Dennis Bartel - KUSC

Cesar Franck - Late Bloomer

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:52:00 +0000

Those who knew him agreed, Cesar Franck went in any direction he was pushed. Among the Great Composers, Cesar Auguste Jean Guillaume Franck defined desultory. He lacked self-criticism. He found plainsong distasteful and Handel dull. His pants were too short and his overcoat too big. As a father, he didn’t exist.

But how could it have been otherwise? His youth was commandeered by his huckster father, Nicolas-Joseph, who paraded the taciturn virtuose prodieux de Leige through the backwaters of Belgium and France. The villageois were impressed by the boy’s agitated performances of ridiculous piano showpieces. The Parisians were not.

Yet, as he emerged from his teens he began to show promise, if not as a pianist as a composer and scholar. At age twenty, in 1842, Franck gained entrance to the Paris Conservatoire and within a couple of years, through diligence, it seemed the Prix de Rome dangled tantalizingly close to his grasp. Whereupon, the ruthlessly ambitious Nicolas-Joseph yanked the youth from his studies and packed him back out on the concert circuit. Four years later, on the very day the 1848 Paris Revolution erupted, Franck married. Marriage offered escape, or so he thought, until, sadly, he found his Felicite to be a tyrant equal to cher papa.

Frank grew morose. Decade upon decade, his flaccid choral music and banal operas failed, partly due to the meddling of his wife, his in-laws, even his son, for they undertook to select his texts for him, Franck’s own eye for literature being blurry. He took to brooding for hours each day in his study. He was forever grimacing as he went about Paris on his unceasing rounds of drudgery.

He composed during stolen snatches and summer holidays, and took on too much work.

1. Teacher of the latest piano novelties to a society of fashionable young ladies of privilege in Auteuil.

2. Maitre de Chapelle and Organist at the basilica of Sainte-Clotide, where his after-service organ extemporizations became l’affaire of the Sabbath.

3. Professor of Organ at the Conservatoire – a post obtained through a friend’s lobbying, unbeknownst to Franck who had not applied for the job. There, his organ classes became the breeding ground for the Franckist principles of composition - high chromaticism, cyclic use of themes from movement to movement - mistakenly thought to have been derived from Wagner. (Bach was Franck’s spiritual master.) Around him formed a coterie of pupils – D’Indy, Duparc, Chausson, Pierne. La bande a Franck hoisted him on their pennant for a new French cosmopolitanism; they would eventually establish the Schola Cantorum de Franck.

Franck carried on une passion infidele for one Augusta Holmes, a French-Irish beauty who was his pupil. Inspired by this love, he at long last discovered his true musical voice, and wrote the first of his works which would enter (all posthumously) the standard chamber music repertoire, Piano Quintet in f.

One day, when in his sixties and by now a well-known failed composer, Franck – he with the gaiety of the Dies Irae – burst excitedly from his study to find his acolyte D’Indy. “I have got it at last,” exclaimed Franck. “A most beautiful phrase!”

His Violin Sonata in A, like the rest of the handful of masterpieces he composed shortly before his death, balances Classical formalism with Romantic self-indulgence. He gave it as a wedding present to the famous violin virtuoso Eugene Ysaye, who, running out of sunlight during the work’s premiere, played the first movement twice as fast as marked. Franck liked that, and remarked it Allegretto moderato which yearns throughout to a final resignation. The turbulent Allegro was one of Franck’s only outbursts of rebellion in a lifetime of docility. The third movement, marked Recitativo-Fantasia, finds the composer brooding again on the opening moments of the work, as Bach is fondly evoked. The final Allegretto poco mosso is sheer canonic inner fulfillment.

Throughout his life, Franck enjoyed only one unqualified success: his last work, String Quartet, composed when he was sixty-seven. When it received an ovation at its premiere, Franck, grinning, whispered to a pupil, “There, you see – the public is at last beginning to understand me.”

L.A. RADIO LEGEND VISITS KUSC

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:43:00 +0000

Johnny Magnus, "The Host Who Loves You Most" from the glorious heyday of KMPC, is a self-avowed fan of Classical KUSC and The Morning Show. He stopped by our studios the other day and kindly consented to let some of us gawking fans take his picture.

Bach Revealed

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson, working in her lab at the University of Dundee in Scotland, has constructed a bust of Bach using digital modeling techniques. She worked from a copper replica of Bach's skull which was made in 1894 by physician Wilhelm His and sculptor Carl Ludwig Seffner, who exhumed Bach's bones from their burial place at the St. John's Church in Leipzig for the purpose of creating the replica. Wilkinson's project was commissioned by the Bach House museum in Eisenach, birthplace of Johann Sebastian. The bust was unveiled last year in Berlin. The Bach House has 140 likenesses of Bach, but the master is known to have sat for only one portrait. As a result of the lack of material with which to work Wilkinson conceeds some aspects of her recreation are speculative. For instance, she explains, there is no way of knowing for certain what Bach's skin was like. "But that's also something that would have changed with the temperature or the state of his emotions," says Wilkinson.

Erik Satie, a life in solitude

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:35:00 +0000

Satie seems to me as a man who lives his life with his head down. Not so much shy; able at times to join the general chaos if wearing his same artful mask. Rather, Satie is absorbed, casually and utterly absorbed in his own thoughts in his one-room, unheated Arcueil flat, where no one ever goes but Satie. Maybe this state of being is not so uncommon among the populous at large, people living in similar kinds of solitude, maybe (like Satie!) with a cat, and that may help account for why Satie’s music lives on today, a century later. It is music of discreet charm and sly playfulness, and sometimes, oui, there is reverie, like a spoonful of sadness in your cup of coffee. Satie’s many tiny masterpieces – Oh, the Gymnopedies! the Gnossiennes! – bring the head down in solitude. I would even liken his music to crouching at a bush to watch a butterfly.

And Satie’s solitude went deeper than the mere fact of him living alone in his second-floor suburban flat in a corner house known as Les Quartre Cheminées where he spent his final twenty-seven years. After his death, all that was found in Satie’s flat was a hammock, a desk covered with papers, a candle, several old umbrellas, velvet suits and derby hats, notebooks, thirty years of notebooks, and the tin-can piano with pedals that worked by string. But hadn’t Satie said he had two pianos in his room, both white, stacked on top of one another? He did say that, oui, in the same way he gave his many tiny masterpieces titles that artfully masked, rather than revealed, their true intent. Which was solitude’s doing. Satie’s solitude is filled with barren space. “Wander about yourself,” he invited us. “I fill up the awkward silence.” I cringe when I hear Satie’s music described as simple, as if it does not contain enough notes, or is not sufficiently difficult to play. Its simplicity is its depth. As paradoxes go, that’s a favorite.

Satie’s music is simple as Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographs are simple. The self-conscious effort to be artful appears missing in each. That Erik and Henri were friends will surprise no one who encounters the many tiny masterpieces of both artists. But where Toulouse-Lautrec looked for his subject in the audacious gaite bursting forth from beneath the red sails of the Moulin Rouge, Satie looked down at the keys of a tin-can piano in his dingy, bare-walled bohemian flat, his “cabinet,” and with technique severely limited brought forth the fine thoughts of his solitude, as if musing alone over coffee on the terrasse of Le Chat Noir, where Satie made his meager living as café pianist. As those who provoked his ire discovered, Satie could also sometimes muse nasty and brittle, to no less effect only stingingly satiric, like a drop of absinthe in your cup.

Satie wrote his many tiny masterpieces in La Belle Epoque, the beautiful era before the Great War turned Paris into a ferment of decay and destroyed everything beautiful. In his final years, Satie lived to see la belle return. “To place one’s trust in the young is something that is always absolutely essential,” said the wizened guru of Les Six.