About the Composer

In the course of researching (read: obsessing over) Bartók’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle, I came across a Hungarian film adaptation of the piece on YouTube. It’s annoyingly divided into fourteen segments, but anyone familiar with the piece or interested should take a look.

Here’s the segment containing my favorite part, known to people familiar with the piece as “The Seventh Door”. It’s basically the denouement, where we find out what Bluebeard’s been trying to prevent Judit from discovering. Below is the corresponding excerpt from my own translation of the libretto, mentioned in the previous post.

		BLUEBEARD
See them.
There are all of my late wives.
See my former wives.
See whom I loved.

		JUDIT
They’re alive.  They’re alive in here!

	(The three former wives enter through the seventh door,
	glorious and laden with crowns and jewels. One after
	the other, their faces pale, they proudly take their
	places opposite Bluebeard, who dips to his knees.)

		BLUEBEARD
	(With his arms outstretched as if he were dreaming.)
They’re beautiful. Beautiful.
Beautiful flowers.
They always were, and they still live.
It was they who collected my many treasures.
It was they who tended my garden.
It was they who made my empire grow.
All of it belongs to them.
All of it. All of it.

		JUDIT
	(Standing among the former wives as the fourth,
	doubled over and afraid.)
How beautiful they are. How magnificent.
I am bedraggled and worn.

		BLUEBEARD
	(Stands. Whispering.)
The first one I found at dawn,
In the beautiful, red-smelling dawn.
Every dawn belongs to her now.
Hers is the fine, red robe.
Hers is the silver crown.
Every dawn belongs to her now.

		JUDIT
Oh, she’s more beautiful than I.  More splendid than I.

	(The first wife goes back.)

		BLUEBEARD
The second one I found at noon.
Speechless, flaming, golden noon.
Every noon belongs to her now.
Hers is the heavy robe of fire.
Hers is the golden crown.
Every noon belongs to her now.

		JUDIT
Oh, she’s more beautiful than I.  More splendid than I.

	(The second wife goes back.)

		BLUEBEARD
The third one I found at evening.
Peaceful, languid, dusky evening.
Every evening belongs to her now.
Hers is the brown robe of sorrow.
Every evening belongs to her now.

		JUDIT
Oh, she’s more beautiful than I.  More splendid than I.

	(The third wife goes back.  Bluebeard stops in front of
	Judit, and they face each other for a long time.  The
	fourth door slowly closes.)

		BLUEBEARD
The fourth I found at night.

		JUDIT
Bluebeard, stop! Stop!

		BLUEBEARD
Starlit, black night.

		JUDIT
Stop.  Stop. I’m here still!

The rest of the segments can be viewed here. I have no connection to the person who’s posted this, nor do I know if he or she has any connection to the filmmakers. Note that the segments appear in reverse order.

I’d like to alert Bay Area readers to the upcoming performances by Berkeley Opera of my two favorite one-acts, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. These two composers are not particularly known for their dramatic works, but each work reveals the composer’s complete mastery of music for the stage. An evening consisting of both of these works is not to be missed.

For the Bartók, I have the privilege of working with the cast of two singers on the nuts and bolts of Hungarian pronunciation, and I’m particularly pleased that Berkeley Opera is using my translation of the libretto for the English supertitles.

I began working on the translation recently after seeing a production that used an old singing translation that was at times incomprehensible, and at times just plain silly. My goal was to stick to the exact meanings line for line in the libretto by Béla Balázs, without sacrificing natural, comprehensible English. It is, in fact, a very tight libretto in a strict eight-syllable-per-line form borrowed from Hungarian folk poetry, and the translations I’ve seen are inappropriately verbose and formal. I hope that audiences will be able to follow the meanings of the words without being distracted by the words themselves.

Both operas will feature the use of a unique, projected image background by Naomie Kremer. It’s difficult to describe here, but I’ve seen the one for Bluebeard, and it’s very effective, to say nothing of just plain beautiful.

Performances are:

• Saturday, May 3, 8:00 p.m.
• Wednesday, May 7, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, May 9, 8:00 p.m.
• Sunday, May 11, 2:00 p.m.

At Julia Morgan Theatre, 2640 College Avenue (at Derby), Berkeley.

More details are on Berkeley Opera’s web site.

Well, I haven’t had much to blog about for a while, so just to keep this thing alive, here’s a kitty playing a theremin. Enjoy.

Real blogging to return soon.

This past Sunday was a date I’d been anticipating for months. As part of the City Arts and Lectures series here in San Francisco, Stephen Sondheim sat down with Frank Rich for a thoroughly spontaneous and entertaining hour-and-a-half discussion.

Now, I’ve read and heard so many interviews and similar Sondheim talks over the years, so there was very little new information for me, but this is my first opportunity to sit through one in person. Sondheim was upbeat, forthcoming and very funny; a true mensh.

Here are some tidbits of information offered by Mr. Sondheim that was indeed new to me, in stream-of-consciousness order:

• The accompaniment in the song “The Little Things You Do Together” from Company is as jumpy as it is, because Sondheim wrote the song while on a cruise ship that was listing drastically as he worked out the accompaniment.
• As he worked in an unoccupied lounge on the ship, passengers would come in and sit down, enjoying what they thought was a performance, despite what must have been a lot of stopping and starting and noodling, etc.
• Sondheim has very recently abandoned the idea of adapting the film Ground Hog Day into a musical, to the disappointment of many
• Elaine Stritch in a bar at 2am: “Bartender, just give me a bottle of vodka and a floorplan.”
• Sondheim thinks the film Vertigo is overrated. This was before a San Francisco audience, mind you. I don’t quite agree with that, but I would say that the film is entirely carried by the score.
• Vertigo is one of Frank Rich’s favorite films. (There you go: conflict=drama)

I’m kicking myself violently for not springing for a bigger ticket that would have included a private dinner with Mr. Sondheim at Absinthe afterwards. There were two left when I bought my ticket. Why? I don’t know. The San Francisco Chronicle apparently didn’t see this as a worthwhile event to cover, which baffles me, but then my big complaint when I first moved here in 1994 was that no one knows who Stephen Sondheim is.

Incidentally, I’m also a big fan of Frank Rich, who, if you’re not familiar, was a New York Times theater critic in the 1980’s — the so-called “Butcher of Broadway”. His memoir Ghost Light was a must-read for me as a fellow Washingtonian and theater fan.

I discovered this service that converts any PDF into a slick browser-based document viewer, and immediately thought it might be a good way to present a score for cursory perusal. After playing around with it, I’m not so sure, but I’d love to know what others think. One of my complaints is that the icons are pretty inscrutable to those who aren’t up on the conventions.

Let me know what you think. Is it too confusing or slow to be useful, or is it a good stopgap to give folks a quick sense of what the piece is about? The service is called Issuu. Thanks to Lifehacker for alerting me to this.

Below is the score of my string orchestra piece Letter to Hungary. If you click the thumbnail, a new window will open (popup blockers beware) with a larger view.

My advice after you get the new window:

• Click the icon with two arrows pointing to the upper-right and lower-left corners. This will give you a full-screen view
• Click on a page to zoom
• Click the “hand” icon to give yourself control over dragging the page around.

This may be of interest to very few regulars, but here it is for the future Kodály googler.

More YouTube trolling has turned up this footage of Zoltán Kodály himself interviewed on Hungarian Television in 1953. It was around this time that the ideas about music education he had been putting out in his writings for decades were just starting to be put into practice officially in Hungary’s education system.

I’ve never seen footage of Kodály before, or heard his voice, so this is a real gem for me. Below, I’ve translated the essential part of Kodály’s comments in the interview.

Yes, on a trial basis, the Ministry of Education has allowed about ten schools to teach singing six hours a week. So, we don’t have a lot of experience yet, but we’re seeing a surprising result in these schools. The students are improving in all areas. Their speech has improved; their writing has improved; their reading has improved. They’re learning to read earlier.

All of this goes back to music. For example, writing music down requires such precision that, if the written note is too high up or low down, it means something completely different. So, that influences their penmanship. Math is also going a lot better for them. Music involves constant counting, so it becomes useful to arithmetic as well.

But the most important thing is the effect it has on discipline. We complain about how hard it is to teach children discipline. Generally, in these schools things go a lot more smoothly. Ensemble singing gets them used to discipline and a feeling of responsibility.

Some of this may seem a little forced, but the epilogue is that Kodály’s notions on singing in schools were put into practice in Hungary in the 50’s and 60’s with the well-documented results that Hungarian students excelled in a number of areas as compared with those of other countries.

It is well known among Sondheim kooks such as myself that Stephen Sondheim’s favorite among his own songs is “Someone in a Tree” from the 1976 musical Pacific Overtures. I love this song too, but it’s never been clear to me exactly why it stands out in particular for Sondheim.

Briefly, the song attempts to deal with a particular event that’s important to the piece, but not particularly dramatic. Sondheim even calls it a “song about nothing” (which is very interesting in these post-Seinfeld times). What’s interesting about the song is the reciter’s setup line: “No one knows what happened in the treaty house.” The solution is to tell the story from three points of view: 1) An old man who remembers watching from the top of a tree when he was a boy; 2) That same old man as a 10-year-old boy; and 3) A soldier hiding under the floorboards of the treaty house.

The old man and the boy report what they’ve seen. The soldier reports what he’s heard. It’s a brilliant use of time and space in a theatrical moment.

The first video below is a very young Frank Rich interviewing Sondheim and his collaborator John Weidman in Sondheim’s house, presumably during the (extremely brief) run of the original Broadway production. In this video discusses in depth how the song came about and why he loves it so much. He also talks about the repetitive accompaniment figure, and how it came about.

The second video is a continuation of the first, where Sondheim accompanies the four cast members involved in a reading of the song.

Now, here’s the song as it looked in it’s full production.

Just a personal note about all this. I’m literally kvelling that YouTube has made it possible to see all of this. I had once before seen the second video, with the actors in Sondheim’s house, at a Sondheim-kook event here in San Francisco many years ago, but I did not know of the existence of the first part. I used to think I’d seen every Sondheim interview that exists on video. I also have to say that it’s really fun to see what the inside of his house looks like (or at least what it looked like in 1976).

Happy new year! I just found this and had to share.

This is Kodály’s “Esti Dal” (Evening Song) performed by the King’s Singers. It is possibly my favorite piece of choral music. Here’s my own translation of the text:

As I lay down for the night by the edge of the woods,
I pull my blanket up to my chin.
I put my hands together,
Thus imploring you, my good Lord

My Lord, grant me a place to stay,
For I’ve grown tired of wandering,
Of hiding,
Of living in a foreign land

My Lord, grant me a good night
Send me your blessed angel
To give courage to the dreams in our hearts.
My Lord, grant me a good night

Why am I so uninterested in the new Sweeney Todd movie? It’s as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone who knows me. I remember being excited about it about 15 years ago when there began to be noise about a Tim Burton adaptation, but in recent years I’ve lost interest.

The original stage version of Sweeney Todd is a masterpiece, and I’ve written before about how my first exposure to it put me on the path toward being a composer. Over many years I’ve studied the score so thoroughly and seen so many productions, some good and some bad, that I don’t think I can ever get excited about it again. It’s not just this film adaptation I’m down on; I’m normally loathe to go and see new stage productions as well. It’s also not that I don’t think the original 1979 Harold Prince production can’t be improved upon, but that happens so rarely.

Also, I hate violence in movies (everywhere, really). I have no tolerance for it. I’m not sure why I find it more acceptable on stage, but I do. On stage, it’s a play and it’s about characters, whereas judging from the trailers and reviews, the violence is more front and center here, and can’t imagine that would add anything new or constructive. I’m a little concerned that the new audience for the piece brought about by the film will only see the blood and not the characters or the ingenious musical dramaturgy.

From the excerpts I’ve heard, the film version seems vocally miscast. This music demands strong voices. Even if, through the magic of mixing, we can have Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter compete with a full orchestra, it sounds weird to me, because the energy of an actor projecting on stage (even an amplified one) is missing. And, no, it’s not just the nature of a movie musical. Listen to Topol in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof (the best-ever film adaptation of a musical in my opinion).

I will see the film, probably on DVD in a few months. Despite whatever may bug me about it, it clearly offers a new look. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

What About the Recent Stage Revival?
I was more excited about the recent revival that was on here in San Francisco a few months ago. What I really can’t stand is when “new” productions basically just ape the original Harold Prince staging. This one had a new angle, and I found it thoroughly entertaining (mainly as someone familiar with the piece), because there was a sort of new sub-plot going on: the instrumental parts are played by actors on stage. So, in addition to being able to hear a really nifty, new orchestration, there’s this circus-like feel of watching the actors navigate transitions from playing to acting and back, and in some cases switching from instrument to instrument.

Unfortunately, the price of that (originally cost-cutting) gimmick is that those in the audience who are unfamiliar with the piece get shortchanged in a couple of ways. For one thing, particularly in the minor roles, the casting tended to skew toward competent instrumental playing, which made for some slightly amateurish acting performances, although the leads were top-notch. But there was also a weird disconnect among the actors. Since they were playing instruments they often couldn’t make eye contact with each other or the audience, so there was a sort of detachment about their performances.

Still, I love that production for at least attempting something different.

Other Productions?
Two other productions of Sweeney Todd stand out in my memory as being new and interesting. One was an early-90’s offering by Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., which was staged in a “black box” environment. Not only was it “in the round”, but the audience seating was arranged such that the action took place among the audience, if you can picture that. It was intensely creepy. And new.

Then there was the San Francisco Symphony “concert” version bringing George Hearn back to the title role. The semi-staging by Lonny Price, where action was played on platforms above and among the orchestra, was as effective as any full staging, and the power of the full orchestra made the drama soar.

About twenty years ago I responded to an offer for a free magazine subscription that had been made available for college students. It was probably Newsweek or something like that.

Just for the hell of it, instead of my own name, I gave the name “Paul Hindemith” with my valid home address. It wasn’t long before I started receiving all kinds of junk mail addressed to the composer of the Pittsburgh Symphony and a sonata for every instrument.

When I received the envelope above it became one of my prize possessions. It remains unopened, in pristine condition to this day.

Click here for a closer look.