Splendid Labyrinths

Nobel Prize in Literature for Kazuo Ishiguro

2017-10-06T10:13:00.000+09:00

A pleasant surprise: Kazuo Ishiguro, a writer I have been following since his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, in the early 1980s, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017. I bought his first novel in the Maruzen bookstore in Kyoto when I was living there as a researcher at Kyoto University. Ishiguro has Japanese roots, as his name tells us, but he is not a Japanese author. Born in Nagasaki in 1954, his parents moved to England when he was five because of his father's job. As they expected to return to Japan at some time, in the home they gave their son a Japanese education, while outside the home he learned to be a perfect Englishman (his speech and mannerisms are absolutely English). As it turned out, the return to Japan never came about and Ishiguro obtained English nationality. But like in my own case (having lived for about half my life and almost all of my working life in Japan), his is a hybrid culture, a mix of Japaneseness and Englishness, and that is what makes his novels so interesting. The butler in The Remains of the Day, for example, with his samurai-like loyalty to a worthless master and total neglect of his private feelings, is only conceivable as a fatal combination of English stiff upper-lip and Japanese self-discipline.

Kazuo Ishiguro writes a spare English style, which is both precise and concise. In this respect he can be compared to South-African Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee (another of my favorite writers whom I appreciate for his conciseness). Another connect is that they both have written dystopian novels and fable-like stories. Ishiguro is a great perfectionist in his craft who to date has written only seven novels and one collection of short stories. Despite the austere style, Ishiguro's novels have a great emotional force and, as the Nobel Committee said, "they uncover the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." His novels often end on a note of melancholic resignation. He engages with memory and forgetting, identity, mortality, and the influence on us of the major 20th/21st c. conflicts - including the comfortable lies people tell themselves to feel like decent persons although they are in fact morally corrupt.

So Kazuo Ishiguro is a major writer with a clear moral stance. His books are serious literature, despite his popularity thanks to the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, and the filming of that novel by James Ivory with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. In fact, his books are not very easy to read. The style is clear enough, but there are always many layers hidden below the narrative which the reader has to uncover in order to be able to appreciate the novel.

The news in Japan was enthusiastic about Kazuo Ishiguro's winning, as he after all was born in Japan and seemed a sort of consolation for the fact that Haruki Murakami again didn't get the prize. The Japanese indeed can celebrate, because Ishiguro is the better writer of the two. This year's Nobel in Literature is an excellent choice (and an intelligent one, as Ishiguro fully deserved it without figuring on any of the outside "bookmaker's" lists) and Kazuo Ishiguro ranks with other recent "deserving" winners as José Saramago, J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Patrick Modiano - to name a few.

Best Twentieth Century Operas (6): Oedipus Rex by Igor Stravinsky (1927)

2017-08-29T11:49:00.000+09:00

Thanks to Freud's study of the so-called "Oedipus complex," everyone has at least heard the name "Oedipus," a hero from Greek mythology who accidentally fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother. The Oedipus story is mentioned in various forms in fragments by Greek poets as Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus and Euripides. The most popular version comes from a set of three "Theban plays" by Sophocles (ca. 496-406 BCE): Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.

[Sophocles - Image Wikipedia]

Here is the backstory of Oedipus Rex, which is also used as background in Stravinsky's opera of the same title. Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of the Greek city of Thebes. The famous Oracle of Apollo at Delphi has prophesied that any son born to Laius will kill him. So when Oedipus is born, the royal couple pierces the ankles of the baby so that it cannot crawl (the name Oedipus means "swollen foot") and orders a servant to abandon the child on a nearby mountain. The servant, however, takes pity on the child and gives it to a shepherd from Corinth; finally, via-via, the infant Oedipus ends up being adopted by the childless king and queen of Corinth, Polybus and Merope.

After many years, when he is a grown man, Oedipus accidentally learns that he is not the son of Polybus and Merope and he consults the oracle in Delphi to ask who his true parents are. The oracle only repeats its earlier message to King Laius, "that he is destined to murder his father and marry his mother." In an attempt to avoid such a terrible fate, Oedipus decides not to return to Corinth (believing Polybus and Merope to be his biological parents), but instead to travel to Thebes, a town near Delphi. On the way, at a crossing of three roads, Oedipus encounters a chariot and quarrels with the charioteer over who has the right to go first. When the charioteer tries to run him over, Oedipus kills the man. As we will learn later, this was none other than his father, King Laius. The first part of the prophesy has been fulfilled with ominous speed.

On his way to Thebes, Oedipus encounters a monster called Sphinx, which asks a riddle of all travelers. Only those who can successfully answer, are allowed to pass unharmed, all others are killed. The riddle is: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?" Oedipus' answer is: "Man: as an infant, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks on two legs; in old age, he uses a walking stick." Oedipus becomes the first traveler ever to answer the riddle correctly.

[Oedipus and the Sphinx by Ingres - Image Wikipedia]

Now the second part of the prophesy is to be fulfilled. Creon, the brother of Queen Jocasta (and therefore Oedipus' uncle) has announced that the person who manages to vanquish the Spinx will be made King of Thebes, by marrying the recently widowed Queen Jocasta. And so it comes about that Oedipus unwittingly marries the queen, his mother, and has four children by her.

The story told so far is the background to which is constantly referred in both play and opera. Play and opera start from here, again many years later. Thebes has been struck by a plague and its people loudly lament this. Oedipus, king of Thebes and conqueror of the Sphinx, promises to save the city. At his request, Creon seeks the advice of the Oracle of Delphi. The answer is that the murderer of the former King Laius must be brought to justice - he is not just still at large, but even living in the city. It is the murderer who has brought the plague upon the city. Oedipus promises to discover the killer and cast him out. Then the advice of the blind prophet Tiresias is sought. Tiresias at first refuses to speak out and warns King Oedipus not to seek Laius' murderer. Angered, Oedipus accuses him of being the murderer himself. Provoked, Tiresias retorts that "the murderer of the king is a king." Terrified, Oedipus then accuses Tiresias of being in league with Creon, whom he believes is after his throne.

At that moment, Queen Jocasta appears. She calms the quarrel by saying that oracles always lie. After all, wasn't Laius killed at a crossroads by robbers, instead of by the hand of his own son as the oracle had predicted? Filled with foreboding, Oedipus confesses that he, too, has once killed an elderly man at a crossroads. So has he brought about the terrible plague in his own city? A messenger arrives from Corinth to announce the death of King Polybus, whom Oedipus believes to be his father. However, it is now revealed to Oedipus that he is not the biological son of Polybus but a foundling brought up as their own child by the Corinthian royal pair. As proof, the ancient shepherd who took the child to the mountains, is also brought to the palace. Jocasta, finally realizing that Oedipus must be her son, flees. Oedipus misunderstands her motivation, thinking that she feels ashamed of him because he now seems to be of low birth. But at last, the messenger and shepherd state the truth openly: Oedipus is the child of Laius and Jocasta, killer of his father, husband of his mother. He has committed both patricide and incest. Next, the death of Jocasta is reported: she has hanged herself in her chambers. Oedipus breaks into her room and uses the pin from a brooch he takes off her gown to blind himself (he, who was blind to himself, now blinds himself). The Thebans, both sad and angry, ban Oedipus from their city.

[Igor Stravinsky]

The libretto for Stravinsky's opera Oedipus Rex was written by the renowned French poet Jean Cocteau, based on the play by Sophocles. As Stravinsky wanted to create a liturgical "opera-oratorio," he asked for a text in Latin, so Cocteau's French (itself leaning heavily on Sophocles) was translated back into Latin. Stravinsky called Latin not a dead language, but "a language turned to stone." Anyway, to write an opera in Latin could also be seen as irony: how many listeners are really able to understand all those Italian operas? Couldn't they just as well be in Latin? And of course, Latin is also the language in which many Masses, Requiems and other church music have been written in the last few centuries, a language which has an important distancing effect.

The music is in Stravinsky's Neoclassical manner, but with varied fluctuations of mood to fit the dramatic story. The six soloists sing in a somewhat Italianate style and all have their own aria. The opera is however dominated by the male chorus, which comments on events in a heavy declamatory style, giving a decidedly Russian-Orthodox impression. There is also a narrator who is allowed to speak the language of the country where the opera is performed. The narrator introduces the story and returns five or six times to give an update about the action, so that everyone in the public can follow the events on stage. The narration gets gradually more dramatic and is eventually integrated into the musical fabric.

My favorite version of Oedipus Rex is an international Japanese production, which adds elements from Japanese culture to the mix and even features a Butoh dancer (Min Tanaka). This production was directed by Julie Taymor (who also made the film version) and performed at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto in Japan in 1992, with Seiji Ozawa as director; soloists are Philip Langridge (Oedipus), Jessye Norman (Jocasta) and Bryn Terfel (Creon); the orchestra and chorus are Japanese. Moreover, the stunning costumes were designed by Emi Wada: the main characters wear a sort of stoneware puppet head on their head (with a primitive face such as have been unearthed by excavations in ancient Greece) and all have huge, hieratic hands of clay; the chorus is clothed in ragged brown sackcloth, which makes them look like resurrected mummies; their make-up is also death-like. Great is also the Japanese narrator, acted by Shiraishi Kayoko, who updates us on the story in what can only be called a super-dramatic style of speaking.

But most interesting is the role played by Tanaka Min. He is a life-size clay puppet wearing a stiff earthen mask, who mimes every gesture of Oedipus with formalized gestures, symbolizing the fact that Oedipus himself is a puppet handled by and at the mercy of the gods. When at the end of the opera the terrible truth about Oedipus becomes known, the clay shell of this puppet breaks and we see a vulnerable, naked man (the only human figure in the whole production). Min Tanaka drives long pins into the eyes of the puppet Oedipus wears on his head and at the same moment strips of red cloth fall like flowing blood from his own blinded eyes. He stumbles down the stage, under which is a pool of dark liquid. Surrounded by ghostly shapes, he walks into the water, the last we see of him. Finally, the sound of dripping water is replaced by that of a cleansing, pouring rain, signaling that the drama is over.

A mix of cultures that works very well, and also a theater adaptation in which always something interesting is happening on stage (if only the mime of Min Tanaka), adding an extra dimension to the original and saving the opera from becoming too static. Musically, it is also an excellent performance.

Twentieth Century Opera: (1) Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy (2) Salome by Strauss (3) Die Gezeichneten by Schreker (4) Der Zwerg by Zemlinsky (5) Die tote Stadt by Korngold (6) Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky (7)

Best Symphonies from the Twentieth Century, Part One (1900-1933)

2017-07-02T09:07:00.000+09:00

The 19th century witnessed a symphonic tradition under the leadership of the German-speaking countries. Seen from an intercultural viewpoint, the symphony with its intricate structure based on sonata form is a typical product of German "engineering." Composers from other countries, from as far away as Russia and America, therefore all traveled for study to Germany. It is only in the last decades of the century that symphonic activity spread evenly to other countries, thanks to the technical revolution which brought greater wealth. At the same time, nationalism was on the rise, and the symphony was a suitable vehicle for the expression of the various "national styles." Even in opera-crazy countries as Italy and France, composers started writing symphonies, and the same was true for countries as England and The Netherlands, which had been in a deep musical winter sleep until about 1880.

[Source photo: Wikipedia]

In the early 20th century, German-lead symphonism found its highest expression in the mega-symphonies of Gustav Mahler, but ended abruptly with the defeat in the Great War of both Germany and the Double Monarchy - that last state fell apart, leaving Austria with Vienna as a small rump-state. Typically, the two symphonies Schoenberg wrote were for chamber ensemble, as was the miniature Symphony by Webern.

The symphonic tradition was however continued elsewhere, in the Soviet Union (where Shostakovich, the 20th century's greatest symphonist after Mahler, lived; he wrote 15 symphonies; other Russian symphonists are Myaskovsky (27), Weinberg (22) and Prokofiev (7)), in the United States (Harris, Schuman, Copland, Hanson, Bernstein, Piston, Thomson and others), in Scandinavia (Sibelius, Madetoja, Nielsen, Langgaard, Pettersson, Holmboe, Wiren, Nørgård, Rautavaara etc), in England (Elgar, Bax, Brian, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold), in The Netherlands (Vermeulen, Andriessen, Pijper, Gilse, Badings), in France (Roussel and Milhaud), in Italy (Casella, Malipiero), in South America (Chavez, Villa-Lobos), in Japan (Yamada, Akutagawa, Mayuzumi, Bekku, Ohki, Ifukube), and elsewhere.

The symphony kept flourishing and even survived the 20th century's next disaster, that of the Second World War, which in Europe led to a strong disillusionment with traditional culture (as this had been implicated in Nazism). Music went down the path of increasingly sterile atonality, finally winding down into non-musical "sonological" experiments. Thankfully, we have survived even the destruction by the postwar generation, and... the symphony is still doing great! Now, as in the past, writing a symphony is considered as the highest proof of musical mastery.

In the 20th century, symphonies were written in all countries of the world that were influenced by Western culture, and they show the greatest variety imaginable. We also find many eccentric composers, who stubbornly went their own "enfant terrible" way. The symphony in the 20th c. provides a colorful and multi-faceted spectacle, ranging from the mystical struggles of Scriabin and Langgaard, the Gothic choral edifices of Brian, the multiphonies of Ives, the ironies of Nielsen and Sibelius in their last symphonies, a symphony honoring silent film Hollywood stars by Koechlin, to the extreme essays in aleatoric music with a great diversity of quotations by Schnittke, the meditations by Hovhaness which include not only Armenian and Indian elements, but also Chinese and Japanese, a symphony including a full performance of a traditional Japanese Nagauta by Yamada and a symphony bringing Buddhist shomu chant on stage by Mayuzumi, or Philip Glass' symphony "Heroes" which is based on music by David Bowie and Brian Eno...

Here are my favorite 20th century symphonies (Part One, from the first three decades of the century):

1. Alexander Scriabin, Symphony No 3 in C minor Op 43 "Le Divin Poème" [1904]
Alexander Scriabin (1872-1916) was an eccentric who lived in his own fantasy world. He also was a typical fin-de-siecle artist, a voluptuary who translated some of the period's Art Nouveau atmosphere into lush and often orgiastic sound. Scriabin wrote five "philosophical" symphonies: the Mahlerian Symphony No 1 (1899-1900), in six movements and with solists and chorus in the exalted hymn to art of the final movement; the Symphony No 2 (1901), a gloomily introspective work which however doesn't lack in vitality and grandeur; the Symphony No 3 (1902-4) subtitled "The Divine Poem," in three movements: "Luttes," "Voluptés" and "Jeu Divin;" the Poem of Ecstacy (1905) which Scriabin called his Symphony No 4 even though that rather stretches the definition of the form - it is again a combination of sensuality with spirituality crashing over the listener in undulant waves of sound; and finally the similar Prometheus "Le Poème du feu" (1910) with a rhapsodic and hieratic character. The last two works are shorter than the first three (roughly 20 minutes in playing time rather than 50) and are of course more like symphonic poems. My favorite is the Third Symphony, about which I have already written in my post about eccentric symphonies by cult composers. Here are the main points. Scriabin's Third Symphony is a sort of fin-de-siecle "soul drama," written for vast orchestral forces. The subject matter of the symphony is the development of the human spirit towards the divine. Man's Ego consists of a "divine part" and "slavish part" and these continually struggle with each other, until they finally attain unity and bliss and so true freedom. The symphony consists of three parts, linked without pause: (1) Luttes ("Struggles"), a mysterious and tragic Allegro in c minor; (2) Voluptés ("Delights"), a sublime Lento in E major; and (3) Jeu divin ("Divine Play"), a radiantly joyful Allegro in C major. The work starts with a short prologue (Lento) which introduces the three leading motives of the symphony: "Divine Grandeur" (an unforgettable motif in the low brass), "The Summons to Man" (an ascending trumpet call) and the "Fear to approach, suggestive of Flight" (literally "flighty" strings). And of course, if you prefer to regard all these metaphysics as so much hot air, you can also enjoy Scriabin's music on a purely abstract level!
[Youtube] [Performance listened to: Neeme Jarvi with The Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on Chandos]

2. Josef Suk, Asrael Symphony for large orchestra in C minor Op 27 (1905-1906)
Another mega-symphony in an intensely personal vein, although here a more singular utterance as Josef Suk only wrote one more symphony, an earlier one which is a somewhat bland affair borrowing heavily from Brahms and Dvořák. Suk was more a salonesque miniaturist (he wrote many small piano pieces, although these were usually linked in series) than a symphonist. Except in this huge and shattering funeral symphony, dedicated to the memory of the composer Dvořák, Suk's mentor and father-in-law, and Suk's wife Otylka, who also happened to be Dvořák's daughter. Suk started work on the symphony about eight months after Dvořák's sudden death; when he was in the middle of the composition, in July 1905, also his wife Otylka died at age 27, so he recast the work in two parts to commemorate both persons nearest to him: the first three movements dedicated to Dvořák, and the last two to Otylka. The resulting ambitious work was a novelty for Suk in its grand scale and solemn style. The solemn opening of the first movement starts with a fate theme that is heard throughout the symphony. Asrael, by the way, is the Angel of Death. The fourth movement is a gentle portrait of Suk's wife, warm in tone. The finale culminates in an all-passion-spent version of the fate theme as a musical sign that Suk had come to terms with his grief. The final chord is in C major. Asrael is hyper-emotional music, a larger-than-life creation.
[Youtube] [Performance listened to: Libor Pesek with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on Virgin Classics]

3. Alfredo Casella, Symphony No 1 in B minor Op 5 (1906)
A first symphony, written by a 22-year young composer, but with a truly distinctive identity. Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) came from an old Torino family and studied at the Conservatoire in Paris with Gabriel Fauré. Although Ravel was a good friend, Casella was not influenced by French Impressionism, but rather by the great Austrians as Mahler and Strauss, as well as Russian composers as Rimsky-Korsakov. Thanks to his Italian lyricism and keen sense of drama, his music is all his own, as is demonstrated in this symphony, the first of three (the second was written in 1909, the third in 1940). The orchestration, for one thing, is very imaginative, making frequent use of dark, crepuscular sonorities. The symphony is in three movements (which may be the only French aspect) and starts with gloomy cello/bass led music answered by rocking woodwind and harp. The slow movement is a melancholy meditation, the 20-minute long third movement employs the second theme of the opening movement as a chorale. There are several big climaxes, but the music ends softly, with an enigmatic return of the opening melody on solo cello. A symphony brimming with energetic youthfulness.
[Performance listened to: Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma conducted by Francesco La Vecchia on Naxos]

4. Arnold Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (1906)
Schoenberg represents the reaction against the huge (in length and number of performers) symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler. Anyway, ten years after Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, when the war had been lost by Austria and the empire fallen apart, there was no interest anymore in exaggerated utterances and small chamber-like symphonies became the norm in the German-speaking world (and not only there: in the 1920s, also elsewhere in Europe Neo-Classicism with its smaller forms took hold, while the contents changed from deep confessions to light entertainments). We also find a further step in the dissolution of tonality in this symphony from 1906. The symphony is remarkable for its whole-tone and quartal harmony, and its initiation of dynamic and unusual ensemble relationships, involving dramatic interruption and unpredictable instrumental allegiances. The form is a Lisztian model, that is to say, in the broad outlines of a single-movement sonata, the scherzo and andante are interpolated between the sonata's formal sections. There is an unparalleled beauty and wealth of ideas in this work, which belies its short duration of only 20 minutes. The 15 solo instruments have all individualized parts (like in chamber music), which has been combined with a symphonic approach.
[Youtube] [Performance listened to: Michael Gielen with the SWF Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden on Philips (with piano concerto)]

5. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No 10 in F sharp (1910)
Mahler is the most typical late 19th-early 20th century symphonic composer, the man of the mega-symphony, of symphonies in which he expressed a whole world view. Mahler wrote ten symphonies: 1 (1888), 2 (1894), 3 (1896), 4 (1901), 5 (1902), 6 (1904), 7 (1905), 8 (1907), 9 (1910), 10 (1910), as well as Das Lied von der Erde (1908-1909), which was in fact his Ninth Symphony but not counted as such for superstitious reasons. Mahler's first four symphonies are often classed as his "Wunderhorn" group owing to thematic links with settings of songs from the anthology of German folk poems "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" ("Youth's Magic Horn"). Symphonies 5 to 8 are then "middle period," and 9 and 10 "late works." As Mahler said: "My symphonies represent the content of my entire life." Mahler used his symphonies to explore psychological states and philosophical questions that still mesh powerfully with audiences 100 years after his death. When 40 years ago I started listening to Mahler (I had a series of records with Rafael Kubelik as conductor, which I played until they were gray), he was by far not as popular as today, although his ascent had already begun thanks to among others the efforts of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and, separately, Leonard Bernstein. When I was a student, Mahler's music was my daily companion. I got to know his symphonies very well, except one: No 10, Mahler's last, uncompleted symphony, and that is therefore the one I want to discuss here. No 10 is often left out of recordings of the full symphonies, and I developed the mistaken idea that it was just a series of sketches. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Not only is there a complete draft score, Mahler also already scored movements 1 and 3. A draft score is not a final score - Mahler used to change many details while scoring - but close enough to say that what we have of the 10th symphony is true Mahler, and not Deryk Cooke (the musicologist who with several collaborators made the performing version which is usually played today). Moreover, the 10th symphony also is more positive than the "dark night of the soul" of the 9th Symphony. Instead of plunging farther into a preoccupation with death, Mahler was clearly moving again towards a more vitally creative attitude. The 10th Symphony has an extraordinary structural balance: two Adagios frame two scherzos, which themselves frame a sort of intermezzo called "Purgatorio." The symphony starts in death-haunted nostalgia, moves to forced happiness and unease, until finally achieving serenity in the finale. It is interesting to ponder what Mahler's 11th Symphony would have been like, and how his career would have proceeded had he lived longer...
[Article in The Atlantic about the 10th Symphony]
[Youtube] [Performance listened to: Simon Rattle with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on EMI Classics]

6. Edward Elgar, Symphony No 2 in E Flat, Op 63 (1909–1911)

That Edward Elgar was not only the patriotic composer of imperial Pomp and Circumstance cliches, is demonstrated by his sensitive Second Symphony (and by his excellent chamber music). Elgar wrote his First Symphony in 1908 when he was 50, a confident, triumphant, but also rather imperialistic work, an expression of the jingoist ideals of Edwardian England. The Second Symphony followed three years later and was very different: a work full of nagging doubt and with a sense of struggle below the surface, an elusive attempt to capture the "spirit of delight" (as in the Shelley quotation on the score that reads: "Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight!"). This can be heard right at the beginning where the opening note has to wrench itself into being before blossoming forth into the first theme. The second movement is a massive funeral march, with something of a veiled radiance, publicly dedicated to the memory of Edward VII, and privately to several friends of Elgar. It has been called an expressive combination of tenderness and melancholy, typical of Elgar. The scherzo contains a violent crescendo, like a nightmare, and the Finale is deceptively serene, closing the symphony with a radiant quietness (very different from the boisterous First Symphony). An ambiguous and multi-layered work.
[Youtube] [Performance listened to: Bernard Haitink with the Philharmonia Orchestra on EMI]

7. Franz Schmidt, Symphony No 2 in E flat major (1911-13)
Franz Schmidt (1874-1939) is an Austrian composer who is combined a reverence for the great Austro-German lineage of composers with very personal innovations in harmony and orchestration. Unfortunately, as so many composer of his generation, he seems to have fallen between two stools: his works are too complex for the conservatively minded, yet too obviously traditional for the avant-garde. Since the last decades of the previous century his music has enjoyed a modest revival like that of his contemporaries. The Second Symphony is a glorious symphony, a real tour de force: three large movements, of which the second is an extremely inventive set of variations. Where Mahler had given way to modernity by breaking up classical forms, Schmidt (two years after the death of Mahler) takes stock by bringing the most important architectural schemes since the Baroque together: fugue technique and variation and sonata form, at the highest level of craftsmanship, realized by a giant orchestra in late-romantic, post-Wagnerian ecstatic sound - while that was still possible. Note that in this 3-movement symphony in fact the Scherzo, the fourth part of the classical symphony, is not lacking: Variation 9 is the scherzo of the Symphony, Variation 10 its Trio, after which the Scherzo is repeated. The Finale, a Rondo, starts with a fugue as introduction, and here the theme of Variation 11 is used. And this again thematically close to the theme of the first movement. The symphony ends with a large apotheosis, a chorale that in its turn is based on variation 8... This is gloriously lyrical writing for the lush Viennese strings and brass (containing eight French horns). A sunny symphony.
[Performance listened to: Neeme Jarvi with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Chandos]

8. Charles Ives, Symphony No 4 [1910-1916]
Charles Ives (1874-1954) was a modernist who has been called the greatest American composer. Perhaps the most remarkable piece of orchestral music Ives completed was his Fourth Symphony (1910–16). The list of forces required to perform the work is extraordinary and eccentric in the sense that although six trumpets are called for, one of them only plays one note in the whole piece; and a whole choir has to join and sit on stage during the length of the symphony, while it only sees 30 seconds of action at the beginning and again at the end. For a certain part of the work, a second conductor is necessary. No wonder this symphony, although considered as the culmination of Ives' musical achievement, is seldom performed. The first complete performance was given in 1965, more than a decade after Ives' death. The symphony starts with a prelude that asks questions to which the succeeding movements try to provide answers - in the style of Ives' The Unanswered Question. It also contains a hymn, "Watchman, tell us the night." The second movement is a riotous multiphony quoting dozens of well-known American tunes, an Allegretto inspired by a story of Hawthorne. Ives himself described the third movement, a fugue, as "an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism." The final movement, Largo maestoso, is a sort of struggle between dissonance and traditional tonal music, taking up earlier motifs and building to a tremendous climax (with the choir) after which the piece ends quietly with just the percussion playing as if from a distance. Ives said this "had something to do with the reality of existence and its religious experience."
See my post about eccentric symphonies by cult composers.
[Youtube] [Performance listened to: Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus conducted by Seiji Ozawa on Deutsche Grammophon]

9. Karol Szymanowski, Symphony No. 2 in B flat major Op 19 (1911)
Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) was the most celebrated Polish composer of the early 20th century. Written at age 27, the Second Symphony is one of the first works by Szymanowski in his mature style. As we also see in his string quartets, there are several unconventional elements, such as the fact that the symphony is in two movements and that it begins with a violin solo. The opening movement has a passionate and grandiose character and provides contrasts in its use of solo instruments in a varied orchestral texture. The second movement is almost self-contained and consists of a theme and five variations. It is playful, festive and dance-like. Also in this movement, the solo violin makes an emotionally effective appearance. The movement ends with a sixth variation followed by a fugue, its chromatic subject dramatically introduced and developed with continuing contrasts of orchestral texture. After an interruption by a gently lyrical section, there is a massive conclusion to the symphony.
[Performance listened to: Karol Stryja with the Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra Katowice on Naxos]

10. Rued Langgaard, Symphony No. 6 "Det Himmelrivende" [1919-20]
Rued Langaard (1893-1952) was a Danish "cult composer" whose musical style was at odds with his Danish contemporaries. Only in recent decades becoming recognized, he has more than 400 works to his name, including 16 symphonies, the Music of the Spheres, 150 songs, works for piano, organ, and an opera entitled The Antichrist. Langaard saw music as a fight between good and evil and the 6th symphony, with the title "The Heaven Storming" is the embodiment of such a cosmic conflict. Langgaard's music is visionary, extreme and bizarre. The Sixth Symphony of 1919-1920 is one of Langaard's strongest works. Here Langgaard releases the forces of good and evil, light and dark, and God and Satan against each other. This Christian-based contrasting of "good and evil" is not my worldview, I rather think in shades of grey, but it makes for good drama. The apocalyptic symphony is in one continuous movement that takes the form of variations on a theme. That theme permeates the whole symphony and has two different shapes, a pure, light one, and a dark, chromatic one. Langaard displays absolute technical mastery of the orchestra and invokes the enormous power of the brass to drive "the storming armies of evil under the canopy of heaven." One of the most astonishing symphonies I know. See my post about eccentric symphonies by cult composers.
[Performance listened to: The Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi on Chandos]

11. Carl Nielsen, Symphony No 5, Op 50, FS 97 (1920-22)
Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) is widely recognized as Denmark's most prominent composer. His Fifth is a very unconventional and original symphony, a one-of-a-kind work. It confounds all expectations of what a symphony is supposed to be. At the premiere, the audience was stunned by the weird battle between the snare drum and the orchestra in the first of the two movements; a near riot ensued, like the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The symphony has been cast in two movements. The first section of the opening movement is a sort of prelude, with bizarre color combinations and amorphous themes. The second section starts with a broadly flowing theme, treated contrapuntally, while the music grows to a cacophonous climax. The above mentioned snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing ad libitum and out of time, as if to destroy the music. The second movement begins with a scherzo-like section. The work's final section starts with an elegiac and harmonically intricate fugue, after which a bustling coda is based on both the section's opening music and the first movement's wailing figure. A sort of battle between the forces of order and chaos.
[Youtube] [Performance listened to: Esa Pekka Salonen with the Swedish radio Symphony Orchestra on Sony]

12. Jean Sibelius, Symphony 7 in C (1924)
The Seventh Symphony was Sibelius' last published symphony, and it is as unconventional as the above symphony by Nielsen. It is notable for having only one movement. Development is continuous from the outset, making a discussion of first and second subjects irrelevant. The form is open to various interpretations - for example the slow opening section has been labeled both as an introduction and as an exposition. The strings dominate in this symphony, but there is also a distinctive trombone theme - in fact, the trombone solo, which occurs three times, punctuates the symphony like three great pillars. The Seventh Symphony must be counted among the most individual examples of organic growth in all music. Its formal aspect is unique and arises as the inevitable result of the content.
[Youtube][Performance listened to: Sir Alexander Gibson conducting the Scottish National orchestra on Chandos (with First Symphony)]

13. Sergei Prokofiev, Symphony No. 2 in D minor Op. 40 (1924-5)
When Prokofiev wrote his Second Symphony, he was settled in Paris and intent on writing a piece in the vanguard of musical modernism. Although the two-movement form is modeled on Beethoven’s final (Op. 111) piano sonata, this is music “of iron and steel,” an onslaught comparable to Stravinsky’s Sacre. The first movement, full of nervous energy, starts with strident trumpet fanfares and charging strings – it is fact an 11 min assault full of anger, bitterness and violence. The second movement, a set of six highly brilliant variations, starts more gentle, with a glorious oboe theme. Each variation is clearly delineated and the range of emotions is remarkable: fast, mercurial music; beautiful slow passages; vigorous percussive writing; patches of aggression and violence; and it all ends with a glowingly orchestrated march.
[Youtube][Performance listened to: Mstislav Rostropovitch conducting the Orchestre National de France on Erato (with Third Symphony)]

14. Willem Pijper, Symphony No 3 (1926)
Willem Pijper (1894-1947) has been called the most important and influential Dutch composer of his generation. He was mostly self-taught. In the early 1920s, he grew into one of the most advanced composers in Europe, working with "cell technique," polytonality and bitonality. As long-time teacher at the Conservatories of Amsterdam and Rotterdam he exerted a large influence over several new generations of Dutch composers. Pijper's large and varied output includes operas, three symphonies, concertos for piano, violin and cello, and five string quartets as well as a number of chamber works. His impressive Third Symphony was written for Pierre Monteux, who performed it frequently. It is in one movement, but as usual the sections allegro, adagio, scherzo and allegro can be discerned.
[Youtube][Performance listened to: Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jac van Steen]

15. Havergal Brian, Symphony No 1 in D minor "Gothic" [1919-27]
Although rarely performed, cult composer Havergal Brian (1876-1972) was extremely prolific until a very advanced age - he wrote a total of 32 symphonies, of which the First one calls for the largest orchestral forces demanded by any conventionally structured concert work. "Gothic" as Brian uses the term here, points to the Gothic style in architecture, to the age in which the great cathedrals of Northern Europe were built. Brian saw these huge stone edifices as symbols of Western culture, as monuments to the struggle of the human spirit against immense odds. Such a struggle had just taken place: the Great War, which had shaken Western values by its cruel violence and unbelievable death toll. Brian, however, reaffirms the idealistic Western tradition in the vast choral movements of the symphony - the Te Deum is meant in a secular rather than religious way. On the other hand, in the orchestral movements Brian reflects on the horrors of the war. Take for example the start of the first movement which its violent tympani attack propelling the music forward, or the brutal, raw march in the second movement. But war and peace go together, there are also moments of great beauty such as the passage for solo violin near the end of the first movement. Brian uses traditional (late-Romantic) idioms in a wholly nontraditional way, thereby severely undercutting the expectations of the listener. He places harmonic opulence at the side of lean polyphony, he combines types of music that are mutually inimical, he elides transitions, suddenly switching from one mood to the next. His music is often extremely violent, but that is paired with sudden patches of peaceful and soft music. In other words, he continually pulls the rug away under the feet of the listener. See my post about eccentric symphonies by cult composers.
[Performance listened to: Martyn Brabbins with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Concert Orchestra on Hyperion]

16. Virgil Thomson, Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1926-28)
Not the cacophony Ives made of his hymn tunes, but also not a straightforward "populist" peroration, in his First Symphony Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) wrote sensitive and affectionate music in which he often falls back on small groups of solo instruments so that the symphony has a strong chamber music character. The main theme (which returns in every movement) is based on an old Scottish melody called "How Firm a Foundation." When the theme appears in the first movement, the harmonization is on purpose half out of focus. This is followed by various dance-like passages derived from the theme. The first movement ends with a humorous "farmyard" cadenza for trombone, piccolo, solo cello and solo violin. The contemplative andante in its turn ends with a suggestion of a distant railway train. The next movement is a strongly rhythmic passacaglia on the hymn-tune bass. The concluding Alla breve reintroduces all the chief material of the symphony, including the hymn in full. This movement was used by Virgil Thomson as the finale of the film The River, for which he later composed the musical score. A rural America that has long since disappeared, but that was dignified and sweet.
[James Sedares conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra on Naxos]

17. Anton Webern, Symphony Op 21 (1928)
A miniature symphony for small orchestra that lasts only 10 minutes, but packs more punch than many much larger works. This is pure twelve-tone serial music, deliciously atonal. Webern's tone rows have been arranged to take advantage of internal symmetries, which gives his work motivic unity. Webern also uses a technique called "Klangfarbenmelodie," splitting a musical line or melody rapidly between several instruments, rather than assigning it to just one instrument, thereby adding color and texture to the melodic line. The Symphony consists of two movements: the first movement is based on a complex canon; both halves of the movement are repeated. The second movement is a very concentrated set of variations. An enigmatic work of immense restraint and luminous clarity.
[Performance listened to: Pierre Boulez with the Wiener Philharmoniker on Deutsche Grammophon]

18. Albert Roussel, Symphony No 3 in G minor Op 42 (1930)
Albert Roussel (1869-1937) has been called the greatest French symphonist of the first half of the 20th century, but that reputation rests mainly on his two last symphonies (of four), and especially on his Third Symphony. This is a vigorous masterpiece, concise and classical in form. It was one of the many works commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where it had a triumphant premiere. A simple five-note motive serves as the cyclic bond between the four highly succinct movements. The music brims with energy, the harmony is harsh and often polytonal. There is a strong motoric drive in the fast movements, like in Prokofiev's music of the 1920s. The initial, hammering Allegro Vivo has an unforgettable impact. The Adagio ascends to a majestic double-fugue. The Scherzo takes the form of a witty fast waltz, and the symphony ends with a vigorous Allegro con Spirito.
[Performance listened to: Charles Dutoit with the Orchestre National de France on Erato (with First Symphony)]

19. William Grant Still, Symphony No. 1 in A-flat, "Afro-American" (1930)
The first symphony written by an African American to be performed by a leading American orchestra. The work combines a fairly traditional symphonic form with blues progressions and rhythms characteristic of popular African-American music at the time. In this way, William Grant Still (1895-1978) integrated black culture into the classical form. The Afro-American Symphony is centered on a single blues-like theme which runs through the entire symphony, and is treated differently in each of the four movements. In the third movement, a banjo is used for atmosphere. Still gave the four movements the subtitles "Longings," "Sorrows," "Humor" and "Aspirations." Still was born in Mississippi as the son of two school teachers. He earned his living writing background music for radio and television. In addition to symphonies, Still's classical compositions include chamber music, operas, and ballets.
[Performance listened to: Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi]

20. Aaron Copland, Short Symphony (Symphony No 2) (1933)
What is designated as Copland’s "Second Symphony" is better known as his "Short Symphony." Strangely enough, this attractive, concise rhythmical work is almost never played and there are only few recordings. It shows us Copland before his populist, sometimes rather bombastic (Third Symphony) Americana phase, letting us glimpse him in neo-classical guise, the Copland of The Symphonic Ode, the Piano Variations and the piano trio Vitebsk which were written around the same time. The Short Symphony is preoccupied with complex rhythms, and although the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez premiered the work in Mexico City in 1934, no Northern-American orchestra dared attempt a performance of this intricate work. In 1937, Copland therefore reworked the symphony into the Sextet for Clarinet, Piano and String Quartet, with hardly any changes to the music itself. It was only in the late sixties that the Symphony received a limited circulation in performance in the U.S. The work is in three movements played without pause. The first movement is scherzo-like in character. The second movement features a song-like middle part, but also has several dissonant climaxes. The finale is once again bright in color and rhythmically intricate. In fact, this is one of Copland most successful compositions, full of marvelous colorations and (poly)rhythms.
[Performance listened to: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop on Naxos]

Posts about classical music include:

Best String Trios
Best String Quartets, Part One (ca. 1750-1850)
Best String Quartets, Part Two (ca. 1850-1900)
Best String Quartets, Part Three (ca. 1900-1925)
Best String Quartets, Part Four (1926-1945)
Best String Quartets, Part Five (Postwar period)
Best String Quintets
Best String Sextets
Best String Octets

Best Piano Trios
Best Piano Trios, Part Two
Best Piano Quartets
Best Piano Quintets

Best Symphonies from the Twentieth Century, Part One (1900-1933)
Best Symphonies from the Twentieth Century, Part Two (1933-1951)
Best Symphonies from the Twentieth Century, Part Three (1951-)

Best Cello Concertos
Best Cello Sonatas
Best Works for Oboe
Best Works for Viola
Best Flute Concertos
Best 20th c. Violin Concertos

Unique Symphonies from the 19th Century
Eccentric Symphonies by 20th Century Cult Composers (1) - Scriabin, Ives & Langaard
Eccentric Symphonies from 20th Century Cult Composers (2) - Havergal Brian & Matthijs Vermeulen
Classical Music in the Netherlands (1): 17th & 18th centuries
Classical Music in the Netherlands (2): 19th century
Classical Music in the Netherlands (3): 20th century

Best String Octets

2017-06-25T19:12:00.000+09:00

String octets are chamber works for eight string players and usually consist of four violins, two violas and two cellos, but there are also combinations of four violins, two violas, a cello and a double bass. One could say that the string octet originated in the double quartets written by Spohr in the early 19th c.; the most famous string octet was written by Mendelssohn, but there are several interesting works from both 19th and 20th c. An octet is of course not a string quartet with the parts doubled: in the double quartets by Spohr we have two quartets set off against each other in a virtuoso way, and in the "normal" octets we have music for eight differentiated string players.

