AN INTRIGUING VOLUME OF DESCRIPTIVE PIANO MUSIC FROM A-R EDITIONS

Abstract

Carli reviews Descriptive Piano Fantasias edited by Halina Goldberg and Jonathan D. Bellman.

AN INTRIGUING VOLUME OF DESCRIPTIVE PIANO MUSIC FROM A-R EDITIONS Descriptive Piano Fantasias. Edited by Halina Goldberg and Jonathan D. Bellman. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2021. (Recent researches in the music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, v. 81) [1 score (xxv, 158 p.) ISBN: 9781987206098, $360.]

"Descriptive" music is a common trope throughout Western art music. Some of the best-known works familiar to the general public are overtly descriptive: Beethoven's Sixth Symphony (the "Pastoral"), Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, and Vivaldi's omnipresent (especially on Sunday morning classical music radio programs) The Four Seasons. Music can be as descriptive as painting or sculpture as a matter of intent. Descriptive music can also include what may be thought of as "nonmusical" elements; the use of instruments to evoke natural or man-made sounds in the course of music created in specific forms, and sometimes these forms incorporate aspects of traditional musical structures. Sometimes these sounds are intended to be or perceived as "noises." "Music" and "noise" are two words which are found in conjunction with each other, often as disparate within a single composition, all through the ages, particularly in regard to music which is experimental to a point beyond the taste and knowledge of its contemporary public. However, a great deal of classical music which is culturally congruent with its audiences was classified in various permutations of "rattle and crash" as well as sonic comprehensibility. Descriptions of nineteenth-century Italian operas are filled with them, such as pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk's description of a "boisterous" reception he would receive if he suddenly arrived at a concert from a delayed train (which happened to him on occasion) as unimaginable "unless you have heard the finale of lone [also known as Jone], by Maestro [Errico] Petrella, or that of Medea, by Maestro [Giovanni] Pacini, which, to my notion, are the two most deafening musical abominations that have ever been committed, since the invention of the bass drum, the cymbals, and the whole kitchen battery of modern instrumentation" (Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Notes Of A Pianist, ed. Jeanne Behrend [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964], 218-19). Granted, both works have sonic cataclysms, especially Jone (based upon Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Last Days of Pompeii), but both works also have ordinary operatic forms, melodies, and harmonies found in all Italian operas from the 1820s to the 1860s that appealed to audiences in many countries.

Such descriptions frequently remark upon the introduction of new instruments and the volume they could produce. There is a famous caricature of Berlioz imperiously leading an immense orchestra containing, in addition to hordes of strings, scattered clusters of trumpets, hordes of trombones, multiple ophicleides (an instrument that Berlioz himself called a "chromatic bullock" but frequently employed), huge drums, and even a cannon. The children's book Professor Branestawm's Treasure Hunt by Norman Hunter, originally published in 1937, contains a chapter titled "The Professor Goes All Musical," in which the titular eccentric character decides to ate new for an orchestra that he will conduct. At the very proper concert, where the audience is in their best clothes and also behaving "properly," the instruments work well during the first piece (which, however, "finished with a sudden xonk which shook the Town Hall's best fern out of its pot, and the applause which followed was more deafening than the piece, but not much more"). In the second piece they turn eventually against the players and the professor in a highly descriptive melee with great violence and noise ("the Great Woopsatara sat on the three men who were holding it and scattered the four who were holding it down," "the Major and Minor Huddabooms were playing a sort of musical ping-pong with the people supposed to be playing them") culminating in a free-for-all Hunter characterizes as "Crash, zoom, twiddely, twiddely, umpetty pip. 'Mind my ear!' 'Down, sir.' Zump whiz. Oo-er!" Then the Professor's friend Colonel Dedshott arrives with his Catapult Cavaliers to quell the riot, and Hunter throws in another violently onomatopoeic passage as everything is settled down (Norman Hunter, Professor Branestaxum 's Treasure Hunt and other incredible adventures [London: Penguin Books, 1966], 97-110).

