Tabloid Tuesday: Johann Sebastian Bach

For the next two weeks we’re going Baroque! No, not like the pun on bankruptcy which I have tried with all my will to suppress – instead we’re going back to the 1700’s. I’ll be featuring two composers who we are not playing the music of this year, but who are greatly influential and important composers. We’ll be starting off with Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach is the most prominent Baroque composer, and one of the most recognized composers generally. He led a life tied very strongly to his home country of Germany. Though he moved around quite a bit at the beginning of his career he always remained within a few hundred mile radius of his home town, Eisenach. This meant that much unlike those who followed in his legacy, he never left Germany.

Bach lived in an exciting time of innovation, change and genius. He had such contemporaries as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and John Dryden.

At the age of 14 he won a scholarship to St. Michael’s school for choral studies. He was exposed to wider European culture there, even though it was close enough to his home to make the journey on foot. He spent two years there and was able to experiment with the organ and harpsichord at the school.

In 1706 he married his second cousin Maria, and they had seven children together, four of whom lived into adulthood.

In 1720, Bach’s wife suddenly died. The same year he met a gifted young soprano, Anna, who was 17 years his junior, and they married VERY shortly afterwards. They had thirteen more children together, only 6 of whom survived into adulthood, of whom three became significant musicians.

Bach was appointed Cantor of Thomasschule in Leipzig in 1723, and he held this position for 27 years until his death.

After his death, his reputation as a composer declined for a while. Though he was popular during his life as an organist and teacher, this began to fade for a number of years. But then in the early nineteenth century, his popularity became restored as famous composers at that time began to recognize his work. These composers included such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. Beethoven even described him as “the original father of harmony.”

Perhaps one of the most interesting bits to pull from the story of Bach’s life is the number of children he lost. Out of twenty children fathered a mere 50% survived. At the time that Bach lived, infant mortality was huge.

It was only actually 20% on average for the German population (which by our modern standards is ludicrously high; for context Canada's infant mortality rate as of 2012 is 0.005%), but his family just set a bad example (his stats also included his deceased offspring who made it out of infancy, but passed away in childhood).

He was living in a time in which the prevalence of the urban centre was on the rise. More people were moving out of the country and into towns where slums quickly erupted, and it became difficult to keep sanitary conditions in check. This meant the spread of disease.

And of course, with a lot of people in close quarters, and many of those people rapidly dying, there was a problem with disposal of the dead, which added even more to the stench, decay and diseases.

But it wasn't all bad; this movement also gave birth to some wonderful things. For instance, just before Bach’s time the City Comedy was a staple in London life before it was banned (see Ben Johnson, first Poet Laureate of Britain  for example)

As much as it assaults our twenty-first-century sensibilities with grief to imagine having that many children die, it was not regarded as such at the time Bach lived. Death of children was seen as more of a natural and regular occurrence. Yes, it was sad, but such were the living conditions that families – especially those in poverty – could not afford to spend a great deal of time mourning the loss of a child.

There were more important things to worry about for lower-class families. There were also more instances of death from disease and undernourishment in the impoverished populations that the death of a fragile young one was hardly shocking.

But in the Bach family, their patriarch was in a good position socially and financially.

Upon doing a bit of research on mourning customs of the 18^th century, I was surprised to find that it was such a big deal– excessive showy mourning is usually ascribed to the middle to upper classes in Victorian England. They went so far as to have people who couldn’t attend the funeral of a loved one send an empty carriage to follow the procession to make it look like there were more people.

One can imagine now the narrow streets festooned with the rotting corpses of the impoverished and sickly, a constant reminder of the horrors of the plague only centuries before. The endless line of darkened carriages of the wealthy which signify the death of one of their own pass by the stinking filth; ornate ceremonies for rich deceased with not a half-penny to spare for their social inferior’s dinner, though they barely cling to the last thread of life.

But it seems that people in the time of Bach also had some excessive funeral practices, though notably I found none for infants and children. It was only a tragedy, it seems, when an adult passed away – quite contrary to our modern perception of death.

Bach may have been of the class to have a formal funeral and mourning period for his family and friends, but his children may not have received quite the same ceremony.