The string octet has a nice sonority. The number of string octets is, however, relatively small. Although there are string sextets, as far as I know, there are no string septets and very few string nonets (probably because this combination is already so close to a string orchestra that it makes little sense). Of course, there are many sextets, septets, octets and even nonets for mixed combinations of winds and strings, but here we will restrict ourselves to string music.

Best string octets:

1. Felix Mendelssohn, String Octet in E-flat major Op 20 (1825)
The original score is for a double string quartet with 4 violins and pairs of violas and cellos. Composed when Mendelssohn was 16 years old, at a time when Beethoven, Schubert and Weber were still alive and active. Schubert had composed his Octet in F major - a work for winds and strings following the pattern of Beethoven's early Septet - only the previous year. This work marked the beginning of Mendelssohn's maturity as a composer. It is a work in a symphonic style, which is immediately apparent at the opening, impressing the listener more as a serenade than a chamber music work. This broadly proportioned and warm-hearted opening movement accounts for nearly half the work's length. It is followed by an Andante characterized by a song-like siciliano. Then follows a Scherzo (played pianissimo and staccato) which seems to point directly to Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, but the inspiration was in fact the "Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania" in Goethe's Faust. The Presto finale is full of energy. The Octet was one of Mendelssohn's own favorites among his works and I think most listeners will agree.
Recording listened to: Octets by Mendelssohn and Raff, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble on Chandos.

2. Louis Spohr, Double Quartet No 3 in E minor Op 87 (1833)
Spohr was attracted by the prospect of using the richer textures that would result from the interplay between two equal, yet independent, string quartets. The concept of two string quartets sharing the musical argument was gradually developed by Spohr in the four Double Quartets he wrote between 1823 and 1847. The third quartet of 1833 is generally considered as the finest of the series. In a minor key, it starts with a gravely melancholic Adagio-Allegro. This is followed by a virtuoso Andante con variazoni. The third movement is a restless and agitated Scherzo and the Finale eventually brings a mood of optimism.
Recording listened to: Spohr Double Quartets Nos 3 & 4, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble on Hyperion.

3. Niels Gade, String Octet in F Major Op 17 (1849)
Gade's Octet is heavily influenced by the Octet of Mendelssohn, who had been the highly regarded mentor of the Danish composer. The work was written when Gade, just past thirty, was establishing himself in Leipzig. It is interesting he tackled the form of the string octet before writing a string quartet, perhaps because it was a genre with less intimidating examples; and he may have preferred the flexibility and expanded range of tone color afforded by the larger number of instruments. The Octet is closely linked to Mendelssohn's elegant, flowing style and perhaps because of that, has remained one of Gade's most beloved chamber music compositions.
Recording listened to: Chamber Music by Niels Gade, The Kontra Quartet and others on BIS.

4. Johan Svendsen, String Octet in A major Op 3 (1866)
The Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen (1840-1911) was born in Oslo (then Christiana) and studied the violin at the Leipzig Conservatory with Ferdinand David, a colleague of Mendelssohn; problems with his hand forced him to switch to composition which he studied with Carl Reinecke. He worked as a conductor in his native town and also became musical director of the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. In his time, Svendsen was considered as the leading Scandinavian conductor. His compositions are not very numerous (two symphonies, two violin concertos and one for cello, Norwegian Rhapsodies, chamber music) and were mostly written when he was in Leipzig, although they should not be considered as student works. As was the case with Gade and Raff, also for Svendsen's Octet, Mendelssohn's youthful masterpiece served as the great example. The emphatic first subject is announced by all eight instruments in octaves. The inventive second movement has the spirit of a scherzo and is rhythmically intriguing. The slow movement can best be described as a set of free, continuous variations. The sonata-form Finale has an angular main theme and lyrical, curving second subject. The Octet is further characterized by its use of Nordic melody, tonal amplitude (often bordering on the orchestral) and bold and innovative rhythms. A very attractive work.
Recording listened to: Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble on Chandos (with Quintet by Nielsen).

5. Joachim Raff, String Octet in C major op.176 (1872)
Joachim Raff (1822-82) was Liszt's assistant in Weimar and later a renowned teacher and composer in his own right. His music is characterized by well-crafted professionalism. Like Gade, his Octet for Strings shows the influence of Mendelssohn - in the opening of the first movement, after a brief statement of the rhythmically powerful first theme, the answering phrase recalls the scherzo of Mendelssohn's Octet. The two middle movements are in ABA form. The C minor scherzo has a delightful central theme; it bounces by like a fast horse ride. The F major slow movement is a "Song without Words" in all but name. The finale, with its moto perpetuo forward momentum, shows the strongest influence of Mendelssohn. The final coda is announced by a brief pizzicato, before the music races down to the finish line. Raff is almost forgotten - by 1920 his music had disappeared from the concert stage - , although happily among collectors his symphonies, concerts and chamber music have made a comeback. In his own time, he was regarded as the equal of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann and Liszt. That is perhaps too much praise, but he certainly was an impeccable craftsman who left behind great chamber music. Raff.org is a website dedicated to his music, with also a detailed discussion of the present Octet.
Recording listened to: Octets by Mendelssohn and Raff, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble on Chandos.

6. Reinhold Gliere, String Octet Op 5 (1900)
Reinhold Gliere (1875-1956) was born in Kiev. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Taneyev and Arensky. Later, Gliere himself became professor at his alma mater; among his students were Khachaturian, Prokofiev and Miaskovsky. Gliere was in the first place known for his symphonies and ballets, but he also wrote excellent chamber music. The Octet, written when he was 25, opens with an excited Allegro moderato in sonata-form - both the upbeat main theme and melodious side-theme are unmistakably Russian in character. The composer displays great polyphonic mastery in the development section. The second movement is an elegant intermezzo with a soulful Russian melody as middle section. The epic Andante builds up an expansive theme, which grows from quiet singing to a powerful climax. The Allegro assai finale paints the picture of a Russian festival; there are two main themes, each distinguished by a colorful sound palette. In the coda-cum-apotheosis the Octet reaches near-orchestral power. One of the best string octets ever written.
Recording listened to: Berlin Philharmonic String Octet on MDG (with Sextet by Gliere).

7. George Enescu, String Octet in C Major Op 7 (1900)
George Enescu (1881-1955) was a Romanian composer, violinist and pedagogue who brought unknown sonorities into Western art music by his inventive use of Romanian folk music (for example quarter-tones). Enescu studied at the Vienna and Parisian Conservatories. Chamber music constitutes a major portion of Enescu's musical output. His epic Octet for strings was hailed as an amazing accomplishment for a young man of nineteen. It combines the musical language of the late romantic era with the emerging new language of polyphony. The opening movement Très modéré is characterized by an expansive main theme. In fact, the thematic material of the whole composition is introduced here: accentuated rhythms, descending chromatic progression, and leaping intervals. The second subject is presented in canonic form. The explosive second movement, Très fougueux, is indeed, as the title says, a massive fugue. Lentement is a beautiful slow movement in the form of a mysterious nocturne. Stillness and harmony predominate here. The finale, Movement de Valse, is a limping waltz which combines many of the themes of the earlier movements and ends in a grandiose classical fugue. As the ceasurae between the movements are not very emphatic, the impression of a continuous melody emerges in this wonderful octet.
Recording listened to: Ensembles of "George Enescu" Bucharest Philharmonic Orchestra on Arte Nova (with Dixtuor).

8. Max Bruch, String Octet op. posth. (1920)
Max Bruch (1838-1920) is now only known as the composer of a famous violin concerto, but in fact he wrote more than 100 works in various musical forms, ranging from opera to oratorio, from cantatas to symphonies and from concertos to songs. When he was born in Cologne Mendelssohn was still in his prime; when he died Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps was already seven years old. But Bruch would his whole life be a classical composer in the romantic style of Mendelssohn and Schumann. In the Octet, the last work Bruch composed, the first violin part is more virtuosic than those of its colleagues. Bruch also has replaced the second cello with a double bass. The Octet consists of three movements - the scherzo has been omitted (although the finale contains scherzo elements). Two strong Allegro movements frame an Adagio in the dark key of E flat minor. The opening allegro features a dramatic first theme and a lyrical second theme. The finale is bright and optimistic and ends with a coda.
Recording listened to: Ensemble Ulf Hoelscher on CPO (with Piano Quintet & String Quintet).

Posts about classical music include:

Best String Trios
Best String Quartets, Part One (ca. 1750-1850)
Best String Quartets, Part Two (ca. 1850-1900)
Best String Quartets, Part Three (ca. 1900-1925)
Best String Quartets, Part Four (1926-1945)
Best String Quartets, Part Five (Postwar period)
Best String Quintets
Best String Sextets
Best String Octets

Best Piano Trios
Best Piano Trios, Part Two
Best Piano Quartets
Best Piano Quintets

Best Piano Concertos, Part One
Best Piano Concertos, Part Two
Best Piano Concertos, Part Three

Best Cello Concertos
Best Cello Sonatas
Best Works for Oboe
Best Works for Viola
Best Flute Concertos
Best 20th c. Violin Concertos

Unique Symphonies from the 19th Century
Eccentric Symphonies by 20th Century Cult Composers (1) - Scriabin, Ives & Langaard
Eccentric Symphonies from 20th Century Cult Composers (2) - Havergal Brian & Matthijs Vermeulen
Classical Music in the Netherlands (1): 17th & 18th centuries
Classical Music in the Netherlands (2): 19th century
Classical Music in the Netherlands (3): 20th century

Best String Sextets

2017-06-15T17:23:00.001+09:00

String sextets are chamber works for six players and are usually written for an ensemble consisting of two violins, two violas, and two cellos, but there also exist rare combinations for three violins, viola and two cellos or three violins, two violas and cello.

The string sextet was "invented" by Boccherini in 1776. The most famous string sextets were written by Brahms and Schoenberg, and we have several more examples from both the 19th and early 20th c. Excellent are also the sextets by Korngold, Schulhoff and Martinu. But the total original literature is not especially large, so we often find as additions to concerts the first two movements of the incomplete sextet by Borodin, or the string-sextet Introduction to Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio.

Best string sextets:

1. Luigi Boccherini, Sextuor No. 5 in D major Op 23 (1776)
Boccherini experimented with the limits of chamber music and was always on the lookout for new forms. One such new form was the string sextet, a combination in advance of the times, which on the other hand also means that Boccherini's six sextets Op 23 barely left an echo in musical history, despite being full of originality. In contrast to the double trios of the period (where instruments were simply doubled for effect), Boccherini goes much farther and gives equal importance to each instrument. He is also able to resolve the problem of four-part harmony for six instruments, mainly by means of a brilliant use of unison, not only in the basses but also in the violins and violas. This leads to a truly captivating sound quality. The six sextets Op 23 are quite extraordinarily beautiful pieces, mostly contemplative in mood. No 5 opens with a Grave for muted strings which features some remarkable and highly expressive decorative writing. This is followed by a vivid Allegro. The Minuetto is dedicated to pathos expressed in imitative contrapuntal writing, but the trio is full of dance-like rhythms. This is capped by a joyous Finale. It is a pity Boccherini only wrote six string sextets; another effort in the combination for six instruments were his sextets for flute and strings Op 16, as well as some of his Nocturni (especially those of Op 38).
Recording listened to: Boccherini, Sextets Op. 23 1, 2 & 5 by Ensemble 415 on Harmonia Mundi.

2. Anton Wranitzky, String Sextet in G (around 1800)
Although little known today, the Bohemians Anton and Paul Wranitzky were key figures in the musical life of Vienna at the turn of the 18th c. Anton Wranitzly studied with Haydn and worked most of his life at the court of Prince Lobkowitz. His chamber music output consists of more than 60 works. In the sextet Wranitzky seeks to exploit unusual sonorities and combinations of thematic lead and accompaniment such as are typical for the rare ensemble music of a sextet. The opening movement is in sonata form and held together by bustling scale patterns. The second movement is comparatively fast moving, using decorated versions of the main theme. The final movement starts with a slow introduction that sets up a faster section of a folk-like character.
Recording listened to: Wranitzky, String Quintet and Sextet, by Ensemble Cordia on Brilliant Classics.

3. Louis Spohr, String Sextet in C major Op 140 (1848)
One of the finest late works by Spohr, said to be inspired by the optimism and exuberance of the "revolution year" 1848. The new medium of the string sextet (it is doubtful that Spohr knew Boccherini, or the meager handful of string sextets written since then) is handled resourcefully, making good use of the sonority of the ensemble, but also exploring the possibility of creating contrasts between different groupings, or treating the first of each pair of instruments in a concertante manner. The Allegro Moderato is characterized by thematic expansiveness, but there is also more delicate work, such as the opening trill that runs throughout the movement. Much of the time, the first viola is the thematic leader. The Larghetto begins with a hymn-like theme. Scherzo and Finale are intertwined; the wistful Scherzo also features a waltz-like section. The Presto finale is full of violinistic brilliance, and capped by the surprising return of the Scherzo, before it all ends in a Prestissimo.
Recording listened to: Spohr, String Sextet etc. by Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble on Chandos.

4. Johannes Brahms, String Sextet no 1 in B flat Major Op 18 (1860)
This is one of the truly great works of 19th c. chamber music. Brahms probably took his cue from Spohr, as his two sextets were composed only a good decade later and feature similar luxurious textures. Brahms wrote his first string sextet in 1860, the second one followed 5 years later. While the second one is more complex, I like the first one best for its broad, typical Brahmsian melodies. Brahms regarded the string quartet as a "hallowed" genre, just like the symphony, and wanted to thoroughly prepare himself well before attempting it. So the form of the string sextet with its extra instruments to aid with harmony and texture provided an ideal opportunity for him to "get his feet wet." The 27-year old Brahms fully explores the sonorities at his disposal, with the violas often playing in parallel harmony. In the first movement the first cello presents the opening theme against the bass provided by the second cello. The movement is in sonata form with an exposition that ends with the suggestion of a Viennese waltz. The following Andante is a set of variations on a theme of a noble character, the most famous movement of the sextet. The Beethovian Scherzo is concise and vigorous and the main theme of the Finale is in outline similar to that of the opening Allegro. In all, this is sunny and melodious music.
Recording listened to: Brahms, String Sextets, by The Raphael Ensemble on Hyperion.

5. Niels Gade, String Sextet in E flat Major, Op.44 (1865)
The Danish composer Niels Gade was a pupil of Mendelssohn and his teacher greatly influenced his style. The work starts with an elegiac Andante introduction in which the main theme of the first movement is introduced (built on a pervasive falling semitone). In the Allegro vivace that theme is then developed in a passionate way. The lyrical second subject has a winning quality. This is followed by an elf-like, typically Mendelssohnian Scherzo (without separate trio). The Andantino is an abridged sonata form in which the recapitulation ingeniously takes the function of the missing development section. Both Scherzo and Andantino are built from semitonally-obsessed material. The sextet closes with a big-boned Molto vivace, which is based on an idea similar to the one that started the first movement; it is similarly prefaced by a slow movement.
Recording listened to: The Johannes Ensemble on Kontrapunkt.

6. Antonín Dvořák, Sextet in A Major Op 48 B. 80 (1878)
Dvořák's first work to be premiered outside Bohemia, the fruit of a period in his life that he could concentrate on composition thanks to a government grant. It is easy to hear that the sextet was composed at the same time as the Slavonic Dances - it is written in a recognizable Czech style and one of the first works of Dvořák's maturity. The two inner movements are stylizations of the elegiac Dumka (a folksong from Little Russia) and lively Furiant (a Czech folk dance). The first movement is written in the classical sonata form (with three themes), and the last movement is composed in the form of a theme and six variations. The work is typical for its sunny atmosphere, melodic wealth and rich tone color.
Recording listened to: The Raphael Ensemble on Helios.

7. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Souvenir de Florence for String Sextet Op 70 (1890)
This string sextet (which is perhaps better known in the later version for string orchestra) was named "Souvenir de Florence" because the composer sketched one of the work's principal themes while visiting Florence, where at that time he also composed his opera The Queen of Spades. The first movement is in sonata form and begins boldly with an energetic main theme. The second lyrical theme is the above mentioned Italian souvenir - the only one in a sextet which is mainly Russian in character. The coda of this movement borrows a phrase from The Queen of Spades. The Adagio second movement opens with a kind of slow version of the first movement’s main theme, as an elegant serenade which however embeds a whimsical scherzo characterized by a pizzicato accompaniment. The third movement is an intermezzo that is all carefree brightness; its trio section reminds us that Tchaikovsky had The Nutcracker in his head at the time. In the Allegro vivace finale, a theme of folklore character is subjected to various kinds of treatment, including an unexpected fugato just before the coda. Like other chamber music by Tchaikovsky, this sextet evidences more naturalness and geniality than many of his large-scale compositions with their over-the-top emotionalism.
Recording listened to: Yong Quartet on Telarc (with complete string quartets).
Also on Youtube in a performance at the Internationaal Kamermuziek Festival Utrecht.

8. Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night"), Op 4 (1900)
Another work that is often heard in a version for string orchestra, but that started life as chamber music. The one-movement string sextet was inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel, which describes a man and woman walking through a dark forest on a moonlit night. The woman shares a dark secret with her new lover: she bears the child of another man. It ends with the man's bright acceptance (and forgiveness) of the woman. The poem as well as Schoenberg's music were shocking for their time: filled by a new, anti-bourgeois sexual morality as well as the idea of an all-conquering Eros that shuns every convention. Schoenberg was not yet in his Twelve-tone period, but the sextet is written in a highly advanced harmonic idiom, with a rich chromaticism (deriving from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde) and frequent use of musical phrases which undermine the metrical boundaries. The sextet follows the poem's structure, which consists of five stanzas of differing length; it is in fact based on a rondo-like ABACA pattern, with the recurring A section representing the moonlit walk, the B section the woman's confession and the C section the man's noble reply.
Recording listened to: Leipziger Streichquartett on MDG (with 3rd string quartet).

9. Hakon Børresen, String Sextet in G Major Op. 5 (1901)
Hakon Børresen (1876-1954) was born in Copenhagen and studied with Johann Svendsen at the Royal Danish Conservatory. His String Sextet was dedicated to Edvard Grieg, who spoke highly about it. Borresen was a conservative composer who remained firmly steeped in a romantic / post-romantic musical language, mostly based on Brahms. The Allegro moderato, ma energico, opens with an energetic, Nordic-sounding main theme. It is followed by a genial scherzo and an introspective Adagio characterized by very long-lined melodies. The finale is again a big-boned movement in a Nordic style.
P.S. There exist several more string sextets by little known Nordic composers, as Ölander and Norman.
Recording listened to: Copenhagen Classic on CPO (with 2nd string quartet).

10. Reinhold Gliere, Third Sextet Op 11 (1905)
Gliere dedicated his Third Sextet to Mitrofan Belaiev, a great patron of music and also music publisher; many of Gliere's chamber music works premiered during the musical gatherings Belaiev organized every Friday. In the Third Sextet Gliere tried to capture the musical preferences of Belaiev (which were also his own): welding Moscow's tradition of Tchaikovsky and Taneyev with the Petersburg composer group The Five, in serene and positive music. The opening Allegro is light and folksy in character, reminding one of Borodin. The Larghetto is filled with heartfelt lyricism, an instrumental cantilena as emotionally charged as a human voice. The third movement, Allegro, is a quintessential Russian scherzo with its juxtaposition of contrasting themes. The final Allegro vivace returns to the festive mood of the first movement. Its colorful, full-bodied palette approximates the orchestral level. A sextet that abounds in fascinating ideas.
Recording listened to: Berlin Philharmonic String Octet on MDG (with Octet by Gliere).

11. Max Reger, String Sextet in F major Op 118 (1911)
Reger had firmly promised the String Sextet for the Gewandhaus Chamber Music of March 1911, but the composer found the filling of this obligation to be a hard task: Reger rejected whole measures and composed them again. In October 1910 he destroyed almost the complete first movement. By November he was still far away from finishing, and he had to work even during the Christmas holidays to complete the sextet in time. But at the premiere on March 12, Reger was enthusiastically celebrated: while striving for orchestral sound, he still remained within the framework of chamber music. The first movement, Allegro energico, is robust and rough hewn. In the second movement, Vivace, we find an effective alternation of dramatic and quiet sections. The third movement, Largo con grand espressione, features a deeply moving chorale. The finale, Allegro commodo, is again full of commotion and dramatic contrasts.
Recording listened to: Ensemble Villa Musica on MDG (with Clarinet Quintet)

12. Erich Korngold, String Sextet Op 10 (1916)
Korngold’s finest chamber work and a direct descendant of the sextets of Brahms. The luxurious sextet combines the melodic sweetness of late German romanticism with flecks of dissonance and moments of anxiety - making it sound quite modern. It encompasses an astonishing range of moods within its four-movement scheme. Korngold’s operatic talent is foreshadowed in the lyrical and romantic first subject of the opening Allegro. A calmer melody serves as the second theme. The second movement broods in melancholy. The delightful waltz-like third movement intermezzo contains a variation on a theme from Korngold's Sinfonietta in B Major. In the exuberant Presto finale we find some exotic, Bartokian-sounding elements.
Recording listened to: The Flesch String Quartet on ASV (with 3rd string quartet).

13. Erwin Schulhoff, Sextet for two violins, two violas and two cellos (1920-24)
Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was a Jewish Czech composer, who was born in Prague, and who studied in Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne. In Leipzig he was taught by Max Reger, who guided him towards a neo-classical style. In Germany in the 1920s and 1930s Schulhoff allied himself to the left-wing avant-garde. The Nazis arrested him in 1939; three years later he died in the Wulzburg concentration camp in Bavaria. The fist movement of the string sextet reveals the influence of Schoenberg, although the music is not consciously atonal. It is however strongly chromatic and demonstrates a deeply depressive emotional state. The second movement is a long-breathed cantilena. This is followed by a tempestuous burlesca, fiendishly difficult to play. The last movement is a despondent Molto adagio. "A rough-hewn work of deep brooding fearfulness," as the Hyperion sleeve notes put it.
Recording listened to: The Raphael Ensemble on Helios.
Also on Youtube in a performance at the Internationaal Kamermuziek Festival Utrecht.

14. Julius Roentgen, Sextet in G Major (1931)
Of Roentgen's substantial output of 650 works, 100 were composed after his retirement to Bilthoven, in the last seven years of his life. Julius Roentgen often wrote chamber music for performance at home, by himself with his family (his sons were professional string players) and musical visitors (these included such luminaries as Grieg and Pablo Casals). As he wrote for private entertainment, Roentgen didn't try to break new ground - this String Sextet, too, is not a work that one would ever associate with the sound world of the 1930s. But it is full of energy and drama; it also possesses a brevity and concision that invest it with a serenade-like charm. It is in four short movements, of which the third is in variation style.
Recording listened to: Julius Roentgen, Chamber Music, Arc Ensemble, on RCA Red Seal.

15. Bohuslav Martinů, Sextet for two violins, two violas and two cellos (1932)
Written astonishingly quickly, in just a week. The sextet displays the "progressive tonality" that would be characteristic for the mature works by Martinu. There are three movements: the first Allegro poco moderato is preceded by a short Lento; this is followed by an Andantino which encloses a scherzo; and the work concludes with a short Allegretto poco moderato. A very vital work, that is a real string sextet and not a quartet with two extra instruments.
Recording listened to: The Raphael Ensemble on Helios.

Posts about classical music include:

Best String Trios
Best String Quartets, Part One (ca. 1750-1850)
Best String Quartets, Part Two (ca. 1850-1900)
Best String Quartets, Part Three (ca. 1900-1925)
Best String Quartets, Part Four (1926-1945)
Best String Quartets, Part Five (Postwar period)
Best String Quintets
Best String Sextets
Best String Octets

Best Piano Trios
Best Piano Trios, Part Two
Best Piano Quartets
Best Piano Quintets

Best Piano Concertos, Part One
Best Piano Concertos, Part Two
Best Piano Concertos, Part Three

Best Cello Concertos
Best Cello Sonatas
Best Works for Oboe
Best Works for Viola
Best Flute Concertos
Best 20th c. Violin Concertos

Unique Symphonies from the 19th Century
Eccentric Symphonies by 20th Century Cult Composers (1) - Scriabin, Ives & Langaard
Eccentric Symphonies from 20th Century Cult Composers (2) - Havergal Brian & Matthijs Vermeulen
Classical Music in the Netherlands (1): 17th & 18th centuries
Classical Music in the Netherlands (2): 19th century
Classical Music in the Netherlands (3): 20th century

Best European Novels (4): Belgium

2017-05-16T15:24:00.001+09:00

Belgium is a small country and its literature is split into two languages, Flemish (Dutch) and French. Happily, there is a lot of talent writing in both languages. The "Big Three" 20th c. classical novelists from Flanders are Willem Elsschot, Louis Paul Boon and Hugo Claus. The greatest Belgian who wrote in French (and therefore was often wrongly thought to be a Frenchman) was Georges Simenon. In fact, Simenon used often Belgian and Dutch settings in his novels, especially in the 1930s, such as in his semi-autobiographical Pedigree.

First the best novels in Flemish:

1. Willem Elsschot, Cheese (1933)
Willem Elsschot (1882-1960; in real life called Alfons de Ridder) was a writer and businessman (in advertising) from Antwerp, who because of the combination of these two functions, has been dubbed the “Flemish Italo Svevo.” He wrote eleven short novels, of which the highly amusing Cheese (Kaas) is the best, a gentle fable, timeless in its skewering of the pretensions and pomposity of the urban bourgeois man. A humble shipping clerk in Antwerp becomes the chief agent in Belgium for a Dutch cheese company and takes delivery of ten thousand full-cream wheels of this red-rinded Dutch delight. But he has no idea how to run a business, or how to sell his goods. He is more focused on setting up his office with a proper desk and typewriter, rather than doing the hard-selling that is needed. When his employer comes to Antwerp to settle the first accounts, he panics... See my full review. Soft Soap and The Leg (Lijmen / Het Been) are two more examples of humorous novels by Elsschot which lead the reader to reflect on the absurdity of life.
English translation and preface by Paul Vincent (Granta Books, 2002).

2. Louis Paul Boon, Chapel Road (1953)
Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979) was a Flemish novelist and journalist who was a serious candidate for the Nobel prize in Literature. He gave up literary language for regional Belgian Dutch words and expressions with which he colored his writing in a Faulknerian way. Boon combines social engagement (an important characteristic of Belgian literature) with advanced literary techniques. Chapel Road (Kapellekensbaan) is his masterpiece. Its interesting construction combines several narrative threads, including an almost postmodern one where the writer and his friends discuss how the story should develop further. The story itself is set in the 19th c. and is about a young woman who wants to escape from a grey industrial town "where it is always raining, even when the sun is shining" (the town is a fictionalized Aalst, the town where Boon himself grew up). A third thread in the book is a reworking of the classic myth of Reynard the Fox. Boon’s other famous novels, both available in English, are My little war (Mijn kleine oorlog) and a sequel to Chapel Road, Summer in Termuren (Zomer in Termuren).
English translation: Adrienne Dixon (Dalkey Archives, 2003)

3. Hugo Claus, The Sorrow of Belgium (1983)
Hugo Claus (1929-2008) has been called the most important Flemish writer of the 20th century. He has written over 20 novels, 60 theater pieces and thousands of poems. Unfortunately, very little has been translated into English, and what has been translated is difficult to find. Claus' best work is the semi-autobiographical "bildungsroman" The Sorrow of Belgium (Het Verdriet van Belgie), a book that has been compared to The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass. It is the story of the coming of age of the protagonist in a right-wing, Flemish nationalist family during the German occupation in WWII. When the young man discovers the anarchist literature that has banned by the Nazi's, his eyes are opened to a new world, one which had been forbidden by his far-right environment and he is inspired to become a writer himself.
English translation: Arnold J. Pomerans (Overlook Books)

4. Dimitri Verhulst, The Misfortunates (2006)
Dimitri Verhulst (born in 1972) was born in Aalst, like Louis Paul Boon. He shares the older author’s critical but compassionate view on Belgian life. Verhulst’s most famous novel is The Misfortunates (De Helaasheid der Dingen), a loosely autobiographical story of a young writer who reflects on his youth growing up in a family that knew no sobriety. Both his father and his uncles had an unwavering commitment to the pub. The boy grows up amid the stench of stale beer, and it seems that the same fate is waiting for him, until he makes his own plans for the future. Both comedic, crude, heart-warming and humorous.
English translation: David Colmer (Portobello Books, 2013)

Then the best novels in French:

1. Georges Simenon, Monsieur Monde Vanishes (1945)
At his death in 1989, Liegeoise writer Georges Simenon had published over 375 works, including 75 novels and 28 short stories in his fictional detective series featuring Inspector Maigret. The Maigret series has been translated into over 50 languages, making the Belgian Simenon the most translated French-speaking author in the world. More than that, Simenon also wrote more than a 100 serious novels, called "romans durs." These "hard novels" were not detective stories but darkly realistic psychological novels, books in which he displayed a sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life. Some famous titles are: Dirty Snow, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Pedigree, Tropic Moon, The Engagement, The Blue Room, The Widow and Red Lights. In the "romans durs" Simenon tried to display the full range of his talent, often addressing existentialist themes. One of the best is Monsieur Monde Vanishes (La Fuite de Monsieur Monde, 1945), in which Simenon addresses one of his favorite themes: the urge to cast off a familiar, restrictive life. The middle-aged Monsieur Monde is a prosperous Parisian businessman, the owner of a factory and conservative family head. One day, feeling unloved by his family and associates, he just walks out on his life, leaving everything behind. He travels to the Riviera where he happens to strike up an acquaintance with a prostitute, then moves on to Nice with her. He has no plan and no ambition; when his money is stolen by a chambermaid, he shows no anger. But then by chance he meets up with his first wife, now an opium addict, and the question of moral responsibility poses itself. Can Monsieur Monde remain uninvolved, a person on his own? See my article on Simenon.
English translation: Jean Stewart (NYRB, 2004)

2. Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Monsieur (1986)
Jean-Philippe Toussaint (born 1957) is a Belgian prose writer and filmmaker, who was educated in Paris. He was strongly influenced by Beckett and the Nouveau Roman. Monsieur, which was filmed by Tousssaint himself in 1990, is typical of his work. It is a minimalist series of vignettes from the life of an introverted, quiet man who lacks any strong interests or will power. Although he is utterly passive, he still manages to keep his head above water and seems always content. You might compare him to the "uncarved block" of Daoism, while his way of life embodies the idea from the Daodejing that the qualities of flexibility and suppleness, especially as exemplified by water, are superior to rigidity and strength. Nothing happens in this novel, but Toussaint still manages to keep his readers interested. In his quirkiness, Monsieur Toussaint also has some traits of that other nay-sayer, Melville's Bartleby.
English translation: John Lambert (Dalkey Archive, 2008)

3. Amélie Nothomb, Tokyo Fiancée (2007)
Amélie Nothomb was born in Japan of Belgian parents in 1967. In fact, her father was the Consul-General for Belgium in Kobe (later also Ambassador in Tokyo). Despite her background in a diplomatic family, in her public persona and her writing Nothomb is the embodiment of unconventionality. Since her debut with Hygiene and the Assassin in 1992, she has written a novel a year (of the concise French type, it should be admitted). She has been widely translated and won many prizes. One of her best novels is the semi-autobiographical Tokyo Fiancée (Ni d'Eve, ni d'Adam), in which an affair with a Japanese suitor, Rinri, serves as the impetus for fun discoveries about the Japanese way of life, especially food culture. Rinri is really in love, and although Amélie likes spending time with him, she doesn't love him. She also doesn't want to give up her independence. After he proposes, she struggles with the question how to best refuse this sweet and shy boy. Another excellent book set in Japan is the popular Fear and Trembling (Stupeur et tremblements), in which a Belgian woman returns to Japan, where she lived as a child, for a job at one of the country's major corporations. The cultural misunderstandings pile up like a train wreck until the woman (again called Amélie - both novels are semi-autobiographical) gives up trying to adapt to the Japanese way of working. See my full reviews of Tokyo Fiancee and Fear and Trembling.

English translation: Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 2008).

Best European Novels (3): The Netherlands

2017-05-07T11:16:00.000+09:00

It's time for novels from my own country, the Netherlands. I have already written about Dutch novels a few years ago, but here I would like to present a somewhat longer list while excluding Flemish authors as these will come in a separate post about the Belgian novel.

As I wrote in my previous article, Dutch literature has long been largely unknown abroad, but thanks to active promotion by writers, publishers and the Dutch Foundation for Literature, that has changed. Today, Dutch novels are, for example, very popular in Germany and Scandinavia and several authors have higher sales figures there than in their own (small) country.

Three themes stand out in Dutch novels: Calvinism (the results of a strict Calvinist upbringing), colonialism (the relationship with the former East Indian colonies) and the War (World War II when Holland was occupied by the Germans).

Here are the best novels from the Netherlands:

1. Multatuli, Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1859)
The first Dutch novel of stature - and according to some, still the best - was written in the mid-19th c. by a colonial administrator. A passionate novel that woke up Dutch society by blowing the whistle about the oppression of the Javanese people in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Max Havelaar is an idealized self-portrait of the author, Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), who, like his protagonist, was a colonial official in the Javanese town of Lebak. The book is advanced in its almost "postmodern" composition, with a self-reflexive frame story and countless digressions and stories-in-stories. A beautiful story at the heart of the book is the tragic tale of Saïdjah and Adinda, two Javanese children whose lives are crushed by the double heaviness of indigenous and Dutch rule. Read my full review.
Translation: Roy Edwards in Penguin Classics (1987). An older English translation at Google Books.

2. Louis Couperus, The Hidden Force (1900)
Louis Couperus (1863-1923) was born in The Hague but grew up in the Dutch East Indies. His first novel, Eline Vere, was a psychological masterpiece about the tragic fate of a young heiress, a neurotic woman with a turbulent family, set in fin-de-siecle The Hague. It was an immediate success. Couperus wrote more novels with a setting bourgeois circles in the Hague, but also Symbolist novellas, as well as historical novels situated in the ancient world (like Flaubert's Salammbo). His greatest achievement is The Hidden Force (De stille kracht), written in 1900 and inspired by a year long visit to the Dutch East Indies in 1899-1900, the country of his childhood. It is the story of the decline and fall of the Dutch resident Van Oudyck due to his inability to see further than his own Western rationalism. The "hidden force" can be interpreted as the silent opposition of the colonized, as the symbol for the cultural gap which in a colonial situation can never be breached successfully. We could also say that colonial society, founded as it was on the right of the strongest, led to moral decay, which slowly but irresistibly wrecked the Europeans, as another hidden force. Read my full review.
Translation: Paul Vincent, Pushkin Press (2012). Older translation by Texeira de Mattos at Gutenberg.

3. Nescio, Amsterdam Stories (1910-18)
Three wonderful novellas (The Freeloader, Titans and Little Poet), bittersweet accounts of artistic, idealistic young men, their big plans and mad longings, all ending in sadness and resignation. The individual is no match for the world and helplessly comes to grief if he tries to resist. Nescio (Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh, 1882–1961) writes about our complete insignificance in the grand scheme of things - but also that our insignificance doesn't matter, for there is something wonderful in that, too. All three stories provide a good picture of Amsterdam at the beginning of the 20th century. Above all, Nescio's style is wonderful: utter simplicity combined with humor, irony, understatement and sentiment (but never sentimentality), all elements miraculously balanced. Read my full review.
Translation: Damion Searls, published by NYRB Classics (2012).

4. J.J. Slauerhoff, The Forbidden Kingdom (1931)
The Forbidden Kingdom (Het Verboden Rijk, 1932), the masterwork of poet-maudit and ship's doctor Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936), is a classic of modernism with an experimental narrative, and at the same it is also a romantic tale of travel and adventure. The novel starts with two historical tales: the founding of Macao in the 1550s, by Portuguese soldiers and colonists, the fortress-trading city on the South Chinese coast, and back in Portugal itself, we get the story of Luís de Camões ("Camoens" in the novel), courtier and poet, author of the classic epic, The Lusiads. To this is added a story about a nameless 20th century Irish radio operator. This man works on a small ship steaming around Asia, and finally ends up in Macao. He describes himself as "the most rootless person alive." These two stories are then closely linked together by Slauerhoff. Much of what Camões felt and said appears again, as an after-echo, in the twentieth-century sections. Slauerhoff even goes so far as to drop hints that the 16th century Camões and the 20th century radio operator may be the same person! The radio operator recognizes places where he cannot have been before, his memories become a mixture of his own and those of Camões. At the end, like the 16th century poet, his highest wish becomes to be absorbed by the anonymous millions of China. Past and present merge as if a hidden passage through time has been opened. Read my full review.
Translation: Paul Vincent. Published by Pushkin Press (2012).

5. Ferdinand Bordewijk, Character (1938)
Ferdinand Bordewijk (1884-1965) was a lawyer and novelist who wrote in a violent style reminiscent of New Objectivity. Karakter (Character) is his most famous novel. It tells the story of Katadreuffe, a clerk who is struggling to work his way up in society, but who is time and again blocked and even bankrupted by his biological father, the formidable Rotterdam bailiff Dreverhaven. Dreverhaven is a massive man who enjoys evicting the poor from their houses or declaring people bankrupt. He knows no mercy. To challenge his enemies, he has his office in one of the darkest and poorest areas of Rotterdam, but although he is generally hated, nobody dares stick a knife in his back. At the end of the book, in a final confrontation with the son, the father declares that he has in fact worked for his son - by putting obstacles in his way, he has made his son "a man of character." But there is no reconciliation, as Katadreuffe exhibits the negative side of a strong character - he is unable to love others or even connect to them. Katadreuffe finds success, but not personal happiness. Character is also a great portrait of pre-war Rotterdam where the drama is set. Character was filmed in 1998 by Mike van Diem. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in that year. Read my full review.
Translation: E.M. Prince (Ivan R Dee; 1st Elephant Pbk., 1999)

6. Gerard Reve, The Evenings (1947)
In The Netherlands, Gerard Reve (1923-2006) is considered as one of the three greatest writers of the postwar period, together with Hermans and Mulisch. However, he remains completely unknown abroad. His greatest novel and one of the best novels ever written in The Netherlands, had to wait until 2016 before its first English translation finally appeared. Set during the last ten dark days of 1946 in Amsterdam, the story of The Evenings revolves around Frits van Egters, a young man who lives at home with his parents, whom he finds annoying and embarrassing. Each of the ten days is the object of one chapter, and as Reve skips the time Frits spends as a clerk in the office, we indeed get descriptions of his "evenings," plus his time off on Sundays and Christmas. Frits spends his free time by withdrawing to his bedroom and doing nothing, listening to the radio, or visiting friends, whom he tries to provoke and challenge. Central themes in The Evenings are loneliness, boredom, disillusionment, lack of self-esteem, social isolation and the cynicism of the protagonist. Although Frits has several friends, he is in fact very lonely, as the conversations he has with them are generally superficial and unimportant, even nonsensical. The relationship Frits has with his parents, and especially his father, is plainly bad - although he also hides his love, which becomes apparent in the conclusion of the novel. He is also suffering from repetition compulsion: he regularly has to look at his watch, cannot stand pauses in conversations and has an obsessive fear of the future, especially the process of aging and physical decline - baldness is an important subject in his conversations and he studies his own scalp every night in the mirror. He delights in reminding his brother, who is only a couple of years older, that his hairline is already receding. According to most interpretations, Frits van Egters' character primarily reflects the problems of the generation that had matured during WWII, when the Netherlands was for five years occupied by the Nazis, and of whom many came dazed and without faith or ideals out of that war. The novel may strike one as gloomy and cheerless, even negative and cynical, as it did readers in the 1950s, and also me when I first read it in high school. But reading it again after several decades, I now enjoyed the grotesque and liberating dark humor that peppers the whole novel. The author has a sharp eye for absurd and poignant details. Perhaps because I don't live in Holland anymore and am not bothered by the dark and gray weather described in the book, I only registered the comical effects, which are made stronger thanks to the businesslike style of the author, setting down even the smallest things in detail. Also funny is the solemn and needlessly complicated idiolect Frits uses, even when talking to himself. This "ultimate book on the art of boredom" ends with a beautiful and moving epiphany when on New Year's Eve, Frits begs God’s forgiveness for mocking his parents so brutally.
Translation: Sam Garrett, Pushkin Press (2016)

7. W.F. Hermans, The Darkroom of Damocles (1958)
Both a dark wartime thriller and a metaphysical mystery, based on the doppelganger motif. During the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt is visited by a shadowy figure named Dorbeck, who looks exactly like a "positive mirror image" of himself - everything that is effeminate and weak in Osewoudt, is strong and manly in Dorbeck. Osewoudt is a man without beard growth and a high squeaky voice who is just a nondescript tobacconist in a suburb of The Hague, living with his mentally ill mother and an unattractive wife who is also his niece. He has no self-respect at all. Dorbeck instructs Osewoudt to execute a number of dangerous secret assignments on behalf of the resistance movement against the Nazis, including several killings. Although things quickly go awry, these violent actions give Osewoudt a feeling of dignity. After the war, Osewoudt is regarded as a traitor and captured. He is unable to prove that he received assignments from Dorbeck - Dorbeck has vanished completely and Osewoudt cannot even prove that his doppelganger ever existed: Osewoudt has taken a photo of himself with Dorbeck, but the film is empty. Hermans shows us the moral ambiguity prevalent in a society in the grip of war and chaos and the impossibility of heroism. In the darkroom of life in wartime, the sword of Damocles is always dangling above one's head. Read my full review.
Translation: Ina Rilke, published by The Overlook Press (2008)

8. Cees Nooteboom, Rituals (1980)
Although in the first place known as a travel writer (see my post about Roads to Berlin), Nooteboom has also created a fine novelistic oeuvre for which - strangely enough - he is more famous in Germany than in the Netherlands. The protagonist Inni Wintrop wanders the streets of the free "flower power" Amsterdam of the 1960s and 1970s, looking for meaning in the "wonderful, empty universe." He happens to encounter Arnold Taads and his estranged son Philip, who in a universe without god, are attempting to create their own meaning in life through rituals. We even have a Japanese tea ceremony here! Arnold Taads is rigidly tied to time, his son Philip in contrast tries to escape time through Zen-like rituals, and as regards Inni, "women had become his religion," but that also leads to complications: when his wife Zita leaves him for an Italian, he attempts suicide. "A parable about the importance of learning to ride the unpredictable waves of life in a universe devoid of God," as the website of the Dutch Foundation for Literature calls this novel. Read my full review. Another great book by Cees Nooteboom is the novella The Following Story (see my review).
Translation: Adrienne Dixon, published by Quercus, London (2013)

9. Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven (1992)
Huge novel containing all the themes that are important in Mulisch oeuvre. As mankind has discovered DNA and therefore the secret of creation, God wants to end his covenant and have the tablets he once gave to Moses returned to him. Events on earth are manipulated by a couple of angels so that two men (an astronomer and extrovert ertomaniac, Max Delius, and a withdrawn linguist who later turns politician, Onno Quist) and a woman (Ada Brons, who is a cellist) meet and a child (Quinten) is conceived who is to become the person who will find the Tablets and return them to Heaven. This setup results in many bizarre and humorous complications. The novel paints an interesting picture of Holland in the 1960s and after, before turning into a sort of Foucault's Pendulum with Raiders of the Lost Ark mixed in. In the two main characters, who are each other's opposites, the reader can recognize Mulisch (Max) and his friend, the chess master, Jan Hein Donner (Onno); it is also the first part of the novel dedicated to their story which is the most beautiful. Read my full review.
Translation: Paul Vincent, Penguin Books (1996)

10. Hella Haasse, The Tea Lords (1992)
When the trio of four great postwar authors is expanded to a quartet, it is usually Hella Haasse who is added to the team. Hella Haasse was of the same generation and also started writing in the years just after the war. Hella Haase was born in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and won fame with the novella The Black Lake (Oeroeg), which came out in 1947. It is a Bildungsroman about an anonymous narrator growing up on a plantation in the Dutch colony, who has a childhood friend of native descent; the story describes their inevitable estrangement as time goes by. Is friendship between a Dutch colonial and an Indonesian child possible and can they really understand each other? Besides colonial themes, Hella Haasse excelled in historical novels, such as In a Dark Wood Wandering, a novel of set during the Hundred Years War and focusing on the mad Charles VI, the brilliant Louis d'Orleans, Joan of Arc, Henry V, and, most importantly, Charles d'Orleans, a poet and scholar who suffered decades of captivity in England. Equally famous became The Scarlet City, set in 16th c. Italy and bringing to life the Borgias, Machiavelli and Michelangelo. But in my view her greatest achievement is The Tea Lords, a later novel in which she brings historical themes and the Dutch East Indies together. The story is based on family archives of the heirs and relations of the tea plantation owners featuring in the book, so there is a historical basis to it all. Protagonist is Rudolf Kerkhoven, scion of an established family of planters in Java, who after his studies in Holland, returns - young, idealistic, and ambitious - to the colony to be introduced into the mysteries of the tea trade. The core of the story is formed by Rudolf’s struggles to establish his own remote plantation in the jungle, so to speak hacking it out from the teeming undergrowth, in the damp uplands south of Bandung, and in his marriage to the resolute but troubled Jenny, daughter of another old-established Dutch dynasty in Java. The greatest strength of the novel is its atmosphere: a powerful sense of the overwhelming greenness of the Javanese countryside and the steaming jungle pervades the book. But empathy for plantation life does not mean that judgement on colonialism itself is suspended.
Translation: Ina Rilke, Portobello Books (2010)

11. J.J. Voskuil, The Bureau (1996-2000)
A series of seven novels (5,000 pages) called a "soap for intellectuals," filled with detailed descriptions of the daily affairs over a period of thirty years at the "Bureau for Dialectology, Folklore and Onomastics" (based on the Mertens Institute in Amsterdam where Voskuil himself worked for thirty years; the novels have a strong autobiographical component). One the one hand, the novels are a parody of academic specialization, on the other hand a demonstration of office politics. In that last respect, they mercilessly describe the petty irritations and teasing, the conniving and crawling that over the years take hold of people obliged to spend their days working together in a hierarchical setting. The academic satire is evident from the fact that Maarten Koning, the protagonist and Voskuil's fictional alter ego, is charged with research into the most obscure of folk traditions, such as the belief in elves, or the uses of scythes and harrows - nobody knows what purpose the research is meant to serve. Scene by scene and through vivid dialogues Voskuil builds up a picture of a surrealistic agency of which Kafka would be proud and gradually The Bureau itself emerges as the real main character. A classic of Dutch literature.
No English translation available; the novels have been translated into German.

12. Arnon Grunberg, Tirza (2006)
Arnon Grunberg belongs to the younger generation of Dutch writers. He wrote his first novel, Blue Mondays, in 1994. Two other novels, Phantom Pain and The Asylum Seeker, won the AKO Literature Prize (the Dutch Booker Prize). But his best novel is Tirza, about a father's obsessive love for his graduating daughter. This novel won another important literary prize and was also Grunberg's first novel to be made into a movie. As J.M. Coetzee has written, it is a novel filled with "wit and sardonic intelligence." It is the hilarious and tragic story of Jörgen Hofmeester, a man who had it all according to bourgeois norms: a beautiful wife, two intelligent daughters named Ibi and Tirza, a nice house with a garden in an upper-class neighborhood of Amsterdam, a respectable job as editor for a publishing house, and a large sum of money stashed away in a Swiss bank account earned by renting out part of the big house without informing the tax office. But during the preparations for his beloved daughter Tirza's graduation party we come to know what Hofmeester has lost: his wife has left him (and now come back after three years to harass him), Ibi has broken off her university course to start a bed-and-breakfast in France, Hofmeester has been laid off at the publishing house and his Swiss savings have evaporated due to hedge fund speculation. So he has only Tirza left, the apple of his eye... but Tirza tells him she is leaving on a trip to Namibia with her new North-African boyfriend Choukri. Hofmeester is shattered when she disappears on that holiday, and travels to Africa to search for her, but the heat, his drinking and bad memories combine to unhinge him. Finally, in a surprising conclusion we discover the beast that had all the time dwelt within him. Grunberg is an even stronger nihilist than W.F. Hermans - again and again he shows us how thin the veneer of civilization is.
Translation: Sam Garrett, Open Letter Books (2013)

Previous posts in Best European Novels:
Austria - Germany & Switzerland

"Sir Vidia's Shadow" by Paul Theroux (Non-Fiction)

2017-05-03T10:17:00.000+09:00

Sir Vidia's Shadow, written in 1998 by Paul Theroux, is a fascinating account of a mentor-disciple relation between two unusual men, the authors Paul Theroux (the disciple) and V.S. Naipaul ("Sir Vidia"; the mentor). The book details how that long friendship started, how it developed when the disciple became a successful author in his own right, and how it ended when Naipaul gave Theroux the boot. Theroux's reaction was typical: he started writing the present book, as he felt liberated, he says - he finally had come out from under the shadow of his mentor.

The friendship began in 1966 in Uganda. Theroux was then 25 and teaching at Makerere University, Kampala, after originally having come to Africa (Malawi) for the Peace Corps. While enjoying the African continent and the free life, he was also trying his hand at poetry and magazine articles. Naipaul was about ten years older and the already famous author of five novels including A House for Mr Biswas, and several non-fiction works as his account of India, An Area of Darkness. He came to Uganda for six months as "writer in residence." The two soon met and Theroux, who spoke the language and drove a car, became Naipaul's guide and interpreter, while Naipaul coached him in writing - having him rewrite an article almost ten times.

Theroux provides a good portrait of the brilliant but eccentric Naipaul, but also of himself as an ambitious starting writer. We see Theroux literally at the feet of the idolized older artist, studying his work in detail and listening to the smallest scrap of advice. Theroux also proofread the book Naipaul was then working on, The Mimic Men. Naipaul in his turn gave the young Theroux the confidence to continue writing and later helped him find a publisher.

“Friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness. I needed Vidia as a friend, because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer.”

When Naipaul left Uganda and returned to the U.K., Theroux soon visited him during the Christmas holidays, staying with Naipaul and his wife Pat. And when Theroux moved on to a University job in Singapore, he kept up a frequent correspondence with Naipaul, what he himself calls a "correspondence course in writing."

In 1972 Theroux settled down in the U.K., where he would remain for the next decades - in 1967 he had married an English woman whom he had met in Uganda; they had two children. This gave Theroux the chance to meet with Naipaul again, although not very frequently as both writers were also busy world travelers and on top of that, Naipaul lived in rather remote English countryside. After Theroux himself became famous thanks to the publication of The Great Railway Bazaar, which was published in 1975, the relation started to change subtly as both men had become more like equals - they also started drifting somewhat apart and in Theroux's opinion, Naipaul became more moody and self-important. Theroux also became more financially successful than Naipaul, although according to general critical opinion Naipaul is in a higher class - he not for nothing received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

The end came in 1996, when Naipaul snubbed Theroux in the street, apparently angered by Theroux's attitude towards his second wife, a Pakistani journalist he had unexpectedly married. Theroux felt deeply hurt (something which shows in the last two chapters, which are a bit venomenous and self-pitying), but was also free to write Sir Vidia's Shadow.

Is it a good book? In general, opinions are sharply divided, but I would say yes, it is a fascinating Johnson-Boswell account, difficult to put down. On the whole, I think Theroux writes truthfully - this is not a tale of sour grapes or dirty laundry. Theroux greatly admires Naipaul as an artist and that shows through on every page. Theroux does in this book what he does best: he is not a superb stylist or deep thinker, but he excels in sharp observations (the African scenery!) and memorable characterizations, here in the first place of his subject, V.S. Naipaul.

By the way, all bitterness is now out of the air again, as both authors have shaken hands in 2011 at the instigation of Ian McEwan.

[This is a revision of a post written some years ago]

Best Non-Fiction

Art

(Auto-) Biography

Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux

Culture

Getting Wet by Eric Talmadge

Food & Drink

Modern Japanese Cuisine by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka

The Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson

History

Legends of Tono

Literature

Memoirs

The World of Yesterday by Stephan Zweig

Music

Philosophy

Daodejing

Zhuangzi

Religion

The Empty Mirror by Jan-Willem van de Wetering
Japanese Pilgrimage by Oliver Statler

Science

Travel

The Inland Sea by Donald Richie
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Roads to Berlin by Cees Nooteboom
Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck

This list consists of posts on two of my websites: Japan Navigator and Splendid Labyrinths. My non-fiction list excludes books that are scholarly or too specialist.

Best Classical Music for Christmas

2016-12-25T20:01:00.002+09:00

When hearing the term "Christmas music" you are perhaps in the first place reminded of the tunes that are piped through muzak systems in shopping malls, restaurants and other public places already from November on - tunes you have heard so often that you really don't want to hear them again. But as Christmas was an important feast within the church year, there is also a great and long tradition of beautiful classical music specially composed for celebrating the season.

[The Annunciation to the Shepherds, by Abraham Hondius, 1663]

Here are my favorite pieces of classical music for Christmas:

1. Thomas Tallis, "Puer natus est nobis"(1554)
Thomas Tallis is considered as one of the greatest composers of choral music in England. The seven-part Christmas Mass "Puer natus est nobis" was written during the reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor who had restored the Roman rite. The elaborate mass is based on the plainchant of the same name. The cumulative effect of the polyphony with seven voices has an almost hypnotic effect. This substantial music must have been written for a special event and scholars think that it was the visit Philip II of Spain made around Christmas Day 1554 to England to marry Queen Mary. There is also a double meaning to the title of the mass, for English Catholics hoped Queen Mary would soon bear a son. Her reign, however, was as cruel as that of her husband Philip II with his Inquisition: in the 5 years Mary was on the throne, she had 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake - so much for the spirit of Christmas. In 1558 - a;ready ill - she died during an influenza epidemic and was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth I, who reversed her policies.

2. Heinrich Schütz, Weihnachtshistorie (1664)
This music was a revelation to me when I heard it for the first time: from the opening sinfonia it is filled to the brim with good will and joyousness. As in Bach's Passions, there is an Evangelist who sings in accompanied recitative and tells the Christmas story, but the work really comes to life through its great lyrical moments. There are eight such interludes, corresponding to moments of direct speech by characters in the story. Each of them is highly individual, from the shepherds to the Three Wise Man and even Herod.

[Nativity scene by Gerard David, 1495]

3. Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Pastorale sur la naissance de N.S. Jésus-Christ (1684)
The French Baroque composer Charpentier wrote various pieces of Christmas music, including a full Mass (Messe de Minuit pour Noël) for Christmas Eve. Charpentier wrote two Pastorals for Christmas - this is the second one (H.483); the other one (H482) is for smaller forces. The Pastoral was popular in France since the 1660s, as a combination of the Bible story with ancient Greek bucolic literature (although the usual love story between shepherd and shepherdess is of course skipped). The Pastorale sur la naissance de N.S. Jésus-Christ consists of seven scenes and follows the story of the shepherds in the fields, the annunciation by the angels and finally the adoration of the child in his straw cradle.

4. Arcangelo Corelli, Concerto No 8 in G Minor "Christmas Concerto" from Twelve Concerti Grossi Op. 6
Several Italian Baroque composers as Vivaldi, Torelli and Manfredini wrote "Christmas concertos" for performance on Christmas Eve, but the very best is the above concerto by Corelli. It has the usual pastoral elements without getting cloying. Instead of the usual fast movement, the concert ends with a Pastoral. In fact, all twelve Op 6 concertos by Corelli are fantastic, so do yourself a favor and listen to them all!

5. Johann Sebastian Bach, Christmas Oratorio (1734)
The Christmas Oratorio consists of six cantatas that were performed consecutively on Christmas Day, Second and Third Christmas Day, New Year's day, the Sunday after New Year and on Epiphany. As I have written in detail about these cantatas in my series about the Bach cantata, I will here only refer to those older posts (starting with the first cantata "Jauchzet, frohlocket" for Christmas Day). Bach's Christmas Oratorio is the best Christmas music ever written and for me Christmas is not complete without listening to this beautiful and joyous music. (Bach wrote more beautiful cantatas for Christmas, these are all discussed in my blog).

[The Adoration of the Shepherds by Guido Reni, 1640]

6. Georg Friedrich Handel, Messiah (1741)
Strictly speaking, Handel's Messiah, although now often played in the Christmas season, is not really Christmas music: it was originally meant for Easter, and the Christmas story only takes up small part of the whole oratorio. But today it has become customary among choral societies to perform the Messiah, just like Bach's Christmas Oratorio, around Christmas. The oratorio starts in Part I with the prophecy by Isaiah, and moves to the annunciation to the shepherds (the only scene based directly on the Bible): the shepherds are introduced by an instrumental Pastorale, the Pifa, which takes its name from the shepherd-bagpipers, or pifferare, who played in the streets of Rome at Christmas time. The music is in swinging time and resembles a lullaby - here we have some real "Christmas music." This part concludes with reflections on the Messiah's deeds. Part II covers the Passion in nine movements including the oratorio's longest movement, an air for alto He was despised. This part is concluded by a scene called "God's Triumph" which culminates in the "Hallelujah Chorus." Part III of the oratorio concentrates on Paul's teaching of the resurrection of the dead and Christ's glorification in heaven.

7. Georg Telemann, Christmas Oratorio "Die Hirten an der Krippe zu Bethlehem" (1759)
This double cantata has been called the "best Christmas cantata after Bach." It is tenderly expressive, imaginative and joyous. The text is by the Berlin poet Ramler, and Telemann's music responds with expressive warmth and irresistible charm. It is work of noble simplicity starting with a harmonization of the Latin carol In dulce jubilo. There are in all twelve movements; of outstanding beauty are the "Shepherd's Song" (with an interesting bassoon part) and the bass aria "Hirten aus den goldnen Zeiten." Trumpets and drums add their luster where necessary in this bright piece of music.

8. Johann Baptist Vanhal, Missa Pastoralis in G Major (1782)
Mass written to performed on Christmas Eve. The pastoral style in 18th c. music is characterized by simplicity and rustic charm; also such devices as a drone bass and a yodeling pattern are employed. Unlike the Baroque number mass, the Missa Pastoralis is cast in six major movements, with a central contrasting section in the long Gloria and Credo movements. There are no arias and set-pieces, but the soloists are employed to delineate new ideas. The use of pastoral elements is sophisticated and effective, promoting a coherent musical unity for the whole Mass cycle. And the melodies are simply very beautiful, too.

9. Joseph Leopold Eybler, Christmas Oratorio "Die Hirten bei der Krippe zu Bethlehem" (1794)
Eybler was a pupil of Albrechstberger and a contemporary of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Besides chamber music works, he mainly wrote religious music. This oratorio has the same title as the one by Telemann, but the text used is a different one and it is longer: there are eighteen movements. The basic mood is cheerful and there are various delightful musical pictures. There are two divisions; at the center of each stands a meditative quartet. Arias placing high demands on the singer prepare for the concluding chorus in each part. The concluding chorus of angels in Part One is a gentle siciliano; the concluding chorus of Part Two has strong dynamic contrasts and ends with a finely crafted fugue.

[Czech nativity scene]

10. Jakub Jan Ryba, Czech Christmas Mass (1796)
This is delicious folksy music, telling the Christmas story in a rural Bohemian setting, in Czech, and that all in the frame of a Mass. The music contains characteristic short melodic motifs and colorful rhythms inspired by Czech folk music. Because of its folk character and simplicity, it was excluded from the Catholic liturgy, but it iwa nonetheless often performed. The mass consists of nine parts. The opening part (Kyrie) begins with a popular verse "Hey Master, get up quickly," with a young shepherd waking his master. The Gloria celebrates the birth of Christ; in the Graduale shepherds assemble people from all lands for a pilgrimage to Bethlehem, where the visitors finally plead with Christ for the protection of all people.

11. Hector Berlioz: L'enfance du Christ (1853–4)
L'enfance du Christ is an oratorio by the French composer Hector Berlioz, based on the holy family's flight into Egypt. Berlioz wrote his own words for the piece. Berlioz described L'enfance as a "sacred trilogy." The first of its three sections depicts King Herod ordering the massacre of all newborn children in Judea; angels warn Joseph and Mary to flee and save their child. The greatest aria of this part is the one by Herod, expressing his inner despair as he is tormented by a recurring dream of a child who will overthrow him. Herod is accompanied by trombones just as Méphistophélès was in The Damnation of Faust. The second part shows Joseph and Mary setting out for Egypt with the baby Jesus. Here we have the most famous part of the oratorio, L'adieu des bergers ("The shepherds' farewell"), which is often performed separately. The final section portrays their arrival in the Egyptian town of Sais where they are given refuge by a family of Ishmaelites. The work concludes with a serene movement for tenor and choir.

[Cornelis Massijs - Arrival of the Holy Family in Bethlehem, 1543]

12. Camille Saint-Saëns: Oratorio de Noël (1858)
Saint-Saens' Christmas Oratorio is somewhere between a cantata and an oratorio: the size is compact, but the structure is that of the larger oratorio. Most of the work is lyrical and contemplative in character. Saint-Saens wrote this work when he was only 23. The work is in ten movements, a prelude followed by nine vocal numbers. The pastoral prelude, for strings and organ, is in "the style of Bach," harkening back to Bach's Christmas Oratorio, evoking images of shepherds tending their flocks in the fields. In the other movements, the vocal soloists take turns representing different characters from the Christmas story. In the Ninth movement the melody from the prelude comes back. The final movement is a hymn of praise of all creation in the presence of God. Saint-Saëns' study of the choral music of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Berlioz had a great influence on the work.

13. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker (1892)
This ballet, based on a story by the German author E.T.A. Hoffman, is primarily performed during the Christmas season, as the story is set on Christmas Day and features a Christmas party and the exchange of presents - the protagonist Clara receives as a wooden nutcracker carved in the shape of an ugly little man from her godfather, the councilman and magician Drosselmeier. In her dream this nutcracker will come alive as a handsome prince and lead her to his fairyland. I watched this ballet yesterday again after a long time and must say that it very well captures the Christmas atmosphere (or perhaps our idea of the ideal Christmas atmosphere has been influenced by this ballet). It is very popular, major American ballet companies are said to generate around 40 percent of their annual ticket revenues from performances of The Nutcracker alone.

[Adoration of the Shepherds, by Gerard van Honthorst, 1622]

14. Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols (1942)
A choral piece scored for three-part treble chorus, solo voices, and harp (no orchestra!), written for Christmas. There are eleven movements; the texts are in Middle English. The piece was written in 1942 while Britten was at sea, going from the United States to England. Originally conceived as a series of unrelated songs, it was later unified into one piece with the framing processional and recessional chant in unison based on the Gregorian antiphon "Hodie Christus natus est," heard at the beginning and the end. The first movement is sung by the sopranos alone. The second movement is an upbeat and festive piece intended to welcome the audience as guests coming to celebrate the holiday. The next few songs are about the child Jesus. The 7th movement consists of a harp solo, creating a sense of angelic bliss. Movement 8 has an interesting echoing effect. After a Deo Gracias, the last movement mirrors the first one, this time by exiting the stage.

15. Arthur Honegger, Une Cantate de Noël (1953)
This was the last work by Swiss composer Honegger. The cantata, for mixed chorus, baritone solo, children's chorus, organ and orchestra, is in three parts. The first part describes the chaos in the world before the advent of the Messiah ("De Profundis"). The second part consists of a potpourri of melodies of famous Christmas songs, as Silent Night, etc. The third part is a solemn chorus (Laudate Dominum) ending in a finale by the orchestra which again takes up the dissonances from the beginning of the cantata.

16. John Adams, El Niño (2000)
A two-hour opera-oratorio for five soloists, large adult chorus, children's chorus and sizable orchestra by the American Minimal composer John Adams. It retells the Christmas story, with the first half focusing on Mary's thoughts before giving birth in Bethlehem, and the second half covering the aftermath of the birth, Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the early life of Jesus. But Adams presents his material in an unconventional way. Mostly avoiding Biblical texts, he sets the Magnificat, extracts from the Apocrypha, a medieval carol, a mystery play, and several poems by Latin American women authors. His switch to a female, non-European perspective brings unusual nuances to the familiar story. Another aspect is that Adams mirrors the slaughter of the Innocents by Herod (see No 10, Berlioz, above) with an account of a massacre in Mexico City in 1968. A nativity with a sharp contemporary twist.

Best Twentieth Century Operas (5): Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Die tote Stadt (1920)

2016-12-16T10:13:00.003+09:00

Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) is the last of the great fin-de-siecle Viennese operas, first performed in 1920 in Vienna and Hamburg. The city in the title refers not to Vienna, but to Bruges in Belgium, as the libretto written by Korngold with his father, the music critic Julius Korngold, was based on a major (but now forgotten) novel by the Belgian Francophone author Georges Rodenbach (1855-98). This book, entitled Bruges-la-Morte, is a melancholic story about an obsessive love over the grave: a man is obsessed with the memory of his deceased wife and tries to mold a dancer, who uncannily resembles her, after his wife, with tragic results (note that the same idea was later taken up in the film Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock!).

[Scene from the opera, 2015 Graz - Photo Wikipedia]

Bruges-La-Morte is the iconic Symbolist novel. The movement in poetry, music and the visual arts, developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, centered on the idea that the truth in art could only be represented indirectly (thus discarding Realism and Naturalism). This could be done by writing in a metaphorical and suggestive manner, thus endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. It is an art which is elusive and shuns direct utterance. It seeks half-tones rather than strong colors. But it is also characterized by a certain mysticism and a preoccupation with death, with swans and lilies, and an obsession with woman's hair (as in the Symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy, where Mélisande's abnormally long hair, longer than her whole figure, is fetishized). The same hair fetish occurs in Die tote Stadt (see below).

The initial setting is the same in both novel and opera. The main character is Hugues (called Paul in the opera), a young widower who, distraught at his wife's death several years before, has moved to Bruges. Bruges (in Flemish: Brugge), once the major trading city of Belgium (and today a bright tourist attraction), in the 19th century had become a dead town, dreaming of the past amid the mystic peace of its churches and cloisters, and for Hugues/Paul the desolate cityscape with its dark and stagnant canals symbolizes his own mood. There he sits brooding among the relics of his beloved dead wife (called Marie in the opera) – her clothes, her letters and portraits, and most importantly, a length of her long blond hair kept almost religiously in a crystal casket.

[Scene from the opera, 2015 Graz - Photo Wikipedia]

In this way, he has erected an altar of sorrow and remembrance to his wife. Hugues/Paul has no occupation and rarely leaves the house. His only activity is a daily walk through the deserted and dusky streets of the old town, under the shadows of the ancient walls, listening to the bells of the many churches, often longing himself for death, hoping to meet his beloved in a new life beyond the grave. It is a situation halfway between reality and dream. The memory of his wife monopolizes his every thought and deed. In fact, he is in the thralls of a morbid and unwholesome cult.

But then chance brings an ambulant opera troupe to the city, among whose members is a dancer named Jane Scott (Marietta in the opera), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife, especially as regards her long, yellow-gold hair. Hugues/Paul seeks contact with the dancer and is surprised to discover that even her voice is similar to that of his deceased wife. Confused, he transfers the feelings for his dead wife to the new Jane/Marietta, and dreams to renew an ideal union. He imagines that the dancer has been brought to him by the intervention of supernatural forces.

Here novel and opera libretto part company. In the novel, Hugues courts Jane and is briefly happy, although his romance with her is in fact scandalous (in the 19th c. operatic dancing girls were virtually prostitutes). She becomes his kept mistress, and he rents a room in the suburbs for her where he pays daily visits; he also has her give up her profession. But of course, no two people are similar and Hugues soon discovers that the character of the new woman is very different from that of his deceased partner: for one thing, being who she is, she is far coarser. She mocks him when he asks her to wear his dead wife's dresses, as these have become too old-fashioned. His infatuation also has become the scandal of the town and sets numerous tongues wagging. The final scene plays out in Hugues' house. An annual religious procession, the Procession of the Holy Blood, will make the rounds of Bruges and also pass by Hugues' windows, so Jane begs to be allowed to visit his house to watch the event. Jane comes for the first time to his house, and is interested in the portrait of his wife (“She looks like me”), without realizing what she is seeing. When finally she dares touch the precious coil of hair, just when the procession is passing, and jokingly winds it around her neck, Hugues in a frenzy strangles her.

[Paul and Marietta in a scene from the opera, 2015 Graz - Photo Wikipedia]

Perhaps because the novel was considered too scandalous for bourgeois sensibilities, in the opera the relation between Jane/Marietta and Hugues/Paul is presented as a vision, a dream brought about by Paul's ecstatic mood upon seeing a woman who looks like his dead wife. Although in his dream he sees her true character as she appears surrounded by her many lovers, she still manages to fascinate her weak admirer, conquering him with a beautiful Lute Song. When she later visits his home, full of the relics of his dead wife, she wants him to embrace her just at the moment when the religious procession (as in the novel) passes by. Paul is appalled at her lack of piety. Next Marietta snatches up the relic, the golden strand of the dead woman's hair, winds it around her neck, and begins to dance. Frantic with rage as Marietta desecrates what he holds most sacred, Paul flings himself upon her and strangles her with the strand of hair. Here the vision ends. Paul wakes up only to see Marietta stand in front of him - in reality, she has only now for the first time arrived at his house - but he sends her away as the vision has cured him of his infatuation. He even decides to leave Bruges, the dead city.

The opera consists of beautiful, elusive music and is the supreme masterwork of the then only 23-year old composer. Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was an Austro-Hungarian composer who astonished the musical world as a composing wunderkind. Mahler proclaimed him a genius at age nine (!), after which he started lessons with Alexander von Zemlinsky. Korngold wrote orchestral music, piano music and chamber works, besides songs and operas.

Die tote Stadt was a great hit, and it made a triumphal tour around the world – until the Nazis forbade it as Jewish music, while the immediate postwar generations were only interested in twelve-tone music. The lavish Straussian music brings out the tension between sexual desire and ideal aspiration, decay and death, and shifts from gloomy orchestral interludes to high-soaring song.

Forced out of Austria by the rise of Nazism, in 1934 Korngold moved to Hollywood where he became a pioneer in composing film scores - along with Max Steiner and Alfred Newman, he is one of the founders of film music. His serious music (which includes a beautiful Violin Concerto) was considered out of vogue at the time he died, but is now experiencing a reawakening of interest, and Die tote Stadt is also again staged in opera houses today.

The opera Die tote Stadt by Erich Korngold is available on DVD (Dynamic) with Stefan Vinke as Paul and Solveig Kringelborn as Marietta/Marie, the Orchestra e Coro del Teatro La Fenice with Eliahu Inbal as conductor and choreography by Pierre Luigi Pizzi.

Twentieth Century Opera: (1) Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy (2) Salome by Strauss (3) Die Gezeichneten by Schreker (4) Der Zwerg by Zemlinsky (5) Die tote Stadt by Korngold (6) Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky (7)

Best European Novels (2): Germany & Switzerland

2016-12-12T15:01:00.000+09:00

Although earlier novels exist, such as the picaresque Thirty Year War novel Simpliccimus, the German novel only really gets under way with Weimar giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who, although in the first place poet and playwright, also wrote three important novels: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), an epistolary novel about an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide; Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795), the first German Bildungsroman (novel of self-cultivation); and Elective Affinities (1809), which will be treated below.

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was also in the first place a playwright; he wrote one novel, Michael Kohlhaas, but also a number of intriguing short stories, of which I include the somewhat strange and uncanny The Marquise of O... below.

The fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) were very influential during the whole 19th c., being adapted into such ballets as Coppelia and The Nutknacker, as well as Schumann's piano work Kreisleriana. Hoffmann was one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. The Sandman is a short story that not only introduces the horrific titular character, but also brings a woman who is in reality an automatic doll on stage. It was one of the core texts studied by Freud in his essay "The Uncanny."

The 19th c. saw few novel writers in Germany, in contrast to France and England; most of 19th c. Germany fiction was truly the territory of the novella and the short story with such authors as Tieck, Von Chamisso, Von Droste-Hülshoff, Von Eichendorff, Mörike, and others. They were not pure realists as Flaubert, but wrote in a romantic style that has been called "poetic realism." I have below selected Theodor Storm (1817-1888) and his novella The Rider on the White Horse as an example. Usually considered as Storm's masterpiece among his in total 50 novellas, through its setting on the North German coast it sets the stage for the battle of man versus nature - the dykes and the sea -, while creating an unnerving, superstitious atmosphere with the haunted white horse and its ghostly rider.

Germany's greatest 19th c. novelist who brings Germany at long last into the European realistic tradition was Theodor Fontane (1819-1898). Born in Prussia, Fontane was a journalist (and for many years correspondent in London) and drama critic, who only at age 57 wrote his first novel. His in total 15 novels are mostly about modern life and are characterized by ironic humor and fluent dialogues. It is regrettable that from this major European author almost no English translations are available. Besides Effi Briest treated below, major works are Irretrievable (like Effi Briest, about a failed marriage), On Tangled Paths and Der Stechlin.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was without a doubt Germany's greatest novelist of all time. His ironic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual, as well as his analysis and critique of the European and German soul. Three of his novels, Buddenbrooks (about the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of four generations), The Magic Mountain (about a Swiss sanatorium as a microcosm of the ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilization) and Doctor Faustus (the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during WWII) have been included in "The Ten Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century" as selected by 99 authors, critics and scholars. One of his many novellas, Death in Venice, became extra famous through the excellent film by Luchino Visconti. In 1929 Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Another Nobel Prize winner was Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), who, although a very respected author in Germany, achieved world fame only after his death as his books were taken up by the 1960s counterculture (hippie) movement. This was in particular with such novels as Siddharta, with its quest-for-enlightenment theme, or Narcissus and Goldmund. The "magic theatre" sequences in Steppenwolf were interpreted by some as drug-induced psychedelia, although Hesse never used substances. His last work, a dystopian novel called The Glass Bead Game was arguably his best. All his novels explore the individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) was a prolific author and important representative of Modernism in Germany. He is best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (see below). Despite the canonic status of that work, Döblin can be called an under-recognized author; although his work has received increasing critical attention in Germany over the last few decades, he is little known in the English language area and too few of his novels have been translated. (Berlin Alexanderplatz is currently unavailable in book form in English).

Anna Seghers (1900-1983) was famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War as her major theme. As she was Jewish, she emigrated in 1934, and after the war returned to what soon became East Germany, where she received many prizes for her work. Besides The Seventh Cross, another important novel was Transit Visa, about Jewish people trying to escape Fascist Europe.

Günter Grass (1927-2015) was the greatest German novelist of the postwar period, and another German Nobel Prize winner. Grass is best known for The Tin Drum (see below), a key text in European magic realism. His works often have a left-wing political dimension; in his fiction he also often returned to the Danzig of his youth. The Nobel prize committee praised him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history." Other important works are Cat and Mouse, The Flounder (about the roles of and struggle between men and women, from the Stone Age to the present time) and Crabwalk.

Christa Wolf (1929-2011) was one of the best-known writers to emerge from the former East Germany and was instrumental in establishing a distinct literary voice for that part of Germany. She also experimented with prose styles. Besides her best known work, The Search for Christa T. (see below), she is also known for Kassandra, a reinterpretation the battle of Troy as a war for economic power and a shift from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society, and Kein Ort. Nirgends about the fictional meeting of the German poet Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderode.

Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) was a member of Gruppe 47 and, together with Heinrich Böll and Günther Grass, is counted as one of the three greatest authors of the generation that started to write immediately after WWII. His early work is often about the division of Germany. He uses a difficult and discontinuous style, with sudden shifts of time and perspective. His magnum opus is the tetralogy Jahrestage (1971, 1972, 1973, 1984). Use Johnson is virtually unknown outside Germany.

That is not the case with Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), as he is another German Nobel Prize winner and has been translated in more than 30 languages (all the same, it is difficult to find an English translation of his work today). Many of his novels and stories describe individuals struggling to sustain themselves against the wider background of war, terrorism, political divisions, and profound economic and social transition. Sometimes his protagonists are stubborn and eccentric individualists opposed to the mechanisms of the state or other public institutions. His best-known works are Billiards at Half-past Nine (1959), And Never Said a Word (1953), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971) and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974, see below). While his early novels usually treat WWII, his later work draws a grim picture of postwar German society.

Peter Weiss (1916-1982) earned his reputation as the proponent of an avant-garde type of meticulously descriptive writing, and as an exponent of autobiographical prose. As a politically engaged dramatist, he gained international success with his play Marat/Sade. Weiss' magnum opus was the novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, called the "most important German-language work of the 70s and 80s." He was also active as a painter and experimental filmmaker. Again, an author who today is almost completely unknown outside Germany.

Happily, that cannot be said about W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), who lived and worked as a university lecturer in Norwich in the U.K. Sebald came late to literature and is especially known for his four postmodern prose fictions: Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001). They combine memoir, fiction, travelogue, literary criticism, history and philosophy in a new form of prose fiction, and are all written in a haunting style with sentences that sometimes meander over several pages.

When we look at German-language Swiss literature, we have to mention four authors. Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854) was a pastor and novelist about the Swiss countryside; he is especially remembered for his nightmarish, allegorical novella The Black Spider (see below).

Gottfried Keller (1819–1890) is best known for his novel Green Henry as well as the short stories collected in The People of Seldwyla. Although he is one of the most popular narrators of literary realism in the late 19th century, nothing of his oeuvre is in print in a modern English translation.

That is different for the Modernist Robert Walser (1878-1956), who has received some welcome attention in recent years. Walser has been called "the missing link between Kleist and Kafka." He was unsuccessful during his lifetime, and even forgotten, until he was rediscovered in the 1970s. His work has influenced contemporary authors as Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek and W.G. Sebald. Representative novels are Geschwister Tanner, Der Gehülfe and Jakob von Gunten.

The best postwar author from Switzerland, and one of the most important writers of the German language sphere, was Max Frisch (1911-1991), whose works are shot through with irony and who focused on problems of identity, individuality, and responsibility. He was also active as an important playwright and practiced the diary as a literary genre. His major novels are Stiller (1954, I'm Not Stiller - see below); Homo Faber (1957 - about an engineer whose rational ideology is shocked by wildly unpredictable events after crash-landing in the Mexican desert); Montauk (1975); and Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979, Man in the Holocene - a chillingly beautiful portrait of a man who, surrounded by nature's erosion in the Swiss mountains, suffers from loss of memory due to senility).

The best German novels are:

1. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O... (1808)
A disturbing novella about a young widow who one day finds herself pregnant without having a clue as to how that could have happened, and advertises in the newspaper for the father of the child to present himself for marriage - this all to the dismay of her highly respectable family! The man who appears is a Russian count, who during an attack at the citadel of her father, saved her from a gang of Russian soldiers... She can't believe it... [tr. Penguin Classics]

2. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Elective Affinities (1809)
An elusive book: even Goethe's contemporaries didn't know how to explain it - was the great author in this tragic story of persons attracted to each other as by some natural force, against which nothing helped, pleading in favor of marriage or rather against it? The novel was even misunderstood as a metaphorical argument for the chemical origin of love (as in the tendency of chemical species to combine with certain substances in preference to others)! Written in a detached, even august tone (the principal characters always maintain the strictest decorousness, no matter how strong their feelings) and composed with well-balanced care, the novel itself is an expression of Weimar Classicism, a movement inspired by the humanistic, classical art of Greece and Rome, of which Goethe was the foremost proponent. [tr. Penguin Classics, Oxford World's Classics]

3. E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman (1816)
Based on the mythical character who kindly puts children to sleep by sprinkling magical sand onto their eyes. Hoffmann turned this on its head by making the Sandman into a sinister character. According to Nathanael's (the protagonist) nurse, he throws sand in the eyes of children who will not go to sleep, so that the eyes fall out and can be collected by the Sandman. The protagonist of the story grows to associate this nightmarish creature with the sinister figure of his father's alchemist associate Coppelius, who may be responsible for the sudden death of the father. Later in the story Coppelius reappears in the guise of Coppola, an Italian trader in lenses. He has a collaborator called Spallanzini, with whom he has built the lifelike automaton Olimpia - the doll is passed off as Spallanzini's daughter and Nathanael falls in love with her - with a terrible result. [tr. Penguin Classics]

4. Theodor Storm, The Rider on the White Horse (1888)
The life story of an ambitious and intelligent young dyke master, who wants to make various improvements to his dyke, not only for safety but also to win new land. The backward villagers, however, obstruct his efforts and in this unenlightened universe, a great man pays with his life for his pride and creativity - a very pessimistic conclusion, were it not that his achievement - the new dike - survives his death. The dyke master, in the meantime, has in death merged into the legend of a rider on a haunted white horse, galloping along the dyke through night and fog. [tr. New York Review Books]

5. Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (1896)
The novel of an impossible marriage that ends in failure: 17-year old Effi Briest is paired by her parents with 38-year old Baron Geert von Instetten, who of all things had been the unsuccessful suitor of the mother! This is all the more wrong as Effi is not only still a child, but also has a childish character. When her stiff, strict and humorless husband is away, Effi has a fling with a Major who is visiting the desolate coastal town. She herself forgets about this short infatuation, but when her husband six years laters find her letters to the Major, he kicks his wife out of the house and kills the Major in a duel! As a "fallen woman," Effi even looses her child to her husband, and her parents avoid her for the social stain attached to her. In the end, German society with its petrified moral concepts, will crush her life. [tr. Penguin Classics]

6. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901)
The saga of four generations of a merchants' family from Lübeck (based on Mann's own family history), which inevitably declines as younger generations are more interested in art than in business. The exploration of decadence in the novel reflects the influence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. The Buddenbrooks of successive generations experience a gradual decline of their finances and family ideals, finding happiness increasingly elusive as values change and old hierarchies are challenged by Germany's rapid industrialization. Germany's most enduringly popular classical novel, an intimate portrait of 19th-century German bourgeois life. [tr. Vintage International]

7. Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
Combining autobiographical and psychoanalytic elements, the novel was named after the lonesome wolf of the steppes and it reflects a spiritual crisis of the author through the portrayal of the protagonist's split between his humanity and his wolf-like aggression. As a journalist, Harry Haller is critical about developments in Germany during the interbellum, but he is also a wolf of the steppes who hates human sentiment. Via various magic-realistic events Harry realizes that he is not a being with only two sides, black and white, but that he, like all human beings, combines hundreds of persons and characters in himself. [tr. Penguin Modern Classics]

8. Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)
The story of a murderer, Franz Biberkopf, who is drawn into the underworld after his release from prison. Biderkopf has to deal with misery, lack of opportunities, crime and the imminent Nazism typical for Germany during the 1920s. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on, he realizes that he will be unable to extricate himself from his environment. Berlin Alexanderplatz is known for its Modernist use of montage, being told from multiple points of view, and using sound effects, newspaper articles, songs and speeches to propel the plot forward. Was included among the top ten German novels in the poll mentioned above. Also made into a great television series by German director Reiner Werner Fassbinder. [tr. Kindle edition via Amazon, no print available]

9. Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross (1939)
The novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was soon translated and inspired a Hollywood film in 1944. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, available during the war itself. [tr. Verba Mundi Books]

10. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959)
The novel is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, who is born in 1924 in Dantzig. Although his brain is already completely developed at birth, through sheer force of will he stops growing from his third year, which enables him to observe the world from the perspective of a child, without having to participate in it (or take responsibility). This maniacal drumming midget can also shatter glass with his voice and drum grownups into a trance. When the war breaks out Oskar pretends to be insane, so that he is not responsible for the terrible things that happen. The novel is strongly political in nature, but there are also elements of magic realism. Initially considered as blasphemous and pornographic, the bawdy, earthly but also serious novel is now a solid part of the canon and considered as one of the top ten German novels. [tr. Mariner Books]

11. Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1968)
When Christa T. dies, her grieving friend tries to prevent her from disappearing into oblivion by recreating the life of this very individualistic woman based on the letters and diaries she has left behind. The narrator's / author's way of searching for who Christa T. was, turns also into a way of thinking about herself. [tr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux]

12. Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries - from the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (1970-83)
Only the first volume of this large novel was ever translated and you are lucky if you can still find it. In this magnum opus Johnson tells via diary entries about the present life of a German single mother in Manhattan, Gesine Cresspahl, who has fled from East Germany, intermingled with her memories about her childhood during the Weimar Rebublic, Nazism and the beginning of the Cold War. [tr. Mariner Books]

13. Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974)
From a literary point of view this is not Böll's greatest novel, but it is his most famous, also thanks to the film by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. The story is told as a documentary, a confidential report to the reader on the basis of sources, about the panicked political climate over Red Army Faction terrorism in the 1970s, fanned by the tabloid press. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter who depicts her as a Communist, an atheist and a whore, and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love turns out to be wanted by the police as a terrorist suspect. A strong condemnation of the misrepresentation of facts which has stolen the honor of Katharina Blum (something happening daily in our "postfact" present). [tr. Penguin Classics]

14. Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-81)
So far only volume 1 has been published in English of this huge 3-volume novel. It is a historical novel that dramatizes anti-fascist resistance from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the end of WWII. The protagonists are young working-class students who seek ways to express their hatred for the Nazi regime. They meet in museums and galleries, and in their discussions they explore the affinity between political resistance and art, the connection at the heart of Weiss's novel. The novel includes extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature. [tr. Duke Univ Pr]

15. W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992)
The Emigrants consists of four short biographical narratives and forms the record of the narrator's research into the memories, traumas and feelings of foreignness of four "displaced persons;" it is at the same time a post-modern fictional investigation into the relationship between memory and history. Unavoidably, that history is the impact of WWII and the Holocaust on Germans, especially those of Jewish heritage. It is a sign of Sebalds' mastery that the word "Holocaust" is never mentioned in the book, but that we feel its ominous present on almost every page. [tr. Vintage Classics]

The best Swiss novels are:

1. Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider (1842)
Gotthelf's best known work, an allegorical tale about a monster spider that devastates a Swiss valley community - first as the result of a pact with the devil born out of need, and a second time due to the moral decay that releases the monster from its prison again. The story is a parable of good and evil, in which evil is painted in glaring colors - both evil in the heart of human beings and evil rampant in society. It is also a vision of cosmic horror in the style of Lovecraft, or, as Thomas Mann interpreted it, as a sort of foretelling of the horrors of Nazism. [tr. New York Review Books]

2. Gottfried Keller, Green Henry (1855 / 1879)
Green Henry is one of the most important "novels of self-cultivation" in the German language, the life of Heinrich Lee from childhood through his first romantic encounters, his fledgling attempts at becoming a painter in Munich, and his eventual installation as a chancery clerk. The story gets its name from the color that Heinrich liked to wear. Unfortunately, there is no modern English translation of this book. [tr. Overlook Books]

3. Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten (1909)
The narrator, Jakob von Gunten, is a young man who runs away from home and decides to spend the rest of his life serving others. To this end, he enrolls at the Benjamenta Institute, a school for servants, but once there, he receives very little education, except learning humility. Walser based the novel on his own experiences: after arriving in Berlin in 1905 he attended a school for servants and later worked as a butler. Jakob von Gunten has something of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, but he is also like Barnabas and Jeremias, Surveyor K.'s demonically obstructive assistants in The Castle by Franz Kafka (who very much liked Walser's writings). [tr. New York Review Books]

4. Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller (1954)
A novel about the question of identity. The narrator, travelling on an American passport with the name White, is arrested on arrival in Switzerland and accused of being the missing Swiss sculptor "Stiller." He persistently denies, but visiting friends and acquaintances also identify him as Stiller - even Stiller's wife! Later the reader will discover that White and Stiller are in fact one and the same person. [tr. Mariner Books]

[This post incorporates some phrases from Wikipedia about the various authors and novels. All images also from Wikipedia.]

"The Other Side" by Alfred Kubin (Book Review)

2016-12-06T14:38:00.000+09:00

In my overview of the Austrian novel, I forgot to include one very interesting book, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin, a great example of European fantastic fiction.

One day, the anonymous narrator of the story receives a surprising visitor, who has come to give him the following message: "Claus Patera, absolute master of the Dream Kingdom, has sent me as his agent, to invite you to move to his country." As Claus Patera was an old school friend of the narrator, he accepts the invitation and travels with his wife to Pearl, the capital of the Dream Kingdom, which is situated somewhere deep in central Asia. But the dream is soon the become a nightmare... this is not a Shangri-la story.

When this decadent, expressionist novel, with the German title Die andere Seite, appeared, it was greeted enthusiastically by Expressionist and Surrealistic artists, not least of all by Kafka himself.

The author Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was a Symbolist and Expressionist graphic artist, who wrote this fantastic novel set in an oppressive imaginary land - his only literary work - in 1908. Born in Litoměřice, in the Bohemian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kubin studied painting in Munich, where he became interested in the prints of Max Klinger. In 1911, he joined the Expressionist Blaue Reiter group. He is known for his dark, spectral fantasies, often grouped into thematic series of drawings; he also illustrated books by Poe, Hoffman and Dostoevsky - illustrations he originally made for The Golem by Gustav Meyrink were in fact used for The Other Side. Kubin was also a life-long friend of Paul Klee.

[Dolmen by Alfred Kubin, c. 1902]

Kubin started his career just when Freud published “The Interpretation of Dreams,” and it is clear he made a careful study of dreams himself. His black-and-white drawings have been called "a guide into the shadowy corners of the unconscious." The same is true for The Other Side, where the Dream Kingdom becomes the setting for a hallucinatory vision of a society founded on instinct over reason. The novel culminates in a dizzyingly surrealistic apocalypse. What started as a utopia, soon becomes a dystopia and then a terrible cataclysm - the narrator is the only one who escapes to tell the tale.

Kubin wrote this novel in only twelve weeks, working day and night, when he suffered from a blockage to draw. Finishing the novel left him with new confidence as an artist.

There is little plot in the novel, although it starts out as an adventure story; the main element is the description of the dream city Pearl and its collapse.

The city of Pearl is protected by a great surrounding wall. The whole town consists of old houses, transported here from all over the world, and filled with antique furniture. The inhabitants also dress in the clothes of a previous generation. All have been summoned here by Patera because of some psychological quirk, such as hysteria, or a mania for gambling, or a physical peculiarity such as a hunchback or a huge nose.

There is no sun in this grey city, but only a filtered twilight. The narrator finds employment as illustrator to a newspaper, but fails to contact his school friend Patera, who hides behind an impenetrable bureaucracy, as the ruler in Kafka's The Castle. His rule is challenged by a newcomer, an energetic American millionaire, Hercules Bell, and finally the struggle between these two factions will take down the city in blood and nightmare. The narrator - whose wife has died miserably - barely escapes with his life.

How should we read The Other Side? There are various possibilities:

- As a satire on the Austro-Hungarian state: for example, the description of the city as wholly consisting of antiquarian buildings and objects could be seen as a critique of a country that is severely behind the times. Interestingly, the ruler, Claus Patera, rules his country via the dreams of the people, and via hypnotism. The name Patera = Pater = Father suggests authoritarianism and also Austro-Hungary was governed by an emperor who was a father-figure and who was getting more and more antiquarian with his advancing high age. Kubin's description of the absurd bureaucracy is reminiscent of Kafka's in The Trial and The Castle, two novels also inspired by nightmarish elements in the Habsburg state.

- As a satire on reactionary, idealist utopianism evident in German thought in the early 20th c. Everybody in the dream-realm is under a sort of irrational spell, but it is not easy to see what that spell exactly is.

- The novel also contains a satire on American capitalism, in the figure of the above-mentioned Hercules Bell, who challenges Patera with industrialization and modernization, but who also brings insecurity, deracination and destruction.

[Alfred Kubin in 1904]

Although written in a matter-of-fact style, the novel is filled with an atmosphere of gloom, doom and threat. Kubin aptly uses dream symbols and dream situations, such as the scene of a blind mare galloping along a tunnel in the dark, threatening the narrator. The Other Side is a wild ride, filled with memorable visions.

The culmination of the novel is a great literary feat, an apocalypse with plagues of insects, mountains of corpses and orgies in the street. The houses literally decay and fall apart, the city is overrun by all sorts of wildlife, dissolving into the primal and decadent. In the end Patera and Bell merge into a terrible double monster, that then gradually dissolves. Kubin was not for nothing in the first place a painter and we see here echoes of such art works as Pieter Brueghel's The Triumph of Death. It all ends with a downpour of filth, entrails, body parts and carcasses of beasts and men.

Best European Novels (1): Austria

2016-12-01T16:57:00.003+09:00

For a start, we should clearly delineate the Austrian novel, on the one hand because most Austrian literature has been written in German so that it is often considered as "(pan-)German literature" (in the same way that Irish literature is often amalgamated with English literature), and on the other hand because Austria today only is the rump state of what until the end of WWI used to be a large multicultural empire that encompassed many different nationalities, leading to such discussions as whether Kafka is a Czech or Austrian writer. So here we go with our definition: the "Austrian novel" refers to German novels written in the Austrian Empire (created in 1804 out of the realms of the Habsburgs), its successor (since 1867) the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the present-day federal Republic of Austria, with its various predecessors (since 1919).

In contrast to classical music, the most important art form Vienna knew, the novel flourished relatively late in Austria and there are only few important 19th c. authors. The greatest of them is without a doubt Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), who was the last representative of Biedermeier culture, but with a twist, for his novels and stories also have a weirdness and uncanniness that undermines small-bourgeois morality. Stifter influenced Thomas Mann and W.G. Sebald and it is time more of his novels are translated into English, besides Rock Crystal introduced below, also such works as Der Nachsommer or Das alte Siegel.

The fin-de-siecle saw a great flowering of culture in Vienna and at this time literature, too, finally came into its own. For starters, from this period we have two important writers who were born in Prague and about whose "nationality" many discussions rage. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), who traveled all over Europe and died in Switzerland, was in the first place a writer of intensely lyrical verse, but he also wrote one great novel: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a semi-autobiographical story written in an Expressionist style.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) needs no further introduction, except perhaps why I consider him as an Austrian writer: Kafka was born in Prague in a Jewish family at the time that Bohemia was part of the multi-cultural Austro-Hungarian Empire; he spoke and wrote in German. In other words, he was part of the German-speaking, Austro-Hungarian culture in Prague (about 10% of the population), not of the Czech population. Below, I have selected his novella The Metamorphosis as this is a perfectly chiseled work, even finer than his novels.

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) has been introduced in several other posts in this blog (his short stories, his novel The Road into the Open) and is again an author who deserves to be much better known in English. In his stories and plays he shows great psycho-sexual insight, applying his colleague-doctor Freud's insights about dreams and the subconscious in his stories. Schnitzler was also one of the first writers to use stream of consciousness techniques, so that he could demonstrate what went on in that subconscious. Below I have selected his novella Dream Story which is a perfectly balanced work, but I also would like to call attention to such stories as Fräulein Else (a stream of consciousness story about a young woman who is sexually blackmailed when her family suddenly falls into poverty) and Doctor Graesler (who is afraid to marry a strong-willed woman although she can help him set up his own sanatorium), as well as the above-mentioned novel, which gives a wonderful panorama of Viennese society in the fin-de-siecle.

To the circle of Schnitzler also belonged the journalist Karl Kraus and playwright Hugo von Hoffmansthal - the last one wrote a famous short story, "The Lord Chandos Letter," in which he voices the fin-de-siecle crisis of language, as a medium no longer suitable to give expression to the human experience.

In interbellum Austria (now the small country of today) literature continues strong and we find several giants, in the first place Robert Musil (1880-1942), the writer of the influential modernist novel The Man without Qualities (unfinished, the third volume was published posthumously). The novel, set just before WWI, is a detached commentary on the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, an event satirized with heavy irony. Musil is also known for his much earlier Bildungsroman, The Confusions of Young Torless, in which we see a prefiguring of Fascism among orderly pupils who shamelessly abuse a classmate by night.

Another giant is Hermann Broch (1886-1951), whose The Sleepwalkers consists of three linked novels which portray different cases of ''loneliness of the I'' stemming from the collapse of any sustaining system of values (see below). Another great novel is the difficult The Death of Virgil, which in a hallucinatory way reenacts the last 18 hours of the Roman poet Virgil. It ends with the conclusion that poetry is immoral in an age of decline.

While Musil labored in obscurity, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was that rare combination, both a great and a popular author, who became especially famous after publishing his novel Job. His greatest novel is, without a doubt, The Radetzky March (see below), which reflects the glory and (especially) fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the fate of the Trotta family. In the 1930s his work became increasingly filled with melancholic nostalgia for the lost imperial state, which had given a true home to many central Europeans, especially Jews. Roth himself became a wanderer, trekking from hotel to hotel, addicted to alcohol. He finally died in Paris after finishing his novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker about the epiphany of an alcoholic vagrant.

Elias Canetti (1905-1994) was born in Bulgaria, but he lived most of his life in Austria and Switzerland (although he finally became a British citizen). His chosen language was German. He wrote only one novel, Auto-da-Fe (see below), written and set in Vienna in 1935, and is further known for a trilogy of autobiographical memoirs of his childhood, and for Crowds and Power, a study of crowd behavior as it manifests itself in human activities ranging from mob violence to religious congregations. Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power."

Vienna-born Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was one of the most popular European authors of the interbellum. His novels, stories, plays and carefully researched biographies (Zweig in fact wrote more non-fiction than fiction) were translated in countless languages. He is also known for his interesting memoir, The World of Yesterday. His only novel, Beware of Pity, is discussed below. Zweig also wrote opera libretti for Richard Strauss (as did the above-mentioned Hoffmansthal).

The period after the war is colored by Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), Peter Handke (1945), and Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek (1946), who, besides novelists, are also important playwrights.

Thomas Bernhard is Austria's greatest postwar author, known for his dislike of his own country - he attacked the Austrian state as "Catholic-National-Socialist." His work typically features long monologues or rants about the state of the world and it also deals with the isolation and self-destruction of people striving for an unreachable perfection. Bernhard wrote 13 novels and 3 novellas. Important titles are Gargoyles, The Lime Works, Correction, The Loser and Wood Cutters.

Peter Handke was an enfant terrible and member of the avant-garde group Gruppe 47. He also wrote plays in which the actors do nothing but insult the public. His novels are more traditional. His best work is The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (see below), almost a psychiatric case study about anxiety. Other novels are Short Letter, Long Farewell, The Left-handed Woman and Repetition. Handke has also written many film scripts and is known for his collaboration with the well-known German director Wim Wenders.

Elfriede Jelinek, too, is a controversial author who has been accused of providing "hysterical portraits of Austrian perversity." She is a communist and feminist; female sexuality, sexual abuse, and the battle of the sexes are prominent topics in her work. Her most approachable novel is The Piano Teacher, which was filmed by Michael Haneke (see below); other typical titles are Lust and Greed. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."

The best Austrian novels (and novellas) are (in historical order):

1. Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal (1845)
Mythical story about two children from an Alpine village who get lost in the mountain snow, becoming trapped among the rock crystals of a frozen glacier. With majestic descriptions of nature and a beautiful epiphany, when at night the snow clears and they find themselves looking from the heart of the void at a discharge of electric flashes in the sky. [tr. New York Review Books]

2. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
This book, written and set in Paris, consists of 71 fragmentary notes, almost individual prose poems. We are inside the fragmented consciousness of a would-be poet who is trying to create art out of his impressions of a hostile city. Rilke addresses existential themes, such as the quest for individuality, the significance of death, and anxiety and alienation in the face of an increasingly scientific and industrial world. Rilke was also influenced by Nietzsche. [tr. Penguin]

3. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)
A perfect absurdist novella about iron "German" discipline (even after he wakes up as an insect, Gregor still worries he will be late for his office) and propriety (the family is ashamed of insect Gregor, as if he had a terrible illness), as well as appalling cruelty, not only from the hands of the father, but also Gregor's "dear sister." [tr. Penguin]

4. Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story (1925)
A doctor and his wife, seemingly happy in a harmonious marriage, are both tormented by unfulfilled desires and dreams, leading to alienation and a crisis. The doctor, Fridolin, has a nightly adventure which symbolizes a voyage of discovery into his own psyche. In the end, he realizes the danger of the subconscious for his relation with his wife, and strives to overcome it. [tr. Penguin]

5. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (1930-43)
Monumental novel of more than 1,700 pages in three volumes - and even then, unfinished. A "story of ideas," and at the same time a very ironical view of Austrian society just before WWI. Officially, the novel is set in the capital of a fictitious European country named "Kakanien," a name derived from the German abbreviation K und K ("kaiserlich und königlich" or "Imperial and Royal“) for Austria. Musil remarks about Kakanien: "By its constitution it was liberal, but the system of government was clerical. The system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen." Introduces many bizarre characters from Viennese life. [tr. Vintage]

6. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (1931-32)
Hermann Broch's novel, The Sleepwalkers, is one of the most remarkable works of modern times. It follows the transformation of Central Europe from its last fin-de-siècle glory to its post-World War I decline. The first part of this epic trilogy is about a neurotic army officer (set in 1888); the second about a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be political assassin (set in 1903); and the final part tells the story of an opportunistic war-deserter (set in 1918). Each of the three parts is written in a different style to reflect the different plots: from a gentle parody of Fontane in the first volume through modernistic, essayistic segments in the last part. A prophetic portrait of a world tormented by loss of faith, morals and reason. [tr. Vintage]

7. Josef Roth, Radetzky March (1932)
The rise and fall of three generations of the Trotta family, concentrating on the youngest and last member, Carl Joseph, paralleled by the glory and subsequent disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire in which they live and serve - in other words, the passing of the Old Europe into the modern world. See my extensive review. [tr. Overlook Books]

8. Elias Canetti, Auto-de-Fe (1935)
Called Die Blendung in German (“Bedazzlement”), this 550 page thick novel was published in 1935 in Vienna, Canetti’s hometown at the time. It is one of the central novels of the first half of the 20th century, with Ulysses and novels by Kafka, Proust, Musil, and Mann. It is an apt allegory for the conflict between the lonely, reflective mind and reality. Sinologue Kien is only interested in his books and leads a secluded life. The world is lodged in his head, and his head is not interested in the world outside, which he grotesquely and routinely misinterprets. When in a moment of insanity he marries his housekeeper, he is faced with the chaos of “normal” life — with tragic consequences, resulting in a terrible struggle that will be fought with all means available. [tr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux / The Harvill Press]

9. Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity (1939)
As a fiction author, Stefan Zweig is best known for his melancholy short stories; this is the only novel he published. A young lieutenant stationed before WWI at the edge of the large Austro-Hungarian empire, is invited to the home of a wealthy local landowner. There he makes the painful mistake of asking the crippled daughter for a dance. Gradually, pity and guilt will implicate him in a well-meaning scheme, where he promises to marry her when she is recovered (hoping that this will motivate her to take a certain treatment). But tragedy follows when he denies the engagement in public. [tr. New York Review books]

10. Peter Handke, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970)
A modern classic that portrays the self-destruction of a murderer in ways that recall Camus' The Stranger. The mental breakdown of a soccer goalkeeper / construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a sleepy Austrian border town after murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier. Handke's fractured language deftly mirrors the disintegrating state of mind of the protagonist. [tr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux]

11. Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher (1983)
Erika Kohut, a piano teacher in her late thirties who teaches at the Vienna Conservatory and still lives in an apartment with her very controlling mother, finds an outlet for her repressed sexuality in voyeurism and sadomasochism. Then one of her students, a handsome seventeen-year-old, becomes enamored with her and sets out to seduce her. Jelinek's very sarcastic look at the relation between the sexes as a mirror of society finally leads to perversity and violence. Haneke's film, with a wonderful performance by Isabelle Huppert is faithful to the book; only Erika's seducer is constructed in a more friendly way than in the much more sardonic novel. [tr. Grove Press]

12. Thomas Bernhard, Wood Cutters (1984)
The narrator has been invited to an "artistic dinner" for a famous actor and sitting in a wing-backed chair apart from the other guests, sipping champagne, in one long torrential rant he dismantles the hollow pretentiousness and cruelty at the heart of the Austrian bourgeoisie. Bleak, but also comically nihilistic. Possible Bernhard's best performance. Bernhard has been called "the missing link between Kafka, Beckett, Michel Houellebecq and Lars von Trier," and a great practitioner of the literature of alienation and self-contempt. [tr. Vintage]

Best Twentieth Century Operas (4): Alexander Zemlinsky, Der Zwerg (1922)

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We saw in our previous post that Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) had ordered an opera libretto about "the tragedy of the ugly man" from his colleague Franz Schreker, but that Schreker became so fascinated by the story that in the end wrote his own music for it. Zemlinsky's interest in this this topic stemmed from the fact that he had enjoyed a passionate love affair with his pupil Alma Schindler, which - perhaps because it was never consummated - had been a two-year long emotional roller-coaster. But in 1902 Zemlinsky experienced the most shattering set-back of his life when Alma, who was to have been his Muse, decided against him and in favor of marriage to the famous (and twenty years older) Gustav Mahler, now calling her former lover "a comical figure, a caricature, chinless and short, with bulging eyes." But for many years they would move in the same circles in Vienna and instead of becoming his muse, Alma Mahler would haunt Zemlinsky's music like a bad dream, starting with his death-obsessed symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid).

[Alexander Zemlinsky - Image Wikipedia]

Next, Zemlinsky's unfulfilled longing resurfaced even stronger in another work, an opera he wrote after a verse drama by Oscar Wilde: Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy). Like Schreker's Die Gezeichneten, this opera is set in Renaissance Italy. Completed in 1916, it brings a love triangle on stage between a Florentine cloth merchant, Simone, who upon his return home from a business trip finds his young wife Bianca entertaining the handsome nobleman Guido. Simone suspects he has interrupted an affair, but as he has actually not caught the lovers doing anything wrong (although there is a peculiar atmosphere), he edges on Guido by treating him as a customer for his precious fabrics and ornaments (which he sells him at an exorbitant price), forcing Guido and Bianca all the time to maintain a pretence of propriety. In other words, Simone is a clever, manipulative man with a sadistic streak that reveals itself in the cat-and-mouse game he plays with the lovers. When Simone leaves the room for a moment, Bianca and Guido quickly embrace and Bianca urges her lover to kill her husband. Simone comes back and now a duel with swords begins between the two men. Against expectation, Simone kills Guido and, in another surprising twist, Bianca finds her love for her husband rekindled by his martial exploits - even at the expense of her lover! Husband and wife reunite in a passionate embrace over the lover's dead body. "Why did you not tell me you were so strong?" she asks, to which he responds, "Why did you not tell me you were so beautiful?" One could call this a rather extreme way to bring fire back into a stale marriage!

[Alma Schindler - Image Wikipedia]

In this short opera, Zemlinsky was in fact pointing at two triangular love affairs among people close to him. The first one was Alma Mahler's infidelity with the architect Walter Gropius, not long before Mahler's death - Zemlinsky had lost his youthful love to Mahler, but as Mahler was also his sponsor and friend, he strongly took Mahler's side. The other one involved an affair of his sister, who was married to Arnold Schoenberg - her lover committed suicide after the relationship failed and she returned to her husband.

The Florentine Tragedy, however, was just a step up towards Zemlinsky's final "denouncement," his own story of "the ugly man," in the form of The Dwarf, another opera based on a story by Oscar Wilde. The Dwarf derives its power from the fact that it was a masochistic self-portrait of the composer, who was regarded as physically repellent not only by Alma Mahler as we saw above, but also by his family and friends. The tragic opera is about the cruel treatment of a repulsive but tender-hearted creature. This dwarf, in a cage, is presented to the Infanta of Spain, among many other wonderful presents, on her 18th birthday. The dwarf, who has no idea how ugly he is, is entranced by the beauty of the young Spanish princess. She plays along with him in a deliberately cruel way, even when her companions warn her not to go too far. The dwarf sings her a song of love, imagining himself as a brave knight. She toys with him and gives him a present of a white rose. Then she leaves him. Left on his own, the Dwarf accidentally uncovers a mirror and for the first time sees his own reflection, realizing how ugly he is - his new sense of self-awareness destroys his sense of self-worth (a case where "Know Thyself" is not beneficial; perhaps we sometimes need our illusions in order to survive?). In great agitation, the Dwarf tries to obtain a kiss from the Infanta, but she spurns him, telling him he is a monster. His heart broken, the Dwarf dies clutching the white rose. The Infante, from her side, lets it be known that next time she wants a better toy, one without a heart, and returns to her dancing.

The music is characterized by a wonderful flow of glorious melody. The Infanta and her companions are depicted in unemotional, neoclassical music, while the music for the Dwarf is of course the emotional heart of the opera, with soft violins and chromatic harmony. As a theater work, The Dwarf is second to none of its contemporaries. It is dramatically taut and well-balanced, words and music are excellently wed. The orchestration is as brilliant and imaginative as anything by Richard Strauss or Gustav Mahler. Deformity, dangerous femininity and social alienation were of course common fin de siècle themes. And in its excessive self-abnegation, The Dwarf may have served as the final theatrical cure of Zemlinsky's obsession with Alma Schindler - who although she didn't become his official "Muse," still inspired much of his best music!

The Dwarf is a story of innocence destroyed, of impossible longing and desire for unobtainable love. The music is full of fin de siècle decadence, glittering sensuality and seductive charm. But like our previous composer, Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky suffered the misfortune of being pushed to the margins of musical history because he fell between two stools: for his conservative contemporaries he was too advanced, for the postwar radicals he was not advanced enough - and for fifteen years in between, his music was forbidden by the Nazis.

Zemlinsky was a typical product of the multiculturalism of the Habsburg Empire: his father was Slovakian, his mother came from a Sarajevo Bosnian-Jewish family. Zemlinsky trained at the Vienna conservatory and opera dominated his career both as a composer and conductor. In that last capacity, his star rose under the patronage of Gustav Mahler; after Mahler's death, Zemlinsky moved to Prague, where he was to remain for the next 16 years. These were his most happy years, when he also wrote the present two operas. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he lost his official posts and in 1938 fled to the United States, where he died in 1942, a forgotten and ill man. (Zemlinsky also wrote wonderful string quartets, see Best String Quartets Part 4).

Happily, the last 30 years have seen a re-assessment of Zemlinsky's lush fin de siècle music, including his operatic output. Although stage productions are rare, both The Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf have returned to opera houses and are often staged together as they neatly make up a full evening program.

Twentieth Century Opera: (1) Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy (2) Salome by Strauss (3) Die Gezeichneten by Schreker (4) Der Zwerg by Zemlinsky (5) Die tote Stadt by Korngold (6) Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky (7)

Best Twentieth Century Operas (3): Die Gezeichneten (The Branded) by Franz Schreker (1918)

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3. Franz Schreker, Die Gezeichneten (The Branded, 1918)

With its potent mix of love, violence and deformity, and a lush score, Die Gezeichneten is a typical opera from fin-de-siècle Vienna. Its composer, Franz Schreker (1878-1934), was a genius opera composer and libretto writer and it was in that last capacity that his fellow composer, Alexander Zemlinsky, asked him to write an opera libretto on the theme of "the tragedy of the ugly man."

Zemlinsky had a special reason to ask for this material, for he carried a love trauma with him: in 1900, Zemlinsky had fallen passionately in love with Alma Schindler, one of his composition students, who initially reciprocated his feelings, but then suddenly broke off the relationship to marry famous composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, within only two months of making his acquaintance. Zemlinsky's unappealing physical appearance and lack of success both seemed to play a role here, so he suffered a double psychological hurt. Rather tactless, Alma Mahler had called him a "hideous dwarf, chinless and toothless and always smelling of the coffee house." This humiliation festered on and led to the request for a libretto on the theme of masculine ugliness versus feminine beauty.

Schreker duly set to work, even though the request seemed a bit strange, but he became increasingly interested in tackling the musical setting for this weird story himself. Zemlinsky proved sympathetic to Schreker's wish (he would later write a new libretto himself called The Dwarf - see my next opera post) and renounced the project. And so Franz Schreker came to write Die Gezeichneten, an opulent work in which he contrasted outer deformity with inner beauty.

[Franz Schreker (Photo Wikipedia)]

The title contains an ambiguity in German: "zeichnen" means "to draw" but also "to mark out," so "Die Gezeichneten" refers both to those who model for artists and those who are marked out, or branded, by fate.

The story is set in 16th c. Genoa. The hunchbacked, crippled aristocrat Alviano Salvago (the man branded by fate) craves beauty as a compensation for his physical defects. On a small island near the coast he has created a park-like paradise of his imagination, a sort of Elysium (it reminded me of the story by Edogawa Ranpo called "The Strange Tale of Panorama Island"). But he doesn't set foot there himself, afraid to profane it with his ugliness. He wants to donate this island to the citizens of Genoa, but his aristocratic friends try to dissuade him. Unknown to Salvago, they secretly use an underground grotto on the island for orgies with young women abducted from prominent Genoan families, whom they abuse and even murder. Their leader, Count Vitellozzo Tamare, has let his eye fall on Carlotta Nardi, the beautiful daughter of the mayor, who is an accomplished painter; she also suffers from a weak heart and fears that excitement will kill her (making her another person branded by fate). Carlotta rejects Tamare, and instead approaches Salvago. She is fascinated by the ugly cripple and wants to "draw his soul," giving rise to confused feelings on his side, especially when she faints in his arms when her weak heart plays up. But after she has painted Salvago, she looses interest in him, even though she has promised to marry him...

In the last act Salvago has finally opened his island paradise to the citizens of Genoa, who are all visiting, awed by the beautiful things they see. Carlotta evades Salvago and wanders off alone on the island, right into the arms of the masked playboy Tamare, who entices her to the secret grotto. Salvago desperately seeks her, and finally discovers the underground cave, followed by the other visitors to the island. There he finds Carlotta, lying senseless on a bed (the excitement caused by Tamare's lovemaking has broken her weak heart), while Tamare boasts of his conquering abilities. Salvago stabs him to death. Carlotta awakens, Salvago rushes full of hope to her side, but with her dying breath she calls out Tamare's name. Salvago descends into insanity as the curtain falls.

This opera, written during WWI, has been called symbolic for a disintegrating society and the disorientation of modern man - something we perhaps are seeing again today. Die Gezeichneten is an extraordinary work, with extremely unsettling music that rarely lets one sense a genuine resolution of the constant dissonances.

It seems that the libretto also contains various cunning portraits of fin-de-siècle personalities - a painting incorporated in the libretto for example resembles one of Arnold Schoenberg's pictures (Schoenberg was also active as a painter).

Franz Schreker, who looked a little like Gustav Mahler, was one of the few young composers of his generation who refused to be overwhelmed by Richard Wagner. His first success had been “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound,” 1912), an opera set in the present-day about an ambitious young composer who in his search for the highest art neglects the woman who loves him, so that she descends into the dregs of society, not unlike Lulu later in Berg's opera. Unfortunately, Schreker had also been born at the wrong time, living exactly at the fracture of two periods: in his youth, Mahler ruled supreme, when he turned forty Mahler had been replaced by Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Although in the 1920s Schreker's operas were staged in all major Austrian and German theaters, by the time of his death he was almost forgotten. One additional reason was that his music was forbidden by the Nazis, as Schreker was partly Jewish - one of the many careers broken by the hate politics of 20th c. Europe. But his lush and decadent music had also gone out of fashion - in the 1920s, a new trend for neo-classical and more businesslike music broke through, as well as for jazz elements in classical music. Schreker was almost forgotten and for many years only the orchestral preludes to his operas could sometimes be heard. Happily, today a full revival is underway, bringing Schreker's operas again successfully to the stage after a hiatus of many decades.

Recording watched and listened to: Kent Nagano (conductor) and Nikolaus Lehnhoff (production) with Deutches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor, and Anne Schwanewilms (Carlotta), Robert Brubaker (Salvago), Wolfgang Schone (Lodovico), Michael Volle (Graf Tamare) and Robert Hale (Herzog Adorno) on Euroarts (DVD). In the first two acts, the singers crawl over the surface of a gigantic broken statue, lying amid Salzburg's Felsenreitschule stage. In Act III, in the island scenes, Lehnhoff shows us an orgy as from Kubrick's “Eyes Wide Shut.” This production is done in high style and vividly brings Schreker's world to life. To emphasize Salvago's difference from others, in this production he first wears women's clothes; when he has won the heart of Carlotta, he starts dressing as a man, but then she has no interest in him anymore.

Twentieth Century Opera: (1) Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy (2) Salome by Strauss (3) Die Gezeichneten by Schreker (4) Der Zwerg by Zemlinsky (5) Die tote Stadt by Korngold (6) Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky (7)

Max Ophüls (Great Auteur Directors 5)

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The German-French director Max Ophüls (1902-1957, real name Maximilian Oppenheimer) was a wonderful stylist of the cinema who used his endlessly mobile camera to tell nostalgic stories of doomed love and sexual passion.

Ophüls was born in Saarbrücken as the son of a Jewish textile manufacturer. He took the pseudonym Ophüls during the early part of his theatrical career so that he wouldn't embarrass his father if he failed. He first worked in the 1920s as actor and then theater director, staging about 200 plays, and made his first film in 1931.

The most acclaimed of his early films is Liebelei (1933), as several of his films based on a play by the great Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler. That same year, however, he had to flee for the Nazis to France where in 1938 he received citizenship. In his first French period (1933-1940) he made more than ten feature films, mostly romantic films and comedies.

In 1940 he had to flee again, now to the United States, where he experienced the same difficulties as other European directors to fit into the commercialized culture of Hollywood. It would only be in 1947 that he made his first American film (thanks to the help of Preston Sturges), to be followed by three more in the next two years. Two of these films are concise noirs; the best one is based on a story by Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman.

In 1950 Ophüls returned to France where he blossomed again and made his greatest films, four immortal masterworks, until his untimely death from heart disease in 1957: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955), his only film in color. In all, Ophüls made nearly 30 films.

His son, Marcel Ophüls, is a distinguished documentary-film maker.

Characteristic for Ophüls are the following elements:

1. Endlessly mobile camera
All his works feature brilliant long takes, distinctive smooth camera movements, complex crane and dolly sweeps, and tracking shots. In fact, Ophüls' flowing Baroque style of filming is like a Viennese waltz. In his own time, his style was sometimes criticized as "merely decorative," but now we see it has a clear thematic purpose, for example to record the contrast between the protagonists and their emotional problems and the hustle and bustle around them, where life goes on unfeeling. His opulent sets and glittering mirrors in the same way underline the unhappiness of his protagonists. In fact, Ophüls turned his camera into an extension of his characters, visualizing their interiority, adjusting every shot to their minds, desires and lives.

2. Films about women
Besides being the director of romantic regret, of the doomed love story, Ophüls is renowned for his sharply delineated female characters. Many of his films are narrated from the point of view of the female protagonist. In this sense, he made "women's films," but he far exceeded any stereotype of that genre, in fact he is working on the same level as Naruse Mikio and Mizoguchi Kenji.

The best films by Max Ophüls are:

Liebelei (1933)
The first characteristic film of the great director, based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler. A young lieutenant has an affair with a baroness but falls in love with a violinist's daughter (Magda Schneider, mother of Romy). Although he breaks with the baroness, her husband challenges him to a duel. He is killed and the girl commits suicide. Misplaced male honor leads to tragedy. Tinged with a forlorn mood unique to the director, this film is full of elements that we recognize as truly Ophülsian: settings like the opera house, the army barracks, the bachelor apartment; dances in cafés; a climactic duel, although, as in Madame de... and Letter from an Unknown Woman, we never see the actual killing; the theme of the choice between love and duty. And, at the heart of Liebelei is a woman, who is lured into the trap of fierce passion. This tender story of thwarted love also features several early examples of the director's magically gliding mobile camera.
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
The second film Ophüls made in Hollywood, a bittersweet melodrama. The film already exudes the grace, beauty and sensitivity characteristic of the masterworks he would make in the 1950s in Europe. The story, set in a nostalgic Vienna from around 1900, is loosely based on a story by Stefan Zweig. It is a joke from beyond the grave: a dying woman (Joan Fontaine) sends a long letter to a concert pianist (Louis Jourdan) who is about to flee Vienna to avoid a duel (and as he reads her long letter, he is prevented from leaving...). She has been her whole life in love with him, but was unacknowledged. The pair has crossed paths over many years, although the crossings never lasted more than a few hours. Still the woman, who appears saintly, has born the maestro's illegitimate child. This film has entered the canon and shows that personal expression was possible in Hollywood (though difficult).
Caught (1949)
Caught is one of the two noir films Ophüls made in the U.S., a concise, tense and mean little film, a criticism of capitalism run wild. Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes), a poor model, dreams of romance, pouring over fashion magazines with mink coats and waiting for her Prince Charming. Then she happens to meet cynical control-freak millionaire Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) - based on Howard Hughes, it is rumored - who marries her as a kind of joke, just to spite his psychoanalyst and to show her he controls her destiny. As a result, Leonora finds herself another piece of opulence stuffed in Ryan's Long Island mansion. On top of that, her husband has a psychotic streak. She tries to run away twice, but each time returns. When she is pregnant, her husband increasingly treats her like one of his many possessions. Struggling slum pediatrician Larry Quinada (James Mason) finally saves her from her Long Island prison, as she has a miscarriage brought on by Ohlig's violence. The film's title "Caught" not only refers to the marriage trap Leonora walked into, but more broadly to the wrong ideas that entrapped her: the materialistic view that money could be the source of all happiness.
La Ronde (1950)
Based on Arthur Schnitzler's notorious play about the vanity and fickleness of love in late 19th c. Vienna (see my posts on Schnitzler's novella Dream Story and his short stories). La Ronde presents a series of vignettes between two lovers, with episodes featuring one lover from the previous segment coupled with a new character, a sort of daisy chain structure. Anton Walbrook gives the performance of his life as the master of ceremonies who connects the various episodes. Ophüls shared Schnitzler's vision of the ferociousness of sexual desire, which plays havoc with human beings. But the director shows understanding and forgiveness for the foibles of humankind. We are all weak, so let's smile about life, instead of setting strict rules for others. There is also a bittersweet note, as all romantic illusions of love are shown to be false. At the same time, it is a nostalgic film about European elegance that had been swept away by two terrible wars. The beautiful waltz melody was composed for this film by the last scion of the Strauss family, the at that time 80-year old Oscar Strauss. Ophüls has also assembled a great talented French cast: Simone Signoret, Simone Simon, Gérard Philippe and Danielle Darrieux.
Le Plaisir (1952)
A triptych of stories drawn from the work of Maupassant and demonstrating that "pleasure" is not the same as "happiness." With Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux & Simone Simon. The first story ("The Mask") tells of a man who is so addicted to balls and women that he hides his aging face behind a mask - pleasure and youth. The opening sequence is an incredible tour de force of the camera, which follows the swirling beat of a 19th c. ball - typical for Max Ophüls in whose camera movements there is always a visual musicality. But the dancer collapses and is carried home, as the wild dance has become a Dance of Death. The third story ("The Model") is about a painter who falls in love with his model, then dumps her when he grows tired of the affair - the fatality of pleasure when it gives way to boredom. Desperate, she tries to commit suicide by jumping from a window and shatters her legs. But this sacrifice enables her to force the painter into marrying her... The second story, "The Maison Tellier," is the most elaborate, taking up about half of the film. It is about pleasure and purity: how Madame Tellier takes her "girls" (prostitutes) to the country for attending her niece's first communion. It starts with a virtuoso crane shot, inspecting the outside of a bordello and finally gliding into the Maison Tellier. The day trip in the countryside is beautifully filmed (Jean Gabin drives a cartload full of jolly whores, including Danielle Darrieux) and the church scene when all the prostitutes start to cry at the sight of the pure young girls is justly celebrated. We also are present at the ill-fated meeting between one of the prostitutes and the farmer. Ophüls looks with a gentle sense of humor at the proceedings.
The Earrings of Madame de... (1953)
A frivolous woman is transformed by true love. We only get to hear the first name of the heroine of The Earrings of Madame de... - her last name is withheld with a wink. Louise has been indiscreet and as is the case with offenders whose names are withheld in the papers, Ophüls replaces her last name as it were with a few dots or a dash. This films contains some of the best long mobile camera movements Ophüls is famous for: such as the sweeping take when Louise enters the jeweler's shop and ascends via an open staircase to the second floor - not to speak about the incredible dancing scenes with their circling camera. Or, on a different note, the scene where Louise is on a forced trip to the Italian lakes and sits day after day writing letters to her lover, only to confess later to him that she lacked the courage to mail her letters - we see those letters, torn into shreds, dancing in the air, and then turning into the snow falling in the next scene. The story is ingeniously organized around the circulation of a pair of earrings, a present given to Louise by her husband. When she needs money, she sells them back to the jeweler, and then, without knowing this, her lover happens to buy them for her again... The Earrings of Madame De... sets out as a simple comedy of errors but goes on to plumb surprising depths. More than that, like all great directors, in the visual compass of film, Ophüls manages to make life's inexorable flow almost tangible which leaves us as viewers a bit sadder, a bit wiser.
Lola Montès (1955)
Ophüls' only film in color, the tragic story of Lola Montès (Martine Carol), a great adventurer ("the most scandalous woman in the world") who becomes the main attraction of a circus after being the mistress of such famous men as the pianist/composer Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook). Taking its cue from La Ronde, we again have a master of ceremonies (Peter Ustinov), who narrates Lola's sensational career as she revolves on a platform in a New Orleans circus. Later the aging courtesan will perform a dangerous trapeze act, and finally the customers will be allowed to kiss her hand after spending a dollar. Ophüls fully employs the devices of circularity and repetition that characterize his late films, as well as the flamboyant cinematic style he had mastered across a lifetime. This is arguably the director's greatest film, a tragic masterpiece that is a summing up of all he stood for. But it failed both critically and at the box-office, which may well have contributed to Ophüls' untimely death in 1957.

References: The Rough Guide to Film (Penguin Group, 2007); Have You Seen...? by David Thomson (Penguin Books, 2008). IMDB, The Criterion Collection, Slant Magazine, Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal. Photos linked from Wikipedia. This series covers two blogs, Japan Navigator for Japanese directors and Splendid Labyrinths for non-Japanese directors.
1. Jean Renoir 2. Kenji Mizoguchi 3. Luis Buñuel 4. Yasujiro Ozu 5. Max Ophüls 6. Mikio Naruse 7. Luchino Visconti 8. Akira Kurosawa 9. Michelangelo Antonioni 10. Orson Welles (to be continued)

Luis Bunuel (Great Auteur Film Directors 3)

2016-06-17T10:39:00.002+09:00

Luis Buñuel is one of the most inventive film makers of the 20th century, a mild Surrealist who looked with wisdom and acceptance at the foibles of mankind. He saw that we are hypocrites who say one thing and do another, but in his view that doesn't make us evil. It is only human, part of the way we are. Buñuel's films have the power to shock, inspire, and reinvent our world.

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) started his career in the late twenties as an avant-garde enfant terrible, spent the thirties fighting Fascism in his native country, fled to the U.S. after Franco's victory and - not welcome in the U.S. with his "red" background - in the mid-forties ended up in Mexico as a director of commercial films. As these were quite successful, he was allowed to make some serious auteur films as well, enabling him to move back to Europe in the early sixties and there make his greatest films as "old master" of Surrealism.

Buñuel was born in a small town in Spain, which, as he often remarked, was culturally still stuck in the Middle Ages. He studied philosophy in Madrid and became friends with Salvador Dali, Frederico Garcia Lorca and other Spanish intellectuals. At the age of 25, Buñuel went to Paris, where he studied film with Jean Epstein and joined the Surrealist movement.

After that, Buñuel's working life can be divided as follows:

1. The Early Films (1928-1932)
In 1928, Buñuel wrote and shot the surrealist short film An Andalusian Dog with Salvador Dali, in only two weeks. Thanks to its opening sequence, of an eye being sliced by a razor, this became the most famous short film ever made. Two years later, Buñuel directed his first feature, L'Age d'Or, a scathing attack on the Church and hypocrisy, and this, too, became a succès de scandale. His third film was a fake documentary Las Hurdes (''Land Without Bread''), an account of Spanish villagers locked in poverty and ignorance, his last movie until 1946.

2. Film-less Interlude (1934-1946)
In his film-less interim, Buñuel dubbed American movies in Paris and aided the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. After the Fascists' victory, he fled in exile to New York, where he edited documentaries for the Museum of Modern Art.

3. Mexico (1946-1964)
Buñuel moved to Mexico in 1946 (where the film industry was at a high point) and began grinding out pot-boilers that proved so popular he was free to direct an occasional serious movie, starting with the 1950 street-gang drama Los Olvidados. I believe the years in Mexico were certainly not a lost period for Buñuel: after all, he had only experience directing two short films; in Mexico he finally learned the craft of film director. And he made some truly good films here, which are still underrated in his total oeuvre: Los olvidados ("The Young and the Damned," 1950); El ("This Strange Passion," 1953); The Criminal Life of Archibaldo Cruz (Ensayo de un crimen, 1955); Nazarín (1958); The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador, 1962); and Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto, 1965).

4. The Late Masterful Films (1963-1977)
There were eight of these; the first, Viridiana (1961), was made in Spain (and soon forbidden there for its anti-clericalism), the others from Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 1963) and Belle de Jour (1967) until his last film That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir, 1977) were produced in France. All of these later films were written by Jean-Claude Carriere, who shared Buñuel's conviction that hypocrisy was the most entertaining target. Backed by French producer Serge Silberman, these late films are also the best, as Buñuel was free to indulge his fancies, without having to worry about commercial or narrative requirements.

Buñuel's style is characterized by three elements:

1. Surrealism
Buñuel was an official member of the Surrealist movement (until he became a Communist in 1932). Early in his career he made the two most authentic surrealist films ever produced, and also his later films are famous for their surreal imagery, such as scenes in which chickens appear in nightmares, women grow beards, and aspiring saints are desired by lascivious women. Even in the many movies he made for hire in his Mexican period, he usually added some of his trademark disturbing images.

2. The Hypocrisy of the Church & Bourgeois Society
His whole career, Buñuel mocked the Roman Catholic Church in particular and organized religion in general for its hypocrisy. The atheistic humanist Buñuel fought a lifelong rebellion against the Catholic Church that had shaped life in his Spanish home village of Calenda with a heavy hand. In L'Âge d'Or, for example, one of the protagonists of the Sade's 120 days of Sodom is portrayed as Jesus; Viridiana culminates in a dinner party that parodies Da Vinci's The Last Supper; and in La Voie Lactée two men travel the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela and meet examples of various Catholic heresies along the way. The Exterminating Angel is a scathing attack on bourgeois values, as are many other films, for example The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

3. Sexual Fetishes & Thwarted Desire
To Buñuel, sex was "something we take seriously when it involves ourselves and ribald or funny when it involves others," as Roger Ebert phrased it. What is more funny than someone saddled with a fetish that is absurd and not respectable? Or someone who is consumed by desire but can find no satisfaction? In the early L'Âge d'Or and in his last film, Cet obscur objet du désir, and many films in-between, we encounter human beings who crave to fulfill a strong passion, but are unable to do so: the couple in L'Âge d'Or wanting to make love; the servant boy in Tristana, with whom Tristana toys cruelly as he is fascinated by her disability; Mathieu's mad love for the young Conchita, who keeps teasing him, in Cet obscur objet du désir; and, on a non-sexual note, the group of upper class citizens who crave to have dinner together in Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, etc. Foot fetishes appear frequently in Buñuel's films, from the kissing of the toes of a statue in L'Age d'Or to the foot washing in El or the old man who loves Céléstine's boots in Diary of a Chamber Maid.

Buñuel died in Mexico City in 1983, after having finished his autobiography, Mon Dernier Soupir (My Last Sigh).

L'Age d'or (The Golden Age, 1930)
Although the earlier Un Chien Andalou starts with a famous sequence in which an eyeball is sliced open in merciless close-up (a scene that still has people fainting), it is only 15 minutes long and therefore L'Age d'Or is Bunuel's first proper feature film. It has also more plot: a man and a woman are passionately in love, but their attempts to consummate that passion are constantly thwarted by the Church and bourgeois society. The feelings of the continually interrupted lovers find an outlet in Bunuelesque fetishism when the woman finally seeks satisfaction by sucking the marble toes of a statue - sex is both terrifying and hilarious. At the premiere in Paris in 1930, the film caused a riot as the outraged audience trashed the theater. Until the early 1980s, the film was banned in many countries.
Los Olvidados (1950)
Film about juvenile delinquents in the slums of Mexico City, which won Best Director at Cannes, putting Buñuel, who was slaving away making trite films in Mexico, on the map again after his 1930 film L'Age d'Or. Los Olvidados is a tough, unsentimental statement. After all, then and now, it is a fact that poverty, combined with broken families and lack of education, leads to crime. Of course, people also have a choice, although many are stuck so deep in the mud that they have no opportunity to realize that. But even if they do, like the young Pedro, the protagonist of this film, and try to better their life against all odds, the environment can cynically block those chances. Pedro tries to extricate himself from the influence of escaped teen prisoner "El Jaibo," but that is impossible as the older boy blackmails him and even shrewdly shifts the blame for his own crimes on Pedro. Another characteristic of Los Olvidados is, that nobody is "good." At the start of the film, the boys beat up a blind musician and destroy his instruments, so the viewer feels sympathy for the man, but that same musician then shows what a pervert he is by groping a young girl. Although the film superficially resembles the at that time popular Italian Neorealist films, by showing that the poor are capable of evil and are players in the same corrupt societal games, Buñuel has in fact parodied Neorealism with its sentimental view of the poor as goodhearted. He has also included his characteristic surrealist sequences, for example a rooster staring down a blind man. Los Olvidados was a major influence on Truffaut's The 400 Blows, and although less known than his later work, is one of the masterworks of Luis Buñuel.
El (This Strange Passion) (1953)
A brutal and absurd glimpse at one man's runaway paranoia. It starts on a Bunuelesque fetishistic high-note: while a priest washes and kisses the feet of altar boys in a church ritual, Don Francisco follows the trail of feet with his eyes and comes to rest on the shapely legs of Gloria - like a hunter finding his prey. The rich bachelor Francisco then courts Gloria until she agrees to marry him. He proves a dedicated husband - or rather too dedicated, for already during the honeymoon his passion starts to exhibit the disturbing traits of a jealous maniac. His paranoia escalates until one night he stealthily approaches her with the intent to "sew her up." He also denies her all contact with the outside world. Gloria stays with her mad husband, at least until it really becomes too much, thinking he is suffering more than she is (after all, the Church is responsible for having made him into a pervert) - and anyway, nobody, even her own mother, believes her complaints... A masterpiece of psychosexuality. To Buñuel's great satisfaction, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would screen the film for his students to demonstrate paranoia.
Viridiana (1961)
Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) invites his niece, Viridiana (Silvia Pinal), to stay with him before she takes her vows as a nun, but the old lecher then attempts to use her for his necrophiliac desires - he wants to have sex with her in the clothes of his deceased wife. When his desires are thwarted and the Don next commits suicide, Viridiana inherits the estate. A true Christian, she sees her new wealth as a great opportunity to practice charity and invites all beggars and outcasts of the area to come, be fed by her and live in her house. Of course they repay her with ingratitude, cruelty and greed. The film ends with a big dinner party, where the poor enjoy a wild feast during Viridiana's absence, imitating Da Vinci's The Last Supper, a parody enacted to the ethereal strains of Handel's Messiah. As the film also contains the above mentioned necrophilia and mockery of Christian charity, the Vatican denounced the film as blasphemy and it was immediately forbidden in Spain - despite winning the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A delicious, darkly humorous story about different kinds of corruption.
The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador, 1962)
While in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, made ten years later, a group of upper middle class friends is repeatedly unable to have dinner together, here a group of socialites have enjoyed a lavish dinner, but are then unable to leave the mansion where the party took place. An unseen force keeps them inexplicably inside, as in an extravagant prison, and they have to spend the night together in the living room. The group futilely tries to figure out ways of escape. The film's absurd situations and surreal images attack ritualistic habits and bourgeois culture. The vast, magnificent salon gradually descends into sordid squalor. A black comedy filled with anti-bourgeois and anti-clerical sentiments, but also a dreamlike story where the surrealism of Buñuel is manifested in all its fantastic wealth. And it is of course more than just class criticism of the bourgeoisie: the film is in fact symbolic of the powerlessness of the human race as a whole.
Diary of a Chambermaid ("Le journal d'une femme de chambre") (1964)
As I have written elsewhere on this blog, Buñuel based this film on Mirbeau's fin-de-siecle, satirical novel, but changed the story into a strong anti-fascist statement, by updating the setting from the late 19th century to the 1930s. Céléstine (Jeanne Moreau) becomes a chambermaid in the country estate of the Monteil family. She soon discovers that indulgence in the sexual frustrations/obsessions of her male employers may help advance her social and financial status. The lecherous head of the household not only hunts game but also women (he has impregnated the previous chambermaid), and his miserly frigid wife indulges her pent-up frustrations by tormenting her chambermaids. The grandfather is a shoe fetishist who dies embracing one of Célestine's boots. There is also the mystery of the murder of a young girl, of which the suspicion falls on the brutish gamekeeper and handyman of the family, Joseph, who is also a fervent Fascist. Nouvelle Vague icon Jeanne Moreau as Célestine gives a great performance: she is impeccably stylish and composedly serene, as well as wholly inscrutable - her face is a true enigma. Although more straightforward and lacking the surrealistic teases of Bunuel's later films, the director takes care to include his usual pokes at erotic repression and religious oppression, and satirize the strange ways of the bourgeoisie who live behind a facade of respectability while secretly indulging their lower instincts.
Belle de Jour (1967)
Belle de Jour is Catherine Deneuve at her classic best: beautiful, elegant, ice-cold - and lustful. She plays an upper-class Parisian housewife, Séverine. Frigid towards her husband, she secretly entertains kinky bondage fantasies... To make these more concrete, she starts secretly spending her idle afternoons working in a boutique bordello. That, by the way, is also what the film title refers to: "Belle de Jour" is a "day-lily" that blooms only during the day, but the same French term can also refer to a prostitute whose trade is conducted during the daytime. So while remaining chaste in her marriage, in the afternoons Séverine satisfies the weird fetishes of the men that visit her high-class brothel. Her clients include a fat industrialist, a professor who dresses in role playing costumes and then abuses her, and a duke who likes to enact a mourning scene in a coffin. But she also meets a mean-looking, young gangster whose cruelty and ugliness rather please her - but when he falls in love with her and starts stalking her, things go horribly wrong... As is usually the case with Buñuel, this surreal, erotic tale forms a gentle criticism of the mores of decaying upper-class society. Deneuve is the ideal actress for this intricate study of female psychology. Despite that the character she plays revels in debauched desires, she retains a cool, inscrutable dignity, clad as she is in the chicest Yves Saint Laurent finery. This is the best and most iconic film Buñuel ever made. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1967. See my detailed review.
Tristana (1970)
A wonderful but perverse film about power over others. Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) is a young woman, who when her mother dies, is entrusted to the care of her elderly uncle Don Lope (Fernando Rey) who lives in the beautiful city of Toledo. The innocent and naive Tristana, wholly in the power of her lecherous uncle, soon ends up in his bed. In the daytime, she is a virtual prisoner in his house. Still, she manages to meet a handsome young painter and elope with him. Two years later, ill, she unexpectedly returns to her uncle's house. But now - although she looses a leg to her illness - she turns the tables on the aging Don and forces him to marry her, after which Tristana mainly uses her position as mistress of the house to humiliate Don Lope. Eventually, winner takes all it seems - but in the process, Tristana has lost her soul and she has become as jaded as Don Lope was. As is usual, this Bunuel film is full of explicit Freudian images. Every scene is packed with visual interest. It also provides an interesting picture of catholic Spain and the hypocrisy rampant in such an ultra-conservative society as well as the marginal position of women in it - of course seen through the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois eyes of the film maker. But above all, the most wonderful thing in the film is the transformation Catherine Deneuve undergoes from uptight virgin with her hair in braids to the bitchy and mean one-legged woman at the end. A most difficult role that is performed in a fascinating way. See my detailed review.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie ("Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie," 1972)
Vintage Buñuel. A great comedy about a group of six upper middle class friends - very bourgeois - (Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stephanie Audran, etc.) who repeatedly try to have a meal together but who find their plans each time interrupted and crossed by bizarre events. Dinner is the central social ritual of the middle classes, a way of displaying wealth and good manners - but here turned on its head. The participants never get what they want, they can never fulfill their desire for a good meal in a nice, sociable and cultivated environment. It doesn't help that the cast is suave and beautiful, superbly dressed in a suitably old-fashioned style. At the same time, the various interruptions reveal the secrets that lurk beneath the surface of the decaying European bourgeoisie: adultery, drug dealing, cheating, military coups, perversion and sheer boredom. The "discreet charm" of the title of course refers to their polite handling of their sense of futility and dismay - although gradually panic takes over. The film also contains some of the best Surrealist dream sequences Buñuel ever shot. In fact, reality and illusion soon blur into one, with delicious comic results. And we have the director's usual barb aimed at the Church in the person of a bishop whose fetish is to dress up as a gardener and work as a servant in the gardens of the wealthy.
That Obscure Object of Desire ("Cet obscur objet du desir") (1977)
Another film about thwarted desire, this time of a sexual nature. The elderly gentleman Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is madly in love with the young Conchita. Although she willfully attracts him, the next moment she tends to push him back even harder. As if she is two different persons, something Buñuel has underlined by having Conchita in the “attracting mode” played by the Spanish dancer Angelina Molina and in the “push-back mode” by French actress Carole Bouquet.
Conchita doesn't want Mathieu to have power over her; and Mathieu doesn't want her to have power over him, so he doesn't offer marriage. Their relationship is stuck in the same unholy groove, except that it escalates. Mathieu tries to kiss her, but she flees; he helps her poor mother financially, but Conchita doesn't want to be bought; he tries to make love to her, but discovers she is wearing a chastity belt; he follows her to Spain where she is dancing in a cafe, only to find out she is stripping for tourists; and after he buys her a house she locks him out and under his eyes embraces a young man. But each time she coyly comes back and smooths his ruffled feathers with her charms...
This is the 30th and last film made by Luis Buñuel, and it has been called a summing-up of his work: respectable (or even pompous) middle class characters plagued by strong and sometimes peculiar erotic desires, and therefore revealed as ultimately weak and funny.
Read my detailed review.

References: The Rough Guide to Film (Penguin Group, 2007); Have You Seen...? by David Thomson (Penguin Books, 2008). IMDB, The Criterion Collection, Slant Magazine, Roger Ebert, Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal. Photos linked from Wikipedia. This series covers two blogs, Japan Navigator for Japanese directors and Splendid Labyrinths for non-Japanese directors.

1. Jean Renoir 2. Kenji Mizoguchi 3. Luis Buñuel 4. Yasujiro Ozu 5. Max Ophüls 6. Akira Kurosawa 7. Luchino Visconti 8. Mikio Naruse 9. Michelangelo Antonioni 10. Orson Welles
(to be continued)

Jean Renoir (Great Auteur Film Directors 1)

2016-04-25T09:34:00.002+09:00

Jean Renoir (1894-1979) was born at the same time as cinema, as the son of the famous impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. His interest in painting was limited to marrying the last model of his father, Catherine Hessling, but he started making films because he wanted to immortalize her beauty, thinking moving images a better medium than paint. He made about 40 films between 1924 and 1962. His peak was in the 1930s, although even at that time he was not always recognized; fame came after WWII when he was highly praised by both Francois Truffaut (and other French New Wave directors) and Orson Welles.

In order to finance his first films, Jean Renoir gradually sold his father's paintings from his private collection. In fact, many family members were engaged in the film business: brother Pierre was an actor who played for example the role of Maigret in Renoir's adaptation of Simenon's Night at the Crossroads, brother Claude was a film producer and nephew Claude (the son of Pierre) was a cinematographer who would photograph Renoir's most beautiful films.

Renoir's humanist films reveal his fondness of all social strata. In the 1930s he endorsed the Popular Front in a series of films celebrating working class solidarity and when the Nazis invaded France, Renoir left the country for the United States (Hollywood), where he became a naturalized citizen. He would never again live in France, although he would return for film making in the 1950s.

Renoir started with some strong experimental work in the age of the silent film (such as Nana based on Zola's novel, or the short film The Little Match Girl based on Andersen - see my post about Best Silent Films), but really came into his own in the 1930s with sound technology. In this decade, he produced his best work and made several of the immortal masterworks of world cinema (The Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game). Renoir was drawn to shooting on actual locations and experimented with long takes and deep focus compositions and the traveling shot. He expressed his auteurist ideal in the phrase: "My dream is of a craftsman's cinema in which the author can express himself as directly as the painter in his paintings or the writer in his books."

As his style was very different from that usual in Hollywood (and as Renoir was a strong individualist who didn't fit into conformist American corporate culture), he only made a handful of films in the 1940s, none among his best. The Diary of a Chambermaid is for example marred by lack of focus, political correctness and outright silliness. In the early 1950s, Renoir returned to France via India where he made The River, one of his masterworks and his first color film.

The films he made in France in the 1950s were very different from his earlier work: instead of realistic films shot on location, these are theatrical films with lots of spectacle and music, such as The Golden Coach, French Cancan and Elena et les hommes. His expert use of color may remind viewers of the paintings of his father. The last twenty years of his life, in the 1960s and 1970s, Renoir almost made no movies anymore and only did some TV work. He died in Beverly Hills but was buried in France.

Here are his best films:

La Chienne (1931)
"La Chienne" means "The Bitch" (in both senses), but obviously that would not be a suitable English title, so it is usually left in French. In this comedy-tragedy, Michel Simon (in a superb performance) plays a henpecked office clerk and amateur painter who becomes so smitten with a prostitute (Lulu) that he makes her his mistress. The weak-minded, respectable middle-class man thinks he has finally met real love in this "vulnerable woman" (who is in reality just a low-class prostitute), and refuses to see the obvious: that she and her pimp boyfriend are taking advantage of him. Lulu is really in love with her pimp and only accepts the clerk so that she can cash in on his paintings and so satisfy her boyfriend's need of money. The love triangle in this profoundly humane but unsentimental film finally leads to a very ironic conclusion: when the clerk finds Lulu in bed with her pimp, he kills her in a jealous fit (a great silent sequence in the film), but the pimp gets convicted of the murder and goes to the gallows. La Chienne was remade by Fritz Lang in Hollywood as the nightmarish Scarlet Street, but this remake lacks the irony and wisdom of Renoir. It also lacks its seedy sexiness, which was too much for U.S. censors, who banished the original film until 1975. Full of Renoir's elegant compositions and interesting camera movements and filmed on location in the noisy streets of Montmartre.
Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux) (1932)
An outrageous, anarchic farce about a tramp played by Michel Simon in a singular performance: not sentimental in the Chaplin style, but on the contrary, a big, smelly, loutish bum with only one belief, that in complete personal freedom. Boudu is saved from suicide by a Parisian bookseller (a true uppity bourgeois) and ends up taking over his benefactor's home, his wife and his maid/mistress! Never take a tramp into your house! The film also forms a lively document of prewar Parisian society, with interesting location shooting around the Quartier Latin. There are delightful touches, too, as when early in the film, Boudu searches for his dog and seeks help from a police officer - in one and the same take the patrolman ignores him, only to offer his services to an affluent lady in a similar predicament. See my full review here.
A Day in the Country (Partie de compagne) (1936)
A lyrical short film based on a famous story by Maupassant (a friend of Renoir's father). The film is only 40 minutes long as bad weather prevented its completion (the negative side of location shooting), but as it can perfectly stand on its own, it was ten years later brought out as a featurette. The film follows a Parisian shopkeeper, his wife, daughter and the shop assistant his daughter is to marry as they spend a Sunday along the Seine, in the countryside. While the two men fall asleep over their fishing poles after a copious lunch, both mother and daughter are (separately) wooed by two strongly muscled rowers and enticed to come to an island in the middle of the river. What happens there (or doesn't happen there) gives insight into the sad lives of both women. A warm and summery film that could have been Renoir's absolute masterwork had he been able to complete it. As it stands, it is the best short film ever made. See my full review here.
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le crime de Monsieur Lange) (1936)
A whimsical Popular Front film about a likable courtyard world of print-shop workers and laundresses, with a naive hero (Monsieur Lange, a writer of adventure stories), a vivacious and practical heroine (Valentine), and their boss, Mr Batala, as the ultimate cinematic scoundrel, an obnoxious fascist pig, this propaganda piece rises to high art (and is good fun, too). When the bad boss fakes his own death to avoid paying back a loan, the abandoned workers decide to form a cooperative, full of the spirit of "liberté, égalité, fraternité." They have great success with printing Lange's cowboy stories, but then Batala returns "from the dead" to reclaim his publishing company. After an argument, Lange shoots and kills him, and flees with Valentine to escape France by crossing the border into Belgium. At a time that fascism and Nazism were rife in Europe, this film about an "excusable homicide" questions authority and the ethical boundaries one should or shouldn't cross. But Renoir makes also clear that the idea of a socialist cooperative is, like the story, nothing more than a romantic fantasy, albeit a beautiful one.
Grand Illusion (La grande illusion) (1937)
The title of this (anti-) war movie refers to the illusion that WWI was seen as "the war to end all wars." Forbidden by the Nazis (Goebbels tried to destroy all copies of the film), it tells the story of a group of French prisoners of war in German captivity, with working class hero Jean Gabin sharing a cell with middle-class Jew Marcel Dalio and the aristocratic Pierre Fresnay, under the strict monocled eye of Commandant Erich von Stroheim. The film is as much about class as it is about the prisoners efforts to escape. Initially "class" is stronger than "nation" as the German aristocrat treats his French aristocratic prisoner with special respect, even becoming friends with him. This also shows what an immense watershed the Great War meant for European culture, as it was the end of the class relations described in the film, and the beginning of the epoch of the "commoners." The last part of the film is different from the rest, as we see how Gabin and Dalio trek across the Alps towards freedom, with beautiful long shots in the snowy landscape. Orson Welles much adored this film and picked it as his "desert-island movie." A humanistic film, showing how important compassion is among the senselessness of war.
La bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1938)
Jean Gabin wanted to make a film in which he could drive a steam locomotive and Renoir made that possible by adapting Zola's naturalistic novel. Gabin plays a solitary train engineer, Lantier, who drives a locomotive between Paris and Le Havre, a man whose tainted blood subjects him to fits of homicidal mania. He falls in love with Séverine (Simone Simon), the sexy wife of the deputy station master in Le Havre, who has helped her husband murder a man who tried to seduce her. Although Lantier was a witness, he says nothing to the police and begins an ambiguous emotional blackmail. One night, Séverine rewards him, but also suggests that he should get rid of her husband. Lantier lies in wait for the man but is unable to do the foul deed. Instead, in one of his fits of madness he ends up killing Séverine and the next day jumps to his death from the speeding train. What makes this hardboiled film noir great are the scenes with the steam locomotives: the film is larded with impressive traveling shots with the camera on the huge locomotive, racing through the French countryside or entering under the roof of a large station, spitting out steam. In a double sense a "steamy movie," this thriller was the greatest commercial success in Renoir's career.
The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu) (1939)
Again a scathing critique of the class system, this time in the form of a country house farce "with teeth." A weekend at a marquis' castle in the countryside lays bare some ugly truths about a group of upper middle class acquaintances. Made on the eve of WWII, it shows European society and its disintegrating values as doomed. There is no protagonist, but in this lavish ensemble piece we see the hosts and guests as a group, as the class that was responsible for the hopeless situation of Europe. "The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons" (as the most famous line in this film goes), and those reasons are used to justify acts like murder and suicide. In the center of the film stands a long hunting scene (with Renoir's expert long shots) that reveals the volcano seething below the feet of the characters. Booed and banned (and nearly destroyed) at its premiere, The Rules of the Game was rehabilitated by the New Wave and shown at the 1956 Venice Film festival. It is now generally considered one of the greatest films ever made.
The River (1951)
Jean Renoir's first Technicolor feature, shot entirely on location in India (with American capital and Indian cooperation - among them future Indian film maker Satyajit Ray), is a bittersweet, Ozu-like account of the growing-up pains of three (colonial) young women, contrasted with the immutability of the river flowing in front of their homes, and full of gorgeous documentary-like color-shots of life in India. Harriet - whose father runs a jute mill - has five sisters and a ten year younger brother. The life of the young woman is shaken up when the charming Captain John, a cousin of the family next door who has lost his leg in the war, comes visiting. Harriet falls in love with him and shows him her secret diary, but he reacts only in a friendly, fatherly way. She later is shocked to see him kiss her best friend - but this is just sport for Captain John, who is really in love with Melanie, the mixed-blood daughter of the family where he is staying. But Melanie finds him stiff and overbearing and senses a big cultural gulf between them. The Captain eventually leaves (still a single man), but not before Harriet - who also feels responsible for the death of her small brother because of a snake bite - has lost the will to live and tries to commit suicide by floating down the river in a small skiff - happily, she is rescued by fishermen. Not only a visual tour de force, but also a very poetic and wise film, enriched by Renoir's subtle understanding of India and its people (a new, non-colonial view; although the story is set in colonial times, Renoir made the film just after India's independence in 1947). The wisdom shows in the retelling of a beautiful Indian legend with the message that things are not always as they seem, and that other persons may see the same things differently, and also in the contrast between the transitory emotions of the protagonists and the unchanging flow of the River, a symbol of everlasting Nature. The River won the International Award at the Venice Film Festival of 1951 and was nominated for the Golden Lion.
French Cancan (1954)
A loving tribute to art and the theater that reminds me of a painting by Degas come alive. A lyrical film full of movement, color and romance in which Renoir was reunited with Jean Gabin for the final time. Gabin plays a Belle Époque Parisian nightclub impresario determined to transform the cancan, an outmoded folk dance, into the rage of the city. The spectacle of the dance in the finale, with its crashing waves of color, is justly famous. The lives of the characters in the film and especially their loves, are just as fluid and evolving. The film also demonstrates the difference between show business people and the rest of the world. The female lead is expertly played by Francoise Arnoul. Although The Golden Coach (1953) is also very interesting - Truffaut based the name of his production company, Les films du Carosse, on this film - I prefer French Cancan for its joie de vivre and the fact that its bright, frivolous surface hides a deeper undercurrent.

Interesting article on Renoir by Peter Bogdanovich; Orson Welles on Renoir.

With the exception of Le crime de Monsieur Lange, all the above films are available from The Criterion Collection.

References: The Rough Guide to Film (Penguin Group, 2007); Have You Seen...? by David Thomson (Penguin Books, 2008). IMDB, The Criterion Collection, Slant Magazine, Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal. Photos linked from Wikipedia. This series covers two blogs, Japan Navigator for Japanese directors and Splendid Labyrinths for non-Japanese directors.

1. Jean Renoir 2. Kenji Mizoguchi 3. Luis Buñuel 4. Yasujiro Ozu 5. Max Ophüls 6. Akira Kurosawa

Best 20th Century Operas (2): Richard Strauss, Salome (1905)

2016-04-20T07:24:00.001+09:00

Richard Strauss, Salome (1905)
Alex Ross begins his survey of twentieth century classical music, The Rest is Noise, with the shock Richard Strauss' Salome caused with its radical harmonies and its violent story of deviant Freudian sexuality - this opera certainly meant the advent of a new age, just like Pelléas et Mélisande had done in France a few years before. The sensationally innovatory score sent ripples all over Europe. It also rekindled interest in Oscar Wilde, on whose French play the opera was based.

[Salome's Dance by Gustave Moreau - Image Wikipedia]

The Salome legend itself originates in the gospels of Saint Mathew and Saint Mark. Salome is the daughter of Herodias, who has left her first husband and father of Salome to marry her husband's brother, Herod King of Judea, because he is richer and more powerful. This marriage was considered as unlawful by contemporaries, as Herodias' first husband was still alive; and as she had married her brother-in-law, it was also condemned as incestuous. One man who publicly criticized her was John the Baptist, an ascetic and fierce moralist. He had been arrested and jailed by Herod, but the king was afraid to put him to death as demanded by his wife Herodias, because of John the Baptist's holiness and great popularity.

On Herod's birthday party, Salome is enticed to dance for her stepfather, after being told that she may ask whatever she wants, even half his kingdom. At the instigation of her mother, she then demands the head of John the Baptist as reward.

[Salome and the Apparition of the Baptist's Head,

watercolor by Gustave Moreau - Image Wikipedia]

Since the Renaissance, the Salome legend has inspired numerous painters. An important example close to the time of Strauss is Gustave Moreau, whose painting of Salome's dance is also described in Huysman's decadent novel A Rebours (1884), where the erotic intent of Salome's dance is emphasized. Some years before that, Gustave Flaubert wrote a short story, "Herodias" (1877), the last of his Trois Contes; in this story Herodias uses her daughter as an instrument to obtain the head of John the Baptist and so take revenge on her critic. Salome herself is shown as a more or less innocent young girl, as she even forgets the name of the man whose head she has to request. Jules Massenet's rather tame 1881 opera Hérodiade was based on Flaubert's short story.

Oscar Wilde wrote his very different, heavily Symbolist play in 1892. He wrote it originally in French, as British law forbade the depiction of Biblical figures on stage; it premiered in Paris in 1896. A new element added by Wilde, was that the sixteen-year old Salome takes a perverse fancy to John the Baptist. She shamelessly eroticizes the body of the ascetic preacher and causes him to be executed when he spurns her affections. In the finale, Salome takes up John's severed head and kisses it - the peak of decadence and necrophilia. Another new motif was that Wilde has Herod - who is already tired of Herodias - lust after Salome, his young stepdaughter and niece. When she dances naked for him, he is willing to give her anything she desires.

[The Climax, Salome and the head of Jokanaan,

by Aubrey Beardsley, 1893 - Image Wikipedia]

Richard Strauss, who after two failed operas in the early nineties, had mainly written large symphonic poems as Also sprach Zarathustra, was inspired by the German translation of Wilde's play by Hedwig Lachmann and decided to set it word for word, only doing some editing and cutting away superfluous passages (as Debussy had done three years previously in Pelléas et Mélisande). He had finally found the right material for a great opera.

In the first part of the resulting concise 100-minute opera, he concentrates on the confrontation between Salome and John the Baptist, called by his Hebrew name "Jokanaan" in the play and opera. Salome could be called "the symbol of unstable sexuality," and Jokanaan the "symbol of ascetic rectitude (but he was also a ridiculous figure in the eyes of the composer Strauss)," as Alex Ross says. Salome is a bored teenager, but she is also very beautiful - Herod is in love with her, as are several others in his court (in an earlier scene, one of the guards even commits suicide out of frustrated love). But, as Strauss insisted, she is also innocent. Salome hears Jokanaan's voice emanating from the cistern in which he has been imprisoned and she is bewitched by it. She has him brought up by the guards and immediately has a crush on him and tries to seduce him, but he shrinks away from her and even utters a curse.

In the second part we meet the tetrarch Herod, a man caught in his own base sensuality, a hypocrite and a hysteric. He persuades his stepdaughter to dance the Dance of the Seven Veils, and so she does, to kitschy music. The dance is a striptease, she removes one after another of the seven veils that conceal her body until she stands naked before Herod. She now calls for the prophet's head. Herod tries to make her change her mind, but she refuses. The executioner descends into the cistern prison and returns with Jokanaan's head which he hands her on a silver platter. Salome explodes in necrophiliac bliss (this is after all a love story), dancing with the head and kissing it, while the orchestra blares forth with erotic love music. Herod is so horrified by the spectacle his own incestuous lust has engendered, that he calls on the guards to "Kill that woman!" With a shriek and howl, the curtain falls. The opera ends with eight bars of sheer noise.

[Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, by Titian - Image Wikipedia]

The combination of the erotic and the murderous with a Biblical theme, shocked opera audiences from its first appearance, but although Salome was censured in many countries, it also took the world by storm - within two years after its first performance in Dresden in 1905, it was playing in 50 opera houses around the world. Not all performers were comfortable with the role of Salome: some refused to perform the "Dance of the Seven Veils," thus creating a situation where a dancer had to act as "body double." And during the first performance in London, the head of John the Baptist, brought on a silver tray to Salome, was replaced by a (apparently more innocuous) bloody sword. But the twentieth century was underway, and modernity made this opera about extreme sexual obsession not only possible, but also a reflection of the age.

Recording watched and listened to: Maria Ewing as Salome, Michael Devlin as Jokanaan, Kenneth Riegel as Herod, Gillian Knight as Herodias; with the ROH Covent Garden conducted by Edward Downes; and with Derek Bailey as stage director; on Kultur Video (DVD).

A performance on DVD stands and falls with the singer playing Salome: she must be a dramatic soprano with a strong voice, but also convincingly look like a young woman. That is a difficult combination, but Maria Ewing perfectly fits the bill in this somewhat older recording. With her large luminous eyes, she is a perfect dramatic actress who aptly conveys Salome's journey from curiosity to infatuation and finally total insanity in her amorous pursuit of John the Baptist.

Twentieth Century Opera: (1) Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy (2) Salome by Strauss (3) Die Gezeichneten by Schreker (4) Der Zwerg by Zemlinsky (5) Die tote Stadt by Korngold (6) Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky (7)

Best Contemporary Crime Novels from Europe

2016-04-08T09:56:00.000+09:00

Here is a look at crime fiction from Europe, a genre characterized by atmosphere and character development above plot. Of course, there have been European authors in the past like Agatha Christie who wrote pure plot puzzles, but this was an aberration which only took place in England - after all, such novels are about just as engaging as the average crossword puzzle. The crime novel as a literary phenomenon about character was created in the 1930s in France by Georges Simenon (see my post about this author) - a writer who, as Andre Gide said, should have had the Noble Prize in Literature, and whose influence can still be felt today, for his manner was picked up by many different European authors after WWII. Somewhat older "character" authors are for example P.D. James and Ruth Rendell in England, or Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in Sweden.

European crime writers in addition learned how to add atmosphere from Americans as Hammett and Chandler (and write in the noir style), but there are two big differences between both cultures: European crime fiction is generally less violent than its American counterpart, which especially in its contemporary form only seems to focus on psychopaths and serial killers. And while in American crime novels the private eye rules supreme as a "lonely wolf" investigator (typical for American culture), European authors (like Japanese ones, as Matsumoto Seicho) prefer the police procedural - most European sleuths are police inspectors who work within the framework of an organization.　

So what are the best contemporary crime novels from Europe? Or, in other words, who are the most interesting fictional police inspectors from our time?

[Ian Rankin (Photo Wikipedia)]

1. "John Rebus" by Ian Rankin (so far 20 novels, from 1987)
My mother had a special link with Scotland and when I was a kid, my parents several times took the family on trips to that wild and melancholic country. Nowadays, my interest in Scottish culture has shrunk to the enjoyment of Scottish whisky, especially the single malt peat whiskies of the Scottish Isles, but recently I also had to add the Rebus novels (and the TV series with Ken Stott based on the novels) by Scottish author Ian Rankin to that small list. Ian Rankin (1960), a graduate of Edinburgh University, who spent the time he should have been writing his Ph.D. on English literature producing his first crime novel Knots & Crosses, has written 20 Rebus novels, winning the Gold Dagger in 1997 with Black and Blue. The stories belong to the genre of police procedural detective fiction, with a decided hard-boiled aspect that has led to them being dubbed "Tartan Noir."

Set in Edinburgh, the novels depict a stark, uncompromising picture of Scotland, characterized by corruption, poverty, and organised crime, a far cry from the holiday country I saw in my youth. Rebus is a misanthrope made cynical by the job he does. He is a maverick cop who drinks, likes to flout authority and ignore the rules. He struggles with his superiors and colleagues and suffers from internal police politics and office politics. He is a lone wolf, a flawed character, but also someone obsessed with his work. He is happiest when he can sit in hus favorite pub with a glass in his hand.

The inventive plots show a broad spectrum of Scotland, from business districts to dying mining towns, from nightclubs and prisons to some better-known pubs and streets of Edinburgh (these latter based on real places, there is even an Ian Rankin tourist guide to Edinburgh!).

Another important aspect, that is also present in the work of the other writers discussed here, is the continual linking between the books, so that we follow Rebus through the various ups and downs in his career and personal life. He has a daughter, but is separated from his wife. His immediate boss at work is a woman, Gill Templer, with whom he had a one-time romantic relationship, and his protege is DS Siobhan Clarke.

The novels can be read apart, so it may be a good idea to begin with one of the best, Black and Blue, or pick a recent one, such as Saints of the Shadow Bible. You may also want to start with the first one, Knots & Crosses, when Rebus is 40 years of age and a Detective Sergeant working on the case of a serial killer who has been abducting and strangling young girls. Rebus receives anonymous letters containing knotted rope and matchstick crosses…

[Henning Mankell (Photo Wikipedia)]

2. "Kurt Wallander" by Henning Mankell (12 novels, between 1991 and 2009)
I have only been to Sweden once, again when I was very young, and only to the Gotenburg area (unfortunately not to Stockholm, which I love because of the early 20th c. novels by Hjalmar Söderberg, as Doctor Glas). Ystad, where the Kurt Wallander novels are situated, is a small medieval town at the southernmost tip of Sweden, close to the large city Malmö. Copenhagen is only 1.5 hrs via the Øresund Bridge, so closer by than Stockholm (which is 5.5 hrs away). There is also a ferry connection with Poland.

The author Henning Mankell (1948-2015) was born in Stockholm. He had an adventurous youth (traveling around the world and joining the student protest of 1968 in Paris) and first worked in the theater. He was a left-wing social critic and activist, and shared his time between Sweden and countries in Africa, mostly Mozambique. He constantly highlighted social inequality issues and injustice in Sweden and abroad. Also in the Wallander novels the overarching question is: "What went wrong with Swedish society?" But happily, Mankell never gets preachy.

His protagonist, Kurt Wallander, is a police inspector living and working in Ystad. His wife Mona has left him and he has since had a difficult relationship with his rebellious only child, Linda. Linda later will follow in the footsteps of her father as a police officer. Wallander also has a difficult relationship with his father, an artist who thousands of times just paints the same landscape for money, and who disapproves of the career choice of his son.

Inspector Wallander drinks too much, consumes junk food, doesn't take exercise and struggles with his anger. He is always very much emotionally involved in the crimes he investigates. Over the years he has also become disillusioned with his work, not in the least because of office politics and the censure by colleagues and bosses of his brusque manner and aggressive tactics (as in the case of Rebus). Mankell puts the character development of Wallander central in the books. We follow his daily life and thoughts about family, or about getting older and his fear of Alzheimer, also when this is not related to the immediate plot - and that is what makes the books so interesting. Like the Rebus novels, they follow Wallander's career and life trough time. These are all passionate and committed books.

Although the novels can be read separately, it is a good idea to start with the first one, Faceless Killers, in which an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered with as only clue the word "foreign" - Wallander must find the killers before anger towards foreigners boils over...

[Fred Vargas (photo Wikipedia)]

3. "Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg" by Fred Vargas (so far 8 novels, since 1991)
The character of Paris-based Chief Inspector Adamsberg was created by Fred Vargas, the pseudonym of medieval historian, archaeologist and folklorist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau (1957). She became a two times winner of the International Dagger award. Vargas' police thrillers are a way to relax from her job as an academic and to combine her interests, such as Medieval legends and various types of folklore. The device of imposing fearful old myths and legends (such as werewolves, the plague or the "furious horde of phantoms") into a modern setting often leads to a supernatural background for human fear and paranoia, and results in surrealist scenes (but can also be a bit far-fetched).

Like the two previous authors, also Vargas leads her readers in the series through the life and career of Adamsberg, his depressed personal relations, and the not always friction-free work relation with his colleagues, such as Inspector Danglard. Where the quixotic Adamsberg takes an indirect approach and relies on his Zen-like intuition, Danglard is the rationalist.

Vargas breaks every rule of detective fiction and it is sometimes difficult to empathize with her strange characters, but she manages to win her readers by the universalism of her themes. It is best to read her novels in order (one point of criticism is that she assumes knowledge of the previous books and doesn't sufficiently fill in the background of Adamsberg for each individual book) and start with The Chalk Circle Man (L'Homme aux cercles bleus) from 1991, where we first meet Adamsberg and Danglard. A solitary man drawing blue chalk circles at night around stray objects in Paris streets manages to create a media sensation, but Adamsberg senses evil behind the act. When the corpse of a woman is found encircled in chalk, he's proven right...

[Andrea Camilleri (Photo Wikipedia)]

4. "Inspector Salvo Montalbano" by Andrea Camilleri (so far 23 novels, since 1994)
Andrea Camilleri (1925) has created one of the most popular crime series at the moment with his Inspector Montalbano series. The books have a mischievous sense of humor and a lovable hero in the compassionate, but also cynical person of Montalbano. Interestingly, Camilleri, who studied stage and film direction and worked as a director and screenwriter as well as TV producer for RAI, started writing this series when he was almost 70 years of age, and he has already managed to finish 23 volumes!

Salvo Montalbano is a detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town, based on Camilleri's home town of Porto Empedocle, on Sicily's south-west coast. The novels contain a substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases. The name Montalbano was selected by Camilleri as homage to the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who wrote a series of crime novels about a fictional private detective called Pepe Carvalho. Like Carvalho, Montalbano is a great gourmet, and we even get some interesting recipes.

These are light and bubbly books, full of Italian sunshine, although the criminals are deadly and cruel and the police officers working for Montalbano not very efficient. In contrast to the previous novels, there is little character development, Montalbano remains the same bon vivant, who never misses a good lunch, or the delicacies prepared by his housekeeper (he lives alone, but has a girlfriend who now and then visits from the Italian mainland). So you could in principle pick any novel, although The Potter's Field excelled by winning the 2012 Crime Writers' Association International Dagger. Generally speaking, I prefer the earlier novels when Camilleri's inspiration was still fresh, so the first novel, The Shape of Water, also forms a good start. These are books that will always put you in a good mood.

[Arnaldur Indriðason (Photo Wikipedia)]

5. "Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson" by Arnaldur Indriðason (so far 15 novels, since 1997)
These novels with their stony Icelandic settings are bleak and dark books, indeed a form of Scandinavian noir. Author Arnaldur Indriðason (1961) was born in Reykjavik and after taking a history degree, worked as a journalist and freelance writer. He wrote the first book in the series with detective Erlendur in 1997, and has gone on to become the most popular writer of Iceland.

Enigmatic Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, at roughly 50, is a brilliant police officer, but also a gloomy and thoroughly anti-social figure who jealously guards his privacy. He keeps stubbornly brooding about his cases and is haunted by the ghosts of the past. The stories reflect the silent, glacial progress of Erendur's battle with his own inner storms. Decades ago, he got divorced, and his son and daughter still can't understand how he could abandon them. His daughter, Eva Lind, suffers from a drug addiction, his son is an alcoholic. Erlendur's investigations also provide rich insight into Icelandic culture, old and new, from the criminal justice system, racism and immigration to genetic diseases. Interestingly, the characters in the novel also show little respect for the police and are often shown lying to them. It is the background atmosphere more than the plots which is interesting.

The novels can be read separately, although here, too, they make up something like a life story (in fact, the first two novels have not yet been translated into English), good ones are Jar City (the earliest one translated into English) and Voices. However, compared to Rankin and Mankell, Indriðason writes more superficially and never digs very deep, resulting in books which are enjoyable, but not much more than that.

[John Banville (Photo Wikipedia)]

6. "Pathologist Quirke" by Benjamin Black (so far 8 novels, since 2007)
These books are not police procedurals, but a series about a consultant pathologist in the Dublin city morgue. They have been set in 1950s Dublin, and were written by Irish literary author John Banville (1950) under the pseudonym "Benjamin Black."

John Banville is known for his precise prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness and for the dark humor of his (often immoral) narrators. He won the Booker Prize with The Sea in 2005. In 2007, Banville wrote his first crime novel, Christine Falls, set in buttoned-up 1950s Dublin as the author remembered it from his early youth, "a poverty-stricken but also beautiful city, dingy and ramshackle with a melancholy beauty." Benjamin Black's Dublin is full of fog, coal grit, whiskey fumes and stale cigarette smoke. His protagonist is a troubled man, who is hard-drinking and intolerant, in many ways a damaged person - more at ease among the dead bodies in his pathologist's lab than among other humans. He lives alone, and his depression is made worse by his longing for his dead wife's sister, or the difficult relation with his daughter Phoebe.

Banville was inspired to write these novels by Georges Simenon - not the Maigret books, but the "romans durs," such as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes or Tropic Moon. Banville felt these were masterpieces of existential fiction, far better and less self-consciously literary than anything by Sartre or Camus.

They inspired Banville to try his hand at crime fiction and he has eminently succeeded. Here, again, we have a life story of the protagonist, especially in the first few novels of the series, so it is best to read them in the order of publishing, starting with Christine Falls.

[Written with some input from the Wikipedia articles about these authors and detectives]

Best Twentieth Century Operas (1): Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (1902)

2016-03-31T19:25:00.000+09:00

At the start I have to make a confession: I am not an "opera fan." I prefer abstract symphonic and chamber music (in my view the highest peak attainable in music) to music depending on words and stories. The only operas I could stomach so far were those by Mozart (Mozart's music always is complex and in his last five operas his characterization is deep and subtle), and single arias from Baroque operas by for example Handel and Vivaldi (but not the whole operas because their stories are too silly and the characters too flat). I can't stand 19th c. belcanto (Donizetti, Bellini), Grand Opera (Meyerbeer), German Romanticism (Weber), Verdi or Wagner (all those grown-up people strutting around with card-board shields and spears and pretending to be mythical deities, in static but blown-up stories that move at a glacial pace and never seem to end).

But then I discovered 20th c. opera. From Richard Strauss via Alban Berg to John Adams, these modern operas are mature and serious, and I discovered quite a few that are simply fascinating. What also makes a difference is that 20th c. composers were in the first place symphonists and not opera specialists, so that the orchestra is center stage - the symphonic aspect is often more important than the singers. In addition, most 20th c. composers have given up on individual arias, choruses or set pieces, but instead build one overarching musical edifice; a sort of declamation takes the place of belcanto singing, making those operas a more realistic form of theater.

Here is the first of my favorite 20th century operas:

[Mary Garden, the first Mélisande]

Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (1902)
Let's first set one thing straight: Debussy has often been called an "Impressionist" - but Impressionism, which was a trend in painting, had long been surpassed by other fashions when Debussy wrote his music. As also his preference for poets as Verlaine and Maeterlinck demonstrates, Debussy was first and for all a Symbolist - the major trend in literature, painting and music around the turn of the century. As Constant Lambert says in Music Ho!, "By suspending a chord in space, as it were, Debussy recalls the methods of the literary Symbolists."

So not surprisingly, Debussy's only completed opera is based on a Symbolist, allegorical play by Nobel-Prize winning Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck (whose plays were very popular around that time). The radical novelty Debussy brought to opera - and why Pelléas et Mélisande became the first truly modern opera - is that he used the play as it was (only making some judicious cuts), having the original prose text declaimed over an ever-moving orchestration, staying close to the rhythms of natural speech in French (this was something radically new - so far, professional librettists had always been employed to fashion prose texts into metrical verse - for how do you fit melodies to unmetred prose?). There are no arias, choruses or set pieces. This enables Debussy to capture the subtleties of human behavior, with the orchestra's delicate texture playing a bigger expressive part than the singers. Instead of using leitmotifs in the unsubtle "visiting card technique" of Wagner, Debussy employs them as a way to draw musical shapes that represent his characters' psychological states. This resulted in the single most innovative opera from the fin-de-siècle. Not all contemporaries were enthusiastic, though - the opera was also seen as "full of the germs of decadence and death."

[The opera Pelléas et Mélisande painted by

Edmund Blair Leighton]

The music itself is indeed often ambiguous and undecided, as if symbolical of Maeterlinck's pessimistic denial of free will. The emphasis is on quietness and subtlety, allowing the words of the libretto to be heard and understood; there are only a few fortissimos in the entire score. But the lack of operatic refulgence does not mean the music is monotonous: the love scenes between Pelléas and Mélisande are filled with passion, and the grim fourth act, when Golaud takes his revenge, is violent but also filled with ecstasy as the lovers, knowing they are doomed, embrace each other for the last time. Debussy's example influenced many later composers who edited their own libretti from existing prose plays, such as Richard Strauss in Salome, Alban Berg in Wozzeck and Lulu and Bernd Alois Zimmermann in Die Soldaten.

What had changed by 1900 is that the dominance of the "opera specialists" was over - Puccini was the last traditional opera composer. Debussy, Strauss, and others were instrumental composers who came from a different sonic world than traditional opera and who dared make radical changes - Pelléas et Mélisande has little to say to people who like narrative thrust and self-contained arias. But after some years of divided reception, by 1910 it was recognized as the masterpiece it is.

[Claude Debussy, by Donald Sheridan - Image Wikipedia]

The story of the frail Mélisande and her adulterous love for her brother-in-law is a sensuously sinister exploration of sexuality. In the mystical land of Allemonde, Golaud is out hunting when he finds a mysterious young woman by a pond, who is defined be her beautiful, but abnormally long hair, longer than her whole figure (and fetishized in both play and opera): Mélisande. She has lost her crown in the water but does not wish to retrieve it. She keeps her identity and origins hidden, and yet Golaud falls instantly in love with her. He marries her and takes her to his family castle, where she wins the favor of Arkel, Golaud's aged father and king of Allemonde, who is ill. However, she soon falls in love with the young Pelléas, Golaud's stepbrother and Pelléas also becomes enchanted by his sister-in-law's beauty. They meet by a fountain, where Mélisande rather symbolically loses her wedding ring in the deep water.

Later, the two gradually grow closer to each other, especially when Mélisande from a window in the castle tower lets her extraordinary long hair be caressed by Pelléas standing on the ground below - he even binds her tresses to a tree. They are caught by Golaud, but he is not suspicious (yet) and as the older man thinks this is just a children's game. But as Mélisande is pregnant, he warns Pelléas not to make her tired. Golaud however feels his brother is hiding something from him and interrogates his young son, Yniold, about how the couple behaves when alone together. Afterwards, he has the boy stand on his shoulders and spy on the couple through Mélisande's window. Through the boy's innocent answers he now is awakened to the reality of the situation.

Next, as the old king has recovered from his illness, Pelléas is requested to go on a trip. He asks Mélisande to come to the well in the garden at night to say goodbye to her. In the meantime, Golaud quarrels with Mélisande in front of Arkel, dragging her around the room by her long hair, and she tells her father-in-law that her husband doesn't love her anymore. At night, Pelléas and Mélisande meet at the well and confess their love for each other. When they kiss, Golaud appears from the shadows and kills his brother, severely wounding Mélisande.

In the last act, Mélisande has given birth to a baby girl. She lies on the bed under a white sheet with her gorgeous hair flowing down to the ground. Golaud presses her to tell the truth about her relation with Pelléas. After maintaining her innocence, Mélisande dies, leaving Arkel to comfort the sobbing Golaud.

The Maeterlinck play, by the way, inspired several other contemporary composers: Gabriel Fauré and Jean Sibelius both wrote incidental music for it, and Arnold Schoenberg based a lush, late-Romantic symphonic poem on the tragic story. But Debussy's conception is the greatest of them all.

Recording watched and listened to: Pierre Boulez (conductor) and Peter Stein (production) with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Welsh National Opera, with Alison Hagley (Mélisande), Neil Archer (Pélleas), Donald Maxwell (Golaud) and Kenneth Cox (Arkel) on Deutsche Grammophon (DVD 1992). Peter Stein's production is uncluttered and vaguely suggestive rather than becoming too literal. The scenery and dresses are often dark, but also lustrous, like black lacquer. Alison Hagley plays Mélisande as a woman-child with a mysterious smile. She also sings gorgeously. Neill Archer is an appealingly young Pelléas.

Twentieth Century Opera: (1) Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy (2) Salome by Strauss (3) Die Gezeichneten by Schreker (4) Der Zwerg by Zemlinsky (5) Die tote Stadt by Korngold (6) Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky (7)

Best Piano Concertos from the Twentieth Century (Part One)

2016-03-26T10:18:00.000+09:00

1. Ferruccio Busoni, Piano Concerto in C Major Op 39 (1904)
In its grand Wagnerian conception (there is even a male chorus in the operatic last movement) this is in fact still a very 19th c. concerto, although there are also associations with the gargantuan Mahler symphonies. Busoni conceived his concerto in five movements. The first, third and fifth movements are large, serious conceptions - the third slow movement is the emotional heart of the work. The second and fourth movements are both Italian dances, tarantella, each using Neapolitan folk song. The last movement incorporates an (invisible) male chorus. In this way, the concerto both possesses great nobility and dignity while on the other hand remaining brilliant fun. One could call it a combination of the native Italian and German-influenced sides of Busoni. But while it is huge, it is also modest, as much of the piano line remains hidden as part of the orchestral texture. A sincere and heartfelt concerto.
[Marc-Andre Hamelin at Youtube; Garrick Ohlsson on Telarc]

[Busoni]

2. Frederick Delius, Piano Concerto in C Minor (1904 / 1907)
Delius is an acquired taste. When I first listened to him, in my early twenties, I felt lost in the formless, lyrical soup of his music and hankered after clearer contours. But today his music fits me like a glove - we probably get more mellow and lyrical with the years... The piano concerto was the first concertante work Delius wrote and it had a rather troubled genesis, going through various versions. Today, the version in three movements from 1904 is generally considered as the most interesting and most typically "Delian" (in the last and "standard" version of 1907 the piano part was at Delius' request rewritten by a pianist-friend, but it is more Chopin than Delius). It is a full-blooded romantic concerto, but without any empty pianistic display, so although this is an early work, we already can hear Delius' mature lyrical and meditative style. Both themes of the first movement show the influence of the Afro-American sounds which influenced Delius so much during his Florida sojourns. The central Largo movement has a sonorous piano part, and the third movement (which was discarded in the 1907 version) ends with a grand tutti in Delius's finest orchestral splendor. Perhaps because of the many revisions, Delius' piano concerto is less well-known than his violin concerto or cello concerto, but it is an appealing piece of music that certainly deserves to be heard more. The 1904 version lasts about 30 min.
[Howard Shelley on Chandos and Piers Lane on Hyperion (three movement version 1904); Justin Bird on Youtube (standard version 1907)]

[Delius]

3. Max Reger, Piano Concerto In F Minor Op 114 (1910)
A sprawling, serious, three-movement concerto lasting roughly 40 minutes, with a tempestuous first movement, an elegiac and delicate second movement and a vigorous third movement full of "clenched teeth" exuberance. The heroic first movement starts with a portentous orchestral introduction and bold first statement by the piano. The piano is fully integrated with the orchestra. The thick-set textures and chromatism are typical of Reger. In dramatic seriousness and complexity this work is equal to the second Brahms concerto. Few composers however have been as misunderstood as Max Reger, whose music has often been regarded as heavy and unrelievedly contrapuntal. This is a massive, tragic concerto.
[Barry Douglas on RCA Victor]

4. Ernst von Dohnányi, Variations on a Nursery Theme for Piano and Orchestra (1916)
This is pure fun, a tongue-in-cheek humorous and playful concerto: an introduction, statement-of-theme and then eleven variations on the nursery rhyme tune “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” ("Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman"). The pompous introduction is full of Wagnerian gestures and faux pathos, until a cymbal clash brings the piano on stage with the nostalgic old nursery tune, an unexpected contrast which will make you smile. What follows is a witty set of variations often alluding to the musical style of other composers. The first variation is simple and innocent, the third one romantic, bringing to mind Brahms's Second Piano Concerto, the sixth variation scampers along, the seventh variation is a boisterous waltz, variation eight alludes to the march from the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony and the pathos-laden tenth variation hearkens back to the Wagnerian opening. In contrast, the eleventh variation sports ethereal harmonies which allude to Debussy. Dohnányi aptly wrote on the score "to the enjoyment of friends of humor, to the annoyance of the others."

[Howard Shelley on Chandos]

[Dohnányi]

5. Sergei Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No 2 in G Minor Op 16 (1913 / 1923)
This concerto carries two dates: it was originally written and performed in 1913, but in WWI the score was lost, and in in 1923, after writing his Third Piano Concerto, Prokofiev reconstructed it from memory, but also altered so many elements, that it became in fact a new work, his real "fourth concerto." Prokofiev gave the new version more depth, but he also kept the original piano-athletics, making this one of the most challenging of all piano concertos. Perhaps that is why it has always been in the shadow of Prokofiev's other concertos, at least until the 1970s, when it crept to the edge of the repertoire. The concerto is in four movements, the second movement a devilish perpetuum mobile and the third a sinister march and another piece of fierce motorism. In a sense both these movements are intermezzos between the more expansive first movement and finale, both of which feature huge cadenzas as their focal point. The whole concerto is imbued with something like the grinding harshness of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite of 1915. It is a dark concerto (dedicated to the memory of a friend of Prokofiev's at the St. Petersburg Conservatory who had committed suicide) imbued with a wild temperament.
[Yefim Bronfman on Youtube; Michel Beroff on Warner Music]

[Prokofiev by Matisse]

6. Erich Korngold, Piano Concerto in C Minor for the Left Hand (1923)

In the 1920s, Korngold stood at the apex of his fame (he was the most performed composer after Richard Strauss in Austria), when he was approached by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein to compose a concerto for the left hand. Paul Wittgenstein, who was the elder brother of the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, had lost his right arm in that terrible European war, WWI, but instead of giving up the piano, he devised novel techniques that allowed him to play chords previously regarded as impossible for a five-fingered pianist. He also actively commissioned works from well-known composers of his day, including Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev and Paul Hindemith, but he first approached Erich Korngold, who had just written his great opera Die tote Stadt. This concerto shows Korngold at his most experimental and features a very large and colorful orchestra. It is in one movement and so concentrated in form that it makes repeated listening necessary. Harmony and tonality are highly original. As a serious composer, Korngold was almost forgotten after he fled for the Nazis and had to build up a new career as film composer in Hollywood, but today he has been fully rehabilitated. Another factor limiting the popularity of this highly unique concerto was that Wittgenstein possessed the exclusive performing rights until his death in 1961. By the way, Wittgenstein was so pleased with this work that he commissioned another composition from Korngold, the Suite for Left Hand Piano and Strings.
[Marc-André Hamelin on Hyperion]

[Korngold]

7. Igor Stravinsky, Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1923–24)
After the Russian extravagance and barbaric Impressionism of his famous ballets in the years before WWI, Stravinsky became a neo-classicist, in contrast working with small ensembles and in more traditional forms, although he also looked for novelty in for example the interesting combination of the piano with only a wind orchestra. In this highly original concerto, eighteenth century gestures may be employed to tease the ears, but basically, this is hard driven, aggressive and percussive music, undeniably Stravinskian. In contrast, the slow movement is extremely simple and therefore all the more memorable. There is a playful episode at the end of the third and last movement, where the music stops and the piano just repeats a single chord, as if the pianist had forgotten what to play, before the final chase to the end. A vigorous and brilliant concerto.
[Alexander Toradze on Youtube; Steven Osborn on Hyperion]

[Stravinsky by Picasso]

8. Paul Hindemith, Kammermusik No 2 for Piano and 12 Instruments, Op 36 no 1 (1924)
Another neo-classical concerto, with a small orchestra consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, string trio and double bass. It is Baroque in spirit, each movement is carried forward irresistibly by a basic pulse. The piano writing is not only highly rhythmic, but also very contrapuntal. The first movement is toccata-like, with busy motoric figurations; in the slow movement the piano spins melodic variations above an ostinato bass theme; and after a tiny scherzo the Finale resumes the energetic style of the opening movement. A very fine work, like all Hindemith's eight "Kammermusiken."
[Ronald Brautigam on Decca]

9. Ottorino Respighi, Concerto in modo misolidio for piano and orchestra (1925)
After writing his large-scale symphonic poems, Respighi looked for a way to create typically Italian music and found it in Gregorian chant. This interest is evident in his 1921 violin concerto, Concerto gregoriano, and in the present piano concerto. The piano concerto makes use of the seventh of the church modes ("modo misolidio") and carries a flavor of plainchant in its material, the source of its inspiration. It opens with a passage for the piano based on the Introit for the Mass of Ascension Day. Also the beautiful slow movement features a Gregorian melody, brought as a dialogue between piano and orchestra. The third movement is a Passacaglia, with eighteen variations, inventively bubbling music. The concerto ends with an impressively romantic climax.
[Konstantin Sherbakov on Naxos]

[Respighi]

10. George Gershwin, Concerto in F (1925)
This is very fine music, a response to demands for a "proper concerto" after the success of the Rhapsody in Blue, avoiding programmatic content. The many themes are both uplifting and nostalgic. The concerto has been called "a masterpiece of unity under a veneer of medley," an integration achieved through cyclic form and thematic transformation. In fact, virtually every tune in the Gershwin concerto is linked to the big melody that follows the introduction to the first movement. The finale, in rondo form, also acts as a grand recapitulation of the whole work, again tying things together. With its snappy rhythms and jazzy dissonances layered over a diatonic foundation, this concerto is the avatar of the Jazz Age.
[Yuja Wang at Youtube; Orion Weiss on Naxos]

[Gershwin]

11. Aaron Copland, Piano Concerto (1926)
Jazz was in the air and Copland's concerto of 1926 forms a sort of dialogue with the Gershwin concerto. Copland starts of with a brash, dissonant fanfare, a typical "wide spaces" opening, followed by a calm if astringent Andante sostenuto. After this more traditional 1920s music, the soloist erupts with a variety of rhythmic and intervallic invocations of jazz. In other words, like in Copland's (later) clarinet concerto, a song-like first movement is linked by a cadenza to a fast and rhythmically complex final movement. But as the jazz element is not so much present in the tunes but rather as the underlying harmonic and rhythmic basis of the score, the concerto is very different from Gershwin. In this concerto we find the harder-edged Copland from the time before he deliberately popularized his style in the 1930s.
[Noel Lee on Etcetera; Bennett Lerner at Youtube]

[Copland]

12. Leoš Janáček, Capriccio for Piano Left-Hand and Chamber Ensemble (1926)
Another concerto for the left hand, not for Wittgenstein, but the Czech pianist Otokar Hollmann (another WWI victim). The work is scored for chamber ensemble consisting of flute and piccolo, two trumpets, three trombones and a tenor tuba, resulting in an even more original sound than Stravinsky's concerto discussed above. The Capriccio consists of four movements. Privately, Janáček called it "Defiance," either referring to the attitude of the pianist who continued playing despite his loss of an arm, or to the "defiant" combination of a piano with mainly brass instruments. The virtuoso brass sound looks back to the military sound of Janáček's Sinfonietta, but is of course much more transparent here. All the same, unusual demands are placed on all individual players, not only the piano. The overall effect is indeed "capricious": whimsical and full of "willfulness and witticisms," as Janáček himself said. Delicious music in Janáček's late style.

[Jean-Efflam Bavouzet on Youtube; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet on Chandos]

13. Darius Milhaud, Le carnaval d'Aix, fantasy for piano & orchestra Op 83b (1926)
This music is good fun, like a real carnival. Milhaud was born in sunny southern France and in Carnival d'Aix he makes this connection explicit. However, this music was just as much inspired by Milhaud's wanderings in Brazil: the composer imagines a group of traditional Commedia dell'Arte characters from the Italian theater, dressed up for the Carnival in Rio, and then magically transported to his homeland in Aix-en-Province. It is a lighthearted work in twelve short sections, sometimes based on dance melodies as polka and tango, filled with good humor and affectionate parody. It also displays all the hallmarks of Milhaud's style: curious chromatic diversions, subtle but incisive use of dissonance within a tonal context, polytonal complexes, and vibrant rhythms inspired by jazz and South American music. Captivating music.
[Jack Gibbons on Helios]

[Milhaud]

14. Nikolai Medtner, Piano Concerto No 2 in C Minor Op 50 (1927)
Nikolai Medtner wrote three concertos, the second of which is my favorite, an energetic and entrancing piece of music. Medtner was a pianist-composer like Rachmaninoff, and he also left Russia after the Soviets came to power, emigrating to the U.K. The concerto is in three movements: Toccata, Romanza and Divertimento. The outer movements are ebullient and full of kinetic energy, the central Romanza is delightfully lyrical. In the first movement there is much dialogue between piano and orchestra and the tireless motor rhythms also show Medtner loved his Scarlatti. The Divertimento plays with themes from the previous movements in a dancing style that culminates in a riot. Medtner's music is not as gripping as Rachmaninoff, but it grows on you, and you will not tire of it as soon as of that of his fellow emigre-countryman. A concerto that deserves to be better known.
[Geoffrey Tozer on Chandos]

[Medtner]

15. John Foulds, Dynamic Triptych for Piano and Orchestra (1929)
This is a truly magnificent concerto that for long years was completely forgotten. Foulds was popular in the 1920s for his A World Requiem in commemoration of the war dead, but was soon forgotten after his death from cholera in India in 1939. The Dynamic Triptych was only performed once (in 1933) and then lay forgotten until Howard Shelley dusted it off for his Lyrita performance in 1984. It is dramatic and experimental music, written under the influence of exotic music theories. The first movement is called "Dynamic Mode," the second "Dynamic Timbre" and the third "Dynamic Rhythm." The writing for both piano and orchestra is exuberant. The slow movement is the most romantic, Foulds inhabits a very shadowy world and the use of slithery quarter-tones is really disturbing in effect. The last movement is a sparkling dance. Jazz plays its part here, we hear cross-rhythms and changes of meter, clusters and complex chords. It is virtuoso music full of unstoppable energy which will blow the mind of anyone who hears it for the first time. Foulds may well be one of the most undervalued composers of the 20th century.
[Howard Shelley on Lyrita]

[Foulds]

16. John Ireland, Piano Concerto in E Flat major (1930)
A lyrical concerto with jazzy dance band elements. Was long seen as the pre-eminent British piano concerto, a worthy pendant to the contemporary Prokofiev and Ravel concertos. Although it has now sunk into oblivion, the concerto was immediately successful and was often performed by British and international soloists over four decades. The concerto was written for the brilliant 19-year old pianist Helen Perkin, for whom the composer obviously harbored tender feelings (he even quotes from a string quartet she had composed as a student). Helen Perkins premiered the concerto at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert, an event which made both their names, but to Ireland's disappointment she next married an architect and moved with him to Australia. Music is not all-powerful, apparently.
[Eric Parkin on Chandos]

[Ireland]

17. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Piano Concerto in C (1926-31)
A concerto full of drama and turbulence, like Vaughan Williams' music from the same period as the Fourth Symphony and Job. The three movements are titled Toccata, Romanza and Fuga chromatica con Finale alla Tedesca. The Toccata is characterized by two "blocks" of music, a driving piano solo set against a rising theme in the orchestra with which the concerto starts, and a more scherzo-like idea, shared between piano and orchestra. A thunderous piano cadenza forms the link to the slow movement which starts without a break, a delicate Romanza. The third movement again follows without a break and begins with a fugue that is linked to a waltz finale. In this concerto, Vaughan Williams treated the piano as a percussion instrument, as did Bartók and Hindemith during this period - the orchestral texture is at times very thick. The composer took the advice of well-meaning critics to rework his music into a Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1946), adding more texture to the piano parts, but today the original version is considered as superior.
[Howard Shelley on Lyrita]

[Vaughan Williams]

18. Constance Lambert, Concerto for Piano and Nine Players (1931)

This a deliciously jazzy concerto, but one which also becomes unexpectedly serious as the music advances. The nine players are flute (doubling piccolo), three clarinets, trumpet, trombone, cello, string bass and percussion, leading to contrast-rich music as in the Stravinsky and Janacek concertos. It is a starkly incisive, even abrasive work. The three movements are called Overture, Intermède and Finale (Lugubre) - and the ending is sad and silent. It has been called "a form of musical parable that investigates every phrase of language, to discard them all, little by little, so as to arrive at something which comes near to an invitation to silence. All this by a route that starts from an apparent rhythmical vital attack, progressing to the final desolate notes of the blues - subtitled "Lugubre" - through all of which, from time to time, can be recognized the echoes of jazz..." (from the sleeve notes by Silvio D'Amicone). A very original work.
[Alessandro de Curtis on ASdisc; Ian Brown on Helios]

[Lambert by Wood]

Posts about classical music include:

Best String Trios
Best String Quartets, Part One (ca. 1750-1850)
Best String Quartets, Part Two (ca. 1850-1900)
Best String Quartets, Part Three (ca. 1900-1925)
Best String Quartets, Part Four (1926-1945)
Best String Quartets, Part Five (Postwar period)
Best String Quintets

Best Piano Trios
Best Piano Trios, Part Two
Best Piano Quartets
Best Piano Quintets

Best Piano Concertos, Part One
Best Piano Concertos, Part Two
Best Piano Concertos, Part Three

Best Cello Concertos
Best Cello Sonatas
Best Works for Oboe
Best Works for Viola
Best Flute Concertos
Best 20th c. Violin Concertos

Unique Symphonies from the 19th Century
Eccentric Symphonies by 20th Century Cult Composers (1) - Scriabin, Ives & Langaard
Eccentric Symphonies from 20th Century Cult Composers (2) - Havergal Brian & Matthijs Vermeulen
Classical Music in the Netherlands (1): 17th & 18th centuries
Classical Music in the Netherlands (2): 19th century
Classical Music in the Netherlands (3): 20th century

"The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes (short review)

2016-02-21T10:28:00.000+09:00

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes enters the head of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (with Stravinsky the greatest 20th century composer) at three critical moments in his life: in 1936 when his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" has been condemned by Stalin himself and the composer fears arrest; in 1948 when Stalin orders him to join a propaganda tour to the U.S. where he has to read out prepared speeches denouncing Stravinsky (whom he admires); and in 1960 when he lets himself be pushed to join the Communist Party and reaps criticism from his friends. Shostakovich was decidedly not a hero or a dissident (and he was probably more "red" than Barnes makes him), but how many people would have sacrificed their career and family to stand up to a totalitarian regime? What his example shows is how inhuman totalitarianism is, for it makes liars and dissemblers of us all. Time to listen to one of Shostakovich wonderful string quartets...

Best 20th c. Violin Concertos

2016-01-23T08:25:00.001+09:00

The instrumental concerto emerged as an independent form towards the end of the seventeenth century and soon evolved into a genre in which virtuosity was a significant ingredient. The violin was initially the most important solo instrument, although in the second half of the eighteenth century it was superseded by the piano. The nineteenth century was the age of the virtuoso with empty display leading to the debasement of the genre, although in the hands of serious composers the "symphonic concerto" (sometimes almost a symphony with obbligato violin) also flourished. In the twentieth century, the virtuoso concerto lost in importance and the symphonic concerto grew in complexity.

As you will see below (and in my other posts about classical music) I believe that 20th c. musical history is broader than only atonality or the twelve-tone technique. What counts is whether a given work is convincing as a statement in his own language by the composer. So below you'll find Schoenberg and Ligeti brotherly side by side with Barber and Walton... And why not - this is all beautiful music.

1. Carl Nielsen, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op 33 (1911)
Carl Nielsen wrote concertos for flute, clarinet and violin. That last concerto dates from around the time of his Third Symphony and is a bridge to the composer's leaner style and also to the 20th c. concerto in general. It has an unusual shape, being in two movements which both start with extensive slow introductions. While the first movement with its violin cadenza full of pyrotechnics and expansive sonata movement still reminds listeners of the virtuoso concerto of the 19th century, the second and last movement - a calm prelude followed by a rondo scherzando, built on a capricious staccato tune, renounces everything that might dazzle or impress and therefore sounds utterly modern.
Recording listened to: Cho-Liang Lin with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen on CBS Records (with Sibelius concerto).

2. Frederick Delius, Violin Concerto (1916)
Written in 1916, immediately after the Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, but only premiered in 1919 due to the delay by the war. The Violin Concerto shares a continuous flow of lyricism and melodic invention unique in 20th-c. orchestral music with Delius' other concertos, the one for cello and the double concerto. It is a rhapsodic work in one movement, a soliloquy for the violin. The whole work springs from several musical cells introduced at the beginning by orchestra and soloist and seems like a wonderful improvisation although it is of course tightly controlled. It is not a bravura piece and even ends pianissimo, which may be the reason for the surprising obscurity of this beautiful music.
Recording listened to: Tasmin Little with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis on Chandos (with cello Concerto and Double Concerto).

3. Karol Szymanowski, Violin Concerto No 1 (1916, premiere 1922)
Again a violin concerto that rejects the 19th c. tradition. The one-movement concerto, which was contemporaneous with Szymanowski's monumental Third Symphony introduces a new musical language full of ecstatic raptures and tension. The euphoric music is based on Noc Majowa ("May Night"), a poem by Tadeusz Miciński: "And now we stand by the lake in crimson blossom / in flowing tears of joy, with rapture and fear, / burning in amorous conflagration." While the violin sings its lyrical song it is surrounded by a fascinating landscape of ever changing, cascading sound waves. A concerto with a marked Oriental flavor.
Recording listened to: Konstanty Andrzej Kulka with the Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Karol Stryja on Naxos (with Second Violin Concerto).

4. Sergey Prokofiev, Violin Concerto No 1 (1917, premiere 1923)
The First Violin Concerto was written while Prokofiev worked on his Dostoevsky opera, The Gambler, and the Classical Symphony. The premiere of 1917 was overtaken by the October Revolution and was finally given in 1923 in Paris. It is a lyrical work without overtly virtuoso effects, starting with a quietly rapturous opening theme. The second movement is interestingly a sardonic scherzo, with typical Prokofievian motor rhythms and the violin partly playing sul ponticello (near the bridge). The songful finale resumes the mood of the opening movement, finally to return to the dreamy tune from the start of the concerto.
Recording listened to: Lydia Mordkovitch with the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi on Chandos (with Second Violin Concerto).

5. Paul Hindemith, Kammermusik No 4 Op 36 No 3 "Violin Concerto" (1925)
Hindemith revived the spirit of the Baroque concerto grosso in his set of seven Kammermusiken, using ensembles inspired by Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. The fourth Kammermusik is a violin concerto, written for Licco Amar, Hindemith's friend and leader of the Amar Quartett. The accompanying ensemble is heavily weighted towards the wind instruments, especially the brass, plus as set of small drums. While the fast movements are hard-driven, the slow third movement is a "night piece," with an intense mood of troubled meditation. The two finale movements are a march and a piece with a strange, surrealistic moto perpetuo figuration in the solo violin.
Recording listened to: Konstanty Kulka with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly on Decca (complete Kammermusik).

6. Igor Stravinsky, Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra (1931)
A masterly example of neoclassicism, not a superficial stylistic copy, but a wholly new creation as the result of an affectionate approach to models from the past - with the spice of some fine parodic distortion added to the new mix. The four movements have Baroque titles as Toccata and Aria, and at the beginning of each movement the violin plays the same motto-like chord. The music is like a colorful collage, refreshingly serene, avoiding all subjective moods and feelings. It is music completely without a "message" or "idea."
Recording listened to: Itzak Perlman with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa on Deutsche Grammaphon (with the Berg concerto)

7. Alban Berg, Violin Concerto "To the Memory of an Angel" (1935)
Berg dedicated his violin concerto to the memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Mahler's widow Alma and the architect Walter Gropius, who had been suffering from polio and died at the age of eighteen. They were family friends of Berg who felt like a second father to the girl. It is a twelve-tone concerto meant to gain acceptance for that style of composition, but it also includes tonal elements such as a Carinthian folk song and Bach's chorale Est is Genug. The opening pitches of the Bach chorale form the first four notes of the twelve-tone series on which the whole work is based. The first movement describes the girl in happy circumstances, the second one is about her struggle with death and her transfiguration. The work ends with a vision of the "angel." One of the most impressive of all 20th c. concertos.
Recording listened to: Itzak Perlman with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa on Deutsche Grammaphon (with the Stravinsky concerto)

8. Arnold Schoenberg, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op 36 (1936)
Written in 1936 in the United States, where Schoenberg had moved in 1933 to escape the Nazis, at the same time as the String Quartet No. 4. The Expressionistic concerto is in neoclassical form and in the traditional three movements. It opens with an expansive sonata movement with waltz-like central development section, succeeded in turn by a reflective Andante and a march-like finale. Based on a single twelve-tone row, the concerto is entirely dodecaphonic. The basic row of the concerto is very much in the foreground and helps to gain a better understanding of the music. The concerto is very difficult to play, needing a "six-fingered" hand, but anno 2016 there should be no difficulty anymore in understanding this music. Just undergo it.
Recording listened to: Hillary Hahn with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen on Deutsche Grammophon (with the Sibelius concerto).

9. Bela Bartók, Violin Concerto No 2 (1938)
Composed by Bartók just after the Second Piano Concerto and while he worked on the chamber piece Contrasts. Bartók initially planned to write a single-movement concerto like a set of variations, but at the request of the dedicatee, the violinist Zoltán Székely, he ended up writing a standard three-movement concerto - with the set of six variations on a Magyar folk theme as the second movement and the third movement being a variation on material from the first. The dramatic music may well reflect the difficult life of the composer in Hungary in 1938 when as a democrat he was the target of various attacks by Fascists. Soon afterwards, he emigrated to the United States.
Recording listened to: Kyung Wha Chung with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Georg Solti on Decca (with violin concerto op. posth.)

10. Samuel Barber, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op 14 (1939).
One of the most magically lyric and romantic concertos ever written. In Barber's own words: "The first movement (allegro molto moderato) begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement (andante sostenuto) is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetuum mobile, exploits the more brilliant and virtuosic character of the violin."
Recording listened to: Elmar Oliveira with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin on EMI (with Symphony No 2 by Hanson).

11. Benjamin Britten, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op 15 (1939, rev. 1950)
Written four months after Britten sailed for the United States in 1939, and first performed in New York. The concerto combines virtuosic brilliance with elegiac lyricism, reflecting Britten's growing concern with the escalation of hostilities around the world that year. The three movements are linked by a motto-rhythm (timpani, which also open the concerto in Beethoven-style), which pervades the opening movement and is recalled in the wild second-movement scherzo (a motoric scherzo as in Prokofiev's concerto). The last movement is Britten's first essay in the passacaglia form (later also used in his Second String Quartet), a set of variations on a ground bass, in the tradition of the Baroque chaconnes by Purcell and Bach. The variations include sections of song, dance, capriccio and march. By the end, the ground bass is reduced to a chant-like memory. Britten is in the first place regarded as an opera composer, but happily this wonderful concerto is enjoying a notable revival of interest in recent years.
Recording listened to: Mark Lubotsky with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britten on London (wit piano concerto).

12. William Walton, Violin Concerto (1939)
An unashamedly romantic, symphonic concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz, who commissioned it in 1936. There is a kaleidoscopic succession of moods in the first movement: from the dreamy opening and rapture, to the central section’s jazz-inspired inflections. The second movement features a sensual Mediterranean ambiance, as well as an unexpectedly jaunty waltz episode. The third movement is even more lyrical and ends with an exquisite cadenza. The previous decade had already seen the emergence of three large-scale masterpieces by Walton - the Viola Concerto, Belshazzar’s Feast and the Symphony No. 1 - to which the present Violin Concerto can be added as one of those works on which Walton's reputation securely rests.
Recording listened to: Nigel Kennedy with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn on EMI Records (with Viola Concerto).

13. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Concerto funebre for solo violin and string orchestra (1939)
In this "funeral concerto" the German composer Hartmann, a sincere anti-Fascist, laments the catastrophe he saw coming, while many contemporaries jumped on the bandwagon of the Nazis that was to drive them to their perdition. The four movement concerto is played without a break and starts and ends with a chorale. The second movement is a lament interrupted by march-like episodes, the Allegro unleashes considerable rhythmic and dynamic forces, with hammering quavers. The final chorale has the character of a slow-moving procession, with a songful melody. The chorales are signs of hope against the background of the desperate situation of intellectuals under the Nazi regime. After the Nazis took full power, Hartmann forbade the performance of his music in Germany.
Recording listened to: Hans Maile with the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Alexander Sander on Koch-Schwann (with violin concertos by Zimmermann and Egk).

14. Eduard Tubin, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1942)
Eduard Tubin was born in Estonia and studied at the Tartu College of Music, where he attended Heino Eller's composition class. When the Soviets invaded his country in September 1944 Tubin fled to Sweden, subsequently living in Stockholm for the rest of his life. Tubin composed 10 symphonies, an orchestral suite and a sinfonietta, 2 operas, a ballet, chamber music and concertos for solo instruments as the present violin concerto. Despite advocacy of the famous Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi, and in contrast to other Baltic composers as Pärt, Tubin remains in obscurity - although he was a masterful symphonist. The first Violin Concerto was written during the war years when Tubin still lived in Tartu and shows the influence of the study the composer undertook in the 1930s of Estonian folk music. After an energetic first movement follows an intimate Andante that is like a painful confession. The final movement has something of a tarantella-like chase.
Recording listened to: Mark Lubotschky with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi (with Suite on Estonian dances etc.).

15. Dmitri Shostakovich, Violin Concerto No 1 in A Minor Op 99 (1948)
A truly symphonic concerto in four movements on a grand scale, with a musical plan that looks towards the Tenth Symphony. The brooding and mysterious slow movement is set against a manic scherzo containing the composer's monogram "DSCH." The intense third movement is a reflective passacaglia out of which a long solo cadenza emerges which leads into the vigorous, folk-style finale. Originally written for David Oistrakh, this wonderful concerto had to wait more than seven years before it could be performed, due to the anti-artistic climate of the late Stalin years.
Recording listened to: Lydia Mordkovitch with the Scottish National orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi (with Second Violin Concerto).

16. Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Concerto for Violin and large orchestra (1950)
A musical commentary on the war and atrocities the composer lived through as a young man in Germany. This is especially clear in the second movement, a long Fantasia that contains an echo of the Apocalypse through quotes of the Dies Irae - after Hiroshima, humans now had the power to destroy the whole planet in their hands. The movement juxtaposes broad, expressive gestures, explosive outbursts and moments of the utmost lyrical intensity.
Recording listened to: Hans Maile with the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Alexander Sander on Koch-Schwann (with violin concertos by Hartmann and Egk).

14. Frank Martin, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1951)
Frank Martin's expressive violin concerto has a mysterious, fairytale-like mood, in part inspired by the Swiss composer's fascination with Shakespeare's The Tempest. It is a beautiful lyrical work. The opening orchestral tutti instantly establishes a magical atmosphere, "an amalgam of impressionism, jazz, modal harmony, and a touch of twelve-tone technique." This movement, Allegro tranquillo, leads to a brilliant orchestral climax after which the unaccompanied violin plays a soliloquy. The Andante molto moderato is songful, but with much darker tonal colors. At the end the soloist floats serenely aloft. The concluding Presto is an exuberant display of high-tensioned energy, swept on by a hard-driven soloist.
Recording listened to: Wolfgang Schneiderhan with Orchester Symphonique de la Radio Luxembourg conducted by Frank Martin on Jecklin (with piano concerto).

15. Mieczysław Weinberg, Violin Concerto in G Minor Op 67 (1960)
A massive work in which the soloist plays almost non-stop, more like an orchestral work with obbligato violin. The opening Allegro with its rhythmically obsessive theme is in sonata form. The second theme has a refined accompaniment from celesta and harp. The Allegretto is the only movement where the soloist is initially silent. The Adagio has a dreamy melodiousness and the Allegro risoluto has the character of a dance. It ends by quoting from the first movement and then sinks away in pianissimo. A little-known, but fabulous concerto.
Recording listened to: Leonid Kogan with Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Kirill Kondrashin on Olympia (with Fourth Symphony).

16. Alfred Schnittke, Violin Concerto No 3 for violin and chamber orchestra(1978)
Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) challenged audiences with his music, which ranges in influences from Russian Orthodox church music to uncompromising atonality. The Third Violin Concerto starts with a cadenza by the soloist. In the first and second movements Schnittke only uses the thirteen wind instruments of the chamber orchestra; the strings only start playing in the third movement and then gradually replace the wind instruments. There are different influences at work in the concerto: Russian Orthodox church music in the closing chorale of the first and third movements and German Romanticism in the forest music at the start of the third, music which directly quotes Schubert and Mahler. There is also the atonal idiom of the chromatic intervals that sometimes produce twelve-note themes but never twelve-note rows. The interaction between these musical worlds is not subjected to any structural principle - Schnittke just follows his ear. He has, he says, been long interested in the interplay between tonality and atonality. The three movements of the concerto (slow-fast-slow) are played without a break.
Recording listened to: Gidon Kremer with the Chamber Orchetra of Europe on Teldec (complete violin concertos).

17. Sofia Gubaidulina, Offertorium, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1980)
This concerto was dedicated to Gidon Kremer, who in touring with it around the world brought the Soviet composer Sofia Gubaidulina first to international attention. The title has a double meaning. In the first place the concerto is based on the theme of Bach's Musikalisches Opfer (Musical Offering, BWV 1079), via the "Klangfarbenmelodie" orchestration of the six-part ricercar of that work by Anton Webern. The introduction presents the theme almost whole, after which the soloist deconstructs it, taking away note after note from it. At the end of the concerto, the theme is again reconstructed resulting in a complete statement by the violin at the very end. The second meaning of the title is a religious one: a reference to the section of the Mass when the priest offers up bread and wine as a symbol for the sacrifice of Christ during the Crucifixion, the Christian symbolism "death" and "resurrection" which is also mirrored in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the theme of Bach's Musikalisches Opfer. The final section of the concerto consists of a slow string chorale that resembles a Russian Orthodox hymn.
Recording listened to: Gidon Kremer with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit on Deutsche Grammophon (with Hommage to T.S. Eliot).

18. Henri Dutilleux, L'Arbre des songes, concerto for violin and orchestra (1985)
This violin concerto was written for Issac Stern and based by Dutilleux on the idea of continuous growth and renewal, symbolized by the "tree of dreams" mentioned in the title. There are four movements linked by three interludes, all played without a break. "All in all the piece grows somewhat like a tree, for the constant multiplication and renewal of its branches is the lyrical essence of the tree. This symbolic image, as well as the notion of a seasonal cycle, inspired my choice of 'L'arbre des songes' as the title of the piece." But it is important to realize that Dutilleux never literally restates his themes - there always is a difference defined by the intervening transformations. The transformations themselves are such that it is difficult to hear the initial theme in them - like hearing a set of variations without first having heard the initial statement of the theme. One of Dutilleux's greatest works, on a par with the Cello Concerto "Tout un monde lointain..." and the string quartet "Ainsi la nuit."
Recording listened to: Isaac Stern with Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn on CBS (with violin concerto by Maxwell Davies).

19. Philip Glass, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No 1 (1987)
In 1987, Philip Glass turned from electronic music to symphonic music in a more traditional and lyrical style. The first fruit of this new style was the Violin Concerto No 1, commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra for soloist Paul Zukofsky. It quickly became one of Glass' most popular works, not surprisingly, as it is really vintage Glass, reminding one of such works as the Dance Pieces. It is in conventional three-movement format. Both the first and last movements have a strong dance-like feel. In both a theatrical and personal way, the violin strews it fast arpeggios upon the pulsing background chords, or soars over them with arching, cantabile lines. The success of the concerto inspired Glass to branch out into more orchestral works.
Recording listened to: Robert McDuffie with the Houston Symphony conducted by Christoph Eschenbach on Telarc (with violin concerto by Adams).

20. György Ligeti, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1992)
György Ligeti has been called one of the most important avant-garde composers of the latter half of the 20th c. Born in Romania in 1923, he lived in Hungary before emigrating to Austria in 1956, where he became a naturalized citizen. In 1973 he became professor of composition at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater until his retirement in 1989. He died in Vienna in 2006. Ligeti uses both polyrhythm and micropolyphony (a similar technique to polyphony but with the polyphony hidden under a dense and rich stack of pitches). This leads to slowly evolving, static music. Ligeti completed his Violin Concerto in 1993 after four years of work. Like the Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto uses the wide range of techniques he had developed up until that point. Among other techniques, it uses "microtonality, rapidly changing textures, comic juxtapositions... Hungarian folk melodies, Bulgarian dance rhythms, references to Medieval and Renaissance music and solo violin writing that ranges from the slow-paced and sweet-toned to the angular and fiery."
Recording listened to: Saschko Gawriloff with Ensemble InterContemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez on Deutsche Grammophon (with cello and piano concertos).

21. John Adams, Violin Concerto No 1 (1993)
The violin concerto was commissioned as both a concert work and music for the dance stage, so that the underlying grid of rhythmic equality is never obscured. As John Adams has stated: "Formally, the concerto embraces a long, rhapsodic first movement, a slow, stately chaconne and a driving, extroverted toccata. The solo voice is almost never ending, the orchestra remaining either behind it or below it..." In other words, there is no contest between soloist and orchestra, to which also the title of the second movement refers, "Body through which the dream flows:" "the orchestra as the organized, delicately articulated mass of blood, tissues and bones; the violin as the dream that flows through it."
Recording listened to: Robert McDuffie with the Houston Symphony conducted by Christoph Eschenbach on Telarc (with violin concerto by Glass).

[Incorporates some information from the CD sleeve notes, Wikipedia, etc. All images linked from Wikipedia. Some of the recommended CDs may not be available anymore (or the names of the labels may have changed)]

Posts about classical music include:

Best String Trios
Best String Quartets, Part One (ca. 1750-1850)
Best String Quartets, Part Two (ca. 1850-1900)
Best String Quartets, Part Three (ca. 1900-1925)
Best String Quartets, Part Four (1926-1945)
Best String Quartets, Part Five (Postwar period)
Best String Quintets

Best Piano Trios
Best Piano Trios, Part Two
Best Piano Quartets
Best Piano Quintets

Best Cello Concertos
Best Cello Sonatas
Best Works for Oboe
Best Works for Viola
Best Flute Concertos
Best 20th c. Violin Concertos

Unique Symphonies from the 19th Century
Eccentric Symphonies by 20th Century Cult Composers (1) - Scriabin, Ives & Langaard
Eccentric Symphonies from 20th Century Cult Composers (2) - Havergal Brian & Matthijs Vermeulen
Classical Music in the Netherlands (1): 17th & 18th centuries
Classical Music in the Netherlands (2): 19th century
Classical Music in the Netherlands (3): 20th century

Best String Quartets, Part 5 (Postwar period)

2016-01-03T10:01:00.000+09:00

The last installment of Best String Quartets, containing music from the mid-1940s to the mid-1990s.

1. Dmitri Shostakovitch, String Quartet No 3 in F Op 73 (1946)
Dmitri Shostakovitch (1906-1975) wrote 15 symphonies and also 15 string quartets. His series of quartets has been compared in importance to that by Beethoven and together with the six quartets by Bartók it forms the most important series written in the 20th c. The numeral balance between symphonies and quartets is somewhat misleading, by the way, for it was not until the Fifth Symphony (1937) that the First Quartet appeared. The 13th quartet appeared just before the last symphony, in 1970, after which two more quartets would follow in 1973 and 1974 - the last one sublime but so bleak and death-haunted that it is difficult to listen to it (in contrast to the 15th symphony, where the darkness is at least somewhat lighted up by a sort of surrealist carnival). I have therefore selected the characteristic Third Quartet which is one of the finest in the whole cycle. It consists of natural and fluent music, "vintage Shostakovitch." The quartet is in five movements. The opening sonata-form Allegretto is bright and playful - featuring an innocent theme of Mozartian grace, like in the First Quartet. In the Moderato con moto we hear harsh repetitions and ostinatos, as if the pastoral world of the first movement is now under threat. That threat takes shape in the centrally placed Allegro non troppo, a grotesque and hard-driven march-cum-scherzo, typical ferocious Shostakovitchian music we also find in similar movements in the 10th and 11th symphonies. This is followed by an Adagio, which is in fact a passacaglia of great expressive power (it reminded me of the great passacaglia in Shostakovitch's First Violin Concerto), mixed with a funeral march (to lament the militaristic onslaught that has taken place in the previous movement?). The theme of the passacaglia is recalled in the mocking finale (Moderato), where it is played fortissimo at the climax, before the music fades away.
[Also see this interesting Introduction to the 15 quartets of Shostakovitch]
Recording listened to: Borodin String Quartet on EMI (with Second Quartet).

2. Nikolay Myaskovsky, String Quartet No 12 in G Major Op 77 (1947)
The Russian composer Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881-1950) studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anatoly Lyadov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Here he also met Sergei Prokofiev with whom he became firm friends, despite the age difference. After graduation, Myaskovsky taught in Saint Petersburg, and from 1921 at the Moscow Conservatory, a position he retained until his death. Among his many pupils were Aram Khachaturian, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Vissarion Shebalin, Rodion Shchedrin, and Boris Tchaikovsky. Myaskovsky was a prolific composer of symphonic and chamber music - he wrote 13 string quartets, between 1930 and 1950 (besides composing the stunning number of 27 symphonies between 1908 and 1949). The Twelfth Quartet was composed in 1947 and dedicated to Myaskovky's pupil Kabalevsky. It is in four movements. It opens with a rather desolate introduction, after which follows a luminous and flowing Allegro moderato, characterized by a soulful lyricism. The Allegro fantastico has energetic pizzicati and quixotic rhythms. The Trio is atmospherically lugubrious. The Andante con espressione is filled with chromaticisms, long melodic lines and muted strings. There are strong hints of the folkloric in the breezily confident Finale (Allegro non troppo). An admirable quartet, arguably Miaskovsky's best (other contenders are the Tenth Quartet, and some of the earlier ones, as Nos 2 & 3).
[Also see Nikolai Miaskovsky - A Survey of the Chamber Works, Orchestral Music and Concertos on Record]
Recording listened to: The Taneyev Quartet on Northern Flower (with Quartet No 13).

3. Grażyna Bacewicz, String Quartet No 3 (1947)
The Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) was born in Łódź. Her father was Lithuanian. She studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and after graduation continued her studies in Paris, among others with Nadia Boulanger. She worked as principal violinist of the Polish Radio Orchestra and after WWII took up the position of professor at the State Conservatoire of Music in Łódź. The violin figures prominently in her compositions - she wrote seven violin concertos and eight violin sonatas (of which three for solo violin). She also wrote seven string quartets and four numbered symphonies. Bacewicz is one of Poland's most remarkable composers, whose works all show a joy in string-instrument sonorities. The Third Quartet was composed while Bacewicz was on a concert tour in Paris just after the war. It is marked by a neoclassicist style, but also by folk music and dance rhythms. The quartet brings not only Bartók to mind, but also Tippett (both composers introduced in Best String Quartets, Part Four). There are three movements. The opening movement is a subtly wrought sonata-allegro structure. The central slow movement is a graceful creation, with elegant melodic phrases. The rondo-finale is in high spirits, full of wit and invention, as if transported from the 18th c. In general this is carefree and optimistic music, but certainly not without depth and weight. The Fourth Quartet from 1951, by the way, is generally regarded as Bacewicz' best and it helped her also get international attention, but I have a personal preference for the brightness of her Third Quartet.
Recording listened to: Lutoslawski Quartet on Naxos (Complete string quartets on 2 CDs).

4. Darius Milhaud, String Quartet No 16 Op 303 (1950)
Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) was one of the most prolific French composers of the 20th c. His modernist compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality. Milhaud was born in Marseille and studied at the Paris Conservatoire where he met Honegger and Tailleferre with whom (and others) he would later form The Group of Six. Milhaud wrote operas, ballets, symphonies, stage works, film scores and also chamber music. Between 1912 and 1958, he wrote 18 string quartets (consciously one more than Beethoven). Some of these quartets are like a personal diary, others seem to be used for musical experiments. The Sixteenth Quartet belongs in the first category, as it was dedicated to Milhaud's wife Madeleine on their 25th wedding anniversary. The first movement (Tendre) is played entirely with mutes and weaves a leisurely contrapuntal discourse. Except for one passionate outburst, this is quiet music. The second movement (Vif) opens with a lively theme. In the third movement (Doux et calme) the players put the mutes back on for warmly lyrical music. The finale (Anime) is in contrast a joyously boisterous movement. In all, this is calm and tender music, exuding a pleasant human warmth, a great tribute by the composer to his wife.
Recording listened to: Quatuor Parisii on Auvidis Valois (with quartets 2, 7 & 13).

5. Edmund Rubbra, String Quartet No 2 in E Flat Op 73 (1951)
The British composer Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986) could be called a "composer's composer" (after the analogy with a "writer's writer"): a composer who is admired, appreciated and respected by fellow musicians, but who is not very popular with the general public, because his complex works are not easily approachable, or because he writes more from the intellect than the heart. Rubbra studied at the Royal College of Music and early in life earned his living by giving piano recitals or playing the piano for a touring theater group. After WWII, he became lecturer at the new faculty of music at Oxford University. As a composer, Rubbra devised his own distinctive style, discarding the at that time fashionable twelve-tone music, although he was certainly a modernist. His style is melody-based and therefore has a vocal feel; he works from a single melodic idea and then lets the music grow from that, without applying any formal rules. Rubbra is known for his eleven symphonies, for large-scale choral works (his Missa Sancti Dominici from 1948) and his chamber music, which shows a great variety. Between 1933 and 1977 he also wrote four string quartets. The Second String Quartet from 1951 is in four movements. The first and last movements are built along similar lines: they have reflective openings leading to vigorous dance-like music. The second movement is a scherzo called "polimetrico," with the four instruments playing independent rhythms - but it doesn't sound "difficult" at all. The third movement is a Cavatine, rarefied mystical music with a strong abnegation of ornament and therefore of almost monastic severity. This is a brilliantly written and deeply felt quartet, but also essentially reserved music, which repays repeated listening.
Recording listened to: Maggini Quartet on Naxos (with Piano Trio etc.).

6. Elliott Carter, String Quartet No 1 (1951)
The American composer Elliott Carter (1908-2012) was a formidable figure in the musical world of his country. His life spanned more than a century and he remained very active as a composer into his most advanced years. Carter studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s. After his return to the United States, he held various prestigious teaching posts throughout his life, at Yale, Columbia, Cornell and the Juilliard School. Carter was a Modernist, whose style - after an early neoclassical phase - emphasized atonality and rhythmic complexity. He is one of the most important 20th c. American composers. Carter wrote in all five string quartets. The First Quartet was composed while the New Yorker Carter stayed in the Arizona desert. The impressive quartet was Carter's major breakthrough as a composer, a mature work in which he brought all his advanced techniques together. It is a long and complex piece, uncompromising in its gritty harmonic language, but if you keep Bartok in mind, you'll probably find your way through it. Although there are four movements (Fantasia, Allegro scorrevole (a sort of scherzo), Adagio, Variations), these are played without pause; the two pauses in the work occur within movements, the first in the middle of the Allegro scorrevole, the second one soon after the beginning of the Variations. The quartet starts with a solo cello recitative, which is completed by the solo violin at the very end of the work, like two bookends. Carter said that this was suggested by Jean Cocteau's film Le Sang d'un poète, in which the entire dreamlike action is framed by an interrupted slow-motion shot of a tall brick chimney being dynamited and collapsing - the collapse occurring at the very end of the film. An important technique used by Carter in this quartet is "metric modulation" (you can also hear this in Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments of 1920, but Carter uses it in much more complex way): the music continuously changes meters by superposing one rhythmic pattern on another; that new pattern then supersedes the previous one and itself becomes the basic meter. Carter uses this technique instead of traditional tonal modulation. Thus this quartet presents a continuous unfolding and changing of expressive characters, the one woven into the other or emerging from it, as Carter said, "like the desert horizons I saw daily while it was being written."
Recording listened to: The Arditti String Quartet on Etcetera (with the Fourth Quartet).

7. Heitor Villa-Lobos, String Quartet No 15 (1954)
Brazil's best known composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-59) is widely regarded as one of the most important 20th c. musicians of the Americas. He studied at the conservatory in Rio de Janeiro. Like Bartok in Hungary and Vaughan Williams in England, Villa Lobos explored the music of Brasil's indigenous cultures, from Portuguese, African and American Indian elements to the music of popular street bands. In 1917, he met both Diaghilev and Milhaud who came to Brasil, and was introduced to the music of Debussy and Stravinsky. In the 1920s, he stayed twice for prolonged periods in Paris, taking in the latest trends, and reaching a synthesis in his work between Brazilian and European elements. Besides his large-scale works, such as his many Choros and Bachianas Brasileiras, his symphonies and concertos, Villa-Lobos also wrote a considerable amount of chamber music, among which 17 string quartets. Villa-Lobos claimed to have learned quartet technique from studying the quartets of Haydn. The Fifteenth Quartet was composed in 1954. It is know as the "Harmonics" Quartet owing to the timbral effects at the beginning and end of the slow movement. The quartet is tonal and bright in tone. The first movement has a ternary structure with a dance-like coda appended. The slow movement mainly is serious in tone, with a central section suggestive of a modinha (a Portuguese song). The Scherzo displays youthful vitality, but the finale, which starts with the cello announcing the main theme, is unexpectedly slow and serious. This is complex music - for Villa Lobos in a more popular and folkloristic vein (as most people know him), listen to his Fifth Quartet.
Recording listened to: Danubius Quartet on Marco Polo (with quartets 3 & 10).

8. Mieczysław Weinberg (Moishe Vainberg), String Quartet No 10 Op 85 (1964)
Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) was a Russian composer of Polish-Jewish origin. In 1939, he fled for the Nazis (who murdered most of his family) to the Soviet Union, where he started his career in music with the help of Shostakovitch (who also had an obvious influence on the younger composer). The two composers remained friends and lived near to each other in Moscow, which facilitated the exchange of ideas. Weinberg left a huge body of work: 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, 8 violin sonatas, 6 cello sonatas, 6 piano sonatas, film music and 7 operas, of which The Passenger has in recent years sparked a revival. Weinberg is sometimes ranked as the third great Soviet composer, after Shostakovitch and Prokofiev. Weinberg's seventeen quartets, like those of Shostakovitch to which they bear comparison in terms of quality and quantity, are personal works. Both friends carried on a sort of "competition" in quartet writing, spurring each other on. Weinberg's Tenth Quartet was written in 1964 and dedicated to the composer's future second wife, Olga Rakhalskaya - not coincidentally, a little earlier that same year, Shostakovitch had dedicated his Ninth Quartet to his wife Irina, and after seeing Weinberg's Tenth Quartet, would soon start work on his own tenth quartet. The present quartet is in four movements, but they are played without a break. The work starts surprisingly with an elegiac Adagio. When this dies away, the brilliant and virtuosic Scherzo suddenly arises. In the third movement, again an Adagio, material from the first movement is taken up and further developed. After a cello passage functioning as a bridge, comes the final Allegretto, which is like a charming waltz - but the last six bars return us to the questioning beginning of the quartet, completing the arch.
Recording listened to: Gothenburg Quartet on Olympia (with quartets 1 & 17).

9. Alberto Ginastera, String Quartet No 2 Op 26 (1958, revised 1968)
The Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) was born in Buenos Aires to a Catalan father and Italian mother. He studied at the conservatory of his hometown and just after the world also with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. He has several teaching posts but in 1968 left Argentina for the U.S. and later Switzerland. With for example Villa Lobos in Brazil and Chavez and Revueltas in Mexico, Ginastera is one of the most important 20th c. composers of the Americas. His music, which contains work in all genres except the traditional symphony, is usually divided into three periods: "Objective Nationalism" (1934-1948), "Subjective Nationalism" (1948-1958), and "Neo-Expressionism" (1958-1983). In the first period he used Argentine folk themes in a straightforward fashion, while in the second period those borrowings became more abstract. In the third period he started using serial composition, microtones, indeterminacy, and polytonality. The Second Quartet stands at the beginning of that third period and is Ginastera's first work in twelve-tone style - in the expressive way of Alban Berg (with an admixture of Bartok). There are five movements. An Allegro rustico and a Furioso make up the two outer movements, and a further fast movement, a Presto magico (a strangely disquieting night scene), stands in third place at the center of the quartet, in turn framed by two slow movements, the Adagio angoscioso and the Libero e rapsodico. This is again a masterly quartet written in response to a commission from the renowned Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation.
Recording listened to: Henschel Quartet on Arte Nova (with Quartet no 1)

10. Aulis Sallinen, String Quartet No. 3 Op 19 "Some Aspects of Peltoniemi Hintrik's Funeral March" (1969)
Aulis Sallinen (1935) is a contemporary Finnish composer, who has written 6 operas, 8 symphonies, various concertos and chamber music - in that last category are also various works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. He studied at the Sibelius Academy, served as administrator of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and later in life was made a Professor of Arts by the Finnish Government, so that he could concentrate on composing full-time. While Sallinen's lyric writing shows a strong influence from his great predecessor Sibelius, there is also a certain harsh and satiric touch in his music that is reminiscent of Prokofiev, Shostakovitch and Weill. In the early sixties, he was influenced by serialism, but as his Third Quartet from 1969 shows, by the end of the decade was already moving away from it. The Third String Quartet was composed for an unpretentious reason: to be used at school concerts. The composer decided to use an immediately recognizable, traditional Finnish fiddle tune, "Peltoniemi Hintrik's Funeral March," as the basis for a set of variations. The quartet is in fact a work of continuous variation in which the theme never disappears, ever present like a distant horizon. The opening of the quartet is deceptively simple: first violin and cello play the mournful melody two octaves apart, but slightly differently, giving the suggestion that what we hear is the echo of a march played in the distance. The instrumental techniques are quite varied, ranging from thrumming pizzicato chords to ghostly harmonics.
Recording listened to: Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (with music by Glass, Nancarrow, Sculthorpe and others).

11. Peter Sculthorpe, String Quartet No 8 (1969)
The Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014) studied at the conservatory in Melbourne and later also with Egon Wellesz (see Best String Quartets, Part Three) in Oxford. For most of his life, he was professor at the University of Sydney. Sculthorpe wrote two operas, orchestral and chamber music, including 18 string quartets. He avoided atonal techniques, but instead studied non-Western music. His work is therefore often characterized by unusual timbral effects and a distinctive use of percussion. This is also clear in the Eight String Quartet from 1969. When writing this quartet, Sculthorpe was influenced by two Balinese idioms, ketungan, the rhythmic rice pounding music of Bali (used in the two fast movements), as well as by arja, a kind of Balinese song play (used in the three slow movements, and played con dolore). The first and last movements are almost entirely for solo cello. Like the third movement, they create a feeling of improvisation and are like timeless and placeless chants, deeply sad. The second and fourth movements, based on the ketungan, have strict meters which are more characteristically Indonesian. One can even hear the hubbub of village life in their dance-like plucks and swings.
Recording listened to: Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (with music by Glass, Nancarrow, Sallinen and others).

12. Ben Johnston, String Quartet No 4 "Amazing Grace" (1973)
The contemporary composer Ben Johnston (1926) is known for his use of "just intonation," making him one of the foremost practitioners of micro-tonal music. Just or pure intonation is "any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers," as Wikipedia states. It is a contrasting system from equal temperament, which dominates Western instruments of fixed pitch such as piano or organ. Johnston taught composition and theory at the University of Illinois from 1951 to 1986 before retiring to North Carolina. He was in frequent contact with such "avant-garde" figures as John Cage, La Monte Young, and Iannis Xenakis. Like Sallinen (No 12 above) and others, he was in his early music influenced by post-Webern serialism, but later moved to a more tonal style, as is clear from his Fourth String Quartet. The eleven minute quartet is as the name says a set of variations on the hymn "Amazing Grace," traversing different tunings, all in just intonation. The rhythmic language is of great complexity. This quartet was commissioned by the Fine Arts Music Foundation of Chicago. It has been recorded several times, making it one of Johnston's most popular compositions.
Recording listened to: Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (with music by Volans, Ives, Bartok and others under the title "White Man Sleeps").

13. Henri Dutilleux, "Ainsi la nuit" for string quartet (1976)
The French composer Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) developed his own idiosyncratic style, influenced neither by Messiaen nor by Boulez (but rather extending the legacies of Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky). Although he incorporated some serial techniques, he felt ambiguous about serialism in general, especially its dogmatism. Dutilleux studied before WWII at the Paris Conservatoire and also won the Prix de Rome (without being able to go to Rome because of the outbreak of the war). After the war, he worked as Head of Music Production for Radio France and later as Professor of Composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. He was composer in residence at Tanglewood in 1995 and 1998. Dutilleux wrote slowly, but all his works are perfect masterpieces, such as his Piano Sonata, the two symphonies, the Cello Concerto "Tout un monde lointain" (see my post Best Cello Concertos), the Violin Concerto "L'arbre des songes," and the present String Quartet "Ainsi la nuit," or "Thus the night." As the title implies, its atmosphere is nocturnal, like the progression of a dream. The rhythmically very complex score contains a broad range of string effects and differing colors. Dutilleux prepared himself by studying the Six Bagatelles by Webern and the Lyric Suite by Berg (see Best String Quartets, Part Four). There are seven interrelated movements played without a break: "Nocturne"-"Miroir d'espace"-"Litanies"-"Litanies II"-"Constellations"-"Nocturne II"-"Temps suspendu." Several techniques that are characteristic for Dutilleux are displayed in the quartet: "fan-shaped" writing (i.e. the voices of the four stringed instruments mirroring each other), the outlining of a tonal triad in a seemingly atonal work (a D Major triad: the pitch of D in the introduction, F Sharp in "Litanies II" and A in "Constellation," the climax of the work) , and a similarity of some melodies to the modality of the Gregorian chant (in "Nocturne I" and the opening of "Litanies II"). Ainsi la nuit also displays "progressive growth," a technique through which musical motifs can both recall music that was heard before or hint at music that will be played in later movements. This quartet is definitely one of the ultimate masterpieces of the 20th c. string quartet repertory.
[Guardian article about Dutilleux]
Recording listened to: Schoenberg Quartet on Koch Schwann (with chamber music by Debussy and Chausson).

14. Toru Takemitsu, A Way A Lone for string quartet (1981)
Tokyo-born Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was the first contemporary Japanese composer to make an impression in the West. Largely self-taught, he devised a style of his own, although there are elements of the Second Viennese School, Debussy, Messiaen and Cage. An interesting difference with Western music is that where all classical Western music is grounded in a bass, Takemitsu's music seems to float freely in the air. Toru Takemitsu was largely self-taught in music. In 1957 he attracted international attention with his Requiem for String Orchestra, which earned praise from Stravinsky, then on a visit to Japan. His major works include orchestral music like The Dorian Horizon (1966), and A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977); concertos like Arc Part I for piano and orchestra (1963; as well as Part II from the next year), November Steps for biwa, shakuhachi and orchestra (1967) and the viola concerto A String Around Autumn (1989; see my post Best Works for Viola); as well as many chamber works and music for solo piano and guitar. Takemitsu was also an important composer of film music, he scored hundreds of films, such as Harakiri by Kobayashi, The Woman in the Dunes by Teshigahara and Ran by Kurosawa. Takemitsu's shimmering sound world has an ephemeral quality and is usually capped by poetic titles. He liked to compare composing and listening to music to walking through a classical Japanese garden. The present quartet was commissioned by the Tokyo Quartet in 1981. The title comes from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, where the closing line of the long and abstruse novel reads: "The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the" (which unfinished sentence then links up with the first sentence of the novel like a snake biting its own tail). One could say that Takemitsu's quartet, which is just under 10 minutes, swirls along like the stream of words in Joyce which has become just a series of sonic objects. With its dizzying textures and coloristic effects, the rhapsodic music flows along naturally, like a surreal conversation. This is music of luminous beauty from Japan's most important 20th century composer.
Recording listened to: Tokyo String Quartet on RCA Victor (with quartets by Britten & Barber).

15. Alfred Schnittke, String Quartet No 3 (1983)
The Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) underwent the influence of Shostakovitch, before developing a polystylistic technique in works such as the epic Symphony No 1 (1969-1972) and his first Concerto grosso (1977). He studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he also worked as a teacher until the early 1970s. After that, he mostly earned his money by writing film scores (more than 70 in 30 years time). Despite almost constant illness, Schnittke produced a large amount of music in all genres, including 10 symphonies, 4 violin concertos, 3 viola concertos, 2 cello concertos and 5 piano concertos, a Requiem and a very large amount of chamber music. Schnittke wrote his Third Quartet (of a total of four) in 1983 when his music began to become more widely known abroad, thanks in part to the work of émigré Soviet artists. The quartet, in three movements played without break (Andante-Agitato-Pesante), is a polystylistic work that uses various musical quotations, a sort of trademark of Schnittke's mature style. In the first movement we hear a cadential sequence from a Stabat Mater by Orlando di Lasso, the theme of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge Op 133, and the personal musical monogram of Dmitri Shostakovich, "DSCH." These three elements are not used as cheap pastiche or montage, but in fact form the organic basis for the whole quartet. Like a sort of punctuation mark, the opening cadence by Orlando di Lasso will return in its original form at important points in the work. As the quartet progresses, the musical material is pulled away from its original source. In the second movement it is turned into a complex and violent waltz-scherzo. The process is completed in the finale where the musical elements have been developed into the modern and original musical language of Alfred Schnittke himself. It all ends with the Shostakovich tetrachord in quiet pizzicato.
Recording listened to: Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (with quartet music by Webern, Riley, Zorn, Barber, etc.).

16. Terry Riley, Cadenza on the Night Plain (1984)
Terry Riley (1935) is one of the pioneers of the minimalist school of Western classical music, whose work was influenced by both jazz and Indian classical music. Riley studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and University of California, Berkeley. Riley made numerous trips to India (one of his teachers in the U.S. was Indian) and also to Europe, soaking up new developments in music. He later joined Mills College to teach Indian classical music. Riley's music is usually based on improvisations through a series of modal figures of different lengths. A good example is his In C (1964). Riley began his long-lasting association with the Kronos Quartet when he met founder David Harrington at Mills. In all, Riley has composed 13 string quartets for the ensemble. Besides Cadenza on the Night Plain, their first album length cooperation from 1984, that are for example Salome Dances for Peace (1989) and Sun Rings (2002). The present quartet is grand in scope, it combines the repeated figuration of minimalism with Riley's Indian trained ability to develop a piece over an extended time period. It is dramatic, folksy and spiritual at the same time. It contains cadenzas for each individual player. There are thirteen separate sections in the 37-minute work, some with whimsical or humorous titles such as "March of the Old Timers Reefer Division." Riley's interest in spirituality is evident in sections such as "Tuning to Rolling Thunder," inspired by the ideas of Native American medicine man Rolling Thunder. In contrast, "Where Was Wisdom When We Went West?" recalls the unenlightened pattern of Western migration. This is beautiful, transcendent music, but with its feet solidly planted on the earth.
Recording listened to: Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (the album contains 3 other pieces for string quartet by Riley: Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, G-Song and Mythic Birds Waltz).

17. Philip Glass, String Quartet No 3 "Mishima" (1985)
Philip Glass (1937) is perhaps the most popular composer among America's minimalists. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music and also in the mid-1960s with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He came to minimal music after meeting Steve Reich after his return to New York. For the performance of his early minimal music, he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble (performing himself on keyboard). Later he also composed music for more traditional combinations. The prolific Glass has written operas, ten symphonies, eleven concertos, solo works, chamber music and film scores. He has written seven string quartets plus several other works for string quartet, such as his music for the 1931 classical Dracula film. The music of the Third Quartet was also originally written for a film: Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters from 1985. This film, framed by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima's highly theatrical suicide in 1970, is a biography of the controversial Japanese writer with interspersed dramatizations of some of his novels (see my Japan Navigator post about Mishima, the novel The Golden Pavilion, and his suicide). In fact, Glass wrote three types of music for this film: a large symphony orchestra plays the music for the sections about Mishima's novels, a string orchestra plus percussion the music for the day when Mishima committed suicide, and a string quartet plays the music for the biographical sections about Mishima's life and the people in it (in the film these sections are black and white flashbacks). The string quartet thus aptly reflects the most personal aspects in the film. There are allusions to Mishima's grandmother (whose romantic tales influenced his later thinking), his body building and his extremist right-wing advocacy. Glass has stated that he conceived the string quartet sections as independent music, that could stand alone as a separate string quartet. The six movements are "1957 Award Montage," "November 25 Ichigaya" [the date and place of Mishima's suicide], "1954-Grandmother and Kimitake" [Kimitake is the childhood name of Mishima], "1962-Body building," "Blood Oath" [obviously referring to Mishima's extremist activities], and "Mishima/Closing." The music in this quartet is "vintage Glass," stirring and mesmerizing.
[Official Philip Glass website]
Recording listened to: Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (with quartets 2, 4 & 5).

18. Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988)
Steve Reich (1936) is with Philip Glass one of the pioneers of minimal music, with such signature works as Drumming (1970/1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1974/76). But his absolute masterpiece is Different Trains, a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written in 1988. As background serves the biographical story that at the time of WWII, Reich made frequent train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he realized that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States, he might have been forced by the Nazis to travel in a train to a death camp. The work is scored for string quartet and digitally sampled voices. Using recorded speech as a source for melodies (which are then picked up by the instruments, playing along with the recorded voices) was a new experiment for Reich (although it had of course been done by Stockhausen in Gesang der Jünglinge from 1956, coupled with electronic music). The quartet also contains recordings of train sounds, as well as of sirens and warning bells, and prerecorded lines by the string quartet, thus effectively doubling or quadrupling the strings. Different Trains consists of three movements. In the first movement, "America - Before the War," two persons, Reich's governess and a Pullman porter, reminisce about train travel in the U.S. with sounds of train travel in the background. In the second movement, "Europe - During the War," three Holocaust survivors speak about their experiences in Europe during the war, including their being sent by train to concentration camps. Interestingly, the European trains have shrieking whistles, while the American ones are heard in perfect intervals, expressing the difference between war and peace. And in "After the War" the Holocaust survivors talk about the years immediately following WWII; there is a return to the American train sounds from the first movement. The sinister weight of 20th c. history sometimes makes this a difficult quartet to listen to. At the same time, Reich uses his shape-shifting minimalism to dazzling effect, making Different Trains his masterpiece.
[Official Steve Reich website]
Recording listened to: The Smith Quartet on Signum Classics.

19. Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, "Already It Is Dusk," String Quartet No 1 Op 62 (1988)
The Polish composer Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (1933-2010) was born in southwest Poland and studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice, an institution where he would serve as lecturer and provost himself until the end of the 1970s. Górecki became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during the post-Stalin cultural thaw. In the 1950s and 1960s he wrote Webern-influenced serialist works, like his colleagues in Western-Europe, but by the mid-1970s he had changed to a sort of "holy minimalism," as exemplified in his popular Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. More religious works would follow such as Beatus Vir, Miserere and a Requiem. In that respect he is frequently compared to composers as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, who share Górecki's simplified approach to texture, tonality and melody, in works often reflecting deeply held religious beliefs. And like Pärt and Taverner, Górecki has had enormous commercial success around the world, like no other recent classical composer. The First String Quartet was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. The quartet is based on the tenor melody of a four-part church song by the 16th c. Polish Renaissance composer Waclaw z Szamotul (c1524-c1560), which is a prayer for children going to sleep: "Already dusk is falling, night closes in / Let us beseech the Lord for help / To be our guardian / To protect us from wicked devils / Who especially under cover of darkness / Profit from their cunning." In the Molto lento beginning of the one movement quartet, this motet is presented by the viola as cantus firmus in a "retrogade-inverse" canon with highly dissonant counterpoint. Three times it is interrupted by fierce chordal interjections of all players. This is followed by an Allegro deciso section which is a stylization of the wild dance music of the Tatra mountains (see Best String Quartets, Part Four, for the inspiration another Polish composer, Szymanowski, derived from this type of folk music). The brief coda is again based on the polymodal canon of the opening. Górecki himself described this quartet as "a kind of village dance music from the plains heard at night time from far above."
Recording listened to: Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (with Lerchenmusik played by the London Sinfonietta).

20. John Adams, John's Book of Alleged Dances for String Quartet and recorded prepared piano (1994)

John Adams (1947) wrote two solid string quartets, in 2008 and 2014, which are both in two movements and take between 30 and 40 minutes to perform. But I opt here for the earlier and more quirky John's Book of Alleged Dances for String Quartet and recorded prepared piano - I love the music of John Adams (such as Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Shaker Loops, the Violin Concerto and the opera Nixon in China), but just as in the case of colleague-minimalist Philip Glass, I feel he is at his best in smaller and less traditional forms. John's Book is a collection of ten short pieces of dance-like music, to be played by a string quartet, and with six pieces in addition accompanied by a recorded track of prepared piano sounds (the "prepared piano" is an invention of John Cage, a piano that has had its sound altered by placing objects on or between the strings, so that it becomes a sort of percussion instrument). The dances can be played in any order or grouping. Adams calls them "alleged" because the dance steps still had to be invented at the time of composing them (these are in other words not traditional dances), but I believe that several choreographers have already put their hand to that. The music is sardonic, exuberant and rowdy, as is also clear from titles as "Alligator Escalator" (a sluggish escalator in a local department store), "Rag the Bone" (a scat-like song), "Dogjam" (a demon fiddle piece, "in twisted hillbilly chromatics"), "Stubble Crotchet" (an "early morning shave with an old razor") and "Pavane: She's So Fine" ("a tender song for a young teenager"). In his CD sleeve notes, Adams has provided highly entertaining notes (as quoted above) to explain these titles.
[Also see Earbox, John Adams' official website with introductions to his compositions]

Recording listened to: The Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch (with Gnarly Buttons played by the London Sinfonietta).

This does not exhaust the topic of the string quartet - there are many more beautiful quartets - but for the time being I rest my case. I will come back to chamber string music at some future time!

[Incorporates some information from the CD sleeve notes, Wikipedia, etc. Mention should be made of the interesting study The String Quartet, A History by Paul Griffiths (Thames and Hudson: Bath, 1985). All images linked from Wikipedia. Some of the recommended CDs may not be available anymore (or the names of the labels may have changed)]

Posts about classical music include:

Best String Trios
Best String Quartets, Part One (ca. 1750-1850)
Best String Quartets, Part Two (ca. 1850-1900)
Best String Quartets, Part Three (ca. 1900-1925)
Best String Quartets, Part Four (1926-1945)
Best String Quartets, Part Five (Postwar period)
Best String Quintets

Best Piano Trios
Best Piano Trios, Part Two
Best Piano Quartets
Best Piano Quintets
Best Cello Concertos
Best Cello Sonatas
Best Works for Oboe
Best Works for Viola
Best Flute Concertos
Unique Symphonies from the 19th Century
Eccentric Symphonies by 20th Century Cult Composers (1) - Scriabin, Ives & Langaard
Eccentric Symphonies from 20th Century Cult Composers (2) - Havergal Brian & Matthijs Vermeulen
Classical Music in the Netherlands (1): 17th & 18th centuries
Classical Music in the Netherlands (2): 19th century
Classical Music in the Netherlands (3): 20th century