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Post by Deleted on Feb 5, 2013 19:20:05 GMT -5
"Robert Craft has sometimes been described as Stravinsky's Boswell," writes the Welshman Mr. Griffiths, "but really there is no parallel for this story." [Is that so? I can think of at least two.] "In 1947, just twenty-three years old and fresh [sic] out of the Juilliard School, Craft wrote to the composer requesting help in getting hold of performing material for the then little-known Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which he wanted to include in a concert. The correspondence continued, and by the time the concert took place, eight months later, Stravinsky himself was on the platform, sharing the programme with Craft, conducting a new version of the Symphonies, and appearing for no fee, even though conducting was, for him at this time, a principal way of making money, and making money was, for him at any time, a way of life. No other incident shows him so generous to a young musician. 'He never told me why he did it,' Craft reports in 'Stravinsky: glimpses of a life,' 'and it remains a mystery.'
"It is perhaps less a mystery than it was before Craft's publication of his letters from Stravinsky, which reveal how, before their first meeting, he had obliged the composer in various errands, pleased him with gifts of records and books, and intrigued him as a young man of esoteric culture and intelligence. But we need another word, rare in such circumstances - 'love' - to explain how the relationship prospered, to the extent that Craft moved in with the Stravinskys in 1949 and remained with them until the composer's death twenty-two years later."
The two close parallels of which I can think are of course those of 1) Fenby's approach to the elderly Delius, and 2) the devotion of one of our own esteemed members to the service and cause of Sorabji. Are there other instances of this phenomenon? I suspect that the expression appropriate in all these cases is not so much "love" as "dedication to the service of Art."
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Post by neilmcgowan on Feb 5, 2013 23:45:04 GMT -5
The Danish diplomat von Nissen attached himself to the Mozart family - moving into the Mozart house with perhaps unusual haste after Wolfgang's death in 1791, officially as a 'lodger'. He thereupon set about writing a definite biography of W A Mozart, with the undisguised aim of providing for Constanze Mozart's old age from the proceeds. What was more remarkable was the way he systematically collected and destroyed all of Mozart's correspondence with others, so that no conflicting material to his own would stymie his project. Moreover, he abused the Danish diplomatic service in these ends. His men went to Nannerl Mozart, with demands that she hand over all of her brother's correspondence. Initially she was told that this was to assist Nissen in his researches. Later it became clear that Nissen had simply burnt them all. But the long hand of Danish musicology stretched further than Vienna. At the inquest into the death of the soprano Anna 'Nancy' Storace in London, Storace's maid testified that "foreign gentlemen" had come to her door, demanding Mozart's letters. "The mistress sent them away, shouting at them" the maid said. Later the same evening Anna Storace burned all of Mozart's letters, while shouting "He shall not have them!". [Storace had created the role of Susanna in 'The Marriage Of Figaro', and worked extensively in Vienna at the time - not excluding singing for Salieri in the legendary 'opera competition' in which the Emperor pitted Salieri's talents against Mozart's.] Nissen's objective was - according to Jane Glover's hypothesis, which seems reasonable - to destroy all light-hearted or scatological correspondence which might eat-away at the image he wished to portray of Mozart as a devout Man Of God. Nissen lived with Constanze quite openly from the outset, finally marrying her in 1809, and taking her with him to Copenhagen when his Ambassadorial term in Vienna expired. On his retirement, the couple returned to Austria, settling in Salzburg. Whether Nancy Storace's relationship with Mozart ever went beyond the professional is open to speculation - but the evidence has now been comprehensively destroyed by von Nissen's men, and by Storace herself. The fact that there was a body of letters - sent from Vienna to Storace until the time of her death - suggests a close relationship. It is known that Storace was working on a project to have Mozart come to London for a concert tour in 1792, and she enlisted the Prince Of Wales as the sponsor of the project. (She could do so most easily, since her fellow soprano at the Drury Lane theatre was Mrs Crouch - the Prince's mistress). However, events conspired to prevent Mozart ever coming to London. The idea to give The Marriage Of Figaro was well-advanced - Da Ponte was in London, and four of the original Vienna cast. It may of course be coincidence that Mozart wrote a farewell aria for Storace to perform at a Benefit Concert when her contract at the Vienna Opera was terminated on the personal orders of the Emperor. The aria - Ch'io mi scordi di te - has the rubric "For Miss Storace and myself to perform" and has an extensive piano obbligato part. The final allegro section has a text from Metastasio - "No matter where I may be forced to go, my heart shall always remain with you alone. Always remain. Always remain." But it's probably a coincidence...
