Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Philharmonic Contender Returns to the Podium

      by

      With a change of the guard imminent at the New York Philharmonic, Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the only guest conductor leading two programs this season.A changing of the guard on the world’s great orchestral podiums was in the air on Friday. Daniel Barenboim, 80, the longtime music director of the Berlin State Opera, had just announced he would step down at the end of the month because of his declining health.A potential generational shift was looming at the New York Philharmonic, too. The evening before, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, 37, had conducted that ensemble with crisply elfin spirit as one of the leading candidates to take over when Jaap van Zweden, 62, leaves at the end of next season.Rouvali faces steep competition — not least from Gustavo Dudamel, 41, who is widely considered the favorite for the position and who arrives in New York this spring for Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a classic music director showcase.But it is no accident that Rouvali is the only Philharmonic guest conductor this season to get two weeks of concerts. After the current program of works by Rossini, Magnus Lindberg and Beethoven, he leads music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Prokofiev and — like the Mahler, a prime assignment — Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” starting next Thursday.It is an added sign of trust in and respect for Rouvali, the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, that each of those programs includes a new work co-commissioned by the Philharmonic: Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis” and Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 — bless him for being one of the few contemporary composers who favor plain, simple concerto titles — with the calmly formidable Yuja Wang as soloist.Yuja Wang, front, was the soloist in Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3.Chris LeeOn Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Rouvali, too, was a calm and lucid guide through the piece — which came off, however, as billowy and somewhat baggy. The score’s meter markings are precisely gauged for shifts of pulse that don’t come across audibly as slow-fast contrasts of tempo; this may be why Lindberg has cheekily described the work as a concerto in three concertos, rather than three movements.But while that is an impressive technical achievement, the whole thing ends up registering for the listener as a bit homogeneous, a roughly half-hour foray into richly chromatic nostalgia, swaths of it reminiscent of golden-age film music à la Korngold. (A modernist sheen over a late-Romantic spirit has become a trademark Lindberg move.) Like the Groundhog Day spectacle of votes for a House speaker this week, the performance gave the sense of hearing the same concerto again and again.If this repetitiveness yielded little urgency, the piece wasn’t exactly sluggish, either. Moment by moment, passage by passage, the music doesn’t feel heavy. Lindberg keeps the orchestra airy, often adding complexity by dividing the strings into ever-ampler harmonies rather than using denser instrumentation or greater volume. And the daunting solo part emerges — particularly in Wang’s cool hands — as quicksilver and subtle, integrated into the general textures and restrained even in the fevered portions of the cadenza near the end of the first movement.Lindberg is never less than artful, as in how that cadenza seems to silkily melt out of softly plush strings, which just as quietly and cleverly rejoin the pianist a minute or so later. The shadows at the start of the second movement organically grow into an expansive, grave grandeur reminiscent of Debussy’s “La Mer,” with passages of candied glockenspiel woven beautifully into the golden wire of a tiny group of violins. The third movement has bits of sumptuous playfulness, punctuated by yelps of brass.But overall the work’s impact is muted and breezy, which is striking given the broad, Rachmaninoff-esque sweep of Lindberg’s musical gestures.Rouvali, one of a full lineup of conductors accompanying Wang in the coming months as she tours with the work, which premiered in San Francisco in October, matches her clean, objective style. There is a conscientiousness to Rouvali that can tip into squareness, as I felt when he led the Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony a year ago. And Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture on Thursday lacked the steadily accumulating propulsion, even through lyrical passages, that is the piece’s reason for being; the soufflé never really rose.But in Beethoven’s Second Symphony — a classic that is still somehow underrated — he was superb, with his deliberate, even careful conducting yielding a graceful, stylish interpretation. I have rarely been more clearly yet delicately aware of Beethoven’s most visionary passages here: the orchestra mistily reconstituting itself near the end of the first movement, the amorphous clouds of harmonies in the finale.Under Rouvali, the second movement was intimate and sober, but it gradually relaxed, even to a charming daintiness; the third, never rushing the eager rhythms, reached elegance. This conductor doesn’t do breathlessness, and he could probably do with a little more liveliness. But when he avoids plainness, his judiciousness can seem very like maturity.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Revisiting a Composer’s Psychedelic Lewis Carroll Music

      by

      Lewis Carroll’s influence is all over contemporary culture.There’s the surreal image of going “through the looking glass”; the look of a Tim Burton movie, including his version of “Alice in Wonderland”; the skewed angles of Tom Petty’s video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More”; the use of a word like “galumphing.”And, as a new album from the Albany Symphony demonstrates, there are the Carroll-inspired musical works of the composer David Del Tredici, some of which have been captured on two world premiere recordings from the ensemble, led by David Alan Miller.These long-awaited performances — of “Pop-Pourri” (from 1968, and revised in 1973) and “Adventures Underground” (written in 1971 and revised in 1977) — are a booming, psychedelic marvel. In the initial seconds of the first movement of “Pop-Pourri,” Del Tredici smash cuts between a Bach harmonization of a Lutheran chorale, “Es Ist Genug,” and his own setting of Carroll’s text. The “Litany of the Blessed Virgin” is also in the mix — making good on Del Tredici’s claim, in the album’s liner notes, that the piece is “a kind of Cantata of the Sacred and Profane.”But that’s not the strangest, or even most alluring, part of the beginning: That would be the music for saxophones, which tends to keen and swoon underneath high-flown writing for a soprano (on this recording, an indefatigable Hila Plitmann). The second movement features boisterous, fast moving lines for contrabassoon. And in the third movement, Del Tredici lets his late ’60s freak flag fly, with percussion blasts and woolly lines for distorted electric guitar and bass.“I’m always trying to make the text come alive,” Del Tredici, 85, said in a recent phone interview. He remembered that, for the “Jabberwocky”-quoting third movement, “I needed something for the monster.”He found just the thing at a percussion store in New York. “They had a huge tam-tam in one room, and I said, ‘What about that, can I rent that?’” he recalled about the period shortly before the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas led the piece in 1972. “And they said: ‘Well, it’s only been rented once for a movie at MGM. I guess you could.’”“I was doing weird things,” Del Tredici said of his work on the “Alice” pieces.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“For a long time I just wrote,” Del Tredici said, describing how the “Alice” music came together. “I didn’t care what I wrote.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDel Tredici then went to Thomas, who was working with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and asked, “Could you rent this for me, for one shot on the tam-tam?” The response: “OK, sure.” (With a winking tone, Del Tredici noted, “They had money.” For their part, Miller and his Albany players likewise make the passage sound like a million bucks in the new recording.)“I was doing weird things,” Del Tredici said. “None of these instruments existed with symphony orchestras — like all the electric stuff. You might find the instrument, but then you had no one to play it. The hardest was the banjo. It was always fighting some kind of tradition by demanding what I did.”But within a span of only a few years, Del Tredici managed to bend that tradition. His “Alice” works — which encompass chamber music, grand symphonic entries and even an opera, “Dum Dee Tweedle,” from 1990 — have drawn public acclaim and interest from elite performers for decades. A 1981 Decca release of “Final Alice,” for large orchestra and soprano, boasts no less a podium eminence than Georg Solti, who with Barbara Hendricks and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra grasped Del Tredici’s penchant for brash, experimental density.Despite that title, “Final Alice” was not Del Tredici’s last word on Carroll. His “Child Alice,” over two hours long, followed shortly thereafter. A selection from that work — “In Memory of a Summer Day” — won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet the gargantuan score received its premiere recording only in the past decade, thanks to the conductor Gil Rose and his Boston Modern Orchestra Project.In the liner notes for that release, Del Tredici was specific about the ways in which layered meters connected with Carroll’s text. Although the musical surfaces may seem madcap, the underlying structures are anything but; small, micro-units of song are balanced with grander processes and callbacks that give these pieces a weightier sense of scale.How did Del Tredici manage this? “One notebook at a time,” he said. “And then I put the notebooks together.” After amassing 50 different notebooks of sketches for a piece like “Child Alice,” he began stitching and editing. That process “was the fun part,” but also a “scary” one.“For a long time I just wrote,” he said. “I didn’t care what I wrote. I insisted I didn’t know what I was doing. Like magic, it did come together.”That magic touch is evident in the new recording of “Pop-Pourri,” released by Albany Records; the swooning saxophone music from the first movement also has a part to play during the amplified extremes of the third movement. While there is an intent to delight a listener — “I’m not entertaining by accident!” Del Tredici exclaimed with a laugh — the writing also rewards a closer listen.After “Pop-Pourri,” as the critic Frank J. Oteri has observed, Del Tredici never used such imposing, rocklike amplification in his “Alice” works again. But there is still an audible connection between “Pop-Pourri” and the folk ensemble embedded within “An Alice Symphony” (which was memorably recorded by the composer Oliver Knussen as conductor).Del Tredici is at work on an opera about his experience with Parkinson’s disease.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIf the “Alice” music is not heard frequently in concert halls today, that may have less to do with style than it does with the orchestra world’s declining investment in grand contemporary works. “I was lucky, getting wonderful performances at the beginning,” Del Tredici said. “The commitment of orchestras — that’s very important. They did give a commitment to my music that they don’t do nowadays, that I see.”Del Tredici hopes to see “Dum Dee Tweedle” staged in full one day. (It has only been presented in concert.) During the interview, he recounted showing the work to a conductor. “I hadn’t heard it for a long time,” he said. “And I couldn’t believe it: It’s 75 minutes of nonstop, fast music. It’s very weird.” (A recording is available to stream on his website, and makes for a thrilling ride.)And he’s currently contemplating another opera with a comic bent about his recent experiences with Parkinson’s disease. In conversation, he analogized that effort with his decision in the 1990s to write music directly on gay themes.“I like being open,” he said, “about all the things that are hard to be open about.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      One Indelible Scene: the Master Class in Ambiguity in ‘Tár’

      by

      When Lydia Tár arrives at the Juilliard School to teach a master class in conducting, we know her about as well as the students do. Like them, we are aware — about 20 minutes into the film that bears her name — of her fame and exalted status. They, of course, live in a fictional world in which her celebrity is established, to the extent that their own professional aspirations are shaped by her example. But now they have a chance to encounter her in person. It doesn’t go well.The Juilliard episode is the fourth extended scene in “Tár.” Like the ones that come before, it presents Lydia, a prominent conductor and composer, in a more-or-less public setting. In due time, we’ll peer in on her private life and ponder its relevance to her work and reputation, but for now we know her as a poised paragon of artistic accomplishment. We’ve watched her converse onstage with the writer Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, flirt with a fan at a reception and spar over lunch with a colleague who is also an important philanthropic patron. In between these lingered-over moments are snippets of cellphone video with anonymous text commentary. The source and meaning of these words and images are unclear, but they produce a tremor of paranoia. We’re not the only ones watching Lydia.Later, a deceptively edited video of the master class will go viral, contributing to the collapse of Lydia’s career as her abusive and dishonest behavior comes to light. The scene itself, among those who have seen “Tár,” has achieved a similar notoriety. It’s become one of the most talked-about parts of the film. The main conflict — an argument between Lydia and an earnest, anxious student named Max, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist — seems to crystallize the movie’s interest in a familiar kind of clash, one that invites clichés about cancel culture, identity politics and white privilege.But like everything else in “Tár,” this episode of generational and ideological strife is more complicated than it might seem. And also simpler. Lydia, a one-time protégé of Leonard Bernstein, insists on the power of music to produce states of feeling and modes of experience that can’t easily be reduced to anything else. Todd Field, the director of “Tár,” has similar intuitions about film. He and Cate Blanchett, who as Lydia occupies nearly every frame of this 158-minute film, reverse the usual patterns of text and subtext. It’s not that there’s more to “Tár” than meets the eye and ear, with extra meanings hidden beneath the surface. Everything is right there on the screen and the soundtrack, arranged to confound and complicate your expectations.Lydia’s too. She strolls onto the classroom stage as eight young musicians, conducted by Max, are laying down what Lydia will call the “bed of strings” of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ro.” Commanding the students’ attention effortlessly, Lydia is comfortable in her own charisma, confident in her opinions and intellect — to the point of hubris, but we don’t know that yet.The first thing she does is establish her dominance, preparing for Max’s thorough humiliation. He’s nervous, smiling, eager to oblige as she asks him why he chose Juilliard and then suggests that it might have been for the “brand.” Her tone is jocular, but her aggression is unmistakable. She ridicules his choice of music — we’ll come back to that — and pleads with him to consider exploring older, more canonical figures. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, for example.That name turns out to be a provocation. Max, who defines himself as a “BIPOC, pangender person,” says that Bach’s reputation for misogyny and his cisgender white male identity make it hard for him to appreciate the composer’s music. At this moment, the script edges toward an easy satire of the young. There are Gen Xers and baby boomers who have encountered — or at least heard stories about — members of succeeding generations who refuse to read the novels of Edith Wharton, see the films of Woody Allen or worship at the altar of Pablo Picasso. Their critique of the canon is often caricatured and misunderstood, and Max may embody the shibboleths of his elders as much as he does the attitude of his peers. His objection to Bach, in any case, serves as bait for the audience and for Lydia.She seizes on it as a teaching moment, and her response is itself a mini-course in the dos and don’ts of contemporary pedagogy. At times, she is bullying and sarcastic, haranguing the class about the fallacies of identity and failing or refusing to read the sensitivities in the room. But she also tries, in good faith, to reach the students where they are. Rather than revert to an argument from authority, browbeating Max with the eternal fact of Bach’s greatness, she invites him to sit next to her at the piano while she demonstrates the complexity and power of his music. In Bach, she says, the question — illustrated by a rising, unresolved musical phrase that replicates the intonation of an asking voice — is always more interesting than the answer.This is true of art in general. The puzzles, paradoxes and mysteries are what keep it alive. A lot of cultural criticism — by which I mean not only the considered responses of professionals but the immediate reactions of viewers — tacks in the opposite direction. We are eager to find an answer, assign a meaning, take a side. This scene seems to be urging us to do just that, to share Lydia’s irritation with Max, so shallow in his certainty and so ill-equipped to defend his position.We might also, in the moment and especially when we look back on it, squirm at Lydia’s self-satisfaction. She treats the master class as an occasion to perform her own brilliance, a temptation that can be fatal to the actual work of teaching, which finally rests on the canceling of ego. The vanity Lydia displays here, which is undeniably seductive, will contribute to her eventual undoing, and we may feel a premonition of that as we watch her pacing and preening, unaware of the puzzlement and indifference in the eyes of her spectators.Really, though, the scene — like the movie — is much weirder than that. It may seem that Field and Blanchett are collaborating in a topical tale of crime and punishment, which the debate about the relevance of Bach’s behavior to his canonical status recapitulates in miniature. Later, we will find Lydia arguing the other side of the question. At lunch in a Berlin restaurant, she reminds a retired maestro that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once threw a woman down a flight of stairs. Her much older male colleague wonders what that has to do with Schopenhauer’s thought. The argument, as at Juilliard, reaches an impasse.As will any similar argument about Lydia herself, who is a formidably talented artist and also a narcissistic, amoral monster. But neither her greatness nor her awfulness is what is most interesting about her. Shortly after “Tár” opened, The Cut published an amusing, much-mocked article by Brooke LaMantia, who claimed to have watched the movie under the impression that Lydia Tár was a real person. Anthony Lane began his review in The New Yorker with the tongue-in-cheek implication that she just might be. More recently, Dan Kois wrote an essay in Slate suggesting that the last part of the film — the part that chronicles Lydia’s professional and personal undoing — takes place in her head, which is to say in a reality distinct from the literal, social world in which the rest of the movie is set.I don’t really buy that, any more than I believe that anyone really thought there was a real Lydia Tár, but Kois, Lane and LaMantia get at the essential uncanniness of “Tár,” which seems to call into question the nature of reality itself.And that brings us back to the unseen person whose presence is felt in that tense session: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, an actual living Icelandic composer who may have acquired new fame as Lydia Tár’s nemesis. The trashing of Thorvaldsdottir occupies much of the scene. Lydia sneers at her “au courant” trendiness, her “hot” good looks, a score notation that “sounds like René Redzepi’s recipe for reindeer.” A conductor performing her music is like a salesman “selling a car without an engine.” At one point Max meekly notes that Thorvaldsdottir conducted an earlier master class in the same course, and it seems possible that poor Max is an innocent victim in a high-powered music-world beef.Maybe it’s also the case that Lydia is a proxy in a similar war. Maybe Field can’t stand Anna Thorvaldsdottir, or maybe Hildur Gudnadottir, the Icelandic composer who scored “Tar,” feels that way. Iceland is a small country; contemporary classical music is a small world.I won’t speculate further, except to note that Thorvaldsdottir might function as what devotees of a different kind of movie like to call an Easter egg. Adam Gopnik is another, as are Leonard Bernstein and the Juilliard School itself. They appear as tokens, clues, nudges at the viewer who might not be paying the right kind of attention. They all belong to the world outside “Tár” — our world — and their presence inside the movie is more than merely allusive.Lydia Tár exists as if on a folded-over page in that world, where the correct answer to the perennially misunderstood question about the distinction between art and life is written in invisible ink. She’s as real as it gets. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      These Young Musicians Made an Album. Now It’s Nominated for a Grammy.

      by

      The debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, featuring some players who were in middle school, is up against recordings by some of the world’s top orchestras.When the Grammy nominations for best orchestral performance were announced last month, several of the usual suspects made the cut. There was the august Berlin Philharmonic, for an album conducted by the composer John Williams, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of its maestro, Gustavo Dudamel.But a newcomer also got a nod: the debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, a prestigious musical program for musicians between the ages of 12 and 22.The news that the ensemble’s album had earned a Grammy nomination astonished some of its young players.“I jumped in the air and I screamed, like I have never screamed before,” said Isabella Marquez, 18, who played violin on the album and watched a livestream of the Grammy nominations announcement in the kitchen of her Manhattan apartment with her mother and grandmother.“I never thought that I would be on an album, much less a Grammy-nominated album,” said Marquez.Clockwise from top left: Kennedy Plains, 22, a bassoonist, Joshua Choi, 18, a clarinetist and Iris Sung, 17, a violinist, who all played on the album, and Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who played with the ensemble last month at a concert at Carnegie Hall.The recording might never have happened had it not been for the pandemic. When live performance was halted in 2020, and a Carnegie Hall concert was canceled, the ensemble decided to try to make an album instead.After the police murder of George Floyd and the social justice protests that spread throughout the nation that summer, the orchestra decided to rehearse and record works by Black composers, and selected pieces by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery and Valerie Coleman. “We need to promote music that deals with these issues,” the orchestra’s music director, Michael Repper, said in an interview.The album, which is untitled, came together after six weeks of remote instruction followed by in person socially distant rehearsals and four days of recording sessions in which the musicians recorded the sections of the orchestra separately — all without a single Covid-19 infection, Repper noted. It was produced by Judith Sherman, a 13-time Grammy winner, who is nominated as classical producer of the year.Many of the young players were proud to have simply recorded an album during the pandemic. They were stunned when it was recognized by the Grammys, amid such illustrious competition — orchestras many of them have long revered.Joshua Choi, an 18-year-old principal clarinetist in the youth program, said he listened to the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Andreas Ottensamer, whenever he needed motivation.After learning of the Grammy nomination, he couldn’t find the words to tell his parents, and stared in shock at his roommate, who plays oboe in the youth symphony, Choi said.“That’s pretty mind blowing,” Choi said. “I still can’t process that.”Michael Repper, the orchestra’s music director, during a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall.Todd Midler for The New York TimesIris Sung, the orchestra’s 17-year-old concertmaster, said she was in class at Tenafly High School in New Jersey when the nomination was announced. After her mother broke the news on her way home from school, she shared the nomination on Instagram, and as her phone flooded with congratulatory messages she thought back to recording it “in such a strange time.”“Just knowing that all that had paid off, I think was just something so special to me,” Sung said.The album features music by Price, including “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” and her Piano Concerto in One Movement, featuring the pianist Michelle Cann; “Umoja: Anthem of Unity” by Coleman; and “Soul Force,” by Montgomery.Montgomery, 40, a composer whose works have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra, and who is now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence, played violin with the New York Youth Symphony as a teenager.“It was the first time I had ever played youth symphonies, really, and it was a really important moment in my education,” Montgomery said. “That was my gateway into orchestral music.”For this recording, she held a video call with the young players, where she answered their questions on articulation and dynamics.When she was young, Montgomery said, orchestras rarely played music by Black composers. She said it was comforting to see that change.When the orchestra was unable to play one of its regular concerts at Carnegie Hall during the pandemic, it decided to make a recording. Todd Midler for The New York Times“Young people in the world right now are coming up in music at a time where Black art is centralized, and I think that is a very positive thing from the perspective of a young person,” Montgomery said.Kennedy Plains, a 22-year-old bassoonist and former member of the Youth Symphony, said that she was glad that ensembles were playing music by a more diverse roster of composers, and that she had appreciated the chance to work with Montgomery on a video call.“I hadn’t really got to play works by a lot of composers of color before,” Plains said, who learned to play the bassoon in middle school.Jessica Jeon, 14, a violinist, said that after learning of Price through the youth program, she gave a presentation about her to her seventh grade civil and human rights class.Price, who became the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra in 1933 when the Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E Minor, has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years, along with other composers of color.“They didn’t have the chance to become super well known such as Mozart or Beethoven because of their race or their gender or their sexuality,” said Jeon, who was 12 when the album was recorded. “Because of that, I felt inspired to try to introduce more people to them.”When the youth symphony returned to Carnegie Hall last month, it played with Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who had fled after the Russian invasion.Repper, who will pass his music director role to Andrew Jinhong Kim in the 2023-2024 season, said that he hopes the album inspires more orchestras to play and record music by Black composers.“Orchestras don’t deserve any extra credit at this point for performing works by Black composers,” he said. “They don’t deserve any extra credit for performing works by women. It’s something that should have been done for decades.”The Grammy Awards will be presented on Feb. 5 in Los Angeles. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The History Behind the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert

      by

      A global event today, the orchestra’s annual New Year’s Concert took shape during dark days in Austrian history.If the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Year’s Eve Concert and the New Year’s Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.In the 19th century, the repertoire of today’s New Year’s Concert was part of a diverse concert business in the many entertainment venues that existed in almost every district of Vienna, including open-air stages. On weekends, this mixture of Viennese popular music, including swinging waltzes, wild polkas and military marches, enthused thousands of visitors, often as many as 10,000.Gerald Heidegger, the editor in chief of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s online services, rightly said in the series “Straussmania” on Topos, produced with the Vienna Institute of Contemporary and Cultural History: “Our image of the Biedermeier era is slightly distorted. It is not completely true that the era of the authoritarian state of Chancellor Metternich only led us to retreat into a private sphere, when one considers the music played in public.”This kind of popular music was revolutionary in terms of its exuberance and the physical proximity encouraged by new forms of dance, and it accompanied Vienna’s booming development into one of the world’s largest cities in the rapid globalization during the years leading up to World War I. Today, in another era of fast-moving developments in technology and politics, the music has not lost any of its emotional impact; people still seem to seek joyful distractions.The ostensible lightness of the countless waltzes, polkas and marches, however, hides a technique that challenges the musicians. Crucial to pulling it off is a nonverbal rapport between the orchestra and the conductor — another characteristic quality of the New Year’s Concert. And the selection of the repertoire requires an exciting dramaturgy in the combination of familiar and unknown pieces. This year, Welser-Möst has dedicated some 70 percent of the program to new works.In the 19th century, the Strauss bands were very much competitors of the Philharmonic, which as the Vienna State Opera orchestra thrilled audiences in the Court Opera Theater while having to play for additional income as the private company known as the Vienna Philharmonic. The conductor Ernst Theis has researched the early interactions between these orchestras and noted that Eduard Strauss gave a New Year’s concert with a 60-person orchestra as early as Jan. 1, 1871, playing not only waltzes and polkas, but also lieder and opera excerpts.A report from 1872 shows, however, that many members of the Philharmonic thought the Strauss clan and their music “harmed the reputation of the Philharmonic concerts.” Still, in 1894, the Philharmonic played at the celebrations marking Johann Strauss II’s 50 years in the business, and a few months before his death in 1899, he conducted the Court Opera orchestra during the performance of his “Die Fledermaus” for the first and last time, the final success of a remarkable career.The conductor Clemens Krauss used relationships with Nazi leaders to further his career in Germany before returning to Austria, where he led the Vienna Philharmonic in an annual “Johann Strauss concert.”Imagno/Getty ImagesThis ambivalence toward the Strauss family would change after World War I. From 1927 onward, the conductor Clemens Krauss in particular repeatedly chose to perform pieces from the Strauss repertoire, including at the Salzburg Festival. It was only in 1934, when he succumbed to the temptations of the Nazi regime and abruptly left Vienna for Berlin, that the Philharmonic’s infatuation with Strauss ended.After the Anschluss in 1938, Krauss returned to Austria and revived the tradition of “Johann Strauss concerts” (a reference to both father and son). The musician Clemens Hellsberg, writing in 1992, and the historian Fritz Trümpi, in 2011, have emphasized Krauss’s role as the initiator of the “Johann Strauss concert” — then termed an “Extraordinary Concert” — as the calendar turned from 1939 to 1940. The proceeds went to the National Socialist wartime winter relief fund.Krauss soon developed the next important pillar of the New Year’s Concert on its way to becoming a global music event: radio broadcasts throughout the German Reich. In November 1940, a contract with the Reich Radio Corporation established that there would be “four Philharmonic Academies in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna played for Greater German Radio” — on Dec. 13, 1940, and Jan. 1 (a “Johann Strauss concert”), Jan. 25 and March 15, 1941 — conducted by Krauss.Without any intervention by Nazi potentates, the refreshing and emotionally uplifting “waltzing bliss” was a perfect fit with National Socialist propaganda, in particular its broadcasting policy — as were Mozart and Lehár. The program notes for the first of these series performed in Vienna not only stressed the intended mass impact of the contribution to “German music,” but also included ideological emphasis on the early history of waltz compositions in “suburban inns” as an “expression of the East Bavarian tribe that stood here on advance border watch,” which was, of course, a complete distortion and misinterpretation of the cultural developments in Vienna during the Biedermeier period.Joseph Goebbels, third from left, with the opera singer Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, left, the actor Paul Hartmann; the singer Jan Kiepura; the actor Gustaf Gründgens; the Nazi official Walther Funk; and Mr. Krauss, right, at a party in 1935.Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesThe politicization of the music of the Strauss family and their milieu was taken to extremes when the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels even had the composer’s partly Jewish descent covered up by falsifying the baptismal registers in Vienna. Incidentally, this act was accompanied by a diary entry in which Goebbels revealed the sheer absurdity of his antisemitic beliefs:Some clever so-and-so has discovered that Joh. Strauss is an eighth Jewish. I forbid this from being made public. For firstly, it isn’t proven, and secondly, I do not want to have German cultural heritage in its entirety gradually undermined in this manner. In the end we will be left with only Widukind, Heinrich the Lion and Rosenberg. That’s not a lot. Mussolini goes about things much more cleverly here. He occupies the entire history of Rome from the earliest days of Antiquity for himself. We are just parvenus in comparison. I’m doing what I can about it. That is also the Führer’s will.The selling point the New Year’s Concert enjoys today as a global event applied neither during World War II nor in the years that followed; it remained limited to Germany and, after the war, Austria. The former Johann Strauss concert was firmly a tradition, and Josef Krips, who conducted the Jan. 1, 1946, concert — the first to be billed as a New Year’s Concert — noted succinctly: “I began 1946 with the first New Year’s Concert in peacetime.”Krips, stigmatized by the Nazis as a half-Jewish conductor, clearly had no problem with the continuation of the concert, whose last performance had taken place when the mood was apocalyptic. The New Year’s Concert lived on as solely Austrian cultural heritage — with Krauss as conductor until 1954, followed by Willi Boskovsky, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, until 1979.The violinist Willi Boskovsky conducting the New Year’s Concert in 1977.KPA/United Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1959, the New Year’s Concert began to develop into an international event with its first television broadcast. The first color broadcast took place a decade later; the first overseas one, in 1972. And since 1980, the New Year’s Concert has been led by alternating, international conductors — a move that reflected its global interest.But the formative phase of the New Year’s Concert — the Nazi era — went unexamined in Austria and abroad until the past decade. Today, those years are extensively documented on the Philharmonic’s website. International music history in particular can make an important contribution to a critical assessment of Austria’s role in National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust.In 2013, for instance, after much preliminary work, Clemens Hellsberg, then the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, initiated a critical documentary on the orchestra and commissioned a comprehensive study by a team of historians — including me — on members of the orchestra who were persecuted, murdered or forced into exile. This was followed in 2014 by the international conference “The Arts of Vienna: A Proud History, A Painful Past.”Those artists whose lives were sidelined by the Third Reich will be memorialized with stones, placed at the sites where they last lived, that Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, will present to the public on March 23. In 2023, then, the orchestra aims to broadcast not just a rich tradition, but also a message of peace.Oliver Rathkolb is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna in Austria, and the chairman of the Vienna Institute for Cultural and Contemporary History and the Academic Committee of the House of European History in Brussels.Lydia Rathkolb contributed research. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      A Musical Modernist’s Newly Polished, Smiling Guise

      by

      A three-CD set of music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, released by the Wergo label, backs up a more expansive view of the artist and is among the standouts of 2022.For devotees of fiendish musical modernism, Bernd Alois Zimmermann was one of the 20th century’s most notorious — and at times elusive — composers.Born in Germany in 1918, he was among the generation of musical prodigies whose early studies were waylaid and then fully interrupted by the rise of the Nazi party, which drafted Zimmermann into service on both the eastern and western fronts of World War II. Yet after his discharge in 1942, the composer quickly resumed the kind of polymathic, globally curious aesthetic that the Third Reich had sought to stamp out of German music academies.By the 1950s, when he had become a part of the postwar German avant-garde, Zimmermann also declared his interest in Brazilian moods of saudade, American boogie-woogie, as well as the similarly eclectic music of French composers like Darius Milhaud. Such catholic tastes put the composer at odds with self-appointed priests of the avant-garde like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.Yet just as Zimmermann was coming into his full aesthetic maturity — with towering, forbidding works like “Die Soldaten” (the opera that seemed to dramatize his lingering wartime agonies) and “Requiem for a Young Poet” — he succumbed to depression and died by suicide in 1970, at age 52.But was that the entire story? This familiar capsule biography is supported by plenty of facts: “Die Soldaten,” long reputed to be “un-performable,” does require a fantastically large orchestra playing dense, 12-tone music. And it also needs a staging that can accommodate near-simultaneous narrative flashbacks and flash-forwards. In 2008, a traveling production landed at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. (There, the director David Pountney dragged seated audiences to and fro, between all of Zimmermann’s discrete scenic zones, thanks to makeshift risers hoisted on rails.)It was an unforgettable scene — and a critical success. Subsequent productions of “Soldaten,” at the Salzburg Festival and Zurich Opera, seemed to ratify this official understanding of the composer as a gnarly and tragic visionary, full stop. Writing for The New York Times on the occasion of Zimmermann’s centennial in 2018, the musicologist and critic Mark Berry said of this final act in his life: “Family notwithstanding, his life had been lonely, and became lonelier; his work dark, and became darker.”But what about earlier decades? Berry also noted that Zimmermann’s broader musical story was “more complicated, contested and interesting” than partisans of various musical debates preferred to acknowledge. And yet polished musical documentation of that complex history has remained hard to access, until now.A new three-CD set titled “Zimmermann: Recomposed,” on the German Wergo label, is among the standout releases of 2022, precisely because it backs up this more expansive view of the artist. Thanks to vivacious performances from the conductor (and oboist) Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, we can now appreciate something we’ve rarely seen — namely, a Zimmermann who smiles.The venue for his good humor was the radio. Before Zimmermann could make a living with his own works, he brought his orchestrator’s skill to various groups — including light orchestras and pops ensembles — that populated West Germany’s airwaves in the late 1940s and early ’50s. This work has scarcely been heard since Zimmermann completed it. But what work it was (and remains)! Across the three CDs you can find witty, sparkling transcriptions of Villa-Lobos and Milhaud, and of Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky — and much else, too.Best of all, this material is often recognizably Zimmermann-like in nature. Very little of it gives the impression of grudging work for hire. Instead, the same orchestrator’s intelligence that is apparent in the densest moments of “Die Soldaten” shows up for duty here. And its owner is often clearly having a ball.To take one example, the French chanson “Maman, dites-moi,” a staple of midcentury Met Opera stars like the soprano Bidu Sayao. On the first CD of Wergo’s set, you can listen to what Zimmermann did with it back in 1950: By including the surprising, brittle sound of the harpsichord inside his orchestra, the composer lends a new edge to the tune’s nervy questioning of the mother figure. Yet it’s still plenty sumptuous, thanks to Zimmermann’s work with harp, celesta and winds. (The soprano Sarah Wegener also excels in this take.)Later, in the 1960s, when Zimmermann was working with a jazz quintet on improvisations based on his theatrical music, he would again employ similarly wiry keyboard attacks. (That material ought to get a reissue from Wergo down the line.)But in this earlier era of his radio work, the density of Zimmermann’s orchestral textures pushes the envelope, yet never goes so far that a lay listener might be moved to pull the plug out of the wall. When the composer allows himself volleys of brash percussive playing — say, near the middle of a three-minute orchestration of Milhaud — the explosion is truly brief, yet no less powerful for that focused expression.Time and again across these new CDs, that balance makes for ravishing listening. Also in 1950, Zimmermann took Rachmaninoff’s “Romanze,” from the youthful Morceaux de salon, and re-envisioned it as a suave saxophone-and-orchestra miniature. (Find it on the second of Wergo’s new CDs.) Even more impressive is his translation of Rachmaninoff’s “Humoresque” (from the same series) into a Concertino for piano and orchestra; Wergo bills it as a Zimmermann original, modeled “after” the Russian composer’s example.In the liner notes, Holliger, speaking of Zimmermann, makes the claim that “everything he did for the radio laid the foundation for his later work.” Along with the current WDR orchestra, Holliger proves this by taking on a few of Zimmerman’s original pieces as well, demonstrating for us how these radio transcriptions were more than mere outliers.Each disc in the set opens and closes with the composer’s own material, before sliding in and out of the adaptations. These performances are equally revealing. The “Caboclo” movement of Zimmermann’s Brazil-influenced “Alagoana” — with its three superimposed dances — has never more closely recalled the music of “Die Soldaten” than it does here. But it still retains the direct, singing quality that once made it attractive to the conductor Ferenc Fricsay.And Zimmermann’s other theatrical and balletic music — including “Un petit rien” and “Souvenir d’ancien balet” — has rarely sounded as light on its feet as it does on these discs. Holliger and the WDR players have real affection for the material, and for the fuller portrait it affords us of an artist too often described as unremittingly bleak in his outlook. But by the third CD, when Zimmermann has left day-to-day orchestration work behind, you can clearly hear how the once-parallel paths in Zimmermann’s creative life have diverged for good.“Apparently it was impossible for him to work in isolation. He needed to be surrounded by people he trusted,” Holliger says in the interview included in Wergo’s CD set. The conductor then goes on to describe the profusion of music (and musicians) that passed through the radio offices while the composer worked there. When reading between the conductor’s lines here, it’s easy to imagine an alternate reality — one in which Zimmermann stayed on longer at the radio gig with its social environment, while perhaps managing to steer away from the depressive isolation of his final years.Yet the music Zimmermann actually managed to make during these decades can, in all its voluptuous weirdness, prove even more inspiring than well-intentioned speculation. Liberated from the West German radio archives, this material is the best kind of music-history corrective — the kind that’s a blast to hear. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Vienna Philharmonic to Honor Players Lost in World War II

      by

      In the new year, the Vienna Philharmonic will pay tribute to more than a dozen of its members who were ousted, exiled and killed during World War II.VIENNA — When armed forces stormed the State Opera here during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” on March 11, 1938, prominent players from the Vienna Philharmonic fled through the back door and would never regain their positions.The solo bassoonist Hugo Burghauser was removed from his post as chairman and replaced with Wilhelm Jerger, a member of the Nazi Party. By the next week, all other orchestra members affected by the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws had been expelled.More than 80 years later, after the Vienna Philharmonic’s 180th anniversary and before its next New Year’s Concert, the orchestra’s current chairman, Daniel Froschauer, has decided to commemorate the players who were victimized during World War II.In 2023, Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones” for the 16 lost members will be laid in the sidewalk in front of their former homes in the Austrian capital. An additional stone will be laid for Alma Rosé, daughter of the veteran concert master Arnold Rosé. The tradition of creating these small plaques to memorialize victims of the Holocaust began in Germany in 1992. The Philharmonic stones include the name of each player, their position with the orchestra, and when and where they died.On March 28, a chamber music concert will take place in front of the onetime building of the Rosés. Also planned is a concert with the orchestra’s academy at the Theresienstadt ghetto in May.In a recent interview, Mr. Froschauer recalled arriving on New York’s Upper West Side as a student in 1982, violin case in hand, and being greeted enthusiastically by local residents of Austrian Jewish descent. Among the people he contacted at his father’s behest was Burghauser, who died three months after they spoke by phone.Hugo Burghauser, a solo bassoonist, in an undated photo. In 1938, he was forced out as chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic. He emigrated to North America.Wiener PhilharmonikerThe brass plaque to be attached to Burghauser’s “stumbling stone.” Details on it include his roles with the orchestra and the date of his death in New York.Wiener PhilharmonikerMr. Froschauer pointed out that while Burghauser was fortunate to find work through the support of the conductor Arturo Toscanini — playing in the Toronto Symphony before joining the NBC Symphony Orchestra and then the ensemble of the Metropolitan Opera — others were left to struggle. Seven members were murdered or died during the war.“There was something inside me that hadn’t yet been worked out,” Mr. Froschauer said of the effort to pay tribute to the lost musicians. “This project should a create a consciousness for what these people had to endure.”Postwar Vienna was slow to face wartime atrocities. According to Fritz Trümpi, author of “The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics During the Third Reich,” the remaining Vienna players seemed more interested in symbolic gestures. With former party members as the majority of the executive committee into the 1960s, the orchestra’s attitude was marked by a kind of indifference, he explains in his book, and attempts to ward off responsibility.“When the question of financial compensation comes up — pensions, extra pay — the orchestra members dismiss them with at times crude arguments,” Mr. Trümpi said in an interview. “It is all the more bitter in a situation when someone is sick but told, ‘You will receive nothing, you are not here anymore.’”The Philharmonic granted modest financial support mostly because of “image concerns,” he concluded in the book “Orchestrated Expulsion,” written with Bernadette Mayrhofer. Among the beneficiaries was the violinist Berthold Salander, who arrived in New York a ruined man and never resumed his orchestra activities.In Berlin last year, a resident polished “stumbling stones” that commemorated four members of a family who died at Auschwitz. The tradition of installing the stones began in Germany in 1992. Markus Schreiber/Associated PressThe violinist Ludwig Wittels had to leave his position with the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera because he had lung cancer. According to “Orchestrated Expulsion,” requests for financial aid from Vienna led to an exchange in which the orchestra’s chairman and executive director accused him and his wife of “blackmail.” They ultimately granted a sum that was a tiny fraction of the funds allocated for a U.S. tour in 1956. Wittels died in December of that year.In 1952, seven exiled members of the orchestra were presented with silver medals celebrating its centenary at the Austrian Consulate in New York — an event originally planned for 1948. “Overdue,” read the headline in The New York Times on Dec. 21.Efforts to reconcile the orchestra with its ousted members met with resistance on both sides. The violinist Dr. Daniel Falk, who lost several close family members to the Holocaust, replied to an invitation to rejoin the Philharmonic in 1946 that a return would “raise questions” that neither he nor his “adored colleagues” were “in the position to solve.”The Argentine-born Ricardo Odnoposoff became an exception, returning to Vienna as a professor in 1956 and appearing as a soloist with the Philharmonic where he once served as concert master. The violinist Leopold Förderl and his wife, Eva, who was Jewish, also returned to their home city, in 1953.Leopold Föderl returned to Vienna in 1953.Wiener PhilharmonikerRicardo Odnoposoff also returned to Vienna, in 1956, and played again with the Philharmonic.Wiener PhilharmonikerMichael Haas, senior researcher at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, said that postwar Austria in general was reluctant to welcome back former citizens who had the right to reparations because it “would have bankrupted the country.” In turn, he continued, the fact that Austria emerged from the war “relatively unscathed” may have led to resentment among Jewish families.He said that in the past decade, however, the Philharmonic had undertaken a “much more honest and sober appraisal” of its history: “I would probably say that we’ve seen the orchestra begin to confront its own past and deal with some of its issues.”Mr. Trümpi noted that there was still “a need for discussion,” and not only with regard to the history of the Philharmonic. Ms. Mayrhofer, his co-author on “Orchestrated Expulsion,” has estimated that about 100 workers at the State Opera — from stagehands to choristers — were ousted, exiled or murdered after the events of 1938.Ms. Mayrhofer has also found that Jerger, who took over as chairman in 1938, tried to save five members of the Philharmonic from deportation in 1941, but that his efforts were too late: All of them died in the Holocaust. He did manage, however, to facilitate the release of the violinist Josef Geringer from the Dachau concentration camp in December 1938 (he emigrated to New York, passing away in 1979).The Philharmonic recently acquired the correspondence of the former concert master Franz Mairecker, who remained in touch with the cellist Friedrich Buxbaum after he emigrated to London (they were close friends and chamber music partners). And Clemens Hellsberger, chairman of the Philharmonic from 1997 to 2014, is updating his 1992 book “Democracy of the Kings,” a history of the orchestra that reckons with World War II and its aftermath.Mr. Haas said reinstating repertoire by Jewish composers that was performed before the war would represent a further step in repairing cultural damage. He noted that Meyerbeer’s “Robert le diable” (performed in German as “Robert der Teufel”) was one of the most popular works at the Vienna State Opera in the second half of the 19th century. He also mentioned Karl Goldmark’s “Könign von Saba” (Queen of Sheba), which premiered there in 1875 and remained in repertoire until December 1937.The operetta composer Jacques Offenbach, who visited Vienna frequently and inspired Johann Strauss to write “Die Fledermaus,” was also well received before World War II. Operettas in Viennese dialect, such as the works of Edmund Eysler, also thrived.With the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, local traditions were altered to fit antisemitic propaganda. For example, the National Socialists modified baptismal documents to conceal the fact that Strauss had a Jewish great-grandfather, while Mr. Trümpi’s research has revealed that more than 40 percent of the Vienna Philharmonic’s programming from 1940 to 1945 consisted of works by the Strauss dynasty.The New Year’s Concert on Jan. 1, 2022, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The concert’s origins stem from World War II.Wiener PhilharmonikerOn Dec. 31, 1939, a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic performing Strauss works served to support the War Winter Relief Program. After World War II, the tradition continued as a vehicle of hope and joy on the first day of every year.This year’s New Year’s Concert includes works by Carl Michael Ziehrer and Franz von Suppé — and Josef Hellmesberger Jr., who in addition to playing and teaching violin served as the Philharmonic chairman and composed ballets.Among Hellmesberger’s students was Fritz Kreisler, a prodigy who began his conservatory studies at age 7 and emigrated to New York in 1938. He had performed as a soloist with both the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, premiering Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1910 (an exhibit is currently on view at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music).Mr. Haas said that “it is only slowly beginning to seep in” to what extent Austrian Jewish musicians contributed to Viennese cultural life. Although there were also prominent doctors, scientists and writers, he explained, “music was greater than any other discipline.”For Mr. Froschauer, laying down the “stumbling stones” for the lost members of his orchestra is a moving opportunity to create awareness about the challenges these individuals faced while the rest of the ensemble was able to carry on with a degree of normalcy.“One should simply never forget,” he said. “This is a very late apology and a sign of gratitude for their accomplishments.” More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

      by

      Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More