Gesamtkunstwerk?

I’ve always been ambivalent about Wagner. Of course I have loved, indeed revelled in, the “bleeding chunks”. Those orchestral excerpts from the operas were amongst the first LPs which I bought in my student days; I have replaced them several times over and naturally, being the completist that I am, I’ve added all his comparatively obscure purely orchestral music over the years.

But, and its a very big but, I have never got to grips with the operas. Generally, I love opera just as much as I love other genres but somehow Wagner’s works just left me cold. Years ago I started ploughing through a CD set of The Ring bought with earnest good intentions but gave up, probably no more than midway through Rheingold. So then I thought that maybe I needed to build up to The Ring by way of Rienzi, Fleigende Holländer and so on, but I couldn’t get “into” them either. After a  few more years, thinking that the visual element was needed, I bought a DVD set of The Ring but once again I got bored and never returned.

Over the intervening years I’ve wondered from time to time why I couldn’t enjoy Wagner properly but I don’t remember coming to any definite conclusion beyond the suspicion that I just wasn’t up to the job intellectually.

Richard Wagner

Earlier this week we saw a performance of Das Rheingold which we had been invited to by Wagner-loving friends at Longborough Festival Opera, a country-house venue about an hour away. The setting and atmosphere were glorious and before the performance I was thinking how delightful the evening was, Wagner or no Wagner. Completely against my expectations, however, I was quite enthralled by Rheingold. It was given a straightforward, functional but elegant and appropriate staging and the singers and orchestra were both first class.

Obviously what was missing even from the DVD was the atmosphere of a live performance, but I’m still at a loss to understand quite why Wagner’s “total art work” came up trumps. Even as I sat there, totally engaged in the performance, I was thinking that, fine performers though the singers were, there was nothing particularly pleasurable to the ear in Wagner’s vocal lines. All the interest for me was in what the orchestra was doing, the production and the acting of Loge and Alberich in particular. The two big set pieces which frame the work: the Rhine maidens singing their gold’s praises and Donner’s leading the entry of the gods into Valhalla, are spine-tingling stuff but on the whole there’s a lot of on-the-face-of-it dreary declamation in between.

So, I’m still ambivalent. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing the other three operas in the cycle, particularly if they follow the lead set by Longborough’s Rheingold, but I feel no urgings to dig out the DVD or the CD set. Odd, isn’t it?

Buy, buy, buy!!!

About a year ago I embarked on a little project. Yes, yet another Raff-related crusade. A few months previously I’d discovered that the Swiss CD label Tudor, which had been doing such a great job of bringing new Raff works to the recorded repertoire, hadn’t followed through with their plan to record the Suite for Violin and Orchestra and La Fée d’amour (a Konzertstück for violin and orchestra). What to do?

Well, for once I did some hustling myself and decided that I’d just have to persuade some other label to record the works. This uncharacteristic determination evolved over a few weeks into a modest programme of perhaps six CDs which will plug the major gaps in the Raff recorded repertoire. My good friend, Raff guru Volker Tosta suggested that a really compelling addition to the violin & orchestra CD would be the newly rediscovered Violin Concerto No.1 which his Edition Nordstern was in the process of publishing. A wonderful idea. The three works would fit perfectly on one CD.

Just as wonderful has been Bo Hyttner, owner of the Swedish label Sterling Records. Through another good friend Ilja Nieuwland, we met at his office in Stockholm and by the time I left we’d agreed that Sterling would produce the CD. Almost a year to the day later, here it is:

Sterling CDS 1075-2

The soloist, Tobias Ringborg, is amazing. Such virtuosity! The tempi are in my judgement just about spot on (always a problem with Raff; people want to play his music too slowly) and the recording quality itself could hardly be bettered. All in all, Bo and his team have done me proud, and that’s just how I feel. The music, being Raff, is also wonderful of course, especially the rediscovered Violin Concerto. A work of real stature.

All that remains is for people in droves to buy it. You will, won’t you?