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Post by Deleted on Feb 20, 2013 1:36:56 GMT -5
Thank you for that most learned response Mr. McG!
In the eighties of the last century, the above-mentioned Mr. Craft published a second volume of Shtrahfinskee's Selected Correspondence. But Mr. Karlinsky, in a review in the Times Literary Supplement, pointed out any number of mistakes therein, which will no doubt be of interest to all our Russian-speaking members.
"The translations are often garbled or simplified," Mr. Karlinsky tells us. "Thus a sentence from Shtrahfinskee's letter of protest against Muzyka's treatment of Debussy: 'In the pages of Muzyka, such an attack will perplex even a reader who is aware of the behind-the-scenes situation at your journal' is rendered as 'But such an attack in Muzycka's own pages is most perplexing to the magazine's readers, considering it is the magazine best versed in life behind the scenes.'
"But even without the original texts to compare, a person who knows something about Russian language and culture can often see what went wrong. When one reads that Shtrahfinskee had a religious object called 'The Image of the Secret Evening,' it is clear that the Russian was 'Obraz Tainoi Vecheri,' an icon depicting the Last Supper. Well, taina does mean 'secret' and vecher means 'evening,' but should texts be translated by guesswork? Similarly, in the synopsis of the opera The Nightingale, the phrases 'Just then a lady-bird notices the Fisherman' and 'The Fisherman . . . notes that it is indeed his lady-bird' suggest that there had been some confusion between Bozh'ia korovka, 'lady-bird' and korovka, diminutive form of 'cow' (the lowing of a cow is indeed mentioned at that point in the opera).
"In Russian, names of places and persons easily form adjectival derivations which cannot be mechanically transposed into English. But since Craft's consultants don't know this, the town of Rovno appears in the text variously as Rovenski, Rovensky, Rovlenskoe (sic) and Rovenskaya. The estate of Shtrahfinskee's first wife, Ustilug, is also spelled Ustiluzhski. When Sir Isaiah Berlin compares the piano-playing manner of Richter to three Russian writers, Dostoevsky, Rozanov and Pasternak (implying, I suppose, mysticism and religiosity), this emerges as 'the Dostoevsky-Rozanovsky-Pasternak tradition.' But the name of Vasily Rozanov, a writer Shtrahfinskee admired, is also found in its non-adjectival form in the book. The idiom figa s maslom, meaning to 'come away empty-handed,' is rendered literally and absurdly as 'to end up with a pocket full of buttered figs.' Shtrahfinskee's grand-daughter Catherine Mandelstamm is given a male patronymic 'Yurievich' instead of the appropriate feminine one, Yurievna." [Just as, in our own time, lady-professors are referred to simply as "professors" rather than in the correct and appropriate way as "professoresses."]
"Craft's own annotations can be regrettably uninformed, as when he says that beginning with a certain line in the libretto of The Nightingale, 'Shtrahfinskee decided that the sex of the Nightingale is masculine' (the Russian word for nightingale is always masculine); or when he informs us that the Moscow Art Theatre was 'renamed the Mardzhanov theatre after the Revolution' (the Moscow Art Theatre was, of course, renamed after Maxim Gorky; the famed Georgian-Russian stage director Konstantin Mardzhanoshvili, also known as Mardzhanov, had a theatre renamed after him in Tbilisi, Georgia). And in Volume One, Craft told his readers that Mnogaia leta, the solemn canticle which is the Russian Orthodox equivalent of the Latin Ad multos annos, has the same meaning as the Hebrew drinking toast l'chaim.
