Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. She also could have pursued a path as a Mozart and Strauss singer, and selections by both of these composers prove her mastery of this genre as well. She also had the power to be a full-fledged dramatic soprano, as shown by her live performances of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder and the title role in Puccini’s Turandot. And yet her subtlety as a recitalist is shown in live and studio Lieder performances. And the fervor and vigor of her performance of spirituals is a thing of joy. This episode is full of surprises but one thing is not surprising at all: the degree of dedication and commitment of this artist, which continues to this day with the performance and education initiative of the Martina Arroyo Foundation. (The episode begins with a brief tribute to Burt Bacharach, who died yesterday at the age of 94.) Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 179. The Pop Stylings of Maria Ewing A year ago, as I was preparing my memorial Countermelody episode dedicated to Maria Ewing I was struck anew at just how naturally she had mastered the often messy “crossover” genre. Perhaps that’s because she never “crossed over” at all: this material formed part of her essence. I thought it would be a lovely thing to give a more complete picture of her work as a pop singer, using three primary sources: first, her 1990 studio pop album entitled “From this Moment On,” featuring arrangements by Richard Rodney Bennett; second, a rare release entitled “Simply Maria,” which comprises a live concert she gave at the Barbican Centre in London in 10 May 1997; and third, live and studio recordings that she made in in the early 2000s with the jazz combo Kymaera, led by guitarist Simon James. The range of material is dizzying, from Broadway classics by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Jule Styne, Harold Arlen, Cy Coleman, Kurt Weill, and George and Ira Gershwin to jazz stylings by Tom Jobim, eden ahbez, and Billy Strayhorn, with more than a few surprises along the way, and her mastery of it all is exceptional, with all of the intense commitment she showed in her operatic portrayals (and none of the condescension or preciousness associated with certain other crossover artists). I’m so thrilled to share this less well-known side of one of the great operatic singing actors of our time. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 177. Great Singers at Twilight For the last episode of 2022, I begin a series of episodes which was one of the reasons I began Countermelody in the fall of 2019: a celebration of great singing from great singers in the late years of their lives and careers. In the early years of the recording industry, a long-retired artist such as Adelina Patti would consent to leave recorded documents of their voices for future generations to experience. Oftentimes a cherished artist will make a guest cameo appearance at an important event (think of Leontyne Price coming out of retirement at age 74 and singing “God Bless America” at the September 30, 2001 memorial concert at Carnegie Hall). Other times, artists like Johnny Mathis, Regina Resnik, or Helen Donath, simply never retire, but continue to bestow their artistry upon us decade after decade. Sometimes, as is the case of Lotte Lenya, a performer finds herself later in her life on a mission which demands that she resume performing, in Lenya’s case, as a means of securing the musical legacy of her late husband Kurt Weill. There is also, in the case of someone like Alberta Hunter or Elisabeth Welch, the thrill of a jazz or pop artist at the end of her life experiencing a career resurgence at the end of a long life. In the classical world, artists late in their lives can still give extraordinary performances of art song, which makes fewer demands on their voices than taxing operatic roles, while allowing full display of their deepened artistry and experience. There are also operatic roles specifically designed for the more mature artist: roles like Schigolch in Lulu, or the Countess in Pique-Dame, among many others, which are sampled here in performances by Hans Hotter and Rita Gorr, respectively. There are also those rare and exceptional artists who are able to perform movingly even into their nineties, like the Ukrainian bass Mark Reizen, or the verismo soprano Magda Olivero; or after having suffered catastrophic physical setbacks, like the German tenor Karl Erb, the African American baritone Robert McFerrin, or the pop icon Joni Mitchell. These artists (along with many others) and this topic seems deeply appropriate as 2022 draws to a close and we look forward to the inevitable challenges, the blank slate, the looming horizon, of the year to come. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 174. Song of Songs This week is a continuation of my memorial tribute to my dear friend and colleague Susan May Schneider, who died last week after a long struggle with cancer. Susan’s husband Gary, a composer and conductor, wrote a stunning song cycle for Susan using texts from the biblical Song of Songs, and this episode is bookended with their live 2000 performance of two of those songs. I supplement this with further material which all use texts based on the Song of Songs. This includes choral works by composers from Brumel and Palestrina, Walton and Bairstow to Penderecki and Daniel-Lesur; pop songs by India Adams and Kate Bush; orchestral song cycles, cantatas, and oratorios performed by Lois Marshall, Elly Ameling, Jennie Tourel, Leontyne Price, Eleanor Steber, and Suzanne Danco; and works from such surprising compositional sources as Stockhausen and Vangelis. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody’s core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody’s Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season. Episode 171. November Birthday Gals Tomorrow morning I leave for three weeks and I’ve been desperately trying to come up with topics that would be a bit easier to produce while I’m away. What could be easier than birthdays for this month and next? Well… leave it to your intrepid producer to make that as complicated as it could be. But there’s a good reason: so many exceptional singers have birthdays this month and next! In fact, November is so chock full of such artists that I decided to focus exclusively on the Birthday Girls. And what a lineup! Iconic divas like Joan Sutherland and Victoria de los Ángeles; tragically short-lived singers like Saramae Endich and the beloved Lucia Popp; forgotten artists like Kjerstin Dellert, Caterina Mancini, and Geneviève Touraine; exceptional Black artists like Barbara Hendricks and Marietta Simpson: all are represented. And let’s not forget the pop divas, both celebrated (Tina Turner, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt), and less well-remembered (Chi Coltrane, Bonnie Bramlett). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So lift a glass, cut a piece of Geburtstagkuchen, and tune in to Countermelody in celebration of these exceptional women! [n.b. This episode was posted before the death of Ned Rorem, who will be properly commemorated in next week’s episode.] Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel’s lifetime in music as a prof
1646	dbpedia	1	13	https://www.meisterdrucke.us/fine-art-prints/Photographer-German/1019305/shop.html	en	Elena Gerhardt, German Opera Singer by Photographer German	https://www.meisterdruck…cke-1019305).jpg	https://www.meisterdruck…cke-1019305).jpg	[ "https://www.meisterdrucke.us/images/logo_white.min.svg", "https://www.meisterdrucke.us/kunstwerke/headerscarousel/11281.jpg", "https://www.meisterdrucke.us/images/flags/flags.svg#de", "https://www.meisterdrucke.us/images/flags/flags.svg#gb", "https://www.meisterdrucke.us/images/flags/flags.svg#it", "http...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Buy Elena Gerhardt, German Opera Singer by Photographer German as fine art print. ✓ High-quality museum grade. ✓ Perfect reproduction	en	/favicon.svg	MeisterDrucke	https://www.meisterdrucke.us/fine-art-prints/Photographer-German/1019305/Elena-Gerhardt,-German-Opera-Singer.html	Undated · black and white photograph · Picture ID: 1019305 Nonclassified artists Elena Gerhardt, German Opera Singer by Photographer German. Available as an art print on canvas, photo paper, watercolor board, uncoated paper or Japanese paper. Add to favorites Remove from favorites Select wall color View painting in a room View in 3D / AR 0 Reviews
1646	dbpedia	2	11	https://chicago.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7208/chicago/9780226563602.001.0001/upso-9780226563572-chapter-005	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
1646	dbpedia	1	44	https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/muller/exhibits/show/goodby-us/page-3	en		https://collections.libr…766672294dfb.jpg		[ "https://assets.iu.edu/brand/3.x/trident-large.png", "https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/muller/files/theme_uploads/f5101d5dfc680ab96861633aa0d390b4.jpg", "https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/muller/files/fullsize/81a3b7a039c12b441224766672294dfb.jpg", "https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/m...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Muller's biographer Elof Carlson argues that this paper heralds a certain exhaustion with the politics and culture of the United States. In short, Muller cound not wait to get out of the country and left for Germany on his Guggenheim fellowship on September 5th, 1932. Prior to heading to Berlin, he stayed with his sister Ada in Munich for a few weeks of needed rest. Muller's wife and young son stayed behind in Texas. Retrospectively, 1930s Germany may seem an odd destination for an individual exasperated by the right-wing tendencies of the likes of Herbert Hoover. However, the communist party was powerful in Berlin at the time and there was a strong sense in the 1920s and early 1930s that communism or socialism could be brought to Germany. More to the point for Muller, Berlin had a fantastic genetics laboratory led by Soviet geneticists Elena Timofeev-Ressovsky and Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. Nikolay was another radiation genetics researcher and had extensive contacts with the physics community that Muller was eager to tap. Berlin did indeed provide enormous research opportunities, but Muller's visit was ill-timed. The Nazi program of strategic street violence and the coopting of leftist rhetoric crippled Berlin's communist party and on January 30th, 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. From book burnings to Wagner operas, Muller witnessed up close the rise of Nazism in Berlin. Muller's sister Ada and her German husband Georg Griesmaier left Munich for New York. Muller's co-workers, Regina Fischer, who was of Jewish descent, and her husband Gerhardt Fischer, left for the Soviet Union where they would work with Muller. The directors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Cecile and Oskar Vogt, refused to support the Nazis or implement their discriminatory policies at the Institute. In March of 1933, the Nazis raided the Vogt's residence at the Institute while Muller was there.
1646	dbpedia	2	85	https://www.grassofuneralhome.net/obituaries	en	Grasso Funeral Home	https://irp.cdn-website.com/9dbcee341f824d2ba4bedaccd4f93a22/site_favicon_16_1619616756986.ico	https://irp.cdn-website.com/9dbcee341f824d2ba4bedaccd4f93a22/site_favicon_16_1619616756986.ico	[ "https://lirp.cdn-website.com/9dbcee341f824d2ba4bedaccd4f93a22/dms3rep/multi/opt/235d386-1920w.png", "https://lirp.cdn-website.com/9dbcee341f824d2ba4bedaccd4f93a22/dms3rep/multi/opt/IMG_2207-1920w.jpg", "https://lirp.cdn-website.com/9dbcee341f824d2ba4bedaccd4f93a22/dms3rep/multi/opt/Dad-s+65t-1920w.JPG", "htt...	[]	[]	[ "funeral home", "funeral planning", "cremation", "consultations", "deaths", "burials", "caskets", "chapel", "cemetery space", "graveside", "funeral" ]	null	[]	null	Contact us to learn about how you can get your loved ones obituaries on the site.	en	https://irp.cdn-website.com/9dbcee341f824d2ba4bedaccd4f93a22/site_favicon_16_1619616756986.ico		https://www.grassofuneralhome.net/obituaries	Kevin, age 69, passed away peacefully on February 19th, 2024, leaving behind a legacy of warmth, kindness, and community spirit that deeply touched all who knew him. A long-time resident of Philadelphia, Kevin truly came into his own in this vibrant city, embodying its spirit of brotherly love and camaraderie. His early years were marked by a passion for the simple joys in life, a trait that he carried throughout his life. He found his calling in the food store industry, where his jovial nature and genuine interest in people made him a beloved figure among customers and colleagues alike. Kevin's laughter was infectious. He was always willing to lend a hand, and could strike up a conversation with anyone, making him a cherished presence in the community. Kevin was an avid gardener, finding solaceplants and flowers. His flair for decoration was especially evident in the care he took in adorning his block of Smedley Street for every occasion. These acts of beauty and care were Kevin's gifts to his neighbors, creating bonds that enriched the community. Kevin's personal life was anchored by his profound love for his husband, Ira Shrager, with whom he shared a life of deep companionship and mutual respect. Their love was a testament to the power of shared passions and unwavering support. Together, they found joy in everyday moments, tending to their garden and taking walks with their cherished dogs, Rosebud and Isaac. The loss of Ira was a profound one for Kevin, yet he continued to embody the love and resilience that defined their life together. Kevin is survived by his loyal dog, Isaac, who continues to bring joy and companionship, and step-sons Joey Russomano of Effort, PA, and Ricky Russomano of Long Branch, NJ, who remember Kevin for his warmth, generosity, and the loving home he created. Kevin's passing leaves a void in the hearts of those who knew him, yet his spirit lives on in the countless lives he touched with his kindness, his laughter, and his unwavering sense of community. His legacy of love, kindness, and community engagement will continue to inspire all who had the privilege of knowing him. n lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society (phillypaws.org), a cause close to Kevin's heart. A celebration of Kevin's life will be held at a later date, where friends and family can come together to honor his memory and the indelible mark he left on the world. Religious Services will be held on March 23, 2024,11:00AM at Saint Mark's Church 1625 Locust St. Phila., PA. 19103 Arr: Buddy Dougherty, F.D. Hendricks Edith age 92, passed away peacefully on December 6, 2023. Beloved grandmother of Genine Robinson-Culler, Kareem Clark, Santa Clark, Precious Samples, Andrea Spencer, Destiny Ivory, Allah Ivory, Stephanie Moore, Shadora Moore, Jarred Ivory, Arabia Samples Dannette Moore-Hasson, Alphonso Moore, Alexander Moore and Stephon Hendricks. Edith was born and raised in Philadelphia, and is a lesson in self determination. Miss Edith doesn't recall specific details of her childhood, only that she enjoyed it. She does remember the family's trips to Virginia where her grandparents. In recounting why she enjoyed spending summer with her grandparents, she shared that her grandmother let her get away with murder because Miss Edith was her favorite grandchild, it was also this grandmother that gave her her outlook on life, saying "Don't cry over spilled milk," and if there's nothing she can do about a situation, to let it go. Miss Edith said she cried like a baby when her grandmother died, She also acknowledges that "I have been a determined person, I've always had a mind of her own, good or bad." She never got married, realizing that "I couldn't put up with the two of us!" Miss Edith always retained her independent spirit, saying "if I want to do it, I did it." This is message from her grandson Stephon: Hey I know what I wanna say Grandma was the best grandma a person could ask for. She was a great person, everyone who knew her loved her. She was always there for me even when she couldn't be. She was more than my grandma she was my best fried. Whenever we would talk she always say "l love you, you know that right." And I'd would say I LOVE YOU MORE GRANDMA. Rest easy now grandma. I love you more. Relatives and friends are invited to attend her Viewing and Funeral Saturday December 16, 2023 10:00AM at The Grasso Funeral Home 2544 S. Broad Street Phila.,PA.19145. Services will begin at 11:00AM. Int. Private. Arr: Buddy Dougherty, F.D. Ron Reuben was a man who possessed great musical talent, an uncanny sense of humor, an inquisitive mind, a desire to share his knowledge, and an ability to attract friends from different career orientations. He was also one of my greatest inspirations, a mentor, and a dear friend. We lost Ron on September 11, 2022, at 90 years old after a number of years of declining health. Ron was one of three instrumental teachers that I studied with who changed my life. (Joe Allard and Tom Nyfenger were the others.) I first learned of Ron in 1978 through Lawrence Feldman. Lawrence played me a tape of Ronnie’s live performance of a solo clarinet piece by Jean Rivier (Les Trois “S”) at an ICA Conference which thrilled me. I had never heard a clarinet tone as interesting and an articulation as resonant. This feeling was corroborated by many musicians over the years. (I once asked the revered clarinet technician Mark Jacobi who had the best sound among all the great clarinetists with whom he had worked. Mark said without any hesitation, “Ron Reuben.”) Soon after hearing that recording, I set up a lesson at Ron’s apartment in downtown Philadelphia. When he came to the door, he was in his boxer underwear with a tenor sax around his neck and a cigar between fingers of his right hand. He was upset because he couldn’t figure out a certain chord change in Lush Life, a Billy Strayhorn tune from Duke Ellington’s repertoire. My first thoughts were “What have I gotten myself into? This is the guy I came to study classical clarinet with?” Little did I know at the time that I would be beginning a 40+ year journey into the world of Ron Reuben, a world where one is in constant search of a more elegant and resonant musical expression ALONG WITH THE PERFECT MOUTHPIECE; a world where Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Stan Getz, Larry McKenna and Harold Wright reigned supreme; a world in which I experienced first-hand how giving a teacher can be and should be; and a world where no topic was immune from his ability to leave one in stitches with his jokes. By the way, that first lesson lasted 4 hours and Ron wouldn’t accept any payment from me, even though we had never met before. (He did allow me to take him out to dinner.)Ron was a brilliant clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and saxophonist with marvelous abilities in both orchestral playing, chamber music and jazz. He was a Philadelphia native who studied privately with Joseph Gigliotti and then with Anthony Gigliotti while a student at Curtis. He played in several influential ensembles after his conservatory studies including the Chicago Little Symphony, the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia, Si Zentner’s Band, Terry Gibbs’ Band, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra. He also did club dates in and around Philadelphia as well as stand-up comedy. Ron even appeared on the “Tonight Show” with Steve Allen doing a bit with the grungeaphone—his invention that combined the bass clarinet with a bassoon. Ron was appointed Bass Clarinetist with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1967. During his long tenure with that orchestra, he developed great lifetime friendships with a number of players including Bernie Garfield (bassoon), Louis Rosenblatt (English horn), and Sid Curtis (viola), and Anthony Gigliotti (clarinet). Here he is with Bernie Garfield Ron was fiercely proud of the orchestra and never failed to talk about how great it was to play with them. He was especially proud of the Philadelphia woodwind tradition that started with Tabuteau, Bonade, Kincaid, Schoenbach, McLane, etc. and that his generation of players still respected. He allowed me to attend every Tuesday rehearsal The Philadelphia Orchestra played at Carnegie Hall when they made their monthly trips to New York in the 1980s and those were some of my most memorable musical experiences. Here are excerpts from two of Ron’s recordings with them. First, in 1967 with Eugene Ormandy conducting Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite as well as the 1976 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. They are indicative of his magnificent sound, expression, and facility on the bass clarinet: Ron’s diverse musical interests informed his performances with Philly. Here is his rendition of the tenor saxophone solo in Ravel’s Bolero from 1982 with Ricardo Muti conducting. I still find his interpretation to be the most endearing and musical statement of Ravel’s melody: His sincere love of swing jazz was a lifelong passion. The influence of Artie Shaw and Stan Getz were evident in his jazz playing. The conductor Dennis Russell Davies recognized this ability and requested him to be the clarinet soloist in Bernstein’s Prelude, Riffs and Fugue with Philly as well as the tenor sax soloist in Ellington’s Les Trois Rois Noirs with the American Composers Orchestra. Here’s Ron playing the Blues on tenor saxophone with a Philadelphia group of musicians: During his 38 years with The Philadelphia Orchestra, he also taught at several schools including Temple University, The New School of Music, and the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts. He was beloved by those who studied with him and was an in-demand source for young players who were taking clarinet or bass clarinet auditions. I have heard from numerous professionals how helpful and giving Ron was to them in those scenarios and that he did not accept payment for his time in many cases. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the role Ron’s wife, Marian, played in his life. Anyone as brilliant, talented, and sensitive as Ron who works under the pressure of a major job can provide challenges for a partner. Marian was a rock throughout all the years I knew them and especially so these last few years. Much of what Ron accomplished is due to her love and support. Thank you, Marian, for allowing all of us to enjoy and learn from Ron. In conclusion, I feel blessed that I had the opportunity to study with Ron and become friends with a musical giant. His friends became my friends and his influence on my life has been monumental. I, along with countless others, could not imagine our lives without him. He was a unique individual who made life interesting and eventful. I will always miss Ron Reuben. Courtesy of Ed Joffe Pat, 77, the renowned and influential Philadelphia jazz guitarist known for the fluidity and speed of his impeccable playing throughout a six-decade career and who relearned how to play guitar after suffering a brain aneurysm in 1980, has died. Mr. Martino, who was born Patrick Azzara, died Monday after a long illness in the same South Philly rowhouse where he grew up, his longtime manager Joseph Donofrio said. The guitarist had been suffering from chronic respiratory disorder since 2018, Donofrio said. Mr. Martino had been breathing with the assistance of oxygen and unable to play the guitar since finishing a 2018 tour in Italy. The jazz world mourned Mr. Martino’s passing. Philadelphia guitarist Kevin Eubanks called him “a great inspiration” and a “beautiful guitarist” on Twitter. “Thanks for all the beauty you shared.” Center City venue Chris’ Jazz Cafe posted on Twitter that Mr. Martino, who frequently played the venue, was “a beloved member of our jazz family. We will miss him and the beautiful music he brought to the club.” "He changed the way you play the guitar,” said Philadelphia jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco, who toured with Mr. Martino and played with him and drummer Billy Hart on the 2001 album Live at Yoshi’s. “He took his influences like Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell and people like that and he just made his own way of playing. He and George Benson are the most influential guitarists.” On Mr. Martino’s albums like El Hombre, recorded with organist Trudi Pitts in 1967 when he was 22, through Formidable, released 50 years later in 2017, “nobody played like that,” DeFrancesco said, speaking from his home in Arizona. “His playing was very clean and clear, and at the same time he swung. He had the grease on his playing. He was very special.” Along with Montgomery (who was a major influence on Martino), Burrell, Benson, and Grant Green, Mr. Martino “is one of the top five guitarists of all time,” DeFrancesco said. Mr. Martino was a prodigy who studied with renowned Philadelphia music educator Dennis Sandole, who also taught John Coltrane, whom Martino was friendly with. As a teen he played music with South Philly friends like drummer and pop star Bobby Rydell and moved from South Philly to Harlem when he was 15 to play with his heroes. “He had perfect pitch,” said John Mulhern, a student of Mr. Martino’s and a friend for nearly 50 years. “He had a gift.”George Benson has frequently told the story of when he first encountered Mr. Martino in the 1960s in a New York club called Small’s Paradise. “I was out on the town, thinking I had conquered New York,” Benson recalled on a video posted on YouTube. “And I saw this young kid … and this guitar leaped out of nowhere. And some of the most incredible lines I had ever heard. Everything in it. Great tone, great articulation and the whole crowd — and it was a black audience — went crazy. And I said to myself, if this is a sample of what New York is, like, I’m getting out of here.” Martino was born with an arteriovenous malformation, an abnormality of blood vessels in the brain and frequently suffered seizures before nearly dying from an aneurysm when he was teaching in California in 1980. Surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital saved his life, though he lost much of his memory, including the knowledge of how to play the guitar, which he relearned in a painstaking process that took years. In 2011, when his autobiography Here and Now written with Bill Milkowski came out, he told The Inquirer that the aneurysm was “the greatest thing that ever happened to me.” “What’s on my mind is a greater focus with more intimate accuracy on each and every moment so that I can truly focus on what life is really all about,” he said. “The mind has a way of thinking about things that have nothing to do with the moment, but if I can love my life in that moment, I’m in the right place at the right time.” Mr. Martino is survived by his wife, Ayako. There is no plan for a memorial service, but there will be a musical celebration of Mr. Martino’s life in Philadelphia in the coming months, Donofrio said. Funeral Arrangements entrusted Grasso Funeral Home Buddy Dougherty, L.F.D. Altamuro Heaven gained an amazing angel when Raymond Altamuro, formerly from South Philadelphia, now resting in the ever loving arms of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, passed away peacefully, Friday, March 26, 2021, surrounded by his loving wife of 57 years, Antoinette (DiDonato) and his family. He was the most genuine guy anyone could ever ask for; a true family man, dedicated to his wife, family and faith. He worked for 30 years at Heintz Kelsey Hayes, making airplane parts for Boeing, “retiring” shortly after moving to Delaware. For the next 15 years, he served his church, St. Helena’s, and the community, contributing his many talents as one of their maintenance personnel, until retiring once again. He continued to serve others and was always there, willing to help anyone that needed or asked! He was a “Jack of All Trades” and a master of many! If Raymond couldn’t fix it, no one could! He never said no to helping anyone and will always be, "Mr. FixIt!" Most of all, he loved working with his hands! He had a passion for working on automobiles, participating in the Hagley and Talleyville Antique Car Shows, as well as taking Sunday drives after church. Raymond was loved by so many more than just his family and friends and will be forever missed! Funeral Details Altamuro Raymond H., Sr. "Ray" of Wilmington, DE formerly of South Philadelphia. Passed away peacefully at home on March 26, 2021. Beloved husband of Antoinette C. (nee DiDonato); devoted father of Christine (the late Richard DeVogel) Altamuro, Antoinette (Vito) Michielli, Raymond, JR. (Donna), Thomas, RoseMarie (John) Lentz and the late Marie Flanagan: also survived by 10 loving Grandchildren, 2 loving Great Grandsons, his drear sister Annette (Fred) Bovoso and loving nieces and nephews. Relatives and friends are invited to attend his evening viewing Friday April 9, 2021 6 to 9 P.M. at Grasso Funeral Home 2544 S. Broad Street Phila., PA 19145 and to his funeral mass Saturday April 10, 2021, 10:00 A.M. at the Church of St.Helena 602 Philadelphia Pike Wilmington , DE 19809. Int. Holy Cross Cemetery Yeadon, PA. In lieu of flowers, please consider contributions in his memory to St. Helena Church would be appreciated Carrozza Obituary and Funeral Information A Glimpse Into The Life of Maria: Her Biography Maria Giuseppe Carrozza was born on March 11, 1928 in South Philadelphia to Italian immigrant parents, Flaviano Tatta and Cesira Di Giuseppe, of Campobasso, Italy. As a young child, Maria enjoyed singing in school, as well as the craft of sewing. She attended vocational school and would often make her own clothes, and later clothes and dresses for her children. Maria met Orlando Carrozza, also from South Philadelphia, in Wildwood, New Jersey. They were married on June 10, 1950 at Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. Maria and Orlando had three children – Maria, Rosanne and Anthony. She was an extremely devoted mother who proudly spent her time cooking, upkeeping her house and caring for her children, as well as her parents. As the fearless matriarch, Maria made their house a home and prided herself with placing the highest value on the needs of her family. Throughout her young life, Maria worked several jobs, including at a patch-making factory and, some years later, a neighborhood candy store. It was there that Maria saved enough money to purchase her first car after completing driving lessons with her oldest daughter. In her spare time, Maria was actively involved in a ladies Bingo group that she referred to as “club.” In 1975, Maria became a crossing guard in Northeast Philadelphia, covering a busy five-point intersection. This part-time job was ideal since it allowed her the time she needed to also care for her father who was living with her family at the time. Maria worked as a crossing guard for 32 years, retiring at the age of 79. She was also a constant presence and highly active in caring for her three grandchildren – Joey, Kristina and Alyssa. Cooking was Maria’s passion and one of her many talents. Each week, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays were religiously reserved as macaroni night. Maria loved to host elaborate, multicourse dinners for her family and friends. She was truly a “one-woman show” and somehow did it all herself with poise, grace and impeccable timeliness. Her happiest times were spent around the dinner table with her family. On July 31, 2011, Maria was suddenly diagnosed with a rare form of Vasculitis that attacked her lungs and kidneys. Her immediate family was advised, due to the graveness of her disease, her life expectancy would be approximately six months. This disease ultimately led to dialysis treatments three times a week for close to 10 consecutive years, a heart valve replacement at age 87, and many other resulting health issues that further compromised her quality of life. She endured a tremendous amount of irreversible pain the entire time, yet never complained or faltered. Maria is a remarkably strong woman and remained a fighter throughout every obstacle that arose. Her daughter, Rosanne, a Registered Nurse, spearheaded all of Maria’s medical and personal care, with the assistance of her siblings and her children. These tireless, triumphant efforts gave her family nearly a decade of precious time with Maria that they would have otherwise never had. This past year was exceptionally challenging with the added concern of keeping Maria safe throughout the pandemic. Taking every precautionary measure possible, Maria and her family strictly observed all safety protocols daily, even in her own home. These efforts were not in vain as Maria remained covid-free throughout her last breath. Her battle ultimately ended on February 27, 2021, due to septic shock of unknown etiology, however her fight never did. Maria will be sorely missed, but her memory will remain alive in the hearts of her family, always and forever. A Personal Reflection of Maria: Our Devoted Mom Our Beloved Mommom Throughout her life, our Mom always prioritized her family. She exemplified unshakable strength for everyone and, later, for herself to fight her everyday health battle. She was the strongest, bravest, most courageous woman we know. Our Mom is the epitome of mother and grandmother, and set the standard for our entire family. She was our rock, our pillar of strength, and our beacon of light, hope and inspiration. Our Mom exemplified family and led by truest example. Without hesitation or even needing to be asked, she instinctively and unconditionally was there for anything any of us needed. There was never a time that she was not available to help, to guide, to support, to sacrifice, to advise, to praise, to correct, to encourage, to laugh, or just to love. She never said “no” and never expected anything in return. She was selfless, elegant, gracious, and generous beyond words. Through her years, she instilled her family values and wisdom in us and taught us that family is paramount. Then, in her time of need, when her health took an unexpected turn, we were blessed with the opportunity to care for her and reciprocate the same unconditional love and support that we learned and gained from her throughout our lives. Everything our Mom did was always done with love. It was instant, constant, abundant, and most importantly, from the depths of her heart. She established our strong core family connection, that she learned from her parents, and taught us to place the highest value on family-togetherness and the quality time we spent. We will always continue to honor, treasure and cherish the moments and memories we shared with her – From every holiday where we would be gathered around the dining room table for our traditional dinners (which she shopped for, prepped and cooked entirely by herself), to our birthday celebrations at her house, to the summers spent at our family shore house in North Wildwood, New Jersey. Our Mom’s greatest achievement in life is knowing that she raised three good-hearted, hard-working, caring, loving children who, in turn, raised three wonderful children of their own – her adoring grandchildren. This made her beam with pride, as she found so much joy and fulfillment in her family. Our Mom’s legacy IS her children and grandchildren. We are a direct reflection of her and have become the people we are today because of her. We will forever be grateful for her incredible influence and exceptional example. Although impossible to attain, we will try our best to uphold her values with the same dignity and class. “Thank you very much,” Mom/Mommom. We love you forever and will continue to make you proud, always. Her Funeral Information: Carrozza Maria Giuseppe "Jo" (nee Tatta) age 92 passed away peacefully on February 27, 2021. Beloved Wife of the late Orlando "Lefty" Carrozza and loving Mother of Maria A. (Ira W.) Lockley, Rosanne B. (Joseph B., Jr.) Clayton and Anthony O. (Marie C.) Carrozza; Loving Mommom of Joseph B. Clayton III, Kristina M. (Giuseppe) Palmiero and Alyssa M.(Luis Rodriguez) Carrozza; dear Sister of Gina (The late Lawrence) Ruggiero and the late Anthony Tatta, also survived by many loving nieces, nephews and cousins. Relatives and friends are invited to her Viewing Friday March 5, 2021 10:00 A.M. at Saint Thomas Aquinas Church 17th & Morris STS. PHILA., PA. 19145 and Funeral Mass 11:00 A.M. Interment Holy Cross Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, please consider contributions in her memory to The American Kidney Fund @ www.kidneyfund.org and/or American Kidney Fund11921 Rockville Pike Suite #300 Rockville, Maryland 20852. MASKS AND SOCIAL DISTANCING ARE REQUESTED. Ciasullo Thomas Francis Ciasullo, 91, passed away peacefully on January 7, 2021. Thomas was born on December 9, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to the late Louis and Mary (Crescenzo) Ciasullo. He was a 1947 graduate of Northeast Catholic High School. Employed for 38 years at DuPont Printing Company in Philadelphia and Boothwyn, PA, Tom operated their 4-color printing press, and was proud of his eye for color and flair for mechanics. He also served in the United States Army Reserves for many years. Upon his retirement from DuPont in the early 1980’s, Tom spent several years traveling the world, visiting 35 countries, often in the capacity as an international courier. As physical limitations made it difficult for travel, he enjoyed local activities, including weekly bocci ball games at Marconi Plaza and Tuesday nights at the Mummers’ summer concerts. He delighted in all things flowers and plants, and was an active member of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, enjoying day trips to wildflower preserves, nurseries, and parks. Tom was an avid fan of all Philadelphia pro sports teams, but his favoriite was Villanova Basketball. He was adventurous and daring—well into his 50’s—enjoying deep-sea fishing, scuba diving, parasailing, sky diving, and hot-air ballooning. His facination with bees kept him studying and observing for years, spending countless hours at his favorite New Jersey bee farm, even adorning the “bee beard” at a New Jersey honey festival. His greatest joy was his family, attending every sporting and music event for his grandchildren, and never missing an invitation to a family gathering—near or far. Tom was a devout and active member of Stella Maris Church, where he served on the Parish Council, and started a volunteer organization to take elderly people to doctor visits, shopping, and recreational activities. He was generous with his time and resources to anyone who was in need of help. Thomas was predeceased by his beloved wife Rosemary (Maddaloni); devoted second mother Adeline Ciasullo; brother Norbert Ciasullo; sister Patricia Lose (late Hal); and very recently sister Mary Koob and her husband, Robert Koob. He is survived by his two children, Louise Ciasullo Masterson (Edward) of Holland, PA and Joseph T. Ciasullo (Christine) of Sewell, NJ; daughters of heart Sandra Landolfi (Steve), Diane Meyers, and Gina Santiago (Fernand). He is loving “Pop Pop” to his three grandchildren, Michael Masterson (Laura), Joseph J. Ciasullo and Maria Ciasullo, and great-grandchild Olivia Joan Masterson; devoted sister to Marian Vile (late Henry) and Frances McDonough (Ed). Adored Uncle, Cousin and Godfather to many. For relatives and friends who are comfortable to attend, a visitation at Stella Maris Church, 9th and Bigler Streets, Philadelphia, PA, will be held on Wednesday, January 13 at 9:00 a.m., followed by a Funeral Mass at 10:00 a.m. Interment to be at New St. Mary Cemetery in Bellmawr, NJ. Strict Covid guidelines for masks and social distancing must be followed. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to Stella Maris Church. Arr: Buddy Dougherty F.D. June 6, 1932 - September 11, 2022 Courtesy of Ed Joffe Ron Reuben was a man who possessed great musical talent, an uncanny sense of humor, an inquisitive mind, a desire to share his knowledge, and an ability to attract friends from different career orientations. He was also one of my greatest inspirations, a mentor, and a dear friend. We lost Ron on September 11, 2022, at 90 years old after a number of years of declining health. Ron was one of three instrumental teachers that I studied with who changed my life. (Joe Allard and Tom Nyfenger were the others.) I first learned of Ron in 1978 through Lawrence Feldman. Lawrence played me a tape of Ronnie’s live performance of a solo clarinet piece by Jean Rivier (Les Trois “S”) at an ICA Conference which thrilled me. I had never heard a clarinet tone as interesting and an articulation as resonant. This feeling was corroborated by many musicians over the years. (I once asked the revered clarinet technician Mark Jacobi who had the best sound among all the great clarinetists with whom he had worked. Mark said without any hesitation, “Ron Reuben.”) Soon after hearing that recording, I set up a lesson at Ron’s apartment in downtown Philadelphia. When he came to the door, he was in his boxer underwear with a tenor sax around his neck and a cigar between fingers of his right hand. He was upset because he couldn’t figure out a certain chord change in Lush Life, a Billy Strayhorn tune from Duke Ellington’s repertoire. My first thoughts were “What have I gotten myself into? This is the guy I came to study classical clarinet with?” Little did I know at the time that I would be beginning a 40+ year journey into the world of Ron Reuben, a world where one is in constant search of a more elegant and resonant musical expression ALONG WITH THE PERFECT MOUTHPIECE; a world where Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Stan Getz, Larry McKenna and Harold Wright reigned supreme; a world in which I experienced first-hand how giving a teacher can be and should be; and a world where no topic was immune from his ability to leave one in stitches with his jokes. By the way, that first lesson lasted 4 hours and Ron wouldn’t accept any payment from me, even though we had never met before. (He did allow me to take him out to dinner.)Ron was a brilliant clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and saxophonist with marvelous abilities in both orchestral playing, chamber music and jazz. He was a Philadelphia native who studied privately with Joseph Gigliotti and then with Anthony Gigliotti while a student at Curtis. He played in several influential ensembles after his conservatory studies including the Chicago Little Symphony, the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia, Si Zentner’s Band, Terry Gibbs’ Band, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra. He also did club dates in and around Philadelphia as well as stand-up comedy. Ron even appeared on the “Tonight Show” with Steve Allen doing a bit with the grungeaphone—his invention that combined the bass clarinet with a bassoon. Ron was appointed Bass Clarinetist with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1967. During his long tenure with that orchestra, he developed great lifetime friendships with a number of players including Bernie Garfield (bassoon), Louis Rosenblatt (English horn), and Sid Curtis (viola), and Anthony Gigliotti (clarinet). Here he is with Bernie Garfield Ron was fiercely proud of the orchestra and never failed to talk about how great it was to play with them. He was especially proud of the Philadelphia woodwind tradition that started with Tabuteau, Bonade, Kincaid, Schoenbach, McLane, etc. and that his generation of players still respected. He allowed me to attend every Tuesday rehearsal The Philadelphia Orchestra played at Carnegie Hall when they made their monthly trips to New York in the 1980s and those were some of my most memorable musical experiences. Here are excerpts from two of Ron’s recordings with them. First, in 1967 with Eugene Ormandy conducting Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite as well as the 1976 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. They are indicative of his magnificent sound, expression, and facility on the bass clarinet: Ron’s diverse musical interests informed his performances with Philly. Here is his rendition of the tenor saxophone solo in Ravel’s Bolero from 1982 with Ricardo Muti conducting. I still find his interpretation to be the most endearing and musical statement of Ravel’s melody: His sincere love of swing jazz was a lifelong passion. The influence of Artie Shaw and Stan Getz were evident in his jazz playing. The conductor Dennis Russell Davies recognized this ability and requested him to be the clarinet soloist in Bernstein’s Prelude, Riffs and Fugue with Philly as well as the tenor sax soloist in Ellington’s Les Trois Rois Noirs with the American Composers Orchestra. Here’s Ron playing the Blues on tenor saxophone with a Philadelphia group of musicians: During his 38 years with The Philadelphia Orchestra, he also taught at several schools including Temple University, The New School of Music, and the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts. He was beloved by those who studied with him and was an in-demand source for young players who were taking clarinet or bass clarinet auditions. I have heard from numerous professionals how helpful and giving Ron was to them in those scenarios and that he did not accept payment for his time in many cases. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the role Ron’s wife, Marian, played in his life. Anyone as brilliant, talented, and sensitive as Ron who works under the pressure of a major job can provide challenges for a partner. Marian was a rock throughout all the years I knew them and especially so these last few years. Much of what Ron accomplished is due to her love and support. Thank you, Marian, for allowing all of us to enjoy and learn from Ron. In conclusion, I feel blessed that I had the opportunity to study with Ron and become friends with a musical giant. His friends became my friends and his influence on my life has been monumental. I, along with countless others, could not imagine our lives without him. He was a unique individual who made life interesting and eventful. I will always miss Ron Reuben.
1646	dbpedia	3	26	https://time.com/archive/6758523/music-lieder-singer/	en	Music: Lieder Singer	https://time.com/favicon.ico	https://time.com/favicon.ico	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "TIME" ]	1938-03-07T05:00:00+00:00	When the plump, round-faced Czech Soprano Gertrude Pitzinger made her U. S. debut in Manhattan's Town Hall month before last, few U. S. concertgoers had ever heard of her. Last week, as Soprano...	en	/favicon.ico	TIME	https://time.com/archive/6758523/music-lieder-singer/	When the plump, round-faced Czech Soprano Gertrude Pitzinger made her U. S. debut in Manhattan’s Town Hall month before last, few U. S. concertgoers had ever heard of her. Last week, as Soprano Pitzinger finished her first U. S. tour, delighted critics went back a whole generation for their comparisons, acclaimed her as the greatest Lieder singer since Wüllner, Gulp and Gerhardt. Thirty-two-year-old Soprano Pitzinger learned Lieder as a girl from Bohemian peasants, studied more with Vienna’s famed Lieder composer, Joseph Marx. Five years ago she braved a Berlin recital, became an overnight sensation. In London last May she was thrilled to sing in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for Coronation visitors. To Germans and Austrians the word Lied means simply song. To the rest of the world it means a particular kind of song, as peculiarly Austro-German as Knackwurst. In Italy, where a beautiful voice is regarded as a princely possession, songs are likely to have melodies constructed to show off beautiful voices. In France, where Art is for epicures, songs are likely to be skillful, titillating and sophisticated. But the Austro-German Lied is a miniature music-drama in which words, melody and accompaniment play equal parts. More important than the contour of its melody is the dramatic mood, or the metaphysical idea, that it expresses. Lieder-singing takes a lot more doing than run-of-the-opera-house singing, and great Lieder singers are rare. Even world-famous opera stars come a cropper when they attempt Lieder; only a handful of them (Marcella Sembrich, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Lotte Lehmann) have ever satisfied the connoisseurs. Most great Lieder singers are specialists. Greatest of them in recent years have been: i) Dr. Ludwig Wüllner, who started life as a professor of philology in Münster, toured the U. S. in 1908-10; 2) Julia Gulp, a Dutch contralto (originally a violinist as well as a singer), who visited the U. S. in 1913; and 3) Elena Gerhardt, a pupil of the late great Conductor Artur Nikisch, who came to the U. S. in 1912.
1646	dbpedia	3	4	https://musicbrainz.org/artist/4d777d12-059c-4406-9a0e-f21509b7676a	en	Elena Gerhardt	https://musicbrainz.org/…avicon-32x32.png	https://musicbrainz.org/…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://static.metabrainz.org/MB/header-logo-1f7dc2a.svg", "https://static.metabrainz.org/MB/search-52f8034.svg", "https://static.metabrainz.org/MB/filter-a7c3d16.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	German mezzo-soprano, Type: Person, Gender: Female, Born: 1883-11-11 in Leipzig, Died: 1961-01-11 in London, Area: Germany	en	/static/images/favicons/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png		null	~ Person Discography Album + Compilation YearTitleArtistRatingReleases2009The Record of Singing: The Very Best of Volumes 1-4: 1899-1952Various Artists1 Showing official release groups for various artists (Show official release groups) Artist information Sort name: Gerhardt, Elena Type: Person Gender: Female Born: Born in: Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany Died: Died in: London , England, United Kingdom Area: Germany Rating Editing Subscriptions Collections
1646	dbpedia	0	32	https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/german-singer-soprano.html	en	res stock photography and images	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	[ "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy-black.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy-black.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/mastercard.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/visa.svg"...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Alamy Limited" ]	null	Find the perfect german singer soprano stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. Available for both RF and RM licensing.	en	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	Alamy	https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/german-singer-soprano.html	Alamy and its logo are trademarks of Alamy Ltd. and are registered in certain countries. Copyright © 26/08/2024 Alamy Ltd. All rights reserved.
1646	dbpedia	3	67	https://open.spotify.com/artist/2B4N612xGjNj2cAAYsP4MO	en	Sir Peter Pears	https://i.scdn.co/image/5a250b3fd476bb6b961829b8049cc6cb64ff7622	https://i.scdn.co/image/5a250b3fd476bb6b961829b8049cc6cb64ff7622	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Listen to Sir Peter Pears on Spotify. Artist · 14.9K monthly listeners.	en	https://open.spotifycdn.…n32.b64ecc03.png	Spotify	https://open.spotify.com/artist/2B4N612xGjNj2cAAYsP4MO
1646	dbpedia	1	91	https://www.memorabilia-uk.co.uk/p/elena-gerhardt	en	Elena Gerhardt	https://www.memorabilia-uk.co.uk/favicon.ico	https://www.memorabilia-uk.co.uk/favicon.ico	[ "https://www.memorabilia-uk.co.uk/images/logo.png", "https://www.memorabilia-uk.co.uk/images/subject_images/imageFile_imageFile__0170161045e58e3b322625a86883_7ub2.jpeg", "https://www.memorabilia-uk.co.uk/images/item_image_images/imageFile_imageFile__aa814bcaad8ccc7c011e30d28a22_Dih5.jpeg", "https://www.memora...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	ELENA GERHARDT d1961. German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. She died in London aged 77 on January 11th 1961.	en	/favicon.ico	Memorabilia UK	https://www.memorabilia-uk.co.uk/p/elena-gerhardt	ELENA GERHARDT d1961. German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. She died in London aged 77 on January 11th 1961.
1646	dbpedia	3	88	https://www.winchestercollege.org/stories/the-winchester-community-remembers-julian-smith	en	Julian Smith	https://www.winchesterco…rg/opengraph.png	https://www.winchesterco…rg/opengraph.png	[ "https://www.winchestercollege.org/assets/img/crest--white--15.svg", "https://www.winchestercollege.org/assets/img/social-twitter--white.svg", "https://www.winchestercollege.org/assets/img/social-instagram--white.svg", "https://www.winchestercollege.org/assets/img/social-linkedin--white.svg", "https://www.w...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	The Winchester community came together on Saturday 29th June 2019 for the memorial service of former Director of Chapel Music, Julian Smith. Keith Pusey, f...	en	/apple-touch-icon.png		https://www.winchestercollege.org/stories/the-winchester-community-remembers-julian-smith	The Winchester community came together on Saturday 29th June 2019 for the memorial service of former Director of Chapel Music, Julian Smith. Keith Pusey, former Master of Music remembers him. Julian Smith had more than a promising start to his singing career. There might have been some surprise when, in 1953, at just 23 years of age, he accepted Walter Oakeshott’s invitation to join the staff at Winchester: a position as a full-time don, and then as a visiting teacher, that lasted right up to 2012; perhaps an unprecedented tenure. Julian had many advantages. He was tall, imposing and good-looking. His voice had an encompassing resonance. With an attractive and sunny personality, he was at home presenting music programmes for television, giving recitals on national radio, appearing as a soloist for Beecham and Klemperer, and singing with some of the finest singers of the post-War decades: Wilfred Brown, Janet Baker, Isobel Baillie, Peter Pears, Heather Harper and Alfred Deller. On stage, he was an acclaimed Papageno for Chelsea Opera Group’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute – in a cast that included Ilse Wolf, Roger Norrington and John Shirley-Quirk. A chorister at King’s College, Cambridge (the Director of Music was Dr Harold Darke), he went on to Dulwich College where he played 1st X1 cricket for three years. Scoring 94 against Tonbridge in his final year, he fell to the bowling of a young Colin Cowdrey. National Service took him to Vienna, where he worked as a translator in the Intelligence Corps. Hauled from a train whilst in the Russian sector of the city, he survived by using natural charm and wit. He read Music at Edinburgh University, and, already making a name for himself whilst still an undergraduate, he sang for two seasons at Glyndebourne. Studies with Roy Henderson and Elena Gerhardt at the Guildhall followed. With a partial volte-face, he turned down a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in order to pursue a career as a schoolmaster. In the 1950s music teachers at leading schools were almost always organists, but Winchester’s imaginative choice brought the school a singer of real quality. This was understood and successive headmasters encouraged him to continue to give performances. Julian’s arrival paid handsome dividends. When he arrived, Chantry was the chapel for boys in their first year, and he directed Chantry Choir. Taking congregational practices in Chapel for thirty years with a congregational repertoire that the boys really wanted to sing and teaching singing to groups and to individuals (a large number later became professional musicians), he radiated the conviction that music was something to be passionate about. An inspirational teacher and musician, he founded three choirs (Madrigal Society, the Kingsgate Singers and St Michael’s Choir), taught German, ran Printing Soc and, for a while, was in charge of Mill. Taking the Yearlings XI for ten years, he also passed on an infectious enthusiasm for cricket and golf. Beyond the school, he invited all the local primary schools to sing in the annual Mayor’s Christmas Carols and he continued the tradition established by Sir George Dyson of encouraging local village choirs to take part in the Winchester and County Music Festival – often coaching the choirs himself. His diversity and sheer zest for life did not diminish his commitment to performance. He was the prophet Elijah, the dashing toreador Escamillo with whom Carmen fell head-long in love. Gerald Finzi’s Let us Garlands Bring displayed his wonderful diction and enunciation – a hallmark of his style. He sang as a soloist in the great choral works, often in the Cathedral, for more than three decades, and there were numerous operatic appearances – The Fairy-Queen, King Arthur, The Magic Flute and Fidelio. But perhaps the highest points were recitals with the exceptional pianists David Gwilt and Robert Bottone with whom he established a life-long collaboration. In 1979, he became Director of Chapel Music and the Quiristers. The boys sang brilliantly. It was easy: they copied him. Winning the national TV competition Fanfare for Young Musicians in 1981 with a performance of Schubert's song ‘Nacht und Träume’, they received the prize from the renowned singer Thomas Allen. Hilary Finch writing in the TES summed up what many others perceived: ‘The Winchester College Quiristers - a unique combination of alertness, happiness and real sense of performance.’ As well as the commitment to liturgical music, a thrilling secular repertoire was developed. There were operas, European tours and prestigious concerts and recordings, including the European premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem in Vienna with Placido Domingo and the Churchill Memorial Concert at Blenheim Palace. The 1990 recording of Mozart’s Salzburg Masses was heralded as one of The Times newspaper’s recordings of the year. ‘I am spellbound by the quality’, wrote the reviewer in The Musical Times. Most obituaries chronicle events and achievements in calendar order, but in this case it is worth reflecting on a prescient tribute paid by CM Fiddian (Headmaster of King’s College School) at the conclusion of Julian’s choristership: ‘I am not looking forward to losing him. He has during all his time here been unfailingly cheerful and contented and he has helped to make others the same, a strong influence for pleasant behaviour and for a nice spirit.’ Ably and loyally supported by his wife Fiona (also a visiting music teacher at Winchester, and an absolute stalwart of the Winchester College community), JJHS made singing vibrant and fun for generations of Wykehamists. His legacy lives on.
1646	dbpedia	2	1	https://letsquiz.com/quiz/elena-gerhardt/in-which-year-did-elena-gerhardt-move-to-london	en	In which year did Elena Gerhardt move to London?	https://upload.wikimedia…ena_Gerhardt.jpg	https://upload.wikimedia…ena_Gerhardt.jpg	[ "https://letsquiz.com/_next/image?url=%2Flogo_23.png&w=256&q=75 1x, /_next/image?url=%2Flogo_23.png&w=384&q=75 2x", "https://letsquiz.com/_next/image?url=%2Ffeedback_button.png&w=48&q=75 1x, /_next/image?url=%2Ffeedback_button.png&w=96&q=75 2x", "https://letsquiz.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=64,format=webp/http://up...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Elena Gerhardt left Germany and moved to London in October 1934. She lived there for the rest of her life, continuing her career as a singer and teacher.	en	/apple-touch-icon.png		https://letsquiz.com/quiz/elena-gerhardt/in-which-year-did-elena-gerhardt-move-to-london	The Enchanting Voice: How Well Do You Know Elena Gerhardt's Life and Career? Created using data under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence & the media files are available under their respective licenses; additional terms may apply. For more information, please review our About us page. // By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use & Privacy Policy.
1646	dbpedia	0	12	https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226563602.003.0003	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
1646	dbpedia	3	10	https://www.academia.edu/322092/Performance_Style_in_Elena_Gerhardts_Schubert_Song_Recordings	en	Performance Style in Elena Gerhardt's Schubert Song Recordings	http://a.academia-assets.com/images/open-graph-icons/fb-paper.gif	http://a.academia-assets.com/images/open-graph-icons/fb-paper.gif	[ "https://a.academia-assets.com/images/academia-logo-redesign-2015-A.svg", "https://a.academia-assets.com/images/academia-logo-redesign-2015.svg", "https://a.academia-assets.com/images/single_work_splash/adobe.icon.svg", "https://0.academia-photos.com/attachment_thumbnails/1596163/mini_magick20190427-579-5rsga...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Daniel Leech-Wilkinson", "kcl.academia.edu" ]	2010-09-09T00:00:00	Performance style is conceptualised as a collection of small ‘expressive gestures’ consisting of changes in frequency, loudness or duration within or between notes or phrases. Collections differ somewhat between individuals (personal style) and				https://www.academia.edu/322092/Performance_Style_in_Elena_Gerhardts_Schubert_Song_Recordings	This exploratory study focuses on the relationship between vocal expression, musical structure, and emotion in recorded performances by famous singers of three Schubert songs. Measurement of variations in tempo, dynamics, and pitch showed highly systematic relationships with the music's structural and emotional characteristics, particularly as regards emotional activity and valence. Relationships with emotional activity were consistent across both singers and musical pieces, while relationships with emotional valence were piece-specific. Clear changes in performing style over the twentieth century were observed, including diminishing rubato, an increase followed by a decrease of the use of pitch glides, and a widening and slowing of vibrato. These systematic changes over time concern only the style of performance, not the strategies deployed to express the structural and emotional aspects of the music. Since the middle of the 19th century, Franz Schubert’s song cycles Die schöne Mullerin and Winterreise are not only considered as an outstanding contribution to the Lied genre, but also as “romantic” compositions par excellence, whose protagonists might be depicted adequately only by performances of male singers. The “masculine nature” (Carl Lafite) of these thoughts, emotions and actions might be inappropriate for female singers. This attitude, which is still present today (even amongst professional musicians and musicologists), though, contradicts not only the performance practice of the early 19th century, but even Schubert’s handling of his songs. In fact, the idea of these two cycles as “men’s cycles” has only developed in the course of the 19th century, when various impacts such as the general upvaluation of the Lied genre, the transfiguration of the composer, the interpretation of his songs as being a personal statement, and the idea of Werktreueshaped the reception of Schubert’s compositions. These factors led to the consolidation of strong and still valid power structures, in which men are regarded as the norm, whereas women (and other alternative voice categories like countertenors) appear as deviation from this norm. These structures are tightly related to similar conditions and principles which have been outlined in the past decades by the masculinity studies on higher levels of our society. In this paper, I will set out this whole process by delineating the performance practice at Schubert’s time, his own attitude (insofar as it is possible), the various influences of romantic musical aesthetics, and the development of the mentioned performance tradition towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Furthermore, a number of statements from the 21st century will demonstrate that these concepts are still common today, and I will correlate them with some certain principles pointed out by masculinity studies from the last decades. Throughout the 20th century, the performance practice of baroque music has undergone many stylistic changes. Moreover, the rich resources of primary source material available to us in musical recordings of the period have only recently been realised. Bruce Haynes, in his book The End of Early Music, suggests that the twentieth century saw three principal schools of performance: romantic, modernist, and historically-informed. This study investigates Haynes' hypothesis through a comparison of fourteen recordings of Bach's Solo Violin Sonata in A minor BWV 1003, ranging from 1933 to 1999. Focus is made on eight predetermined observation criteria: tempo, tempo fluctuation, rhythmic alteration, accentuation, articulation, portamento, vibrato, and ornamentation. Each criterion is discussed with reference to the secondary literature and observations of each recording are compiled in a systematic fashion. Each ofthe three schools (romantic, modernist, and historically-informed) is p... Performance practice denotes the study of information relevant to the performance and perception of music in various historical contexts. Such information may be found in manuscript and printed scores, mechanical or electrical recording devices, music and dance treatises, books and letters, media accounts and visual documentation of concert settings, instrument designs and TEMPERAMENTS, and so on. A temporal art, live music can only manifest itself in ever-varied performances, yet it “remains unchanged behind this relativity” (Rosen). The relationship between the absolute and the relative aspects of music constitutes the basic concern of performance practice. Depending on the resolution of this relationship, two orientations have evolved. The first asserts the inherent value of the past, seen as a repository of the composer’s intentions, and hence the source of presumably immutable truths about proper musical performance. By contrast, the second orientation affirms the all-important contribution of the present, seen not necessarily as a corrupting factor but rather as a re-creative one without whose impulse music would ossify into a lifeless repetition of the past. The three major topics of performance practice—notation, perception, and instruments—will be treated from the often conflicting perspectives of the two orientations, and exemplified by findings of contemporary research.
1646	dbpedia	1	48	https://classicalvoiceamerica.org/2024/01/04/schubert-song-cycles-re-cycled-in-full-glory-of-marginalized-mezzo/	en	Schubert Song Cycles, Recycled In Lyric Glory Of Marginalized Mezzo	https://classicalprod.wp…voiceamerica.png	https://classicalprod.wp…voiceamerica.png	[ "https://classicalprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-header-blue.png", "https://classicalprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/logo-header-1.png", "https://classicalprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-header-blue.png", "https://classicalprod.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/GinellMoz...	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/1cAk5uxDmnI?list=OLAK5uy_md6LHlwjPfm8lAHaQe0AsgfMdpMxwa8QU" ]	[]	[ "die schöne müllerin", "inez matthews", "winterreise" ]	null	[ "David Shengold" ]	2024-01-04T00:00:00	DIGITAL REVIEW – Mezzo-soprano Inez Matthews (1917-2004) belonged to a generation of Black singers blocked from much classical work, but she pursued a career. Her restored recordings of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise bear attention.	en	https://classicalprod.wp…voiceamerica.png	Classical Voice North America \|	https://classicalvoiceamerica.org/2024/01/04/schubert-song-cycles-re-cycled-in-full-glory-of-marginalized-mezzo/	Inez Matthews Sings Schubert: ‘Die schöne Müllerin,’ ‘Winterreise.’ Inez Matthews, mezzo-soprano; Lowell Farr, piano. Parnassus Records PACD96085/6. DIGITAL REVIEW — Both of Franz Schubert’s magnificently genre-defining song cycles — Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827) — have garnered many outstanding recorded performances. It’s rare that newly available ones merit much comment. A new release from Parnassus Records reaches back seven decades and unearths worthy traversals of both, which are remarkable in that they exist at all. A native of Ossining, N.Y., mezzo-soprano Inez Matthews (1917-2004) belonged to that generation of Black singers blocked from much classical work, but she pursued a singing career where she could: largely on Broadway and in concert. In addition, other than Lotte Lehmann — whose 1940 78 RPM set of Winterreise with Paul Ulanowsky was, according to Alan Blyth in Song on Record, Volume 1, pieced together from sessions spanning a few years — women hadn’t much performed or recorded these cycles back then, especially not lyric mezzos like Matthews. Her 1954 tapings with solidly musical pianist Lowell Farr (1925-2002), reissued in bright and generally acceptable period sound, are well worth a listen. The highly influential German concert and recital mezzo-soprano Elena Gerhardt (1883-1961) was, with Lehmann, one of the few women who regularly programmed the somber Winterreise; recent decades have produced notable recorded versions featuring Lois Marshall/Anton Kuerti; Christa Ludwig/James Levine; Brigitte Fassbaender/Aribert Reimann; Mitsuko Shirai/Hartmut Höll; and — after staged performances in which the singer intriguingly recontextualized the cycle’s narrative impulse from the lover to the beloved — Joyce DiDonato/Yannick Nézet-Séguin. With its more vernal and romantically triangulated titular hero, Die schöne Müllerin 70 years ago had even less of a tradition of female interpreters. Two recordings preceded the one under review: a 1935 effort in French translation by soprano Germaine Martinelli and Jean Doyen, and again the impassioned if indubitably operatic Lehmann with Ulanowsky. Marshall/Kuerti and Fassbaender/Reimann have weighed in; also Barbara Hendricks with Roland Pöntinen. Matthews made several Broadway appearances between 1942 and 1953, not only in musical material but in plays, including The Pirate with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. After performing as an ensemble member in the original 1943 Carmen Jones, she alternated the title role with Muriel Smith in 1945’s City Center revival. Four years later, she created Irina in Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s Lost in the Stars. Several of her classically trained fellow cast members in that production had blighted or marginal careers in the American classical arena due to the prevalence of segregated casting, including baritone Warren Coleman (the original Crown in Porgy and Bess) and contralto Lucretia West, who eventually made a concert career in Europe. Baritones Todd Duncan (the first Porgy) and Robert McFerrin had already sung at New York City Opera, and in 1955 McFerrin became the Met’s first Black male leading singer; but neither enjoyed the opportunities their vocal and musical merits warranted. (Matthews herself only once sang at Carnegie Hall, in a 1957 potpourri gala of opera excerpts also featuring NYCO baritone Lawrence Winters, who attained operatic success in San Francisco and Hamburg.) In her last Broadway venture — as St Theresa I in 1952’s revival of Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, led by the composer himself — Matthews rubbed shoulders not only with her older brother Edward Matthews, who had created St. Ignatius in the work’s 1934 world premiere (as well as Gershwin’s Jake the next year) but also with Black artists of a younger generation who would establish themselves on the international scene: singers Leontyne Price, Betty Allen, Vera Little, Martha Flowers, and Gloria Davy and dancers Louis Johnson and Arthur Mitchell. Later in the decade, Matthews provided the voice for Serena in 1959’s Porgy and Bess film and recorded various excerpts from that opera. For decades, she has been known mainly for her participation on Thomson’s 1947 excerpts recording of Four Saints. Matthews displays an individual timbre, with a bright finish and a slight, expressive vibrato. She sings with a fine command of dynamics, as in the diminuendo ending “Wohin?” She shows clear, informed though not native-quality diction. She is never unduly operatic in her treatment of line or text and is, blessedly, not an over-interpreter. While alert to the quite different progressions of the disappointed romantic trajectories in the two cycles, and observant of the modulations of mood and key in such important songs as “Ungeduld” and “Auf dem Flusse,” she never indulges in the existential showboating some popular current interpreters exhibit — often to audience and critical acclaim. And few manage Winterreise as she does, with nary an ugly sound. That said, at age 37 she had less experience in weighting every detail into developing narratives than some of her more mature recorded competition. Idaho-born pianist Lowell Farr studied with Nadia Boulanger and was an active participant in chamber groups and as a collaborative pianist; he made several Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) appearances in the 1950s and ’60s and accompanied Licia Albanese in a late-career mainstage recital there in 1968. His activities extended to Tanglewood, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition, and the Johnson White House, plus decades of teaching. His work in the sometimes stormy preludes here bespeaks complete control, and the artists are clearly in sync as to their intentions. Both command the cleanly executed triplets that are — or should be — a sine qua non of Schubert style. The one slight demerit of the set as engineered is that the voice is given primacy, relegating the piano somewhat to the background. These fine readings are neither linguistically nor in terms of modern recording quality the very first CD versions I would recommend to those new to these works — everyone familiar with them doubtless has a different first choice, or even group of choices. (My current tastes gravitate to Fassbaender or Peter Mattei for Winterreise and Christoph Prégardien or Ian Partridge for Die schöne Müllerin, though I have a number of other favorites.) But they are well worth hearing. Plus, their quality poses poignant questions as to what an artist like Matthews might have achieved with no barriers placed on her career due to her race — and also, as to what traces of other marginalized careers might still be accessible. The two-CD set forms part of Parnassus Records’ “Black Swans” series (PACD96085/6), which also features compilations of remastered rare early recordings by pioneering Black artists such as the Dvořák associate baritone-composer Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) and the splendid concert tenor-arranger Roland Hayes (1887-1977), as well as a collection of widely sourced tapings by classical artists more of Matthews’ generation, including her colleagues Allen, Davy, Duncan, and McFerrin as well as Camilla Williams and Mattiwilda Dobbs — the first Black artist really to make a significant international career in staged opera at the highest level. It seems that Matthews and Farr’s 1954 sessions also included the posthumously assembled but powerful pseudo-cycle Schwanengesang; one hopes that tape will also see the light of day. Perhaps Parnassus Records can turn its efforts to restoring that recording as well.
1646	dbpedia	3	92	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/2015/01/	en	Voix des Arts: A Voice for the Performing Arts throughout the World	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/favicon.ico	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/favicon.ico	[ "https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d5E6wcjMiXk/VrY7v7gCLcI/AAAAAAAAGMc/TrIVMj7EB1A/s1600-r/MET_VdA.jpg", "https://lh4.ggpht.com/-0Zw3UYCR5IQ/VM2vti74ziI/AAAAAAAAEJY/AtFioIg3OF8/Winterreisen_Covers_20155.jpg?imgmax=800", "https://lh4.ggpht.com/-mAVVFTnWgck/VM2vuNTq91I/AAAAAAAAEJg/L-lKpx7pYfc/Franz-Schubert%25255B5%2525...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Joseph Newsome" ]	null	Founded in 2008, the primary goal of VOIX DES ARTS is to supplement the ever-decreasing—and, in terms of quality, the ever-deteriorating—coverage of the Performing Arts by mainstream media outlets. All content is written and copyrighted by Joseph A. Newsome.	en	https://www.voix-des-arts.com/favicon.ico		https://www.voix-des-arts.com/2015/01/	FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Winterreise, D. 911—(1) Zvi Emanuel-Marial, male alto; Philip Mayers, piano [Recorded in b-sharp Studio, Berlin, Germany, on 17, 21, and 23 October 2013; Thorofon CTH2615; 1 CD, 67:36; Available from ClassicsOnline, Amazon, jpc, and major music retailers] and (2) Daniel Behle, tenor; Oliver Schnyder Trio [Recorded in Zürich, Switzerland, 15 – 19 June 2013; Sony Classical 88883788232; 2 CDs, 125:56; Available from Amazon, jpc, iTunes, and major music retailers] Since the publication of the cycle in 1828, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise has been one of the benchmarks by which a singer’s fluency in Lieder repertory has been assessed. The array of voices by which the cycle has been sung and the range of interpretations to which the individual Lieder in Winterreise have been subjected are exceptionally broad. Winterreise on records will likely always be associated in the minds of many listeners, even those who never heard him otherwise, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, but among male interpreters of the cycle memorable accounts have been recorded by low voices as diverse as Gerhard Hüsch, Karl Schmitt-Walter, Hans Hotter, Kurt Moll, and Hermann Prey, as well as by tenors such as Peter Anders, Anton Dermota, Julius Patzak, Sir Peter Pears, Ernst Haefliger, and Ian Partridge. The first female singer to set her sights on Winterreise—in near-complete form on records, at least—seems to have been the magnificent German soprano Lotte Lehmann, whose idiosyncratic 1940 – ‘41 recording with her regular accompanist, Paul Ulanowsky, paved the way for notable later efforts by Lois Marshall, Brigitte Fassbaender, Christa Ludwig, Christine Schäfer, and Alice Coote. [Sadly, Elena Gerhardt’s famed interpretation of the cycle was not preserved in full.] The autograph keys suggest that Schubert intended Winterreise for tenor voice, but his fondness for the baritone voice of his friend Johann Michael Vogl is extensively documented. Vogl was the foremost interpreter of Die Schöne Müllerin, Schubert’s earlier cycle utilizing poetry by Wilhelm Müller, in the years between the completion of the cycle and his death in 1840, and though his relationship with Winterreise is less known to history he sang the complete cycle to great acclaim shortly before he died on the twelfth anniversary of Schubert’s death. In the generations since the first publication of Winterreise in two parts, a near-infinite progression of transpositions has altered the individual songs and the cycle as a whole. The Winterreisen on these new releases from Thorofon and Sony Classical present new perspectives on this endlessly enchanting trek through love, uncertainty, and resignation. Whatever novelties a recording of Winterreise proposes, it is the singing that must ultimately be the raison d’être. The voice is the only conduit for the emotional deluge of this music: without it, where can a Winterreise go? However the twenty-four Lieder in Winterreise are transposed, arranged, re-ordered, or reconfigured, they are fraught with difficulties for any singer regardless of Fach. Many singers have discovered that approaching Winterreise as an extended operatic scena is folly, as is tiptoeing through the music as though each Lied is a holy relic. It is a cycle that requires attention to its basic construction and cognizance of the ways in which Schubert utilized restrained musical structures to further the dramatic impetus portrayed in the texts. As an exhibition of unexaggerated sentiments expressed in song, Israeli male alto Zvi Emanuel-Marial’s Winterreise on Thorofon is a very personal journey that never descends into tasteless hyperbole. Possessing a lovely, soft-edged timbre, Mr. Emanuel-Marial must be applauded for singing the cycle without taking shortcuts or cautiously crawling through the music. Ably accompanied by Australian pianist Philip Mayers, whose playing instinctively matches the emotional nuances of his colleague’s interpretations of each song, the singer builds great cumulative force by approaching each song in succession with clear-headed simplicity. This is not a reading of grandiose philosophical aggrandizing: instead, it is a look—indeed, almost an intrusion—into a bare but not despondent explication of sentiments too ambivalent for expression via words alone. Mr. Emanuel-Marial opens his journey through Winterreise with an especially lovely account of 'Gute Nacht,' and there is a simple, boyish fascination at the heart of his voicing of 'Wetterfahne.' In 'Gefrorne Tränen' and 'Erstarrung,' the tessitura makes demands that Mr. Emanuel-Marial's voice can meet only with discernible effort, but what his performance costs him in the expenditure of vocal capital is handsomely repaid by the sagacity of his elucidation of text. His singing of 'Der Lindenbaum,' a song too often flippantly delivered, is endearing, the warmth of his enunciation of the vowels combining with the fluidity of Mr. Mayers’s pianism with rare grace. The imagery of ‘Wasserflut,’ ‘Auf dem Flusse,’ and ‘Rückblick’ is powerfully conveyed by Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s unaffected diction, and the stark but soft-edged realism of his performances of ‘Irrlicht,’ ‘Rast,’ and the sublime ‘Frühlingstraum’ is very effective. ‘Einsamkeit’ is executed with bleakness, all color drained from the voice. The anxiety of hearing the distant post-horn and the bitter disappointment of realizing that it heralds no news from the object of the narrator’s passion are palpably imparted by Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s agitated singing of ‘Die Post,’ and the restlessness of ‘Der greise Kopf’ finds a meaningful outlet in the singer’s and Mr. Mayers’s rhapsodic performance. The growing perceptions of natural phenomena as harbingers of psychological upheaval in ‘Die Krähe,’ ‘Letzte Hoffnung,’ ‘Im Dorfe,’ and ‘Der stürmische Morgen’ are pointedly translated into sound by Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s sparse vocalism. The taunting beacons of ‘Täuschung’ and ‘Der Wegweiser’ are decried with fervor, and the deceptive haven encountered in ‘Das Wirtshaus’ is denounced with heartbreaking hopelessness. The biting cold of the wind and snow in ‘Mut!’ shiver in the voice and piano, and the symbolic trinity of ‘Die Nebensonnen’ draws from singer and accompanist an expression of spellbound religiosity. There is unmistakable significance to Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s pronouncement of the final line of ‘Der Leiermann,’ ‘Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier dreh’n?’: the question is delivered directly to the listener, as if to say, ‘Will you walk with me, wherever this journey leads?’ The ambiguity in Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s tone, poised between romanticized masculinity and poetic androgyny, facilitates a construal of Winterreise that reverberates with melancholy and manic energy, and the singer and his accompanist give a performance of the cycle that is memorable for far more than its unconventionality. As in his Capriccio recording of Brahms's Die schöne Magelone, tenor Daniel Behle offers a pair of performances, one of Winterreise in its traditional form and another in an intriguing adaptation of his own composition. Many—perhaps most—of the instrumental arrangements of Winterreise that have been attempted in past have been egotistical endeavors, the primary goals of which were not to pay homage to Schubert’s genius but to provide opportunities for ambitious musicians to hone their compositional skills by tinkering with music of proven appeal. This emphatically is not the case with Mr. Behle’s reimagining of Winterreise. An artist of uncompromising integrity, Mr. Behle has looked very deeply into the most minute details of Schubert’s settings of Müller’s texts and extracted threads that he then reassembled in expanded form, neither disrupting the lyrical flow of Schubert’s thematic development nor imposing harmonic complexities that the basic structures of the music cannot sustain. This also is not vapid salon music, however, and it is not a wholesale restatement of Schubert’s piano accompaniments with decorative violin and cello obbligati. Instead, Mr. Behle has essentially transformed Winterreise into profoundly emotive chamber music for quartet, with the voice being the instrument charged with speech. Hearing him sing the cycle in this form, it seems virtually impossible that any other artist could do it justice, but Mr. Behle’s arrangement is one of a handful of loving adaptations that deserves attention from other singers and musicians undertaking Winterreise. Whether accompanying Mr. Behle in the traditional performance of the cycle or anchoring the trio in the tenor’s arrangement, pianist Oliver Schnyder is an attentive, unflappable source of grounded strength who plays as though he were singing the Lieder himself. Reveling in Schubert’s sometimes very wittily contrasted harmonies, he collaborates with Mr. Behle in the adoption of tempi that enable rhythmic precision without inhibiting dramatic flexibility. Violinist Andreas Janke and cellist Benjamin Nyffenegger play entrancingly, their phrasing informed by obviously multi-layered comprehension of the texts and an uncanny sensitivity to the subtleties of Mr. Behle’s interpretations. Individually and in ensemble, the instrumentalists respond to one another, to the singer, and to the ever-changing facets of Schubert's music with consummate artistry and the thrill of exploration missing from so many performances of the cycle. Solely in terms of vocalism, Mr. Behle is among the most successful performers of Winterreise on disc. He shares with Mr. Emanuel-Marial an unwonted freshness of approach, a sense of having come to the music without preconceptions or prejudices. It is only natural that a singer should give of his best when performing music that he arranged, but Mr. Behle possesses an ideal voice for Schubert’s vocal lines. His burnished lower register is heard to potent effect in the opening ‘Gute Nacht,’ both in the ‘traditional’ performance and in that of his arrangement. In fact, the singer’s exegesis of the songs remains strikingly consistent in both performances. The squeaking of a rusted weathervane is evoked in Mr. Behle’s ‘Wetterfahne,’ particularly in his own arrangement, and the crystalline beauty of tone that he devotes to ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ is inspiring. His singing of ‘Erstarrung’ has a deadened quality, the voice hollow with the disenfranchisement of a man who finds no trace of his beloved. Both with piano and with the trio, his ‘Der Lindenbaum’ glows with serene recognition. Like Mr. Emanuel-Marial, he unleashes startlingly vital tone painting in ‘Wasserflut,’ ‘Auf dem Flusse,’ and ‘Rückblick,’ and his handling of ‘Irrlicht’ exudes confusion and chagrin. Mr. Behle makes of ‘Rast,’ ‘Frühlingstraum,’ and ‘Einsamkeit’—three of the finest songs in the cycle—a strangely vivid triptych, closing the first half of Winterreise with an acutely erudite, almost sensual voicing of the line, ‘War ich so elend nicht.’ Mr. Behle begins ‘Die Post’ with a burst of optimism that quickly fades into anguish. A marvel of Mr. Behle’s performance is that he heightens the impact of the desolation of the text by intensifying the attractiveness of his singing. The prevailing sentiment of his account of ‘Der greise Kopf’ is the suggestion that suffering purifies human desires, and he transforms this conceit into an acceptance of the conflicting implications of nature manifested in ‘Die Krähe,’ ‘Letzte Hoffnung,’ ‘Im Dorfe,’ and ‘Der stürmische Morgen.’ The flickering light mentioned in Müller’s text in ‘Täuschung’ shines in Mr. Behle’s voice and in the instruments that support it. His wide-eyed contemplation of nature’s trickery in ‘Der Wegweiser’ contrasts with his recognition of the pain of human denial in ‘Das Wirtshaus.’ ‘Mut!’ bristles with irony, but, like Mr. Emanuel-Marial, he lends ‘Die Nebensonnen’ an atmosphere of hard-won tranquility. In the final song, ‘Der Leiermann,’ the lingering impression of Mr. Behle’s interpretation differs markedly from Mr. Emanuel-Marial’s: rather than seeking the companionship of the listener, Mr. Behle addresses his concluding query to himself, quietly appraising the ability of the narrator of Winterreise to carry on. Whether accompanied by piano in Schubert’s settings or by piano trio in his own noteworthy arrangement, Mr. Behle’s Winterreise is one of struggle endured with insurmountable grace. With so many superb song cycles, especially those by Czech, Polish, and Spanish composers, still virtually unknown beyond the ranks of the most conscientious connoisseurs of Art Song, why does Franz Schubert’s Winterreise remain a central pillar in the temple of song? Why, nearly two centuries after the shy composer’s death, are his songs still the standards by which singers’ abilities as Lieder interpreters are measured? In her book More Than Singing, the soprano Lotte Lehmann wrote that in Winterreise ‘the lover has come to realize the worthlessness of his beloved and knows at last that the love which was the greatest experience of his life, has been squandered on one who was incapable of appreciating the unique gift of true love and faith.’ It is the dichotomy of expressing the narrator’s realization of that worthlessness and maintaining at least a muted faith in love that makes performance of Winterreise one of the most fearsome experiences in lyric art. Each in his own way, Zvi Emanuel-Marial and Daniel Behle make the journey hauntingly, proving anew that the spectrum of emotions explored in the songs of Winterreise is limited only by the imaginations of the artists who perform them. Franz Peter Schubert (31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Der fliegende Holländer—Terje Stensvold (Der Holländer), Anja Kampe (Senta), Christopher Ventris (Erik), Kwangchul Youn (Daland), Jane Henschel (Mary), Russell Thomas (Der Steuermann); Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, WDR Rundfunkchor Köln, NDR Chor; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Andris Nelsons, conductor [Recorded during concert performances in the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 24 and 26 May 2013; RCO Live RCO 14004; 2 CD, 135:57; Available from ClassicsOnline, Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Few composers have been as successful at creating and perpetuating the impression of having emerged fully mature, Athena-like, from artistic infancy as Richard Wagner. To the observer acquainted with the scores that remain in the repertories of the world’s opera houses, it must indeed seem that the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal was at work even at the dawn of the composer’s career. Admittedly, unlike the works of almost all other composers but Monteverdi and Mozart [Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and complete Il trittico still are not performed as often as they deserve to be], all of Wagner’s mature operas remain in almost continuous circulation, but his early operas, those apt to be unknown to casual Wagnerians (and not without the composer’s tacit approval), only sporadically show the obvious handiwork of the genius of the Green Hill. Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi, all enjoyable works when appropriately performed, might justifiably be said to lack nothing needed to be typical grand operas except Auber’s, Halévy’s, or Meyerbeer’s signatures on their manuscripts. At its first performance in 1843, then, Der fliegende Holländer must have seemed incredibly radical even to those in the Dresden audience acquainted with the young Wagner’s style. In Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner embraced the ephemeral emotions of larger-than-life mythic characters that would guide the course of his creative development throughout his career, and his pioneering—but not altogether original, as is often suggested—use of leitmotivs took a major step towards Der Ring des Nibelungen. Celebration of the bicentennial of Wagner’s birth was the occasion for the concert performances in Amsterdam’s storied Concertgebouw that produced this recording on the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s house label, and a celebration it is: presented in clear, spacious sound with finer balance than has been achieved in many studio recordings, RCO Live’s performance of Der fliegende Holländer exults in the profuse musical and dramatic capacities of Wagner’s score. The quality that makes this performance of Der fliegende Holländer especially interesting, however, is its pragmatism. Rather than being a stilted, tumefied obeisance to a musical leviathan, this performance takes Der fliegende Holländer on its own terms, treating it as a living, sentient work, not a frigid artifact that must be admired only from a distance. In presiding over this or any performance of Der fliegende Holländer, Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons faces the enormous weight of history. In addition to a legacy shaped by notable performances and recordings guided by virtually every conductor with an affinity for Wagner repertory, Der fliegende Holländer has the provenance of having been conducted at its Dresden première by Wagner himself, a circumstance repeated only in the first performance of Tannhäuser two years later. In this performance, Maestro Nelsons exhibits a thorough grasp of the young Wagner’s idiom, marshaling the musical forces at his disposal with clear-sighted focus on the opera’s lofty climaxes, but the most impactful element of his approach to the score is the way in which he grants meticulous attention to small details without distorting the overall structure of the opera. There is more bel canto in Der fliegende Holländer—indeed, in all of Wagner’s mature operas—than many Wagnerians are willing to admit, and Maestro Nelsons does not hesitate to caress phrases with Italianate warmth. He is fortunate to have in the players of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra an ensemble of musicians whose versatility enables them to bring stylistic pertinence to virtually any repertory. Employing the three-act construction with the Norwegian setting rather than the composer’s original concept with the drama playing out in Scotland in a single act, this performance finds the RCO on representatively excellent form. From the first chords of the Ouvertüre, crucial brass and woodwind lines are delivered with near-perfect intonation, and the string playing is as sinewy as the music requires without being ponderous. The same might be said of the performance as a whole: muscle is never lacking when it is needed, but passages that benefit from delicacy receive it. The choristers of the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, NDR Chor [both directed by Martin Wright], and WDR Rundfunkchor Köln [led by David Marlow] sing sonorously whether portraying Senta’s friends, the hearty Norwegian sailors, or the Holländer’s eerie crew. In their seagoing duties, Wagner gave the chorus quite a lot of exclamations of ‘Hojoje,’ ‘Johohoe,’ and the like, and it is to the choristers’ credit that these do not sound as silly in this performance as they often do. The tenors are troubled by the tessitura, which often suspends them in the passaggio with frequent top Fs and Gs, but they cope without embarrassing themselves. In the Norwegian sailors’ ‘Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer,’ the gentlemen sound appropriately weary of the sea, and the ladies’ singing of the Spinning Chorus, ‘Summ’ und brumm’, du gutes Rädchen,’ is charmingly chatty. Then, however, they respond to Senta’s ballad with bracing immediacy in ‘Ach, wo weilt sie, die dir Gottes Engel einst könnte zeigen?’ The Norwegian sailors’ drinking song, ‘Steuermann! Laß die Wacht,’ is raucous, and the choruses’ voicing of the Holländer’s crew’s ‘Johohoe! Johohoe! Hoe! Hoe! Hoe!’ is chilling. There is audible diligence in every line sung by the choristers; a commitment not just to producing pleasing sounds but, equally importantly, to believably enacting their parts in the drama, as well. The presence of American mezzo-soprano Jane Henschel as Mary is the very definition of luxury casting. A true artist can make the smallest of parts significant, and Ms. Henschel makes more of Mary than almost any other recorded exponent of the rôle. Her interactions with Senta and the girls in the first minutes of Act Two are playfully scolding but genuinely concerned, and she creates a character who seems to live vicariously through Senta. Her singing of ‘Du böses Kind, wenn du nicht spinnst’ is both vivid and secure, traits that few singers have brought to Mary’s music on records. Moreover, Ms. Henschel’s timbre is always attractive, and she heightens the apprehension generated by the drama by sounding like an unnerved confidante rather than a superannuated duenna. Having rising American tenor Russell Thomas on hand as the Steuermann is also an example of the care with which these concert performances of Der fliegende Holländer were prepared. In his song, ‘Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer mein Mädel, bin dir nah,’ Mr. Thomas sings splendidly, rising to the top B♭ with ringing freedom. Aside from a few lapses in pitch, which were likely results of the difficulty of placing tones against the din of Wagner’s orchestra in full cry, his performance is striking. Like Ms. Henschel, Mr. Thomas sets a new, exalted standard in a rôle that has endured much poor singing on stage and on records. With extensive experience in a wide repertory under his belt, Korean bass Kwangchul Youn has grown into a cogent Wagnerian. As Daland in this performance, he starts uncertainly but quickly gains confidence as the performance progresses. In ‘Kein Zweifel! Sieben Meilen fort trieb uns der Sturm vom sichren Port,’ the repeated Cs, Ds, and E♭s at the top of the staff tax him, but the voice has appealing gravitas. In the duet with the Holländer, Mr. Youn evinces paternal affection for Senta in ‘Wie? Hör ich recht? Mein Tochter sein Weib?’ The subsequent scene with Senta, ‘Mein Kind, du siehst mich auf der Schwelle,’ inspires him to singing of pointed intensity, and he gives a firm, well-phrased account of his aria, ‘Mögst du, mein Kind, den fremden Mann willkommen heißen,’ handling it as a moment in the drama rather than a concerted number. Mr. Youn voices ‘Verzeiht! Mein Volk hält draußen sich nicht mehr’ in the trio with Senta and the Holländer with feeling, and he imparts a sense of understanding that his daughter is lost to him even before the opera’s final scene. The amalgamation of heft and finesse in Wagner’s music for Erik, Senta’s rejected suitor, complicates casting the rôle. The traditional tendencies have been either to give the part to a Heldentenor whose brute strength bruises the music or to cast a lighter, more lyric voice that cannot compete with the power of the orchestra. British tenor Christopher Ventris possesses a voice of logical proportions for Erik, and he sings the part capably without completely conquering the music’s difficulties. His delivery of ‘Bleib’, Senta! Bleib’ nur einen Augenblick!’ is ardent, and his ‘Senta! Laß dir vertrau’n’ conveys the sting of unrequited love. Mr. Ventris gives Erik’s cavatina, ‘Willst jenes Tags du nicht dich mehr entsinnen,’ a zealous reading, negotiating the turns and top B♭ with impressive composure. His top notes are generally solid, but the timbre sometimes takes on an unpleasant stridency. He is ultimately a skillful but not an ideal Erik, but this is a part in which honorable efforts are particularly commendable. German soprano Anja Kampe is one of the world’s preeminent Sieglindes in Die Walküre and, as she proved at Glyndebourne, an unconventional but unusually sensual Isolde. With the exceptions of Marjorie Lawrence, Kirsten Flagstad, Astrid Varnay, and Dame Gwyneth Jones, who also excelled as Brünnhilde, Senta has most often been best served by Sieglinde voices. Ms. Kampe is thus as natural a fit for the part as might be found today. Still, the voice that is not challenged by Senta’s music has not yet been heard, and Ms. Kampe faces some of the most murderous vocal lines in opera. In Senta’s ballad, ‘Johohoe! Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an,’ she manages the difficult intervals imposingly, and she brings great warmth to the section marked più lento by Wagner, ‘Doch, daß der arme Mann noch Erlösung fände auf Erden,’ Her singing sizzles with the fire demanded by the composer in the allegro con fuoco, ‘Ich sei’s, die dich durch ihre Treu’ erlöse!’ The exposed top A in Senta’s duet with Erik, ‘Er sucht much auf,’ soars, and she rises to the top As and Bs in the duet with the Holländer with abandon. The opera’s final scene is a formidable test for a soprano, and it is one that Ms. Kampe passes with voice and dramatic instincts to spare. With her poetic phrasing of ‘Wohl kenn’ ich Weibes heil’ge Pflichten,’ the top B launched heroically, she lends her Senta the aura of romanticized tragedy. The radiance of her ‘Von mächt’gem Zauber überwunden reißt mich’s zu seiner Rettung fort’ is complemented by the potency of her ‘Preis’ deinen Engel und sein Gebot! Hier steh’ ich, treu dir bis zum Tod!’ The final top A and B♭ are hurled out defiantly: this Senta does not accept her destiny: she seizes it. Vocally, Ms. Kampe sings Senta with far fewer compromises than many sopranos have found necessary, but it is the histrionic sovereignty of her interpretation that lingers in the memory. Sixty-nine years old at the time of the concert performances that yielded this recording, Norwegian baritone Terje Stensvold is a stern, commanding Holländer. There are instances in which loosening of the singer’s vibrato and approximations of pitch are evident, but Mr. Stensvold gives a more durable performance than many singers half his age might manage. He energetically constructs an imaginative account of ‘Die Frist ist um,’ traversing the aria’s wide range with enthusiasm. The top F in ‘Wie oft in Meeres tiefsten Schlund stürtz’ ich voll Sehnsucht mich hinab’ is a trial, but the zeal of his delivery of ‘Durch Sturm und bösen Wind verschlagen’ is rousing. Mr. Stensvold imparts suggestions of burgeoning tenderness in the duet with Senta, ‘Wie aus der Ferne längst vergang’ner Zeiten spricht dieses Mädchens Bild zu mir.’ His vehement utterance of ‘Verloren! Acht! verloren! Ewig verlor’nes Heil!’ and ‘Erfahre das Geschick, von dem ich dich bewahr’!’ is grandiose, and his ‘Du kennst mich nicht’ explodes with frustration and disappointment. Mr. Stensvold portrays a pessimistic Holländer who clings to hope of redemption despite his distrust of humanity. The voice is not always projected without effort, but it meets the requirements of the music with authority. 171 years after the opera’s first performance, it is easy both to overestimate the extent to which Der fliegende Holländer ushered in Richard Wagner’s artistic maturity as if by magic and to underestimate the quality of the score when considering it alongside the epic music dramas of the last fifteen years of the composer’s career. There is validity to the assertion that Der fliegende Holländer is a good introduction to Wagner’s singular gifts for those listeners for whom the later, considerably longer works are hard going, but Der fliegende Holländer is not—and should not be—‘light Wagner.’ RCO Live’s recording brings together an excellent cast, impeccably-prepared choruses, a responsive conductor, and one of the world’s great orchestras in a performance of searching zeal. This is a Der fliegende Holländer recommendable to novice Wagnerians, but it should also be heard by those curmudgeonly aficionados who argue that all truly momentous Wagner singers are dead and buried. Traft ihr das Schiff: Anja Kampe as Senta in Tim Albery’s production of Der fliegende Holländer at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2011 [Photo by Mike Hoban, © The Royal Opera House] JOHANN ADOLF HASSE (1699 – 1783): Siroe, rè di Persia (1763 Dresden version)—Max Emanuel Cenčić (Siroe), Franco Fagioli (Medarse), Julia Lezhneva (Laodice), Mary-Ellen Nesi (Emira), Lauren Snouffer (Arasse), Juan Sancho (Cosroe); Armonia Atenea; George Petrou, conductor [Recorded in Parnassos Hall, Athens, Greece, 21 – 31 July 2014; DECCA 478 6768; 2 CD, 170:28; Available from Amazon, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] When Johann Adolf Hasse's Siroe, re di Persia was first performed at Bologna's Teatro Malvezzi on 2 May 1733, the cast included a quintet of the most widely-celebrated singers of the Eighteenth Century: Vittoria Tesi, Anna Maria Peruzzini, Filippo Giorgio, and the castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli as the title monarch and his younger brother Medarse. Three years later, Farinelli reprised his rôle in performances at London's Haymarket Theatre, and Tesi and Caffarelli returned to their parts at the famed Teatro di San Carlo in Naples in 1747. In defiance of the hardship and devastation suffered by the Saxon capital during the Seven Years' War, Hasse was commissioned to adapt his setting of Metastasio's libretto for performance at the rejuvenated court of Elector Friedrich August II, who died two months after the revised Siroe was first performed on 3 August 1763. The extent of Hasse’s alterations to Siroe is difficult to ascertain 250 years later, but the Dresden score recorded by DECCA and Parnassus Arts Productions is a progressive work, its prevailing musical language being that of the formative utterances of Classicism. Supplementing the surviving music with material from Carl Heinrich Graun’s 1751 opera Britannico and Händel’s setting of Siroe, as well as from another of Hasse’s operas, Giovanni Andrea Sechi [handling arias] and Renzo Bez [responsible for Sinfonia, recitatives, and final chorus] have recreated the opera in an approximation of the form that, in 1763, distracted its composer from the misfortunes of war, which included the razing of his house. Comparing the results of their labors with the few surviving accounts of the 1733 Bologna première and subsequent revivals, the Dresden version of Siroe is a tauter, faster-moving work, though it is acknowledged that the present recording makes use of extensive cuts to secco recitative. Hasse’s extraordinary imagination is fully in evidence, however. As recorded here, Siroe lacks the expressive potential of the composer’s Artaserse, Cleofide, and Piramo e Tisbe, but the quality of the music is undeviatingly high. With only a few reservations, this recording—a release that upholds DECCA’s storied traditions of technical expertise and thoughtful presentation—preserves an account of the opera that advocates strongly for the justification of its revival. Most valuably, it is another small glimpse of the mosaic of Hasse’s creativity that remains mostly obscured by the grime of two-and-a-half centuries of neglect. As in their previous collaborations with DECCA and Parnassus, Armonia Atenea and George Petrou prove to be musicians of the highest order whose contributions construct excellent-quality frames for the musical portraits created by the singers. Leading from the harpsichord, Maestro Petrou exhibits an innate comprehension of Hasse’s musical-crossroads style, a trait that here expands on its airing on the previous DECCA release Rokoko. The conductor has an affinity for challenging both singers and instrumentalists without overwhelming them, and he proves especially adept in Siroe at propelling the drama excitingly. In a few of the bravura arias, however, Maestro Petrou’s tempi rush the singers unduly, which jeopardizes the potency of their efforts and increases the tension on their techniques. Assistant Conductor Markellos Chryssikos shares harpsichord duties with Maestro Petrou, and their efforts combine with the theorbo playing of Theodoros Kitsos to fashion a largely logical but lively continuo. Zacharias Tarpangos’s and Nikos Dimitratos’s sweet-toned playing of the transverse flutes is complemented by the lovely, appealingly stylish playing of oboists Yannis Papagiannis and Dimitris Vamvas, bassoonist Alexandros Economou, and horn players Costas Siskos and Spyros Kakkos. The string playing is wonderfully animated within the boundaries of period-appropriate practices. All of the musicians bring to the performance a sense of close cooperation, and, on the whole, this provides the singers with the support that they need to brave the perils of Hasse’s score. Among the sextet of gifted soloists, young American soprano Lauren Snouffer makes a magnificent major-label début with a splendidly-sung performance as the Persian general Arasse. Composed in 1733 for a lower voice, it is likely that Hasse substantially altered the tessitura of the part for the Dresden production in 1763 in order to make the music more congenial for a higher voice. In the Act One aria ‘Contente non siete d'un povero core,’ Ms. Snouffer discloses a strong technique that never fails her as the opera progresses. Allying a genuinely lovely, silvery timbre with dazzling fluidity in the bravura writing and a particularly attractive upper register, she delivers Arasse’s music, arias and recitatives alike, with the assurance of a veteran singer twice her age. Her singing is unabashedly feminine, but she conveys a suggestion of machismo with the confident swagger of her phrasing. Ms. Snouffer sings both of her subsequent arias, ‘Se pugnar non sai col fato’ in Act Two and ‘L'alma a goder prepara’ in Act Three, with such conviction that Arasse himself seems destined for the throne. Deeming a young singer promising has become a cliché, but this performance confirms that Ms. Snouffer, already an impressively finished singer, is an artist of exceptional promise, both in Baroque repertory and beyond. The rôle of Laodice, Arasse's sister, was specially crafted for Elisabeth Teyber, Hasse’s pupil, and the composer undoubtedly sought to give his student plentiful opportunities to cover herself—and him—in glory. In fine operatic fashion, Laodice is Cosroe’s mistress but is in love with his son Siroe, and her predicament—and the identity of her portrayer in Dresden, to be sure—prompts some extravagantly difficult music. Young Russian soprano Julia Lezhneva, already a mainstay of DECCA’s releases in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, is a Laodice of icy integrity, her accuracy in coloratura awe-inspiring but also slightly off-putting. Ms. Lezhneva’s bravura technique is phenomenal, but there are instances in this performance in which it sounds as though she is dangerously forcing the voice in the upper register. In Laodice’s aria in Act One, ‘O placido il mare lusinghi la sponda,’ she establishes herself as a central focus of the drama, and she perpetuates Laodice’s significance with electric performances of ‘Mi lagnerò tacendo’ in Act Two and ‘Se il caro figlio vede in periglio’ in Act Three. It is also in Act Three that the foremost mystery of this recording of Siroe is encountered. In both the track list and the libretto accompanying the CD release, the aria ‘Di tuo amor, mio cor è indegno’—a number borrowed from Act Two of Graun’s 1751 opera Britannico, in which it was set as an aria for Agrippina with the text ‘Mi paventi il figlio,’ in which form it was popularized in Berlin and Dresden in the Eighteenth Century by Gertrud Elisabeth Mara, in Vienna in the Nineteenth Century by Sophie Löwe (the creator of Donizetti’s Maria Padilla and Verdi’s first Elvira in Ernani and Odabella in Attila), and in London in 1856 by Pauline Viardot, who owned a manuscript score of the aria—is attributed to Emira, but there is no question that the aria is sung on the recording by Ms. Lezhneva, who has also sung Graun’s aria with its original text in concert. The text of ‘Di tuo amor, mio cor è indegno’ appears neither in Metastasio’s original libretto for Siroe when it was first set to music by Domenico Sarro in 1721 nor in the surviving materials from Hasse’s versions of the opera, so the most logical conclusion is that the aria was custom-fit with a newly-invented text in order to provide Ms. Lezhneva with a suitably fiendish bravura aria in which to further exercise her formidable technique. The aria fits that bill perfectly, and Ms. Lezhneva sings it staggeringly well if rather coldly, but not even the white-knuckle pyrotechnics display justifies the aria’s inclusion, especially as the source of the performing edition of the music is of questionable provenance. Musically and dramatically, the aria—very effective in its proper position in Act Two of Britannico, in which Agrippina bemoans her son Nero’s treachery—adds nothing but a flurry of notes to Siroe, and its interpolation is frankly an affront to Hasse, whose writing for the Dresden Siroe is already in danger of seeming superfluous. Why the aria is attributed to Emira but sung by Ms. Lezhneva is a conundrum. Furthermore, could an equally daunting piece not have been found in another of Hasse’s operas? Emira, the Princess of Cambay disguised during much of the opera as Idaspe, is sung by Greek mezzo-soprano Mary-Ellen Nesi, a fantastic singer who in this performances sounds slightly out of sorts. In Emira’s Act One aria, 'D'ogni amator la fede,' Ms. Nesi immediately commands attention with the boldness of her singing, but she does not sound completely comfortable with the rôle’s tessitura. In her aria in Act Two, 'Sgombra dall'anima tutto il timor,' Ms. Nesi is on more solid vocal ground, and the familiar strength of her singing is evident. The pinnacle of her performance is the aria ‘Non vi piacque, inguisti dei,’ which she sings with the concentration of an Olympic athlete and the dramatic intensity of a woman whose life seems on the brink of collapse. The ferocity of ‘Che furia, che mostro,’ Emira’s aria in Act Three, is palpably conveyed, but Ms. Nesi would have benefited from greater support from Maestro Petrou. She must push the voice in order to keep up with his tempo: keep up she does, but the hectic pace deprives her singing of a measure of its dark beauty. Ms. Nesi is always heard with pleasure, and it is indicative of the extraordinary quality of her artistry that a performance as accomplished as this one falls just short of her own standard. Sung in the 1763 Dresden production of Siroe by Angelo Amorevoli, a singer considered one of the greatest tenors of the first half of the Eighteenth Century who also created rôles in Hasse's Attilio Regolo and Solimano, Cosroe is assigned in this performance to Spanish tenor Juan Sancho. In recitative, Mr. Sancho is sometimes over-emphatic but always involved in the drama. His accompagnato with Siroe and Medarse in Act One, ‘Figli, di voi non meno che del regno son padre,’ is vigorously declaimed, and he brings tireless aplomb to the aria ‘Se il mio paterno amore,’ detonating one flashing tone in the vicinity of top C after another in his adventurous embellishment of the da capo. Cosroe has another powerful accompagnato in Act Two, ‘Più dubitar non posso, è Siroe l'infedel,’ and Mr. Sancho again spits out the words with vehemence. His singing of the aria ‘Tu di pietà mi spogli’ is robust, and the vulnerability that he infuses into the red-blooded urgency of the Act Three aria ‘Gelido in ogni vena scorrer mi sento il sangue’ enhances the impact of his shapely singing. Mr. Sancho creates a winsomely dispirited, vengeful monarch whose ultimate magnanimity is the culmination of a process of personal growth evinced through song. As sung by Argentine countertenor Franco Fagioli, Medarse is an iron-willed usurper whose ambitions overcome his innate decency. It was to Medarse that Hasse entrusted the final number of Act One, the coloratura showpiece ‘Fra l'orror della tempesta,’ which Mr. Fagioli sings majestically. Here and throughout the performance, Mr. Fagioli is stressed by Maestro Petrou’s tempi, and this results in an over-prominence of vibrato. His range extends to B♭5 and occasionally higher with few hints of strain, and even when cruelly tested by the music the voice is a first-rate instrument. Medarse’s arias in Acts Two and Three, ‘Tu decidi del mio fato’ and ‘Torrente cresciuto per torbida piena’ receive sterling performances, Mr. Fagioli’s technical composure enabling him to bring off incredible feats of virtuosity. In this sensitive singer’s performance, Medarse’s final confession and capitulation are unexpectedly touching: Mr. Fagioli manages to make the character one who seems truly contrite and deserving of forgiveness. His advocacy for Hasse having been expertly established with Rokoko, his recital of Hasse arias for DECCA, Croatian countertenor Max Emanuel Cenčić expands his familiarity with the composer’s engaging gallant idiom with a subtle, richly expressive performance of the wrongly-accused title character in Siroe. Mr. Cenčić’s Siroe is a prince of legitimate nobility who proclaims his innocence without resorting to harshness or hysterics. In the Act One aria ‘La sorte mia tiranna,’ Mr. Cenčić unleashes the very best of his artistry: singing the exquisite cantilena with firm, rounded tone, he phrases expansively. In Act Two, he differentiates the sentiments of the arias ‘Mi credi infedele’ and ‘Fra dubbi affetti miei’ imaginatively, all while singing with the rapt absorption that is his hallmark. His aristocratic utterance in the Act Three accompagnato ‘Son stanco, ingiusti Numi di soffrir,’ borrowed from Act Three of Händel's Siroe, is communicative of profound emotions, and his performance of ‘Vo disperato a morte,’ an aria extracted from Act Three of Hasse's 1738 Tito Vespasiano, is sensational. Most impressive is the sincerity with which Mr. Cenčić sings Siroe’s final aria, ‘Se l’amor tuo mi rendi.’ On stage and on disc, Mr. Cenčić has continually proved himself to be an artist of uncommon perceptiveness. In Siroe, too, he finds the soul of his character in the music and inhabits it unforgettably. That Johann Adolf Hasse was an important composer is a fact that is finally gaining acceptance beyond the ranks of musicologists and well-informed musicians. As recently as a decade ago, the notion of any of Hasse’s operas being recorded by DECCA would have seemed ridiculous. Siroe, re di Persia is not the most persuasive of Hasse’s operas, but it receives a persuasive performance on this recording despite decisions that diminish the rectitude of the enterprise. Qualms aside, this Siroe, re di Persia is a valuable addition to the expanding Hasse discography and a documentation of the work of some of today’s best period-adept singers. Hasse by Hand: the manuscript of the Sinfonia from the 1733 version of Hasse’s Siroe, re di Persia in the collection of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Stats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden GIOVANNI BONONCINI (1670 – 1747), GIOVANNI BATTISTA COSTANZI (1704 – 1778), FRANCESCO FEO (1691 – 1761), NICOLA PORPORA (1686 – 1768), DOMENICO SARRO (1679 – 1744), ALESSANDRO SCARLATTI (1660 – 1725), and LEONARDO VINCI (1690 – 1730): Arias for Domenico Gizzi – A star castrato in Baroque Rome—Roberta Invernizzi, soprano; I Turchini; Antonio Florio, conductor [Recorded in Sala del Vasari, Chiesa di Santa Anna dei Lombardi, Naples, Italy, 3 – 8 February 2014; Glossa GCD 922608; 1 CD, 56:49; Available from Glossa Music, ClassicsOnline, Amazon, fnac, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Born in Arpino in the Lazio region of Italy in 1687, Domenico Gizzi is familiar to Twenty-First-Century observers primarily as an acclaimed pedagogue whose pupils included the composer Francesco Feo and fellow soprano castrato and Arpino native Gioacchino Conti, who ultimately adopted the stage name Gizziello in homage to his tutor. It was as a singer that Gizzi conquered the aristocratic and archiepiscopal courts of Italy in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, however, and such were his accomplishments in opera that he could share the stage with his slightly younger colleague Farinelli with equal billing. Possessing a range that extant music composed for him suggests extended at least from C4 to B♭5, Gizzi was a celebrated exponent of a style of singing that in his lifetime was already falling victim to the caterwauling of shallow virtuosi. His own technique was undoubtedly extraordinary, but the high salaries that he commanded are surely evidence of gifts that extended beyond mind-boggling execution of bravura passagework. Indeed, it was for the expressive use of his voice rather than coloratura prowess that Gizzi's artistic namesake Gizziello was most praised during his tenure under Händel's management in London, and at least some of the credit for this must have been owed to Gizzi's example. Now not as renowned as a singer like castrati such as Farinelli, Caffarelli, Carestini, and Senesino, he was esteemed during his time before the public as one of the finest singers in Europe, the peer of the most talented of his colleagues. The thirteen arias on Arias for Domenico Gizzi – A star castrato in Baroque Rome, all of them extracted from operas that figured in Gizzi’s Roman career, facilitate the creation of a portrait of a singer who was obviously adept at delivering vocal pyrotechnics and evincing the emotional contexts that instigate them. Italian soprano Roberta Invernizzi is also such a singer, and she summons Gizzi’s spirit in this performance with singing of taste and pizzazz. He was unquestionably an important teacher, but if he sang these arias as well as Roberta Invernizzi sings them on this disc, he was indeed a true ‘star castrato.’ Ms. Invernizzi is one of the most stylish singers making a home in Eighteenth-Century repertory today, and her performances on this disc match the highest levels of achievement in recreating music composed for castrati. She is supported with elegance that complements her own poise by the superb musicians of I Turchini: concertmaster and noted musicologist Alessandro Ciccolini; violinists Patrizio Focardi, Paolo Cantamessa, Marco Piantoni, Claudia Combs, and Massimo Percivaldi; violist Rosario Di Meglio; cellist Alberto Guerrero; double bassist Giorgio Sanvito; and harpsichordist Patrizia Varone. Under the leadership of Antonio Florio, they give surprisingly robust performances of the Sinfonie from Alessandro Scarlatti’s 1718 Telemaco and Domenico Sarro’s 1720 Ginerva principessa di Scozia, proving that size of ensemble is not as important as the breadth of the interpretation. In each of the arias on the disc, Maestro Florio and I Turchini concoct a musical atmosphere that fosters the adventurous expressivity of Ms. Invernizzi’s singing. Ms. Varone’s harpsichord continuo is noticeably free of the over-complicated meandering that is often billed as period-appropriate continuo realization, and this closer adherence to stylistic accuracy as it is presently understood is considerably more imaginative than more fanciful efforts. Mr. Ciccolini has an exceptional historically-informed bowing technique but likewise lacks nothing in passion. Following Ms. Invernizzi and Maestro Florio with flawless attention, the instrumentalists produce sounds that seem extensions of the singer’s voice. In Rome at the time of Arcangelo Corelli’s reign as the Eternal City’s presiding instrumental genius, Gizzi likely enjoyed the finest musical support available in Italy: in a project in which nothing was left to chance, Ms. Invernizzi can make a similar claim in the context of this disc. A tendency to accentuate the downbeats in coloratura passages notwithstanding, Ms. Invernizzi’s performance of Mirene’s aria ‘Amore inganna, e piace’ from Giovanni Bononcini’s 1719 L’Etearco is a magnificent feat of Baroque singing, the divisions tossed off with élan and the vowels on the breath as they must be in music of this nature. Insightfully used to her advantage, occasional edginess at the top of the range sharpens the focus of Ms. Invernizzi’s phrasing. The same character’s aria ‘Barbari siete, o Dei,’ perhaps the finest single piece on the disc, is engrossingly sung, the greater simplicity of the melodic line prompting Ms. Invernizzi to singing of engaging subtlety. The pair of beautiful eyes evoked in the text shine like sapphire pools in winter sunlight in Ms. Invernizzi’s expansively-shaped singing of Farnace’s aria ‘Per due pupille belle’ from Giovanni Battista Costanzi’s 1730 L’Eupatra, and the wide intervals in Pirro’s ‘Prima 'l vorace fulmine,’ the first of the two arias from Francesco Feo’s 1730 Andromaca included on the disc, are negotiated with consummate artistry. In all of the selections on Arias for Domenico Gizzi, Ms. Invernizzi’s ornamentation is bold without being vulgar, and she makes frequent use of the bright sheen of her upper register in a manner that avoids taking the voice out of the range that was likely comfortable for Gizzi. Pirro’s subsequent aria ‘No, non mi basterà bocca vezzosa’ draws from Ms. Invernizzi vocalism that throbs with emotion. Feo having been Gizzi’s pupil, it must be assumed that he knew his teacher’s voice intimately: he might have known Ms. Invernizzi’s just as well. ‘Volo il mio sangue a spargere,’ an aria sung by Idelberto in Nicola Porpora’s 1723 Adelaide, is dashingly delivered, every tone placed with dramatic impact and the words fizzing like sparkling wine. The pair of Ariodante’s arias from Sarro’s Ginerva principessa di Scozia, an homage to the native Britain of James Francis Edward Stuart, the deposed Prince of Wales and a prominent patron of the Arts at his Italian court-in-exile, ‘Povero amor tradito’ and ‘Cieca nave, infidi sguardi,’ are powerfully traversed. It was in a secondary rôle in Sarro’s Il Valdemaro that the fifteen-year-old Caffarelli made his professional début in 1726, alongside Gizzi’s performance of the rôle of Sveno. If Gizzi sang the aria ‘La brama di regno si unisce ad amore’ as engrossingly as Ms. Invernizzi sings it on this disc, Caffarelli cannot have failed to have been inspired by the experience. The soprano’s beautiful sustained tones in ‘Crude Parche, deh, accrescete’ from Scarlatti’s Telemaco afford great pleasure, and she manages to make something very unique of the formulaic coloratura in ‘O a morire, o a goder.’ His participation in the creation of Leonardo Vinci’s 1726 Didone abbandonata was one of the great triumphs of Gizzi’s Roman sojourn, and Ms. Invernizzi’s fantastic coloratura in Araspe’s aria ‘Amor che nasce colla speranza’ channels the vivacity with which Gizzi must have sung the music. Here and in the aria ‘Su la pendice alpina,’ her upper register glistens, and her embellishing of the vocal lines is unfailingly intelligent. Without overextending the music, she reveals what an inventive, resourceful singer she is. It is impossible to know how any of the revered castrati of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries sounded. Contemporary accounts of their voices are often contradictory, and many of the artistic representations of their stage presences are unflattering caricatures. A prevalent debate in the Baroque revival during the past half-century has concerned whether operatic rôles composed for castrati are more effectively cast in modern times with female or male singers. There are no sure answers for questions about the general suitability of certain types of voices for music created by castrati, but Roberta Invernizzi here makes a persuasive argument for her supremacy in performances of rôles originated by higher-voiced castrati. Her singing on Arias for Domenico Gizzi is distinguished by technical finesse and an laudable lack of attempts to affect masculinity. Like Kirsten Flagstad in the music of Wagner, Maria Callas in bel canto, and Magda Olivero in verismo, Roberta Invernizzi approaches this collection of arias sung by Domenico Gizzi with pure musicality. It is an approach that yields glorious results. Looking Back: A tribute to 60’s music and dedication to my best friend—Rich Stephen, all vocals and instruments [Recorded in 2014; Private release, DVR 2014; NOTE: Looking Back is not available commercially. All arrangements are the intellectual property of Rich Stephen. Copyrights are held by the original artists and/or songwriters, and no performance rights are stated or implied.] There are many extremely talented musicians active in all genres of music today, and that is a fact that is acknowledged far too infrequently. Today’s musicians are, on the whole, better educated, better equipped, and better prepared for careers than their counterparts in any previous generation, but this progress is not consistently rewarded with better music-making. The well-schooled musician is not necessarily the well-informed musician, and a musician with a haphazard knowledge of the roots in his own musical garden may achieve technical perfection without ever attaining a level of connection with the life force beyond lyrics and melodies. Whether in recordings of Beethoven piano sonatas, Verdi operas, Mahler symphonies, jazz riffs, R&B ballads, or pop hits, what is sadly so seldom heard on albums now is true, discernible affection for music itself. Clinical precision is perhaps its own kind of love, but it is one that is perceived by the listener only with the greatest difficulty. Where are today’s Dave Brubeck, Eric Burdon, and Glenn Gould, artists whose recordings seemed to say, ‘This is who I am, this is what I do, and if it does not appeal to you, listen to something else’? This is the spirit of Rich Stephen’s Looking Back. This disc is not an egotistical commercial exercise, a stepping stone in a quest for stardom, or a venture with ulterior, non-musical motives. Rich Stephen loves music and the incredible power that it has to immortalize people, places, and emotions in our lives in ways that memories cannot replicate. Looking Back is not meant to be a chart-topping effort from a neglected star singer: rather, it is one man’s journey through songs and experiences shared with friends. That is the purest essence of music and the quality that makes Looking Back a vastly more fulfilling experience than the over-processed endeavors of musicians whose artistic achievements are measured in dollars and cents, not hours with friends and unforgettable jam sessions that no other ears will ever hear. Providing lead and harmonizing vocals and playing a dizzying array of instruments—Fender Stratocaster, Lead III, and Mustang guitars, Prestige electric guitar, Yamaha acoustic guitar, Ibanez bass guitar, Casio CT-700 keyboard, Kurzweil Mark 3 digital piano, Zoom RhythmTrak RT-123, Olds Ambassador trumpet, Starmaker Garimet cornet, Buescher alto saxophone, and Huang Silvertone deluxe harmonica!—on the cuts on Looking Back, Mr. Stephen takes the listener on a chronological journey through some of his favorite songs from the 1960s. A member of a successful band called The Right Ways, active in metropolitan Chicago during the latter half of the ‘60s, he pays homage to an era that he experienced first-hand during his own musical infancy. Along with his best friend Art Gall (1951 – 2012), to whose memory Looking Back is dedicated, he launched his career as an avid concertgoer in 1965 with a performance by The Beatles—as auspicious an introduction to contemporary Rock ‘n Roll as any aspiring musician might desire. The Beatles medley is one of the most enjoyable tracks on Looking Back. Beginning with a boyishly spirited account of ‘Love Me Do’ (1962), he traverses the too-little-heard ‘Boys’ (1963), previously recorded by The Shirelles in 1960, ‘Slow Down’ (1964), and George Harrison’s tremendous ‘If I Needed Someone’ (1965), also a hit for The Hollies, all sung with heart and surer pitch than is sometimes heard on the original recordings. Mr. Stephen appropriately closes the disc with the The Beatles’ 1965 ‘In My Life,’ one of the finest numbers in the Lennon – McCartney songbook: the combination of wistfulness and optimism in Mr. Stephen’s vocals honors John Lennon’s inimitable style without attempting to emulate it, and he exhibits a winsome lightness of touch in his rendering of Sir George Martin’s Bach-inspired piano ritornello. Mr. Stephen’s performances of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Fire’ (1967) and The Doors’ ‘Touch Me’ (1969) incorporate recordings of Art Gall’s vocals from 1989 rehearsal footage, seamlessly integrated into the 2014 tracks. Here, as in The Beatles covers, Mr. Stephen does not attempt to replicate Hendrix’s and Jim Morrison’s unique vocals, but his own singing, combined with the archival sampling of Mr. Gall’s vocals, is rousingly effective. Fellow Illinois band The American Breed’s ‘Step Out Of Your Mind’ receives particularly fresh treatment from Mr. Stephen, his confident performance of the melodic line improving upon Gary Loizzo’s vocals in the original 1967 recording. Sam Cooke’s 1960 ‘Wonderful World,’ one of the truly emblematic songs of the ‘60s that was also successfully recorded by Herman’s Hermits, is delightfully and imaginatively sung by Mr. Stephen, and he soars through The Drifters’ 1961 ‘Sweets for My Sweet,’ the original recording of which featured a then-undiscovered Dionne Warwick as a backup singer, and Martha and the Vandellas’ 1963 ‘Heat Wave,’ in which he provides Motown styling that Martha Reeves would surely applaud. Mr. Stephen unites his Chicago roots and the British Merseybeat with his performance of The Searchers’ 1963 ‘Sugar and Spice,’ a number-two hit in the UK that was also a success for Illinois band The Cryan’ Shames in 1966, and his accounts of The Zombies’ ‘She’s Not There’ (1964)—a rare minor-key number with which Santana also charted more than a decade later—and The Yardbirds’ rhythm-driven ‘For Your Love’ (1965) confirm his credentials as a razor’s-edge rocker. Sam and Dave’s 1966 classic ‘Hold On, I’m Comin’’ and Brenton Wood’s 1967 ‘Gimme Little Sign’—a great song now more familiar, for better or worse, via Peter Andre’s later version—give Mr. Stephen the opportunity to flex his impressive soul muscles, and his fantastic rendition of ‘Kind Of A Drag’ (1966) is a brilliant tribute to fellow Chicagoans The Buckinghams. Mr. Stephen’s way with Todd Rundgren’s 1968 ‘Hello It’s Me,’ originally recorded by his band Nazz, revels in the funk vibes that made the song so attractive to Mary J. Blige and John Legend. Musically, the pinnacle of Looking Back is Mr. Stephen’s stirring performance of The Grass Roots’ ‘Midnight Confessions’ (1968), in which his vocals give the arching melody the gleaming freedom it demands but seldom receives. [I heard the then-current incarnation of The Grass Roots perform ‘Midnight Confessions’ in Westbury, New York, in 2013: Mr. Stephen sings it markedly better.] In all of the tracks on this disc, Mr. Stephen adapts his laser-bright timbre to the stylistic nuances of the music without abandoning the singular vocal signature that he imprints on each song, and his skills on all of the instruments at his disposal are splendid. ‘Looking Back,’ the disc’s title track, is Mr. Stephen’s self-penned tribute to Mr. Gall, and it serves both as a moving remembrance of a beloved friend and fellow artist and a fitting overview of Mr. Stephen’s musical upbringing and accomplishments. The song’s hook is immediately alluring, and the depths of emotion that Mr. Stephen conveys in his vocals and accompaniment are evidence of the compelling sincerity of the song’s message. Both its eponymous track and Looking Back as a whole epitomize the ethos missing from so many of the ridiculously-hyped albums churned out by the commercial recording industry. They also remind the listener that one man with a pervasive, unaffected love for music can make a recording that shames the phony efforts of labels with deep pockets and legions of cynical would-be ‘stars.’ To learn more about Rich Stephen and his work as a musician, please visit his website. PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY / Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский (1840 – 1893): Iolanta (Иоланта), Op. 69—Anna Netrebko (Iolanta), Sergey Skorokhodov (Count Vaudémont), Alexey Markov (Robert), Vitalij Kowaljow (King René), Luka Debevec Mayer (Bertrand), Lucas Meachem (Ibn-Hakia), Junho You (Alméric), Monika Bohinec (Martha), Theresa Plut (Brigitta), Nuška Drašček Rojko (Laura); Slovenian Chamber Choir; Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra; Emmanuel Villaume, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during concert performances at the Philharmonie Essen, Germany, in November 2012; Deutsche Grammophon 479 3969; 2 CDs, 93:02; Available from Amazon, iTunes, jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Premièred in St Petersburg on 18 December 1892, less than a year before its composer’s death, Iolanta was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s final opera and, in many ways, one that summarized his career as a composer for the operatic stage. Setting a libretto by his brother Modest, Tchaikovsky peeled away the artifice of the aggrandized tale of Yolande de Lorraine, who almost certainly was not blind, and replaced it with an idealized but red-blooded humanity. As in Yevgeny Onegin and Pikovaya dama, the central theme of individual isolation lends Iolanta depth that heightens the sense of connection among the princess who does not know that she is blind, the man who loves her in spite of her trials, and the audience, and, as in Nutcracker and Swan Lake, even the happy ending is not without suggestions of ambivalence. To modern ears, some of the sentiments expressed in Iolanta seem quaint, perhaps even misogynistic, but to the extraordinarily sensitive Tchaikovsky, a genius perennially at odds with the society into which he was born, Iolanta must have seemed a kindred spirit. For her, blindness—the barrier to her complete acceptance by society, by which she is pitied and shielded—is not a disability, disease, or disorder: it is a reality of which she is aware despite not knowing that her blindness separates her from her physical and social surroundings. This surely resonated with Tchaikovsky, whose correspondence from the final year of his life discloses a despondent weariness with the necessity of false conformity. Recorded during concert presentations in the Philharmonie Essen with the sonic excellence for which Deutsche Grammophon titles have been renowned throughout the label’s history, this recording of Iolanta allows this wonderful score to resonate with a new generation of listeners. Perhaps much of the interest in this recording will be prompted by the famous name at the head of the cast. So be it. In this case, the bearer of that name justifies its prominence and must be thanked for giving Tchaikovsky’s endearing heroine an opportunity to transport listeners beyond what can be seen. Conducted with persuasive Gallic refinement by Emmanuel Villaume, the Slovenian Chamber Choir and Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra approach Tchaikovsky’s music with energy and sophistication. There is in Iolanta a pervasive kinship with the music of Jules Massenet, and Maestro Villaume instinctively responds to the melancholic Francophile undercurrents in the score, exercising a firm control on thematic development in ensembles. Massenet and Tchaikovsky shared a great affection for Mozart, and even in this final opera of his career there is a Mozartean grace in Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations. Maestro Villaume avoids inflating any phrase or scene to dimensions greater than the music can sustain. Starting with strongly-sung accounts of ‘Vot tebe lyutiki’ (‘Вот, тебе, лютики’) and ‘Spi, pust' angelï krïlami navevayut snï’ (‘Спи, пусть ангелы крылами навевают сны’), the choristers convincingly portray the differing rôles assigned to them, sounding comfortable with Tchaikovsky’s most stringent demands. The orchestral players leave no doubt that the musical glories of Slovenia’s past, when Ljubljana was a jewel in the diadem alongside Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, have been lovingly maintained. The strings produce formidably sure intonation that complements the earthy wind playing, combining Germanic rectitude with Mediterranean flexibility. This is an ideal formula for playing the music of Tchaikovsky, whose unmistakably Russian musicality was spiced with doses of French cosmopolitanism, Teutonic ruggedness, and Italianate rusticity. Those who assume that Iolanta is an inferior score because it is performed less frequently than Yevgeny Onegin or Pikovaya dama do Tchaikovsky a great disservice: Maestro Villaume and the Slovenian Philharmonic forces affirm that Iolanta is smaller in stature than her siblings but equally effective, musically and dramatically. As Iolanta’s companions Brigitta and Laura, Canadian soprano Theresa Plut and Slovenian mezzo-soprano Nuška Drašček Rojko sing attractively, bringing delightfully unique touches to their performances and combining flawlessly with Slovenian mezzo-soprano Monika Bohinec’s Martha in their sumptuous little trio. Ms. Bohinec is an alert singer with a distinctive voice, and she aptly conveys affection and concern for Iolanta. Singing Bertrand with a robust timbre and apparent dramatic instincts, bass-baritone Luka Debevec Mayer is a suitable consort for Ms. Bohinec’s Martha. His slightly imperious demeanor is appropriate for the castle doorkeeper who, like Raimondo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, is the de facto guardian of King René and his family honor. South Korean tenor Junho You makes a similarly positive impression in his duties as Alméric, King René's armor-bearer. Few performances, whether on stage or on disc, enjoy such consistently fine work in supporting rôles: great indeed were the vocal riches of medieval Burgundy! American baritone Lucas Meachem is here given a vehicle in which to display his virile, brusquely beautiful voice in music that enables this tremendously gifted young singer to show what he can do. There are in his interpretation of the Moorish physician Ibn-Hakia unexpectedly noble sentiments. Far too often, this rôle is enacted as an uncomfortable stereotype, but Mr. Meachem finds in his music sympathetic threads of sincerity and feeling. The celebrated monologue ‘Dva mira’ (‘Два мира: плотский и духовный’) is the cornerstone of the part, and Mr. Meachem manages its sixteenth-note triplets and sustained top F♯ with absolute freedom and panache. Hearing his performance, it is unusually obvious that Ibn-Hakia plays a crucial part in the emotional transition that accompanies the physical restoration of Iolanta’s sight. Frequently merely a conjurer, Ibn-Hakia is in Mr. Meachem’s hands a true healer. This brilliantly-sung performance raises hopes that, in time, recordings of his Onegin and Yeletsky will follow. As Robert, the man torn between his duty to honor an arranged betrothal to Iolanta and his passionate love for another woman, Russian baritone Alexey Markov exudes chivalrous masculinity in singing of power and security. In Robert’s aria extolling the virtues of his true love, ‘Kto možet sravnit'sya’ (‘Кто может сравниться с Матильдой моей’), he negotiates the high tessitura—the second note of the aria is a sustained top E, leading quickly to a sustained top F♯—with refreshing ease, and his fortissimo top G is a thrilling tone. Like Mr. Meachem, Mr. Markov eschews all vestiges of conventional operatic preening and sings his rôle with compelling honesty. The scene in which Robert agrees to honor his commitment to Iolanta though his heart belongs to another is strangely moving thanks to Mr. Markov’s forthright performance. It is impossible not to think of Tchaikovsky himself feeling forced to wed, contrary to his desires, in order to keep up appearances. Vocally, Mr. Markov’s Robert is a marvel, and it is heartening to hear a young singer trusting a composer’s music so implicitly. A fusion of Verdi’s Rigoletto and Simon Boccanegra, Wagner’s Wotan, and Tchaikovsky’s own Kochubey in Mazeppa, King René in Iolanta is a flawed but earnestly protective father whose actions are inspired by recognition of even a king’s inability to thwart social stigmas. As sung by Swiss-Ukrainian bass Vitalij Kowaljow, he is a warmly sonorous presence whose good nature does not prevent a streak of iron from showing when his daughter’s wellbeing seems jeopardized. Though his vibrato occasionally loosens slightly, Mr. Kowaljow’s command of the range required by René music is appreciable. In the king’s arioso, ‘Gospod' moy, esli grešen ya’ (‘Господь мой, если грешен я’), the singer unperturbedly traverses the two octaves from F2 to F4 and exhibits no fear in the repeated ascents to top E♭. The gruffness of his threats of execution does not fully disguise a basic geniality, and he enhances the dignity of his performance with his clear, unaffected enunciation of text. It is a pity that Russian is notoriously difficult for non-native speakers because it is a gorgeous language for singing, something that Mr. Kowaljow makes particularly noticeable in this performance. King René launches the opera’s finale with ‘Prosti menya, ya obmanul tebya’ (‘Прости меня, я обманул тебя’), and Mr. Kowaljow sings it confidently. His well-supported, dark-hued sound brings to mind the voices of Feodor Chaliapin and Mark Reizen, and even when René’s decisions are misguided this singer’s deliveries of them are assured and appealing. For excitement, intensity, and golden tone, the performance of Russian tenor Sergey Skorokhodov as Count Vaudémont is astounding. To date, this young singer’s repertory at the Mariinsky ranges from Donizetti's Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor and Nemorino in L'elisir d'amore to Wagner's Lohengrin and the Shepherd in Szymanowski's Król Roger, and his experience with these rôles prepared him to impersonate a Vaudémont of ringing ardor. He begins his romance, ‘Net! Čarï lask krasï myatežnoy’ (‘Нет! Чары ласк красы мятежной’), with an endearing aura of lovesick wonder, and he is little bothered by the high tessitura of the aria proper, which opens on top A♭. He rises to the long-held top B♭ with total security. In the wonderful duet with Iolanta, ‘Čudnïy pervenec tvoren'ya’ (‘Чудный первенец творенья’), the outpouring of firm, youthful tone is encouraging. Throughout his performance, Mr. Skorokhodov sings with a very welcome lack of traditional tenor posturing, credibly portraying a young man near to bursting with new love. This sometimes leads to a sameness of approach and bluntness of phrasing, but the lyric splendor of the voice disarms complaint. Mr. Skorokhodov is clearly an invaluable treasure of the Mariinsky, one whose 2010 Metropolitan Opera début in Shostakovich’s The Nose continued the legacy of great Russian tenor singing in New York exemplified in the 1990s by Vladimir Atlantov, and this performance confirms the legitimacy of his place in the tradition of the legendary Ivan Kozlovsky. In her performance of the title rôle in Iolanta, a portrayal that she brings to the Metropolitan Opera in the current season, soprano Anna Netrebko displays the full panoply of the qualities that elevated her to the top of her profession. One of the most acclaimed sopranos of her generation, Ms. Netrebko is an important singer who has not always sounded like one. In her—or her management’s—quest for stardom on the world’s stages, she has appropriated bel canto and Verdi rôles to which the voice is not ideally suited by nature, and her musical success has been sporadic. Even in her native Russian, her diction is imperfect, but as Iolanta she offers an example of the Anna Netrebko of worldwide adulation. In Iolanta’s arioso, ‘Otčego ėto prežde ne znala’ (‘Отчего это прежде не знала’), its tessitura centered in the lower octave of the voice, Ms. Netrebko sings lusciously, the tone focused and caressing the line cresting on top A♭. The duet with Vaudémont, ‘Čudnïy pervenec tvoren'ya’ (‘Чудный первенец творенья’), finds her interacting with Mr. Skorokhodov with unforced chemistry, and she takes the profusion of top As and the exhilarating top B♭ at the duet’s end in stride, the voice remaining secure and capably-projected. Her phrasing of ‘Gde ya? Kuda vedyoš' menya tï, vrač!’ (‘Где я? Куда ведешь меня ты, врач!’) and ‘Blagoy, velikiy, neizmennïy’ (‘Благой, великий, неизменный’) in the opera’s final scene is masterful, and the immediacy of the dramatic profile that she creates for Iolanta is specific but nuanced. In every scene in which she appears, she matches an insightful understanding of her rôle with an authoritative grasp of the music. The intermittent blowsiness of her tone here seems to result from the increased weight and amplitude of the voice rather than from hard use, and the solidity of her intonation throughout the range is wonderful. Iolanta is a near-perfect fit for Ms. Netrebko, and it is a joy to hear her sing the part so meaningfully and with such uncompromising musicality. With Ms. Netrebko and Mr. Markov reprising their rôles in this season’s Metropolitan Opera première of Iolanta, opening on 26 January, the opera’s familiarity will hopefully expand exponentially. An eloquent, strangely bewitching product of Tchaikovsky’s mature genius, the score is worthy of the respect and recognition devoted to Yevgeny Onegin and Pikovaya dama. In this recording, Iolanta is superbly performed by an ensemble of musicians who understand its worth and potential, and in the company of dedicated colleagues the leading lady proves that she is a significant artist, not just a cleverly-managed approximation of one. Iolanta is an opera that reminds the listener that each of us is blind to some aspect of life, and Deutsche Grammophon’s recording provides an eye-opening experience. Coming soon to a Forbidden City near you: soprano Othalie Graham, leading lady of Opera Carolina’s 2015 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot [Photo © Othalie Graham; used with permission] The individual fortunate enough to have heard any of the very few truly great interpreters—Dame Eva Turner, Gina Cigna, Gertrude Grob-Prandl, Birgit Nilsson, Dame Gwyneth Jones—or, to an even greater extent, unfortunate enough to have experienced the legions of under-prepared, undernourished, and simply bewildered exponents cannot possibly dispute the assertion that Puccini’s Turandot is one of the most demanding, destructive, and mistreated rôles in the soprano repertory. Perhaps the most damning mistake a potential Turandot can make is thinking that the foremost challenge of the part is the tessitura. Few things in opera are more terrifying than the pair of top Cs that Turandot must fire over the chorus in Act Two, and the profusion of top Bs and Cs is throat-numbing, but the Turandot who primarily focuses on the exposed high notes—something that she should not have to do in that musical utopia in which singers only sing rôles for which their voices are suited and reliably possess the required notes with being forced to rob Tosca to pay Turandot—deprives both herself and the audience of the true glories of the part. These glories—the insecurity masquerading as cruelty, the blissful discombobulation of true love, the gritty self-preservation and marvels of self-discovery—are indelible traits in the Turandot of soprano Othalie Graham. In a production opening on 24 January 2015, she brings her acclaimed portrayal of Puccini’s most granitic heroine to Charlotte’s Opera Carolina opposite the Calàf of Carl Tanner and the Liù of Dina Kuznetsova: courtesy of Opera Carolina, a bona fide princess will be enthroned in the Queen City. Canadian by birth and American by adoption, Ms. Graham is Italian by nature—musical nature, at least. She is an artist with a rare gift not just for singing Puccini heroines but for inhabiting them, for finding within the pages of the composer’s scores fully-formed women whose emotions she feels, not feigns. As Minnie in La fanciulla del West, a rôle in which many sopranos seem to focus almost obsessively on the climactic exposed top C in ‘Laggiù nel Soledad’ while the nuances of the part are neglected, Ms. Graham surrenders herself completely to the golden-hearted girl’s predicament, shaping the narrative with attention to dramatic verisimilitude rather than individual notes. Of course, this is an easier task when, as in her case, the notes are in the voice and the singer knows it. Similar insightfulness is at the core of her interpretation of Turandot. Complete cognizance of one’s own voice is rare enough, but the ability to translate one’s vocal capabilities into a lushly-realized spectrum of emotional colors is even more precious. These traits define Ms. Graham’s singing in any repertory, but in Puccini’s music for Turandot they initiate her into the exalted company of the handful of sopranos whose portrayals of the ‘principessa di gelo’ melted the frosty separation between the character and audiences. Principessa altera: soprano Othalie Graham in the title rôle of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot [Photo used with permission] In practical terms, Turandot is a rôle without precedent in the Italian repertory, and Ms. Graham views her as both one of the greatest challenges and an uncommonly rewarding opportunity for a soprano. ‘I love to play a character that has such an incredible arc,’ she says. ‘For Turandot to start off so icy and imperious while having a continually-running undercurrent of vulnerability makes it a lot more fun!’ More than many Turandots, for whom trumpeting out the notes is the paramount concern, Ms. Graham is particularly attentive to the subtler nuances of the part. ‘I think that she has to have that soft underbelly that she continually covers with her rhinoceros hide! It makes Act Three much more believable,’ she suggests. This philosophy is evident in her approach to the opera, which combines indefatigable musicality with an exceptional degree of sensitivity. It is a philosophy that extends to many aspects of life and Art, Ms. Graham feels. If she could give Turandot advice, she muses, ‘I would tell her that it’s okay to be such a strong woman but that she has to allow herself to open enough to let love in. I think that’s true of many women.’ The relationship between Turandot and her father, Emperor Altoum, is of great but often overlooked significance to the plot of Turandot. Because of her own life experience, Ms. Graham is uniquely responsive to this element of the drama. ‘Before I head to makeup,’ she confides, ‘when I arrive at the theater, I always walk out to the stage and kneel down and ask God to help my father hear me sing. I lost my father, the great love of my life, when I was twenty-five years old and he was forty-eight. There is nothing more important to me than knowing that he hears me.’ As she faces Turandot’s father on stage, her thoughts fly to her own father, and love for him soars in her voice as she sings ‘In questa reggia.’ ‘Right before I sing that fiendishly difficult aria, I always look up, knowing that he’s there and that he hears me,’ she shares. The intensity of her connection with her father is paralleled by the bond between Turandot and her imperial sire, and it is indicative of Ms. Graham’s commitment to her artistry that, even from behind the curtain, she shares such an intimate aspect of herself with audiences via song. For many sopranos bold enough to sing Turandot, the foremost goal of a performance is survival. For Ms. Graham, the goal is and must always be beauty. Her abiding objectives are to honor Puccini’s requests and to do so in ways that draw audiences into the innermost depths of Turandot’s heart. ‘I always want them to remember the beauty of my voice and the beauty of my portrayal of a woman who is incredibly strong yet beautifully vulnerable,’ she states. That she achieves these objectives so exquisitely is the hallmark of a great artist. What Ms. Graham brings to Turandot is precisely what the character lacks in so many performances: humanity. Here, at last, is a Turandot worth losing one’s head for! ♪ ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ To learn more about Othalie Graham, visit her Official Website. She is represented in the United States by Uzan International Artists. Opera Carolina’s production of Puccini’s Turandot opens on Saturday, 24 January. Additional performances are scheduled for 29 January and 1 February. For more information and to book tickets, visit Opera Carolina’s website. Sincerest thanks to Ms. Graham for her kindness, candor, and time in responding to questions during rehearsals for Opera Carolina’s Turandot. Photos are reproduced with Ms. Graham’s permission. FRANCESCO MARIA VERACINI (1690 – 1768): Adriano in Siria—Sonia Prina (Adriano), Ann Hallenberg (Farnaspe), Roberta Invernizzi (Emirena), Romina Basso (Sabina), Lucia Cirillo (Idalma), Ugo Guagliardo (Osroa); Europa Galante; Fabio Biondi, conductor [Recorded in conjunction with a concert performance in the Grosser Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, Vienna, Austria, 17 – 19 January 2014; Fra Bernardo fb 1409491; 3 CD, 172:00; Available from Amazon (USA), Amazon (UK), jpc, Presto Classical, and major music retailers] Thanks to the efforts of artists as diverse as Luisa Tetrazzini, Richard Tucker, Maurice André, and Frans Brüggen, the name and music of Francesco Maria Veracini have never fully disappeared as have those of many composers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Accounts of Veracini’s life are almost certainly blends of fact, fiction, and the ridiculously fanciful: different sources suggest that, based upon their chronologies of the composer’s life in the public eye, he possessed the admirable ability to be in two distant parts of Europe simultaneously. The son of an affluent family of musicians and artists, Veracini was one of the most admired violinists of his generation, one whose bowing technique allegedly shamed even the great Tartini. As a composer, his reputation among his contemporaries seems to have been more variable: Charles Burney, who was never more prolific or imaginative than when being nasty, thought Veracini’s music unimpressive and his temperament even less attractive. What he lacked in charm he surely had in artistic merit, however, and the enduring presence of his work, albeit a minute fraction of his output, is suggestive of musical craftsmanship of the first order. In this performance of his opera Adriano in Siria, recorded by Fra Bernardo with clarity that combines the precision of recording in studio with the verve of live performance, the neglected brilliance of Veracini is polished to diamond-brightness by the efforts of a team of extraordinary musicians. In truth, the cast assembled for this performance could make the most banal music seem important, but in Adriano in Siria they find music worthy of their best efforts. Rediscovered and meticulously prepared for performance by insightful musicologist Holger Schmitt-Hallenberg, Adriano in Siria is a fascinating score, this recording of which is a considerable milestone in the appreciation of Veracini’s artistry. Premièred by the Opera of the Nobility at the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1735 by a cast that included Farinelli, Senesino, and Francesca Cuzzoni, the opera enjoyed acclaim that, like that of many celebrated operas in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, was short-lived. Even superb scores were shelved as tastes changed, and this was particularly true in London, where, by the time of the first performance of Adriano in Siria, interest in Italian opera was already waning. In the case of Veracini’s opera, this was perhaps fortuitous: it is difficult to fathom a cast in subsequent generations matching the musical prowess attributed to Farinelli, Senesino, and Cuzzoni. Mr. Schmitt-Hallenberg has produced a performing edition of the opera that reveals the splendor that it surely possessed when it was first heard in 1735. His thoughtful management of the surviving musical material provides a score with impressive consistency of inspiration and dramatic impetus that, in the hands of alert singers, generates excitement and organic continuity even in the contexts of concert performances and a recording. Vitally, Mr. Schmitt-Hallenberg has given Veracini the gift of a performing edition of Adriano in Siria in which not one note seems superfluous. A rejuvenated Baroque opera could not hope for better handling than Adriano in Siria receives from Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante. Many of Maestro Biondi’s baton-wielding colleagues have intriguing ideas about infusing Baroque scores with historically-informed practices, but Maestro Biondi has confirmed in a progression of lauded performances and recordings that his guiding philosophy as a conductor is that, whether a score was composed by Bononcini or Bellini, the fundamental element of any piece is rhythm. In this performance, the commitment to following the lead of the composer’s rhythmic patterns is especially apparent, and Maestro Biondi and the Europa Galante musicians follow Veracini’s blueprints expertly, constructing a compelling musical edifice. Giangiacomo Pinardi’s playing of the theorbo and the harpsichord playing of Paola Poncet give the continuo variety and unflagging momentum, and the Europa Galante string and wind players produce sounds of stylish beauty that complement the kaleidoscopic emotional colorations of the music. As ever, Maestro Biondi and Europa Galante collaborate to create a musical environment in which the composer’s requirements and the singers’ needs, both musical and dramatic, are fused in a way that preserves the integrity of historically-informed performance values without jeopardizing the vitality of the performance or the freshness of the dramatic feast prepared by the cast. Unfortunately, many singers seemingly still believe that successful performances of music of the vintage of Adriano in Siria require special vocal modifications. While it is a gross oversimplification to suggest that a singer either can or cannot sing music like Veracini’s, there is a measure of truth in the assertion that a singer either has or has not the technical acumen needed for Baroque opera. The mistaken assumption made by a number of singers is that artificially altering the inherent qualities of voices trained to sing other repertories constitutes approaching Baroque music informedly. Whitening the tone and gingerly pecking at notes do not render a performance stylistically appropriate: rather, these devices make a performance dull and unfocused for both artists and audience. In terms of fostering a successful international career with aspirations to longevity, specialization is dangerous in today’s opera environment, but the unnaturally broad versatility forced on young singers is even more perilous for vocal health. The singers engaged for Adriano in Siria offer examples of the most intelligent blends of specialization and versatility. Just as Maestro Biondi understands that the bones that support musical flesh are rhythms, these artists truly understand that successfully singing Baroque music does not depend upon singing nothing else. The key is technique, which until the last performance of a singer’s career should be a work in progress. What these singers comprehend is that building the technical foundation needed to sing Baroque music is not restricting: wrapping the voice around music like Veracini’s unlocks artistic doors that singers with less cognizance of their own voices can only force open with great risk. Bass Ugo Guagliardo brings to his portrayal of the Parthian king Osroa a sturdy voice with an imposing presence that does not inhibit flexibility in coloratura. In Osroa’s aria in Act One, ‘Sprezza il furor del vento,’ he sonorously imparts the majestic power of the elements described by the text. The regal authority of the character is grandly served by Mr. Guagliardo’s singing of Osroa’s aria in Act Two, ‘Se mai piagato a morte.’ The vigor of his singing of ‘Non ritrova un'alma forte’ in Act Three is very effective, the singer clearly almost tasting the words. It is often dismaying to observe how lazy singers are when singing in their own languages, but Mr. Guagliardo enunciates the Italian text with brio. He shares with all of the singers in this cast a flair for animating secco recitative. Rousingly as he sings his arias, Mr. Guagliardo’s most valuable contribution to this recording is perhaps his leadership of the cast in their creation of a credible drama in which characters interact and respond to one another. The captive Parthian princess Idalma receives from mezzo-soprano Lucia Cirillo one of this excellent singer’s most enjoyable recorded performances. She, too, makes much of the text, coloring her native Italian vowels to reflect the moods of the words. ‘Per punir l'ingrato amante,’ Idalma’s aria in Act One, is sung with great depth of feeling, and her aria in Act Two, ‘Saggio guerriero antico,’ inspires Ms. Cirillo to particularly effective singing, her technique making light of the difficulty of the music. In Act Three, the power of her singing of the aria ‘Più bella al tempo usato’ is startling. Ms. Cirillo shepherds her resources very shrewdly, saving the most arresting hues of her vocalism for moments of greatest dramatic significance. This singer has graced a number of valuable recordings with her singing, but in this performance she achieves new heights of technical and histrionic excellence. In Veracini’s music for Sabina, Italian mezzo-soprano Romina Basso uses her smoky timbre like a dagger, penetrating the heart of the drama with her every utterance. The fire that she ignites in her accompagnato in Act One, ‘Io piango? Ah, no,’ and the aria that follows, ‘Numi, se giusti siete,’ blazes until the last note that she sings in this performance, and she exploits every facet of her remarkable musicianship to portray the wronged woman with depth and dignity. Sabina’s aria in Act Two, ‘Ah, ingrato m'inganni nel darmi speranza,’ receives from Ms. Basso a performance of tremendous musicality and spine-tingling intensity. In Act Three, her account of ‘Digli ch'è un infedele digli che mi tradì’ boils with justified indignation, and she resplendently blends her voice with that of her Adriano in their duetto ‘Prendi, o caro, mio sostegno.’ Ms. Basso is the kind of singer whose performances reveal unexplored aspects of familiar music. In performance of a rediscovered score like Adriano in Siria, she makes new magic with each subsequent phrase. She is a busy singer but one who could never be heard often enough. In the part created by Francesca Cuzzoni, Emirena, soprano Roberta Invernizzi provides singing of a quality that furthers her reputation as one of today’s preeminent leading ladies of Baroque opera. Hers is singing that is unfailingly stylish without being a pretentious display of exaltedly artful vocalism. Rather, she sings what the composer has given her—sings at all levels, musical, emotional, and psychological. She is unafraid of occasionally producing an unlovely sound if the drama of her rôle demands it, but this only increases the beauty of her performances. In Emirena’s music, she provides a glorious exhibition of appropriately-scaled singing that highlights the intelligence of Veracini’s vocal writing. The wrenching ‘Prigioniera abbandonata’ in Act One is sung with the sort of vehemence that leads many singers to destroy their voices: Ms. Invernizzi tears the passion from the words, not from her throat. Emirena ends Act One with ‘Un lampo di speranza,’ one of the finest numbers in the score and one that Ms. Invernizzi sings movingly. Both of Emirena’s arias in Act 2, ‘Per te d'eterni allori’ and the stirring ‘Quell'amplesso e quel perdono,’ are given traversals worthy of comparison with Renata Scotto’s singing of Puccini heroines. The concentration of her singing of ‘Quel cor che mi donasti’ in Act Three is unflappable, and her performance of this aria crowns a subtle but sparkling characterization of a rôle in which Cuzzoni herself could hardly have been more memorable. Any singer with Baroque or bel canto inclinations, no matter the progress of the career, should adopt as a critical component of her (or his) training regimen frequently listening to Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg. In Farinelli’s rôle of the Parthian prince Farnaspe, she demonstrates in this recording of Adriano in Siria what a great voice in its prime allied with a technique continually subjected to refining can achieve in Baroque music. Her rôle’s association with Farinelli raises expectations of feats of bravura gallantry, and Ms. Hallenberg does not disappoint. Not even her most extravagant bursts of coloratura are mere displays of her formidable technique, however: she manages to find the dramatic significance of every run, roulade, and trill. Farnaspe’s arias in Act One, ‘Già presso al termine de' suoi martiri,’ ‘Parto, sì, bella tiranna,’ and ‘Ascolta idolo mio dell'alma il bel desio,’ make daunting but widely varying demands upon the singer’s vocal resources, and Ms. Hallenberg responds with uncompromising expertise, differentiating her negotiations of the vocal lines according to Veracini’s requirements but always maintaining dedication to upholding the nobility of the character. After giving a beguiling recital of her abilities in ‘Quel ruscelletto va mormorando,’ she closes Act Two with a heart-stopping performance of ‘Amor, dover, rispetto, nell'agitato petto.’ She, too, soars to the summit of her artistry in Act Three with her singing of ‘Son sventurato ma pure, o stelle,’ in which she paints melodic landscapes with the shimmering emerald and sapphire tones of her voice. Sadly, it is impossible to know how Farinelli might have sounded in this part, but it is possible to imagine that he might have preferred to listen to Ms. Hallenberg sing Farnaspe rather than singing the rôle himself. It was to Senesino that Veracini entrusted the title rôle of the opportunistic Roman emperor Adriano in 1735, and the part receives from contralto Sonia Prina an interpretation in this performance that honors the great castrato’s legacy. In a pair of arias in Act One, ‘Dal labbro che t'accende’ and ‘E' vero che oppresso,’ the singer throws herself into the part with febrile energy and dexterity, conveying the emperor’s masculinity without resorting to unmusical growling. The darkness of the voice’s timbre gives Adriano an immediately-identifiable persona, and Ms. Prina’s technical acumen enables her to bring laudable authority to the sometimes awkward vocal lines customized by the composer for Senesino’s singular capabilities. ‘La ragion, gli affetti ascolta,’ the first of Adriano’s arias in Act Two, is sung with intriguing simplicity, and the bracing sentiments of ‘Tutti nemici e rei’ are expressed in an explosion of bravado. The emotions of the aria ‘Va', superbo, e del tuo fato’ in Act Three are also resolutely communicated through song, but the apogee of Ms. Prina’s realization of Adriano is the duetto with Sabina, ‘Prendi, o cara, in questo amplesso,’ in which she and Ms. Basso—ladies possessing voices so alike yet so different—unite in absolute stylistic and expressive synchronicity. Like her colleagues in this performance, Ms. Prina is not exclusively a Baroque-specialist singer, but her endeavors in Veracini’s music are exclusively adroit. It is rare that a recording of an opera composed in any era in the genre’s history can boast of a cast with no weak links, but Fra Bernardo’s world-première recording of Francesco Maria Veracini’s Adriano in Siria can do just that. The cast of singers for whom the composer created the six rôles in his opera brought together on the stage of the Haymarket a sextet of the most celebrated singers of the Eighteenth Century: the Twenty-First-Century equivalent electrified the storied environs of Vienna’s Konzerthaus with a magnificent performance of Adriano in Siria. The singing preserved on this recording warrants many words of praise, but the two words that are ultimately the most precious are those that this performance inspires for Veracini and Adriano in Siria—welcome back.
1646	dbpedia	1	64	https://www.artistcamp.com/rose-bampton/lebendige-vergangenheit/717281896757/index.html	en	Rose Bampton (Rose Bampton)	https://www.artistcamp.c…mage/favicon.png	https://www.artistcamp.c…mage/favicon.png	[ "https://www.artistcamp.com/image/mes_weiss.png", "https://www.artistcamp.com/image/loginicon.jpg", "https://www.artistcamp.com/image/menue.svg", "https://www.artistcamp.com/store/rose-bampton/lebendige-vergangenheit/717281896757/cover.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Lebendige Vergangenheit - Rose Bampton (Rose Bampton) 01.01.2006	en	/image/apple-touch-icon.png		null	Rose Bampton was born in Lakewood near Cleveland, Ohio, on 28 November 1907, the daughter of a father of Welsh and a mother of German origin. After the family moved from Cleveland to Buffalo, she began studying voice with the local church organist, Seth Clark, and singing in his choir. Because of her obvious vocal talent, he recommended that she continue her studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Bampton had only limited musical experience during her time in Buffalo and it had little lasting effect. During her time in the church choir, she sang coloratura soprano, learning the entire role of Gilda. At Curtis, she soon began having problems with her high range, and her teacher, Horatio Connell, decided she was a mezzo. But while she possessed a fine mezzo sound, she never had a low chest voice. Among her colleagues at the Curtis Institute were Helen Jepson, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber. She studied with Connell for four years. In her fifth year she intended to study with Marcella Sembrich, but when Sembrich became ill, Queena Mario took her place. She was a lyric soprano and a member of New York’s Metropolitan Opera from 1922 to 1938. Under Mario, Bampton learned the roles of Cenerentola and Semiramide. He voice gradually began to gain stability, and she continued to work with Mario even after leaving Curtis. During that period she made the acquaintance of the conductor Wilfried Pelletier, who at the time was married to her teacher and had been a vocal coach at the Met since 1917. Despite the sound training she had received at the Curtis Institute between 1929 and 1932, Bampton continued to have vocal problems. In addition, her teachers had failed to prepare her for the stage, believing that she was better suited to a concert than an operatic career. Nevertheless, she found opportunities to sing a number of stage roles in concert under Leopold Stokowski, including an appearance in Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo and another singing the “trousers role” of Feodor in Boris Godunov. She even made a recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder under Stokowski in which she sang the role of the Wood Dove. Bampton had made her operatic debut in 1929, the year before she entered the Curtis Institute: as Siebel in Faust at the Chautauqua Opera in western New York state. She subsequently joined the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company but was given only minor roles in Carmen, Lakmé and Thaïs. During her time at Curtis, she took advantage of an opportunity to travel to London, where she attended a recital by Elena Gerhardt. Afterward she asked Gerhardt to teach her, and the two became friends and worked together for many years, with Bampton receiving valuable suggestions for the interpretation of lieder and German articulation. Having heard the recording of the Gurrelieder, the Met’s general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, invited Bampton to New York for an audition in 1932. She sang Dalila’s aria from Samson et Dalila “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” as well as “Bel raggio lusinghier” from Semiramide. The conductors who were present at the audition (Tullio Serafin, Artur Bodanzky, Louis Hasselmans, Vincenzo Bellezza and Pelletier) decided that she was a soprano rather than a mezzo. Bampton, however, did not agree with their opinion and in the discussion that followed with Gatti-Casazza, she said she felt she was not yet ready for the Met. She feared that she would be given only minor roles and felt that she was unsuited for them because of her larger-than-average stature. If she came to the Met, she said, then only to sing major roles. The Met promised to meet her demands, and she signed a contract. Bampton’s first performance with the Met ensemble was on 22 November 1932, singing Laura in Amilcare Ponchielli’s La gioconda in Philadelphia, where the Met performed every Tuesday. Her first performance in New York came six days later, again as Laura, with Serafin on the podium and with Rosa Ponselle as Gioconda, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi as Enzo, Armando Borgioli as Barnaba and Tancredi Pasero as Alvise. Other roles she sang during her first Met season were Waltraute (Die Walküre), Sandmännchen (Hänsel und Gretel) and Wellgunde (Das Rheingold). The following year she sang Brangäne in Tristan and a Flower Girl in Parsifal. Among her other major roles were Amneris on 24 March 1933, in the final performance of the Met’s 1932/33 season. She experienced problems with the relatively low range in the first and second acts, but not in the trial scene in the third act, where she could show off her brilliant high range. While in New York she also worked with the celebrated choreographer Martha Graham, who was greatly successful in helping Bampton improve her movement and acting on stage. An early highlight in Bampton’s career came on 31 March and 1 April 1933, when she sang in concert performances of Parsifal conducted by Stokowski in Philadelphia. This was the first time the opera had been broadcast on American radio, and there was a highly positive nationwide response (a fragmentary recording has been preserved). In 1934 Bampton toured the US and Canada as a member of the Metropolitan Quartet (with Grace Moore, soprano [later: Helen Jepson], Edward Johnson, tenor [later: Charles Hackett] and Richard Bonelli, baritone). In 1935 she made a sensational debut at the Hollywood Bowl (singing lieder and arias from operas by Purcell, Rossini, Debussy, Massenet, Mozart, etc.). The following year she resumed touring with a reconstituted Metropolitan Quartet. Pelletier and Bampton married in 1937. …
1646	dbpedia	1	72	https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9910080330602121	en	The dawn of recording : the Julius Block cylinders	https://web.library.wisc…avicon-32x32.png	https://web.library.wisc…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://search.library.wisc.edu/assets/document/sound-a6adbc0a7acee6a19952fc9144733e8623a91c798b25e667530baf13d8357d66.svg", "https://search.library.wisc.edu/assets/gbs_preview_button-ca6001e18294d475cffa1946c53714f6d9113820986b7ff9b0e052b423642576.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://web.library.wisc…e-touch-icon.png		null	schedule Next available on Tuesday 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
1646	dbpedia	2	27	https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/block	en	Marston Records	https://cdn.shopify.com/…peg?v=1447694642	https://cdn.shopify.com/…peg?v=1447694642	[ "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0614/0837/files/m-banner-preferred-1.png", "https://www.marstonrecords.com/cdn/shop/products/53011_large.jpeg?v=1447694642", "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0614/0837/files/FindUs-FB-RGB-1024.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "gramophone recording", "phonograph cylinder recording", "classic recording reissue", "historic piano recording", "historic opera recording", "historic voice recording", "Pathe opera recording", "Pathé opera recording", "Edison recording" ]	null	[ "Marston Records", "Takeshi Takahashi" ]	null	Home page of Marston Records. New release, promotions, and the latest information of the company.		//www.marstonrecords.com/cdn/shop/t/2/assets/favicon.ico?v=136588477034757280881416780421		https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/block	History of the Block Cylinders Julius Block was born in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, (a British colony located in South Africa) in 1858. He had hopes of becoming a musician, but his father, a wealthy businessman who represented two American trading firms in Russia, insisted that he not waste his career on music. Reluctantly, Julius capitulated. Block proved to be an outstanding businessman and the family business in Russia flourished under his leadership, but music remained an essential part of his life. It was this confluence of music and business, linked with ingenuity, drive, persuasiveness, and charm that stimulated one man to create one of the world’s most important surviving musical legacies. In 1889, the young entrepreneur, Julius Block, paid Thomas Edison a visit at his laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, in order to secure a phonograph. Block, an amateur pianist, had read about the tantalizing new invention in European newspapers and immediately recognized its amazing potential: a phonograph could preserve musical performances and capture oral history. Edison demonstrated the phonograph for Block, who eagerly asked to take one back to Russia. Edison agreed. Upon his return to Russia, Block demonstrated the phonograph to Tsar Alexander III and his family; arranging this meeting was no small feat. The presentation was a resounding success. Intrigued, the Tsar asked to purchase a phonograph. Block wired Edison with the request, and soon Block personally presented the Tsar with his own phonograph, complete with a dedication plate from Edison.1 With this demonstration behind him, Block mounted a successful publicity campaign for his phonograph by organizing public exhibitions at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the Moscow Conservatory, the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and other universities and scientific societies. These created a sensation and there was a keen curiosity in many circles throughout St. Petersburg and Moscow to witness this new invention firsthand. Beginning in 1889, one of the earliest dates to record music, Block organized phonographic soirees, which resulted in his greatest accomplishment: documenting some of the most important artists and personalities of his time on cylinder. Within ten years, Block was able to demonstrate his cylinder machine to—and in many cases record—numerous luminaries who lived and passed through Moscow and St. Petersburg. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Anton Rubinstein were among these and each described his reaction to the phonograph in Block’s “Edison Album.” Tchaikovsky called it “the most surprising, most beautiful and most interesting invention of the end of the nineteenth century” Tolstoy predicted the phonograph, like the printing press, would herald a new “epoch in the history of humanity.” Rimsky-Korsakov, with some foresight, saw the possibility of using the phonograph “in a broadcast manner,” adding “” Rubinstein saw in the phonograph a boon to “the PERFORMING artists,” for now their “lamentations that their art is forgotten immediately after the execution are eliminated.” He added, “But ‘gare aux executants’!!!” (sic) (“Performers beware!!!”). This warning could, of course, mean at least two things: that recorded music might take the place of performers or that ephemeral memories of performances might be kinder than the harsh reality of recordings. Rubinstein may have had the latter in mind when Block recorded snippets of a gathering he attended, probably early in January 1890.2 One by one, the guests—including Tchaikovsky (the only surviving cylinder in which he participates), the soprano Elizaveta Lavrovskaya, and the pianist Vasily Safonov (who had just become director of the Moscow Conservatory)—urged Rubinstein to play the piano. Lavrovkskaya sings some trills, Safonov introduces himself, Tchaikovsky pronounces: “Block is great, but Edison is even better!”—and then whistles into the recording horn. Rubinstein remained steadfast in his refusal to perform, but left posterity with a single recorded sentence; referring to the phonograph, Rubinstein said, “What a wonderful thing.” Luckily, others were not so reticent. Because of Block, we can eavesdrop on Josef Hofmann playing a year after Anton Rubinstein’s death; Paul Pabst, a Liszt pupil who died in 1897, performing his own solo transcriptions as well as piano four-hand with Leo Conus and Sergei Taneyev; Anton Arensky performing his own compositions, including excerpts from his famous D Minor Piano Trio in the year of its composition with violinist Jan Hřímalý and cellist Anatoly Brandukov; Maria Klimentova-Muromtzeva, who created the roles of Tatiana and Oksana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Cherevichki, accompanied at the piano by Tchaikovsky’s pupil Taneyev; the great Russian mezzo-soprano Elizaveta Lavrovskaya, who recommended to Tchaikovsky that he compose an opera based on the story of Eugene Onegin; as well as Anna Essipova, Nikolai Figner, Paul Pabst, and many others. Block moved to Germany in 1899. There is no evidence that Block recorded cylinders between 1901 and 1910, but significant recordings do survive from the years 1911 to 1915. These include the 11-year-old Jascha Heifetz one week after his sensational debut with Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic; Nikisch accompanying Elena Gerhardt; Paul Juon, a student of Arensky and Taneyev, playing his own compositions; Leonid Kreutzer, the pianist and teacher at the Berlin Academy of Music, playing four-hand piano with Juon as well as solos by Chopin, Liadov, and Juon; and the 19-year-old-violinist, Eddy Brown, who is accompanied by Block, playing Kreisler, Haydn, Beethoven, and others. Block spent his final years in Vevey, Switzerland with his second wife, where he added Emanuel Moór and his wife, Winifred Christie-Moór to his circle of friends, which included Paul Juon, who was also living in Vevey. While living in Switzerland, Block recorded the pianist Egon Petri and the voices of the Moórs as they listened to Petri. In Vevey, Block also recorded the voices of Leo Tolstoy’s daughter and granddaughter. Julius Block died in 1934, in Switzerland. During his lifetime, Block was quite aware of the importance of his collection. In fact, in his journal Block wrote, “…these are some of the treasures stored up in my phonogram library, and their value will increase with time.”2 He sent several of his cylinders to Edison with the hope that the inventor could preserve them by making moulds of the recordings. Such attempts failed.4 The cylinders that Block sent to Edison were evidently later destroyed in a fire. In 1930, Block began negotiations with the Phonogramm-Archive at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin to preserve his cylinders. Three were turned over to the archive for galvanization that year, with plans to galvanize all the cylinders to assure their preservation. But Block’s death and financial considerations prevented that from happening. After Block’s death, his daughter Nancy donated 359 original wax cylinders to the Phonogramm-Archiv with a catalogue of the cylinders entitled, “Phonogrammothek.” Block’s large collection of musical scores and manuscripts went to Bern University in Switzerland (Bibliothekarin, Institut für Musikwissenschaft).5 According to Block’s son Walter, some of the cylinders also went to an archive in Warsaw, Poland. This would explain the disappearance of a number of cylinders Block mentions in his memoirs and essays. For example, Block refers to recordings of Leopold Auer and of the Eccles cello sonata played by Joseph Press, which are not listed in the “Phonogrammothek.”6 Most intriguingly, Block writes in another essay that he recorded the Tchaikovsky piano trio with Taneyev, Hřímalý, and Brandukov. He said that he recorded the trio specifically for a visit by Tchaikovsky on 7 November 1891, “as a surprise” for the composer. The day before, Tchaikovsky had conducted the premiere of his symphonic poem Voivode in Moscow. The composer was disappointed by the work’s reception and went into a great depression. The meeting at Block’s apartment, with Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest and several mutual friends, including Taneyev and Brandukov, was meant to lift his spirits. The evening began with dinner, but Tchaikovsky’s mood remained dark. After dinner, Block played the recording of his trio, as well as others. Tchaikovsky’s “gloom did not disappear until well on in the phonographic séance. Our maestro was so taken by some of the musical recordings that he continued to listen until the clock struck half past two.”7 If only we knew what other recordings Tchaikovsky listened to that night. Several recordings in this set were recorded before 7 November 1891. These include performances of Tchaikovsky compositions by both Klimentova-Muromtzeva (accompanied by Taneyev) and the tenor Samus. Could it be that Tchaikovsky listened to these very cylinders that night? Many, including Block’s family, believed that all of the cylinders were destroyed during World War II. As his son Walter wrote in 1965: “Unfortunately, the collections in Warsaw and Berlin were destroyed during the second World War. But the collection in Bern is still preserved…”8 Amazingly, many of the Berlin cylinders survived; they had been evacuated to Silesia in 1944 to prevent their destruction.9 They were confiscated by the Russians after the war. The Berlin archive that originally housed the cylinders was located in what soon became Soviet-controlled East Berlin, and it disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. The cylinders themselves were eventually taken to Leningrad where they came to be housed at the Institute of Russian Literature—more commonly known as the Pushkin House (Pushkinsky Dom). Outside the Soviet Union, everyone assumed that the cylinders were forever lost. Interest in the Block cylinders occasionally resurfaced. Block’s son Walter gave a copy of his father’s memoirs to Yale University in 1965. The book contained detailed information about the cylinders. In the early 1990s, a small collection of 24 Block cylinders, together with photographs, papers, and ephemera relating to them appeared and were auctioned in London. The noted New York collector Allen Koenigsberg bought them and wrote an article about the Block cylinders in the Antique Phonograph Monthly in 1992. Within Russia, musicologists were aware that the Block cylinders existed. In the 1990s, news began to filter out to the West about the lone Tchaikovsky cylinder. But only now, as the result of a chance discovery of the remaining cylinders in 2002, can the treasures of the Pushkin House be heard by all. ©John and John Anthony Maltese, 2008 1 Julius Block, Mortals and Immortals: Edison, Nikisch, Tchaikofsky, Tolstoy. Episodes Under Three Tzars. Unpublished manuscript, distributed by Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. H.S.R., ML300 .4 B651 M84, with the compliments of Walter E. Block, 1965, Bermuda, p. 16. 2 This recording is perhaps the most curious cylinder in Block’s collection and additional information is devoted to it in the article, “A Note on the Recordings.” 3 Block, Mortals and Immortals, p. 22. 4 Allen Koenigsberg, “The Russian Connection: Julius H. Block Meets the Czar,” Antique Phonograph Monthly, Vol. 10, no. 4, Issue No. 88, p. 9. 5 It is possible that some Block cylinders also survive in Bern. The Bibliothekarin has several uncatalogued cylinders that may be a part of the Block Collection. 6 Block, Mortals and Immortals, p. 22. 7 Essay by Julius H. Block in Alexander Poznansky, ed., Tchaikovsky Through Others Eyes, translated from Russian by Ralph C. Burr, Jr. and Robert Bird, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 160–161. 8 Block, Mortals and Immortals, “Introduction,” Walter E. Block. 9 Letter from Dr. Susanne Ziegler (of the Phonogramm-Archiv, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin) to John Anthony Maltese, 26 May 2003. The Block Cylinders and the Dawn of Recording In 1889, in the months just after Edison perfected the first viable sound recording device, the inventor’s agent Theo Wangemann inscribed a number of unique cylinder recordings of great musicians. Most famous is the legendary (some would say notorious) Brahms cylinder, on which the composer can be heard performing one of his own Hungarian Dances. Played so much it was worn out long before it was copied onto a 78 rpm disc, this earliest of all composer recordings is the object of controversy, with some claiming the remaining sound is so faint and distorted that it sadly reveals little of musical value, while others have written extravagant essays about Brahms’s playing. Most of the other cylinders incised by Wangemann, recordings of Hans von Bülow, Lilli Lehmann, Theodore Thomas, and other important musicians, have apparently been lost to history. Wangemann was not the only pioneer making celebrity cylinders—in his Berlin home the prodigy Josef Hofmann recorded tenor Jean de Reszke and others in the early 1890s, while at the same time Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad made cylinders of his friends Paderewski and soprano Marcella Sembrich, and a New York City doctor assembled a library of cylinders that included several played by his friend, the pianist Leopold Godowsky. These too seem to have disappeared from history.1 At the same time in Russia, the farsighted businessman Julius Block was recording cylinders. Consumed with interest in the newly invented phonograph, Block was determined to record and preserve the piano playing of pianist Anton Rubinstein. Alas! He never succeeded. It was a huge loss to posterity, but history owes Block a great debt for the many other cylinders he did record, and which have miraculously survived. A remarkable 1922 letter from Edison to Block has also survived. Block had written to the inventor, offering to send these cylinders so Edison’s company could preserve and even issue them. Edison’s answer makes it clear he had no interest in Block’s cylinders. Among these Block cylinders are the earliest surviving recordings ever made of music by Bach, Wagner, Chopin, Schumann, Donizetti, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and others. There are also recordings by the composers Arensky, Taneyev, and Pabst. Paul Juon and Leo Conus were also captured playing their own compositions, and the singing and playing of musicians who created operatic roles and premiered major works by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Anton Rubinstein, and Rachmaninoff were preserved. Block’s cylinders provide a unique glimpse into Tchaikovsky’s musical circle with performances by eight artists who had premiered his works, including his pupil Taneyev, who gave the premiere of the Second Piano Concerto, and completed the Third Concerto after Tchaikovsky’s death. These are Taneyev’s only recordings, and his 1891 cylinder enjoys the status of being the earliest surviving recording by a major soloist, if we agree that Brahms was not a major soloist. Among the most satisfying cylinders that Block recorded are those of the Liszt pupil Paul Pabst, who died in 1897 at the age of 43. By then Pabst’s paraphrases of Tchaikovsky melodies were already famous. His 1895 cylinder of his own paraphrase of the Sleeping Beauty Waltz is probably the first great piano recording in history, enjoying amazing sound quality that successfully showcases the grandeur and virtuosity of his pianism. No wonder that both Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff had dedicated compositions to him. The cylinder is a fitting tribute to his friend Tchaikovsky, who had died 26 months earlier. Together, Pabst’s recordings are a major addition to the discography of nineteenth century pianists. Obviously a very great virtuoso in the Liszt/Rubinstein tradition, Pabst’s passionate reading of Schumann’s “Chopin” section from Carnaval might be the most lyrical Schumann playing ever captured. His cylinders, the only recordings of this neglected Liszt pupil, include the first-known recordings of works by Chopin and Schumann. Pabst and Sergei Taneyev were recorded playing movements from Arensky’s Silhouettes for two pianos, representing three titans from the Moscow Conservatory. In 1892, when these recordings were made, Taneyev was teaching counterpoint at the Conservatory (which he had directed from 1885 to 1889), while Pabst taught piano, and Arensky taught composition. Their pupils included such luminaries as Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Medtner, and Glière. Another important pianist whose playing would have been lost without Block’s efforts is Anna Essipova, who had some coaching with Liszt but was really the creation of Theodor Leschetizky, who became her husband. Her 1898 cylinder of a gavotte by Benjamin Godard is less well recorded than Pabst’s cylinders, but shows her to have been an elegant stylist with a distinct and attractive musical personality. Her only other recordings are unreliable Welte piano rolls. Essipova’s daughter by Leschetizky, the soprano Therésè Leschetizkaya, married the tenor Evgeny Dolinin, who sang in the premieres of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko (1897) and The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900.) Neither recorded otherwise. Dolinin’s sole 1898 Block cylinder is the earliest surviving recording of music by Wagner. If Thérèse was remembered before these cylinders were discovered, it was because she later became the teacher of the musical philanthropist Alice Tully. An Essipova student, Leonid Kreutzer, who studied piano with her and composition with Glazounov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, was captured in his earliest known recordings. Several of the singers Block recorded had close ties to Tchaikovsky, and two had important links to the opera Eugene Onegin. The great mezzo-soprano Elizaveta Lavrovskaya, one of the stars of the Mariinsky Theatre, actually suggested the idea of turning Pushkin’s novel into an opera to Tchaikovsky. He dedicated his Six Romances, op. 27 (1875) to her. Soprano Maria Klimentova-Muromtzeva had created the role of Tatiana at the premiere of Eugene Onegin in 1879. She also created the role of Oksana in Cherevichki in 1887. Each recorded a Tchaikovsky song, with Taneyev accompanying Klimentova-Muromtzeva. These are the only known recordings of both singers. Tenor Nikolai Figner sang in the premieres of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (1890) and Iolanta (1892). Block’s 1891 cylinder of Figner was recorded a decade before the tenor’s first commercial recordings. The cylinder of Adele Borghi, recorded in 1891 singing the “Habanera” from Carmen (just 19 years after the opera’s premiere) is faint, but she was the most famous Carmen of her day. It is the first recording ever made of music from Carmen. Much more vivid are the cylinders recorded in 1890 of “Mlle. Nikita,” an American soprano (Louisa Margaret Nicholson) who had a sensational career for several years in Europe and Russia. She took Russia by storm in 1889, where she returned in 1890 when the first of these cylinders were made, and again in 1895, when she was accompanied by the young pianist Harold Bauer. Nicholson was reputed to have received 2,000 fan letters per season and Massenet begged her to sing his Manon, yet a bicycle accident in 1897 crushed her throat and ended her career. Nikita dropped from history—her fate and death date unknown. These recordings suggest that she deserves attention. Perhaps the most important of her cylinders is a decorated rendition of Lucia’s mad scene, accompanied at the piano by the composer/ conductor Pyotr Schurovsky (his only known recording), who had studied with Tchaikovsky, Moscheles, and Litolff, and frequently conducted at the Bolshoi Theatre. In 1890 Block also recorded four cylinders of the tenor Vasily Samus, who taught voice at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. His student there, tenor Lavrentii Donskoi, was recorded in 1894 during his own tenure at the Bolshoi Theatre. Donskoi had also studied at the Free Music School co-founded by Rimsky-Korsakov, whose aria he sings. There are also cylinders by two mysterious singers about whom we have not found biographical information: soprano Maria Ivanovna Gutheil (definitely not the famous Mahler singer, Marie Gutheil-Schoder) who Block recorded singing in a large hall in 1894, and mezzo-soprano Eugenia Jurjevna Werdan, recorded two years earlier. These are the only known recordings of these singers, as well as the first recordings ever made of music by Bizet, Donizetti, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi. The great pianist Josef Hofmann’s cylinders for Block were made in 1895 just after his sensational Russian debut, and then in 1896 after a concert in Moscow at which the 19-year-old Hofmann honored his recently deceased teacher, Rubinstein. They include two works by Rubinstein and one by Mendelssohn that Hofmann didn’t otherwise record, as well as Wagner’s “Magic Fire Music,” which he did record in 1923, offering an opportunity to compare versions. Block himself was a musician, and he can be heard accompanying cylinders made in 1914 in Germany of the 19-year-old violinist Eddy Brown, whose few recordings are much sought after by collectors. These are the earliest surviving recordings of the American violinist, a fellow Auer pupil with Heifetz. The Juon piece and the three original Kreisler compositions are new to Brown’s discography. Brown speaks on all but the last cylinder. These are also the only cylinders in which Block performs. Two years earlier an even greater fiddler recorded for Block. His recordings of the 11-year-old Jascha Heifetz were made one week after the prodigy’s sensational debut with Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic. Little Jascha speaks on the cylinders, as does his father. All of the compositions are new to Heifetz’s discography, and they include a performance of “Schön Rosmarin” composed by his idol, Fritz Kreisler, who had accompanied Heifetz in the same piece six months earlier. These recordings pre-date Heifetz’s first Victor recordings by five years. His accompanist, Waldemar Liachowsky, a Schnabel pupil who was born in Russia, later accompanied many violinists, including Kreisler, Mischa Elman, Maud Powell, and Carl Flesch. These were not, however, the earliest recordings of the violinist or even of a prodigy, for Heifetz had recorded three commercial discs a year earlier in Russia in 1911. Cellist Joseph and violinist Michael Press also made a Block cylinder together, the only recording of the Press brothers performing with each other. Both studied at the Moscow Conservatory—Joseph with Alfred Glehn and Michael with Jan Hřímalý. Halvorsen had made his famous arrangement of the Handel in 1894. Though undated, this cylinder was probably made shortly thereafter and is surely the first recording of this work. Block documented the musical circle of Anton Arensky as well as that of Tchaikovsky. He was especially proud of the recordings he made of Arensky playing his own compositions, the first systematic effort in history to preserve any composer’s interpretations of his own works. Block began the project in 1892 and therefore predated the Gramophone Company’s recordings of composers such as Grieg in 1903 and Saint-Saëns in 1904 by 11 years. Arensky recorded several of these pieces in the year of their composition. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Block’s project is the set of recordings he incised in 1894 capturing Arensky playing the piano in his Trio No. 1 in D Minor, one of the most beloved chamber works in the repertoire, recorded just months after the Trio was composed. Though not a complete performance, these cylinders contain substantial sections of the first three movements. The fourth movement was recorded, but does not survive. In the performance we hear the only recordings of Arensky and violinist Hřímalý, who taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1869 to 1915, and who premiered Tchaikovsky’s string quartets number 2 (1874) and 3 (1876) and piano trio (1882); his passionate performances of the Trio were legendary. , who premiered Rachmaninoff’s two piano trios (1892 and 1893) and cello sonata (1901, dedicated to him) and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo capriccioso, Op. 62 (1889), which was also dedicated to him. Hřímalý and Brandukov enjoyed reputations as great artists; now it is verified. Jules Conus was a successful violinist/composer who in 1892 had just returned from a period as associate concertmaster of the New York Symphony. His own violin concerto, dedicated to his teacher Hřímalý, has remained in the repertoire. He recorded two selections for Block in 1892, the first solo violin recordings ever made, including the earliest recorded performance of Bach. The young composer Paul Juon (who had also studied violin with ) accompanies Conus in a third, 1894 recording—the same year that Conus premiered Rachmaninoff’s second piano trio with the composer and the cellist Anatoly Brandukov. These are the only known recordings of Jules Conus. Paul Juon was nicknamed “the Russian Brahms,” and Block’s cylinders are his only known recordings. His solo cylinders document him playing his own works when he was head of the composition department at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1911. His earlier, 1894 cylinder as an accompanist to Jules Conus was recorded when Juon was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with Arensky and Taneyev. Juon’s compositions are also performed by other musicians recorded by Block, and he was recorded playing excerpts from his own Tanzrhythmen with pianist Leonid Kreutzer in 1915. Jules Conus’s brother Leo was a pianist whose playing was documented by Block performing his own Suite for four hands with his teacher Taneyev. Leo Conus had also studied with Arensky. This is his only known recording. Block secured pianist Vladimir Wilschaw’s only recording. Wilschaw was a student of Arensky, Pabst, and Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory, and a lifelong friend to Rachmaninoff; their correspondence has provided three generations of scholars with rich source material. Sandra Droucker, an Anton Rubinstein pupil, is represented by her only recordings aside from Welte piano rolls. Besides Nikolai Figner, Block also recorded cylinders by two other artists who did make commercial recordings: the lieder singer Elena Gerhardt accompanied on the piano by the conductor Arthur Nikisch with whom she was romantically linked. Block captured that duo in one Brahms song they did not record commercially. In all, the surviving Block cylinders document the work of 21 composers and musicians who did not otherwise record, as well as one of Gerhardt and Nikisch speaking. Block also recorded the voice of Leo Tolstoy, whose cylinder gives a fascinating glimpse of the Tolstoy family. Dating from 1895, it is the first recording Tolstoy made, reading from his work ”The Repentant Sinner.” It also contains the voices of Tolstoy’s wife, Countess Sophia Andreyevna, as well as a recording of the Tolstoys’ daughter and granddaughter, inscribed on the same cylinder 33 years later at Block’s home in Vevey, Switzerland. Block’s final musical cylinders, made in 1923, captured the earliest recordings of pianist Egon Petri, at Block’s home in Vevey in the presence of composer Emanuel Moór. Block’s oddest, and some might say the most important cylinder is presented last on our three-CD set. It contains the voices of several people including Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. It is unlike any other cylinder in the Block collection and a detailed discussion is devoted to it in the article, “A Note on the Recordings.” None of the above facts, however, can emphasize enough the musical importance of these recordings. Taneyev’s 1891 cylinder of Mozart’s Fantasie C Minor K. 396, shows that he played with a freedom and elasticity of tempo almost unknown today. More than 100 years have passed since Taneyev made that cylinder, but less than a 100 years had passed from the time of Mozart’s death to Taneyev’s recording. The Taneyev cylinder and several others presented here contain powerful evidence to help address questions about the evolution of performance practices and styles. Schumann had been dead for less than 40 years when Pabst recorded excerpts from his Carnaval, about the same amount of time that has passed between the writing of these words and Stravinsky’s death; Chopin had been dead a decade longer. There is compelling reason to regard these recordings as the “Rosetta Stone” of nineteenth century musical performance practice. © John Anthony Maltese and Gregor Benko, 2008 1 Transcriptions of two other cylinder recordings from 1889 do survive. These were made in Denmark of the bass Peter Schram (1819–1895) singing arias from Don Giovanni. The celebrated Mapleson cylinders of live opera performances were recorded at the Metropolitan Opera House between 1900 and 1904 and have been issued by their custodian, the New York Public Library. BIOGRAPHIES Arensky, Anton Stepanovich [Pianist, Composer, Conductor] (1861–1906). Born in Novgorod, Russia, Arensky studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (1879–1882). The Moscow Conservatory hired him upon his graduation, and he taught harmony and composition there until 1895. His students included Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Glière. In 1895, he succeeded Mily Balakirev as director of the Imperial Chapel in St. Petersburg, a coveted post that he held until 1901. Notorious for his heavy drinking and gambling, he fell ill with tuberculosis and died at a sanatorium in Finland at the age of 44. Arensky, described by the New Grove Dictionary as “one of the most eclectic Russian composers of his generation,” wrote over 70 works, including three operas, two symphonies, a ballet, violin and piano concertos, chamber music, songs, and works for the piano. Block, Julius [Pianist, Businessman] (1858–1934). Born in Natal (a British colony located in South Africa), Block was raised in St. Petersburg where his father represented two American trading firms. Julius loved music and was a fine amateur pianist. He wanted to study at the Leipzig Conservatory, but his father stood in the way. After travels to London and the United States to further his education, Julius joined his father’s business in 1877 and took it over in 1888. Between them, he and his father introduced many inventions to Russia, including the cotton gin, the elevator, the bicycle, and the phonograph. Block moved to Berlin in 1899 and spent his last years in Switzerland. He recorded these cylinders with a phonograph that Thomas Edison gave him during a visit to the United States in 1889. Borghi, Adele [Mezzo-Soprano] (1860–?). Relatively little is known about Borghi (not to be confused with Adelaide Borghi-Mamo). She was born in Italy and sang at La Scala where she originated the role of Lélio in Ponchielli’s Marion Delorme in 1885. She toured widely, appearing in Russia, Spain, Romania, and the United States. She was especially known for her interpretation of Carmen. Brandukov, Anatoly Andreyevich [Cellist] (1856–1930). Born in Moscow, Brandukov studied there at the Conservatory from 1868 to 1877. He moved to Paris in 1878, where he played in Martin Marsick’s string quartet and performed the Saint-Saëns cello concerto with the composer conducting. He also performed with Liszt and Anton Rubinstein. He returned to Russia frequently and played the premieres of both of Rachmaninoff’s trios with the composer at the piano. He and Rachmaninoff also played the premiere of the cello sonata, which Rachmaninoff dedicated to him. Tchaikovsky dedicated his Pezzo Capriccioso, op. 62 (1889) to Brandukov, as well as an arrangement of the “Andante Cantabile” from his first string quartet, which Brandukov premiered in Paris with Tchaikovsky conducting. Brandukov became director of the Moscow Philharmonic School of Music and Drama in 1906, and taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1921 until his death. Brown, Eddy [Violinist] (1895–1974). Born in Chicago, Brown studied violin with Hubay and composition with Bartók and Kodály at the Budapest Conservatory (1904–1909). After hearing Brown’s 1909 London debut, Leopold Auer invited the 14-year-old to study with him at St. Petersburg. Brown agreed and stayed with Auer from 1910 to 1915. He made his Berlin debut in 1910 with Nikisch and the Philharmonic, and he played there often before making his U.S. debut in 1916. He gave the U.S. premiere of the Debussy sonata at Carnegie Hall in 1917. One of the first great American violinists, he recorded for Columbia, Odeon, and Royale. In the 1930s, he turned to a career in radio, becoming director of WOR and later WQXR in New York. Conus [Konyus], Jules [Yuly Eduardovich] [Violinist, Composer] (1869–1942). Born in Moscow to a family of French musicians, Conus studied violin with Hřímalý and composition with Arensky and Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory. He played in the Colonne Orchestra in Paris and was associate concertmaster of the New York Symphony for one season (1891–1892). He returned to Russia to teach violin at the Moscow Conservatory. There, he became a close friend of Rachmaninoff, who dedicated his Two Pieces, op. 6 to him in 1893. The next year he performed the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s second piano trio with Rachmaninoff and Brandukov. Conus is best remembered for his violin concerto, written in 1898 and dedicated to Hřímalý. Kreisler gave its U.S. and British premieres, and Heifetz later championed it. Conus lived in Paris from 1919 to 1939 before returning to Moscow. His son Boris married Rachmaninoff’s daughter Tatiana in 1932. Conus [Konyus], Leo [Lev Eduardovich] [Pianist, Composer] (1871–1944). The brother of Jules, Leo was born in Moscow. He studied there at the Conservatory under Arensky and Taneyev. Like his brother, he was a close friend of Rachmaninoff. Conus arranged Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique symphony for piano 4-hands and played it with Taneyev for Tchaikovsky in 1893. Conus taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1912 to 1920 and served as head of the piano department. He moved to Paris in 1921 and then immigrated to the United States in 1937. He settled in Cincinnati and taught there until his death. Dolinin, Evgeny Ivanovich [Tenor] (1873–1918). Born in Simbirsk (currently Ulyanovsk), Russia, as Evgeny Shein, he later adopted the stage name Dolinin. He studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Cotogni. Upon graduation he sang at the Mariinsky Theatre. He originated two Rimsky-Korsakov roles: Foma Nazarich in Sadko and Tsarevich Gvidon in The Tale of Tsar Saltan. He performed throughout Russia and appeared in Italy (1902), Prague (1904–1905), Budapest (1905), and Vienna (1906). He settled in Khar’kov, Ukraine where he taught at the College of Music. His wife was the soprano, Therésè Leschetizkaya (daughter of Theodor Leschetizky and Anna Essipova), who is also heard on these cylinders. Donskoi, Lavrentii Dmitrievich [Tenor] (1857 or 1858–1917). Born into a peasant family in the village of Ushilovo in the Kostroma region of Russia, Donskoi moved to St. Petersburg in 1872. There he studied at the Conservatory with Samus and Everardi from 1877–1880. He then studied at the Free Music School, created by the so-called “Mighty Handful” (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov), and was among Mussorgsky’s last pupils. He sang with the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow from 1883–1904. Donskoi was an accomplished actor and acclaimed as one of the best singers of his generation. He sang 78 roles in 69 different operas, performed at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, received the title “Distinguished Singer of the Imperial Theatres” in 1909, and taught at the Moscow School of Music and Drama from 1907–1917. Droucker, Sandra [Pianist] (1876–1944). Born in St. Petersburg, Droucker studied with Anton Rubinstein and made her debut in 1894. She toured Europe, appearing with Fürtwangler and other leading conductors. Her 1910 marriage to the pianist Gottfried Galston ended in divorce. She taught in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, wrote a book about Rubinstein that was published in 1904, and made piano rolls for Welte-Mignon. Essipova [Essipoff], Anna [Annette] Nikolayevna [Pianist] (1851–1914). Born in St. Petersburg, where she entered the Conservatory at the age of 13, Essipova studied first with Villoing and then with Leschetizky (to whom she was later briefly married). After her Moscow debut in 1871, Tchaikovsky took note of her exceptional technique and artistic expression. She met and played for Liszt in 1873 and began a period of extensive touring. She made her London debut in 1874, her Paris debut in 1875, and her U.S. debut in 1876. After 20 years of touring, she settled in St. Petersburg and taught at the Conservatory until her death. Her pupils include Barere, Borowski, Pouishnoff, Prokofiev, and Schnabel. She made piano rolls for Welte-Mignon, but the one cylinder in this collection is her only recording. Figner, Nikolai [Tenor] (1857–1918). Born in the province of Kazan, Figner attended the Naval College in St. Petersburg and served in the Navy for six years. He later studied voice at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but was told that he had no vocal talent. Undeterred, he traveled to Italy for further lessons and made his debut in Naples in 1882 in Gounod’s Philémon et Baucis. This led to successful appearances throughout Italy and Spain, followed by a season in South America where he sang in Aïda under the young Toscanini in 1886. He returned to Russia in 1887 and made his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. He sang in the premieres of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (1890) and Iolanta (1892), and Napravnik’s Dubrovsky (1895) and Francesca da Rimini (1902). From 1910 to 1915, he directed the Narodny Dom Theatre in St. Petersburg. (Nikolai was the husband of the famous Italian soprano, Medea Mei-Figner.) Gerhardt, Elena [Soprano and Mezzo-Soprano] (1883–1961). Gerhardt was born in Leipzig where she studied at the Conservatory with Marie Hedmont from 1900–1904. Her talent was such that the Conservatory’s director, Arthur Nikisch, accompanied Gerhardt at her debut recital on her 20th birthday. She sang briefly with the Leipzig Opera (1905–1906), but devoted most of her career to lieder and helped to perfect a style of lieder singing distinct from the operatic style used by most of her predecessors. Nikisch, with whom she was romantically involved, accompanied Gerhardt at her 1906 London debut, and the two made a series of records for G&T in 1907. Gerhardt made her U.S. debut in 1912. She left Germany in 1934 and settled in England. Her voice deepened to mezzo-soprano with time, and she gave recitals as late as 1953. Gutheil, Maria Ivanovna [Soprano]. Almost nothing has been discovered about this soprano except that she studied with Elizaveta Lavrovskaya and that she is not the soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder. Heifetz, Jascha [Violinist] (1901–1987). Born in Vilnius, Heifetz entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1910. He studied first with Nalbandyan and then with Auer, who introduced Heifetz to Berlin at a private press matinee in May 1912. Among the many violinists in attendance was Heifetz’s idol, Fritz Kreisler, who accompanied Heifetz at the piano and then wrote: “Never in all my life have I witnessed such precocity.” Heifetz made his Berlin recital debut that same month, followed by a sensational debut with the Berlin Philharmonic under Nikisch on October 28. These cylinders were recorded exactly one week later. Heifetz made his U.S. debut at Carnegie Hall in 1917 and his London debut in 1920. He proceeded to take the world by storm, including Australia in 1921 and the Far East in 1923. He recorded extensively for Victor and Decca, and gave his final recital in Los Angeles in 1972. Hofmann, Josef [Pianist] (1876–1957). Born in Krakow, Poland, Hofmann was one of the greatest pianists of all time. He toured extensively as a child prodigy, making his European debut in 1886 at age ten, and his U.S. debut a year later at the Metropolitan Opera House. In 1888 he retired from the concert stage when the heir of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune put up an enormous sum to insure the boy’s future education. Hofmann worked briefly with Moszkowski before becoming the only private pupil of Anton Rubinstein in 1892. He resumed his concert career in November 1894, the same month that Rubinstein died. Hofmann returned to the United States in 1898, and toured Europe and America widely, visiting South America in 1936. He was considered the preeminent pianist of his generation. In 1926 he became director of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Hofmann was also a prolific inventor (of shock absorbers for motor vehicles, piano improvements, medical devices, etc.) and held over 70 patents. He made his first cylinders during a visit to the Edison laboratory in 1888, but went on to leave few recordings over his long career, apparently sharing Rubinstein’s distrust of recording. Hřímalý [Grzhimali], Jan [Ivan Voytekhovich] [Violinist] (1844–1915). Born in Pilsen, Hřímalý studied at the Prague Conservatory with Moritz Mildner. From 1862 to 1868 he served as concertmaster of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. He also had a successful career as a soloist and chamber musician, performing in the premieres of Tchaikovsky’s string quartets number 2 (1874) and 3 (1876) and piano trio (1882). He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1869 to 1915, succeeding Ferdinand Laub as chief violin professor in 1874 and establishing himself as Moscow’s equivalent to Leopold Auer in St. Petersburg. Hřímalý’s scale studies are still widely used. His many students included Stanislaw Barcewicz, Issay Barmas, Jules Conus, Paul Juon, Lea Luboschutz, Alexander Moguilewsky, Alexander Petschnikoff, and Michael Press. Juon [Yuon], Paul [Pavel Fedorovich] [Pianist, Composer, Violinist] (1872–1940). Born in Moscow of German and Swiss descent, Juon spent most of his life in Germany. He entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1889, studying violin with Hřímalý and composition with Arensky and Taneyev. Between 1894–1895, he studied composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and won the Mendelssohn Prize. He returned briefly to Russia to teach violin and music theory at the Baku Conservatory, but settled in Berlin in 1897. In 1906, Joseph Joachim appointed him head of the composition department at the Hochschule für Musik, a post he held until 1934. He wrote a great deal of chamber music, as well as works for solo piano, orchestra, and several concertos. He was nicknamed “the Russian Brahms” and won the Beethoven Prize in 1929. He translated Arensky’s book on harmony into German in 1900, and published his own book on the subject the next year. He also translated Modest Tchaikovsky’s two-volume biography of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Klimentova-Muromtzeva, Maria [Soprano] (1857–1946). Born in the Kursk region of Russia and raised in Kiev, Klimentova studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1875–1880. As a student, she sang Tatiana in the 1879 premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (a student production conducted by Anton Rubinstein). She made her debut at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow the following year as Marguerite in Faust, and sang there until 1889 when, at the peak of her career, she left over a conflict with the administration. She also originated the role of Oksana in the 1887 premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki. Beginning in 1890, she taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where she worked with the director Constantin Stanislavsky to stage student productions. Kreutzer, Leonid [Pianist] (1884–1953). Born in St. Petersburg, Kreutzer attended that city’s conservatory, where he studied piano with Essipova and composition with Glazounov. He was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s only piano student (the composer admitted to just mentoring and coaching others who claimed they were his piano students) and Kreutzer assisted Rachmaninoff and Siloti in preparations for the premiere of the composer’s Second Piano Concerto in 1901. Kreutzer moved to Berlin in 1908 and toured as a concert pianist. He taught at the Hochschule für Musik from 1921–1933, subsequently teaching at the Imperial Academy in Tokyo. Kreutzer recorded discs for Polydor and Japanese Columbia as well as making piano rolls. His students included Ernö Balogh, Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Wladyslaw Szpilman, and Alexander Zakin. Lavrovskaya, Elizaveta Andreyevna [Mezzo-Soprano] (1845–1919). Born in Kashin, Lavrovskaya studied with Henriette Nissen-Saloman at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and with Pauline Viardot in Paris. She was a staple at the Mariinsky Theatre, and also sang at the Bolshoi. She toured widely, including the European continent and England. She had close ties to Tchaikovsky, who dedicated his Six Romances, Op. 27 (1875) to her and was the one who suggested Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as a subject for an opera. Tchaikovsky described her suggestion in a letter to his brother Modest on 18 May 1877. At first, he wrote, the “idea seemed wild to me,” but later as he ate alone at a restaurant he thought about Lavrovskaya’s idea and grew more and more excited. He located a copy of Onegin, spent an “utterly sleepless night” reading it, and found a librettist to work on it the very next day. Lavrovskaya was appointed a voice professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1888. Leschetizkaya-Dolinina, Therésè [Soprano] (1873–1956). Born in St. Petersburg, Leschetizkaya was the daughter of Theodor Leschetizky and his second wife, Anna Essipova. She first studied piano, but after developing rheumatism in her right hand at age 16, she turned her attention to singing. In 1891 the eminent soprano Marianne Brandt took an interest in her voice and began to teach her singing. Therésè continued her studies with Desirée Artôt de Padilla, Madame Giraldoni, and later with Napravnik. She established a career as a concert singer and coach and became head of the vocal department at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where one of her students was the tenor Evgeny Dolinin, whom she married. She left Russia to escape the depredations of the Soviet government and moved to Vienna, teaching there from 1933–1939, before returning penniless to Paris with a different husband, a noted vocalist named Voskresensky. She taught at the Russian Conservatory in Paris. Her American student Miriam Carleton-Squires wrote: “...she never talks about the voice. In fact, she says there is no voice, that we make it through our will.” Leschetizkaya died in Paris. Liachowsky, Waldemar [Pianist] (1874–1958). Waldemar Liachowsky was born in Stolptsy, Russia, in 1874. He immigrated to Berlin as a young man, received his academic and musical education there, and studied piano with Artur Schnabel. His first big break came as accompanist for Mischa Elman, one of the early child prodigies to come out of Russia. He traveled to America with Elman and accompanied him at his debut in Carnegie Hall in 1908 and in many recitals to come. Liachowsky became a prominent accompanist for numerous famous violinists, including Maud Powell, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, and Carl Flesch. He even accompanied Albert Einstein who was an amateur violinist. He married the lieder singer Paula Nivell, with whom he appeared on the concert stage. They had two sons, Henry and Rudolph, whom he sent out of Nazi Germany to safety in the U.S. Liachowsky himself immigrated to the U.S. in 1937, changed his name to Lea, and continued his musical career, coaching and accompanying young violinists and singers. Nikisch, Arthur [Pianist, Conductor] (1855–1922). Born in Hungary, Nikisch attended the Vienna Conservatory where he studied the violin with Joseph Hellmesberger and composition with Felix Dessoff. Upon graduating in 1874, he joined the Vienna Court Orchestra where he played in the violin section. He became assistant conductor of the Leipzig Opera in 1878 and principal conductor the next year. His posts included music director of the Boston Symphony, the Budapest Opera, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Berlin Philharmonic. He also directed the Leipzig Conservatory. Nikita (stage name of Louisa Margaret Nicholson) [Soprano] (1872– ?) Probably born in Kentucky, though some sources say Philadelphia, Nicholson studied in Washington, D.C. with her uncle M. C. Le Roy. She toured America in her pre-teens and was billed as “The Miniature Patti.” She continued her studies in Paris with the brother-in-law of Adelina Patti, Maurice Strakosch. She was much manipulated by the inflated schemes of her uncle and Strakosch, who floated the absurd story that she was abducted as an infant by an Indian chief named “Niki”. In 1889 she made her Russian debut and immediately became a favorite of the public as well as with composers and musicians. That same year she appeared in Moscow (Zerlina in Don Giovanni) and in concert at Covent Garden with Luigi Arditi conducting. She also sang leading roles in Germany and Paris. Her looks, charm, and extraordinary singing led to huge success in Europe, until a bicycle accident in 1897 crushed her throat and ended her career. She retired to life as a society figure in Paris. Despite her stardom in Europe and Russia, Nikita has been completely forgotten. Pabst, Paul [Pianist, Composer] (1854–1897). Born in Königsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Pabst first studied piano with his father. He later studied in Dresden and then with Anton Door in Vienna. He also spent time with Liszt at Weimar. Pabst joined the piano faculty of the Moscow Conservatory in 1878 at the invitation of Nikolai Rubinstein, and was elevated to professor of high degree in 1881 (joining Taneyev and Safonov)—a post he held until his untimely death. Pabst composed many works, including a piano concerto, a piano trio (dedicated to the memory of Anton Rubinstein), and numerous paraphrases based on Tchaikovsky’s music. In return, Tchaikovsky dedicated his Polacca de concert, op. 72, no. 7 to Pabst. Pabst also had ties to Rachmaninoff. He performed Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 1 for two pianos, op. 5 with the composer shortly after its composition, and Rachmaninoff dedicated his Seven Pieces for piano, op. 10 to Pabst. His students include Nikolai Medtner, Alexander Goldenweiser, and Konstantin Igumnov. Petri, Egon [Pianist] (1881–1962). Born in Hanover, Petri studied with Teresa Carreño in Berlin and later with Busoni, who became his mentor, in Weimar. He made his debut in Holland in 1902 and taught at the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1905–1911 and at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin from 1921–1925. In 1923, the year these cylinders were made, he appeared in the Soviet Union, playing 31 times in 40 days to enormous acclaim. He was reportedly the first soloist from the West to perform there after the Revolution. He made his U.S. debut in 1932. He settled there in 1940, teaching at Cornell University and then Mills College in California. He collaborated with Busoni in an edition of Bach’s keyboard works. Among his many pupils are Eugene Istomin, Grant Johannesen, Ernst Levy, John Ogdon, and Earl Wild. Press, Joseph [Cellist] (1881–1924). Born in Vilnius, Press studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Alfred Glehn and graduated in 1902. He had further studies with Casals and Julius Klengel. He performed widely both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. In 1906, he formed the Trio Russe with his brother, Michael, and Michael’s first wife Vera Maurina. They toured with great success throughout Russia and Europe. From 1916–1918 Press was professor of cello at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1918 he moved to the Kiev Conservatory, and later to the Odessa Conservatory. He left Russia in 1921 and was offered a position as head of the cello department at the Berlin Conservatory, but he turned down that offer in order to tour the United States as soloist. He was well received in the U.S., and joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music in 1922. He died suddenly of pneumonia at the age of 41 shortly before a scheduled Carnegie Hall recital. He recorded for Polyphon. Press, Michael [Violinist] (1872–1938). Born in Vilnius, Press was a prodigy. He played first violin in the local theater orchestra at the age of ten and became its concertmaster at the age of 13. He entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with Hřímalý. Press was appointed professor of violin at the Moscow Conservatory in 1901, and succeeded Hřímalý as chief violin professor in 1915. He narrowly escaped execution during the Russian Revolution and fled to Germany where he lived for several years. He made his U.S. debut in 1922, joined the violin faculty of the Curtis Institute in 1924 (serving as Carl Flesch’s assistant for one year), and taught at Michigan State College from 1928–1938. He was also a composer and conductor (guest conducting the Boston Symphony, among others). He recorded for acoustic Vox when he lived in Germany. Rachmaninoff, Sergei [Composer, Pianist, Conductor] (1873–1943). Rachmaninoff was a 20-year-old Moscow Conservatory graduate whose pre-eminent talent had already been proclaimed by Arensky, Taneyev, and Tchaikovsky when the cylinder in this set was recorded. The work known variously as O Mother of God Perpetually Praying, Sacred Concerto, or Spiritual Concert, was composed in the summer of 1893. The three-part work for unaccompanied mixed chorus began the composer’s relationship with the Choir of the Synodical School of Moscow, which culminated 22 years later in the premiere of his choral masterpiece, All Night Vigil. The Sacred Concerto was not published or performed again in the composer lifetime. Rubinstein, Anton Grigorevich [Pianist, Composer, Conductor] (1829–1894). Rubinstein is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of his time. He founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which along with the Moscow Conservatory (founded by Anton’s brother Nikolai) helped to establish Russia’s reputation for producing innumerable outstanding musicians. Rubinstein studied with Alexander Villoing (one of Moscow’s leading piano teachers) as a non-paying student. Under Villoing’s tutelage, Rubinstein played in the Salle Erard for an audience that included Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt. Liszt advised Rubinstein to study composition in Germany, which he did in time. In Berlin, Anton and his younger brother Nikolai were supported by Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, who arranged for their instruction in composition, theory, and other non-musical subjects. Safonov, Vasily Ilyich [Pianist, Conductor, Director of the Moscow Conservatory] (1852–1918). Safanov studied with Theodor Leschetizky and Louis Brassin. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1880 and taught there briefly before succeeding Taneyev as director of the Moscow Conservatory in 1889. He was the principal conductor of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society from 1889–1905, and again from 1909–1911; the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic from 1906–1909; and director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York from 1906–1909. He returned to Russia in 1909 where he resumed his concert work and played in chamber ensembles. Samus, Vasily Maksimovitch [Tenor] (1849–1903). Samus attended the St. Petersburg Conservatory where he studied voice. He became an instructor there shortly after his graduation in 1877. He was elevated to Professor in 1886. Lavrentii Donskoi was his most prominent student. Schurovsky, Pyotr Andreevich [Pianist, Composer, Conductor] (1850–1908). Schurovsky studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory with Tchaikovsky, with further studies under Ignaz Moscheles in Leipzig and Henry Charles Litolff in Paris. He conducted often at the Bolshoi Theatre, led the Berlin premiere of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, and wrote a book on conducting. He also published a collection of 85 national anthems, and wrote one for Thailand (which is still used). His other compositions include an opera, piano pieces, and nearly 30 songs (some dedicated to, and sung by, Nikolai Figner). He also wrote extensively as a music critic. Taneyev, Sergei Ivanovich [Pianist, Composer] (1856–1915). Born in Dyudkovo, Russia, Taneyev studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory with Tchaikovsky, and piano with Nikolai Rubinstein. When he graduated in 1875, he was the first in the history of the Conservatory to win the gold medal for both composition and piano performance. He made his official debut as a pianist in Moscow in January 1875, playing the Brahms D minor concerto. The following December he gave the Moscow premiere of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto. He also premiered Tchaikovsky’s second concerto in 1882 (with Anton Rubinstein conducting) and after Tchaikovsky’s death completed his third concerto. When Tchaikovsky resigned from the Moscow Conservatory in 1878, the 22-year-old Taneyev took over his harmony and orchestration classes, and when Nikolai Rubinstein died in 1881, Taneyev took over his piano classes. In 1883 Taneyev also took over the composition classes and in 1885 he became director of the Conservatory, a post he held until 1889. Thereafter he taught counterpoint at the Conservatory. A renowned polyphonist, Taneyev’s many compositions include symphonies, chamber music (including nine string quartets), an opera, and over 60 songs. Among his pupils were Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Glière, Medtner, and Juon. Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich [Composer] (1840–1893). Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Russia and although he showed early promise in music, he began a career as a civil servant. Without “giving up his day job” Tchaikovsky studied music at the new St. Petersburg Conservatory including instrumentation and composition under Anton Rubinstein, whom he idolized, but who never warmed up to him. Upon graduation, Tchaikovsky accepted the position of professor of harmony, composition, and history of music, but eventually was able to compose full-time, resulting in beloved masterpieces such as: Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Marche Slave, the Nutcracker, Eugene Onegin, and the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies. Details of the mysterious circumstances surrounding his early death have launched novels, biographies, and movies, but the opening of archives in Russia in recent years, and this publication of recordings by his colleagues and friends, provide new and important resources for anyone interested in Tchaikovsky and his work. Tolstoy, Count Leo [Lev] Nicholaevich [Novelist, Philosopher] (1828–1910). Born to nobility in Central Russia, Tolstoy is considered one of the greatest of all novelists, War and Peace and Anna Karenina being his most famous works. He was known for his views on nonviolence (Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within You) and was a great influence on Gandhi, who called Tolstoy “… the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced.” What is less known, is Tolstoy’s love of music. Tolstoy is quoted as saying, “Music is the shorthand of emotion,” and Tolstoy composed a simple waltz for piano, which survives today. Eugenia Jurjevna Werdan [Mezzo-Soprano]. We have been unable to locate any biographical information about Werdan. Wilschaw, Vladimir Robertovich [Pianist] (1868–1957). Born into a musical family (his father played violin at the Bolshoi Theatre), Wilschaw attended the Moscow Conservatory where he studied piano with Pabst. He also took classes with Arensky and Taneyev. At Pabst’s suggestion, he went to study with Busoni in Helsinki and then followed him to Boston for a year. Wilschaw was a lifelong friend of Rachmaninoff. He became a teacher, first at a women’s college, and then at the Moscow Conservatory. A Note on the Discovery of these Cylinders The discovery of these cylinders is, for my father and me, the culmination of a search that lasted more than 30 years. It is also an event of remarkable serendipity. We first learned about these cylinders in 1971, when I was 11 years old. The source: the great American violinist Eddy Brown, who was a friend of my father’s. Brown made cylinders for Julius Block in Berlin in December 1914, and he told us that Jascha Heifetz had also recorded cylinders around the same time. Brown even claimed to have recorded duets with Heifetz. He and Heifetz had both studied with Leopold Auer at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia, and also at Auer’s summer school in Loschwitz, Germany (where Heifetz was stranded in 1914 at the start of World War I). For years, my father and I tried to hunt down these cylinders. Years before meeting Eddy Brown, my father had asked Heifetz if he had ever made recordings before coming to the United States. Heifetz had nodded yes and said, “In the old country.” Perhaps these were the recordings he meant.1 Armed with Brown’s story, we asked Heifetz’s producer at RCA, Jack Pfeiffer, if he had ever heard of these recordings. He had not. Pfeiffer, in turn, asked Heifetz, who now claimed never to have made recordings before coming to the U.S. (if, in fact, he remembered making them, maybe he feared that they would not be up to his exacting standards and did not want Pfeiffer to look for them). When Heifetz died, we examined his personal collection of recordings (donated to the Stanford Sound Archive) in search of clues. None could be found. When we published discographies of Heifetz, we mentioned Brown’s claim in the hopes that a reader might come forward with information about them. None did. Then, in early 2002, we began corresponding with Galina Kopytova, who lived in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was writing a book about Heifetz’s boyhood years, and I sent her an e-mail in which I mentioned the 1912 cylinders of Heifetz, adding: “Eddy Brown told me about them years ago. They do not survive, as far as I know.” Her reply on 2 March stunned me: “I have information to add to Eddy Brown’s: In the Institute of Russian Literature (St. Petersburg) are stored wax [cylinders] recorded by Heifetz in 1912….The recordings were made in the apartment of Julius Block.” After picking myself up off the floor I shot back an e-mail asking for more details. On 10 March, she wrote back to say that she had visited the institute and that, indeed, there were also recordings of Eddy Brown, and they had been made in Berlin. We had found the cylinders at last. Ten days later, Galina wrote with even more good news: the collection also included recordings of Josef Hofmann, Anton Arensky, Elena Gerhardt, Arthur Nikisch, Leo Tolstoy, and others. She put me in direct contact with the institute (better known as the Pushkin House) and I then traveled to St. Petersburg to see the cylinders for myself and to listen to them. The institute expressed interest in publishing the cylinders, and I contacted Ward Marston and his business partner Scott Kessler to secure their help. Together we went back to Russia in 2005, met with sound engineers at the Pushkin House, and returned with digital copies of the cylinders. Our friendship with Eddy Brown is not my only indirect link to Edison and these cylinders. When Block visited Edison in 1889, my great, great grandfather, Theodore Carmen, worked for Edison in his laboratory. In fact, his young daughter Maria was one of the first to have her voice captured on record. Shortly after inventing the phonograph in 1877, my great grandmother (then just eight years old) was visiting the laboratory and Edison asked her to sing into the device that would transform the world. Maria lived to be 103 years old—long enough for me to get to know her and to talk with her about growing up around Edison. The tin-foil of her voice no longer exists, but the cylinders of Julius Block and the testimonials written about them are tangible documents that reflect the excitement felt by those experiencing the phonograph for the first time. As Tchaikovsky wrote in 1889: “Honor to the great inventor Edison!” ©John Anthony Maltese, 2008 1 In fact, Heifetz probably was referring to discs that he made for Zvukopis in St. Petersburg in May 1911. Appendix 1: Recording locations The majority of cylinders were recorded at Julius Block’s residences. Based on Block’s journal and the announcements heard on the cylinders, these include locations in Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg), Germany (Berlin and Grunewald), and Switzerland (Vevey.) The notable exceptions are Cylinder 40, which was recorded at the Hall of the Synodical School of Moscow; Cylinders 64, 65 and 66, which were recorded in Moscow at the History Museum’s main lecture hall; Cylinders 68, 69, and 70, which were recorded at the Physics Lecture Hall, Moscow University; and Cylinder 74, which was recorded at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Appendix 2: Cylinder Announcements: Translations and Transcriptions C40 From Russian January 23, 1894, performed by the Synod Choir in the hall of the Synod College, concerto by Rachmaninoff, second and last parts C43 from Russian [Unintelligible] with Brandukov, December 10, 1894 C44 from Russian Performed by the author [unintelligible] Brandukov, year 1894, 10th of December C50 from Russian March 10, 1892 C51 from Russian Romance by Tchaikovsky, “Lullaby in a Storm” C52 from Russian Romance “Ich liebe dich” by Grieg and “Musical Picture” by Cui is sung by Eugenia Jurjevna Werdan November 14th, 1892 in Moscow, on [unintelligible] (Ostonovchesky Pereulok?) street, at the Lepeshinsky House, Apartment #14 C55 from Russian Part of Tchaikovsky’s “Legend” was sung by Eugenia Jurjevna Werdan in Moscow on November 14th, 1892. That’s all, that’s all. C59 from Russian “La Zingara” was sung by Mademoiselle Nikita, accompanied by Pytor Schurovsky in St. Petersburg on February 19th, 1890. C60 from Russian “A la Fontaine” [unintelligible] was sung by Mademoiselle Nikita, accompanied by Pytor Schurovsky in St. Petersburg, on February 19, 1890. C61 from English “Nocturne” by Chopin sung by Mademoiselle Nikita on the 22nd of November 1891 in Moscow C63 from English [Unintelligible] in Moscow. C64 [Speech unintelligible] C65 from Russian Sung by Madame Klimentova-Muromtseva on 4 February 1891 at the History Museum’s main lecture hall in Moscow. C66 from Russian Sung by Madame Klimentova-Muromtseva on 5 February 1891 at the History Museum’s main lecture hall in Moscow. C68 from Russian Romance “Sail” by Rubinstein is sung by Maria Ivanovna Gutheil at the Physics Lecture Hall of Moscow University at the 9th Congress of Russian Researchers in Moscow on January 10, 1894. C69 from Russian “And night, and love, and the moon” (“E noch’, e lubov’, e luna”), romance by Davydov was sung by Maria Ivanovna Gutheil at the 9th Congress of Russian Researchers and Physicians in Moscow, at the Physics Lecture Hall of Moscow University on January 10, 1894. C70 from Russian “Longing” (“Zhelanie”), romance by Rubinstein is sung by Maria Ivanovna Gutheil at the 9th Congress of Russian Researchers in Moscow on January 10, 1894. C74 from Russian [At beginning of cylinder]: Dargomïzhsky’s romance “I am in love, oh beautiful girl [my maiden my beauty] (Vljubljon ya, deva-krasota) sung by Samus, accompanied by [unintelligible] in the hall of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, February 15, 1890. [At end of cylinder]: Thank you, I am very grateful. C77 from Russian Moscow, 1890 [unintelligible] at the apartment of Nikolai Ivanovich [unintelligible] C88 from Russian March 31, 1891 C93 from Russian “Lohengrin’s Tale” (“Rasskaz Loengrina”) by Wagner was sung by me, Evgeny Dolinin, at Julius Ivanovich Block’s December 10th, 1898. C97 from German “Chanson de Florian” by Godard sung by Therésè Leschetizkaya 26 November 98, St. Petersburg C100 from German “Blinde Kuh,” lied by Johannes Brahms performed by Elena Gehardt, and accompanied by Arthur Nikisch, on Thursday, 16 September 1911, in Berlin. C101 from German “Wohin” by Schubert, performed by Elena Gerhardt, and accompanied by Arthur Nikisch, on 16 September 1911 in the afternoon at the Block residence in Berlin-Grunewald. C104 from English I want thank Mr. Block and his kind wife for the charming afternoon we have here and I hope we can another wonderful evening. [Unintelligible] keen pleasure [unintelligible] and I ask to forgiveness for my very bad improvisation to Emanuel Moór, Vevey, [unintelligible] of October, 1923, Vevey. I have to thank Mr. and Mrs. Moór for THEIR kindness of giving us the pleasure of… C106 from English Free improvisation after old classic [unintelligible] it’s the old ones do much better than I do now. Ah, yes, Mr. Moór, E. Moór, inventor of the duplex, wife [sic] of Winifred Christie, formerly Christie, yes [unintelligible] of October, 1923. C107 [Speech unintelligible] C109 from Russian [Unintelligible] by Arensky was performed by the [unintelligible] December 20, 1894 in Moscow. C111 from Russian “Polichinelle’” and suites by Arensky were performed by Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev in Moscow on December 14, 1892. C112 from Russian [Unintelligible] by Arensky [unintelligible] November 24, 1892. C114 from Russian “Nocturne” by Arensky was performed by the author November 25, 1894 in Moscow. C117 from Russian [Unintelligible] April 12, 1899 [unintelligible] by Arensky [unintelligible] C119 from Russian [Unintelligible] by Arensky [unintelligible] December 20, 1894. C120 from Russian Improvisation number 5 by Arensky. C121 from German “Nocturne E” by Chopin [unintelligible] Pavel Augustovich Pabst, Moscow. C123 from Russian Mazurka. Chopin. Performed by Pavel Augustivich Pabst [unintelligible] Moscow [unintelligible] 12 February 1895. C124 from Russian Tchaikovsky, Pyotr. A fragment from “Sleeping Beauty” was performed by the author February 12, 1895 in Moscow. C125 from Russian Pavel Pabst [unintelligible] in Moscow [unintelligible] 12 February 1895 C127 from Russian [Unintelligible] in Moscow December 14, 1892. C134 from Russian In the house of the hosts Block, played February 16, 18 [unintelligible] (laughter) [unintelligible] Oh, I forgot to say that I am Sandra Droucker. C135 from Russian As you might have noticed, with great success, performed by [unintelligible]. February 18, 1898. C136 from Russian November 15, 1898 I, Anna Nikolayevna Essipova played at the apartment of Julius Ivanovich Block. C139 from German [Unintelligible] by Anton Rubinstein performed by Josef Hofmann, as a token of remembrance for Herr Julius Block in Moscow, on 24 December 1895. C140 from German Performed by Josef Hofmann on 10 February 1896 in Moscow. C141 from Russian [Speech unintelligible] C158 from German Presented by Leonid Kreutzer, February 1915 in Grunewald. C162 from Russian Variations on his own sonata for violin were played by Pavel Fyodorovich Juon February 26, 1911 at the home of C189 from Russian April 7, 1894, much respected Jules Ivanovich Block, performed [word repeated twice]” C191 from Russian “Dance Sarasate” was performed October 4, 1893 1892 [the announcer first says 1893, then corrects himself] in Moscow by Jules Eduardovich Conus. C192 from German On 4 November 1912, I, Jascha Heifetz, played at the Block residence in Grunewald: “Orientale” by César Cui. C193 from German On 4 November 1912, I, Jascha Heifetz, played at Herr Block in Grunewald: Cui “Orientale.” C194 from German I, Jascha Heifetz of Petersburg, played at Herr Block, Grunewald: “Gavotte” by Leopold Auer on 4 November 1912. C195 from German I, Jascha Heifetz of Petersburg, played at Herr Block, Grunewald: “Spinnlied” by Popper-Auer. C197 from German [Jascha Heifetz]: I, Jascha Heifetz of Petersburg, five years old1, played at Herr Block, Grunewald: “Schön Rosmarin“ by Fritz Kreisler on 4 November 1912. [Male German Speaker]: Accompanied by Waldemar Liachowsky of Königsberg-Schottenwald. [Ruvin Heifetz]: I am very pleased how my son Jascha could perform with this amazing machine. C198 from German “Passacaglia” by Handel, played by the Press brothers [unintelligible]. C200 from German On 27 December 1914, I, Eddy Brown, played the “Tartini Variations” at Herr Block’s home in the Grunewald, who [Block] also accompanied me. C202 from German … have on 6 December 1914. C205 from German Played by Eddy Brown on 27 December 1914 at Herr Bloch: “Vogel als Prophet” by Schumann. C207 from German I, Eddy Brown, played the Martini “Andante” on 6 December 1914 in the Grunewald at Herr Block. C209 from German I, Eddy Brown, played the “Minuet” by Haydn on 27 December 1914 at Herr Block in the Grunewald, who (Block) also accompanied me. C211 from German [Eddy Brown]: I, Eddy Brown, played on 27 December 1914 in the Grunewald at Herr Block: “La Chasse” by Cartier. Herr Block also accompanied me. [Female Voice, German]: I thank Eddy Brown for this most beautiful playing. It is the most beautiful performance [of the piece] which I have ever heard. C212 from German Eddy Brown played on 27 December 1914. “Minuet” by Beethoven. C245 from Russian and English2 Part 1: [Tolstoy reading from “The Repentant Sinner,” 14 February 1895]: Now surely I shall be allowed to enter. Peter and David must let me in, because they know man’s weakness and God’s mercy; and thou wilt let me in, because thou lovest much. Was it not thou, John the Divine who wrote that God is Love, and that he who loves not, knows not God? And in thine old age didst thou not say unto men: “Brethren, love one another.” How, then, canst thou look on me with hatred, and drive me away? Either thou must renounce what thou hast said, or loving me, must let me enter the kingdom of heaven.3 Part 2: [Spoken by Tatiana Mikhailovna Sukhotina-Albertini (1905–1996), Tolstoy’s granddaughter, daughter of his daughter Tatiana L’vovna Tolstaya-Sukhotina, 2 November 1927]: I, Tata Sukhotina, November 2, 1927, listened on this same cylinder, to the voice of my grandfather, Lev Nicholaevich, and will now hear the voice of my grandmother. Part 3: [Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, wife of L.N. Tolstoy, is reading from “The Repentant Sinner,” 14 February 1895]: He fell ill but even then did not repent. Only at the last moment, as he was dying, he wept and said: ‘Lord! forgive me, as Thou forgavest the thief upon the cross.’ And as he said these words, his soul left his body. And the soul of the sinner, feeling love towards God and faith in His mercy, went to the gates of heaven and knocked, praying to be let into the heavenly kingdom.4 Part 4: [Leo Tolstoy, 14 February 1895]: Spoke I, in Moscow, February 14, ‘95. I—Lev Nicholaevich Tolstoy, and his [sic] wife. Part 5: [Spoken by Tatiana L’vovna Tolstaya-Sukhotina, Tolstoy’s daughter, 2 November 1927]: Tolstoy’s views are now so different from the views of the people of the secular world, that one has to think his views through deeply, and learn Tolstoy thoroughly, to understand him. People of the world want to apply their own measure to him, but he has walked away from this world’s measure. And that’s why, I think, his views, his worries, his bewilderment, now annoy them and are misunderstood. Part 6: [Spoken by Tatiana L’vovna Tolstaya-Sukhotina in English]: I, Tatiana L’vovna Tolstaya have listened to my father’s voice 32 years later at Mr. Block’s house in Vevey and have added a few sentences in Russian from my lecture upon his ideas, 2nd of November 1927. C247 from Russian Read by Count Lev Nickolaevich Tolstoy. And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy Kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’- Luke xxiii. 42,43. THERE was once a man who lived for seventy years in the world, and lived in sin all that time. He fell ill but even then did not repent. Only at the last moment, as he was dying, he wept and said: Lord! forgive me, as Thou forgavest the thief upon the cross. And as he said these words, his soul left his body. And the soul of the sinner, feeling love towards God and faith in His mercy, went to the gates of heaven and knocked, praying to be let into the heavenly kingdom. Then a voice spoke from within the gate: What man is it that knocks at the gates of Paradise and what deeds did he do during his life? And the voice of the Accuser replied, recounting all the man’s evil deeds, and not a single good one. And the voice from within the gates answered: Sinners cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. Go hence! Then the man said: Lord, I hear thy voice, but cannot see thy face, nor do I know thy name. The voice answered: I am Peter, the Apostle. And the sinner replied: Have pity on me, Apostle Peter! Remember man’s weakness, and God’s mercy. Wert not thou a disciple of Christ? Didst not thou hear his teaching from his own lips, and hadst thou not his example before thee? Remember then how, when he sorrowed and was grieved in spirit, and three times asked thee to keep awake and pray, thou didst sleep, because thine eyes were heavy, and three times he found thee sleeping. So it was with me. Remember, also, how thou didst promise to be faithful unto death, and yet didst thrice deny him, when he was taken before Caiaphas. So it was with me. And remember, too, how when the cock crowed thou didst go out and didst weep bitterly. So it is with me. Thou canst not refuse to let me in. And the voice behind the gates was silent. Then the sinner stood a little while, and again began to knock, and to ask to be let into the kingdom of heaven. And he heard another voice behind the gates, which said: Who is this man, and how did he live on earth? And the voice of the Accuser again repeated all the sinner’s evil deeds, and not a single good one. And the voice from behind the gates replied: Go hence! Such sinners cannot live with us in Paradise. Then the sinner said: Lord, I hear thy voice, but I see thee not, nor do I know thy name. And the voice answered: I am David; king and prophet. The sinner did not despair, nor did he leave the gates of Paradise, but said: Have pity on me, King David! Remember man’s weakness, and God’s mercy. God loved thee and exalted thee among men. Thou hadst all: a kingdom, and honour, and riches, and wives, and children; but thou sawest from thy house-top the wife of a poor man, and sin entered into thee, and thou tookest the wife of Uriah, and didst slay him with the sword of the Ammonites. Thou, a rich man, didst take from the poor man his one ewe lamb, and didst kill him. I have done likewise. Remember, then, how thou didst repent, and how thou saidst, “I acknowledge my transgressions: my sin is ever before me?” I have done the same. Thou canst not refuse to let me in. And the voice from within the gates was silent. The sinner having stood a little while, began knocking again, and asking to be let into the kingdom of heaven. And a third voice was heard within the gates, saying: Who is this man, and how has he spent his life on earth? And the voice of the Accuser replied for the third time, recounting the sinner’s evil deeds, and not mentioning one good deed. And the voice within the gates said: Depart hence! Sinners cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. And the sinner said: Thy voice I hear, but thy face I see not, neither do I know thy name. Then the voice replied: I am John the Divine, the beloved disciple of Christ C283 from Russian and German [Participating in the discussion:] Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein (1829–1894) – pianist, composer Elizaveta Andreyevna Lavrovskaya (1845–1919) – singer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) – composer Vasily Ilyich Safonov (1852–1918) – pianist, conductor, Moscow Conservatory director Alexandra Ivanovna Hubert (1850–1937) – pianist, Moscow Conservatory director Julius Ivanovich Block (1858–1934) Unidentified voice Translation from Russian (R) and German (G): [Lavrovskaya]: That awful Kuz’min! How dare he call me insidious? (R) [unidentified]: [Sings a scale out of tune.] [Tchaikovsky]: This trill could have been better! (R) [Lavrovskaya}: [heard vocalizing]. (R) [Tchaikovsky}: Block is great, but Edison is even better! (R) [Lavrovskaya sings]: Coo-Coo, coo-coo. [Safonov]: Peter Jurgenson in Moscow. (G) [Tchaikovsky]: Who was speaking just now? I think it was Safonov’s voice. [whistles]. (R) [Lavrovskaya]: Anton Grigorievich, play something! For posterity! Please, a couple of chords! Please Anton Grigorievich, play! (R) [Hubert]: [Unintelligible] (G) [unidentified]: [Unintelligible] (G) [Safonov]: Please, little one, a couple of chords! (R) [Rubinstein]: What a wonderful thing. (R) [Block]: Finally! (R) C352 from German [Participating in the discussion:] Julius Ivanovich Block (1858–1834) Elena Gerhardt (1883–1961) – singer Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922) – conductor Frau Professor Nikisch (dates unknown) – wife of Arthur Nikisch Fräulein Friedländer (dates unknown) Frau Block (dates unknown) – wife of Julius Block Unidentified voice Translation from German: [Block]: Today, on 16 December 1911, in the Grunewald in Blockhausen, I spent a most charming afternoon speaking with Frau Professor Nikisch, Herr Professor Arthur Nikisch, Fräulein Elena Gerhardt, Fräulein Friedländer, and the Block family. [Gerhardt]: [laughs] Today I have tasted Pommery for the first time—it was magnificent. And I thank the dear host that he gave me this magnificent libation. [A. Nikisch]: I hope to get many more full hands tonight, and to bluff my buddies thoroughly. These scoundrels do not deserve better. [Gerhardt]: But I prefer the Pommery even to Champagne; and the sold-out houses in the Philharmonic. [Fräulein Friedländer or Frau Professor Nikisch]: Will come back soon. It tasted magnificent. Indeed, it was […] [J. Block]: I am very pleased, and I hope you will at least keep your word, unlike Fräulein Gerhardt, who already for the weekend [unintelligible] us pleasure [unintelligible] but it takes time [unintelligible] the pleasure to see you [unintelligible]. [Frau Block]: I thank you all, dear guests, for the most pleasant afternoon. 1 “Five years old” is clear, yet history shows that Heifetz was not in Germany at this early date. The sound of the other Heifetz cylinders are similar to this when Heifetz was 11; the announced year of 1912 is relatively clear; and the voice of the young Heifetz is not that of a five year-old. Either Heifetz misspoke, the phrase refers to something else, or we are mis-hearing. 2 A description of how this cylinder contains several recordings from two different dates, as well as an excerpt from Block’s journal can be found on pages 54–55 of this booklet. 3 The translation of the passage is provided by Louise and Aylmer Maude. 4 Ibid. Appendix 3: The Phonogram Archive of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences The Phonogram Archive is part of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences, more commonly known as the Pushkin House (Pushkinsky Dom). The Phonogram Archive contains over 35,000 historic recordings in the field of ethnomusicology, ethno-linguistics, and philology. Specifically noteworthy is the high proportion of items from the earliest period of recording (i.e. before 1910) that use a phonograph in the field. The collections in the Archive offer a rich overview of the orally transmitted cultures of the former Tsarist Russian Empire and the later Soviet Union. Many of these recordings are the oldest of their kind, and some are unique. As a whole, they represent orally transmitted cultures, languages, and rites, which have since undergone substantial changes or are entirely lost.1 The Julius Block Collection is a small part of the Phonogram Archive. Unlike the majority of the collections in the Archive, the Block cylinders have little to do with language and ethnology.
1646	dbpedia	1	25	http://jplathrop.net/blog/elena-gerhardt-sings-brahms/	en	Elena Gerhardt sings Brahms' Lieder	http://www.jplathrop.net/wp-content/uploads/EG25.jpg		[ "http://www.jplathrop.net/wp-content/uploads/Elena-Gerhardt.jpg", "http://www.jplathrop.net/wp-content/uploads/EG25.jpg", "http://www.jplathrop.net/wp-content/uploads/ElenaGerhardt55.jpg", "http://jplathrop.net/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/share_save_256_24.png", "http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/e41fbe03dcab6...	[]	[]	[ "lieder", "elena gerhardt", "brahms", "lauter liebe", "brahms", "elena gerhardt", "music" ]	null	[]	null	Elena Gerhardt's 1939 interpretation of Brahms' Der Tod das ist die kühle Nacht. Historically informed Lieder, profoundly moving today.	en			http://jplathrop.net/blog/elena-gerhardt-sings-brahms/	Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht Why does this song of Brahms’, from a poem by Heine, mean so much to me? Why has it meant so much for so many years? Even as I write, the song playing in the background grips my heart. Most nineteenth century German Lied is about love–or unrequited love, or death. This song may be about all three. It’s hard at first to tell. It’s a triumph of suggestion, of atmosphere. Here’s the German text, followed by an English translation: Der Tod das ist die kühle Nacht, Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag. Es dunkelt schon, mich schläfert, Der Tag hat mich müde gemacht. Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum, Drin singt die junge Nachtigall; Sie singt von lauter Liebe, Ich hör es sogar im Traum. The translation: Death is the cool night, Life is the sultry day. It grows dark, I’m sleepy, The day has made me weary. Above my bed a tree arches up, In it sings the young nightingale. It sings of love alone, I hear it even in my dreams. And now for the question: what exactly does the nightingale sing of? What is, ‘lauter Liebe’? What did it mean, in historic, cultural, poetic context, when Heine wrote the poem about 1825 and when Brahms set it to music one or two decades later? Did it mean, in English, ‘love alone’, or ‘only love’, or ‘sheer love’, or perhaps ‘pure love’? What did it mean to Elena Gerhardt, the singer whose performance is available below? Gerhardt was born in 1883 near Leipzig; Brahms died in 1897 in Vienna. Gerhardt gave her first Lieder recital in 1902 at the age of twenty and was an instant success. For the next 32 years she was on an almost constant world concert tour. “Wer machte dich so krank” and “Alte Laute” were recorded in Berlin on September 24, 1929. She was accompanied by Coenraad V. Bos on the piano. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. She married as she turned 49 and she and her husband settled in London a few years before the Second World War. In 1939, a few days shy of 56 years old, she recorded the song in London at the Abbey Road studio no. 3, with Gerald Moore accompanying her on the piano. It was among a set of six 10″ records, privately published under the HMV White Label. It was not a great moment in the English-speaking world for German Lieder, and I don’t think more than two or three hundred sets were published. In 1984 Keith Hardwick transferred the recording to tape and thence to LP as part of HMV’s massive, six-disc ‘Lieder on Record’ compilation. It’s been out-of-print for years, and is now almost unobtainable. Electrical recording in 1939 was done straight to wax disc; there was no editing involved. We hear today, as a live recording, what they played and sung in studio no. 3, on 20 October ’39. How sensitive is Moore’s accompaniment, how clear Gerhardt’s diction, how profoundly moving her interpretation. (There are a few loud pops–surface noise–during the first phrase of the third line of stanza one. They do not continue.) Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. “Therese” and “Der Tod” Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht” For a first-class recent performance, see: Graciela Alperyn Tags: Brahms, Elena Gerhardt, Lieder, Music
1646	dbpedia	0	87	https://englishfamilyhistory.wordpress.com/3-2/	en	My family history	https://s0.wp.com/i/blank.jpg	https://s0.wp.com/i/blank.jpg	[ "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2013-04-01T06:46:17+00:00	FRANCES JOAN SINGLETON PIANIST AND ACCOMPANIST: A PERFECT WONDER This account is based on Joan Singleton’s personal papers and from what is currently available on the internet about her and her contemporaries. Her personal papers cover the period from 1905 to 1940 in…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	My family history	https://englishfamilyhistory.wordpress.com/3-2/	FRANCES JOAN SINGLETON PIANIST AND ACCOMPANIST: A PERFECT WONDER This account is based on Joan Singleton’s personal papers and from what is currently available on the internet about her and her contemporaries. Her personal papers cover the period from 1905 to 1940 in detail and consist of letters, reviews of concerts, and programmes. Thereafter there are occasional newspaper articles about her. Unfortunately, many of the reviews of her concerts are undated and there is no way of knowing how completely they represent her career. The title, Pianist and Accompanist: A Perfect Wonder comes from an undated description of Joan Singleton’s playing at a Glasgow Music Festival by Harry Plunket Greene: Miss Singleton yesterday was a perfect wonder. A whole heap of baritones were bad musicians and kept coming in where they liked, and skipping half bars and putting in others. She covered up their tracks and kept the whole thing alive in a way that was just genius besides playing the music quite brilliantly. She was wonderful. H. P. G. Michael Slaytor Greenwich July 2012 Joan Singleton in 1935 at the peak of her career (photograph from her passport). Frances Joan Singleton was the second of four daughters of the Rev. James Sydenham Fowke Singleton and his wife Mary Norman. She was born at The Vicarage[1] in Theale in Somerset in 1886 and, with her sisters, educated at the High School in Wells. To her nieces, the daughters of her sister Marion Routh Clarke, she was known as AJ (Aunt Joan).[2] Joan Singleton was a professional pianist and an accomplished organist. She was a tiny lady who had gone into black at the age of 30 (because she thought it slimming) and wore no other colour thereafter. Marion and Joan Singleton photographed in Wells, Somerset, and Joan Singleton (photographed by the Eastern Daily Press, Norwich) as she was in about 1960. She was godmother to her niece Prue Routh Clarke and her great niece Petrina Neal. She was warm and generous and alarmingly eccentric. In 1961, when I first met her, she would either turn up at Wattlefield Hall, Wymondham in Norfolk (the home of her sister Marion Routh Clarke) unannounced, or not arrive when expected. Similarly, it was never known if she would play the organ or engage in whatever musical activities her sister had arranged and expected her sister’s cooperation. This made planning rather difficult and her sister very cross. There is a description of her at this time which captures her in old age:[3] [The] accompanist was Mrs [sic] Joan Singleton, a little lady dressed all in black with a black hat, she didn’t look the part but she was a professional accompanist in the London Musical World and could make the piano talk and, because of connections, was prepared to come to Norfolk to play for us for many years. She returned to Somerset after leaving Leipzig in 1908 and went to Scotland in about 1910 where she lived and worked until she moved back to London, as an established accompanist, in 1924. Throughout her career she used her professional expertise as pianist, organist and festival accompanist to help her sister, Marion Routh Clarke, run Norfolk Women’s Institute choirs in Spooner Row, Wymondham, and Hethersett. These choirs competed in the Norwich Musical Competition Festivals where they were invariably successful throughout the 1930s and 1940s.[4] Marion Routh Clarke (front row with baton) and Joan Singleton (on her left) with one of Marion Routh Clarke’s Women’s Institute choirs in 1937. They had been competing in the Norfolk Musical Competition Festival (photograph from the Eastern Daily Press, Norwich). For much of the war she lived at Wattlefield Hall. Her niece, Prue Neal (née Routh Clarke), who was also then living at Wattlefield Hall with her children, remembers her aunt as always wearing a hat and cooking non-stop for the farm workers. Among Joan Singleton’s papers is a grim reminder of the war years,[5] a Memorandum (No. 38) from the Board of Education entitled Catering for Harvest Camps. The menu from Day 13 gives a flavour: Breakfast: Porridge, Fried Fish and Potatoes; Marmalade, Bread, Tea 11 A. M. (packed): Bread and Cheese Luncheon (packed): Egg Pasties, Carrot and Cabbage Sandwiches Tea (packed): Flapjack Dinner: Fish and Cheese Pie, Cauliflower or Greens, Jam Sponge Pudding. Supper: Only if required A drawing by Prue Neal, Joan Singleton’s niece and goddaughter, entertaining curates from Wymondham Abbey at Wattlefield Hall during the Second World War. In the 1960s, one curate from the Abbey was called Mr Pagan and another Mr Bliss. She also played for the Wymondham, Hethersett and Spooner Row W. I. Choirs with the cellist Muriel Taylor from the Robert Masters Piano Quartet;[6] she gave a solo recital at Wymondham Abbey to celebrate the 850th anniversary of the founding of the Abbey.[7] A souvenir from Germany. There is a short diary outlining three visits to the Continent in 1925 and 1927. In August and September 1925, apart from normal sightseeing, there were operas and concerts. She went with Anna[8] to Prague, Munich where she saw (21 August) Cosi fan tutte with Richard Strauss conducting (‘an outstanding and wholly satisfying performance’), Don Juan, with Richard Tauber, Richard Mayr and Maria Nemeth, the next night (‘under Böhm, first rate cast. Lovely performance’), then (24 August) Il Seraglio (no comments) and finally (25 August) Parsifal at the Prinz Regenten Theater. In Salzburg (27 August) she went to Le Nozze di Figaro at the Stadt Theater (‘good little performance but judged by Cosi, only 3rd rate. Audience disappointing, both in size and behaviour’); the next night there was a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic under Bruno Walter and Rudolf Serkin with Haydn, a Mozart piano concerto and Brahms Op. 73 (‘Oh, what a programme and what a performance! Simply great, outstanding performance. Big audience and a big damp hall’). On August 29 there was Don Pasquale with Bruno Walter as Dirigent (‘such a bright and amusing performance with a better behaved audience tho’ still too anxious to clap and fidget’). The next night there was another orchestral concert, this time at the Riding School with Karl Muck[9] conducting. The programme was Mozart G moll [symphony], and the Beethoven Eroica symphony (‘tremendous audience and reception for Carl Muck, [who] looked quite unmoved by it all.’). The last concert was on 31 August under [Franz] Schalk;[10] with the Schubert Unfinished and Bruckner VIII. There were then a few days sightseeing in Innsbruck and then Paris where they saw Manon at l’Opéra Comique (6 September) (‘glad to be there but oh!… well music and manners don’t begin to compare with Mozart’). In March 1927 Joan Singleton went to Vienna and Berlin for the Beethoven centenary celebrations. In Vienna these were held 26-31 March. Among her papers are programmes for: the Missa Solemnis (27 March; 12 noon) with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Franz Schalk with Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Mayr among the soloists; in the evening (7 p.m.) there was an ‘evening of historical opera’ (Dido and Aeneas, La Serva Padrona and a Rameau Ballet); a chamber music concert (28 March); the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Felix Weingartner[11] and Pablo Casals with Paul Weingarten[12] playing the piano concerto in G minor, the Eroica and the 8th symphony (30 March), Fidelio with Lotte Lehmann, Alfred Piccaver, Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Mayr conducted by Lothar Wallerstein (31 March at the Odeon-Musikhaus); Turandot (1 April). From Vienna she went to Berlin for the end of the Beethoven celebrations: the 6 (letztes) Konzert (5 April) with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Julius Prüwer[13] with Bronislaw Huberman (violin), Gregor Piatigorsky (cello) and Siegfried Schultze (piano); the Letzter Beethoven Abend (7 April) Edwin Fischer playing four sonatas. After the Beethoven concerts she went to a recital (10 April) by the Violinist Stefi Meyer[14] (accompanied by her husband Walter Schulthess) and finally to Fidelio again on 22 April conducted by Bruno Walter.[15] In September 1927 she went to Austria and Germany with Nora Forman.[16] In Munich (14 September) they saw Paganini with Richard Tauber (‘absolutely great’) and (18 September) they saw Die Gräfin Maritza (‘ever so pleasing’). After the war she lived at Ware in Hertfordshire possibly to be near her great friend, the violinist Aline Hay who lived in Hertfordshire. Her musical activities there are described in her obituary. Her professional career covered more than 60 years starting in 1910 and she continued to be active musically until her death in 1975. The peak of her career was from the 1920s until the Second World War in both Scotland and in London. Her early training was in Somerset where she took the local examination in musical knowledge from Trinity College, London on 23rd June 1900 and obtained 100%. The next year she got 131/150 in the examinations of the Associated Board of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music but three years later she received a letter from the Royal College of Music regretting to inform her that she had: not obtained the requisite number of marks to entitle you to a Certificate of Proficiency in Pianoforte Teaching. Her great uncle, the Rev. Henry Mallet[17] wrote to her expressing his and his sister-in-law, Caroline Singleton’s, understanding of her disappointment, and continued: with the taste and power for musical performance which you have, there is often more good to be got out of a first failure than out of a first success. You will have learned more what is needed, and will not I trust be at all discouraged but will set to work with more determination to supply what is wanting and secure success. Left, Otto Goldschmidt, a foundation piano student of the Leipzig Conservatorium which was founded by Felix Mendelssohn (right) in 1843 (images from the internet). In May 1905, Henry Mallet again wrote to her, this time congratulating her on obtaining a Certificate with Honours for a performance. On 8 September her father wrote to Otto Goldschmidt,[18] sending him a copy of the current prospectus of the Royal Conservatorium of Music of Leipzig, and requesting his help in getting his daughter admitted as a pupil of Professor Teichmüller at the Leipzig Conservatory.[19] Whether or not Otto Goldschmidt helped, Joan Singleton was accepted as a pupil of Professor Teichmüller at the Leipzig Conservatorium in 1905. One of the star students from this time at Leipzig was the mezzo-soprano, Elena Gerhardt, a protogée of Arthur Nikisch, the Director of the Conservatorium.[20] She gives a vivid picture of the privilege of being a student there in her autobiography.[21] Students were allowed to go to rehearsals of the Gewandhaus Orchestra which was conducted by Arthur Nikisch. They could pick up the small Eulenberg scores of which there were dozens piled up outside the hall and so follow the music and learn from the way Nikisch interpreted or explained points to his orchestra. Students also had free entry to the public rehearsals on Wednesday mornings when the Conservatorium was closed so that every student might have the opportunity to attend. At these concerts we would also hear the world’s greatest artists: Paderewski, Carreño, d’Albert, Siloti, Suggia, Ysaye, Joachim, Lilli Lehmann, Schumann-Heink, Edith Walker, Alice Barbi, Raimund von zur Mühlen, Nordica, and dozens more. Two students at the Leipzig Conservatorium who were contemporaries of Joan Singleton and who went on to international careers. Left, Elena Gerhardt, aged 20, after her first concert with Arthur Nikisch in 1903. She was a student from 1900; right, the portrait of the Portuguese cellist, Guilhermina Suggia (1885-1950) painted by Augustus John between 1920 and 1923. She enrolled as a student in 1901 and within a year was playing as a soloist with the Gewandhaus orchestra under Nikisch. She completed the 3 years study in 18 months. The Leipzig Conservatorium, the oldest university school of music in Germany, had strong connections with Great Britain: Sir Arthur Sullivan, Dame Ethyl Smyth and Frederick Delius were amongst the British students and, from Australia, Alfred Hill. In 1905, there were more than 900 students:[22] The Conservatorium aims at giving its pupils an opportunity of acquiring practically and theoretically musical efficiency and knowledge in all branches, indispensable to the modern musician, offers great advantages over private tuition. Through participation of several students in the same lesson industry and emulation is promoted. True musical feeling is engendered and kept alive, the best preventive of one-sidedness in education and taste against which every musician should be on his guard. After acceptance as a student, accommodation had to be found. The Pension Harris at Arndtstrasse 4 in Leipzig looked suitable and a prospectus was obtained. Carry S. Harris wrote of the rules and conditions:[23] Since we inhabit a villa, contrary to the usual German habit of flats, there is no difficulty about practising beyond: no practising with open windows, and not later than 10 p.m. The young ladies here each [have] their own instruments – which they hire for 9 to 18 sh. a month – one to 9 sh. is good enough for practice, 12 sh. certainly. There is then 10 sh. carriage to pay extra. In the case of two young ladies having the room between them, the one has her instrument in the dining or the sitting room. As you will see in the Prospectus German lessons are included in the price of the Pension. There are German, French and English young ladies in the house. The conversation at table and when we are together in the evening is always in German. I allow no English talking in the house. Carry S. Harris from the Pension Harris wrote to the Rev. Singleton:[24] I duly received your letter this morning and am very glad you should have decided to trust your daughter to my care. I shall do my best to make her stay with us profitable and pleasant for her. Everything shall be ready for the young lady’s reception on 23rd of September. It would be well for her to bring a passport. It is required here and if she has not got it we would have to apply to the British Consul for one. A passport was duly obtained on 16 September 1905 for Frances Joan Singleton to travel to Germany accompanied by the Reverend James Sydenham Fowke Singleton. The fees of 360 marks per term, paid in three instalments of 120 marks at Michaelmas, Christmas and Easter, plus an entrance fee of 10 marks were paid between 26 September 1905 and 8 Jan 1908.[25] Joan Singleton’s sister Marion had acquired a passport to go to Germany on 4 January 1907. She learnt to swim and acquired a Schwimm-Zeugnis as a Frei-Schwimmer under the Schwimm-Meister Gustav Meissner on 10 August 1907 and had herself photographed in Magdeburg and returned to Somerset by Christmas.[26] Professor Robert Teichmüller, her teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory (photograph from a postcard owned by Joan Singleton) and Marion Singleton, Joan Singleton’s elder sister, photographed in Magdeburg in 1907. Joan Singleton’s passport issued by the Foreign Office on 16 September 1905. On 20 March 1908 as Fräulein Joan Singleton aus Theale she played in her graduation concert four Solostücke by Scarlatti, Schumann and Brahms. While in Leipzig she played the organ at the British and American Episcopal Church. The Rev. Ernest F. Scofield, the British Chaplain, wrote to her on 13 April 1908 enclosing a small token of the esteem and gratitude of the congregation on hearing that they might be losing her. When she went to Edinburgh in 1911 she hoped to get a job as a church organist. She was an excellent organist and received testimonials in 1911 from the Rev. E. F. Scofield, the former British Chaplain at Leipzig.[27] From her return from Leipzig she had been organist in Wookey, a village near her parents’ home in Theale in Somerset. Another testimonial from the same time was from Edward B. Cook, the Vicar of St Martin’s in Leeds: It is a pleasure to me to write commending Miss Singleton’s ability and enthusiasm as a church organist. For some three years she played for us at Wookey near Wells, and I have great reason to thank her for what she then did for us. She is not only a well trained and experienced musician, but she has had a long experience in playing church services, and is full of enthusiasm for this work. She possesses a rare gift of accompaniment and can be trusted not only to use the organ fully, but to assist the choir and not to let the organ assert itself unduly. Any church would be glad it had secured Miss Singleton’s services, and it will be a pleasure to me to reply to any questions which may be sent to me on her behalf. Her real interest was getting established as a pianist. On her return to England she wrote to the Rev. Canon Thomas Henry Davis for advice regarding her future career teaching private pupils.[28] He replied on 16 June 1908 saying that: The best and only thing I can suggest your doing is that to get started was to have a friend, if you have such a one, to give an ‘At Home’ in her drawing-room in London to which she will invite heaps of people and then she can give out that you are anxious to teach and one pupil may turn up and may lead to others. Of course there are heaps of girls doing this sort of thing in London but there is always room, I think, if you can get a few introductions such as would come from playing at ‘At Home’, you may have to wait before you get many but you might get a few engagements to accompany at swell ‘At Home’ or necessarily to play a few solos. As regards playing in the school-room at Wells, you must not think of it. It would be madness to do it, of course if you thought of settling down to teach in these parts, you might then give a recital in the Town Hall and get an audience of all the people round in the county who are interested in music. We might of course keep you in this way, still the teaching in the county is not good. I mean as regards fees obtainable and would become hard work if you depended on it entirely. I hope you will understand all this, but if I am not clear, please let me know, as I will certainly do anything I can for you. I am so glad the English congregation appreciated your services. On 22 June 1908 he sent a testimonial as to her excellence as a musician, both practical and theoretical (including harmony). Further advice as to how to proceed came from Muriel Little, a former pupil of Robert Teichmüller, in response to a letter from Joan Singleton.[29] Muriel Little’s long letter written to Joan Singleton in Leipzig on 2 July 1908 is full of good advice learnt by hard experience. It is worth quoting in full as it gives a vivid picture of the musical jungle in Edwardian England facing Joan Singleton: Dear Miss Singleton, I was very pleased you wrote to me and can assure you I will do all I can to help you. You must not think me disparaging when I tell you that there is very little scope for musicians in London – especially performers – everything being highly competed for. Altho’ again, if one is only determined and, of course, gifted enough to get on in spite of long waiting there is work to be had. Have nothing to do with agents unless you have money to back you up. They are a “set of thieves” (please forgive the ausdrück) and impose terribly on one’s pocket unless one has already made a name, or has someone influential behind pushing. The great thing seems to me, is to get a private influential ‘clientele’ of one’s own and until that is obtained it is impossible to give a recital in London to bring one’s name before the public unless as I said before, one has means. The Bechstein Hall, or any of the others if hired or filled for you by an agent would cost £40 to £50 and even then (unless you were pushed or brought out by someone like Richter, Nikisch or Wood) would be of practically no use to you with the exception of obtaining press notices. The latter you are always asked for (if you have no money) by the agents before they even suggest helping you or becoming your agent. Of course my chief clientele at present is in Norwich where I have 15 pupils and visit each weekend. This I started by giving a big invitation concert in Norwich, getting two London artistes (friends) to help me and giving my professional cards of terms away at the door afterwards. I also saw that the Press had invitations. This was of course directly I left Leipzig. My native town is only 12 miles away from Norwich. So of course I had a few friends who pushed and helped me and mentioned my name, until I had one or two pupils and as one or two of them have turned out successes, I have now several. The next thing I intend giving there is a pupils’ concert. I tell you all this as you asked and for this reason I would suggest that you make your start in the nearest large town to your home. It is no use whatever relying on promiscuous engagements if you want to begin earning at once. You must bide your time to become known (unless you have money). But never let an opportunity slip by, either of becoming known or of accepting an introduction to anyone. One never knows what it may lead to, perhaps a pupil or something. I also found it a great thing never to refuse to sing or play whenever or wherever asked even if not in the mood or bei Stimme. I am afraid all this everlasting push, and ‘grasping’ (almost) does not tend to further one’s musical instinct or intuition but it has to be done in England unless you are already a Mischa Elman[30] or Godowsky[31] and can afford to employ an agent. Of course so much depends on one’s self as you of course can already surmise and if you are to reach the top of the tree, and are an artiste to the core nothing can keep you back. Then only you can be your own mistress and hold the agents in your hands. (I expect you will laugh at me giving you the latter advice not having arrived anywhere near that myself yet). I find, of course, living in London adds a trademark to my profession, and London is the only place where one can keep in touch with the musical world [her letter was sent from 56, Holmdale Road, West Hampstead]. You must also be prepared to find the average listener in England totally ignorant of music as regards classical and technical knowledge (except in the London real musical sets) and must not expect to be understood, and admired as much as you were abroad (I mean from a musician’s standpoint). It is hard to tell you this – but I can assure you I have been through it. You must be prepared for disappointments. But now to the brighter side. I found after this first year of drudgery (and many tears) I could pay my own expenses. (Father had to help me until that time had elapsed). This, of course, by teaching (private pupils) which is the only reliable way of earning at first. Of course during the concert season one gets several odd jobs – “At Homes,” “Charity Concerts,” Provincial Concerts also. The latter are helpful and I would suggest if you have a local musician to call on him and let him hear you and give you a chance of performing with him (this perhaps for expenses only). I must also confess I had a very dear and influential friend who has helped me in both London and Norwich, whom I met and sung for shortly after my return from abroad. It seems to me Miss Singleton that you must be on the spot to do any good. I mean it would not be any use me putting your name down on any school agents’ books if you were not here to be interviewed. I would strongly recommend a visiting school appointment which are generally very remunerative but also vey highly sought after. For this purpose you must have your teachers testimonials (both English and foreign) and credentials done, printed or typewritten in proper form. I strongly advise you to get yours from all your masters in Leipzig recommending you as a competent teacher (your performers you have on your prüfungs zeugnis). I had to write for mine afterwards, but felt rather sorry to bother them all so late in the day although they were ripping. You must also expect many people over here to know nothing of the Leipzig masters or even what a Leipzig diploma entails and more than often one finds it is these people that one has to do with; they wanting their children to be musically instructed. I think this is all I need tell you. I cannot enforce too strongly that it depends entirely on yourself and your powers as a performer and teacher. Another great thing is to be able to convince patrons that your method and ideas are the right ones. Self-confidence in one’s method, I mean. This I am sure you have! Of course it will be a good thing for you to put your name on several educational school agents booksby paying the entry fee of 1/. You do not tell me when you are coming home, but it would be a good thing to do it soon because of the summer vacation coming on and I know the schools fix up their new mistresses early for the Autumn Semester. A very good medium is the Educational Journal (6d every month) if you could get it. At any rate Miss Singleton, I shall be only too pleased to help you in any way if you care to come and see me or write to me. I know only too well what a struggle it is to become known for the first year. I had to find out everything for myself. What I have told you is the gist of it but all good comes to him who waits long enough. Yes, I have seen a great deal of Elena Gerhardt. She has scored a huge success over here, and has been in grand form. She has been kind in recommending me. Of course she is so often asked here if she teaches. I expect you would smile to see me posing as a conductor but I have a Ladies Choral at Sandringham. We are giving a concert next month. How sorry you must be to leave Leipzig. I suppose you don’t earn enough to keep yourself there. I should recommend you to stay if you don’t like the idea of waiting to become known here which has to be, if one means to do it alone. Every one tells me I have been lucky to get on so well. So it can be done Miss Singleton in two years. I gave a recital last month at Princes Skating Rink and managed to fill the Hall to standing room. I am giving an invitation concert kindly lent me the hall by a friend in London on June 19. Next year if all goes well I shall hope to take one of the larger halls and perhaps give a recital with someone else. I was fortunate in getting some good press notices last month. Well do write if you want to know anything further. I hope this letter does not dampen your zeal because I imagine that you will be one who takes things seriously and will succeed. Please give my love to Bertha when you see her. I hope to go to Leipzig again this summer. And please give my heartiest greetings to dear old “Teichy” and tell him the Chopin Scherzo got a good press notice the other day. With kindest remembrances, Very sincerely yours, Muriel S. Little. Getting established in London, Joan wrote to Maude Valerie White,[32] who replied: I am so touched by your dear kind little card and the lovely flowers – dear Miss Joan, believe me it’s a real joy to do even such a trifle as I have been privileged to do for you – Mr Theodore who was sitting just behind you when you played Miss Ealons (?) first solos turned to me and said “How beautifully that girl accompanies” and I certainly agreed with him con amore. I do wish you the greatest of luck for you deserve it. Do keep up with dear Harry Greene.[33] He loves your playing and likes you very much, and I’m sure he’d be a real true friend to you as he has been to many another young artist. I am sure to see you again so I’ll only say au revoir and bless you. Yrs affectly, Maude Valerie White An early, but undated, letter from the violinist Lilian Foulis[34] asks her to accompany her at the Aeolian Hall.[35] She wrote: I heard you last meeting and liked your playing very much. I am playing two violin solos, Ave Maria (Schubert-Wilhelming) and Souvenir de Moscow Wieniawski. Of course I am getting no fee, but I should be pleased to give you 7/6. The Royal Conservatorium of Music, Leipzig from Joan Singleton’s copy of the 1905 prospectus. Joan Singleton moved to Edinburgh about 1910: it had been recommended to her by an Edinburgh student in Germany as a teaching centre.[36] She had clearly been to Edinburgh as she sent a postcard of Edinburgh (of Colinton, a suburb) from Leipzig to her sister Marion on 27 June 1909. Joan Singleton’s Aunt Pussie[37] had enlisted the help of a Mrs Thomson: Mrs Thomson wrote off at once to a musical cousin in Edinburgh and to her Italian singing master of what she should say! Mrs T. says she will be glad to do anything to help you and if any use you could play at her house and she would ask people who might be useful to hear you. In an undated brochure she offers lessons (in Edinburgh) for £4.4.0 a term of 12 lessons, (‘specialising in teaching small children from 4 to 6 years’: references are kindly permitted from the Lady Dunedin of 7, Rothesay Terrace, among others). An early friend in Edinburgh was Marcus Dods, a judge, who collected antique furniture and used to knit on the train going ‘through to Edinburgh’ during the First World War.[38] He was also an accomplished musician who played a prominent part in the development of vocal music in the West End of Edinburgh and for his work on the Executive Committee of the Edinburgh Musical Festival.[39] Had he wished, he might have won fame as a musician, for he had not only a glorious voice, but he had also in singular degree an emotional and intellectual knowledge and appreciation of music.[40] On Easter Monday 1912 Marcus Dods wrote to Joan Singleton asking if she would accompany him. He had heard her play and had greatly enjoyed her playing. He also wanted her help with a girls’ choir he ran. He particularly wanted to improve his acquaintance with Hugo Wolf and he wanted her to accompany him in at a Browning Centenary recital in May. He also wanted her to play a toccata by Gallupi in that concert. Browning had written a poem entitled A toccata of Galuppi’s but no such composition was available in print so Joan Singleton had to play Galuppi’s Sonata in C minor. He had been asked to play the toccata but he felt it needed her Bach touch not his. He hoped she would approve of a Steinway on which to play. The concert duly took place and on 8 May Marcus Dods received a letter from a Mr Marshall thanking him for his help and adding Will you also convey our gratitude to Miss Singleton I can’t tell you how much her playing enchanted us. Her accompaniments were superb and her playing of the Galuppi music was the very perfection of art and good taste. You had not told me half about her. What a joy it must be to hear her play Bach. Marcus Dods (1876-1935) from a photograph by Lafayette owned by Joan Singleton and Jean Marcel, cellist (photograph from programme). Joan Singleton became, and remained, a close friend of the Dods family. After her death in 1975, Marcus Dods daughter, Marcia wrote:[41] She was a dear friend to our family making much music with my father and we always enjoyed her annual visits. I always looked forward to seeing her when she came to Edinburgh for the Competitive Festival. I was always sorry that she seemed so busy that she could never stay for long! She did once pay me a very fleeting visit here but it was lovely to see her and I feel privileged to think she thought it worth her while to come so far for such a short visit. From 1918 Joan Singleton collected reviews of her concerts though as these became more frequent they were not as carefully entered and many are undated; there are no reviews after 1938. Based on concert reviews there were three strands to Joan Singleton’s musical life, as a soloist and in chamber music, accompanying singers and instrumentalists in recitals, and, as official accompanist at competitions. One of the few reviews mentioning her solo playing was a concert in the Playhouse Galashiels in Scotland[42] featuring the cellist Beatrice Harrison (‘The lady who set nightingales singing’), the soprano Dora Labette, the contralto Miss Olga Haley,[43] the baritone Mr Robert Parker and Miss Joan Singleton, pianist and accompanist. The programme opened with a very fine performance by Miss Singleton of Bach’s Fantasia in C minor and Bach-Busoni Choral Prelude. The distinctive features in these numbers were delightfully brought out by this accomplished lady, who in response to the applause gave another charming piece, which emphasised her fine tone and excellent technique. The (anonymous) reviewer goes on: The accompaniments for the vocalists were exquisitely played by Miss Joan Singleton with whom patrons of these concerts were glad to renew acquaintance, and to whom much of the evening’s enjoyment was due. She has, we are sure, by her gracious personality and artistry, made a host of friends, amongst the music-loving people of the Borders, who will accord her a hearty welcome on any future occasion. An earlier concert in the Gymnasium of the Madras School at St Andrews[44] with the Scottish cellist David Millar Craig received this review: Miss Singleton is a veritable virtuoso at the piano, and she charmed the audience with her solos – Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 1 (Brahms), Clair de Lune (Debussy) and Fireflies (Frank Bridge). The Intermezzo was brilliantly executed: in the second piece the sad stillness of moonlight was beautifully expressed, and fluttering movements were cleverly suggested in Fireflies. In response to an encore that would not be denied, she played a theme by Schumann. A review from 1930[45] of a concert of ‘two artistes of the first rank – Miss Eileen Bingham (soprano), and Miss Joan Singleton (pianist)’ gives full detail of Joan Singleton’s playing: Miss Joan Singleton, the solo pianist, was only down to play one group of pieces, and the audience, realising this, clapped so persistently at the end of the series of pieces, that Miss Singleton had to oblige twice more. To begin with, everyone had a foretaste of her qualities, for she played Miss Bingham’s accompaniments superbly. And when she alone held the stage, her power over the audience was magnetic. She could achieve a pianissimo which literally made you hold your breath, and, conversely, she could produce tonal volume which was sheer magnificence. Her pieces included Minuet and Variations in D Major, Allegro (from a harpsichord suite by Maurice Greene), Gavotte (Gluck-Brahms), Beethoven number, and the very descriptive and fast-moving Fireflies. It may truly be said that Miss Singleton added another to her long list of successes and secured a warm place in the musical hearts of West Kirby. One of the striking features of reviews of chamber music concerts featuring Joan Singleton is how unimportant the pianist’s role appears. For example, when she was playing a work such as the Kreutzer sonata, her contribution was noted, not as a partner, but as ‘ably supporting the violinist’. In an undated review[46] of a performance at the Grotrian Hall of the Schumann E flat major piano quintet by the Beredin String Quartet,[47] the reviewer (F. B.[48]) says: that the pianist, Miss Joan Singleton proved so invaluable an ally to the string players.[49] This diminishing of the importance of the role of the pianist in chamber music is reflected in the paucity of chamber music in the record catalogues of this time. For example, the HMV wartime catalogue of 1914-18 lists Marjorie Hayward and Una Bourne playing the Kreutzer Sonata; this appears to be the only chamber music in a substantial catalogue.[50] Joan Singleton’s career as a pianist was as an accompanist. Before Gerald Moore (1899-1987), accompanists, though obviously valued by singers and instrumentalists and essential for the success of a concert, were not given more than a throw away line at the end of the review. Ivor Newton (1892-1981) and Harold Craxton (1885-1971) are the only British pianists who were contemporaries of Joan Singleton whose names are remembered as accompanists. From her first concerts in London, her talent as an accompanist was recognised by her fellow musicians but reviewers usually recognised the accompanist in the last line of a review such as: The accompaniments were ably played by Miss Joan Singleton.[51] At this time the idea in England of a singer or instrumentalist and pianist as partners, such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore, would appear to be unknown. More positive is this review from The Times of a recital by Mark Raphael at the Grotrian Hall in London: Miss Joan Singleton contributed very considerably to the success of the recital by her admirable performance of the accompaniments.[52] More typical reviews are the following from London concerts. The first, from The Observer,[53] was Joan Singleton accompanying Mark Raphael in a group of songs by E. J. Moeran to poems of James Joyce: The songs were sensitively sung by Mr Mark Raphael to the excellent accompaniment of Miss Joan Singleton their true stature becomes even more impressive. A third review is from The Sunday Times[54] and was the debut of the soprano Eileen Bingham at the Wigmore Hall: Miss Bingham was exceptionally fortunate in her accompanist, Miss Joan Singleton, whose technique was unimpeachable, including the rare faculty of faultless judgment both of song and of singer; clearly she has a special vocation for this difficult art. An undated review of a concert in Ayr with Mark Raphael and Seymour Whinyates comments on the accompanist: Miss Singleton contributed compositions by Bach, Couperin, and Schumann, and also assisted in Brahms’ Sonata in D minor, Op. 108. She is a pianist of outstanding qualities, all her work displaying technique of the best kind. An appreciation of her accompanying came from the cellist Miss Jean Marcel[55] whom she accompanied in a concert at the Freemasons’ Hall in Edinburgh in aid of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in France and Serbia on 30 October 1915 and the next day received a thank you note: I cannot thank you enough for your delightful accompanying yesterday; very very few accompanists have played as well for me as you did; and I hope we shall often play together. I enclose two guineas. Hoping you are none the worse, Yours very sincerely, Jean Marcel The cellist Beatrice Harrison and the soprano Dora Labette (images from the internet). Perhaps the best review of her accompanying is from a review of a mixed concert she played in 1928 in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. The main attractions were the cellist Beatrice Harrison, and Dora Labette, the soprano. Beatrice Harrison was accompanied by her sister but Joan Singleton accompanied Dora Labette.[56] The reviewer wrote of the accompanist: The accompaniments for the vocalists were exquisitely played by Miss Joan Singleton, with whom patrons of these concerts were glad to renew acquaintance, and to whom much of the evening’s enjoyment was due. She has, we are sure, by her gracious personality and artistry, made a host of friends amongst the music-loving people of the borders, who will accord her a hearty welcome on any future occasion.[57] In the programme notes for this concert, it is recorded that: Her headquarters are now in London,[58] where she is doing good work in collaboration with most of the leading singers and instrumentalists of the present day. She holds an unrivalled position as a most sympathetic accompanist, as well as a brilliant pianist, a rather unusual combination. A year later an even grander concert (‘there were very, very few empty seats’) was held at The Playhouse in Galashiels.[59] ‘It was given before a distinctly music-loving audience, because there was no breaking in with applause before a song and its accompaniment were finished.’ The star of this concert was the young violin virtuoso Milan Bratza[60] but: There were some beautiful accompaniments, which were presented in all their glory by that accomplished lady, Miss Joan Singleton. As well as Milan Bratza the artists were the bass Robert Easton,[61] the tenor Heddle Nash[62] and the soprano Miss Megan Foster.[63] Undoubtedly his [Bratza’s] best number, in collaboration with Miss Singleton at the pianoforte, was “The Devil’s Trill” (Tartini), his interpretation of which was greeted with enthusiastic and prolonged applause. In acknowledging the appreciation of the audience, Bratza was not unmindful of Miss Singleton, whose accompaniment had not a little to do with the success of the piece. Milan Bratza in 1929, Heddle Nash in 1945 and Robert Easton in 1933 (images from the internet). Over her long career, Joan Singleton was associated with many musicians. There are reviews for concerts with singers and instrumentalists both famous and now forgotten. Among the musicians who are unknown to me are: Eileen Bingham (soprano),[64] Cecilia Brenner (‘a Dutch mezzo-soprano with a magnificent voice’), Charles Bruce (violinist), Dorothy Chalmers (violinist), Gladys Clark (violin),[65] Elsie Cochrane (soprano), David Millar Craig (cellist),[66] Douglas Dickson (violinist), Marjorie Greenfield (soprano), Helen Henschel (soprano),[67] Jeanne Hommedieu (‘American soprano’), Walter Johnstone-Douglas (bass baritone),[68] Miss Hope MacDiarmid (‘a young Scottish singer unknown to me’), Sheila Macdonald (‘a New Zealand soprano of Scottish parents’), Beatrice Parker (soprano; ‘comes from Edinburgh where she has won immense popularity as a teacher and a singer’), Denne Parker (contralto),[69] Hilda Saxe (‘a clever pianist’ who played with Jean Marcel, cellist),[70] Gregory Stroud,[71] Marie Thomson (soprano),[72] Marcus Thomson (baritone). One of her earliest concerts with a famous singer was in 1920 when she accompanied Mignon Nevada in a concert she had given in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh. Of the concert, The Evening Dispatch wrote: A most enjoyable feature of the evening was the very beautiful singing of Miss Mignon Nevada, an operatic soprano of exceptional musical quality, who is not unknown to Edinburgh music-lovers. Nothing finer has been heard here for many a day than her touching rendering of the famous “Willow” song from Verdi’s Otello, in which she was accompanied most sympathetically by the orchestra. Later she gave, with perfect charm, tender air from Mozart’s Zaide, and Purcell’s wholly delightful “Hark! Hark! The echoing air.” She had a great reception from the audience, and was induced to give two encores, one being a pretty trifle entitled “Daybreak,” from the pen of Mr Julius Harrison [the conductor of the orchestra]. The later songs were accompanied most tastefully by Miss Joan Singleton. Emma Nevada (left) and her daughter Mignon Nevada (right). Mignon is photographed as Ophelia in Thomas’s Hamlet. Sir Thomas Beecham thought her the finest Ophelia he had ever heard. Joan Singleton wrote to Mignon’s mother, the famous soprano Emma Nevada,[73] about the concert and, in reply, received a letter of thanks:[74] Mignon is indeed a great singer – among the most perfect singers before the public today – and what is more her art like her voice grows every day. She does not sit still content with what she has – but looks always for more and more perfection. Mignon told me how beautifully you accompanied her. I remember the recital of Laddie how splendid you were, My husband is in London for a few days but will be back I hope tomorrow. He has gone to arrange the contract of Mignon’s engagement in London which is a very interesting one. Sir Thomas Beecham’s fifteen year old son[75] has written an opera for Mignon which is nothing less than “The Merchant of Venice” and Mignon is to create the role of Portia in the first days of February so we are leaving Paris on the 3rd of January to go back to London. John Coates is to conduct the opera and there is great excitement about it. The most important singer Joan Singleton regularly collaborated with was the baritone Mark Raphael. The following is adapted from the notes accompanying a record of Mark Raphael singing songs by Roger Quilter and Samuel Alman: Born in London’s East End on April 7, 1900, Mark Raphael received his initial musical experience as a child chorister in the Great Synagogue, where he sang under the direction of Samuel Alman. Shortly thereafter he appeared as a soprano soloist in Alman’s King Abaz, the first Yiddish opera. Mark was also featured in numerous appearances with the then visiting Cantor of Warsaw, Gerson Serota. As a young adult Mark studied voice and repertoire in Italy, Germany and France.[76] Returning to England he began to appear widely throughout the area of Greater London, coming to public notice particularly for his singing on programs dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased Fauré. Shortly thereafter he gave a recital at London’s Wigmore Hall,[77] programming several songs by Roger Quilter which attracted the attention of the composer himself. Quilter regularly accompanied Mark Raphael in recitals. In the Autumn of 1924 they gave concerts in Vienna and Frankfurt. Quilter and Mark Raphael preformed three of Fauré’s songs in a memorial concert at the Wigmore Hall on 9 June 1925. In 1934/5 Mark Raphael and Roger Quilter recorded a set of seventeen Quilter songs.[78] In the years from 1927 to 1938 Mark Raphael and Joan Singleton gave recitals all over England and Scotland. The first dated programme of Mark Raphael and Joan Singleton is from 1927 and was at the Masonic Hall, Cambridge on 21 October. It was a replacement concert for Mark Raphael and Roger Quilter.[79] In February, and again in October, 1928 they went to Scotland accompanied by the violinist Seymour Whinyates playing in Perth, Edinburgh (at the Freemasons’ Hall), Ayr and Glasgow. Mark Raphael sang Old French songs, lieder and songs by Roger Quilter; Seymour Whinyates and Joan Singleton played the Beethoven and violin sonata Op. 30, a Chaconne by Vitali and violin pieces by Martini-Corti and de Falla and Joan Singleton played piano soli by Bach, Schubert and Brahms. The Edinburgh Evening News gave first mention of Joan Singleton:[80] For a number of years Miss Singleton took a prominent place in musical circles in Edinburgh, but she is now resident in London. She amply manifested the high qualities of her art in her renderings of Bach’s Fantasia in C minor and the Bach-Busoni Choral prelude In dir ist freude; the latter being brilliantly played. ‘ Mark Raphael (left) and the flier for Marian Anderson’s debut concert at the Wigmore Hall in 1928. The Evening Dispatch was equally complimentary and said of the singer: Mr Raphael’s contributions as a lieder-singer were perfect cameos of their kind. His singing displayed a delightful lyric quality that found its happiest expression in a group of five Schubert songs. In each number Mr Raphael brought a sympathy of expression and deep understanding of the spirit of the songs which could not fail to impress. In June 1928 they gave their first London recital. On 7 June they gave recital of Schubert songs at the Wigmore Hall. It was briefly reviewed in all the papers:[81] He used a smallish baritone voice with so much skill and intelligence as to be more pleasing than many a more imposing singer. It was a musician’s concert. A more complimentary review of his singing was from a concert they gave at The Royal Pavilion in Brighton in 1929:[82] Since Mr Plunket Greene was last here, Brighton has heard no singer of such distinction and versatile accomplishment as Mr Mark Raphael. He is charged with a colourful emotion in voice that springs from his own temperament. Equipped with a mellow, sensitive baritone, responsive to all shades of his mood, and technically excellent, Mr Raphael is something greater than a good singer. He is a creative artist. There are two programmes for concerts in the Grotrian Hall; one is dated 20 May 1931 and was a recital of songs by Schumann, Wolf and E. J. Moeran (to poems by James Joyce). The back of the programme advertises that he teaches singing in the Blüthner Studios in Wigmore Street.[83] In this concert he sang, to excellent reviews, some Schubert songs and Fauré’s, La Bonne Chanson cycle. There are other undated programmes for concerts at the Aeolian Hall, Wigmore Hall and another at the Grotrian Hall (9 November 1937) and finally a performance of Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall on 15 November 1938. It was through Mark Raphael and Roger Quilter that Joan Singleton accompanied Marian Anderson at her Wigmore Hall debut on 15 June 1928. In England, Marian Anderson had been taken under the wing of Roger Quilter after writing to him in 1922 asking him to coach her on singing his songs. She had a few lessons from Mark Raphael’s teacher, Raimund von zur Mühlen, and then some from Mark Raphael. Marian Anderson was a regular visitor to Quilter’s home and sang frequently for the gatherings in his music room. Her recital at the Wigmore Hall took place on 15 June. For most of the songs she was accompanied by Joan Singleton, but Quilter accompanied her in a group of his own songs.[84] There is a signed photograph of Rosina Buckman[85] inscribed to ‘My love dear Joan Singleton’ but there is neither programme nor review of any concert they gave together among Joan Singleton’s papers. Rosina Buckman (from a photograph in Joan Singleton’s papers). Joan Hammond (image from the internet). Similarly, there is neither a programme nor a review of a concert which Joan Hammond and Joan Singleton gave at the National Gallery in London on 18 July 1940.[86] During the Second World War, Joan Hammond lived with Joan Singleton’s sister, Patience Singleton. Joan Singleton was “Flutterby,” an appropriate name,[87] to Joan Hammond. Among the better known instrumentalists she played with, not already mentioned, were the violinists Jelly d’Aranyi[88] and Marjorie Hayward.[89] Among Joan Singleton’s papers is a postcard with Christmas greetings from Marjory Kennedy-Fraser and several programmes of recitals of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s Hebridean songs. Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1857-1930) was a Scottish singer (she was a pupil of Mathilde Marchesi), composer and arranger of Scottish folk songs. Joan Singleton accompanied Rachel Neill Fraser[90] in a recital of these songs in Berlin in 1928 at the Bechstein Saal. Joan Singleton attended a memorial concert for Marjory Kennedy-Fraser in the Wigmore Hall on 12 March 1931 with Marjory’s sister, Margaret Kennedy, her daughter Patuffa Kennedy-Fraser, and Ruth Waddell (cellist).[91] The first group of songs were sung by Margaret Kennedy with Patuffa playing the piano. Joan Singleton’s comments, written in the margin of the programme, reveal another side of her nature: The whole of this group rather missed fire with the exception of the last. Patuffa’s piano touch is certainly matured in the wood, or was it the Chappell piano. Anyhow she hit a record number of wrong notes. The next group sung by Patuffa fared no better: An attractive group but what a rasping voice when it is let out. On The Lull-Song to the Heir of the Macleods: I felt sorry for the heir of the Macleods if he was lulled as Patuffa lulled him! Of a piano piece, Coronation Processional: Another pet of mine, but Patuffa hit the piano as though she hated it. Finally, a comment on Margaret Kennedy singing The Leaping Galley: Painful. Christmas card (undated) from Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (from Joan Singleton’s papers). Later she was associated with the Robert Masters Piano Quartet and the London Mozart Players.[92] Presumably the association was through the Beredin Quartet, two members of whom came from Edinburgh, Nannie Jamieson[93] and her sister Hilda Jamieson. Joan Singleton had played the Schumann piano quintet in E flat major with them. Nannie Jamieson later played the viola in the Robert Masters Piano Quartet. The cellist of the quartet, Muriel Taylor gave a concert with Joan Singleton in 1958. The Robert Masters piano quartet photographed in Australia by Max Dupain in 1950; from the left: Kimlock Anderson (piano), Robert Masters (violin), Nannie Jamieson (viola) and Muriel Taylor (cello) (image from NLA website). “I like this piece taken slowly,” Fred Blacklaws discusses his piece with the accompanist (undated newspaper photograph). One of Joan Singleton’s major roles as an accompanist was at festivals both vocal and choral. She was the official accompanist to the Perth Musical Festival, to the Edinburgh Competition Festival for 50 years from 1920[94] and, for a time, the Glasgow Festival. Judging by the interviews she gave she clearly enjoyed this work. Joan Singleton made an impression on Hugh Roberton. As the most important person in the choral world in Scotland (and in Britain), I assume he was instrumental in getting Joan Singleton associated with the Scottish Music Festivals. He was the founder and conductor of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir the foremost a cappella choir in Britain. He was also one of founders of the Glasgow Music Festival in 1911, a festival Joan Singleton was associated with for several years. He wrote an apologetic letter to her on 25 May 1920 from Glasgow in which he is hoping to work with her in Glasgow.[95] He was successful as shown by the review by Harry Plunket Greene quoted above. Hugh Roberton wrote: Dear Miss Singleton, Although I have come home to a mess of correspondence I feel I must write to you. It may not have occurred to you that to find encouragement and sympathy at the outset of my Edinburgh job meant so much to me as it did. And you were the first to make me feel that the work was worth doing. I think that appreciation of yours after my first innings on the Monday night coloured the whole week and helped to make it what it was. If I was cheeky and presuming you will, I know, forgive me. I had come straight from an exacting week at Birmingham and one cannot ride on the crests of musical waves and remain, at the same time, normal in every respect. I enjoyed being associated with you because of your reliable musicianship and your very quick sympathy and if I expressed myself crudely either in word or action you will know that it was really an emotional reaction from the judicial (and necessarily somewhat cold and analytical) work of adjudicating as such. Isn’t a Festival a real living thing? Compared with the exotic kind of music dabbling that passes current for musical interest it is as red riotous life to a kind of polite stupor. By the way Bisset[96] is sure he can get you a choir composed of girls who will look up to you and to whom you will be able to impose your personality. So you must see him. I enclose a few copies of The Lute[97] including a reprint of an old one containing essays by members on “the spirit of the choir”. When I get time I shall look out some music for you. I would greatly like to see you at Moray House Training College, High St Edinburgh when I am lecturing on Saturday 5 June at 10 a.m. Not to hear my lecture but to hear Cathie Woods Choir which was the feature of the Edinburgh Festival and which you missed. I am due at Galashiels on Friday morning for the Border Festival. This ends my Festivals for the year. Pardon the long screed. Best wishes and a thousand thanks. Yours very sincerely, Hugh S. Roberton PS My purpose in sending you the Lutes is to let you know what kind of folk we are. Some day you will come to Glasgow and see us all. Joan Singleton met Harry Plunket Greene early in her London career and he remained a friend and supporter to the end of his life. As well as being a fine recitalist – he was the first to sing Schumann’s Dichterliebe cycle in London in 1903 – he was a noted adjudicator at festivals.[98] A handwritten undated review by him of her playing at a Music Festival in Glasgow indicates his enthusiasm for Joan Singleton’s accompanying: Miss Singleton yesterday was a perfect wonder. A whole heap of baritones were bad musicians and kept coming in where they liked, and skipping half bars and putting in others. She covered up their tracks and kept the whole thing alive in a way that was just genius besides playing the music quite brilliantly. She was wonderful. H. P. G. Harry Plunket Greene and Sir Hugh Roberton (images from the internet). In a concert at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh featuring the Glasgow Orpheus Choir under Hugh Roberton, Joan Singleton accompanied Miss Gladys Clark ‘a violinist of considerable power and executive skill’. As usual, Miss Joan Singleton was ‘an excellent accompanist’. [99] Sir Richard Terry,[100] one of the adjudicators at the Festival: Warmly complimented Miss Joan Singleton, the accompanist in this class (of ‘raw-toned sopranos’). If the audience had been wearing hats, he should have asked everyone to take their hats off to Miss Joan Singleton. One dear one young lady had missed two and a half lines through lapse of memory, yet no one had turned a hair; this accompanist had not given them away. They should approach en bloc and thank her for saving their lives. 50 years when a tactful letter came from the Association:[101] We think that now perhaps is the time to suggest a change. We feel that the day must come when you would rather be working nearer home and when the thought of a strenuous week up here will become something of a burden to you. Joan Singleton had written on the envelope: Final word from above (Edinburgh Competition Festival). Newspaper photographs of (left) Joan Singleton at the Perth Musical Festival in 1937 and (right) at the Edinburgh (Competition) Festival in 1960. The caption under the photograph from the Perth Musical Festival reads: Miss F. Joan Singleton who has been playing accompaniments day and night since Perth Musical Festival started on Monday. For example, in one competition there were 20 soloists, who sang a song of six verses – making 120 times in which she repeated the tune. In another class she had to repeat a song 77 times. That was one afternoon’s work. The article accompanying this photograph is attached as Appendix II. This caption under the photograph on the right from the Edinburgh Evening News, 23 May 1960 reads: Miss Joan Singleton, who has been an accompanist at the Edinburgh (Competition) Festival since its inception 40 years ago, was presented with a purse and cheque to mark the occasion at Saturday evening’s session in the Music Hall. Dr T. M. McCourt, this year’s chairman, is shown making the presentation to Miss Singleton. The article accompanying this photograph is attached as Appendix III. Joan Singleton’s views on accompanying are in a lecture she gave a lecture called The Art of Accompanying to the Women’s Institute at Denman College in 1952 (Appendix I), but there are also newspaper interviews with her on the subject: one from the Perthshire Festival in 1937 (Appendix II) and another from Edinburgh in 1960 celebrating her 40 years association with the Edinburgh Competition Festival (Appendix III). From her papers, it is clear that Joan Singleton gave other lectures including one on Parry’s song Jerusalem which traditionally opened Women’s Institute meetings (see Appendix IV). Joan Singleton’s last years are best described in her obituary in the Thundridge and High Cross Church Monthly Magazine. After the war Joan Singleton lived at 32 Ermine Street, Thundridge, Ware in Hertfordshire: Early in October Joan Singleton aged 88 years, died.[102] She was a much loved member of Thundridge Parish. Joan was an accomplished musician – her professional life had been filled with travel and much interest. We shall always remember Joan for her joy in living – her sense of artistry and delight in all that is beautiful coloured everything for Joan and we miss now a dear friend. Joan was well known in musical circles throughout the country, having accompanied many famous singers and instrumentalists and taken part in choral festivals. Before, and during, World War 2 she accompanied Aline Hay’s Trio.[103] In 1947, encouraged by Miss Hay, and at the suggestion of Molly and Charles Sweet (then of Pine End) and their friends, she helped to re-form Ware Choral Society which she saw grow from forty to about a hundred voices before she retired as accompanist a few years ago and became the Society’s President. Always wanting to make music, in about 1950, Joan Singleton gathered together a group of friends, known as Thundridge Madrigal Singers who met on Sunday evenings to enjoy music together under her inspiration. This group sang to W.I.’s and churches, including Thundridge for several years. Harvest Thanksgiving for the Blind at Little Berkhampstead organised by the Rev. Garth Bawtree-Williams and broadcast annually were a great delight to her as she accompanied her friends in the choir on the piano, with Dr. George Thalban Ball on the organ. When Betty Hvistendahl formed the present Thundridge Singers it was Joan Singleton who was their first accompanist, later becoming President. Joan’s Funeral Service at Thundridge on October 8th was fittingly joyous – the congregation nearly raised the roof with ‘For all the Saints.’ We are having a Memorial Service at Thundridge for Miss Singleton on the evening of Sunday, November 23rd at 6.30 p.m. A photograph of Joan Singleton aged 86 from the Eastern Daily Press in 1973. The caption reads: Still playing the organ in St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, for the W.I. 55th annual meeting was Miss Joan Singleton who made a special trip from Hertfordshire to start the meeting off with the traditional bars of Jerusalem.[104] APPENDIX I The Art of Accompanying (A lecture given at Denman College 5 March 1952)[105] What a task I have accepted for myself and no mistake!…..but it’s a great pleasure being here and to try and give you some idea of the Art of Accompanying. But I may as well confess as hobby or career to some fear and trepidation to embarking on such a difficult subject — And WHY? Is it because it covers such a vast field? That its requirements are untold? That it asks for a whole-hearted surrender to the ART?…No, surely because it’s so elusive, so difficult to put into words. One has but to scan over the shelves of a music (library) to see how few have written anything more than the merest scraps on the subject altho’ our stalwart Gerald Moore has made a success of his The Unashamed Accompanist and is now following it up with Request Lectures (and one can well imagine that H.M.V. Records will not be far distant. He urges people to take up the ART as a profession – even in preference to being a solo pianist and surely he’s right. It’s so many-sided… Some say solo playing and accompanying are one and the same thing – some utterly deny this. But speaking for myself I can’t help feeling that the one who begins with a comprehensive background of pianoforte works has a tremendous pull over the student who starts from scratch. Apart from the enormous literature for the piano there is the added advantage of forms and styles – to mention but few of its assets. The solo pianist may draw huge audiences, perhaps enormous fees – while in contrast the struggling accompanist may have to be content with a few shillings for an hour’s work with a singer, a few more with strings or other instruments in Sonata works – More still if you achieve the high order of being a coach accompanist and for concerts and recitals programmes the fees a movable and varying scale of fees…But putting aside this tiresome question of pence (tho’ the labourer should always be worthy of his hire, of course) hasn’t the accompanist all the “Fun of the Fair,” so to speak? There is all the fun of team-work, the immense amount of matching to be done together – Practices with all and sundry from Village Hall to Albert Hall, in Church, in Cathedrals, in the Home, in Recitals, in Festivals – the making of friends if only in passing, tho’ many one can keep for life – the experience shared together (as here, in these helpful surroundings) in the counties and countries visited (I well remember a 1st class return sleeper to Rome to cover some vocal recitals there and Genoa – Florence thrown in) and languages learnt for foreign songs. Not forgetting our own lovely poems…… Then it need not be restricted to soloists – there can be opera – perhaps filling in parts for orchestras when you can easily imagine you are doing something much grander than you are – a concerto at least !! And let no one belittle or under-estimate the experience and valuable help that can be gained from playing for a Choral Society – working under a good conductor can be an education in itself. So much for the fun of it and opportunities offered…..and now for the requirements. Text-books tell us some of the essentials. 1 To be a fair and accurate pianist. 2 To be a good sight-reader. 3 To do transposition in all its phases 4 Even Memory tests 5 Even filling in missing bars, or vamping as best one can, to save awkward situations and to these surely one should add:- 6 To be a good pedaller (not pedlar) 7 To be ALERT – ALIVE ENTHUSIASTIC and SUPPORTING 8 And what of Touch…….? 9 The one touch mortal always fills me with sadness – a singing master said t’other day – “what on earth do you mean by a ‘one-touch’” It’s when Notes are Notes, technique good but a deadly monotonous level throughout – a “p” mark can be coloured or un-coloured in so many different ways. Equally so with “f” or “ff” marks. 10 Whatever the Touch, the nearer you can get to making your own fingers ‘sing’ – the better accompanist you will be. This matching of tones and colours can be such an entrancing study and more than repays one for all the time and thought and terrific listening put into it. For the finished artist you must be able to put your keyboard behind you – your keys and fingerings well established and devote yourself heart and soul to the picture you are helping to present — and when you have had the music long enough beforehand, be sure and memorise all you can – at any rate the vital spots and especially the turn of the pages – both sides – for even if you have the most skilled turn-over-er at your side, he or she can have an accident or turn bars too soon or too late…… Why even worse can befall – the whole copy may fall – then what? (Saw it happen at the Festival of Britain in London last summer – hot day windows opened everywhere – charming young accompanist started off 1st choir entrant – wind blew down from top windows, the music flapped away – a nasty scruffle to patch it up, but the performance was shattered). Then memorising is important when you find yourself in such a poor position on the platform that you simply can’t see the music and the conductor at the same time! (one could go on at length about the extraordinary positions one can find the pianos in halls – in the furthest and most awkward corners – in fact you may not be on the platform at all.). This question of memory is all the more important now that we have such works of art woven for voice and piano. Look at the incomparable Schubert for a moment – what equality of musical partnership, what a school for one’s apprenticeship – or for any aspiring student. Taking at random:- WOHIN Whither? With its vocal line telling the story – the right hand the brook, the left hand the march rhythm – together thus – (Anyone who can burst into the vocal line anywhere please do) and going backwards in this same song-cycle called the “Maid of the Mill” – to Das Wandern – a strophic song with 5 verses to the same tune, when it’s so important that the accompanist should make all the subtle difference in them 1) – 2) – 3) – 4) – 5) – Then that huge “Dramatic Religious Rhapsody” the Young Nun – with its background of raging storm, thunder and lightening, the convent bell heard whether in storm or calm throughout – the young nun saying her life has been such a battle to win through to. And for sheer joy of Rhythm why not “Mein” ? one of the same cycle – And for fascination of figure work, why not the Trout and the bubbles it makes in the water? And so from Schubert through Schumann, Brahms and Wolf, right on to our present day writers – and now with many of the modern choral accompanists – one never ceases to be grateful for the interest brought into these little works, these miniatures, for the pianist. So many spring to one’s mind by A. Gibbs, Bridge, Dyson, Gardiner, Howells, Ireland, Thiman and all the others – shame to start singling out but the duet – “See how the morning smiles” by Ireland is such a particularly grateful bit of writing from a practice point of view. (Let it be confessed, though, I always hope choral works won’t be too difficult because of having to read them at sight – without rehearsal – and often in the semi-dark. When re-working and practising the Lady of Shalott it occurred to me you might like it if we took it through as a ‘practical’ experience and did some “spotting” together as if in quick study class? Conclusion In olden days one was expected to “keep under” – self-effacement before all else – for fear of spoiling or [being] accused of stealing the soloist’s limelight – but now with all these lovely works which can only be given in ‘double harness’, with the piano part in real duet form, one dare not be less than supporting. And oh! What a delight it is to hear this support and balance when justright – It can be quite different in rehearsal at home – and then in public. Conditions have so much to do with it. This applies just as much to singers and strings – they can sound quite different. The piano part is often now so elaborate. Far more like Chamber Music in which all players are on equal terms, with their give and take, balance of tone and Good Ensemble. A good piano accompanist STIMULATES singing – it can even make singers do more than they thought they could – Then again it amplifies and can give completeness to effect. Then it can help to maintain pitch and prevent flatness or other faults of intonation. (Quote own fears here) And think how important it is to ‘launch’ a song or work in the right mood – perhaps not more than a few chords (like the Lark?) – the utmost musicianship and insight are required to make a real ARTIST. Several ordinary things may be required of you – play from impossible MSS or incomplete copies – play on all kinds of pianos, cope with varying artistic temperaments – show tact, be loyal, be ready to direct or advise if asked – yes, and in whatever conditions to appear cheerful and helpful. A bad dreary accompanist can have a deplorable effect on the spontaneity of the singing – and many a choral society has been brought to disaster by the unimaginative efforts of an indifferent player…. but we know only too well how true they are. If asked how to draw up an ABC for accompanying with but little time to spend on it, I know I should be defeated – But of the bass: advocate these bass notes only – I seem to remember many occasions at Festivals when it would have been a relief if some kind-hearted person at the piano would stop struggling with chords and their insides and just play a good bass – remember the 4th as the bus to take you home. APPENDIX II[106] The perfect accompanist – the competitor’s friend – the nice lady at the piano. At one time or another all these titles have been conferred on Miss F. Joan Singleton, official accompanist at [the] Perthshire Musical Festival. These descriptions have been applied by adjudicators, by festival officials, by competitors. Miss Singleton must now be known to thousands of people in the district. This is the seventeenth Musical Festival and the sixteenth at which she has officiated. Encouraging Smile But she never obtrudes. Her manner and actions are those of the perfect accompanist – quiet, competent and understanding. It is thus that competitors know and appreciate her – her ready, encouraging smile, her comforting presence and her sympathetic support in the ordeal of competitive singing or playing. Miss Singleton has played for thousands of singers at musical festivals. Normally her work is in London concert hall accompaniment. She also acts as accompanist at Edinburgh and for a time was at the Glasgow Festival. She plays at similar events in England. This week alone she has been at the piano in Perth City Halls morning, afternoon and evening for five days – playing for kiddies’ action songs and singing games, junior choirs and young soloists, and in the medal and classical vocal competitions. “I Like It All” Which class does she enjoy best? “I like it all,” she says. “It does not get monotonous. One gets a personal interest in the competitors. Some of these singers I have seen grow up from the time I played for them in the children’s classes. It is good to feel how some of them have improved, and it can all be so interesting.” APPENDIX III A clipping from an Edinburgh paper from 1960 is headed: Dedicated When I looked into the Assembly Rooms yesterday to see what was happening at the Edinburgh Musical Festival, I found Joan Singleton playing passages of “The Messiah” on the piano. Miss Singleton, one of the Festival’s great personalities, has a remarkable record of service at this and other Scottish Festivals over the last 40 years. If ever there was a woman dedicated to music it is Miss Singleton, who told me it was the late Dr Hugh Roberton, the founder and conductor of the famous Glasgow Orpheus Choir who played a very important part in inaugurating Music Festivals in Scotland. I asked her if she ever found it monotonous playing the same tune over and over again at festivals and she replied “Never.” She was born in Somerset, and her parents sent her to Germany to study. There she met an Edinburgh student who recommended Edinburgh as a teaching centre. “Joan is really quite a remarkable personality and is known at festivals throughout the country,” commented one of the adjudicators, Jan Van Der Gucht from the Royal College of Music in London. APPENDIX IV The Story of “Jerusalem” There is no record of when and where this talk was delivered. It was presumably presented at a W.I. meeting, probably in Norfolk. Words by William Blake (1757-1827); Music by Sir Hubert Parry (1848-1918). The poem, Jerusalem, which with its setting by Sir H. Parry has been adopted by many W.I’s as their special song, is of such a mystic character as frequently to demand some sort of explanation. W. Blake, painter, engraver, and poet, was born in London in the reign of George II. His unusual imaginative powers found expression, not only in poetry, but in illustrations for many books, both in water colours and engraving. The poem, Jerusalem, is taken from one of his “Prophetic Books” all of which are highly symbolical and now very obscure. The title Jerusalem, the dwelling place of Peace, embodies his vision of the ideal city of God, where Christ’s law of Love prevails, and where men live in brotherhood with one another. The first 8 lines, which have been puzzling to many, refer to the widely accepted tradition that the living Christ actually visited England in parts of Cornwall and Somerset. It is a historical fact that a trade in tin and lead existed in very early times between England and the Country of the Phoenicians. There is a persistent tradition that Joseph of Arimathea was engaged in this trade: the idea occurs in a quaint song used by the tin-miners. If, as many commentators have surmised, Joseph of Arimathea was related to the Mother of our Lord, it is not unlikely that Christ, as a youth, may have accompanied him in some of his journeyings. During the period when the Gospels are silent as to his life, between the ages of 12 and 30. The tradition survives in Cornwall, at Glastonbury in Somerset, and at Priddy on the Mendip Hills where the trade in lead is known to have existed in the time of Christ. It was to this story Blake referred, probably hearing it when on a visit to Priddy, a small village, lying in the very centre of the ancient lead and copper mining district. The entrances to these disused mines still show, dark and terrible, against the green hillsides. Probably in Blake’s time, gaunt machinery rose black against the sky line, causing his reference to “dark Satanic Mills.” Yet beyond them still rise the green hills of Somerset, peaceful and unsullied, and the beautiful belief that these hills are always green because they were once trodden by holy feet. Possibly also Blake had in his mind the great increase of mechanical power all over England, and the cruel use of child labour in the mills. This vision of England sanctified and claimed for Christ himself leads Blake on to the prayer and resolve of the 2nd stanzas. He prays for the bow and arrow of burning enthusiasm, for the spear for closer battle, and above all, for the spiritual forces of Heaven the “Chariot of Fire” to carry him onwards, till his vision of peace shall find fulfilment in the fertile and smiling English land. Sir Hubert Parry. For many years the President of the Royal College of Music, composed the music. The accompaniment is difficult but it is possible to procure a simpler setting, and the marked increase of force and fervour, in the ‘2’ verses, tho’ the air remains the same, should be clearly defined. “Jerusalem” formed part of the Jubilee celebrations in 1935 when it was included by special command of King George V in the programme of the great National Concert in the Albert Hall. Other thoughts on ”Jerusalem.” The 1st verse has as its theme the legend that Christ came to Britain as a child, but it really throws out a challenge. Blake is asking us what we think about our country, what does it mean to us with all its beauty and traditions? Do the right spiritual and physical conditions prevail in it for its people to develop what is best in themselves? In the 2nd verse he answers the challenge and as we sing it we answer it too, for it is a challenge to the individual. “Bring me my bow of burning gold, I will not cease from mental fight.” We shall all interpret this challenge according to our lights: the bow, the chariot and the spear will mean something different for each of us, but the essence of Blake’s message in this and all his other poems is his belief that it is only by men using their knowledge and their imagination and by their working together in love, that a solution to the world’s problems can be found. Let every Christian, as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem.
1646	dbpedia	1	73	https://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/biography/4253/Saudek/Rudolf	en	Annex Galleries Fine Prints			[ "https://www.annexgalleries.com/static/images/logo.jpg", "https://www.annexgalleries.com/static/images/header2.png", "https://www.annexgalleries.com/static/images/items/small/20925.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "annex galleries", "Gustave Baumann", "annex gallery", "art dealer", "IFPDA", "California", "fine prints", "american", "european", "latin american", "19th century", "20th century", "21st century", "woodcuts", "American printmaking", "paintings", "sculptures", "photography", "WPA ...	null	[]	null	Established in 1971, the Annex Galleries is a salon style gallery which specializes in 19th, 20th and 21st century American and European fine prints. With an inventory of over 8000 works on paper (half of which are available on this website), our focus is American color woodcut, Arts and Crafts prints, WPA prints, modernist and Abstract Expressionist prints from the 1940s and 1960s, prints created at Atelier 17 in New York and Paris, and California prints and printmakers.	en			null	Sculptor and printmaker Rudolf Saudek was born in Kolin, Czechoslovakia, on October 20, 1880. He didn't pursue art until age twenty when he took courses in sculptural work in Paris in 1900. He formally enrolled in the Royal Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Trade in Leipzig from 1903 to 1906, followed by study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and courses in Paris, London, Rome and Florence. He became known for his marble busts, and in 1910 he was comissioned to revise the marble funerary portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche at the request of his sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. This led to other "death masks," most notably for the composers Arthur Schopehauer, Antonin Dvorak, and Bedruch Smetana. He was commissioned to create busts for famous contemporary politicians, scientists, doctors, royalty, and performing artists, including the opera singer Elena Gerhardt. Additionally, decorative works were commissioned by the Gewandhaus theater and the Leipzig Zoo, and in the 1920s he published a series of etchings to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. In 1935 Saudek, who was Jewish, was banned from working professionally as an artist and resigned himself to tombstone carving for fellow believers in order to support himself. Eventually, however, this was also banned. He filed official complaints with the Czech officials in Berlin in the hopes that such laws wouldn't apply to foreign Jews as they did to German Jews, but was rejected. He relocated to Prague in 1938 to escape the rising tide of anti-Seimitism, but to no avail as the Nazi occupation spread. In 1942, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Theresienstadt, known primarily as the a camp for the elderly and used for propaganda purposes to spread the idea of the humane treatment by the Nazis, was left under the direction of sympatheic Jewish overseers and as such many of the prisoners were allowed some modicum of normalcy as long as it didn't draw attention from the Nazi government. (Its seemingly benign set-up was therefor successful enough to fool visiting inspectors from the Red Cross in June of 1944.) This allowed for Saudek's survival. His skills as a sculptor were used in a propaganda film shot in late 1944, creating a fountain decoration for the SS who, in a bid to boost their world image, filmed the prisoners creating art, gardening, and performing other benign "leisure" tasks. Additionally, Saudek participated in the secret education and entertainment of the children who were also imprisoned in the ghetto, creating a puppet theater that recreated famous children's stories on a miniature stage. Following the completion of the propaganda film in September of 1944, many of these prisoners, primarily the youngest, were deported to extermination camps, where they were murdered. After the liberation of Theresienstadt by the Red Army on May 8, 1945, Saudek returned to Prague, where he continued to work as an artist, as well as a professor of art at the Academy of Fine Arts, until his death on July 19, 1965.
1646	dbpedia	3	85	https://www.gramophone.co.uk/classical-music-news/article/baritone-derek-hammond-stroud-has-died	en	Baritone Derek Hammond-Stroud has died	http://www.gramophone.co.uk/media/192873/hammond-stroud.jpg?anchor=center&mode=crop&width=960&height=640&rnd=132213270290000000	http://www.gramophone.co.uk/media/192873/hammond-stroud.jpg?anchor=center&mode=crop&width=960&height=640&rnd=132213270290000000	[ "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1212098742461537&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://www.gramophone.co.uk/media/233361/e64c2718796a53a23b65326a1c69e6d253b27705-photoroom-png-photoroom.png?height=69", "https://www.gramophone.co.uk/media/232137/953472d9ca7ea8fad442e86a32a1f0f8199b200d.png?height=25", "https://www...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "kYlzrO1BaC7A" ]	2012-05-28T07:29:14		en	/media/127553/bge7m-5ffd4-0.png	Gramophone	https://www.gramophone.co.uk/classical-music-news/article/baritone-derek-hammond-stroud-has-died	The English singer Derek Hammond-Stroud has died; he was 86. A noted interpreter of Gilbert and Sullivan, he also excelled in roles that called for exquisitely nuanced acting such as Faninal (Der Rosenkavalier), Alberich (Der Ring) and Beckmesser (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). He was also a fine Lieder singer. Hammond-Stroud was born in London and studied at Trinity College of Music in London and, abroad, with two of the great Lieder singers, Elena Gerhardt and Gerhard Hüsch. He made his debut in 1955 in a concert performance of Haydn's Orfeo ed Euridice, making his stage debut in 1957 at Publio in La Clemenza di Tito. He joined the Sadler's Wells company where his roles included Papageno (Die Zauberflöte), Dr Bartolo (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Melitone (Rigoletto) and also started to make a name as a superb actor-singer in G&S: he was outstanding as Ko-Ko in The Mikado. His crystal-clear diction and vivid acting skills (both verbal and visual) that shone in G&S set him in good stead for characters by Wagner and Strauss. He was a Proms regular, appearing over 30 times in the 20-year period from 1968. He made his Covent Garden debut in 1971 as Herr Faninal, the arriviste father of Sophie, in Der Rosenkavalier and the role took him around the world - to the Met, Buenos Aires and Munich. His Alberich in Wagner's Ring – conducted by Reginald Goodall at ENO and enshrined on disc – was seized on by Gramophone's Alan Blyth (4/92) for its 'formidably articulate and power-hungry' nature. He appeared in the TV premieres of Walton's The Bear and Façade. A recording of Schubert's Winterreise, made live at Wigmore Hall in January 1979 with the pianist Geoffrey Parsons, was released on Exegete Recordings and a Schubert collection on Symposium drew from AB (1/90) the comment that 'the baritone has been at pains to emphasise the importance of clear and meaningful diction; indeed he has regarded it as a sine qua non for any reputable singer so it's hardly surprising to find words playing such a vital part on this disc'. He was a fine teacher and received honorary titles from both the Royal Academy and Trinity College, and in 1987 was made an OBE.
1646	dbpedia	3	9	https://www.periodpaper.com/products/1925-print-elena-gerhardt-portrait-music-mezzo-soprano-lieder-singer-german-221769-xmf4-012	en	1925 Print Elena Gerhardt Portrait Music Mezzo Soprano Lieder Singer G	http://www.periodpaper.com/cdn/shop/products/XMF4_012_1ae55246-ebd8-467e-88f7-17b052463498_1200x1200.jpg?v=1571712263	http://www.periodpaper.com/cdn/shop/products/XMF4_012_1ae55246-ebd8-467e-88f7-17b052463498_1200x1200.jpg?v=1571712263	[ "https://www.periodpaper.com/cdn/shop/files/checkout_logo_3_180x.png?v=1614240650", "https://www.periodpaper.com/cdn/shop/products/XMF4_012_1ae55246-ebd8-467e-88f7-17b052463498_300x300.jpg?v=1571712263", "https://www.periodpaper.com/cdn/shop/products/XMF4_012_1ae55246-ebd8-467e-88f7-17b052463498.jpg?v=157171226...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	"Elena Gerhardt" This is an original 1925 black and white halftone print of a portrait of German mezzo-soprano "lieder" singer Elena Gerhardt (November 11, 1883 - January 11, 1961). CONDITIONThis 88+ year old Item is rated Very Fine ++. Light aging throughout. Small crease - bottom right corner. Some light surface rub.	en		Period Paper Historic Art LLC	https://www.periodpaper.com/products/1925-print-elena-gerhardt-portrait-music-mezzo-soprano-lieder-singer-german-221769-xmf4-012	"Elena Gerhardt" This is an original 1925 black and white halftone print of a portrait of German mezzo-soprano "lieder" singer Elena Gerhardt (November 11, 1883 - January 11, 1961). CONDITION This 88+ year old Item is rated Very Fine ++. Light aging throughout. Small crease - bottom right corner. Some light surface rub. Product Type: Original Halftone Print; Black / White Grade: Very Fine ++ Dimensions: Approximately 4.5 x 7.5 inches; 11 x 19 cm Authentication: Serial-Numbered Certificate of Authenticity w/ Full Provenance Protection: Packaged in a custom archival sleeve with an acid-free black board (great for display, gift-giving, and preservation) Period Paper is proud to present a collection of prints from 1925 of portraits of famous opera singers like Marcella Sembrich and Emma Calve, musicians such as Brazilian pianist Guiomar Novaes, and composers the likes of Ethel Leginska, Arthur Schnabel, Thurlow Lieurance, and many others. To continue browsing this collection, simply click on the link provided beneath the condition paragraph, Enjoy! XMF4C25
1646	dbpedia	3	93	https://m.facebook.com/3241570582638162/	en	Facebook	https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/B8BxsscfVBr.ico	https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/B8BxsscfVBr.ico	[ "https://facebook.com/security/hsts-pixel.gif?c=3.2" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Sieh dir auf Facebook Beiträge, Fotos und vieles mehr an.	de	https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/B8BxsscfVBr.ico		https://www.facebook.com/login/
1646	dbpedia	1	65	https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/02/music-under-the-nazis-archive-1933	en	Music under the Nazis - archive, 1933	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…456be70d1b93ac85	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…456be70d1b93ac85	[ "https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035250&cv=2.0&cj=1&cs_ucfr=0&comscorekw=Nazism%2CClassical+music%2CWorld+news%2CGermany", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f3c829f8df8ef3aaea0d5a8cdbd67650a4091693/0_85_3984_2391/master/3984.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Guardian staff" ]	2018-08-02T00:00:00	<strong>2 August 1933</strong>: A Lancashire artist’s experience of musical life in Germany after a stay of 10 months in Leipzig	en	https://assets.guim.co.u…e-touch-icon.svg	the Guardian	https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/02/music-under-the-nazis-archive-1933	The effect of the National Socialist revolution on musical life in Germany was described to a Manchester Guardian reporter yesterday by Miss Ann Broadhurst, a young singer, whose home is at Leigh, Lancashire, and who returned a few days ago from a stay of ten months in Leipzig, where she has been studying at the Conservatorium. “Music has received a terrible setback since the elections of March,” she said. “It is not so much that there is active hostility to musicians, or to the practice of the arts in general, as that the atmosphere of the country is one- in which artists cannot work and study. People have no time for music in Germany now. I know and admire the Germans, and I remember how striking their enthusiasm for music seemed to me when I first went there. Even the poorest people knew and appreciated the great composers, and could sing long passages front them. All that is gone, for the time being at any rate. Political excitement is so high that it is doubtful whether a recital will get support. Of course, a great deal of damage has been done directly by the movement against the Jews. In May the Leipzig Conservatorium decided to hold a week’s festival in commemoration of Brahms. But the grandmother of Brahms was a Jewess. A letter was received from the authorities, asking whether it was absolutely necessary to carry out this programme. The Conservatorium replied that they had made elaborate and costly preparations, and that it would be extremely inconvenient to cancel it. The Government then said that they would allow it on this occasion on condition that the event did not recur. The same ban has fallen on the works of Mahler, Mendelssohn, and other Jewish composers. The Salzburg Festival is suffering badly this year from the fact that German visitors to Austria are subject to a special tax of 1,000 marks (about £75), imposed by the German Government. This is, of course, a purely political measure, but music suffers by it. The expulsion of Jewish musicians has had its effect, too. The case of Bruno Walter is now notorious. He will never conduct at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig again, I suppose. It is a strange thing, because he was so popular there, and had an enormous following of the real German kind. Dr. Fritz Kohl, the husband of Elena Gerhardt, the singer, has been removed from the directorship of the Leipzig wireless station for political reasons, and that is another loss.” Miss Broadhurst found the Germans consistently friendly and pleasing in ordinary society; but when she found that one of her letters home had been opened in transit she gave up writing fully to her relatives and destroyed her private papers, which contained nothing but personal correspondence and press cuttings. “The only thing I kept was a series of articles clipped from the Manchester Guardian on the Polish Corridor,” she said.
1646	dbpedia	0	2	https://dbpedia.org/page/Elena_Gerhardt	en	About: Elena Gerhardt	http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Elena_Gerhardt.jpg?width=300	http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Elena_Gerhardt.jpg?width=300	[ "https://dbpedia.org/statics/images/dbpedia_logo_land_120.png", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Elena_Gerhardt.jpg?width=300", "https://dbpedia.org/statics/images/virt_power_no_border.png", "https://dbpedia.org/statics/images/LoDLogo.gif", "https://dbpedia.org/statics/images/sw-sparql-bl...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883 – 11 January 1961) was a German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934.			DBpedia	http://dbpedia.org/resource/Elena_Gerhardt	dbo:abstract Elena Gerhardt fou una mezzosoprano alemanya associada al repertori de cambra i cançons (Lieder), considerada un dels seus màxims exponents i pionera com a cantant de cambra. Les seves successores foren , Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Kathleen Ferrier, Christa Ludwig, i altres. Estudià en el Conservatori de la seva ciutat natal amb , però fou el gran pianista Arthur Nikisch que formà el seu estil i perfeccionà al seu art dramàtic. Fou considerada unànimement per la critica i el públic de les principal capitals d'Europa i Amèrica com una de les més perfectes intèrprets del lied alemany, especialment de Schumann, Schubert i Brahms, en els quals concerts fou acompanyada sovint del pianista alemany Walter Pfitzner (1882-1956). (ca) إيلينا غيرهارد (بالألمانية: Elena Gerhardt)‏ هي مغنية ومغنية أوبرا ألمانية، ولدت في 11 نوفمبر 1883 في Connewitz ‏ في ألمانيا، وتوفيت في 11 يناير 1961 في لندن في المملكة المتحدة. (ar) Elena Gerhardt (* 11. November 1883 in Connewitz; † 11. Januar 1961 in London) war eine deutsche Opernsängerin (Mezzosopran), die 1934 zur Emigration gezwungen wurde. Sie war eine der bedeutendsten Lied-Interpretinnen der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. (de) Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883 – 11 January 1961) was a German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. (en) Elena Gerhardt (Leipzig, 11 de noviembre de 1883-Londres, 11 de enero de 1961), fue una mezzosoprano alemana asociada al repertorio de cámara y canciones (Lieder) considerada una de sus máximos exponentes y pionera de la cantante de cámara actual como sus dilectas sucesoras Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Kathleen Ferrier, Christa Ludwig, Janet Baker y otras. (es) Elena Gerhardt (Connewitz, 11 novembre 1883 – Londres, 11 janvier 1961) est une chanteuse mezzo-soprano allemande. Son nom est associé au Lied classique allemand, dont elle est considérée comme une des plus grandes interprètes. Elle quitte définitivement l'Allemagne en 1934, pour vivre à Londres. (fr) Elena Gerhardt (Lipsia (Connewitz), 11 novembre 1883 – Londra, 11 gennaio 1961) è stata un mezzosoprano tedesco legata al classico lied tedesco, di cui era considerata una delle grandi interpreti. Lasciò definitivamente la Germania per vivere a Londra nell'ottobre del 1934. (it) エレナ・ゲルハルト（Elena Gerhardt, 1883年11月11日 - 1961年1月11日は、ドイツのメゾソプラノ歌手。 (ja) Елена Герхардт (нем. Elena Gerhardt; 11 ноября 1883, Конневиц[d], Королевство Саксония — 11 января 1961, Лондон) — немецкая певица, меццо-сопрано, исполнительница Lied’ов. (ru) rdfs:comment إيلينا غيرهارد (بالألمانية: Elena Gerhardt)‏ هي مغنية ومغنية أوبرا ألمانية، ولدت في 11 نوفمبر 1883 في Connewitz ‏ في ألمانيا، وتوفيت في 11 يناير 1961 في لندن في المملكة المتحدة. (ar) Elena Gerhardt (* 11. November 1883 in Connewitz; † 11. Januar 1961 in London) war eine deutsche Opernsängerin (Mezzosopran), die 1934 zur Emigration gezwungen wurde. Sie war eine der bedeutendsten Lied-Interpretinnen der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. (de) Elena Gerhardt (11 November 1883 – 11 January 1961) was a German mezzo-soprano singer associated with the singing of German classical lieder, of which she was considered one of the great interpreters. She left Germany for good to live in London in October 1934. (en) Elena Gerhardt (Leipzig, 11 de noviembre de 1883-Londres, 11 de enero de 1961), fue una mezzosoprano alemana asociada al repertorio de cámara y canciones (Lieder) considerada una de sus máximos exponentes y pionera de la cantante de cámara actual como sus dilectas sucesoras Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Kathleen Ferrier, Christa Ludwig, Janet Baker y otras. (es) Elena Gerhardt (Connewitz, 11 novembre 1883 – Londres, 11 janvier 1961) est une chanteuse mezzo-soprano allemande. Son nom est associé au Lied classique allemand, dont elle est considérée comme une des plus grandes interprètes. Elle quitte définitivement l'Allemagne en 1934, pour vivre à Londres. (fr) Elena Gerhardt (Lipsia (Connewitz), 11 novembre 1883 – Londra, 11 gennaio 1961) è stata un mezzosoprano tedesco legata al classico lied tedesco, di cui era considerata una delle grandi interpreti. Lasciò definitivamente la Germania per vivere a Londra nell'ottobre del 1934. (it) エレナ・ゲルハルト（Elena Gerhardt, 1883年11月11日 - 1961年1月11日は、ドイツのメゾソプラノ歌手。 (ja) Елена Герхардт (нем. Elena Gerhardt; 11 ноября 1883, Конневиц[d], Королевство Саксония — 11 января 1961, Лондон) — немецкая певица, меццо-сопрано, исполнительница Lied’ов. (ru) Elena Gerhardt fou una mezzosoprano alemanya associada al repertori de cambra i cançons (Lieder), considerada un dels seus màxims exponents i pionera com a cantant de cambra. Les seves successores foren , Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Kathleen Ferrier, Christa Ludwig, i altres. (ca)
1646	dbpedia	3	11	https://www.amazon.com/Photo-Gerhardt-1883-1961-Mezzo-Soprano-Reading/dp/B083ZJZJQB	en	Amazon.com			[ "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/captcha/cucusdhr/Captcha_ligyeqmxrq.jpg", "https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/oc-csi/1/OP/requestId=PCBRPYZ0572HN64HCXHJ&js=0" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Enter the characters you see below Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies.
1646	dbpedia	3	46	https://www.classicalmusicdaily.com/articles/s/d/derek-hammond-stroud.htm	en	Classical Music Daily			[ "https://www.classicalmusicdaily.com/media/mobilemenumusicwhite.gif", "https://www.classicalmusicdaily.com/media/classical-music-daily-2024.gif", "https://www.classicalmusicdaily.com/2012/04/manon320.jpg", "https://www.classicalmusicdaily.com/2016/11/joubert-fredrick-00.jpg", "https://www.classicalmusicdail...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Derek Hammond-Stroud English opera singer Derek Hammond-Stroud was born in London on 10 January 1926. He studied with Elena Gerhardt and Gerhard Husch. His career included appearances at New York Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, Munich State Opera, ten years as a principal baritone with English National Opera and recitals with Gerald Moore and Geoffrey Parsons. He sang in the BBC television premiere of William Walton's Façade, appeared regularly at the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in London and recorded many Gilbert and Sullivan roles, including an almost complete series of 'patter' songs. Hospitalised in 2009, he moved to a care home at Roden in Shropshire, where he died on 14 May 2012, aged eighty-six.
1646	dbpedia	3	31	https://www.barrycassidyrarebooks.com/products/keyword/concert/~/product_quantity_asc	en	Keyword: concert			[ "https://www.barrycassidyrarebooks.com/assets/images/block/bcheader.jpg", "https://www.barrycassidyrarebooks.com/assets/images/media/logoChris.png", "https://www.barrycassidyrarebooks.com/setcookie/ofJk8ohlPAb2X3QiVdUvNzHxVsJp11PyLHAVgrCU", "https://stats.secure-chrislands.com/piwik.php?idsite=358&token_auth=...	[]	[]	[ "Keyword", "concert" ]	null	[ "Charles E. (Manager)", "F. J. (Editor)", "Sacramento Saturday Club", "Morgan Music Studio", "Sacramento Opera Committee", "Ballet Foundation" ]	null	List of Items by ＂Keyword = concert＂	en	/themes/panel/img/favicons/defaultfavicon.ico	Barry Cassidy Rare Books	null
1646	dbpedia	0	64	https://www.academia.edu/37809994/The_English_Voice_of_the_Mid_Twentieth_Century	en	The English Voice of the Mid Twentieth Century	http://a.academia-assets.com/images/open-graph-icons/fb-paper.gif	http://a.academia-assets.com/images/open-graph-icons/fb-paper.gif	[ "https://a.academia-assets.com/images/academia-logo-redesign-2015-A.svg", "https://a.academia-assets.com/images/academia-logo-redesign-2015.svg", "https://a.academia-assets.com/images/single_work_splash/adobe.icon.svg", "https://0.academia-photos.com/attachment_thumbnails/57808988/mini_magick20190110-13725-us...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Xin Ying Ch'ng", "uuiioo.academia.edu" ]	2018-11-19T00:00:00	This thesis explores how the reception of Kathleen Ferrier, Alfred Deller and Peter Pears’s voices gave new insights into the constructions of national musical identity in mid-twentieth century Britain. I highlight how an exploration of the ‘national				https://www.academia.edu/37809994/The_English_Voice_of_the_Mid_Twentieth_Century	(Une traduction française suit) This dissertation is the first in-depth exploration of the connections between the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge (“King’s”) and the early music revival since the mid-twentieth century. It is also one of the first detailed considerations of the role of choirs in the revival. The central question I aim to answer is: How has the vocal style of King’s influenced the development of the vocal style of the early music revival in Britain? I show how the choir’s 109 albums featuring music written before 1750 have helped spread and popularize what I call the “King’s sound.” This sound is characterized by a high level of blend within choral sections, an even balancing of sections with one another, little vibrato, few changes in tempo and dynamics, and a light, bright, and breathy timbre. It is similar to a broader “English sound” found among other Oxbridge college choirs as well as British vocal ensembles specializing in early music. I argue that King’s was an important precursor to these specialist early music ensembles, as the choir began issuing many albums in the 1950s, before a large number of specialist groups formed in the 1970s and 1980s. King’s was also compatible with and helped bolster the valuing of historical authenticity in the early music revival. Because the choir has sung frequently in church services since its foundation in the fifteenth century, listeners can see King’s as exemplifying longstanding English sacred traditions. In addition, the King’s sound itself seems more historically sensitive for early music than a singing style with hallmarks of nineteenth-century performance practice, such as heavy vibrato and frequent or large changes in tempo and dynamics. I also argue that the close links between King’s and powerful and wealthy British institutions—particularly the University of Cambridge and the Church of England—aided in spreading the King’s sound. In addition, the all-male and mostly Caucasian composition of the choir allows listeners to see it as a remnant of Britain before twentieth-century feminist movements and modern waves of immigration. This reinforces the choir’s sense of historical authenticity as well as its appeal given the hegemonic status of whiteness and masculinity. I also suggest that the King’s sound itself reflects the relatively homogeneous identity of choir members by way of its exclusion of “other” sounds (and bodies) in favor of choral blend. To conclude, I examine how King’s has influenced the early music revival by training performers, by making premiere recordings of Renaissance and Baroque compositions, and by collaborating with instrumental ensembles. I also consider how other ensembles and trends in the revival have influenced King’s, particularly the rise of historically informed performance. « La musique ancienne et le Chœur du King’s College, Cambridge, 1958 à 2015 » Cette thèse est la première exploration en profondeur des liens existant entre le Chœur du King’s College, Cambridge (« King’s ») et le mouvement pour le renouveau de la musique ancienne depuis le milieu du XXe siècle. C’est également l’une des premières considérations du rôle des chœurs au sein de ce renouveau. La question centrale à laquelle je tenterai de répondre est la suivante : comment le style vocal du King’s a-t-il influencé le développement du style vocal du renouveau de la musique ancienne en Grande-Bretagne ? Je démontre comment les 109 albums du chœur sur lesquels l’on retrouve de la musique composée avant 1750 ont aidé à disséminer et populariser ce que j’appelle le « King’s sound » (le « son King’s »). Ce son se caractérise par un haut degré de fondu choral (« blend »), un équilibre uniforme des sections chorales entre elles, peu de vibrato, peu de changements de tempo et de dynamiques, ainsi qu’un timbre sonore qui est léger, brillant et aéré. Il est semblable au « English sound » (« son anglais ») que l’on retrouve parmi d’autres chœurs des collèges d’Oxbridge ainsi que des chœurs britanniques se spécialisant dans la musique ancienne. Je démontre que King’s fut un précurseur important de ces ensembles spécialisés parce que le chœur ayant commencé à produire des albums dès les années 1950, avant la formation de nombreux groupes spécialisés de musique ancienne dans les années 1970 et 1980. King’s était également compatible avec, et contribua à fortifier, la valorisation de l’authenticité historique au sein du renouveau de la musique ancienne. Puisque le chœur a fréquemment chanté dans des services religieux depuis sa fondation au XVe siècle, les auditeurs peuvent percevoir King’s comme illustrant des traditions sacrées anglaises très anciennes. En outre, le son King’s lui-même apparaissait plus historiquement sensible pour la musique ancienne qu’un style vocal qui a des caractéristiques rappelant les pratiques d’interprétation du XIXe siècle, telles qu’un fort vibrato et des changements fréquents ou prononcés de tempi et dynamiques. Je propose également que les liens étroits entre King’s et des institutions britanniques puissantes et riches– particulièrement l’Université de Cambridge et l’Église d’Angleterre – ont contribué à la dissémination du son King’s. De plus, la composition entièrement masculine et principalement caucasienne du chœur permet aux auditeurs de le percevoir comme un vestige de la Grande-Bretagne avant les mouvements féministes du XXe siècle et les vagues d’immigrations contemporaines. Ceci renforce le sentiment d’authenticité historique du chœur ainsi que son attrait, étant donné le statut hégémonique de la race blanche et de la masculinité. Je suggère aussi que le son King’s lui-même reflète l’identité relativement homogène des membres du chœur par son exclusion des sons alternatifs (et de différent types de personnes) en faveur d’une homogénéité chorale. En conclusion, j’examine de quelle manière King’s a influencé le renouveau de la musique ancienne grâce à la formation d’interprètes, par l’enregistrement d’œuvres de la Renaissance et de la période baroque qui n’a jamais été enregistré auparavant, et par la collaboration avec des ensembles instrumentaux. Je m’intéresse également à la manière dont d’autres ensembles et tendances au cours de ce renouveau ont influencé King’s, particulièrement l’essor d’interprétations historiques. (Traduction par Claudine Jacques)
1646	dbpedia	3	66	https://www.sfcv.org/articles/feature/essential-joyce-didonato	en	The Essential Joyce DiDonato	https://www.sfcv.org/sit…pg?itok=zwa6NwST	https://www.sfcv.org/sit…pg?itok=zwa6NwST	[ "https://www.sfcv.org/themes/custom/sfcv/images/sfcv-logo.svg", "https://www.sfcv.org/sites/default/files/styles/small_heading_360x140/public/media/images/2024-08/xcrumb_header_0.jpeg,qh=199d5854,aitok=Tw1tng4p.pagespeed.ic.l47Xl9uQkx.jpg", "https://www.sfcv.org/sites/default/files/styles/edge_to_edge_image_192...	[ "/media/oembed?url=https%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DF0VxUR98uAw&max_width=1170&max_height=800&hash=SSN5p-OPfTc68045ml2E4cafyuGfcQ3-3wbdkEChgTU", "/media/oembed?url=https%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3Dt569zj-VqDc%26ab_channel%3DWarnerClassics&max_width=1170&max_height=800&hash=_9qQx6vzHfVWKHul1WYNNGB-Oxuk25...	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "www.sfcv.org", "jason-victor-serinus" ]	null	The mezzo who portrayed Rosina despite a broken leg is now one of the finest bel canto singers of our era. Here’s where to start with her discography.	en	/sites/default/files/xsfcv-logo_0.png.pagespeed.ic.HDw2ND26J6.png		https://www.sfcv.org/articles/feature/essential-joyce-didonato	Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato had already participated in Houston Grand Opera’s young artist program and San Francisco’s own Merola Opera Program when the August 2001 broadcast of her performance as Meg in Houston’s world premiere of Mark Adamo’s Little Women thrust her into the public spotlight. But it wasn’t until she began performing mezzo coloratura parts in works by Rossini and Handel that the world became aware that, as fine as she may be in lyric roles, her most enduring gifts lie in the range-stretching pyrotechnics of bel canto. It didn’t take long for the midwestern mezzo to show the world that she wasn’t just another conservatory product with technique and high notes. Listen, for example, to her unique embellishments, unbridled sense of humor, and flawless execution in this fabulous concert performance of “Una voce poco fa” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. The performance of this aria and opera that undoubtedly sticks most in people’s minds is the one a wheelchair-bound DiDonato gave shortly after she broke her fibula during a performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. You can buy the entire video of that 2009 performance here. Starting with DiDonato’s early recordings, I wouldn’t want to be without her 2004 release for Virgin Classics, Amor e gelosia — Handel: Operatic Duets, in which she and Patrizia Ciofi are supported by Il Complesso Barocco under Alan Curtis. By 2008’s Furore: Handel Opera Arias, DiDonato has hit her stride. Her ability to use consonants to infuse long Baroque arias with emotion (which you can see her discuss with Avery Amereau in a brilliant Juilliard master class) and her superb acting chops have made her a diva for the ages. After that, you can just about take your pick. I vividly recall how mind-blowing it was to hear her first album of Rossini arias, Colbran, The Muse. She begins with “D’amor al dolce impero,” from Armida, whose live performance by soprano Maria Callas at the Florence May Festival in 1952 remains lodged in the memory of any self-respecting opera lover who hears it. As aware of what Callas did with that number as she is of what every coloratura soprano in recorded history has done with “Bel raggio lusinghier,” from Semiramide, DiDonato proceeds to make these and other career-defining arias her own. All-star performances of Vivaldi’s sacred music and Stabat Mater; Handel’s Radamisto, Floridante, Alcina, and Ariodante; Mozart’s Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito; and Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troyens are self-recommending. I wasn’t a huge fan of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Great Scott at its Dallas premiere, but their first breakthrough effort, Dead Man Walking, made a tremendous impact during its Dallas Opera revival. The Bay Area’s own Frederica von Stade reprises the role of the mother, which was composed for her, and Patrick Summers conducts on this recording. With each passing year, DiDonato has cultivated the means to translate her emotional commitment into sound, as well as into facial expressions and actions. For the tragic DiDonato, don’t miss the video of her Metropolitan Opera performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. Having been around gay men since the start of her career (if not well before), DiDonato was in more than a bit of a campy mood when, in 2012, she recorded Drama Queens. The eternal musical value of some of these arias may be open to question — DiDonato is not shy about exposing their vapid excesses — but their cred as coloratura showpieces is beyond question. This must-hear recital is a hoot. As her social media presence has increased her profile, DiDonato has been bolder in her advocacy of human rights and the planet. 2016’s In War and Peace and 2022’s Eden are musts. So, too, is her Winterreise. DiDonato is hardly the first woman to perform and/or record cycles that Schubert composed for tenors or baritones: Elena Gerhardt, Lotte Lehmann, Brigitte Fassbaender, Christa Ludwig, and Nathalie Stutzmann are some of the great artists who preceded her. But she is the first to attempt to perform the cycle from the vantage point of the woman whose lover has gone off on what may very well be his final journey of suicidal despair. This 2021 release with Yannick Nézet-Séguin is essential. (And find selected video excerpts from her Carnegie Hall performance of the cycle here.)
1646	dbpedia	3	89	https://artmusiclounge.wordpress.com/2021/08/page/2/	en	THE ART MUSIC LOUNGE	https://s0.wp.com/i/blank.jpg	https://s0.wp.com/i/blank.jpg	[ "https://mobstertiger.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/cropped-images-3.jpg?w=48", "https://mobstertiger.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/cropped-images-3.jpg?w=48", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/7f08bbaa0b15019f0aacf36859798d941e76f2d0502febefc28017599313d1e2?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://mobstertiger.files.wordpre...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "The Art Music Lounge" ]	2021-08-23T20:32:51+00:00	10 posts published by The Art Music Lounge during August 2021	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	THE ART MUSIC LOUNGE	null	SCHUBERT: Der Tod und das Mädchen. Die Forelle. Der Einsame. Frülingsglaube. Erlkönig. Litanei. Der Fischer. Der Zwerg. Nacht und Träume. Die junge nonne. Das Echo. Seligkeit. MOZART: Das Veilchen. MENDELSSOHN: Auf flügeln des Gesangen. SCHUMANN: Waldegespräch. Der Nuβbaum. LOWE: Herr Oluf. BRAHMS: Immer leiser wird mein schlummer. Schwesterlein. TCHAIKOVSKY: At the Ball. WOLF: Heimweh. MAHLER: Wer hat dies liedlein erdacht / Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, mezzo-soprano; Waldemar Lischowsky, Julius Dahlke, pianists / available for free streaming at Internet Archive The austere-looking woman pictured above may not be on your musical radar; she wasn’t on mine until two days ago, when my friend Joe Pearce mentioned her in passing and I looked her up on YouTube. In fact, unless you are German or Austrian, you may never even have heard of her, let alone heard her. I certainly hadn’t. But there are reasons why I hadn’t heard her. Although she is listed in the Kutsch-Riemens A Concise Biographical Dictionary of Singers (Chilton, 1969), a book I’ve owned since 1970, their assessment of her is not nearly as enthusiastic as it was for her contemporaries Elena Gerhardt, Julia Culp or Lotte Lehmann. All Kutsch and Riemens have to say of her is that she was one of the most famous concert singers of her epoch, not that she was a great lied interpreter. Thus I had no real motivation to look her up. After all, she wasn’t mentioned even once on George Jellinek’s famous WQXR radio program devoted to historic singers, The Vocal Scene, nor was she featured on any of those many Everest-Scala cheapie LPs on which historic singers were reissued—the ones with the candy-cane-colored generic covers, which sold for $2 at Sam Goody’s ($1 when they were on sale). And because she recorded exclusively for Polydor, and didn’t make all that many records (roughly two dozen, both acoustic and electric, during the 1920s), there weren’t any other LP reissues by her except for one on Discophilia M3, a weird pirate label I never saw, and one on Preiser’s “Lebendige Vergangenheit” series, and those were fairly pricy LPs back in the day. (As it turns out, she also wasn’t featured on either Vols. 1 or 2 of Michael Scott’s massive The Record of Singing boxed sets in the 1980s; she did appear on Vol. 3, but those sets cost an arm and a leg and I didn’t have the money to buy Vol. 3.) So she flew under my radar, as I’m sure she has flown under most of yours. But she was truly one of the greatest lieder singers who ever recorded. The following biographical information is culled from K-R, Wikipedia (which is similar to K-R), and a few tidbits that Joe Pearce told me. Born in Kronstadt, then part of Transylvania, on August 16, 1876, Julie Sophie Gmeiner grew up in a highly musical family. Her sister Ellen and brother Rudolf also had successful career as concert singers, though they never recorded; another sister, Luise, was a pianist in Berlin. She first studied with Ludwig Lassel, then with Gustav Walter (1834-1910), one of the leading tenors of his day and the second-oldest singer known to have made commercial recordings (baritone Antonio Cotogni, born in 1831, made one issued recording in 1908). After 1896 she also studied with Emilie Herzog, Etelka Gerster and Lilli Lehmann. She made her concert debut in 1899 and garnered high praise for her singing, but in 1911-12 she underwent further vocal training with Raimund von zur Mühlen, another unrecorded singer. Somewhere along the line she changed her first name to Lula, and in 1900 married the Transylvanian engineer Ernst Mysz in Kronstadt. They had three daughters, two of whom died young. The third, Suzanne, later fell in love with tenor Peter Anders when he studied with Lula in the 1930s. Lula’s other notable pupils were sopranos Maria Müller and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Lula made extensive concert tours of both Europe and the United States, was highly prized by such knowledgeable colleagues as conductor Artur Nikisch and composer Max Reger, who was crazy about her voice and wrote several songs dedicated to her including his Vier Gesänge, Op. 88, published in 1905. From 1920 onward she was a voice teacher at the Staatlich akademische Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin, and it was during the 1920s that she made all her records for Polydor, both acoustically and electrically, with a few songs recorded in both formats, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of them, perhaps 26 or 28 titles in all. A few (see labels) were somehow reissued by British Decca in the 1930s, but for the most part they remained on Polydor 78s. Although nothing is known of her two accompanists, Waldemar Liachowsky during the acoustic period and Julius Dahlke on the electricals, they were both clearly above the usual norm of pianists on old lieder recordings. Dahlke, in fact, was identified on the labels as playing a Bechstein grand piano, clearly a luxury for a lieder singer on discs in those days. Listening to Mysz-Gmeiner takes you back to not only an era of lost vocal art, when singers were expected to not only have firm, well-produced voices, not the squally, tremulous horrors that often pass for professional singers nowadays, but ones who were expected to throw themselves emotionally into the words of the songs, acting them out both dramatically and poetically. Mysz-Gmeiner often makes her effects through her complete absorption in the words she is singing, and this alternates between a dramatic reading, as one might expect from a great actor like Chaliapin, and a poetic reading of the text. Moreover, Mysz-Gmeiner often makes her points by means of coloring her tones, and in this respect she was truly a master painter. She could even change the color of a tone while holding a single note, something that is impossible for nearly any modern-day singer, no matter how vocally gifted, to bring off, and all of this comes from a woman who was near or over age 50 at the time of recording. The other thing you will notice is something that is completely verboten today, and that is the use of rubato and rallentando effects in her songs. Very often this is subtle, but occasionally the effects are a bit broad. Most musicians nowadays will probably cringe at this, but there was a point in time when, if you did not introduce some rubato into classical music, you were considered an unfinished artist. Yes, there are some similar effects in Gerhardt’s recordings, but those moments are generally subtler than Mysz-Gmeiner’s. A good example is Schubert’s Der Einsame; no lieder singer on earth would even think of introducing such broad decelerando into this song as she does, but she gets away with it because it enhances the words and the mood. In short, she may have had her mannerisms, but she knew what she was doing. She is never, ever vulgar or cheap in her effects; nothing she does is to show off the voice. And oh, yes, she also occasionally used a somewhat broad portamento—listen to Schubert’s Frühlingsglaube, for instance—and this, too was a musical tradition going back to the late 18th century. But our musical academics, in their rush to force Straight Tone down everyone’s throat, have thrown out portamento and rallentando in performance practice, ignoring the fact that this is quite probably what Schubert’s, Schumann’s and Brahms’ songs sounded like during those composers’ lifetimes. Of course I agree that these traits in her musical style could occasionally be excessive, but as I said, for the most part she is extremely tasteful. And what an interpreter she was! Her recording of Erlkönig is far and away the greatest I’ve ever heard in my life. She accurately portrays the father, son and Erl-king with exactly the right vocal tone and accents; you are never once in doubt as to which character is singing, and the terror she infuses into the young boy’s lines is almost horrific. You get so caught up that, at first listen, you may not even catch some of the slow-downs she tosses in here and there. My impression of Mysz-Gmeiner’s voice is that it was of a good size but not really huge: more like Brigitte Fassbaender than Lilli Lehmann. Of course, this is good enough for a lieder singer, particularly one with such extraordinary skills as hers. Small wonder than listeners, even professional musicians, were bowled over by her singing. Mysz-Gmeiner poured the same kind of emotion into Der Zwerg, one of Schubert’s strangest and darkest songs, yet she could also sing lightly and with great joy in Die Forelle, though she imparted more of a connection to the words in this song as well as in Mendelssohn’s generally flighty Auf flügeln des gesanges and even Mozart’s Das Veilchen, a song usually just tossed away by most lieder singers. As one might expect, Carl Loewe’s crazy dramatic ballad Herr Oluf is right up her alley with its almost over-the-top histrionics. One of her more interesting performances is that of Tchaikovsky’s At the Ball. She doesn’t entirely reflect the mood that Pushkin intended, that of someone who is so numbed with grief that she can’t even show emotion; on the contrary, Mysz-Gmeiner’s grief comes out of her as if she is even beyond tears, it is so deeply felt. Thus I would place this in the category of an interesting outlier among recordings of this song. My guess is that, in non-German countries, she was already forgotten by the time she died in August 1948, one week shy of her 72nd birthday. But an art as sincere, dramatic, and occasionally poetically subtle as hers should never be neglected or forgotten. —© 2021 Lynn René Bayley Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique) Return to homepage OR Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music HINDEMITH: Mathis der Maler / Kurt Streit, tenor (Albrecht von Brandenburg); Wolfgang Koch, baritone (Mathis); Martin Snell, bass (Lorenz von Pommersfelden); Charles Reid, baritone (Wolfgang Capito); Franz Grundheber, bass (Riedinger); Raymond Very, tenor (Hans Schwalb); Ben Connor, baritone (Prefect of Walburg); Oliver Ringelhahn, tenor (Sylvester von Schaumberg); Manuela Uhl, soprano (Ursula); Katerina Tretyakova, soprano (Regina); Magdalena Anna Hoffmann, mezzo (Countess Helfenstein); Andrew Owens, bass (The Count’s Piper); Vienna Symphony Orch.; Bertrand de Billy, cond / Naxos DVD 2.110691-92; Capriccio CD C5450 (live: Vienna, December 11-12, 2012) This 2012 performance of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler is being simultaneously released by Naxos as a DVD and by Capriccio as a conventional CD. I listened to the audio-only version first, in part because I had access to it about a week before the DVD arrived. So far as I can tell, this is only the fourth recording of this opera despite the fact that it is considered one of the few true masterpieces of the 20th century, which goes to show you how reactionary and resistant to non-Italianate works most operagoers are. The other three were the 1977 EMI recording with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, James King, Ursula Koszut, William Cochran and Peter Meven, conducted by Rafael Kubelik; a 1990 Wergo recording with Roland Hermann, Josef Protschka, Victor von Halem, Sabine Hass, Heinz Kruse and Ulrich Helscher, conducted by Gerd Albrecht; and a 2005 Oehms Classics recording with Falk Struckmann, Scott MacAllister, Susan Anthony and Par Lindskog, conducted by Simone Young. The EMI recording, which I own, is considered to have the best singing and conducting. The Oehms Classics recording is considered to have the overall poorest singing, which I think is fair. The biggest drawback to this opera is that the entire plot is based on religion, specifically the early war of the Lutheran Protestants vs. the Catholic Church, with Mathis the painter caught in the middle of all the action. Mathis is also torn between creating secular and religious art. For those of us who do not believe in all this organized Christianity nonsense, which is in fact all based and built upon so-called pagan religions, much of the opera is thus somewhat meaningless. But the music survives, and if we buy into the concept that not only Mathis but all of the other people in this opera really believe down to their feet in either Roman Catholicism or Lutheran Protestantism, it is indeed a dramatic tale. I made an A-B comparison between the first 20 minutes of these two recordings in order to get a feel for the differences in both singing and conducting. My impressions are as follows: De Billy’s conducting is not only a bit slower than Kubelik’s but also more lyrical. He does emphasize the rhythm when the music demands it, but becomes slack on in-between passages when it does not. For those who like lyrical approaches to modern opera, however, this will suffice. Both of our Mathises, Wolfgang Koch and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, have a somewhat loose vibrato. (This was a period when Fischer-Dieskau was having a vocal crisis; I heard him “live” at Carnegie Hall in 1976 and his voice sounded uncharacteristically dull in timbre and not always steady.) Raymond Very, the Hans Schwalb on this new set, has an ugly voice, a full-blown wobble, and just shouts his role. I’m not sure he’s really a professional singer, although the other two tenors are almost (but not quite) as bad. Soprano Manuela Uhl, as Ursula, has a somewhat edgy voice but it is steady and she can sing; Koszut’s voice, though not golden age, has a more pleasant timbre. Both casts act out their parts dramatically, although Fischer-Dieskau has more of a lieder singer’s detail in interpreting the text. So from a strictly aural standpoint, I prefer the EMI recording. As the opera moves along, however, de Billy becomes rather more animated and begins accenting the rhythms more strongly. Regarding the vocal line, Hindemith took great pains not to write in his most harmonically advanced style; although the orchestral accompaniment is full of unusual harmonies, the vocal lines, taken by themselves, are tonal and consonant. They don’t sound so much like sung recitative as simply like sung transitional passages one would hear in a Strauss or Wagner opera. The difference is that he never “breaks out” into arias, and without arias as guideposts, 90% of opera audiences are absolutely lost. They don’t know when to applaud (how about you just don’t until the end of the act?) or what to applaud for (how about the music drama and not for the tunes and high notes?). But Mathis builds up to some terrific climaxes; it’s just that most of them are choral, not for solo voice. The biggest problem with this performance is that the three tenors get a lot of singing, and every one of them is awful. As for the video, the production is interesting if somewhat over-symbolic and fussy. During the playing of the orchestral prelude, we see Mathis standing with his arms outstretched as if he were Christ on the cross, then reading from some holy book or another before staring up into heaven. I’m not entirely sure why modern stage directors feel the need to continually have action when none is asked for by the composer, but apparently this is their thing. Some kind of giant object (the hand of God?) appears in the upper left-hand corner in the sky above Mathis. A woman appears before him, looking up at him alluringly (we later learn that this is the Countess Hellfenstein), but he does not get involved romantically. Another goofy-looking object that resembles a giant hip bone suddenly appears stage right up in the sky. At the end of the Prelude, Mathis again extend his arms in the air, crucifixion-style. Symbolism, folks, symbolism! “What does it all mean, Mr. Natural??!?” “It don’t mean shee-it!” Yet the set does resemble an artist’s loft, there is nothing bizarre about the costumes or perverse in any way. For this, I was very grateful, although Mathis’ loft studio has, for some unexplained reason, a whole human skeleton standing under one of the stairways. Perhaps the former tenant. Sadly, none of the tenors’ voices sound any better while watching than they do when just listening to the opera. But by golly, they act up a storm. Manuela Uhl does a boatload of superfluous arm-waving during her arietta and duet with Mathis. I wouldn’t have minded it so much except that none of it looked natural; all of her movements were “stagey” in a way that signaled to me that she learned to mechanically replicate every little motion and facial expression the director told her to do. At least most of Wolfgang Koch’s motions looked natural, though he did some eye-bugging that annoyed me. Tenor Raymond Very has, as noted above, an extraordinarily ugly and defective voice, but he’s an excellent stage actor. Every motion he did looked natural and motive by the situation and the character. Tenor #2, Oliver Ringelhahn as Sylvester von Waldburg, is just a shade less squally-sounding than Very but isn’t as good of an actor. And of COURSE the chorus has to keep moving while they’re singing, walking around and around each other in circles. Can’t you directors learn that choruses are supposed to remain static when singing? No one in real life moves around this much while singing, and if they do move around this much they’re usually not singing at the same time. Or even talking. And no one I know, whether in a mob or not, is going to wave their arms and mill around when welcoming the Cardinal. Interestingly, some guy from the chorus who sings out “Make way for the Archbishop!” has a better voice than all the others, particularly that of Archbishop Albrecht von Brandenburg who sounds like a junk man screaming that he has some nice used pots and pans to sell. Magdalena Anna-Hofmann as the Countess also has a very squally voice. I tolerated this performance for about 40 minutes but just had to pull the plug on it. Most of the singing was so bad that it was giving me a migraine. My luck, right? I finally find an opera production that’s pretty traditional in terms of sets and costumes, and most of the singing is so execrable that it took then nine years to decided to release it on CD and DVD. So that is my assessment, and if you can prove to me that I have been unfair in my assessment of the singing (mostly the tenors) or incorrect in my description of the acting, I will gladly eat this review. But I don’t think you can prove this to me. —© 2021 Lynn René Bayley Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique) Return to homepage OR Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music GORDON: Pointillism.1-5 Havens.2-3,5 Stranger Than Fiction.* 2-3,6 Dance.2-3 Sunyasin.4,5 Counterpoint.2,3,6 Bella.* 1,3 Modality.1,4 Steps.1,4 Walking Dream 4 / Jon Gordon, a-sax; Derrick Gardner, tpt; Alan Ferber, tb; 1Reginald Lewis, 2Tristan Martinuson, t-sax; 3John Ellis, 4Anna Blackmore, bs-cl; 5Jocelyn Gould, gtr/voc; 6Larry Roy, gtr; Will Bonness, Orrin Evans, pno; Julian Bradford, bs; Fabio Ragnelli, dm / Artist Share, self-produced CD available HERE It seems as if every jazz player in the world today considers him or herself a “composer,” when in fact most of what they write are tunes, and often uninteresting ones at that—it’s the solos that liven up the pieces they play. But alto saxist Jon Gordon can honestly and truly call himself a composer because what he writes are complex pieces that have structure and are also harmonically challenging to his fellow musicians. The opener on this set, Pointillism, is a perfect example, starting off as a few sporadic notes that seem unrelated but then moves on to a sax solo by Gordon, during the course of which we hear dark, Monk-like figures played by two tenor saxes and two bass clarinets in unison. Thus we have here music akin to that which Charles Mingus wrote, only with a modern bent. In Havens, Gordon coalesces the beat more fully than in Pointillism, opens with one them and then moves to another which contrasts as well as complements the first. Eventually we get a swinging 6/8 beat, but this comes and goes as the music—all of it at this point written and not improvised—continues to develop. But fear not, jazz lovers; there’s plenty to hear in this piece, improvised or not. It holds your attention in part due to the constantly shifting meter and in part due to the eventual regularity of the irregular-sounding melodic line which runs like a thread throughout the entire composition. I believe that Will Bonness’ piano solo is the only improvisation on this track; it starts out almost as a fill to the ongoing melodic line before the saxes drop out and let Bonness move into more daring territory—but still staying within one basic chord except for the ends of phrases. At about the 6:35 mark, I think that trumpeter Derrick Gardner is also improvising, but not truly a solo…he plays over the ongoing development of the saxes. Truly a strange composition! Moreover, this strangeness continues throughout the album, and I must give Gordon props for not repeating himself from track to track. Not only is every piece in this set interesting, all of it sounds different from the tracks preceding and following each one. He thus has more than one “voice” as a composer, although intricate rhythms and a strong use of counterpoint infuse each one. Gordon’s solo in the midst of Stranger Than Fiction somehow comes as a surprise, simply because at this point in the piece one has come to expect further written-out development, but here he chose to just play an improvisation, which is in turn followed by an excellent guitar solo by Larry Roy and an even better one by pianist Orrin Evans. As one continues to listen to the entire set, the more one becomes engrossed in Gordon’s compositional style, almost as if this were a concert of formal music. And that is as it should be because, as I mentioned early on, he is a real composer and not just someone who bats out a few tunes to jam on. Now, mind you, he’s not quite as varied in his approach as Mingus was; most of his melodic lines, though very creative, tend to stay within a fairly narrow note-range, and Dance sounds suspiciously like a faster variant of Haven, but the invention is always there, and I particularly like his ear for instrumental color. Gordon apparently likes his instruments to play from the middle of their ranges on down–not for him the blasting trumpet sound of some groups—and he has a keen ear for mixing his instruments to create unusual timbral blends. So he at least has an individual approach to both composition and orchestration. One might be tempted to say that he uses his 9- or 10-piece (depending on the track) band as a small orchestra, but it goes beyond that. Gordon thinks like a chamber music composer who is trying to balance a specific group of woodwinds, or strings and brass, or whatever, thus he constantly alternates between blending, polyphony, and moving the different voices in his ensemble around either together or in opposing figures. In Sunyasin he even blends in a wordless soprano voice (Jocelyn Gould) in a way that reminded me of the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, only with far less brass. And this impression continued into the little fugue he threw in, which eventually unravels as the underlying tenors and bass clarinets move away from the alto sax and trumpet. So much of this is subtle that the casual listener will undoubtedly miss a lot of this, but repeated listening will reward you with the ingenuity of Gordon’s writing. And, as in the preceding tracks, when the guitar solo comes it almost seems like a surprise—a release from the intricate web of music he has sucked you into. And the surprises, always subtle, keep on coming, like the opening rhythm of Bella which seems to be running backwards, and the sudden surprise of hearing a bass solo (the first one on the record). On Modality, Gordon harks back to several of the jazz experiments of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, yet his use of harmony is more fluid and has more movement than in many a “modal” piece from that earlier time (e.g., Miles Davis’ So What?). When the alto solo comes in, around the 1:48 mark, the rhythm suddenly changes into a sort of a funky Latin groove. Then, in Walking Dream, one hears the multiple layers of the improvised piano playing against the alto sax, both of which are played against by the bass and drums in different rhythms. Fascinating! My best advice to you is, Get this album and listen, listen, listen! I promise you, the listening will reward your patience. There are several layers to this music, and all of them are fascinating. —© 2021 Lynn René Bayley Follow me on Twitter (@artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique) Return to homepage OR Read my book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond: An extended and detailed guide to the intersection of classical music and jazz SCHUMANN: Myrthen: Der Nuβbaum / Fritz Schrödter, ten; anon pno; Charles Panzéra, bar; Magdeleine Panzéra-Baillot, pno; Victoria de los Angeles, sop; Gerald Moore, pno / Dichterliebe: Ich grolle nicht / Félia Litvinne, sop; anon pno / Dichterliebe: Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet / Nicolai Figner, ten; anon pno / Frauenliebe und Leben: Er, der Herrlichste von allen / Marie Knüpfer-Egli, sop; anon pno / Liederkreis: Dein Bildnis wunderselig / Lilli Lehmann, sop; anon pno / Wanderlied: Wohlauf! noch getrunken den funkelnden Wein / Willi Birrenkoven, ten; anon pno / Die beiden Grenadiere / Vittorio Arimondi, bs; anon pno; Feodor Chaliapin, bs; anon orch.; Sir George Henschel, bar/pno; Herbert Janssen, bar; Michael Raucheisen, pno / Volksliedchen: Wenn ich früh in der Garten geh. Wenn alle Wälder schliefen. Der Soldat: No. 3, Er geht bei gedämpfter Trammel Klang* / Therese Behr-Schnabel, mezzo; Artur Schnabel, pno / Myrthen: No. 7, Die Lotosblume; No. 24, Du bist wie eine Blume / Giuseppe Borgatti, ten; anon pno / Myrthen: No. 7, Die Lotosblume / Leo Slezak, ten; anon pno / Frühlingsnacht: Über’m Garten durch die Lüfte. Dichterliebe: Die rose, die lilie / Lydia Lipkowska, sop; anon pno / Dichterliebe: Ich grolle nicht / Erik Schmedes, ten; anon pno / Frauenliebe und Leben / Julia Culp, mezzo; Otto Bake, pno / Myrthen: Widmung / Frieda Hempel, sop; Coenraad V. Bos, pno / Wanderlied: No. 3, Wohlauf! noch getrunken den funkelnden Wein. Myrthen: Du bist wie eine blume.* Liederkreis+ / Friedrich Schorr, bar; Robert Jäger, +Fritz Kitzinger, pno / An den Sonnenschein: O Sonnenschein, O Sonnenschein! Volksliedchen: Wenn ich früh in den Garten geh / Ursula van Diemen, sop; Arpad Sandor, pno / Unterm Fenster: Wer ist vor meiner Kammertür? / Lucrezia Bori, sop; John McCormack, ten; anon orch. / So wahr die Sonne scheinet / Jo Vincent, sop; Louis van Tulder, ten; Betsy Rijkens-Culp, pno / Lied eines Schmedes / Sir George Henschel, bar/pno / Liederkreis: In der Fremde / Alice Raveau, alto; G. Andolfi, pno; Charles Panzéra, bar; Magdeleine Panzéra-Baillot, pno / Myrthen: Aus den östlichen / Richard Tauber, ten; Percy Kahn, pno / Dichterliebe: Ich will meine Seele tauchen; Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome / Thom Denijs, bar; Enni Denijs-Kroyt, pno / Myrthen: Zum Schluβ. Liederkreis: Frühlingsnacht. Wer machte dich so krank? Alte Laute / Elena Gerhardt, mezzo; Coenraad V. Bos, pno / An den Sonnenschein: O Sonnenschein, O Sonnenschein! Marienwürmchen. Frauenliebe und Leben+ / Lotte Lehmann, sop; Odeon Orch., cond. Manfred Gurlitt; +anon orch., Frieder Weissmann, cond / Mondnacht. Frühling laβtsein blaues Band.+ O ihr Herren. Röselein, Röselein.+ Loreley: Es flüstern und rauschen die Wogen.+ Ständchen+ / Elisabeth Schumann, sop; Karl Alwin, +George Reeves, pno / Wer machte dich so krank? Hörst du den Vogel singen? Mondnacht. Was sol lich sagen? / Karl Erb, ten; Bruno Seidler-Winkler, pno / Schöne Fremde. Aus der Heimat unter den Blitzen.* Was weht um meine Schläfe.* An den Sonnenschein: O Sonnenschein, O Sonnenschein!+ / Ria Ginster, sop; *Gerald Moore, +Paul Baumgartner, pno / Frühlingsnacht: No. 12, Über’m Garten durch die Lüfte / Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, bar; G. Haberland, pno / Myrthen: Die Lotosblume. Schneeglöckchen. Zum Schluβ. Herzelied. Dir zu eröffnen mein Herz / Susan Metcalfe-Casals, mezzo; Gerald Moore, pno / Dichterliebe. Dein Angesicht, so lieb und schön / Aksel Schiøtz, ten; Moore, pno; Gerhard Hüsch, bar; Hanns Udo Müller, pno / Du bist wie eine Blume. Flutenreicher Ebro, blühendes Ufer / Aksel Schiøtz, bar; Moore, pno / Meine Rose. Widmung / Frida Leider, sop; Michael Raucheisen, pno / Frühlingsfahrt / Hans Hermann Nissen, bar; Bruno Seidler-Winlker, pno / Erstes Grün. Requiem / Flora Nielsen, sop; Moore, pno / Mondnacht / Hans Hotter, bar; Michael Raucheisen, pno / Meine Rose. Widmung / Karl Schmitt-Walter, bar; Victor Graef, pno / Die Kartenlegerin / Elisabeth Höngen, alto; Hans Zipper, pno / Dein Angesicht, so lieb und schön / Pierre Bernac, bar; Gerald Moore, pno / Aufräge / Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, sop; Moore, pno / Die Lotosblume. Die Beiden Grenadiere / Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, bar; Moore, pno / Profil PH21025 Although the header to this review suggests that this is a massive set of records, it actually fits on four CDs. It is part of Profil/Hännsler Classic’s series dedicated to historic lieder recordings, and the first devoted to Schumann. As one can see from the above list, we have singers great and not-great, famous and obscure, legendary interpretations—some, like the 1928 Lotte Lehmann Frauenliebe und Leben, in an earlier, far less common version—and some who just sing the notes. Interestingly, the net has been cast far and wide, including such singers one would never suspect of having recorded Schumann such as Nicolai Figner, Giuseppe Borgatti and Erik Schmedes, as well as such obscure names as Fritz Schrödter, Marie Knüpfer-Egli, Willi Birrenkoven, Ursula van Diemen, Louis van Tulder, Alice Raveau, Thom Denijs and Flora Nielsen. Thus it’s quite the grab-bag! I like the suggestion in the liner notes that this is Profil’s answer to the massive EMI LP sets of the 1980s, titled The Record of Singing, only devoted exclusively to lieder, but was less thrilled about the fact that they didn’t include even rudimentary information on who the singers were. Between Joe Pearce of the Vocal Record Collectors’ Society and some information which I was able to find online, including photos of the artists, I was able to identify the singers I didn’t know. Two things strike you regarding many of the acoustic recordings, particularly the early ones from 1901-1909. First, nearly all of the artists are singing too loudly, which somewhat spoils the effect of the texts of these songs, probably in order to compensate for the fact that the early recording horn wasn’t very sensitive to singers with nuance (as tenors Karl Jörn and Karl Burrian learned to their embarrassment). And second, almost none of the accompanying pianists were any good. I don’t mean just somewhat straightforward and insensitive: most of them could barely play their instruments. Apparently in the old days, the accompanist didn’t matter to ANYONE at the record companies as long as the Famous Singers could be heard, so the singers belted and the pianists klunked along. We start our excursion with tenor Fritz Schrödter (1855-1924), an interesting case. He was primarily a singer of operetta and light tenor roles, the heaviest (for the most part) being Assad in Goldmark’s Queen of Sheba and the title role of Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann, yet he also belted out Canio, Turiddu and Enzo Grimaldi in La Gioconda. He must have been very close to the horn for his recording of Der Nuβbaum because he almost sounds as if he’s shouting the song. But he had a good voice. a fine legato, and didn’t distort the music. Next up is Félia Litvinne, the famous Russian soprano who migrated to France and was associated with dramatic roles, particularly Wagnerian. Just to think of a Wagnerian soprano singing Schumann lieder sounds horrible, but although Litvinne’s voice really had a bright “cut” to it, she also had a good legato and actually sings the song with some feeling. Even better, however, is the famous early Russian tenor Nicolai Figner. Nearly all of his opera recordings sound not so good, but in “Ich hab’ im Traum gewinet” from Dichterliebe (in Russian) you can really tell that he was an artist—and for once, his pianist is at least competent. Marie Knüpfer-Egli (1872-1924) was an Austrian soprano. According to Pearce, she “made a good number of recordings for G&T and Gramophone, from 1902 up to about 1920. She recorded with Margarethe Knupfer, a mezzo who must have been her sister-in-law, as she (Marie) was married to the very famous bass Paul Knupfer, who died around 1920 and was a prolific recorder.” Her excerpt from Frauenkliebe und Leben is cleanly sung but has zero feeling in it. Lilli Lehmann needs no introduction to vocal collectors; she was one of the legendary sopranos of her time, and her version of the “Intermezzo” from Liederkreis is very finely sung. Willi Birrenkoven (1865-1955) was a dramatic tenor with an excellent voice. He debuted in 1888 at the Opera House of Dusseldorf. From 1890 to 1893 he appeared at Köln, from 1893 to 1912 at the Municipal Theatre of Hamburg. Here he sang among other things in the premieres of Busoni’s Die Bratwald (1902) and Siegfried Wagner’s Sternengebot (1908). He became known in particular as an famous interpreter of Richard Wagner’s operas, even at Bayreuth. His rendition of Wanderlied is strongly and robustly sung, yet with some soft singing in the middle section to show that he could modulate the voice. Vittorio Arimondi was a famous Italian bass of the period, and revels in the famous Beiden Grenadiere. Mezzo-soprano Therese Behr-Schnabel is, of course, more famous for having been Artur Schnabel’s wife than for her career which she gave up shortly after her marriage except for a few lieder recitals with hubby accompanying. I had only heard her electrical recordings, of which two are featured here, on which she sounds as if the voice was shot—and indeed it was, because her 1904 recording of Volksliedchen, with an indifferent pianist, is really outstanding both vocally and interpretively. In the later recordings, it’s only interpretation you listen for, and yes, she still had it. Otherwise, the voice has turned sour in tone and the low range is unsteady. To say I was surprised to see Giuseppe Borgatti singing Schumann would be an understatement; he was clearly one of the premier dramatic Italian tenors of his time, and lieder certainly didn’t seem to be his thing, yet he turns in a surprisingly fine rendition of Due bist wie eine Blume, and the 1905 Fonotipia sound quality is quite good for its time. Of Slezak there is little to say that hasn’t already been said of him; next to Caruso, he was clearly the greatest tenor of his time, and he does not disappoint here, though he uses more rubato than is fashionable nowadays. Lydia Lipkowska was a famed Russian soprano who didn’t sing at the Met but did sing at the Boston and Chicago Opera companies as well as New York’s San Carlo Opera. I never thought a lot of her voice—it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t grab me, either—and here she is OK without being really impressive either vocally or interpretively. Next up is Erik Schmedes, a dramatic tenor almost as highly prized in Vienna (but not quite) as Slezak, but who always sounded just loud and dreadful on records. He does so here. He should have been dragged out in back of the recording studio and horsewhipped for giving a performance of “Ich grolle nicht” from Dichterliebe as awful as this. Ditto his pianist. Julia Culp was a mezzo-soprano whose lieder performances were absolutely drooled over by critics in her day. She didn’t possess the most beautiful of voices, and she uses far too much portamento for our tastes today, but you can tell that she was a really fine artist, although in “Er, der Herrlichste von allen” she takes a lot of unnecessary breaths. Piano Otto Bake, actually one of the few identified by name on these early records, wasn’t great by any means but he sounds like Geoffrey Parsons compared to most of the others. Chaliapin was Chaliapin: a bit over the top, but always involved with the feelings of the character he was singing. Frieda Hempel, who had for me one of the most beautiful voices of all German soubrettes, does a typically excellent job with Widmung, and she had a very fine pianist in Coenraad v. Bos. The great German-Jewish baritone Friedrich Schorr sounds absolutely fantastic in Wanderied, his rich, beautiful voice ringing out with ease. But Schorr is even more sensitive in Du bist wie eine blumen, a formerly unpublished recording. Robert Jäger is the fine pianist in both. Ursula van Diemen (1897-1988) had a Dutch father and a German mother, and acted in movies in addition to singing. She had a high, bright voice, sang expressively, and was lucky to have a fine accompanist in Arpad Sandor, who later worked with Jascha Heifetz. I could have lived without the duet, sung in English by Lucrezia Bori and John McCormack (quite bad English in Bori’s case). Two very pretty voices, but only McCormack really sings as if he understands the words. Much better is the duet between famed Dutch soprano Jo Vincent and the little-known (outside of Holland) tenor Louis van Tulder. Born in 1892, van Tulder first worked in an office but left the security of a fixed job to become a singer. From 1916 on, van Tulder was first lyric tenor at the Netherlands Opera, singing in Faust, Martha, and La Boheme. After 1930, he was exclusively a concert- and oratorio-singer. Few truly great singers of the pre-World War I era were so highly prized, yet so quickly forgotten after his death, as Sir George Henschel, who also happened to be an excellent conductor (his recording of Beethoven’s First Symphony was part of Columbia Records’ 1927 centennial tribute to the composer). He had a fine, pointed voice, never used much portamento, sang with an almost 3-D reading of the texts, and also accompanied himself at the piano (no mean feat, even today). Interestingly, I had never heard his Beiden Grenadieren before, and although it is not as theatrical as Chaliapin’s it is just as deeply felt. Alice Raveau (1884-1945) made her debut in 1908 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in Gluck’s Orphée, and this part remained her real star role. In 1911 she appeared as Orpheus at the Arena d’Orange and in 1910 she sang at the Opéra-Comique in the premieres of the Samuel-Rousseau’s opera Léone. She was a very intense singer who felt the music from the inside, although on this recording, at least, the voice sounds a bit nasal. Richard Tauber is Richard Tauber. Thom Denijs (1877-1935) was a Dutch baritone, who made two complete recordings of Dichterliebe, one for the acoustic horn in 1923 and the second for the microphone in 1928. It is from the latter we hear two excerpts here. Although he devoted a large part of his career to lieder and oratorio, he did have an opera career earlier on, singing such roles as Papageno in Die Zauberflöte. Elena Gerhardt was, of course, the German mezzo noted for her lieder interpretations; when she made her electrical recordings for HMV, critics practically had an orgasm praising them. But like Theresa Behr-Schnabel, there was some tonal deterioration; her acoustic recordings with Artur Nikisch at the piano are superb whereas in these you’re really just listening for the artistry. These four recordings by her had never been issued previously. French baritone Charles Panzerá had both fine artistry and an excellent voice, though I had never heard him sing Schumann before. In der Fremde is a little slow, but his Der Nuβbaum is sheer perfection. Lotte Lehmann was a singer I enjoyed thoroughly on her early electrical recordings, but never much liked after 1935. Happily, we have here two early examples of her from 1932, and she sings with a much fresher, more attractive tone than in her later outings, though to my ears she always took too many breaths. Herbert Janssen was a fine artist who, to my ears, really didn’t have the best German baritone voice. But by the electrical era, record producers finally started ensuring that the accompanists were at least pretty good and, at time, superb, thus from this point on we have few problems with the accompanists. Elisabeth Schumann remains a controversial artist. Many listeners complain about her rubato effects, which sounded quite out-of-date by the 1930s, while others, like me, are mesmerized by the purity of her voice and her ability to color her tones. With that being said, she was too close to the microphone for Mondnacht, which rather ruins the effect she was clearly trying to make. If she had stepped back two paces, I think it would have come out fine. Tenor Karl Erb (1877-1958) was another of those singers who, like George Henschel, were lionized during their lifetimes only to be marginalized and then forgotten in later years. In his case, however, it was because the voice itself, though pleasant, wasn’t much to listen to; it was his artistry you went back to, over and over again, and he does not disappoint here in the four songs chosen for inclusion. Indeed, I would put him on the same high pedestal as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and that’s going some. A true interpretive and musical genius. Ria Ginster, a German concert soprano who specialized in lieder, was sort of the female Karl Erb, except that her voice had a somewhat abrasive and metallic sound whereas Erb’s voice was quite pleasant, just small. But she too was a first-rate interpreter, as these songs show. (In fact, these specific pressings are the best I’ve ever heard of Ginster; not even her EMI LP or CD reissues ever sounded this good.) Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender’s one contribution to this set is beautifully sung and interpreted with passion, but perhaps a bit too much so—he sounds as if he’s delivering an Italian opera aria rather than a Schumann lied. I knew the name of Susan Metcalfe-Casals, the American mezzo who married Pau (Pablo) Casals, but had never heard her before. It was a somewhat small, dry voice, not unpleasant or defective in any way but not really a first-rate instrument. She was, however, a good interpreter, and perhaps we should cut her some slack since she was 59 years old when she made these discs, the only ones she ever made. Interestingly, these were not fully commercial recordings, but were made for HMV’s yellow label, for private distribution only. CD 3 starts with a very famous recording, Aksel Schiøtz’ 1946 Dichterliebe with Gerald Moore, one of his very last recordings as a tenor. He suffered a stroke shortly thereafter, had to stop singing for nearly three years, and could only come back as a baritone. The Dichterliebe is a very good one, but it’s been available on Danacord for more than a decade. The three songs recorded in 1949 as a baritone are also quite good, and in fact on these the voice sounds very tenor-ish; it would be a few years before he completely lost the brightness on top. By 1949, he merely lost his highest notes, B and C, but still had the tenor timbre. Frida Leider was, of course, one of the two greatest Wagnerian sopranos of her time, the other being Florence Austral. Both were eclipsed in 1935 by the arrival of Kirsten Flagstad on the international scene, but by 1939 Leider’s voice was on the decline and she soon gave up the Wagnerian roles. These 1943 lieder recordings are among her very last; the voice is bit more fluttery than in the past, but she was still a fine artist if rather too loud an interpreter for this delicate music. (Her accompanist, Michael Raichausen, is also too slow.) Baritone Hans Hermann Nissen was also a Wagnerian who sang Hans Sachs in Toscanini’s famous 1937 performance of Die Meistersinger. He, too, is a fairly straightforward, exuberant singer, but at least he chose a song that fit that style of interpretation. Flora Nielsen (1900-1976), another little-known singer nowadays, was a Canadian soprano whose real name was Sybil Crawley. She started out her career as a soprano, and was still one when she made these recordings, but later switches to mezzo-soprano. The voice sounds very “British,” if you know what I mean: tight, laser-like tonal focus, very little vibrato, almost an edgy quality, but still a decent quality timbre. She also sounds like a mezzo, even here. As an interpreter she’s so-so. These are more curiosities than anything else. And of course everyone who listens to Wagner knows who Hans Hotter was. Apparently he suffered throughout his life from asthma, and this is what caused the frequent wobble in his voice, but when at his best he was incomparable as an interpreter. Curiously, he chose to record Mondnacht, but surprisingly he pulls it off, in part because the voice is steady as a rock here, even if you never in a million years would think of Mondnacht as a song for a bass-baritone. Karl Schmitt-Walter (1900-1985) is the next little-known singer. Joe Pearce claims that he was one of the most popular baritones in Germany, even better liked in the 1930s than Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, that he made films and recorded a lot of crossover material on 78s and LPs well into the 1960s, but truth to tell, I’ve never heard or heard of him before. It was a nice, light voice, and he was clearly a fine interpreter; both of his songs here are very well sung. He rode the voice on the breath with perfect ease, and though the voice obviously lacked size it was of a fine quality. Mezzo Elisabeth Höngen is another famous name, but I doubt if many have heard her from as far back as 1946, when this recording of Schlief die Mutter endlich ein was made. The voice was much lighter and brighter than in the 1950s and ‘60s, and she sings with wonderful energy and engagement. Her accompanist, Hans Zipper, is also quite zippy! We next hear four very famous singers. French baritone Pierre Bernac also qualifies as a Karl Erb-type singer: a pleasant if not really beautiful voice, but outstanding interpretation. One will search far and wide to hear lighter, more engaging singing from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in 1951, and of course Fischer-Dieskau was a great singer regardless of era. Victoria de los Angeles was never much of an interpreter of anything, except perhaps Madama Butterfly, but she had a gorgeous voice. The last CD, titled “Legendary Lied Cycle Recordings,” starts with Gerhard Hüsch’s 1936 recording of Dichterliebe which I felt only has his outstanding vocal quality to recommend it. As for me, I not only prefer Schiøtz’ version to his but also the 1935 recording by Charles Panzéra and Alfred Cortot…but it’s typical of Germans to assume that only a German baritone could deliver a “great” performance. A Dane and a Frenchman doing a better job on German lied than a German? Impossible! But so it was although, on re-listening to it, there are some interesting interpretive touches here that somehow escaped me the first time I heard it. So maybe it’s not really legendary, but it is pretty good overall, though “Aus alten Marchen” is taken too slowly and has some extra decelerandos in it to boot. Happily, Profil chose to include Lotte Lehmann’s earlier 1928 recording of Frauenliebe und Leben rather than her later recording. Although this has an orchestral arrangement, it is somewhat tasteful for its time despite the drippy string portamento (probably arranged by the conductor, Frieder Weissmann), and in 1928 Lehmann still had the youthful bloom on her voice that was gone by the mid-1930s. Indeed, the only fault in her singing here—which only became worse with age—is that she took too many breaths in the middle of phrases, even those that were fairly easy to sing. Nonetheless, this is clearly a great performance in every respect, truly worthy of preservation. Listen particularly to “Du ring an meinem Finger,” where she not only interprets the words like the great actress she was but also binds the phrases together perfectly. Seven years on, she couldn’t sing half this well. We end with Friedrich Schorr’s 1937-38 recording of Liederkreis with Fritz Kitzinger at the piano. The famous baritone’s voice was not in as good estate here as it was in the late 1920s-early ‘30s, but although there is some obvious wear on the voice (he gave up singing by 1940 and turned to teaching) the tonal deterioration was not as pronounced as Lehmann’s by this time. As mentioned earlier, Schorr was alternately pretty good and great in his interpretations, and he is so here. Not every song is interpreted fabulously, but most are quite good and some are truly great. More interestingly, in some songs (a good example is “Die Stille”), one can actually “hear” the face behind the voice, and he lightens his voice even more than Hotter did for “Mondnacht.” Thus we come to the end of our Schumann survey, and I would be remiss if I didn’t give the absolute highest praise to restoration engineer Holger Siedler for this set. Although he often left in a bit more of the original surface noise than I like, each and every track on this set is engineered perfectly—so much so that, even in the early acoustic recordings, you can actually hear some of the natural studio resonance, which is almost miraculous. I would place his restoration of these discs even higher than not only my own but also of Ward Marston and Seth Winner, both of whom have done some very high-quality remastering of older records. I’m sure that he didn’t have mint copies of every record in this set to work from, but it sounds like it, and for that I’d give him a “What a Performance!” award just for the remastering. —© 2021 Lynn René Bayley Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique) Return to homepage OR Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music FEATHER: Esquire Blues. QUEBEC-CLARKE: Mop Mop. ELLINGTON-RUSSELL: Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear From Me.1 HOLIDAY: I Love My Man.1 FIELDS-McHUGH: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.2 ARLEN-KOEHLER: I Got a Right to Sing the Blues.3 BURWELL-PARISH: Sweet Lorraine. G. & I. GERSHWIN: I Got Rhythm. TRADITIONAL: The Blues. UNKNOWN: We All Drink Coca-Cola. FEATHER: Esquire Bounce. CARMICHAEL: Rockin’ Chair.4 S. WILLIAMS: Basin Street Blues.3 AHLERT-TURK: I’ll Get By.1 YOUMANS-CAESAR: Tea for Two. RUSSELL-ARMSTRONG: Back O’ Town Blues.2 ORY: Muskrat Ramble. CASEY: Buck Jumpin’. SAMPSON-WEBB-GOODMAN: Stompin’ at the Savoy. PETTIFORD: For Bass Faces Only. WHITING-CHASE: My Ideal. HICKMAN-WILLIAMS: Rose Room. WALLER-LINK-ROSE: I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling. ELISCU-ROSE: More Than You Know.4 WALLER-RAZAF: Squeeze Me.4 Honeysuckle Rose.4 HAMPTON-DeLANGE-ROBIN: Flying Home [Flyin’ on a V-Disc]. HAMPTON: Jamming the Vibes. KEY: Star-Spangled Banner / Louis Armstrong, tpt/2voc; Roy Eldridge, tpt; Jack Teagarden, tb/3voc; Barney Bigard, cl; Coleman Hawkins, t-sax; Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, pno; Al Casey, gtr; Oscar Pettiford, bs; Sid Catlett, dm; Lionel Hampton, vib; Red Norvo, xyl/vib; 1Billie Holiday, 4Mildred Bailey, voc. Announcers: Leonard Feather, Michael Roy (Spotlight Bands Broadcast) / available for free streaming on YouTube (live: Metropolitan Opera House, New York, January 18, 1944) For one night and only one night in the long history of the Metropolitan Opera House, Tuesday, January 18, 1944, there was a major program change. Instead of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini or Strauss, the composers featured were Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, the Gershwin brothers, Spencer Williams, Fats Waller and Lionel Hampton. The sopranos were Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey, the baritones Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden, the bass was Oscar Pettiford, and the only tenor featured was the tenor sax of Coleman Hawkins. This was a jazz concert, a major War Bonds drive, and Eddie Johnson and the Met board had no choice but to capitulate in order to show their patriotism. The concert has since become the stuff of legend; it was issued several times on LP and CD beginning in 1971, shortly before Louis Armstrong’s death, although in recent years the number of re-releases has dropped off. Despite the fact that Benny Goodman’s name and image were featured prominently on the poster advertising the concert, he wasn’t even in New York at the time. He and his band were playing out in California, and he just phoned in a performance of Rachel’s Dream sometime during the evening, but this remote contribution has not been included in any of the releases I’ve seen. Barney Bigard, who at the time was a star with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, plays all the clarinet solos. As you can see from the lineup listed above, this was clearly an all-star band, all of the musicians present either winners or runners-up in every instrumental category. Nowadays, few people pay much attention to Esquire Magazine, and when they do it’s probably to protest the attitude of Maleness propagated in its pages, but in the 1940s it was one of the few major mags in America besides Metronome and down beat to devote a good number of pages per month to jazz and to hold annual popularity contests for fans from 1944 t0 1946. It’s rather sad that neither of the two best jazz guitarists of the day, Oscar Moore or Django Reinhardt, were present, but Moore was still little-known, only recently coming to prominence as a member of the ascendant Nat Cole Trio, and Reinhardt was hiding out at the time in France. Or Algiers. Or Switzerland. As you can hear on this remarkable recording, the young audience—and those are clearly young voices yelling and cheering, teenagers and others either too young for or exempt from being drafted—go absolutely nuts over the music. Granted, many of them probably had little real knowledge or appreciation of what these musicians were really doing, but although I won’t pretend that every solo in this two-hour concert was an absolute gem (Jack Teagarden, for one, overblows several notes, and a few of the musicians just played rhythmic riffs during their solo spots) there is clearly enough here to excite the jazz genes of anyone who still has blood in their bodies. For these young people, who didn’t even have to buy tickets—all they had to do to get in was to buy a War Bond or three—this concert was the equivalent of their Woodstock, only without having to sleep in mud and get sick. And you know what? It’s actually refreshing to hear an audience go absolutely bonkers for the likes of Roy Eldridge, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Bigard, Casey and drummer Sid Catlett, who in my personal opinion never sounded more vibrant and inventive as he does here, rather than screaming for some craphead rock band playing inane licks over a deafening but uninteresting drum beat. This was, in a sense, Swing’s Last Stand. In only two years, the musical landscape was to change drastically in favor of progressive swing (faster and less danceable than the beats heard here), bebop (faster and even more complex) and early R&B, the three divisions into which jazz was headed. By the end of the 1940s, you were in one of those three camps or a “Moldy Fig” who only listened to New Orleans or Chicago Dixieland. The jazz world was about to rip asunder, and to this day no jazz historian other than me has ever pointed to this multiple fork in the road as the real reason for the demise of the big bands and the loss of interest in jazz. For better or worse, swing had something in it that appealed to almost everyone. The later forms of jazz did not. They appealed to large sects within the jazz-listening community but clearly not to everyone or there wouldn’t have been that division. Considering what would happen to Billie Holiday about a decade hence—drug busts and a fall from grace—it’s almost sad to hear her introduced as the “All-American singer.” But was she ever in great voice for this concert! So too was Mildred Bailey, who by 1947 had dropped out of sight, fighting ill health and depression, eventually becoming one of the forgotten superstars of jazz singing. To be honest, I have no idea how much of this program was worked out in advance. Probably the order of appearances: note that they held off bringing Armstrong in until the fifth number, giving him special status, and of course Teagarden was also held back until that time as well. There was probably also an ordering of the numbers played or sung—that only makes sense. But in several cases, the length of the performances tended to run as long as they ran, and if one or two of them went overtime, someone else’s number probably got cut. As in the case of Benny Goodman’s January 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, they programmed the longest jam session for next-to-last, a 12-minute version of Lionel Hampton’s Flying Home that absolutely tore up the floorboards. In fact, this performance was so popular with the audience that they even issued it on a V-Disc under the title Flyin’ on a V-Disc. The second half hour of the show was broadcast live on the Spotlite radio program. Since this was a commercially-sponsored program, the all-stars had to play the then-theme song of the Coca-Cola company We All Drink Coca-Cola. Probably the best band that ever played it in the history of the company. Interestingly, within this two-hour swingfest we do hear a few indications of the split in jazz to come. Armstrong, of course, always had his heart in what he loved to call “one of the good old good ones,” and there are several of them here, from Muskrat Ramble to Basin Street Blues. Ike Quebec’s and Kenny Clarke’s Mop Mop was very close to the emerging bop beat, and bassist Oscar Pettiford, also at that time a star with Duke Ellington, suggests elements of bop in his solo on For Bass Faces Only. One of the really interesting things about this concert—to me, anyway—is that fact that although Teddy Wilson was present, he did not play on many numbers here. That honor went to Art Tatum, a man often castigated by the musically insensitive for not being able to swing, but swing he does throughout this concert, even when playing behind Holiday or Armstrong, which he was never to do again for the remainder of his career. Had Goodman been in New York instead of California, we might have had the rare opportunity of hearing Tatum accompany him as well. But what stands out about this concert that one didn’t always hear in the later Norman Granz-organized Jazz at the Philharmonic jam sessions is the easy communion and unity among the musicians. Everyone is trying to play their best, but as a group there is a cohesion that rarely came out of thrown-together jam sessions like this, even when one hears the contrast between the Armstrong-inspired vibes of Hampton and the Bix Beiderbecke-inspired xylophone and vibes of Red Norvo. It’s not so much competition as simply playing their best and having fun. Just listen, for instance, to the way Tatum comes roaring into view on piano right after Norvo’s excellent solo on I Got Rhythm. You can hear Norvo call out, “Come on, Art, Art!” to egg him on, and I don’t think it bothered Red in the least that Art blew him away. When Armstrong enters, he’s playing his best, but in his own style; he’s not trying to out-Tatum Tatum…although Coleman Hawkins, then on the cusp of his bop phase, plays a blistering solo halfway between bop and R&B, and a brilliant one it is, too. And listen to how Tatum plays a steady and un-frilly comp to Roy’s, Hawk’s and Bigard’s solos. He’s not trying to show off here, but be a good colleague. He even gets Jack Teagarden into a great mood on trombone. Big T never really embraced bop, but he did flirt with it. Only Roy Eldridge sounds as if he wanted to show Tatum that he had the kind of chops on trumpet that the latter had on piano, and by golly, he succeeds. (It just struck me that one other major jazz name who should have been at this concert, but apparently wasn’t voted in, was Lester Young.) So there’s not a lot of harmonic sophistication in this concert. Don’t expect to hear anything that resembles what Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie or Bud Powell were doing behind the scenes…that was to dominate jazz’s future, not early 1944. And although I alluded to the fact that Al Casey wasn’t the greatest jazz guitarist of his time, he contributed a surprisingly modern-sounding chorus to the improvised blues that just precedes the Spotlite portion of the program. But alas, Casey later rose to fame as a rock guitarist, and you can hear this element of his playing in his own composition, Buck Jumpin’, which is pure R&B. Casey may have been a good guitarist, but he knew which was the path to riches and it wasn’t the way he played on the blues. Taken as a whole, however, this is clearly an excellent concert within the swing axis as of 1944. You get a little of everything and a lot of surprising moments when you suddenly realize that your favorite (or not-so-favorite) musician is giving out with a really great chorus or two, and that, after all, is the essence of jazz. —© 2021 Lynn René Bayley Follow me on Twitter (@artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique) Return to homepage OR Read my book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond: An extended and detailed guide to the intersection of classical music and jazz
1646	dbpedia	1	45	https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226563602.003.0003	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
1646	dbpedia	2	10	https://letsquiz.com/quiz/the-enchanting-voice-how-well-do-you-know-elena-gerhardt-s-life-and-career	en	Elena Gerhardt Quiz	https://upload.wikimedia…ena_Gerhardt.jpg	https://upload.wikimedia…ena_Gerhardt.jpg	[ "https://letsquiz.com/_next/image?url=%2Flogo_23.png&w=256&q=75 1x, /_next/image?url=%2Flogo_23.png&w=384&q=75 2x", "https://letsquiz.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=48,format=webp/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/Elena_Gerhardt.jpg/400px-Elena_Gerhardt.jpg 1x, /cdn-cgi/image/width=96,format=webp/...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Get ready to flex your Elena Gerhardt muscles with this tricky quiz! Featuring 21 questions on a variety of Elena Gerhardt topics, this is not for the casual fan. Only true Elena Gerhardt buffs will b	en	/apple-touch-icon.png		https://letsquiz.com/quiz/the-enchanting-voice-how-well-do-you-know-elena-gerhardt-s-life-and-career	The Enchanting Voice: How Well Do You Know Elena Gerhardt's Life and Career? Updated: Jun 25, 2023
1646	dbpedia	1	12	https://www.rootsvinylguide.com/ebay_items/1911-elena-gerhardt-artur-nikisch-piano-schubert-du-bist-die-ruh-monarch-recor78--1912	en	Roots Vinyl Guide	http://assets.rootsvinylguide.com/pictures/1911-elena-gerhardt-artur-nikisch-piano-schubert-du-bist-die-ruh-monarch-recor78--1912_7170723		[ "http://assets.rootsvinylguide.com/pictures/1911-elena-gerhardt-artur-nikisch-piano-schubert-du-bist-die-ruh-monarch-recor78--1912_7170723" ]	[]	[]	[ "reggae", "roots", "dub", "ska", "vinyl", "punk", "rap", "jazz", "record", "tracker", "price guide" ]	null	[ "Will Sulzer" ]	null	RootsVinylGuide.com provides a searchable back catalog of eBay vinyl record auctions.	en			null
1646	dbpedia	0	48	https://issuu.com/melbsymphony/docs/mso_encore_issue_05	en	MSO Encore Magazine: Issue 5	https://image.isu.pub/24…e/jpg/page_1.jpg	https://image.isu.pub/24…e/jpg/page_1.jpg	[ "https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/31d186ba39f38e8c4fac.png", "https://static.issuu.com/fe/silkscreen/0.0.3042/icons/gradient/icon-canva-gradient.svg", "https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/1e794a8c4ec65e549678.png", "https://photo.isu.pub/melbsymphony/photo_large....	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00	The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Magazine	en	/favicon.ico	Issuu	https://issuu.com/melbsymphony/docs/mso_encore_issue_05	Welcome to Issuu’s blog: home to product news, tips, resources, interviews (and more) related to content marketing and publishing. Here you'll find an answer to your question.
1646	dbpedia	1	7	https://classicalmusicandmusicians.com/2019/07/28/elena-gerhardt/	en	Elena Gerhardt, Dramatic Mezzo Soprano	https://classicalmusican…/11/CMM-Logo.png	https://classicalmusican…/11/CMM-Logo.png	[ "https://classicalmusicandmusicians.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/CMM-Logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Steven Honig" ]	2019-07-28T00:00:00	Gerhardt was one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century. She was a German dramatic mezzo-soprano and was best known for her interpretations of the	en	https://classicalmusican…M-Logo-32x32.png	Classical Music and Musicians	https://classicalmusicandmusicians.com/2019/07/28/elena-gerhardt/	Elena Gerhardt was one of the greatest lieder singers of the 20th century. She was unique in that she appeared in both opera and lieder recitals. This is not usually the case. I have been very particular about the lieder that I have chosen. There are many postings on youtube, where the material dates from about 1925-1930. These recordings have been remastered to remove the surface noise. Unfortunately, unless you know what you’re doing, removing the surface noise also removes half the voice. I have selected Japanese reissues of vinyl records that have not been cleaned up. You will hear surface noise but you will also hear Elena Gerhardt’s voice. There are several things that I would like to point out. There is no pressure on this voice. In her later recordings, there might be problems with pitch, but the voice production is spectacular. Also, the last recording, Mariä Wiegenlied was made on a wax cylinder around 1907 and was later transferred to vinyl. This recording is 20 years earlier that all the other recordings selected, and you can hear Gerhardt’s voice when she was young. Sacred Lullaby You who hover Around these palms In night and wind, You holy angels, Silence the tree-tops! My child is sleeping. You palms of Bethlehem In the raging wind, Why do you bluster So angrily today! O roar not so! Be still, lean Calmly and gently over us; Silence the tree-tops! My child is sleeping. The heavenly babe Suffers distress, Oh, how weary He has grown With the sorrows of this world. Ah, now that in sleep His pains Are gently eased, Silence the treetops! My child is sleeping. Fierce cold Blows down on us, With what shall I cover My little child’s limbs? O all you angels, Who wing your way On the winds, Silence the tree-tops! My child is sleeping. In Spring I sit silently on the hillside. The sky is so clear, the breezes play in the green valley where once, in the first rays of spring, I was, oh, so happy. Where I walked by her side, so tender, so close, and saw deep in the dark rocky stream the fair sky, blue and bright, and her reflected in that sky. See how the colorful spring already peeps from bud and blossom. Not all the blossoms are the same to me: I like most of all to pluck them from the branch from which she has plucked. For all is still as it was then, the flowers, the fields; the sun shines no less brightly, and no less cheerfully, the sky’s blue image bathes in the stream. Only will and delusion change, and joy alternates with strife; the happiness of love flies past, and only love remains; love and, alas, sorrow. Oh, if only I were a bird, there on the sloping meadow! Then I would stay on these branches here, and sing a sweet song about her all summer long. Secrecy Let me go, O world, O let me be! Do not tempt with gifts of love, Let this heart keep to itself Its rapture, its pain! I do not know why I grieve, It is unknown sorrow; Always through a veil of tears I see the sun’s beloved light. Often, I am lost in thought, And bright joy flashes Through the oppressive gloom, Bringing rapture to my breast. Let me go, O world, O let me be! Do not tempt with gifts of love, Let this heart keep to itself Its rapture, its pain! Homesickness He who would journey abroad Must go with his beloved, Others, in their joy, leave The stranger all alone. What do you know, dark summits, Of these happy days now past? Ah, my homeland beyond the mountains, How far it lies from here. I love best to watch the stars That shone as I went to her, I love to hear the nightingale That sang at my loved one’s door. The morning is my delight! At that peaceful hour I climb The highest mountain far and wide, And greet you, Germany, from the depth of my heart! Elena Gerhardt Elena Gerhardt was born on November 11, 1988, and she died on January 11, 1961. Gerhardt was one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century. She was a German dramatic mezzo-soprano and was best known for her interpretations of the masterworks of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf. Her earliest recordings from 1908 display the full beauty of her voice. Later recording sessions displayed more unique aspects of her art. Her most important recordings are those found in the first volume of discs issued by the Hugo Wolf Society. Most likely, without her participation in this project, it would not have gained publication. She championed the music of Wolf from her earliest recitals and she almost single-handedly brought his songs to the general public. Gerhardt began her musical studies at the Leipzig Conservatory at the age of 16, studying with Marie Hedmont. She displayed such promise that the great conductor Artur Nikisch accompanied her in her first public recital which was given on her 20th birthday. In 1903 she made her debut at the Leipzig Opera as Mignon in Thomas’ opera and later sang Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther. However, she quickly abandoned the opera stage and concentrated her performances on recitals and concerts. A “Liederabend” with Gerhardt and Nikisch, who was often her partner in recital, became an important event. In June 1906 she sang her first London recital and became one of the first singers to make a successful career in England without the benefit of important operatic productions. Gerhardt made Leipzig her home while continuing to sing around the world. Her New York debut came on January 9, 1912, as part of her North American tour which again featured Artur Nikisch as her partner. Her other tours included visits to Spain, Russia, Holland, and Belgium. In 1932, she married Fritz Kohl, the director of the Leipzig Radio. When the Nazis came to power, Kohl, along with most radio directors, was arrested. When he was finally released, he and Gerhardt made the decision to make London their permanent residence. From 1934 on, London became the center of her musical activities. Her principal partners at the piano were Artur Nikisch, Coenraad Bos, and Gerald Moore, a formidable group of pianists. All true partners in bringing song to life. She continued to give recitals until 1953, but also became very well-known as a teacher. Her most famous pupil was Flora Nielsen. In 1953 she wrote her autobiography entitled Recital which has a preface written by the great pianist Dame Myra Hess. She also sang with Hess at several of Hess’s National Gallery concerts in London during World War II. She emigrated to London in 1934.
1646	dbpedia	1	53	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11120098/	en	Frequent Lucid Dreaming Is Associated with Meditation Practice Styles, Meta-Awareness, and Trait Mindfulness	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih…rd-share.jpg?_=0	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih…rd-share.jpg?_=0	[ "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/uswds/img/favicons/favicon-57.png", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/uswds/img/icon-dot-gov.svg", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/uswds/img/icon-https.svg", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/nwds/img/logos/AgencyLogo.svg", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.ni...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Elena Gerhardt", "Benjamin Baird" ]	2024-05-26T00:00:00	Lucid dreaming involves becoming aware that one’s current experience is a dream, which has similarities with the notion of mindfulness—becoming aware of moment-to-moment changes in experience. Additionally, meta-awareness, the ability ...	en	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/nwds/img/favicons/favicon.ico	PubMed Central (PMC)	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11120098/	2.3. Measures In order to achieve a comprehensive assessment while maintaining time efficiency, shortened versions of many instruments were implemented. For internal consistency of the scales, McDonald’s omega total was preferred over Cronbach’s alpha. Since it can be assumed that not all items contribute equally to their score, McDonald’s omega is a more accurate reliability estimate, especially for multidimensional or ordinal scales [42,43,44]. Omega can be described as the proportion of variance in observed scores that can be attributed to a single underlying factor or to the common variance among the items on a scale [45,46]. As with Cronbach’s alpha, larger values indicate a higher reliability [47]. Dream Recall and Lucid Dreaming Experience. Lucid and ordinary dream experiences were recorded with an adapted dream survey. The original questionnaire developed by Baird et al. [48] was modified to fit the specific aims of this study. All participants reported dream recall frequency and lucid dreaming frequency on a 16-point Likert scale, extending the established scales by Schredl and Erlacher [49]: 0 = never; 1 = less than 1 (lucid) dream per year; 2 = 1 (lucid) dream per year; 3 = 2 (lucid) dreams per year; 4 = 3–5 (lucid) dreams per year; 5 = 6–8 (lucid) dreams per year; 6 = 9–11 (lucid) dreams per year; 7 = 1 (lucid) dream per month; 8 = 2 (lucid) dreams per month; 9 = 3 (lucid) dreams per month; 10 = 1 (lucid) dream per week; 11 = 2 (lucid) dreams per week; 12 = 3–4 (lucid) dreams per week; 13 = 5–6 (lucid) dreams per week; 14 = 1 (lucid) dream per night; 15 = more than 1 (lucid) dream per night. Based on the methodology of Stumbrys, Erlacher, and Malinowski [33], class means transformed the ordinal scores into metric frequencies either as units per month (0 → 0, 1 → 0.0714, 2 → 0.0833, 3 → 0.1667, 4 → 0.3333, 5 → 0.5833, 6 → 0.8333, 7 → 1, 8 → 2, 9 → 3, 10 → 4, 11 → 8, 12 → 13.5, 13 → 23.5, 14 → 30, 15 → 33) or units per week (0 → 0, 1 → 0.0185, 2 → 0.0192, 3 → 0.0385, 4 → 0.0769, 5 → 0.1346, 6 → 0.1923, 7 → 0.25, 8 → 0.50, 9 → 0.75, 10 → 1, 11 → 2, 12 → 3.5, 13 → 5.5, 14 → 7, 15 → 9). The same class means-recoded 16-point scale was given for lucid dream induction frequency per month. Participants received a written definition along with the scales: “Lucid dreaming is a special sort of dream in which you know that you are dreaming while still in the dream. Typically, you tell yourself “I’m dreaming!” or “This is a dream!”. In some cases, you may also control the content of the dream and alter the dream events as well as your actions voluntarily”. Respondents who had previously experienced lucid dreams were asked detailed questions regarding their lucid dream experiences, their ability to control lucid dreams, and their training in lucid dream induction techniques. In addition to the monthly lucid dreaming frequency, the number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period was assessed, which is a summative measure (i.e., an overall measurement taken after a period of time has passed) of lucid dreaming frequency as opposed to a formative approach (i.e., a measurement at shorter time intervals for each week or month). All items were presented either as an open text field or as a Likert-type format. The following single items were used: success of the lucid dream induction: “If you decide to have a lucid dream on a given night, how likely will you succeed?” (0 = very unlikely; 4 = very likely); wake-initiated lucid dream occurrences (0 = never; 4 = always); and how often one experiences a detached observer stance in the lucid dream (0 = never; 4 = always). To verify participants’ understanding of the lucid dream state, they were required to provide a brief report of one of their lucid dreams, detailing how they realized that they were dreaming. As all scales were adapted or created for this study, traditional reliability measures were not applicable. Nonetheless, a strong correlation was found between the frequency of lucid dreams per month and the number of lucid dreams in the previous six-month period (rsp = 0.93, p < 0.0001). Participants who reported experiencing lucid dreams at least once per month were categorized as monthly frequent lucid dreamers (MFLDs), while those who reported experiencing lucid dreams at least once or more per week were classified as weekly frequent lucid dreamers (WFLDs), extending the standard classification convention [9,29,50,51]. Meditation Experience and Frequency. A revised version of the Meditation Experience Questionnaire [28] was utilized to assess the quantitative experience of meditation practices. To cover various meditation frameworks, three options of Buddhism (Theravadan, Tibetan, or Mixed) were extended to 18 different meditation frameworks: 9 religious/spiritual-oriented traditions (Theravadan, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism; Daoism; Yoga; Sufism; Judaism; Christianity; and Shamanism) and 9 secular-oriented frameworks were included (app-guided, online-based, Vipassana, self-guided, Yoga, Thai Chi/Qigong, MBSR-based, non-dual meditation, and Transcendental Meditation), plus the option to specify an individual framework and tradition. Two items assessed previous meditation experience (yes/no), and meditation frequency. Meditation frequency was measured with a 16-point scale (0 = never, 15 = more than 1 meditation per day). Class means transformed the ordinal scale into metric units per week (0 → 0, 1 → 0.0185, 2 → 0.0192, 3 → 0.0385, 4 → 0.0769, 5 → 0.1346, 6 → 0.1923, 7 → 0.25, 8 → 0.50, 9 → 0.75, 10 → 1, 11 → 2, 12 → 3.5, 13 → 5.5, 14 → 7, 15 → 9). If participants meditated at least once per week, they reported how many different techniques they used in their meditation practice on a regular basis. In addition to questions about the quantitative meditation routine, they reported on the styles practiced while meditating, as well as meditation training and retreat experience. For each regularly practiced meditation framework, respondents provided an estimate of the length of an average meditation session in minutes, the frequency per day, the number of days per week, and the number of years of practice within the meditation framework. Based on this account, the total number of hours spent in meditation for each framework per week was calculated: MinutesperSession∗FreqencyperDay∗DayswithPractice60. Moreover, the participants indicated the percentage of the total time they dedicated to each meditation framework in which a specific quality was facilitated: “Please indicate what percentage of your average meditation time you spend on a specific meditation technique”. Respondents were presented with six options: open monitoring (OM) meditation, focused attention (FA) meditation, loving-kindness/emotionally toned (LK) meditation, meditation to recognize the nature of the mind, non-dual meditation, and one option for an individually specified technique. Meta-Awareness. The Meta-Awareness subscale of the Multidimensional Awareness Scale (MAS) captured the cognitive ability to recognize one’s current mental state based on self-assessment [52]. The item “I am aware of my thoughts and feelings as I experience them” reveals the direct aim of measuring the trait aspects of the cognitive process, as the instruction asked participants to indicate the extent to which the given statements represent the typical experience of their thoughts or feelings. The MAS-MA subscale consists of 7 items selected from the original 25-item MAS scale. The items were rated on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). Reliability was found to be good, ωt = 0.89. Trait Mindfulness. The measurement of trait mindfulness was performed using multiple instruments: the Toronto-Mindfulness Scale (TMS) [53,54], a short version of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) [55,56], and the Relaxation, Meditation, and Mindfulness Experience Questionnaire (RMMtm) [36,57]. The TMS is a 13-item mindfulness inventory constructed as a 5-point Likert-scale (0 = not at all; 4 = very much). The original scale measured state mindfulness and the survey incorporated the trait version of the TMS, asking for experiences during the previous 7 days [53]. The scale was derived from a two-component definition of mindfulness: Curiosity and Decentering [1]. Curiosity includes 6 items and refers to the openness to explore one’s internal states as they occur. Decentering, measured by 7 items, refers to the ability to maintain a stance of detachment from one’s thoughts and emotions, with the capacity not to be carried away by thoughts and emotions [54]. The scales were found to be reliable, with ωt = 0.91 for Curiosity and ωt = 0.85 for Decentering. Drawing from various definitions of mindfulness, a psychometrically validated trait mindfulness measure, the FFMQ, was developed. It combines five mindfulness instruments, and factor analysis on a large sample revealed five factors [58]. Its condensed form has 20 items rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = never or rarely true, 5 = very often or always true) [56]. The brief version measures five distinct but related components of mindfulness, with 4 items for each scale: (1) Observing: the ability to notice and attend to internal and external experiences, ωt = 0.76; (2) Describing: the capacity to articulate one’s experiences in words, ωt = 0.77; (3) Acting with awareness: as opposed to “being on autopilot”, the degree of presence and awareness while engaged in activities, ωt = 0.88; (4) Nonjudgment of inner experience: the ability to refrain from judging inner experiences as neither good nor bad, ωt = 0.88; (5) Nonreactivity to inner experience: the attitude of allowing thoughts and feelings to arise and pass without being caught up in or swept away by them, allowing these experiences to exist without interference, ωt = 0.77. The psychometric properties of the short version of the FFMQ by Tran et al. [56] demonstrated moderate to strong reliability. The Relaxation, Meditation, and Mindfulness Tracker (RMMtm) by Smith [59] comprises a self-reported broad-spectrum inventory for assessing dispositional mindfulness. The 7-point Likert scale with 32 items captures trait mindfulness (1 = never, 2 = not this month, but once or twice this year; 3 = about once this month; 4 = about once a week; 5 = about 2 or 3 times a week; 6 = about every day; 7 = several times daily). The RMMtm includes various experiences associated with the practice of mindfulness meditation techniques that manifest as characteristics over time. The instrument was derived from third-wave mindfulness theory to capture all essential phenomenological states of mindfulness, represented on a continuum with varying levels of mindfulness [60]: (1) Mindful Relaxation, which assesses initial mindful relaxation experiences; (2) Mindful Quiet Focus, which captures the stillness and observational nature of meditation; (3) Mindful Engagement, which measures the ability to remain present and compassionate during activities; and (4) Mindful Transcendence, the deepest level observed in long-term practitioners in spiritual or non-secular contexts [61]. Due to expected variations in levels of mindfulness among long-term and frequent meditators compared to other groups, separate component analysis for each population sample is recommended [36,57]. A principal component analysis identified 2 distinct factors. Items 1–24 loaded on the first factor; this dimension is interpreted as Mindful Relaxation and Focus, ωt = 0.97. The first dimension includes aspects of physical relaxation but also cognitive and emotional aspects of mindfulness: “I was living in the present moment, not past or future concerns” or “I felt selfless/caring/compassion”. Items 25–32 loaded on the second factor, compromising Mindful Transcendence, ωt = 0.93. Self-transcendence, in general, is defined as the capacity to expand self-boundaries [62]. The subscale refers to transpersonal self-transcendence: “I had a sense of what is timeless, boundless, infinite”. Due to the sample-specific component analysis, reliability measures were not comparable to previous research. However, reliability analysis indicated satisfying internal consistencies. 2.4. Statistical Analysis Statistical analyses were performed using R, version 4.3.1, and SPSS, version 29. For the primary data analysis, only the general mixed sample was utilized, following manual validation of each participant’s lucid dream report. The student populations were not included in the data analysis for the research questions addressed in this study, since there was an insufficient number of participants per group. Data management was based on the functions of the tidyverse package in R [63]. A total of 270 participants out of 291 were considered eligible for data analysis. The more liberal Shapiro–Wilk tests revealed significant deviations from normal distribution for most of the measures, e.g., lucid dreaming frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.590, p < 10−14), dream recall frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.855, p < 10−15), lucid dream induction frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.540, p < 10−22), and meditation frequency (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.813, p < 10−16). Therefore, non-parametric independent two-sample permutation tests were utilized for assessing overall group differences. For each group, a set of multiple tests with adjusted p-values based on Benjamini and Hochberg and the False Discovery Rate (FDR) correction were reported [64]. Monte Carlo permutation tests with R = 10,000 permutations were implemented for group comparisons [65]. For most group comparisons, the Monte Carlo permutation test of the mean was calculated. All variables besides the ordinal scaled WILD frequency and the ordinal variable related to the detached observer stance were continuous variables. When comparing the total hours of meditation per week and the largest number of years for a meditation practice, a Monte Carlo permutation test of the median was used. In addition to that, Spearman’s correlation was preferred over the Pearson correlation due to the influence of the largest values in the weekly hours of meditation for each meditation practice style. Prior to this, an exploratory principal component analysis found the sample-specific RMMtm scales [36]. Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (X2 = 8357.33, df = 496, p < 0.001), indicating that the variables were sufficiently intercorrelated to proceed with principal component analysis (PCA). A PCA with Kaiser normalization and an Oblimin rotation method yielded a two-factor solution in the general population with tools from the psych package [66]. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin Measure was 0.953, which indicates good sampling adequacy. Factor extraction was based on the scree plot, indicating two factors, while parallel analysis yielded two factors and Kaiser–Gutman criteria indicated four factors. The two-factor solution accounted for 62% of the cumulative variance, compared to 67% for the three-factor and 70% for the four-factor solution. The tools from the MBESS package calculated omega total (ωt) estimates instead of the psych tools for a more conservative reliability measure [43,47]. Multiple regression analysis for the monthly lucid dreaming frequency, predicted by the RMMtm Mindful Transcendence subscale, the TMS Decentering and Curiosity subscale, the MAS-MA subscale, weekly meditation frequency, and age, was implemented with the Boot and LessR package in R (i.e., Table S1, Figures S1 and S2) [67,68]. Due to violations of heteroscedasticity and normal distribution, examined by means of the visual plotting of the predicted values against the standardized residuals, the coefficients were tested based on 10,000 bootstrapped bias-corrected confidence intervals. Assumptions were investigated via the LessR package: no VIF values exceeded 5, and none of Cook’s distance indexes was larger than 1, with the highest VIF being 3.634 and the largest Cook’s distance index being 0.12. The exploratory analysis of the relationship between lucid dreaming, meditation, and meta-awareness was performed with model 4 of the PROCESS macro for R [69]. In this model, meta-awareness was used as a mediator, meditation frequency as the independent variable, and the number of lucid dreams in the previous six months was used as the outcome variable. The model controlled for covariates including lucid dream induction frequency, dream recall frequency, and age. It must be stated that for this analysis, 25 participants who did not have prior experience with lucid dreams were excluded, due to missing data. Bias-corrected accelerated (BCa) confidence intervals for the coefficients were bootstrapped with R = 10,000 replicates, as was the confidence interval for the indirect effect. Standard errors were computed using heteroscedasticity-consistent estimates due to the heteroscedasticity of the residuals and the nonnormality of the dependent variable (Shapiro–Wilk’s W = 0.381, p < 10−22). The model parameters were standardized, and the random seed was fixed to 9999 to ensure the reproducibility of the results.
1646	dbpedia	3	65	https://operawire.com/erato-announces-joyce-didonatos-winterreise/	en	Erato Announces Joyce DiDonato's 'Winterreise' - OperaWire	https://operawire.com/wp…unnamed-11-1.jpg	https://operawire.com/wp…unnamed-11-1.jpg	[ "https://operawire.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/unnamed-11-1-300x300.jpg", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/337f6d99c0d469e6a85cc999ce8b9722?s=300&d=mm&r=g", "https://operawire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/MixCollage-09-Aug-2024-03-58-PM-5694-700x700.jpg", "https://operawire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Francisco Salazar" ]	2021-02-20T05:00:38+00:00	The high and low notes from around the international opera stage	en	https://operawire.com/wp…2019/favicon.png	OperaWire	https://operawire.com/erato-announces-joyce-didonatos-winterreise/	Erato has announced the release of Schubert’s Winterreise. The new release feature Joyce DiDonato in a piece that is traditionally performed by tenors or baritones. DiDonato joins a rare group of female singers including Lotte Lehmann, Elena Gerhardt, Christa Ludwig, and Brigitte Fassbaender who have placed their stamp on the piece. For the new recording, DiDonato is joined by pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who suggested Schubert’s cycle to take on their recital tour together. In a statement, DiDonato noted, “Perhaps one element of a true masterpiece is that it invites itself to be experienced in a new light.” She added, “But what about her? The woman he loved and who, for whatever reason, disappointed him. Perhaps it’s my identification with Charlotte in Massenet’s opera ‘Werther’ that kept this question front and center in my mind. I’ve always wondered what happens to her when the curtain comes down [after Werther has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound] … What if the young man of Winterreise sent her his last journals before he parted? What if his final words arrived to her as a kind of suicide note? … And what if she reads the writings? Word for word. Over and over … ‘Ces lettres … ces lettres,’ Charlotte screams out in Werther … So what about the woman who spoke of love in the first song of Winterreise? This can also be her journey.” DiDonato recorded the song cycle at New York’s Carnegie Hall in December 2019 with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Erato will release the new recording on April 23, 2021.
1646	dbpedia	1	93	https://www.imdb.com/list/ls064279913/	en	German History in the Movies	https://m.media-amazon.c…al/imdb_logo.png	https://m.media-amazon.c…al/imdb_logo.png	[ "https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:139-2146151-5570102:AT3CGAYX8B89QA2VC6X9$uedata=s:%2Fuedata%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3DAT3CGAYX8B89QA2VC6X9:0", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjAxMDU3NTcxNF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMDY0Nzg4._V1_QL75_UY207_CR2,0,140,207_.jpg", "https://m.media-amazon.com/...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	No Ranking	en	https://m.media-amazon.c…B1582158068_.png	IMDb	https://www.imdb.com/list/ls064279913/	Kaspar Hauser is the son of the duke of Baden. At the age of one he was swapped by another baby that has been killed right after the change. The real Kaspar Hauser grew up in prison without light, social contacts and education for more than ten years. As teenager he came to public again. First he had to learn a language and other basic skills. Before Kaspar Hauser, meanwhile well educated, found out his real idendity, he was killed. A group of kids grows up on the east side of the Sonnenallee in Berlin, right next to one of the few border crossings between East and West Germany. The antics of the people on Sonnenallee all show the absurdity of their everyday life. Julian is a 12-year-old boy whose family is just scraping by in the Ruhr industrial region of Germany in the early 1960s . When his mother and younger sister go away for a while, he is left mostly alone in the apartment while his father works in the coal mine. He has to confront the confusing world of adults and older boys and the older girl next door on his own. Finally events build up and threaten to tear the family apart. As the Allies sweep across Germany, Lore leads her siblings on a journey that exposes them to the truth of their parents' beliefs. An encounter with a mysterious refugee forces Lore to rely on a person she has always been taught to hate. A man's story parallels Hitler's rise. Austrian Klaus Schneider, wounded in World War I, recovers in the care of Dr. Emil Bettleheim. Bettleheim discovers that Schneider possesses powers of empathy and of clairvoyance, such that could aid suicidal patients. After the war, with one friend as his manager and another as his lover, Schneider changes his name to Eric Jan Hanussen and goes to Berlin, as a hypnotist and clairvoyant performing in halls and theaters. He always speaks the truth, which brings him to the attention of powerful Nazis. He predicts their rise (good propaganda for them) and their violence (not so good). He's in pain and at risk. What is Hanussen's future? The life and death of the legendary Ludwig van Beethoven. Besides all the work he is known for, the composer once wrote a famous love letter to a nameless beloved, and the movie tries to find out who this beloved was--not easy, as Beethoven has had many women in his life.
1646	dbpedia	0	30	https://www.nicholsschool.org/alumni/in-memoriam	en	Nichols School	https://www.wiscassetnew…pg?itok=CjoOPzKH		[ "https://bbk12e1-cdn.myschoolcdn.com/ftpimages/1425/logo/master-logo-white.png", "https://bbk12e1-cdn.myschoolcdn.com/1425/photo/orig_photo1012988_6796807.png", "https://www.nicholsschool.org/ftpimages/1425/link/large_link1584476_159978.jpg", "https://www.nicholsschool.org/ftpimages/1425/link/large_link158430...	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "John Hickey", "Buffalo News" ]	null	Nichols School lists names of community members who pass on this page and in the alumni magazine Toaxnoes.	en	//bbk12e1-cdn.myschoolcdn.com/ftpimages/1425/site/1501/favicon/Black-Baud-Favicon.ico		https://www.nicholsschool.org/alumni/in-memoriam
1646	dbpedia	3	6	https://www.nytimes.com/1912/01/10/archives/elena-gerhardts-recital-a-singer-of-german-songs-with-many-fine.html	en	ELENA GERHARDT'S RECITAL.; A Singer of German Songs with Many Fine Artistic Qualities Heard Here.	https://static01.nyt.com…op.png?year=1912	https://static01.nyt.com…op.png?year=1912	[ "https://s1.nyt.com/timesmachine/pages/1/1912/01/10/100507799_360W.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "The New York Times" ]	1912-01-10T00:00:00	E Gerhardt recitals, Carnegie Hall	en	/vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico		https://www.nytimes.com/1912/01/10/archives/elena-gerhardts-recital-a-singer-of-german-songs-with-many-fine.html	Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT ELENA GERHARDT'S RECITAL.; A Singer of German Songs with Many Fine Artistic Qualities Heard Here. Jan. 10, 1912 See the article in its original context from January 10, 1912 , Page 12Buy Reprints TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Full text is unavailable for this digitized archive article. Subscribers may view the full text of this article in its original form through TimesMachine. Miss Elena Gerhardt, a singer of German songs, who has recently attracted much attention in Germany and England, made her first appearance in America at a recital in Carnegie Hall yesterday afternoon. She soon made it clear that she is an artist of no common fibre, and that by her intelligence and understanding, her musical feeling, she has penetrated deeply into the essence of the German song. View Full Article in Timesmachine » Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT