Sunday, July 8, 2012

Thoughts on (and inspired by) a recording by Mascagni

It's a Saturday night (July 7), and the Greater Philadelphia region is experiencing one of the most brutal heat waves I can remember.  When the weather gets like this, I dunno about you, but I might feel inclined to stay indoors, read, and/or listen to music.  Often, my musical curiosities lead me to YouTube to track down a recording of some forgotten/out-of the way piece.  Tonight, it was the "Intermezzo" from Act III of Guglielmo Ratcliff by Mascagni.  Pietro Mascagni, for any of you out there who may be unfamiliar with the name, is best remembered for his one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana; a sensational hit when it premiered in Rome in 1890, it made Mascagni's name and remains one of the most popular operas in the repertoire.  This popularity was not lost on Martin Scorcese, who used the "Intermezzo" from Cavalleria in the opening credits of his 1980 film Raging Bull, the equivocal beauty of the piece both obscuring the brutality of and evoking a sense of pathos for the boxer Jake LaMotta, the film's eponymous raging bull.

Which leads me back to my original point, because the film also uses Mascagni's Ratcliff Intermezzo in its soundtrack, and tonight I happened upon a 1933 recording of the composer himself conducting the Orchestra of the State Opera House in Berlin.  Like the Cavalleria Intermezzo, this short, achingly beautiful piece of soaring passion could only have been written by a fiery composer of Italian opera, and it is made somewhat more poignant by the faded-glory crackle of the recording.  I've always been fascinated by recordings of music conducted by the composers themselves.  Not so much by the composers of today, when it is much more commonplace and even expected of a composer to record his/her own music.  In 1933, however, composers were beginning to take advantage of this new method of preserving their musical legacy for posterity (Elgar, John Philip Sousa, Rachmaninov, to name a few), and in so doing, the recordings they left behind have brought us just a little closer to their now-bygone era, making the composers seem less like phantasmic giants who haunt us through their memorable music, and more like the human beings they were.

Composers recording their music did not catch on immediately at this time, however.  Even though I mentioned Sousa among the first generation of sound-recording creative artists, the composer of "Stars and Stripes Forever" was reluctant to do so, vociferously opposing recorded music on the grounds that by preserving it on record, the very life-force of music would be destroyed, trapped like a bug in amber (to use Kurt Vonnegut parlance).  Also, Sousa correctly predicted that listening to music would ultimately replace making music among the general public.  

As for that last part, he hit the nail on the head; a group of musicians getting together and playing for recreational purposes has become an all-to-rare pastime.  As for the first part of that statement, however, I'm not so sure that a recording, particularly one made by the individual who created the very music being recorded, is where the buck stops as far as performing music creatively.  Unfortunately, so many fine musicians and conductors have fallen into this trap, and listening to the Mascagni recording made me think back to an interview I read with conductor Gerard Schwartz, who spoke about his championship of the music of Howard Hanson (1896-1981), an influential American composer and teacher whose complete symphonies Schwartz recorded with the Seattle Symphony.  The recordings of these symphonies is a monumental achievement; they are, as far as I know, the first to be made since Hanson's own with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra.  According to Schwartz, Hanson is an example of a composer who has been neglected not because he is a lousy composer, but because most conductors feel stymied by the fact that the composer's own recordings are "definitive", and thus that any new interpretation is superfluous.  

This is an incredibly dangerous mentality for any musician, for once they assume that "there is nothing more to say" because the artist has already said it, they begin to compromise their artistic integrity and to miss the entire point of music.  More than any other art form, music is the most malleable form of expression, relying as it does on the individual performer's projection of the emotional states encoded in the music, emotional states shared in various ways by all of humanity.  

To put it another way, there is no such thing as a "definitive" interpretation of a piece of music.  The whole purpose of performing music is to recreate a series of events in a new and original way each time it is approached.  Only when something is declared dead and beyond any hope of revival does it become the bug trapped in amber that Sousa feared.  To counter Mr. Sousa's argument, I would say that a  recording places at our disposal an opportunity to hear a new perspective on a tried-and-true piece of music, and that numerous recordings of one work give us a wide range perspectives.  Thus, I don't think anything definitive is lost; if anything, it is gained.  What is gained is a definitive benefit of art, and indeed of life itself: the immutable truth that diversity and change are necessities for perpetuating the life force, and for opening us up to new levels of consciousness and insight.  Hearing so much difference may be confusing as all hell at times, and we may want to resist and even hinder its chaotic currents, but hey, it's better than the alternative - boredom and stagnancy, the devil's playground.

All of this from a five-minute recording made by a composer who may never have dreamed that it would find its way to a medium where anyone may hear it at anytime, anywhere.  Perhaps Mascagni would be pleased to read this musing from a musical wanderer who happened upon it on a hot, rainy summer's evening, and moreover, that his music, no matter who is conducting it, has given some humanity to a tortured soul, a raging bull.  I'm sure he would say that if that's the impact his music has had, who the hell cares about an "authentic" recording?


Click the link below for Mascagni's 1933 recording of the Act III "Intermezzo" from Guglielmo Ratcliff.  Note: I do not own the rights to this recording.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijT-jQ7f5gQ

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