"These lapses (and many others could be cited) will irritate the readers who know Russian and mislead the ones who don't. The latter are also ill-served by the many instances when Russian is left untranslated and unannotated. Shtrahfinskee read Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago and wrote to a correspondent: 'I confess my disappointment. Of course it is real peredvizhnichestvo. How strange to read such a novel in the age of James Joyce.' The untranslated word, which is the key to the entire passage, refers to an association of nineteenth-century painters who stressed realism and social relevance but ignored artistic or pictorial values in their work. In another passage, we read that the 'Piatyorka' were musical populists instead of musical slavophiles and that 'almost all of them were nevyi's [sic], weren't they?' There is no way for even the most intelligent readers to make any sense of this, unless they are told the Piatyorka are the group of composers usually known as the Mighty Five and that the word nevyi's is a mistranscription of levye, 'left-wing.'
"Let us hope that in future Robert Craft finds consultants who can do justice to the writings of the composer whose life and music Craft loves and knows better than any one else on earth."
Thus - in part - Mr. Karlinsky.
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Post by neilmcgowan on Feb 20, 2013 8:45:40 GMT -5
There is no way for even the most intelligent readers to make any sense of this, unless they are told the Piatyorka are the group of composers usually known as the Mighty Five and that the word nevyi's is a mistranscription of levye, 'left-wing.' Entirely correct! In fact "The Five" (aka " moguchaya kucha', the mighty handful) were mostly extreme right-wingers of an extremist-nationalist persuasion. Balakirev, who was their prime mover, worked actively to sabotage Tchaikovsky's career - simply because he believed Tchaikovsky represented a 'polluted' form of Russian culture which had too much western influence. After the premiere of OPRICHNIK ('The Tsar's Agent') Balakirev spent weeks on a letter-writing and whispering campaign. The hit success, in an overtly French grand-opera tradition, complete with the Siebel/Niklaus-style mezzo-soprano 'young man' role, was soon being written off as a disaster. Even Tchaikovsky became convinced he'd written a shameful monstrosity, and he begged his publisher to destroy the plates. Luckily for us, the publisher (the magnificent Jurgenson, immune to all such silliness!) said he couldn't - but would agree to take the work off sale in Russia, while maintaining it for sale in his Berlin and Paris showrooms. It is very possible that the hounding campaign against Tchaikovsky, which ended in his death, was prompted by Balakirev and his friends in the Russian nationalist movement - which was also closely linked with the Freemasons. (Whatever the cause of Tchaikovsky's death, it remains a fact that he was summoned to a Masonic 'kangaroo court' just days before his death). The idea that they were 'lefties' is patently absurd. The whole nationalist 'schtick' was to portray the foreigner-friendly liberal tendency as 'lefties' - and themselves as the avengers who would 'cure' Russia of such unwanted ideas. The entire picture became permanently occluded in 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was murdered in a bomb plot - he was lured from his carriage in the street, and blown to pieces. The Russian Secret Service - acting more from kneejerk than evidence - announced that 'foreigners' had been behind the attack, within only hours of the Tsar's death. Ironically Alexander II had been a liberal Tsar who had abolished serfdom, set up compulsory primary education for all, and opened new cultural links with foreign countries. He spoke French and Italian, and enjoyed the Italian opera. On a musical note, it was Alexander II who had opened the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. It was dedicated to his wife, the Grand-Princess Marie - and thus it was the Marie-insky Theatre.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 29, 2013 3:53:46 GMT -5
Here is another interesting instance of such a relationship; it comes from Clare Delius's " Memories of my Brother," which came out in 1935: Regrettably Heseltine's view of Delius and his music altered in later years; he was nowhere near as consistent as Fenby was in his time (1928 onwards).
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Post by Deleted on Mar 29, 2013 4:10:44 GMT -5
As it happens, Sydney Grew, I first came across Delius's music on television! Based on Eric Fenby's 1936 memoir ' Delius as I knew him', Ken Russell's film, ' Song of Summer' (1968) traces the last years of Frederick Delius, and Eric Fenby's dedication in giving up five years of his life to helping the blind, paralysed composer set down the unfinished scores he could hear in his head. Wikipedia - Song of SummerPerhaps the finest of the series of biographical films that Ken Russell made for the BBC arts series ' Omnibus' in the 'sixties, ' Song of Summer' is an immensely moving story of sacrifice, idealism and musical genius. I commend it to everyone reading The Third!
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