It’s impossible to see an Almodóvar film and not come away a) raptured and b) contemplating what it means to create art and to live as an artist, and Dolor y Gloria gives more fodder to the latter than any of his films for at least a decade.
I’d heard that this was “a return to form” or a “comeback” (both impossible: Almodóvar has never lost his way.) I’d also heard it was a new direction for him, a departure from his earlier films, and here I also disagree: it is a deeper exploration of themes and techniques that have been a consistent part of his work for decades:
Mother-son relationships. The art of filmmaking. Self-medication via illicit drug use. Stories told in several temporal layers. Rural Catholic education. Young boys singing and reading. Unrealized desire. Hospitals and death. City/village life. Theatrical performances (featuring audience members crying.)
What’s amazing is that, given the consistency of the tropes, themes, and tone palette with which he builds his films, each one crystalizes in a unique way, based on the weighting each element receives.
[A side note: I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately as I’ve deepened my appreciation of the music of Herbert Howells. Just think about how many times he set the phrase, “my soul doth magnify the Lord.” He uses similar melodic gestures and harmonic structures in all his canticles, and yet, some sound ancient and ethereal, others bluesy and grounded.]
Most importantly, the film offers a beautiful answer to the question “why do we create?” Put simply, it’s for the physical and mental health of the creator.
That’s an answer that I resonate with deeply. I’ll never reap fame or fortune from writing music. I feel lucky to have a handful of friends and family who remain curious about my work, and to obtain the odd commission or sale. I think the music I write is pretty good, but I’m under no illusion that any of it is groundbreaking or life-changing.
What I do know is that when I’ve gone too long without composing, I fall into bad habits, and my body and my soul cry out to me to begin work on a new piece. (Thankfully my vice is eating too much vegan junk food rather than smoking heroin, but we all take our kicks where we can get them.)
Which means I should stop typing and start plunking out notes on the piano. But before I go, two recommendations:
The film Tous les matins du monde (which I’m sure I’ve written about on this blog before) which answers the “why do we make art” question differently: to communicate with the dead.
I did a pre-concert talk this past weekend for the Seattle Symphony. After a beautiful opening work by Anna Clyne, the orchestra performed Schumann’s piano concerto and Mendelssohn’s “Scotch” Symphony, easily my favorite of his large-scale works.
An acquaintance who heard that I had given the talk asked what my area of expertise was, and the best I could come up with was “charm.”
Cheeky, I know, but the fact of the matter is, we conductors are generalists who immerse ourselves in research for specific projects for short periods of time, and after enough years and enough projects, all those mini-spates as experts at up to an interesting and personalized view of the repertoire and of music history.
This was a great talk to give because there was so much to explore in the relationship between these great composers. They were total bros! Almost exact contemporaries (Mendelssohn: 1809-1847; Schumann 1810-1856), they both grew up in “Germany,” and they were both on the early edge of Romanticism in music.
And yet, given that narrow set of constraints, they were about as different as you could get. Mendelssohn came from immense wealth and privilege. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn was considered the ‘Father of the Jewish Enlightenment’, a period in history when the German states were liberalizing their laws towards Jews, and Jews were liberalizing their stance towards assimilation into German society.
Moses ben Mendel / Moses Mendelssohn
When Moses was born, he was named in the conventional Jewish system as Moses ben Mendel, but he Germanized his surname to Mendelssohn. He raised his children with a very liberal brand of Judaism, such that his son Abraham raised his children—including Fanny and Felix—with no religion at all.
Abraham became a banker, and he went to work at his family’s branch in Hamburg, then an independently governed city-state. There, he set about financing the smuggling operations that would bring an end to Napoleon’s “continental system,” a blockade of goods between Britain and Europe. Fearing retribution when Napoleon’s forces invaded, the Mendelssohn family had to escape Hamburg in disguise under cover of night. Which is how Felix ended up back at his family’s seat in Berlin. (The Mendelssohn & Co. bank lasted well into the 20th century—until, 1938, in fact, when it was liquidated by the Nazis and its assets were folded into Deutsche Bank.)
In Berlin, Abraham and his family were taken in to his wife’s mother’s estate. The maternal line of Felix Mendelssohn’s ancestry is just as interesting as the paternal. His maternal grandfather had been Court Jew to Frederick the Great of Prussia, back when German kings had things such as “Court Jews” (really a type of banker.) Using his clout, this Court Jew was able to convince FGP to liberalize many laws surrounding the Prussian Jewry, including opening up the ghettos.
This grandmother of Felix’s would have an important role to play in music history. The family owned several rare manuscripts, and for Felix’s 17th birthday, she commissioned a new manuscript copy of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, which is of course the work with which Felix would inaugurate the modern Bach revival.
Robert Schumann, on the other hand, did not come from a wealthy background. His father was a bookseller, and young Robert’s earliest ambitions were literary. He thrilled to the novels of Jean Paul (whose Titan was similarly adored by Gustav Mahler) and the poetry of Goethe, Rilke, and Heine. He came to music late, and didn’t have a proper piano lesson until he was 19.
His piano teacher was Friedrich Wieck of Leipzig, and it was at Wieck’s house that young Robert would meet a child named Clara. Clara was on her way to becoming a virtuoso pianist; by the age of 18, she would be appointed “Imperial Concert Pianist” to the Hapsburg Emperor. (Another long-gone courtly title, although it should be noted that the Prince of Wales still employs an official harpist.)
After several years in close quarters, Robert and Clara fell in love, and this is where things became challenging. Herr Wieck did not feel that Robert—a poor young piano student with dreams of composing but little to show for himself—was a worthy match for his daughter, already a star on the European musical stage. And thus he launched into a lengthy court proceeding to keep the two apart.
This is where Mendelssohn steps into the story. Robert and Felix had become friends and admirers of one another during the 1830’s, in spite of the fact that when they first met, Mendelssohn was already an adept composer, pianist, and conductor, and Robert had only a few unpublished compositions to his name. (Not to mention the fact that he had rendered his right ring finger totally lame by trying to speed up his muscular development with a hack gadget called the chiroplast.)
And yet, Robert and Clara found a way. They mainly carried out their clandestine romance via musical composition. Clara, as we all know, was herself a distinguished composer. While she was under lock and key, forbidden to see her beloved Robert, she would compose piano pieces that were coded with motifs that had private meanings between her and Robert. Robert would then work these same motifs into his own piano works and arrange to have them delivered to Clara. Old Herr Wieck simply heard Clara practicing new works, and was none the wiser.
Oh right, back to Mendelssohn. Wieck mounted an outright defamation campaign against Robert Schumann, so much that Robert had no recourse except to countersue his father-in-law-to-be. First on the list of character witnesses for the prosecution: Felix Mendelssohn.
Their bromance was one for the ages. They visited and wrote to one another often. Felix likely conducted* the first read-through performance of Robert’s Phantasie for piano and orchestra, which would later become the first movement of the piano concerto. (*Sources differ; some say it was Ferdinand David.) When Felix died at the tragically young age of 38, Robert was one of the pall bearers at his funeral.
The two also wrote pieces that begin in a dreary a minor and end in a triumphant A major, Schumann’s piano concerto and Mendelssohn’s Scotch symphony. (Mendelssohn, however, has the distinction of having the only work in the standard repertoire that begins in major and ends in the tonic minor: his “Italian Symphony.”)
The Scotch is my personal favorite of Mendelssohn’s five symphonies. It’s another one of those cases where the numbering is out of order: though he conceived of it as early as 1829, he didn’t complete it until 1842, making it the last—i.e. the 5th—of his symphonies that he would bring to completion.
The original conception came from a trip that he took to Britain at the age of 20. Mendelssohn went there in order to perform and conduct his own music in London, where he was a huge hit. After that, he and a friend took a pleasure tour of the north of Britain, hitting the major Scottish industrial centers as well as its craggy coasts.
As you probably know, the Hebrides made a major impression on the composer, but so did the derelict ruins of the Holyrood palace chapel.
Of COURSE Mendelssohn was obsessed with this place. It was the most prototypical Romantic-with-a-capital-R site imaginable: a Gothic ruin, decaying and being taken over by nature, not to mention the site of the crowning of Queen Mary, whose story had been immortalized in a play by Goethe. There is literally NOTHING more Romantic that he could have stumbled upon, and so he wrote the opening bars of this symphony as a memento of that visit.
Schumann’s a minor-to-major piano concerto also has a deeply personal story. Naturally, it was written for Clara, shortly after they were married (she played that first, perhaps-conducted-by-Mendelssohn reading while 8 1/2 months pregnant.) The piece can easily be read as a retelling of their courtship. The stormy opening that seems to capture the moment when they were torn apart by Friedrich Wieck. Then the moody opening melody, based on the notes “C-B-A-A,” or in German “C-H-A-A,” which, if you fill in a few gaps, gives you “C-H-i-A-r-A”—”Chiara” or Italian for “Clara”. (I know it sounds far-fetched, but let me assure you: they were into stuff like this.)
The second movement reads as the delicate flirtation between two coquettish people who are taken to flights of fancy together. And of course the finale has the character of a romp, full of joy and optimism, perhaps reflecting their recent nuptials.
So that’s it, that’s the interesting stuff I learned about Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, and now I can forget it until the next time I have to become an expert on these pieces.
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, viola, and piano op. 40
Commissioned and premiered by Northwest Art Song: Arwen Myers, soprano; Laura Thoreson, mezzo-soprano Kenji Bunch, viola; Susan McDaniel, piano
The English text was assembled and freely adapted from speeches by and interviews with Valerie Bell (mother of Sean Bell), Gwen Carr (mother of Eric Garner), Sybrina Fulton (mother of Trayvon Martin), as well as a number of pseudonymous sources interviewed in Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War & Terror by Susan Galleymore, and a 1992 article from the New York Times entitled “Parents and AIDS: Rage and Tears†by Carol Lawson.
It’s a busy and thrilling moment for me up here in the Pacific Northwest, all to do with preparing new music, by me and by my friends. I can honestly say that I’ve been embraced by a regional community of composers, arguably for the first time in my professional life.
This Sunday, Northwest Art Song (aka my friends Arwen and Laura) will premiere a piece I wrote for them, Stabat Mater, about which:
On the concert, I’ll conduct a new song cycle by Robert Kyr, and playing the viola in my piece will be Kenji Bunch, whom, frankly, I’ve thought of as a big famous composer ever since the Ahn Trio released “Music for my Favorite Insomniac” in 2008:
This summer, I spent many an hour creating “critical editions” of the music of two Seattle composers, Carol Sams and Huntley Beyer. I’m currently in rehearsals for Carol’s The Earthmakers, a monumental work if ever there was one, and, in my view among the very best oratorios composed in the past 50 years (if not the past 100.)
Kia (that’s Carol) wrote The Earthmakers in 1986 (which, she continues to claim, was before I was born, in spite of my protestations to the contrary.) It’s an oratorio in 16 movements that tells the story of the creation of the world from a variety of cultural perspectives—Zuni, Inuit, Melanesian, Biblical, scientific, etc.
Every second I spend with this piece is filled with excitement as it comes to life in my inner ear and in rehearsals with the chorus, soloists, and orchestra. Each section flows naturally from what came before, but never in the way you’d expect. Simply put, it’s a masterpiece, and I can’t wait to perform it, not only now, but many times in the future.
The Earthmakers is on a concert I’m doing with OSSCS called “Origins,” and we’re kicking things off with music by a composer who wrote his first concert work for this very occasion. Carlos Garcia (whose instagram, @carlosgarsizzle, is highly recommended) created this little mockup, which to me sounds like a fully produced Hans Zimmer score, to give you a taste of the real thing until we make our live recording.
