The Classical Chat Thread

[jlaurson]

Excellent article, Jens!

Thanks kindly. Even linked/quoted GMG, if you noticed. 

[Florestan]

Thanks kindly. Even linked/quoted GMG, if you noticed. 

I noticed all right. You could have quoted even more of us. 

[Karl Henning]

I'm just not that into Boulez.

[Ken B]

I'm just not that into Boulez.

Boulez
Stockhausen
Ives

You now what they say. Two out of three ain't bad.

[Karl Henning]

Things are getting a little weird even weirder than usual in the Havergal Brian thread . . . .

[Mirror Image]

I'm just not that into Boulez.

+1

[jlaurson]

Mariss Jansons renews contract with Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra until 2021



Mariss Jansons wasn't going to be seriously considered for the Chief Conductor
position of the Berlin Philharmonic (or maybe seriously considered but decidedly
without a hope of attaining the position, with the Berlin Philharmonic going for
someone young), so he might as well renew his gig with the Bavarian standouts...
http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2015/05/mariss-jansons-renews-contract-with.html

[North Star]

Günter Reich is a fitting name for a narrator in A Survivor from Warsaw.

[jlaurson]

Ionarts-at-Large: End-of-the-World-Music in Vienna

http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2015/05/ionarts-at-large-end-of-world-music-in_9.html

Within a few days, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian State Orchestra
(the opera's orchestra) pitched their tents at the Musikverein in Vienna. I caught the second
of those two concerts, with the Opera's orchestra under their music director Kirill Petrenko,
because I had to! It featured Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, but that wasn't the reason. It
opened with Ravel's La Valse (Poème chorégraphique pour Orchestre), but that wasn't the
reason either. But in the middle lured a tremendous work: Gesangsszene to words from
"Sodom and Gomorrha" by Jean Giraudoux for Baritone and Orchestra by Karl Amadeus
Hartmann. Not only that, but with the best possible baritone in that repertoire, too: namely
Christian Gerhaher. That's unmissable in my book – and everything else is mere bonus...

[jlaurson]

Fresh from Forbes:



MAY 9, 2015 @ 7:30 PM
The Berlin Philharmonic's Next Conductor: The Odds And Ends

It's a slightly smaller community that cares, but for them it's like electing the pope:
The Berlin Philharmonic is getting together to choose their chief conductor and only
the plume of smoke will missing when they announce the result on Monday. Here's
some rampant speculation as to what that result will be...

[North Star]

Emotions are not innate properties of works of art, they are felt by someone experiencing a work of art --- very true, but the artist creating a work of art uses tools and elements which are specifically designed, or intended, to induce emotions, passions and feelings (I mean, those artists who are taking themselves seriously; those who are just into cold intellectual games or hot emotional histrionics for the sake of them should not even be counted in as artists).

I wonder what, and who, you mean by 'cold intellectual games' and 'hot emotional histrionics' for their own sake - list hit writers would certainly fit the description. I doubt that much, if any, that aspires to be art music can objectively be bracketed like that.

Now, there are basically two types of emotions, passions and feelings that a work of art can induce: (1) those of the one who listens, reads or watches or (2) those of the artist creating the work of art. Prior to the advent of Romanticism, the former was the norm: Romanticism turned the whole thing upside down and made a norm of the latter. Whether one likes one or the other is a matter of personal taste.

It is true that the likes of JMW Turner, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Wordsworth & Coleridge, Goethe, Schiller, and Friedrich started to express their own feelings, and what they felt was important, more than their predecessors had done, but I don't think it is justified to think of earlier art at all as a tabula rasa on which the listener built their own emotions. Before the Romantic era, art was commissioned by the church and the aristocracy, and most art was written for a purpose that wasn't necessarily artistic - to accompany a religious ceremony, to illustrate the greatness of an old man with a white beard or one of his to other personae, to show the majesty of the monarch or a prince, or perhaps to illustrate the products of a merchant. In Netherlands, the booming merchant class had created a strong demand for all kinds of art, of course. But after the start of the industrialization, artists were freed from the necessity of serving the church & monarchy, and they also gained more freedom to express their ideas.

In music it is surely true that e.g. the lieder of Schubert or Schumann are more emotion-inducing than a Renaissance mass, but a Bach cantata, can certainly be as emotion-inducing as anything. What you seem to be saying is that the Romantics started to feed us particular emotions in their art, and to me it is patently false to think that artists before hadn't worked to instill in us very particular feelings - artists just changed from expressing the the mightiness of the monarch or of the Heavenly Father to expressing the beauty of nature, joys and sorrows of love and life, antislavery, anti-industrialist, etc feelings.

[Florestan]

I will reply tomorrow. 

[Florestan]

What you seem to be saying is that the Romantics started to feed us particular emotions in their art, and to me it is patently false to think that artists before hadn't worked to instill in us very particular feelings

You misunderstood me. Of course emotions have been expressed in music long before the Romantics. But they were not necessarily felt by the composer themselves. The composers had at their disposals a lot of tools and building blocks which they could combine in order to induce in the listener a particular emotion without any need for feeling it themselves. It´s exactly as you say: they worked (mostly) under patronage and on demand: the one who pays calls the tune, and if a patron wanted something cheerful or sorrowful or comic or tragic it should have been that way irrespective of the composer´s own feelings or state of mind at the time.

The Romantics changed all that in that they began to express their own emotions, feelings and state of mind. There is not a single emotion, feeling or state of mind in the greatest works of Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Mahler etc that was not deeply felt or experienced by them at the time of its composition, whereas I doubt that Bach was for years in a constant state of religious fervor and rapture, for instance.

I hope my point is clearer now.

[Jaakko Keskinen]

Trash libretto aside, I really hope more people recognice some day the worth of Sibelius's only opera, Maiden in the tower. I often compare it to Fidelio and Pelleas, because they, although very different in style, are their creators single operas yet show tremendous skill. If only Sibelius had composed Juha or Blauer Dunst, much better librettos...

[Jo498]

There is not a single emotion, feeling or state of mind in the greatest works of Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Mahler etc that was not deeply felt or experienced by them at the time of its composition,

How could one ever know that? It is usually unknowable and I seriously doubt that it is true, it seems a romantic cliche than might fit for a few works of some composers but very probably not in general.

We know of Berlioz that he took pains to create such a hyper-romantic persona (conducting with a sword or whatever). Apparently he claimed that he had composed the March to the scaffold in the Fantastique in one single night. He might have needed only one night but he basically arranged/transposed a piece he had already composed years before for an unfinished opera.

(Chopin presumeably was not fond of Berlioz' spleens and Mendelssohn is supposed to have quipped that Berlioz' tragedy was that in all his efforts to become raving mad he never succeded... )

[Florestan]

Ok, strike Berlioz off the list then. 

[Karl Henning]

We know of Berlioz that he took pains to create such a hyper-romantic persona (conducting with a sword or whatever). Apparently he claimed that he had composed the March to the scaffold in the Fantastique in one single night. He might have needed only one night but he basically arranged/transposed a piece he had already composed years before for an unfinished opera.

It might, of course, mean that at the time when he initially wrote it for the opera, he composed it in a single night, yes?

[Jo498]

It might, but I definitely read once a "debunking" that assumed that he had written it at a normal pace long before and the "composed in one night" specifically referred to the context of the SF.

Anyway, it might be an apocryphal anecdote either way but we should not confuse the persona of the tragic or crazy romantic artist with real people and especially not extend it to people like Chopin (or Mendelssohn or Brahms) who explicitly distanced themselves from those ultra-romantic manners.

[Karl Henning]

It might, but I definitely read once a "debunking" that assumed that he had written it at a normal pace long before and the "composed in one night" specifically referred to the context of the SF.

Anyway, it might be an apocryphal anecdote either way but we should not confuse the persona of the tragic or crazy romantic artist with real people and especially not extend it to people like Chopin (or Mendelssohn or Brahms) who explicitly distanced themselves from those ultra-romantic manners.

All agreed on;  we may never sort through the anecdote . . . but it is indeed possible for Berlioz to have composed that movement in a single evening, all the more possible if we think of short score.  I'm not arguing that he must have, of course;  just pointing out that the claim itself does not compel debunking 

[North Star]

You misunderstood me. Of course emotions have been expressed in music long before the Romantics. But they were not necessarily felt by the composer themselves. The composers had at their disposals a lot of tools and building blocks which they could combine in order to induce in the listener a particular emotion without any need for feeling it themselves. It´s exactly as you say: they worked (mostly) under patronage and on demand: the one who pays calls the tune, and if a patron wanted something cheerful or sorrowful or comic or tragic it should have been that way irrespective of the composer´s own feelings or state of mind at the time.

There was no misunderstanding on this matter - although it should be said that many of the artists did in fact feel what they wanted their audience to feel - Soli Deo Gloria and all that.

The Romantics changed all that in that they began to express their own emotions, feelings and state of mind. There is not a single emotion, feeling or state of mind in the greatest works of Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Mahler etc that was not deeply felt or experienced by them at the time of its composition, whereas I doubt that Bach was for years in a constant state of religious fervor and rapture, for instance.

The Romantics changed the musical language into something more expressive, but that doesn't necessarily prove that all of their works were inspired by personal emotions, I'd be particularly loathe to include Chopin there, as he was in many ways an anti-Romantic.