Norman Hunter's book not only goes outside its ostensibly juvenile parameters to cleverly lampoon the 1920s-1930s avant-garde trend of introducing non-musical machinery into ensembles (as in George Antheil's let as well as new "scientific" musical instruments (like the theremin), but directly symbolizes a musical battle, in which comparative order turns into a great affray with the "enemy" initially winning only to be overcome by the "forces of good" in a tonal repulse culminating in victory. It captures the thrust of the "battle pieces" which began to appear in great numbers in the late eighteenth century, the most famous of which is The Battle of Prague by Frantisek (or Franz) Kotzwara (1730-1791), which appeared in the 1770s. Arthur Loesser points out in Men, Women, and Pianos that such works were not unknown before Kotzwara's, with examples going back to the seventeenth century, but Kotzwara unquestionably was the instigator of a genre that flourished in various forms until the early twentieth century (Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, And Pianos: A Social History [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954], 243-44).

Kotzwara's piece also instigated a genre of directly descriptive piano works covering a variety of specific occurrences, following the rise of the piano as a keyboard instrument with wide expressive capabilities that found its way into domestic circumstances concurrent with the Industrial Revolution, which facilitated mass production, and the rise of commercial distribution, introducing individuals and families into personal music-making on a hitherto unthought-of scale. As pianos sold in increasingly exponential numbers-rising to over 100,000 per year by 1810-music appealing to players of all tastes and abilities proliferated as well, and the variety of genres composed flourished to include forms never before thought of and were offered to all who had access to what became the most prevalent of all musical instruments in the home.

Until now, the incredible worldwide proliferation of descriptive works for the piano over 150 years has not been historically documented, culturally examined, critically encapsulated, and appropriate examples provided in a single performance edition. A-R Editions' Descriptive Piano Fantasias takes care of that need handily. Speaking as one who recorded The Battle of Prague for the journal Victorian Studies some thirty-eight years ago, the scope of pieces provided in this volume is fascinating on many fronts. Most of the works contained are by composers not only unfamiliar but almost completely untraceable today, while others were written by composers who may not be in the upper echelon of many musicians' ratings but were nonetheless important in their time in other fields. It is this cross-section and intermingling of pieces by composers we now divide into "High" and "Low" that show that everyone was in the game when it came to writing piano pieces about specific events and experiences. And really, these pieces should be placed in a larger context of music history, not only including examples like Beethoven's, Tchaikovsky's, and Vivaldi's works mentioned above, but also Beethoven's critically-battered Wellington's Victory, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, and Felicien David's "ode-symphonie" Le désert. As well as, some of the more directlydramatic Romantic "symphonic poems" such as Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, Joachim Raff's "Lenore" symphony, and Victor Herbert's Hero and Leander which are specifically linked to stories both in forms and orchestration, and multi-faceted instances such as Haydn's Symphony No. 101, the so-called "Military," of which close examination reveals "army-like" elements beside the use of Janissary instruments and the miniature "battle" at the end of the second movement. And there are other obvious descriptive pieces we now take for granted, notably Rossini's four-part descriptive overture to Guillaume Tell (and many people forget the orchestral storm in II barbiere di Siviglia).