As morbid as this post has been, the customs of funerals and mourning are enlightening if the time in which Bach lived. Even about the music and art produced in this time is informed by the social practices and customs, so a greater understanding of these aspects of the lives of Baroque artists can lead to a greater appreciation of the artists.

Tabloid Tuesday: Edward Elgar

In addition to possessing just the most thick and full mustache my eyes have ever had the pleasure of experiencing, Edward Elgar is a well-known British composer.

This composer had humble beginnings. His parents believed in the virtues of a rural upbringing, so he was raised outside the city, which meant that he had instilled in him at an early age a fondness for nature which would last through his life.

He received his earliest music instruction from his father who owned a music shop. He also had violin lessons with a local musician, but he never received formal academic instruction.

Elgar lived in the Victorian era which was a time obsessed with class. Because social mobility was becoming more common, those who already occupied the ruling classes felt that they needed to defend their kind against the rising members of lower classes, who could now enter their sphere thanks to rapid urbanization which created more opportunities to accumulate wealth. Unless you were a member of the landed gentry in the country, if you didn’t have property in London it was difficult to gain social status in the city spheres.

So signifiers of class became incredibly important. One had to be seen wearing the right thing, saying the right thing at the right time, making the proper connections, showing a certain type of comportment, and most importantly – marrying in a suitable manner.

Elgar, who was not rich, and definitely not a member of the landed gentry, is really an impressive figure for making his way to fame at the time in which he lived, which he certainly did.

His wife, Alice, was a daughter of fortune, but was disinherited by her father when she married a musician who was at that time unknown.

As a Victorian artist, he was expected to be able to interact on a level with the aristocrats who would attend his concerts. Once, he responded rather haughtily to a dinner invitation by referring to himself and Alice as a “shopkeeper’s son and his wife.”

He soon realized that his wife had given up so much for him, and that he should accept the various honours and invitations bestowed upon him with grace, instead of moodiness.

Despite this rocky beginning he became a favourite among London music society. He was praised by his fellow musicians and the general public. He even conducted the London Symphony Orchestra for a year.

After his marriage, he found himself with the means to move to London and get into the heart of the music scene in England. Even though his wife had been disinherited for having married a musician who was at the time unknown and without much in the way of fortune, they still managed to move into the popular city sphere.

In 1904 he was knighted and found himself even more adored by the musical circles in London. However, when his wife died in 1920, he moved out of London and back to the country and wrote very little after that time.

Elgar is a composer who adored his close circle of friends and was in turn adored by English society. He struggled with class relations as many in his time did for part of his life, but managed to come out on top.

You can hear music by Elgar performed by the Kingston Symphony this season in Brahms, Mozart & Elgar on March 2^nd at 2:30 at The Grand Theatre.

Tabloid Tuesday: Maurice Ravel

Today is going to be a sort of anti-tabloid Tuesday, because the featured composer actually led a very secretive private life of which little is known – and many speculate that there was little to know about.

Maurice Ravel, though mysterious in many ways, was incredibly devoted to the creation of music, and ostensibly not much else. After the death of his mother in 1917, he is said to never have been so fond of another living being again.

His parents raised him in Paris where they discovered very early that their son was musically talented. He was sent to the best teachers and got a start in performance and moved on to composition afterwards, though he did not fare so well on the academic side of things.

He is a man known for being solely devoted to his art. In fact, he actually is not known to have ever had an intimate relationship with another person. He is famously quoted as once saying “my only love affair is with music.”

Of course, as soon as a man is not in a relationship with a woman, many people make the assumption that he is gay – and this speculation has been repeatedly made about Ravel, though I have not found any conclusive evidence of his sexuality of either persuasion.

I find Ravel interesting because his secretive nature is so unlike many public figures today; though I’ve always been fascinated by the artists whose lives are shrouded in mystery. For instance, Frederick Phillip Grove, Canadian author, spent a quiet second half to his life writing fiction in Manitoba in the early twentieth century. While people thought that he was born in North America and had led an unimportant first half of his life, this was far from the truth.

Grove was born in Germany and after graduating from a prestigious school, quickly became a prolific translator. He was part of a homoerotic circle before running off with a woman to Italy, amid a great deal of scandal. He was later charged with fraud and found himself in immense debt. So he spent a year in jail and burned some bridges.

He was again accused of fraud a few years later, so he and his wife staged his suicide and ran off to America – because once you’re accused of fraud you may as well continue to perpetrate that crime. There he soon abandoned his wife who became a model, and he moved to Manitoba where he married a school teacher and became a well-known writer of prairie fiction, and few knew of his scandalous origins until after his death.

Ravel, like Grove, spoke very little about his life, and actually insisted that he was much too devoted to his craft to even have a private life for the public to speculate upon.

Though there have been no grand reveals about Ravel’s private life, his entire existence was fairly mysterious. I’m not just talking about his private life, but also his artistic process.

No one would ever have the privilege of seeing one of his works in progress; he only revealed a work once he had put on all the finishing touches.

The process of writing music for this composer seemed magical. He would go on lengthy walks in the woods and across Paris, no matter what the weather was like until he felt properly inspired, then subsequently shut himself up for long periods of time to compose.

He once said, “It’s lucky I’ve managed to write music, because I know perfectly well I should never have been able to do anything else.”

Ravel was a man completely committed to his craft, and it shows in the works he produced. You have the opportunity to see his piano concerto performed by prodigy Jan Lisecki and the Kingston Symphony this season on February 2^nd at the Grand Theatre in Mahler Ravel & Dvorak.

Tabloid Tuesday: Carl Orff

There have been a lot of interesting speculations made about composer Carl Orff over the years – and not all of them flattering.

But first I’m going to start with an important tidbit on his contribution to musical instruction (not to say that this bit isn’t also terribly fascinating, of course). He seriously influenced the principles of elementary teaching of musical skills. He believed that all children have the ability to learn music to a degree. While many thought that a child had to show natural genius to be able to learn music, he showed the world that just about any child can be taught to play an instrument or sing. In other words, he came down on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate.

I want to add a disclaimer right now, before we get into the heart of the issue I will be discussing this week: Though we play and listen to the music of any given composer does not mean we endorse his/her political views. This is merely a discussion of lives of artists, and a showcase of rumors surrounding them.

Orff lived a long life in a tumultuous time, especially considering the fact that he was a German citizen. He was born in 1895 and died in 1982. This means that he lived through both world wars, post-WWII Germany and all that it entailed, and unfathomable technological and political development.

The most well-known work Orff produced in his lifetime is Carmina Burana. This piece was largely popular with the Nazi party during WWII. Of course, having your work admired by bad people does not necessarily make you a bad person.

Moreover, if you’re living in Nazi Germany and you are commissioned to write a piece for the Nazi’s, you’d better believe you’re going to do it. After all, you’re creating music, not actively killing people. So when the Nazi’s asked someone to re-write incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream after Felix Mendelssohn had been banned, Orff took on the task, though there is evidence that he may have actually written the music before the Nazis asked for it, and simply produced it upon request.

Now without getting too much into a major discussion of the nature of evil, I want to briefly discuss something called the banality of evil. This is essentially the S.S. officer who works at the camps all day, then comes home, gives his wife and kiss and spends the evening playing with his children. This was a term coined post-WWII to describe those who accepted the basic premise of their state and carried forth orders accordingly; that the people who committed these atrocities were not fanatics or psychopaths, but regular people – those “just following orders.” If you’re familiar with the Milgram Experiment, this is the issue from which it arises.

So we have to ask: How far down does evil go? Does complying with the demands (even if those demands are just to compose music) of an evil administration to save yourself make you evil? Moreover, does this discussion really apply to Orff at all? These are all important questions, and definitely something to consider before condemning Orff to the category of evil based upon speculations about his supposed associations with the Nazi party, as some people do.

Those who say that Orff supported the Nazi party have little evidence to back this up, however, and there is little cause to believe it to be true. Though there is evidence that he went through the “denazification” process. 

In fact, Orff himself claims to have helped to establish theWhite Rose resistance movement in Germany, but like the contrary claims, this also has little evidence.

No matter what his political standing was, it is impossible to recognize Carima Burana as anything short of a musical masterpiece. You can hear this comedic and bawdy scenic cantata performed by the Kingston Symphony on Saturday November 9^th at 7:30 at the Kingston Gospel Temple.