The rest of my programme? Well, I’m going to keep that and the recording labels under wraps for the present, but of the two chamber music CDs, one is already recorded and will be issued later this year, all being well, and the other will be recorded this Autumn. Our friend and very talented pianist Tra Nguyen will play on the two piano-based CDs. We known what the repertoire will be but the recordings sessions have yet to be finalised. The choral (yes, choral!) CD will just have to wait until we can identify an affordable choir of sufficient expertise which is available at the same time as an orchestra. I’ll leave that to those who know more about these things than I do…

What a Wonderful World (www that is…)

My mother has shunned computers. She doesn’t want anything to do with them “thank you, dear”. At first sight her reasons are valid enough. She’s wary of new technology, although she’s mastered her new TV’s electronic programme guide with ease. She doesn’t need a word processor when a pen and a pad of Basildon Bond continue to serve well enough. She likes the excuse for a few hours away from the house that shopping brings, so she doesn’t want to supermarket shop online. Of course she still manages to enjoy the conveniences which internet access brings: worldwide shopping and instant flight and hotel bookings for example. It’s just that we act as her agents, whilst she looks over our shoulders and says how marvelous it all is.

I’ve tried to explain to her how enriching the internet can be. How her interest in crafts, clothing and fabrics would be enhanced by the web, but she doesn’t want to know. And fair enough, at 83 why should she?

For my own musical enthusiasms the internet has been a wonderful thing. It has brought me (well, OK, I brought it) the Raff site, a widening circle of good friends sharing the same obsession with the music of neglected composers, the ability to buy obscure recordings which I’d never have known existed, access to some amazing resources and, well, no, I’ll stop there because it’s the resources that I wanted to highlight.

 
Hofmeister XIX – lousy logo, wonderful resource

The Raff site may be the online Raff resource, but it is mirrored by many others for composers just as neglected. Be it Carl Reinecke, Felix Draeske, Heinrich von Herzogenberg or Norbert Burgmüller there’s lots of authoritative information out there. For the even more obscure, the much maligned Wikipedia is a great boon and, where the information can be verified, it’s largely accurate. Google, of course, is the greatest tool, thoroughly deserving of being verbed (if you see what I mean).

An example: if someone gives me an off-air recording of a really obscure work a quick spat of googling often yields radio listings which give performance and performer details. Online library catalogues and composer-specific sites produce more about the piece itself, like movement titles and publication date. I may well be a saddo, but it’s all very satisfying.

A couple of new resources recently popped over my personal horizon and they deserve a mention. Hofmeister XIX is an on-line, searchable database which lists all the music published in the German-speaking world between 1829 and 1900.  It is a truly wonderful thing. The work involved must have been colossal. For anybody wanting to track down even the most obscure piece of music, as long as it was published in those 70 years its details will be in Hofmeister.

 
A new (to me) portrait of Joachim Raff

Secondly there’s the Manskopf Archive. I love Victorian and Edwardian portrait photos, so this huge collection of photo and engraved portraits of mostly 19th. century musicians is a great time waster, but also very interesting. What sold it to me straight away, of course was that I found there several portraits of Raff previously unknown to me or any of the Raff cognoscenti.

Isn’t is great that all this stuff is now freely available to us, wherever we are in the world? I really do believe that the internet, for all its faults, is a truly positive development in our history.

Off went the van with my home packed in it

Well, not quite, but it feels like it. After a couple of weeks, the marathon re-packing of the CDs into boxes in strict alphabetical-by-composer and then hierarchical-by-work order is finished. Three and a half thousand CDs into thirteen quite small but extremely heavy boxes. It was a bigger job than even I’d thought it would be.

 
The CDs take over the Garden Room

Firstly all the unsorted CDs were divided up on the floor of the Garden Room into alphabetical piles. That produced an interesting phenomenon. I hadn’t expected there to be such a huge variation in the sizes of those piles. By some margin the largest was S: Saint-Saëns, Schumann, Schubert, Sibelius, Strauss, Suppé, Scharwenka, Smetana, Stanford, Stenhammar, Spohr, Sullivan etc. Some way behind was R: Rachmaninov, Rubinstein, Reinecke, Rheinberger, Rimsky-Korsakov, Röntgen and, oh yes, Raff! In the middle ranks were D: Donizetti and Dvorak mostly, M: Massenet, Mercadante and Meyerbeer, and L: Liszt, whilst it was the vowels which were under-represented. A made the best showing with a rag bag of names from Abert to Auber, but E couldn’t muster many more than Elsner and Elgar and poor I had only a half dozen from Ippolitov-Ivanov and Ireland. U, like Q and X remained empty.

Stage two, and this is what took the time, saw each pile resorted into my desired order. Now this is really anally-retentive stuff. But for the record it’s:

1. Alphabetical by composer. If there’s more than one composer on the CD then I decide (utterly subjectively) under which composer it’s to be stored and make a note in my database so that I can find it again.

2. Hierarchical by work. Symphonies, operas, choral works, concertos, orchestral works, chamber works (biggest to smallest, so quintets before quartets), songs, two piano or piano four hands, piano sonatas, piano suites, other piano works.

3. By number or date of composition. Sonata no.1 before Sonata no.2 etc.

Boxes stacked and labelled 

It’s all very sad, I know, but it gets worse!

Once that was done (and I’d checked it all against a print out of the database, of course), I re-packed the boxes backwards, if you follow, so that when each box was full the first CD in the sequence was top left on the upper row and the last was bottom right on the bottom row. Then each box was numbered and labelled (courtesy of a spiffy new labeller) and stacked (in numerical order of course) back in the Study awaiting the digitisation of its contents. Finally, I reworked my database so that each entry shows in which of the thirteen boxes that elusive CD is lurking. Well, actually it’s thirteen and a half boxes, because Raff gets one to himself!

Now, joy of joys, for the first time in the five or six years since I ran out of shelf space I can find any piece of music within a couple of minutes. Often a couple of huffy-puffy strenuous minutes, mind, what with all the unstacking and restacking of those ton-weight boxes.

The joy of labelling 

It feels quite liberating, but that’s dangerous. After all, this mammoth job is meant to be just the prelude to the main task of digitising the whole collection. But as a displacement activity it’s proved more satisfying and guilt free than most. No doubt it’s also a window into my soul, but I’ll let you ponder that one…

Now, where’s that recording of Ölander’s Symphony? That’ll be in Box Six, filed under Lindblad!

Alia iacta est

 

The die is indeed cast, or at least the decision has been taken. As I wrote a month or so ago (A pox on the box) my 3,500 or so CDs have been in chaotic “temporary” storage for the last year and this has coincided with my realisation that the neat little plastic disc and jewel case combo has had its day. It may take a few years, but the future is definitely digital storage. The iPod and hard disk have won.

In that earlier post I warned you not to hold your breath, but actually the inevitable decision hasn’t taken too long. Apart from when I’m by myself in the car, I hardly ever listen now to a CD. I’ll listen to the music on my PC or on my iPod, having ripped it from the CD. Once it’s on my PC it stays there.

I will rip all my CDs to a hard disk. Of course, I had to work out a strategy first:

I’ll use Windows Media Player as I dislike the Apple-centric and wayward iTunes, and will rip to mp3 but at the highest quality bit rate of 320kps. That’ll need around 600 GB of storage space, but I recently bought a 1,000 GB (1 Terabyte apparently) external hard disk to store all my music, so that won’t be a problem. I’ve just ordered a second one to back up the first.

It’ll take ages. A full year at the rate of 10 CDs a day, which might be all I can stand bearing in mind that many of my CDs don’t have entries on the online databases and so I’ll have to track them manually.

I’ll probably keep the insert booklets for reference and won’t just dispose of the CDs but will definitely store them, once ripped, in the loft or somewhere safe but out of the way.

If we ever decide to plumb the house with an all-room entertainment system I’ll will be ready. I might even be enthusiastic.

By way of displacement activity, the first step was to buy more storage boxes and a backup external hard drive. Done. The next was to get my catalogue up to date (just done). Next is to get out all the CDs, sort them alphabetically and then put them back in the storage boxes in order. Then I’ll start digitising. I’ll be back in the land of the living this time next year!

Yes, I know it’s all very anally retentive, but that’s just the way I approach these things. I like to plan. Sad, but true.

Journey’s end…

One of the wonderful things about music is its ability to give solace even in distressing circumstances. When my father, that most unmusical of men, died just over a year ago after a twelve year struggle with Parkinson’s Disease I found myself mentally playing back the wonderfully uplifting choral finale to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony time and time again. An obvious piece of course, and he’d probably have hated it, but it worked for me.

Edna, my dear mother-in-law who was probably the sweetest person I’ve ever known, died this morning after battling the disabling effects of a stroke suffered five months ago. Gill and I spent the last week at her bedside as she fell into a deeper and deeper sleep. Thankfully, her death was the most peaceful imaginable and it brought to mind a rather different, but equally appropriate work and one which has a very special place in my heart.

Raff’s Fifth Symphony Lenore was one of the first LPs I bought when I was “discovering” serious music and the first with music by an “unsung composer”. It began my abiding obsession with Raff and my interest in all that fine but now forgotten music from the 19th. century by composers from Abert to Zarzyki.

As we looked at Edna this morning, lying there as if in the gentlest of sleeps, what came to my mind wasn’t the blazingly affirmative end of Mahler’s Second, but the serenely simple conclusion to Raff’s Fifth. After 50 minutes of subjecting Lenore to all the gothic horrors of Bürger’s lurid imagination, Raff rewards us and that innocent girl with a glowing apotheosis which I always imagine as her being carried gently heavenward by angels. ’nuff said, I think…

Listen to the end of the finale of Raff’s Symphony No.5 Lenore.

One of the 10% perhaps?

My rule of thumb goes like this. Roughly a third of the obscure music which I hear for the first time immediately reveals why it has been, and will remain, forgotten. Another third is pleasant and worth the occasional airing but, if I’m honest with myself, incapable of making its own way in the world and quite properly only of interest to enthusiasts like me.

The final third is what makes this obsession with unearthing old music worthwhile. They’re the works which are worth a place in concert halls and discographies. They are fully the equal of works which are well known and part of our modern “standard” repertoire and it’s only through historical accident or temporary changes in fashion that they fell by the wayside. By no means all are “masterpieces” of course, but then neither are many of the works which form our present repertoire.

Some, maybe 10% of the total, are real knockout discoveries which deserve to be played year in year out. Now’s not the time to reveal my nominees, but a contender has just come to light which is worth sharing.

On Armistice Night, November 11, last year a previously forgotten work, A World Requiem by John Foulds, was played at the Albert Hall. It created a pretty big stir in the press and was recorded. The recording has now been issued by Chandos. The musical press is talking about a lost masterpiece and I must say that I have found it a hugely impressive and affecting work. Whether it’s a masterpiece I’ll leave to others to decide.

The style is extremely eclectic and, despite talk in the recording’s accompanying booklet about its advanced aspects (for the 1920s), I found it utterly tonal, very melodic and in most places sounding as if it could have been written in the 1890s. There’s no doubt that Foulds could write effectively for big forces and he certainly produces some marvelous sounds and grand moments. You can hear samples from each of the twenty-odd movements at the Chandos site.

Whether it’ll repay repeated hearings is too early to tell, but I suspect that we haven’t heard the last of John Foulds or his Requiem. Which is great. The more gems are unearthed, the more the notion that the only good music is the music we already know will be disproved.

A pox on the box

Over the last year I’ve fallen out of love with CDs. Not the music on them, you understand, but the whole paraphernalia of jewel box, disc and insert. Time was when I’d gaze at my shelves and shelves and (increasingly) carpet-based piles of CDs and hug myself at the splendour and size of my “collection”. No more. I have had an epiphany.

The days of the CD are numbered. From a commercial point of view, the costs of physical production, storage and distribution are substantial, as is the retailer’s markup. How much more attractive to sell direct over the internet and avoid all that? Of course the performer, recording and editing costs are still there and you have to pay for a solid internet sales operation, but once you’ve mastered and tracked the recording the only cost per unit is that of processing the payment and download. You don’t have to physically make, store and distribute any more CDs.

It should be possible to both sell more cheaply to the consumer and make more profit. The Holy Grail for a sales operation. With the rise of the iPod and PC-based home entertainment systems it has to be the way for smart companies to go. And most are.

 
Not a long term storage solution!

Since around this time last year my 3,500 CDs have been banished to packing cases and piles on the floor of a spare room here at The Ponderosa, as we embarked on a major remodelling of the room in which the shelves had been. That was finished after five months but the second phase, conversion of that spare room into a Music Room for CDs and newly-acquired piano has so far stalled, firstly because of holidays and then in the face of my dear mother-in-law’s serious illness which has virtually eliminated our spare time. Now, finding a piece of music buried in those baleful piles is virtually impossible. I’m beginning to resent them and the space they’ll eventually take up when I do get around to converting the room.

Hence the epiphany: If I buy music as downloadable tracks I pay less. I only have to buy the tracks I want; no more unwanted duplication. I only have to find “virtual” room for them on my hard drive. I can take the music anywhere. I get instant gratification: see, pay, listen within ten minutes. So as soon as I spot a tempting CD, I straightaway try to track down its downloadable alternative. At present, online retailers are still building up their stores from back catalogues. “Straight to internet” offerings are pretty much restricted to Naxos, Marco Polo and Chandos, but the time lag is lessening and I suspect that before 2008 is out most new classical CDs will be immediately available as DRM-free downloads.

There are disadvantages to be sure. A computer crash without backup wipes out the collection, but we all backup, don’t we? Some tracks have DRM restrictions, but the answer there is easy: don’t buy them and retailers will soon get the message. You lose the insert booklet, but several companies give you the option of downloading a PDF version and, anyway, I reckon that I read most booklets only once. Mp3 sound isn’t as high quality as CD although to my non Hi-Fi ears there’s little difference and some retailers, like Chandos, are now offering higher definition tracks as a higher cost option. The only insurmountable disadvantage for me is that I can no longer show off to visitors my serried ranks of CD shelves!

The big question is: will I digitise my CDs and then throw them away? Too big a  question to answer today, though.

A geeky digression

One of the reasons I resisted blogging for so long was my dislike of writing online. I know that I could compose offline in a text editor and then upload it, but that seems very calculated somehow and still leaves the formatting and adding of photos to be done in the blogging editor. My early experience of Blogger’s flakiness wasn’t very inspiring.

So, when Gill told me today that Microsoft, of all people, have published a new offline blogging tool I downloaded it straight away. It’s called Windows Live Writer and it seems to be a real boon.

You write and format your blog entry on your desktop PC rather than online. You can format it, add pictures, links and all the usual blogging paraphernalia. In fact, many of the functions which I’ve not yet found on the online WordPress editor are easily accessible in Live Writer. You can save drafts. Because it knows the look and feel of your blog page everything appears as it will in the finished product in true WYSIWYG fashion. I’ve found it altogether a much more comfortable experience than online editing.

Even the reviews have been very positive. And it’s free. That’s something for those knee-jerk Microsoft bashers to ponder. Oh, and this is my first post using it.

Donald Rumsfeld knew what he was talking about…

I’ve never understood why the late unlamented US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got pilloried for this piece of, to me, perfect logic:

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

I suppose that it’s the rediscovery of the “unknown unknowns” which is one of the great pleasures of my passion for unsung composers, but the “known unknowns” can sometimes prove a mixed blessing. Once-famous music which I’ve read about, know that it’ll be “my thing” but which I’ve never heard and assume I have no prospect of hearing. Of course, sometimes they do surface and sometimes they justify all the contemporary hype. More often they don’t. An example might be the Frithjof Symphony op.22 of Heinrich Hofmann (1842-1902), which is immediately very attractive, is clearly very influenced by Raff’s style, but which doesn’t have enough depth to sustain repeated hearings.

Heinrich Hofmann – a handsome fellow

 

The most frustrating “known unknowns” are those composers who I read about, but of whose music I have never heard a note. Perhaps the best example is Herrmann Hirsbach (1812-88) who was extravagantly praised by his contemporary Schumann, but has all but vanished. I first read about him in a book from the 1900s by Frederik Niecks. Here’s what he wrote.

Hirschbach composed umpteen string quartets, at least four (but possibly fourteen!) symphonies and seems to have had a high reputation in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, only to squander it by making enemies through writing acerbic reviews in a journal. Eventually he seems to have given up composing altogether and taken up journalism. All that I have been able to find out about him is set out in this post I made to the Unsung Composers forum a little while ago.

The key question is: Schumann was no fool and wasn’t given to praise without cause. So, if he thought so highly of Hirschbach, why did his music fall so thoroughly into neglect? After all, there’s no shortage of examples of composers who were dreadful people but whose music is still played. Wagner, his exact contemporary comes to mind. I would love to hear just one piece by Hirschbach. But maybe it is more interesting for him to stay a “known unknown”…