A-R Editions' Descriptive Piano Fantasias contains fourteen works, dating between 1788 and 1910 and appropriately leading off with The Battle of Prague. The variety of their structures, contents, and performance difficulty demonstrates the wide range of keyboard skills expected of mostly domestic music buyers, as well as national and cultural compositional characteristics and sophistication (indeed coming down to levels of competence). Without naming specific pieces, as everyone's tastes and expectations are different, musically the pieces may seem to range from intricately constructed and characterful to rather bald and obvious, and in pianistic difficulty ranging from fairly demanding (Juliette Godillon's Le violon de Crémone, for instance) to very easy (Joseph Delafosse's Le baptême d'un poupée), but none are actually awkwardly unplayable or dull. They are all genuinely interesting on many levels, especially concerning what they attempt to describe and the backgrounds of their composition, from actual events to moods to original stories. Many archives, libraries, and collections provided the works contained, and a number of eminent scholars aided in providing information to editors Halina Goldberg and Jonathan D. Bellman. Their introduction and notes on each composition are exhaustive, fascinating, and gracefully written, compelling readers to not only absorb information but enjoy doing so. The editors even include suggestions as to how to perform these works, turning them from objects of curiosity into living, breathing, performable music. As such, the collection is a scholarly, literary, and musical triumph, presenting history and vividly illustrating it with complete examples. In their acknowledgements, Goldberg and Bellman themselves specifically mention the inspiration that prompted their work from a suggestion from Neal Zaslaw and a 2002 conference paper by Linda P. Cummins which first drew light upon this repertory; myself, I would like to read Ms. Cummins' paper, as its contents must have been compelling in a way outside the norm of many conference papers to provide impetus for the present collection.

Everyone will find favorite pieces here that will appeal to them on one or more of the aspects mentioned above. I have several-actually quite a few. Among them I must somewhat shyly admit a fondness for The Battle of Prague, since I recorded it and it is so frequently referred to in many classic works of fiction (as Arthur Loesser wittily points out in Men, Women, And Pianos, 278-79). Also, Kotzwara was a competent composer, it is a landmark piece, and it has a certain appeal now that it has disappeared from its annoyingly ubiquitous presence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Daniel Steibelt's lengthy La journée d'Ulm, which also achieved international popularity, is a fascinating insight into this virtuoso's often-debated (and sometimes-derided) piano technique; and truthfully, it's not that easy to play. It cleverly introduces quotes (which he acknowledges) from operas by Grétry, Piccini, Gluck, and even the aforementioned combative second movement of Haydn's "Military" Symphony, and is conceptually and compositionally imaginative-unlike most "battle pieces," it ends pianissimo. Félicien David's 1833 Un promenade sur le Nil is an early and evocative expression of David's fascination with Middle Eastern music-predating Le désert by eleven years-and one of his comparatively few works for solo piano. The charming Une messe de minuit à Rome by the prominent-then-temporarily-dismissed organist-composer Louis-James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (deliberately left out of the fifth edition of New Grove by its dour editor Eric Blom) is the unexpectedly most-complex piece originally written into a lady's "musical autograph" album which also contained signed miniature works by Cherubini, Rossini, Gounod, Berlioz, Chopin, and Liszt. LefébureWély fills his short work with chime effects, a richly melodic chorale, and a joyous Christmas Eve dance. My sentimental attachment to Alberto Rivieri's 1889 The Johnstown Flood, published shortly after that tumultuous American disaster, is because I have family now living in that part of Pennsylvania, which was destroyed through the hubris of Pittsburgh's financial elite (including Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, and Andrew Mellon). Culturally, the collection's most important work may be its twelfth, Louisville, Kentucky-based Hermann S. Shapiro's 1904 The Kishineff Massacre, which takes as its inspiration a horrifying pogrom which took place in Kishinev, Russia, on Easter Sunday, 1903, when Christians exiting a church service took it upon themselves to attack the town's Jewish population, killing fifty people, injuring over a hundred, and burning down hundreds of homes. Prefaced with a poem about the massacre by Shimon Shmuel Frug (p. 132), Shapiro's carefully arranged multi-movement piece was published in New York with headings in Hebrew and aimed at Jewish populations along the Eastern seaboard, a piece taken from the headlines about an event that affected a whole population. (The Kishinev affair elicited international condemnation, inspired a famous grimly provocative poem by Hayim Nahan Bialik, and was one of the catalysts of the Zionist movement of the early 20th century.)

I believe many scholars and performers should study and bring these works into their homes for domestic musicmaking-something I personally encourage and practice with my friends- and public performance. It is a sincere pleasure to have a collection of music that is "improving and educative" to read about and play.

PHILIP C. CARLI

Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester