October 17
Death of Vic Mizzy (b. 1/9/16, New York, NY), at 93. Los Angeles, CA. "[He wrote the] catchy themes for the television comedies
The Addams Family and
Green Acres. In a musical career that stretched over eight decades . . . Mizzy wrote pop hits, novelty songs and movie scores, but his most enduring compositions were the two humorous theme songs he created in the mid-1960s. Asked in 1964 by his friend David Levy, the head of programming for NBC, to provide music for a new comedy called
The Addams Family, based on Charles Addams’s sinister cartoons, Mr. Mizzy came up with a da-da-da-dum beat followed by two finger snaps. The parody of beatnik ennui fit with the show’s satirical, proto-hipster humor. The theme, sung by Mr. Mizzy, was so distinctive that it remained popular far beyond the series’s two seasons. Just one year later, Mr. Mizzy wrote the theme song for
Green Acres, a comedy about Manhattanites returning to the land, which ran from 1965 to 1971. Once again he combined a gallumphing rhythm (similar to
The Addams Family opening but faster) with lyrics that stayed in the mind. . . . As with the “Addams Family” theme, Mr. Mizzy was also involved in the direction of the title sequence. . . . He attended Alexander Hamilton High School and New York University, where he wrote songs and sketches for campus shows. He later wrote for radio and Broadway with an early collaborator, Irving Taylor. . . . Mizzy married the radio singer Mary Small, who performed many of his songs publicly for the first time, and the couple had two children. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a later marriage to Shirley Leeds. . . . Before he worked on “The Addams Family” and “Green Acres,” Mr. Mizzy had written music for other television shows . . . . Mr. Mizzy continued working well into his 80's. . . . None of his output, however, could overshadow those snapping fingers in
The Addams Family. And that was fine with Mr. Mizzy. 'That’s why I’m living in Bel Air,' he said last year on the CBS program
Sunday Morning. 'Two finger snaps and you live in Bel Air'" [Mike Hale, The New York Times, 10/21/09].
Composer Portraits: Iannis Xenakis in New York. Miller Theater, Columbia University, New York, NY. "The six works that the percussionist and conductor Steven Schick and the International Contemporary Ensemble played . . . were written from 1975 to 1997 and offer a glimpse of Xenakis’s late period, when the vast, dense sonorities of his earlier orchestral scores often gave way to greater refinement and focus. In most of the pieces performed here, stretches of old-fashioned melody are disguised but not entirely obscured by layers of dissonant harmony. Not that harmony is always an issue in Xenakis’s music. Mr. Schick opened the concert with
Psappha (1975), a high-energy percussion solo that evolves from a steady, unadorned beat into a whirlwind of rhythmic counterpoint and textural contrast: delicate, high-pitched melodies played on short metal tubing at one extreme and fortissimo bass-drum thwacks at the other. Mr. Schick used the score’s punctuating silences as an increasingly dramatic element as well. He was also an eloquent soloist in the closing work,
O-Mega (1997), a fascinating spatial piece in which the woodwinds and brasses (in the hall, on either side of the audience) and the percussion and strings (on either side of the stage) conversed in bursts of fanfarelike grandeur. In
Akanthos (1977), Xenakis puts an assertive microtonal vocal line into a frame of rough-hewn string figures and sharp-edged woodwind and piano writing. The soprano Tony Arnold’s deft reading highlighted the ritualistic quality of Xenakis’s vocal style. In
Thalleïn (1984), for chamber orchestra;
Échange (1989), where the protagonist is a bass clarinetist (Joshua Rubin); and
Palimpsest (1979), with its madcap piano solos (Cory Smythe), Xenakis’s most striking quality is a capacity for surprise: fortissimo passages give way to whispers, and aggressive dissonance suddenly becomes triadic harmony, moves that, without preparation, are just as startling as the other way around" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/18/09].
October 18
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presents New York premiere of David Del Tredici’s 35-minute Magyar Madness (with David Krakauerand the Orion String Quartet) plus Bela Bartok's String Quartet No. 3 and Erno Dohnanyi's Piano Quintet No. 2 (with Anne-Marie McDermott). Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "[t]he large audience stayed to hear what all the madness was about. It was not always apparent, despite an extensive program note from Mr. Del Tredici. The first of three movements is called 'Passionate Knights,' and you have to assume, given the composer’s recent musico-erotic fixations, that the title is a double-entendre: the more so since he puns in the note, 'This was (one could say) a knight well spent.' (One could, but one shouldn’t.) Not that the music is in any way insinuating or titillating. To the contrary, it is mostly square and straightforward. Since his
Alice phase, Mr. Del Tredici has shown a fondness (not to say mania) for simple melodies. The prime material of this work is scales or scale segments, rising and, more often, falling. The first movement makes heavy use of a four-note descent. After a brief string quartet arrangement of a song (from a cycle celebrating sex) comes an extended finale -- called 'Magyar Madness,' like the work as a whole — that makes even heavier use of a four-note descent, usually as part of a longer descent. . . . As for the Magyar part, Mr. Del Tredici offers a wealth of vaguely Eastern European gestures, beginning with klezmer for the clarinetist and Gypsy fiddling for the quartet. Mr. Krakauer, showing the full range of his virtuosity, and the Orion seemed masters of a work written for them. . . . The Orion gave a gripping account of the single-movement Third Quartet of Bartok, with, at its center, a sort of deconstruction and apotheosis of folk dance" [James R. Oestreich, 10/19/09].
Bleecker Street Opera Company presents Italo Montemezzi's
L'Amore dei Tre Re. Theaters 45 Bleecker Street , New York, NY. "A verismo rarity composed in 1913 by Italo Montemezzi, the opera was popular during the first half of the 20th century but has mostly languished since. Montemezzi’s music, which blends lithe Italian lyricism with Wagnerian lushness and Debussian languor, is worth hearing. That the opera disappeared might have more to do with its slender plot: Archibaldo, an old blind king, menacingly guards his daughter-in-law, Fiora, against the advances of her lover, Avito, a vanquished prince. Three corpses hit the ground before an unhappy ending. . . . Where the Bleecker Street Opera departed most from its forebear [Amato Opera] was in the quality of its instrumental component: the music director, Paul Haas, conducting a 15-piece chamber orchestra positioned beside the stage, offered a passionate, refined and keenly balanced account of Paul Fowler’s skillful reduction. . . . On the whole the performance showed that the Amato legacy is in good hands" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 10/19/09].
October 21
Bernard Haitink conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Gustav Mahler's
Symphony No. 4. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "[S]maller scale goes only so far in Mahler; the Fourth still runs an hour and uses a large orchestra (here almost 90 players). But . . . briskness, trimness and compactness can serve well in Mahler’s Fourth, with its lively, childlike spirit, announced at the opening by sleigh bells, and its gleaming but contained climaxes. Mr. Haitink set an extremely deliberate tempo in the opening movement, as if to savor the little grotesqueries of harmony and instrumentation. There was indeed much to savor . . ." [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/22/09].
Meredith Monk's Songs of Ascension (with video artist Ann Hamilton). BAM Harvey Theater, New York, NY. "The wonder of Meredith Monk is that having created a musical language and theatrical style, she has been able to stretch and refine them with just about every work. Her recent music, including
Songs of Ascension . . . sounds nothing like the assertive pieces she wrote and sang in the 1980's. Yet enough musical DNA remains, in the form of idiosyncratic warbling and interlocking rhythms, that you would not mistake it for anyone else’s work. Ms. Monk has written that her inspiration for
Songs of Ascension was the imagery associated with spiritual quests, including the circular symbols of Buddhism, and the sense of spiritual ascension common to many religions. Circling was plentiful. In several of the work’s sections, Ms. Monk and her singers (formally, Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble) and the accompanying musicians (the Todd Reynolds String Quartet, with John Hollenbeck on percussion and Bohdan Hilash playing winds) were deployed in circular formations, either moving or static. And Ms. Hamilton’s shadowy fast-moving projections were shown not only on the back wall of the stage but on the theater’s walls as well, surrounding the audience. Ascension imagery was more scarce; the singers were as likely to descend (moving down the theater’s aisles, toward the stage) as to ascend, although the sudden appearance of large choirs in the balcony had the effect of pulling the music (or at least, the audience’s attention) upward. That said, Ms. Monk’s music and staging are serene, slow-moving and decidedly ritualistic. Her stage pictures are in constant flux, as singers and instrumentalists rearrange themselves, sometimes in opposing lines (the players across the front of the stage and the singers in a small circle at the back, or the singers to the right and the players to the left), more often interspersed. At times Ms. Monk’s score hints at antiquity. One piece (no titles are given for the individual songs) has a soprano singing a solo passage that evokes plainchant. But the historical allusion is fleeting: the other musicians gradually add lines of counterpoint until the texture becomes fascinatingly complex. Much of the string writing has the insistent repetitiveness of early Minimalism. But those Minimalist figures regularly blossom into more complex styles: late Brahmsian string writing and Vaughan Williams-like choral polyphony, for example. Ms. Monk’s use of her own invented language underscores the sense of otherworldly mystery inherent in the piece. Often, her vocalizations, matched by her singers, suggest bird song or the calls of nocturnal forest animals. Elsewhere, they seem to be strings of cognates: you have no idea what she’s singing about, but you have the odd feeling that you do. The members of Ms. Monk’s ensemble are thoroughly drilled in her musical style, and they perform it expertly. The instrumentalists seemed comfortable with it, as well, even though they were often required to move around the stage as they played (even the cellist, Ha-Yang Kim)" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/22/09].
October 24
Jacarnda presents excerpts from Philip Glass's
Einstein on the Beach, plus Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel and Ben Johnston's
String Quartet No. 4 ("Amazing Grace"). First Presbyterian Church, Santa Monica, CA. "Glass offers the option of replacing the women’s voices at the end with a children’s chorus and that is what Jacaranda did. Asking youngsters to show up late at night to sing the last eight minutes of a five-hour avant-garde work is, obviously, unreasonable. Then again, little about putting on
Einstein on the Beach has ever been practical. Glass has presented the score in concert on several occasions and performed the
Spaceship scene with his ensemble at the Hollywood Bowl last summer. But despite repeated attempts to find funding for a revival, the magnificent Wilson production has not been seen for a generation. Four years ago, Jacaranda did its bit by turning the opera’s most modest segments, the five Knee Plays (Wilson’s term for short connecting scenes) into a 40-minute concert work. Saturday, a block from the beach, the Knee Plays were back, this time with three dozen angelic Einsteins, courtesy of Los Angeles Children’s Chorus. For many of us who have found
Einstein on the Beach in the theater a religious experience,
Einstein in a church is not a stretch. Still, Jacaranda’s concert made a considerable spiritual statement. . . . Feldman’s score for chorus, viola, celesta and percussion was intended for Houston's interfaith Rothko Chapel, built to house haunting late paintings by the American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. This is music in which no notes touch ground, no downbeat is felt and pianissimo is the dynamic of choice. The chorus is asked to sing chords with a consistent 'open hum.' The viola has the wisps of melody, slightly Hebraic at first and hinting at Ravel later. Performing
Rothko Chapel is like capturing wind. Feldman asks for a calm 30 minutes; this reading conducted by Mark Alan Hilt was an ever-so-slightly nervous 24. Still, the choral singing was sensitive; Tamara Bevard handled the soprano solos smartly and Alma Lisa Fernandez was a soulful violist. Fernandez is a member of Jacaranda’s superb resident Denali Quartet, which has made Johnston’s 'Amazing Grace' its calling card. Johnston pulls the 18th-century hymn tune in directions it has never been and asks the players to use pure tunings. The result is the amazement of grace made palpable in sound. The Denalis made that evident in, to repeat the only word that describes the music and its rendition, an amazing performance. Following all this, the “Einstein” Knee Plays, which Hilt conducted with evident affection, were in danger of too much churchliness. They began with a pipe organ intoning the bass line Glass played in more rock’n’roll fashion on an electric organ. The chorus’ 'libretto' consists of either counted numbers of the changing meters or the solfege syllables of the pitches. The impressive Jacaranda Chamber Singers made even these sound more eloquent than spunky. A solo violin – the Denali’s Joel Pargman – played Glass’s classic minimalist etudes with style and two actresses (the familiar radio personalities Gail Eichenthal and Sandra Tsing Loh) alluringly read stream-of-consciousness texts that included an incantation on the line 'Oh these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends.' I would have liked more electronic punch from Eichenthal and Loh, who were amplified, but they were not displeasing as exquisite aural wallpaper.
Einstein ends with a final speech about lovers on a park bench that was written and originally delivered by an elderly actor in the original. Ken Page read it wonderfully for Jacaranda, accompanied by the solo violin, organ and the children singing their one-two-threes and do-re-me's with marvelous clear voices lifted to heaven. There are critics who once called
Einstein on the Beach baby opera. But those were other days my friends. Saturday, Jacaranda brought
Einstein to the beach and it was transcendent" [Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 10/25/09].
October 25
A spokeswoman for Andrew Lloyd Weber announces that the 61-year-old composer has prostate cancer [Associated Press, 10/25/09].
October 26
Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: Ensemble ACJW presents works of Chen Qigang, Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, Guo Wenjing, and Zhou Long. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Mr. Chen studied with Messiaen in Paris and his
Instants d’un Opéra de Pékin for solo piano, ably performed by Gregory DeTurck, reflects his mentor’s aesthetic. Pentatonic themes are woven through the mystical interludes of this colorful piece, whose percussive nature evokes the gongs and cymbals used in Peking Opera. That genre was also represented in Mr. Guo’s
Parade for Six Peking Opera Gongs, which blends Western influences like Cage, Steve Reich and Xenakis with the traditions of Mr. Guo’s native Sichuan Province. It was played here by three percussionists, including David Skidmore. Before the performance Mr. Skidmore demonstrated the ascending sound that results from striking the gong. The three percussionists also performed in Mr. Zhou’s
Taigu Rhyme for Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Percussion, which evokes the Tang Dynasty’s “dagu” drumming style. In this intensely visceral work, a throbbing beat underpins a rhapsodic (and almost klezmer-sounding) clarinet part, played with aplomb by Sarah Beaty. The clarinet evokes the guanzi, a double-reed instrument used in ancient temple music. In Chen Yi’s meditative
Qi for Flute, Cello, Percussion, and Piano the flute and cello (played with striking sensitivity by Nicholas Canellakis) reflect the sonorities of Chinese instruments. Mr. Sheng lived in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, and his
String Quartet No. 3 was inspired by a Tibetan folk tune as well as by Bartok, another major influence in his career. The quartet reflects that Hungarian composer’s style of incorporating traditional melodies into a modernistic idiom. The ensemble, led with panache by Joanna Marie Frankel (the first violinist), gave a heartfelt performance of the work, which blends haunting solos with grittier interludes" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/27/09].
Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: Tan Dun. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "For all his accomplishments and accolades, Tan Dun is a genuinely gracious celebrity. An Academy Award winner with a Metropolitan Opera commission under his belt, Mr. Tan is the only composer to have a concert of his own during Carnegie Hall’s festival Ancient Paths, Modern Voices. Yet at the event, presented at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center on Monday night, Mr. Tan redirected praise toward his collaborators: the Juilliard School musicians playing his works; the violinist Cho-Liang Lin, featured in the premiere of Mr. Tan’s
Violin Concerto; and the school itself. The program was shrewdly chosen. In four pieces you got a remarkably good overview of Mr. Tan’s stylistic development. The quirky instrumentation of
Concerto for Six is that of the ensemble it was written for, the Bang on a Can All-Stars: bass clarinet, guitar, cello, double bass, piano and percussion. An exuberant piece from 1997, [it] . . . showed Mr. Tan’s knack for juxtaposing Chinese and Western idioms. In one jazzy exchange Sean Rice, the bass clarinetist, played bluesy bends over Kyle Brightwell’s patter of cymbals. Elsewhere, musicians shouted Chinese numerals; Cameron O’Connor fluttered on his guitar strings in a manner reminiscent of a pipa player’s technique; and Conor Hanick stroked a piano’s strings as if playing a guzheng.
Silk Road, a 1989 setting of a whimsical poem by Arthur Sze, for soprano and percussion, mixed atonal vocal lines with the mannered delivery and explosive cadences of Beijing opera. Mr. Tan is exceptionally skilled at writing for percussion, fashioning the subtlest gradations of touch and timbre. Michael Truesdell, the percussionist, played with sensitivity and dexterity; Jennifer Zetlan was an extraordinary partner, singing with technical assurance, gleaming tone and abundant charisma.
Secret Land, a 2006 work for 12 cellos, alternated solos and duos in modes explicitly redolent of Chinese idioms, with murky swarms of collective motion. More effective as a catalog of effects than as a sustained utterance, the work at least demonstrated the depth of Juilliard’s cello department. Mr. Tan’s new Violin Concerto, subtitled
The Love, showed the more approachable side he has recently favored. The piece — in three continuous sections meant to evoke young love, romantic love and philosophical love —included material reworked from an earlier violin concerto,
Out of Peking Opera. The opening section,
Hip Hop, was lean and angular, with free-time violin soliloquies and violent outbursts. But a steady funk-rock drum beat and brash whoops from the brass section made the music unusually playful and accessible. The middle movement,
Malinconia, recalled Mr. Tan’s lushest film-score work; Mr. Lin’s warm playing was surrounded with a plush bed of strings. Energy dipped slightly during the final section,
Dramatico, with its constant shifts of pace and mood. But Mr. Lin’s exuberant playing held your attention, and Mr. Tan drew a performance of exceptional assurance from the Juilliard Orchestra" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 10/27/09].
October 28
Ancient Paths, Modern Voices. Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the Juilliard Orchstra in music of Chen Qigang, Lou Harrison, and Gustav Mahler. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "
The Family of the Court, the opening section of Harrison’s
Pacifika Rondo (1963), was included as a curtain raiser because the composer’s lifelong fascination with Asian forms and timbres yielded an idiosyncratic hybrid of Eastern and Western sounds. Here he imagined -- rather cinematically -- the music of the Tang dynasty, which ruled China for almost 300 years starting in the early seventh century. You would not bet the store that Tang music actually sounded like . . . [this] but the Juilliard musicians gave the score, with its sliding string and flute melodies and full-throttle percussion, a vigorous, colorful reading. Mahler earned his berth on the program by drawing the texts for
Das Lied von der Erde from
Die Chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute), Hans Bethge’s collection of Chinese poetry, also from the Tang period. Mahler’s approach to his Chinese inspiration was to ignore it: he was drawn to these texts because of their universality, and nothing in his vast score alludes to Chinese music, real or imagined. This was, however, the Juilliard Orchestra’s moment in the sun, and it responded to Mr. Thomas, an eloquent Mahler conductor, with power, flexibility and, in the quieter movements, an admirable transparency. Mr. Kunde sometimes strained in the upper reaches of Mahler’s tenor line, but otherwise sang attractively. Ms. von Otter’s performance was the picture of interpretive subtlety, with carefully calibrated dynamics and coloration and a velvety tone that perfectly suited these graceful world-weary texts. [Lang] Lang presided over the part of the program devoted to actual Chinese music. With the stage to himself -- the orchestra cleared off -- he played four of the short folk-song-inspired piano works of the sort he sometimes performs as encores. For an American listener these called to mind the music of Ethelbert Nevin and other late-19th-century salon composers, not because of any musical similarities but because, like Nevin and his colleagues, the composers here -- He Luting, Lu Wencheng and Sun Yiqiang -- sought a hybrid of distinctively national themes and European harmonies and textures. Debussy and Chopin’s influence, particularly, was palpable. Mr. Thomas and the orchestra rejoined Mr. Lang for Mr. Chen’s
Er Huang, a piano concerto written for the occasion. Mr. Chen’s inspiration was traditional Peking opera. Its title refers to a family of gracefully melancholy themes, and in a way this gentle, often dreamy score is a requiem for a dying style. Mr. Lang, who can be a hyperkinetic performer, played this music -- and the solo pieces as well -- with the gracefulness and dignity it demanded, and couched Mr. Chen’s melodies in a rich, singing tone" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/29/09].
Jay Farrar, of the Midwestern alternative-country band Son Volt, and Benjamin Gibbard, of the Northwestern indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie, in music from their new album
One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Music From Kerouac’s Big Sur (F-Stop/Atlantic). Webster Hall, New York, NY. " The album, which grew out of a similarly titled documentary film, involves lyrics borrowed from Kerouac’s prose, rearranged and set to music. It came about after Mr. Farrar and Mr. Gibbard were enlisted in 2007 to record songs for the film. Working together for the first time, they bonded over a mutual inspiration and decided to take the project further. Mr. Gibbard went so far as to hunker down in the Pacific coastal cabin that inspired
Big Sur, a memoirlike study in sodden disillusionment. The title track of the new album is his invention, a folk-rock ballad with a ruminative lilt and a labored melody. Arriving early in the set, it simply wafted by, innocuous and wan. Much of the show felt hardier and more purposeful" [Nate Chinen, The New York Times, 10/29/09].
Alexander Zemlinsky's
String Quartet No. 2 (1915) performed by the Escher String Quartet, as well as Anton Webern's
Five Movements for String Quartet (1909). Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY "[Zimlinsky] was devastated when his student Alma Schindler rejected him and married Mahler in 1902. Several years later, the painter Richard Gerstl committed suicide after an affair with Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, who was married to Schoenberg. . . . Pierre Lapointe, the group’s violist, writes that the first time he heard Zemlinsky’s quartet, he was scared by its craziness.' This densely chromatic, symphonic and potently expressive piece seems to evoke the personal traumas of Zemlinsky’s inner circle, with an anguished polyphony of vehement discourse tempered with gentler, bittersweet interludes. The ensemble offered a passionate rendition, conveying the full spectrum of grief and turbulence in this 40-minute work of Wagnerian proportions. Each member of the group -- Adam Barnett-Hart, first violinist; Wu Jie, second violinist; Andrew Janss, cellist; and Mr. Lapointe -- played with a glowing tone and insightful musicianship, resulting in a characterful whole. Many of Zemlinsky’s colleagues, including Schoenberg, deemed his sensual, late-romantic music too conservative. The program also included the
Five Movements for String Quartet (1909) by Webern . . . who helped persuade Mathilde to return to her husband" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/29/09].
October 31
New York City Opera presents Hugo Weisgall's
Esther. David H. Koch Theater, New York, NY. "New York City Opera, ornery and independent as ever, opens its abbreviated fall season . . . with a revival of Hugo Weisgall’s last opera,
Esther. 'Inexplicable,' a recent editorial in the influential British periodical Opera grumbled. Several American commentators seem equally baffled by the choice, an opera by a composer whose name is no longer familiar and whose music has long since fallen from fashion. The work was respectfully received when the City Opera gave its premiere in 1993, but Weisgall’s edgy, dissonant style, angular lyricism and free adaptation of classical atonal methods may pose problems for audiences accustomed to today’s new American operas, which are more eager to please. On the other hand, the opera’s subject matter could not be more appealing. Esther, having married Xerxes of Persia, saves her people from mass extermination at the hands of the king’s evil prime minister, Haman: this is among the most inspirational and upbeat of biblical stories. Even at that, Weisgall’s elevated treatment of the material hardly promises the sort of festive opening-night opera one might expect from a troubled company under new management, still struggling for survival and lacking the flashy media savvy that energizes the Metropolitan Opera these days. Yet viewed from a different perspective, the whole spirit of the project reflects one of the important reasons the City Opera was founded in 1943: to search out, perform and nurture recent American operas of quality, especially those that have fallen into neglect. Weisgall, who died in 1997 at 84, wrote 12 stage pieces of varying shapes and sizes, a sufficient body of work for the 1986 New Grove Dictionary of American Music to proclaim him 'one of America’s most important composers of opera.' 'I gratefully read that compliment,' Weisgall once told me, 'and promptly had a nightmare. I dreamed that despite such a generous assessment, no company in the country was performing my operas any longer and had no intention of doing so. Then I woke up with a start and realized my dream was true.' That was an exaggeration perhaps. I’ve never spoken to a living American composer who felt sufficiently recognized, however much he or she was performed, discussed and argued about. Weisgall’s operas may not have become repertory pieces, but I have seen most of them produced over the last 50 years. Beyond that, Weisgall was an active presence as an administrator and a teacher as well as a conductor; even, on rare occasions, as a singer. The many institutions he served included the Juilliard School, Johns Hopkins University, the H. L. Miller Cantorial School of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Queens College, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he was director of the composer-in-residence program from 1988 until his death. . . . Some never took to Weisgall’s special voice, which always presupposed an active listener. Although his music avoided strictly doctrinaire 12-tone techniques, there was always that provocatively spiky sound to negotiate, albeit one that over time became increasingly expansive and lyrically expressive as it explored the dramatic life of each opera’s special theatrical world. And what a variety of subjects attracted him. Weisgall drew inspiration from classic sources of every stripe — Wedekind, Strindberg, Pirandello, Yeats, Shakespeare, Racine, Mishima and the Bible — and he never flinched from the thorny moral and philosophical issues they examined. I first encountered a Weisgall opera in the spring of 1960,
Six Characters in Search of an Author, based on the famous Pirandello play. The City Opera had given the premiere a year earlier. The power of the opera, the performance and the production knocked me flat. The play’s tense conflict arises when the blasé members of a professional theater troupe (changed here to an opera company) actually confront the six emotionally scarred characters of the dysfunctional family they are impersonating. Weisgall’s score, an astonishingly original manipulation of traditional opera techniques, seizes on this explosive situation in a carefully structured linear music-theater piece that takes full advantage of a composer’s right to interpret and reimagine the drama through purely musical means. The City Opera was putting on a festival of new American opera during that 1959-60 season, but compared with the theatrically sophisticated
Six Characters, the pleasantly tuneful offerings of Douglas Moore, Gian Carlo Menotti, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Ward and Norman Dello Joio seemed cozy and flat. A budding opera composer myself at the time, I immediately presented myself to Weisgall in hopes of individual instruction, but his busy schedule did not allow private pupils. We did, however, become friends, and I was flattered when he solicited my opinions. I seldom saw his prickly side, which could be sharp indeed, but mostly benefited from his astute musical insights, immense culture and generosity. No composer of his generation wrote music with more passion and sincerity, and he used the voice he felt to be right and true for him. Yet he was receptive to an amazing range of musical idioms and could recognize genius when he heard it. One contemporary opera that always moved him deeply was Virgil Thomson’s
Mother of Us All, with its crazy-quilt score of Protestant hymns, country marches and Americana ballads. 'I can think of nothing farther removed from my own style, musical identity and ethnic background,' Weisgall once said to me. 'But the piece is a miracle of sorts. The marbleized apotheosis of Susan B. Anthony at the end always leaves me in tears.' He was also greatly impressed by the ease and naturalness of Thomson’s ability to set the English language to music, the more so since Weisgall himself was a master of the craft. After his success with the conversational intricacies of
Six Characters, Weisgall turned to a more epic style in
Athaliah (1964), a grandly scaled choral opera based on Racine’s play. His most ambitious stage work was produced by the City Opera in 1968:
Nine Rivers From Jordan, another complex blend of reality and fantasy, but this time a huge panorama that deals unflinchingly the moral dilemmas of World War II. That is perhaps the Weisgall opera most urgently in need of revival and reassessment, but my personal favorite is its successor,
Jenny, or the Hundred Nights (1976), after Mishima. Its orchestral score is exquisitely diaphanous, and its arching vocal lines subtly reflect the stylized shapes of the librettist John Hollander’s poetic language. After getting to know Weisgall, I gradually began to suspect that his gentle refusal to take me on as a pupil, after perusing a few of my student scores, stemmed from politeness toward a young composer with no talent rather than a lack of time on his part. And the more of his music I got to know, not to mention his unsparing critiques of composer colleagues, the more that suspicion grew. While at work on
Esther, Weisgall dropped a few hints that this probably would be his last opera. He put everything into it: not just the compositional skill and canny dramatic instincts that came from a lifetime of writing music for the theater but also his deep love and knowledge of the Jewish liturgical traditions that were so firmly rooted in the fabric of his style. As I recall it, the City Opera production of
Esther modestly but effectively caters to the opera’s cinematic organization. The action flows back and forth in time and space against a series of projected films on sliding flats that reflect both the subject’s archaeological grandeur and private drama. This heartwarming story gave Weisgall precisely what he needed to sum up his achievement, employing a fastidious, finely worked out operatic technique that could combine the intimate detail of
Six Characters with the grand epic scale of
Nine Rivers From Jordan. All the traditional elements you look for in a major operatic experience are present: large choral scenes, tender love exchanges, hot moments of jealousy and political intrigue, subtle suggestions of local coloring, even a brief ballet. The whole score represents Weisgall at the peak of his powers. His orchestra never sounded more sumptuous, and his vocal writing was never more fluent and expressive. . . . By bringing back “Esther” on such an important occasion, the City Opera may yet confound its critics. More important, the revival allows the company to reaffirm its mission and offers a second opportunity to savor the last work of a great American opera composer" [Peter G. Davis, The New York Times, 10/28/09].
