According to influential conductor Hans von Bülow, the German composer Johannes Brahms was one of the “three Bs” of musical composition along with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven (an accolade that Brahms himself would probably have rejected given his personal veneration for both those composers). He was a virtuoso pianist and a prolific composer of symphonies, chamber music, piano, organ and choral works throughout the second half of the 19th century. However, it’s his early experiences leading to his series of Hungarian dances that interest us here.
By the middle of the 19th Century, scores of Hungarian immigrants and refugees from throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire were flooding into Austria – mostly to Vienna, but also to many other towns including Brahms’s hometown of Hamburg. As a young musician at the beginning of his musical career, Brahms had to play light piano music at taverns to make money. He would also occasionally get hired as an accompanist for a touring musician, and on one evening he had the good fortune to meet one of Hungary’s great touring violinists, Eduard Reményi. Brahms thus learned gypsy music in the intimate musical company of the greatest gypsy violinist of the time.
Forever after cherishing gypsy music, Brahms would go on to publish two sets of Hungarian Dances for two pianos, 21 pieces in all. To this day, however, Hungarian Dance No. 5 is probably the most beloved of his Dances. And rightly so, with its enchanting first theme in a minor key, evoking the swagger and gravitas of a mustachioed Slav lover. The first orchestration of No. 5 was not done by Brahms himself but by Martin Schmeling, but it was this orchestration of Brahms’s transformation of gypsy music that helped it become one of the most treasured pieces in Western music’s repertoire. Enjoy this suitably rousing version, appropriately enough by the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra.
I’m fascinated by the concept of epic poetry, a literary genre originating in the mists of pre-literate societies, when bards of the time would compose and memorise traditional stories, and pass them on from performer to performer and performer to audience. The classic epic poems that come down to us from ancient history include the Epic of Gilgamesh (composed anywhere between 2500 and 1300 BC), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (8th century BC), the Mahabarata (5th century BC), and Virgil’s Aeneid (c.20 BC)…whilst from later medieval and early Renaissance years, we have the Old English Beowulf, the German Nibelungenlied, the French Song of Roland, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. All of them massively significant in the history of world literature.
What these epic narrative poems have in common is great length (the Iliad contains over 15,000 verse lines; the Mahabarata a whopping 200,000!), featuring vast settings and grand, sweeping themes, usually featuring a hero who participates in a quest or journey, performs great deeds, and generally embodies the ideal traits and moral values of the nation or culture from which the epic emanates. They also have in common the constraint of poetic meter, originally to help the bard recall the lines – in ancient Greek and Latin epic poetry it was dactylic hexameter that lent itself to the languages (dum-di-di dum-di-di); in Renaissance England, iambic pentameter (di-dum di-dum), beloved of Shakespeare of course.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost may not have an obvious hero (given that his “heroes”, in his two main narrative arcs, are Satan and Adam and Eve), but there’s no doubting the grand theme: Milton tackles the epic saga of the Fall of Man, the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Written across 10,000 lines of blank verse in iambic pentameter, Milton starts in media res (another characteristic of the epic, meaning in the midst of the plot with the background story being recounted later) with Satan and the other rebel angels defeated and banished to Hell.
The piece is a monumental and remarkable achievement, particularly given that by the late 1650s, when he started writing Paradise Lost, Milton had become blind and had to dictate the entire work to amanuenses. Milton saw himself as the intellectual heir of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, and sought to create a work of art which fully represented the most basic tenets of the Protestant faith. Like all epic poetry, with its length and archaic language, it’s a slog to read through (and I’m not recommending it), but there’s no doubting its influence down the ages.
Here are the opening lines where Milton lays out his intentions (to “justify the ways of God to men”):
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing heavenly muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed, In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of chaos: Or if Sion hill Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou Oh spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples the upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou knowest; thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast abyss And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the heighth of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
There were two main sub-genres of jazz to emerge in post-war America, morphing out of the big band swing era that had dominated in the 1930s and 1940s: they were bebop and cool jazz. Now, whereas bebop was “hot,” i.e. loud, exciting, and loose, cool jazz was “cool,” i.e. soft, more reserved, and controlled. In bebop, the emphasis was on improvisation; in cool jazz, the emphasis was on arrangement. Bebop was East Coast, nightclub-oriented; cool jazz was West Coast and took jazz out to the college campuses. For bebop, think Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk; for cool jazz, think early Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Dave Brubeck.
Dave Brubeck was one of the most active and popular musicians in the jazz world from the late 1940s forwards. Having served in Patton’s army in Europe during the Second World War, he enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California to study composition with French composer, Darius Milhaud. It was Milhaud who encouraged him to pursue a career in jazz and to incorporate jazz elements into his compositions, and this cross-genre experimentation with like-minded Mills students led to the formation of the Dave Brubeck Octet in 1947.
It was, however, the smaller incarnation formed in 1951 that would become the “classic” Brubeck outfit – the Dave Brubeck Quartet – featuring Brubeck on the piano, the legendary Joe Morello on drums, Eugene Wright on bass, and long-time Brubeck collaborator Paul Desmond on alto sax. In 1959 they released the album Time Out, featuring the song that would become a jazz standard and the biggest-selling jazz single ever, Take Five. Written by Paul Desmond, Take Five rapidly became Brubeck’s best-known, and signature, tune, famous for its distinctive, catchy sax melody and use of the unusual 5/4 time from which its name is derived. It’s been used in countless movies and television soundtracks, so if you think you don’t know it, I’m pretty sure you will!
Here’s a wonderful recording of the quartet playing Take Five live in Belgium in 1964. Enjoy these master musicians on top of their game…it’s cool, man!
Édouard Manet is thought of as a leading light of the Impressionists, but actually, although he was associated with them and was admired by Monet and Renoir, he never actually exhibited at any of the Impressionist Exhibitions in Paris. He was more of a precursor to the new era of artistic impressionism, and still had a foot planted firmly in realism. His early work was, however, controversial, and he scandalised critics and public alike, most notably with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (both 1863), but even these were modelled on old classical masterpieces: Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert (1509) and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) respectively. Let’s have a quick look and see if you can spot, in the mind of a nineteenth century purist, the elements of Manet’s work that transformed elegant classicism into lewd modernism:
However, the subject of this blog is actually the Manet that is arguably the most recognisable…the celebrated A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The Folies Bergère was the most famous of Paris’s café-concert halls and was noted at this time for its new-fangled electric lights. We see the frontal image of a barmaid looking out at us from behind her counter, and behind her a huge mirror in which we see reflected the back of the barmaid along with the scene that she herself is observing. There are the members of the audience, watching the show, and indeed an element of the show itself: the legs of the trapeze artist which appear in the very top-left corner of the picture.
The woman behind the bar was actually a real person, known as Suzon, who worked at the Folies Bergère during the early 1880s, and whom Manet painted in his studio. The gentleman at the bar was Manet’s neighbour. The bottles, fruit and vase of flowers arranged on the counter are replicated with all the precision of a still life painting, and interesting to note – for such a French-feeling painting – the bottles of British beer: yes, Bass Pale Ale of all things! The loose British connection is maintained: this famous painting is held not in Paris but at the Courtauld Gallery, London.
Last year my family and I went to see Puccini’s Madama Butterfly performed at the Royal Opera House. I should mention I suppose that it was the live streaming we attended, at Leeds’s Cottage Road Cinema, rather than the actual event, lest you think your blogger can actually afford to ponce about in the capital, with family in tow, and attend operas at £175 a ticket. Anyway, attend the live streaming we did, and a comfortable and relatively uncostly affair it was.
Operas are not exactly unknown for their exploration of tragic themes, but you would be hard pressed to find a more perfect example of tragedy as expressed in music than Puccini’s masterpiece. Indeed, it was a personal favourite of the composer himself who described it as ‘the most felt and most expressive opera that I have conceived’. This production was directed by Antonio Pappano (who first appeared on my radar in 2015 when I caught his excellent TV series about opera singers, Classical Voices) and featured Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho in the starring role.
Madama Butterfly is set in Japan at the start of the twentieth century, and tells the tale of the teenage geisha Cio-Cio San (“Butterfly”) and her doomed marriage to Pinkerton, an American naval lieutenant. To Pinkerton, the marriage is one of convenience and shortly after the wedding he leaves Japan. Three years later, Butterfly is still waiting for him, and despite her maid Suzuki endeavouring to convince her that Pinkerton is not coming back, Butterfly won’t listen…and just that dogged belief alone, against all rationale, is enough to break your heart. We know only too well, as does Suzuki, that he’s not coming back.
Actually Pinkerton does come back, but not to Butterfly. Instead, he is – cruel blow! – with his new American wife, and from this point on, Puccini focuses ever deeper on the heartache that culminates in Butterfly committing suicide.
I have selected the electrifying Un bel dì vedremo (One fine day we’ll see) to showcase Ermonela Jaho’s (and Puccini’s) formidable artistic skill. Jaho, as Butterfly, delivers this ravishing and pathos-filled solo from a deep well of emotion. As she steadfastly sings of her belief that Pinkerton will return to her, we can hardly watch, knowing that tragedy awaits! It’s a great performance…
I first heard the classic phrase from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet – “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” – during one of Stuart Hall’s typically overblown football commentaries in the seventies, somehow managing to tie Shelley’s sublime lines to a gritty encounter between Everton and Spurs. The real deal, I found out later, concerns the fates of history, the ravages of time and the folly of hubris, rather than what was in fact a fifth consecutive nil-nil draw at Goodison Park (hence Hall was employing a certain degree of irony).
Percy Bysshe Shelley first published his sonnet in a January 1818 issue of The Examiner, a periodical that happened to be a champion of the young Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats and Byron. Shelley had written the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith. The two had spent Christmas 1817 together along with Shelley’s wife, Mary, when a sonnet-writing contest broke out, the subject being an Ancient Greek text which cited the inscription on a massive Ancient Egyptian statue:
“King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.”
So both Shelley and Smith wrote a poem called Ozymandias and in fact Smith’s poem was also published in The Examiner, a few weeks after Shelley’s sonnet. Both poems explore the themes I mentioned above and how the legacies of kings are fated to decay into oblivion.
In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum’s acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the 13th century BC. The 7.25-ton fragment of the statue’s head and torso was expected to arrive in London in 1818 and it’s a fair inference to assume that Shelley and Smith were inspired by this. So here’s Shelley’s famous poem, followed, should you wish to compare, by Horace Smith’s less well-known offering.
Incidentally, you will perhaps have twigged that this wasn’t the only time that an evening with the Shelleys spent concocting literary challenges would lead to a famous literary work: the previous winter, a similar evening spent discussing ghost stories led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
And Horace Smith’s poem…
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows:- ‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone, ‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows ‘The wonders of my hand.’- The City’s gone,- Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder,-and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Writing my last blog about Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock put me in mind of the hilarious scene from the movie Wayne’s World, wherein the character Garth, prone as he is to day-dreaming, envisions himself inveigling a beautiful woman to the soundtrack of Hendrix’s Foxy Lady. I chuckled so much solely from its recollection that I just had to find it and feature it (along with several other scenes from the movie) this week!
Back in 1987, on a Canadian variety show called It’s Only Rock & Roll, an aspiring comic called Mike Myers was trying out a new character in a brief segment called Wayne’s Power Minute. The character of teenage heavy metal fan Wayne Campbell with his puppy-like exuberance and loveable-airhead philosophy was pretty much fully formed even back then.
It was a couple of years later that Myers joined the Saturday Night Live cast and introduced Wayne to a wider audience, in the form of the Wayne’s World sketches, now with sidekick Garth Algar (Dana Carvey). The premise of Wayne’s World was that it was a public-access television show broadcast from Wayne’s basement, and characterised by its chaotic production style, the anarchic schoolboy humour of its hosts, and their obsession with “babes” and rock music.
Myers and Carvey recorded 27 episodes during its 1989-1992 heyday and in 1992 filmed the first Wayne’s World movie, the perfect vehicle for Wayne and Garth to get involved in antics and exploits in the wider world. The movie was an instant critical and commercial success. Catchphrases abound, and many of them have become colloquialisms: “Party on!”, “Good call!”, “I am not worthy”, “Excellent!” (when intoned in the correct way), “No way…way!”, and of course “…not” (as in “Sure, it’s a great movie…not!”).
Let’s view a montage of some of their hilariously juvenile movements, followed by that mesmerising Foxy Lady mating dance of Garth’s. Excellent!
In August of next year we will reach the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock Festival, that three-day concert (which rolled into a fourth day) involving lots of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and mud, and which became an icon of the 1960s hippie counterculture. Held at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York State, the Woodstock Festival, billed as “three days of peace and music”, featured a roll-call of big acts of the day: Joan Baez, Santana, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Jimi Hendrix (it’s interesting to read the roll-call of cancelled acts and declined invitations too, but that’s another story).
When Hendrix stepped onto the stage, it was 9 o’clock on the morning of the fourth day – technical and weather delays had caused the festival to stretch into Monday morning. The organisers had given Hendrix the opportunity to go on at midnight, but he opted to be the closing act (by 1969 he had earned the traditional headliner’s position). The morning light made for excellent filming conditions, which may be part of the reason this particular Hendrix performance is so well known. In any event, Hendrix embarked upon an uninterrupted set lasting nearly two hours, one of the longest performances of his career. It concluded with a long medley that included the solo performance of The Star-Spangled Banner that would become emblematic not only of Woodstock, but of the 1960s themselves.
When most people think of Hendrix and Woodstock, it is this performance of the national anthem that comes to mind. It was not the first time Hendrix had performed it (in fact, there are nearly 50 live recordings of Hendrix playing it, 28 made before Woodstock) but no other version is so iconic. The idea of incorporating the sounds of bombs and jets and cries of human anguish into his country’s national anthem was brilliant. As a protest against the Vietnam War it was unambiguous and powerful: raw, jarring, soaring, and discomforting in equal measure (though in fact performed in front of a relatively small crowd since so many people had left Woodstock to return to work or college that Monday morning!). So 49 years on, and from the comfort of your mud-free armchair, here is Hendrix’s guitar-torturing rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. It’s not comfortable to listen to, frankly, but its cultural impact is clearly understandable. It’s followed by an interesting snippet of Hendrix discussing the performance on the Dick Cavett chat show a year later.
As musical geniuses go, you don’t get much more genius than Felix Mendelssohn. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg in 1809, Felix was deeply involved in music from an early age; by the time he was fourteen, he had written twelve string symphonies. In 1821 his piano teacher, Carl Zelter, introduced the eleven year old Felix to the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was then in his seventies. Goethe was greatly impressed by him, leading to a memorable conversation between Goethe and Zelter comparing Felix with the young Mozart, whom Goethe had also witnessed, many years before:
“Musical prodigies…are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporising and playing at sight, borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.”
“And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?” said Zelter.
“Yes“, answered Goethe, “…but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.”
The grown-up Mendelssohn had a good friend and collaborator in violin virtuoso and composer, Ferdinand David. The two had met as late teenagers in the late 1820s in Berlin where Felix was already an accomplished composer and Ferdinand was a violinist in the orchestra at the Königsstädtisches Theatre. In a remarkable coincidence, it was discovered that the two had been born in the exact same house in Hamburg, a year apart!
A few years later, in the summer of 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend: “I should like to write a violin concerto for you next winter. One in E minor runs through my head, the beginning of which gives me no peace.” In the end, it took him another six years to complete it, regularly consulting David about violin technique. Ever the perfectionist, Mendelssohn continually made minor adjustments to the concerto, right up to its premiere in Leipzig on March 13, 1845. The concerto became an instant classic and remains one of the cornerstones of the repertoire, being the most frequently performed violin concertos in history.
So I give you Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, performed by Ray Chen and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and if you can free up the twenty nine minutes required to wallow in its total glory, you will find it a worthwhile experience, believe me.
Art Deco was one of the first truly international styles, influencing the design of just about everything from buildings to furniture, jewellery to fashion, and art to everyday objects like radios and vacuum cleaners. It took its name (short for Arts Décoratifs) from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes Arts which was held in Paris in 1925, and which serves as a fair starting point to credit for the birth of a movement. We are slap-bang in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, the era of the Jazz Age and of flappers, of motion pictures and the Charleston, of The Great Gatsby and Radio City Music Hall, and whilst this representative list smacks of the United States, the cultural vibe was no less felt in Berlin, Paris, London and Sydney. It was an era of economic prosperity and cultural dynamism and as such, don’t be surprised to see this blog return to this period in the future.
Art Deco drew its inspiration from such art movements as Cubism, Futurism, and the influence of the Bauhaus. It played with geometric motifs and bright, bold colours, and of all the artists pursuing this style, one of the most memorable and interesting was Tamara de Lempicka.
Born in Poland in 1898, she lived, after her parents divorced, with her wealthy grandmother, who spoiled her with clothes and travel. By age 14 she was attending school in Lausanne, and holidaying in St Petersburg. All this high living gave the young girl an idea of how she wanted to live and what her future should be. Thus, when she found she had a talent for art, she took herself to Paris to live among the bourgeois and bohemian of the Left Bank (where else?). Between the wars, she painted portraits of the great and the good, and many of Eastern Europe’s exiled nobility, bringing her critical acclaim, social celebrity and considerable wealth. She was also well-known for her highly stylised nudes.
Her iconic work exuded a confidence that epitomised the era (see her Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, for instance). But let’s look at her Young Lady with Gloves (AKA Girl in the Green Dress), typical of her style. It has streamlined, geometric shapes and clean, metallic surfaces depicting a beautiful, sophisticated woman. She exudes a detached aura of superiority, and there is a visually striking interplay of compositional effects, angular lines, and shading. The unabashed sensualism of those nipples and that navel visible through the fabric is pure de Lempicka. Small wonder that one of her high-profile collectors is international superstar, Madonna, who has featured some of de Lempicka’s works in her own videos, notably Vogue. Pushing the boundaries as a fearless female artist, she was perhaps the Madonna of her day.
Tamara de Lempicka
Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature
