Tim Page Post Classical Music Critic Wednesday, August 06, 2003; 2:00 p.m ET
Tim Page is the chief classical music critic for The Washington Post and the author or editor of a dozen books, including "Dawn Powell: A Biography," "The Glenn Gould Reader," "The Unknown Sigrid Undset," "William Kapell: A Documentary Life History of the American Pianist" and the forthcoming "Tim Page on Music" (Amadeus Press). He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997 for his writings about music for The Post. He has also worked as an artistic adviser (the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra), a radio host (WNYC-FM in New York), a record producer (BMG Catalyst) and, in his younger days, a rock musician and cocktail pianist. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives in Washington with his wife, Julieta Stack. A transcript follows. Editor's Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
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Tim Page: Good afternoon from a windy village in Nova Scotia. All things considered, there are few places I would rather be in August. Even the music is good, if you enjoy Irish and Scottish folk strains, translated into North American. It's a very beautiful place -- very calm and very far away.
I want to start off today by reprinting a lovely article Peter G. Davis wrote about the late Harold C. Schonberg. It ran on musicalamerica.com -- to which I am addicted. Susan Elliott is the editor and I check the site every morning.
(While I'm at it I should mention www.andante.com and www.artsjournal.com, too. Artsjournal.com has recently moved into "blogging" -- Terry Teachout and Greg Sandow, among others, offer daily "diaries" about music and ideas. Enthusiastically recommended.)
Anyway -- here is Peter Davis on Harold:Last of the Red Hot Music Critics
By Peter G. Davis
MusicalAmerica.com
August 1, 2003
NEW YORK -- If one examines history carefully enough, significant turning points can be found in just about every area of human activity, even in classical music criticism. One grand era in that specialized field came to an end with the death of Harold C. Schonberg at the age of 87 on July 26. Although few may have noticed it at the time, the curtain actually began to descend much earlier, when Schonberg retired in 1980 as chief music critic of The New York Times.
It's probably safe to say that Schonberg represented the last of the truly larger-than-life music critics who dominated the American musical scene throughout much of the 20th century, most of them from key vantage points in New York City. Not that some fine writing on the subject hasn't appeared in print during the past couple of decades. But now that classical music is being increasingly marginalized in our culture and the outlets for serious commentary on the subject have become so scarce, there seems little possibility that we will ever again encounter the likes of W. J. Henderson, Henry E. Krehbiel, Richard Aldrich, Olin Downes, Irving Kolodin, or Virgil Thomson to name just a handful of colorful personalities. Like Schonberg, these men were opinionated, powerful, prolific, and compulsively readable music critics who had influential platforms and attentive audiences.
Few if any of these men ever actually planned to become a music critic; indeed, most practitioners of the art generally fall into the profession by chance. Schonberg was probably unique in that respect since he never wanted to be anything else, an ambition that crystallized as early as age 12 soon after seeing his first opera in 1927, Wagner's “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” at the Metropolitan. His first reviews were published in the Musical Advance nine years later while he was still an undergraduate at Brooklyn College. World War II interrupted his progress toward bigger things, but by 1946 he was working at The New York Sun and four years later he arrived at the Times.
When Schonberg hired me in 1966 to join the paper's music department as a part-time stringer, he had been chief critic for six years, securely established as the country's leading and most widely read critical voice in all matters musical. Needless to say, both the Times and the times were very different back then. The paper's newsroom was as highly politicized then as it is today, but the music department seemed to function in a different world: strictly structured, peaceful, and blissfully free of intrigue, it ran like a smoothly run machine. Everyone understood and accepted the hierarchy. Harold was the boss and Donal Henahan was his second in command -- there was never any question that Henahan would succeed Schonberg when the time came. The pecking order after that continued through music editor Raymond Ericson, Allen Hughes, and on down to whoever happened to be functioning as novice critics at the time to cover debut recitals and tend to other minor chores. There was no competition for space with the pop music critics because there weren't any. John Wilson covered jazz and the occasional high-profile pop event, while rock was mostly considered unworthy of the Times's attention.
Harold had immense influence within the Times's power structure no less than he did in his public persona as the paper's chief music critic. He was a newspaper journalist through and through, and the Times's interests always came first. He spoke the same language as his powerful contemporaries who ran the paper, the executive editor Abe Rosenthal and managing editor Arthur Gelb, and they all listened when Harold had something to say. If a problem arose, if the music department seemed to be getting short shrift in any way, or if some major change in coverage seemed mandatory, Harold marched into the lion's den and emerged with pretty much everything he wanted.
Harold's rules of conduct for a Times critic were just as exigent as those laid down for Caesar's wife, and they were strictly enforced. Fraternization with active musicians was not just frowned upon but forbidden. A critic should be just that and nothing else, not a composer, a performing musician, a librettist, a consultant, or in any way associated with the institutions he wrote about. If even a suggestion of conflict of interest arose, the offender was sharply reprimanded or shown the door. When you had won his trust, Harold really did not care a whit if your opinions ran counter to his own. What he did expect was first attention to be paid to the news, and the opinions, when they came, should be an informed personal reactions expressed with force and clarity. "It's not a critic's job to be right or wrong," he once stated in a 1967 interview; "it's his job to express an opinion in readable English."
Speed counted as well, and Harold's ease at turning out perfect copy on demand was legendary. In those days most reviews appeared the morning after the concert -- I recall once having just ten minutes to write up the world premiere of a particularly complex Elliott Carter score -- and the tighter the deadline the more Harold flourished. When the news of Sol Hurok's death came, it was on the day that the Sunday Arts and Leisure section closed. Harold's weekly piece was already in type and on the page, but he threw it out, called for the Hurok clips, and had a lively, informed, and balanced 1,000-word essay ready to go in under 45 minutes. Truth to tell, I sometimes felt that Harold's famed facility could be a curse as well as a blessing, since he occasionally seemed to be writing to formula. That, however, is an occupational hazard for any busy journalist, especially for one who estimated that he wrote 1.3 million words during his two decades as the Times's senior critic.
For all of the awesome technique and professionalism he had at his command, Harold, like all important music critics, is remembered for the original nature of his thinking and his strongly held opinions. His special area of expertise was the piano and its literature, in particular the Romantic tradition; his book “The Great Pianists” is a classic, an indispensable reference volume. When he got onto the subject of the keyboard, no one could really touch him, and his enthusiasm for pianists of the grand manner such as Josef Hofmann was just as passionate as his disapproval of the chilly objectivity and lack of individuality that characterized so much of the music-making of his day. I did find it strange that his admiration for such minor masters of the keyboard as Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, Moszkowski, Scharwenka, and their ilk was never extended to their opera-writing counterparts -- Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and the whole bel canto crew he always found insufferably trivial. Then, too, Harold never could understand the fuss about Maria Callas, whose voice he found impossibly flawed even during her best years. Callas and Stokowski died within a day of each other in September 1977, and there was never a question in Harold's mind about which of these colorful musicians deserved his full journalistic attention that week.
As a management figure, never a union man (he had no problem crossing picket lines during a newspaper strike), Harold faced mandatory retirement at age 65, and I think he never quite recovered from the shock. Even the chief music critic of the Times becomes a forgotten man the moment he retires. The press publicists are too busy fawning over his successor, and readers immediately take up cudgels to do battle with the new critical voice. Harold bore being ignored stoically, but I think he was truly hurt that the newspaper he loved so much and had served so loyally would treat him so shabbily after he stepped down. He did receive the honorary title of cultural correspondent, but the editors had little interest in printing what he wanted to report on or the critical pieces he suggested, so he soon gave up trying to force the issue. Even then Harold diplomatically held his tongue about the paper, and only once did I hear him flare up. When asked how he thought Edward Rothstein was handling his old job, the answer was swift: "A disaster!"
He never said anything about it within my hearing, but I believe Harold knew deep down that he was the last of a special kind of music critic. He lived through a stormy period in America's musical life -- not the richest or most creatively vital perhaps, but full of fascinating musicians as well as some seismic changes in this country's attitudes toward and perceptions of classical music. He observed it all with a clear, cool eye, sometimes getting it wrong, but more often hitting the target dead center, and always in a way that made you look forward to the next column or review. Not many critics today write about music with his zest, wit, and flavor. I miss him.
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Twin Cities, MN: Did you have any professional or personal contact with Harold Schonberg? I'm wondering what he was like as a person. Also, one of the consistent themes in his writings is that present-day musicians, especially pianists, really don't "get" romantic-era performance practice Do you think he was right?
Tim Page: A quick follow-up to my lead paragraph that has just come in!
Harold was bright, eager, anecdotal, convivial and generous to young critics. I don't think he was a great admirer of my work but he was always willing to offer advice in negotiating the thickets of NY Times politics.
He may well have been right that many present-day musicians don't "get" romantic era performance practice. That said, I think our best pianists -- Pollini, Kissin, Peter Serkin, Richard Goode -- are more satisfying musicians than many of the pianists Harold loved so much. I guess I'm fundamentally a modernist when it comes to performance practice -- I like all the notes in the right places, whatever the Lisztian "titans" may have done 100 years ago.
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St. Louis, MO: Greetings Tim from St. Louis!
Two quick non-SLSO questions--How good do you think Joshua Bell really is? I have heard two recordings on our classical station (Brahms and another that I cant remember right now) and thought his playing was extremely good. He seems to have real warmth and ability--I thought I was listening to Zuckerman or maybe Mutter.
I want to get my hands on some D. Barenboim recordings with him as the pianist. Can you recommend any? The Penguin guide seems to always recommend others but I want to hear some of his recordings.
Tim Page: I like Joshua Bell's violin playing. It is clean, passionate, proportionate and imbued with intelligence. I don't think it is an insult to suggest that he is somewhat "middle of the road" in his interpretations. He rarely startles, but, in my experience, he never disappoints.
As for Barenboim, I'm simply not a fan. I find his playing strangely humorless and much too grand for my tastes. His great mentor was Wilhelm Furtwangler, whose interpretations were equally willful, but, to my ears at least, more inspired.
Say hi to St. Louis. I hear Stephen Duncan has been given a promotion at the Symphony. I am glad, as he was a terrific colleague and smart man.
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Dunn Loring, Virginia: I just finished watching the DVD of John Adams' "El Nino" for the second time. Did I stumble across the worst opera ever written and produced? Fascinating! Nothing can quite prepare one for the mind-numbing assault on the senses.
Tim Page: Oh, I've heard worse -- do you remember "Il Guarany" at the Washington Opera a few years back? How about most of Menotti? I'd add Prokofiev's "War and Peace" to the roster, too.
In fact, I think "El Nino" is one of Adams' better works and I have friends who believe it a masterpiece. I know that a lot of people have objected to the Peter Sellars staging, which is said to be overly busy and curiously inappropriate.
I've confessed my own inability to "get" most of Adams on several occasions here. I keep waiting for the moment where I will hear the many excellences my friends and colleagues hear in this music. Not much luck, so far -- although I've loved "Shaker Loops" for 25 years.
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Georgetown, Washington, DC: I caught the NSO's Bugs on Broadway concert at Wolf Trap on Saturday (lotsa fun, by the way).
The program was approximately 90% Wagner. Do you have any insight on this? Did Chuck Jones & co. have some love/hate of Wagner, or does his body of work simply lend itself to Elmer Fudd's singing capabilities?
Vewwy mysterwious.
Tim Page: I've never caught the "Bugs on Broadway" show, but can imagine that is an enjoyable way to spend a summer evening.
Wagner was fantastically popular in the years before World War II -- as popular as he is now, he's never quite won back the following he had before his anti-Semitism was widely known. (Indeed, I had a friend at college -- a very sophisticated friend -- who simply wouldn't listen to Wagner's music because he hated the man behind the music so much.) I believe most of the cartoons were made in the late 30s and early 40s, during that time when Wagner was ubiquitous and everybody would recognize the music.
You hear quite a lot of Liszt in those cartoons, too -- especially "Les Preludes" and the Hungarian Rhapsodies Nos. 2 and 6.
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Chicago, IL: I'm interested in buying a complete set of the Beethoven piano sonatas. I know you mention individual discs in your "Classical music for beginners" list. Do you have a recommendation for a complete set? Thank you.
Tim Page: I'm very fond of the Claude Frank performances, originally issued on RCA and now on Music and Arts, a small label in San Francisco. The French pianist Yves Nat did a wonderful set back in the 1950s. I'm quite fond of the Richard Goode performances on Nonesuch. The Schnabel set is historic -- faded sound and lots of finger slips but both historically important and musically rewarding.
I wish Wilhelm Backhaus's mono recording of the complete sonatas would be reissued: the stereo takes are rather brusque. Avoid Barenboim and Arrau -- the last of whom actually said that Beethoven had "no humor." Beethoven! -- who just might be the wittiest composer after Rossini.
There are many others -- I don't have my reference books or my record collection up here with me.
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Broomes Island, MD: What Choral group in the area do you think takes the most chances...provides the greatest variety. I'm all for a "Carmina Burana" or a Verdi "Requiem" once in a while (and thank goodness for the groups that do those) but I'm getting just a little tired of the old chestnuts of the Choral repetoire. I remember the first time I heard "the Coolin" (Samuel Barber) and I relish the memory of excitement at the discovery. Who can do that for me again?
Tim Page: I think they all take chances on occasion. There is so much choral music in the Washington area that it would be suicide to perform only the same pieces again and again. I'd pick and choose between concerts.
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Arlington VA: As a mid-40s guy who works in the business world, I'm continually appalled at the inability of the classic music industry to market itself in any coherent way. It's an industry that seems to continually put out artistically wonderful product with the minimal amount of publicity, advertising, or support.
What's going on in the business end of the recording industry these days? It seems that new recording have slowed to a trickle. Or are products being released with zero publicity and backing?
And what of the Washington Concert Opera? Can they survive financially? Personally, I attended my first performances this year. Why can't word get out better about groups such as this?
Tim Page: My own advice would be to get involved! Approach some of these organizations and offer some of your ideas. Myself, I like the fact that most classical music organizations have avoided the sort of idiot hard-sell we see in so many other fields. But marketing doesn't have to be idiotic, as you well know -- and it is essential to build an audience.
There is no word on Washington Concert Opera yet -- the troupe is taking the high road and refusing to go ahead with a season if there is no way of doing it up right. I think the climactic board meeting is in September, and then we will know if this excellent organization continues to bring us its valuable offerings.
They may be able to use your marketing skills.
As for the record business, most of the classical masterpieces have been recorded many times -- some of them many dozens of times. If you figure you'll sell some 25,000 copies of a new recording of the Beethoven Seventh -- and that is a generous estimate -- it makes little sense to record a new version for $250,000. Do the math. Something quite different is needed.
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Washington, DC: At the risk of repeating myself - in case you already read my earlier submission, is there any chance that you may take up that Heifetz biography you were considering? What is your opinion of Heifetz as artist and influence - both instrumentally and musically? Do you favor a posthumous Kennedy Center Honors award for him and other contributors to American culture who died not having received the honor? Thank you!
Tim Page: Thanks so much for your question. I wrote about Heifetz extensively for The New Criterion in 1995 and will reprint the article here for you. (It's also collected in my book "Tim Page on Music.")
Jascha Heifetz
by Tim Page
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Some ten years ago, I set out to write the first full biography of Jascha Heifetz. The violinist was then still living—in a grand, gated mansion toward the top of Beverly Hills—but, despite intercession on my behalf from several mutual acquaintances, Heifetz refused to cooperate in any way. He had never much cared for publicity; in 1939, he summed up his life for Deems Taylor: “Born in Russia, first lessons at three, debut in Russia at seven, debut in America in 1917. That’s all there is to say, really. About two lines.”
Over the next months, however, I conducted almost twenty hours of taped interviews with those who had known Heifetz throughout his life. Mistaking quantity for quality, I thought I was making progress until the evening I played through part of my archive. And then I realized that I had absolutely nothing on which to build a book—only a vague portrait of a rigidly formal, exceedingly isolated, and not especially pleasant man who happened to play the violin with a technique that knew no difficulties and an idiosyncratic and affecting warmth that transcended the patrician authority of his approach.
Apparently, there were few events in the Heifetz story: he came, he played, he conquered, again and again—and then he went home. Friendships were uncommon and circumscribed, brought to an end, more often than not, by petty quarrels; there were two marriages, followed by two fairly nasty divorces. One is tempted to say that Heifetz ended up a lonely man, but since there is no evidence that he knew, believed, or even suspected this was the case, all one can do is affirm that most of us would have been very lonely under similar circumstances.
To date, there has not been a reliable life of Heifetz. And so The Heifetz Collection, a vast trove of sixty-five compact discs (arranged into forty-six self-sufficient volumes) issued earlier this year by BMG Classics, may prove the best “biography” of the violinist for many years to come. Certainly, it captures everything that was most interesting and attractive about Jascha Heifetz. He had one of the longest recording careers in history—more than sixty years, a span rivaled only by Mischa Elman, Vladimir Horowitz, Yehudi Menuhin, Claudio Arrau, Leopold Stokowski, and the Australian baritone Peter Dawson (some other musicians will be joining this club very soon). And now, with one small but significant omission, the entire discography is available to us, in digitally remastered sound, with program notes that are engaging as well as specific.
String players and aficionados with the means (approximately $600) will doubtless have purchased the entire set by this point. It is by any standard a worthwhile investment—the listener will be rewarded by close to 100 hours of superlative violin playing— but it is also curiously static. There is a natural human temptation to funnel facts into tidy narrative, to chart “growth” in our artists over time, but Heifetz was not a markedly better violinist in 1972 than he was in 1917. He seems to have sprung to life fully formed—male-child Minerva with a fiddle —and, if anything, in some of the later Heifetz albums, one has the sense of a perfection that is rapidly tiring of itself.
Still, it is this very technical perfection that made Heifetz so important. One may question his interpretations—indeed, one may actively dislike them—but, on a purely objective level, it doesn’t matter very much. We live in a century that has placed enormous value on the ability to “prove” merit —remember those twelve-tone compositions that were inseparable from their analyses? the art works that came ready-made with theoretical justification?—and Heifetz can be proven. Whether or not we like what he does with his violin, there can be no denying that he elevated performance standards to a new level of exactitude. After Heifetz, a slurred phrase was no longer accepted as a soulful indulgence; it was only a slurred phrase. He showed just what could be done with a violin; if Heifetz is partially to blame for the mechanical, metronomic violinists of today—those aging Wunderkinder who skate flawlessly and meaninglessly through everything that is put in front of them—the fact remains that he was a genuine Olympian, however austere.
Almost all of Heifetz’s recordings were made for what was initially the Victor Talking Machine Company, was then RCA Victor, then RCA Red Seal, and has now been transmogrified into a division of BMG Classics. The exceptions are some fine performances for EMI in the 1930s, a handful of charming smaller pieces for Decca in 1945, and the live recording of Heifetz’s 1972 farewell recital in Los Angeles that was issued on Columbia Masterworks. All these have been incorporated into The Heifetz Collection; the only known omission among Heifetz’s published recordings is a remarkable Russian 1911 disc that turned up in the mid-1980s and for which BMG was unable to secure the rights. (A London-based magazine called The Strad issued portions of this precious souvenir on a plastic “giveaway” disc inserted in the pages of its February 1986 issue; suffice it to say that Heifetz was already recognizably Heifetz before he reached puberty.)
Those who don’t care for Heifetz’s work sometimes dismiss him as a great encore player. Such an estimation is unfairly reductive, but he really was an absolute master of the violin miniature. And, because the one-sided 78-RPM record could only contain roughly four and one-half minutes of music, most of Heifetz’s first recordings were devoted to encore pieces.
How well our grandparents knew the music Heifetz recorded between 1917 and 1925, in his teens and early twenties, at the old Victor studios in Camden, New Jersey! Here they are—transcriptions of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Schumann’s “Widmung,” Mendelssohn’s “On Wings of Song,” and Chopin nocturnes, fragments from concertos by Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn, showpieces by Paganini, Wieniawski, Sarasate, and others. The playing is gripping, original, and fully mature. Perhaps Heifetz lacked the intellectual probity of Szigeti, the glowing and gigantic (if sometimes rather glutinous) tone of Elman, and the sheer “olde world” charm of Kreisler. But he made up for these liabilities with performances of unparalleled technical accuracy (no tape splicing in those days), a sure sense of structure (each recording has its own Platonic perfection, with carefully delineated beginning, middle, and end), and what can only be described as the genesis of a modernist aesthetic. There is sentiment in abundance but little sentimentality; while Heifetz does not banish portamento altogether he uses it sparingly and he will not descend to histrionic manipulation. “When [Bruno] Walter comes to something beautiful, he melts,” Toscanini once said, in a moment of exasperation. Heifetz never melts, but I can’t imagine many 1990s listeners finding these records chilly. The passion is subtle, the artistic personality unusually self-effacing for its era. But both are present.
Throughout much of this century, we have placed an emphasis on what might be called all-purpose musicians; just recently has it become acceptable—indeed, outright fashionable—to specialize (note the careers of such current performers as John Eliot Gardiner and the Kronos Quartet). Heifetz, in common with other early “superstars” such as Toscanini and Horowitz, was not only expected to play everything but to play everything equally well—the Baroque and Classical repertories, the Romantic sonatas and concertos, a cautious smattering of contemporary music. In retrospect, through recordings, strengths and weaknesses have become apparent. It used to be heresy to suggest that Toscanini was generally a more convincing interpreter of Rossini and Verdi than he was of Beethoven and Brahms but, for many of us, when we judge from the recorded evidence, such is our conclusion. Likewise, I can affirm that the scores in which Heifetz is the most consistently reliable are those by what Virgil Thomson used to call “cold-climate composers,” including music from Heifetz’s native Russia.
For example, Heifetz recorded the Tchaikovsky Concerto three separate times—in 1937, with the London Philharmonic under Barbirolli; in 1950, with the Philharmonia under Walter Susskind, and, finally, in 1957, with the Chicago Symphony under Reiner. All of these performances have their excellences; the last boasts vivid recorded sound and the most virtuosic combination of orchestra and conductor (although I continue to find Heifetz’s earliest reading of the solo part more dazzling and intrinsically poetic). Still, you can’t go wrong with any of them; this is rich, haunting, melodic music, imbued with a gypsy warmth made all the more potent by Heifetz’s refusal to milk it beyond its proper boundaries.
The Heifetz Collection contains two chimerical renditions of the Glazunov Concerto in A minor; only Michael Rabin, on EMI, is more moving, infusing the pyrotechnics with an ethereal sweetness (the disintegration and premature death of this violinist was nothing less than an artistic calamity). Heifetz’s first recording of the Sibelius concerto, with Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic Orchestra—appropriately cool and sometimes stern, yet always deeply felt and even seductive—has long been the standard by which other performances were judged and found wanting. (I would place Heifetz’s 1959 interpretation, with the Chicago Orchestra and Walter Hendl, among the preterite.) There are two recordings of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, both with the Boston Symphony (Koussevitzky’s conducting is rather more idiomatic than Munch’s, although the sound is pallid by comparison). And there are numerous encore pieces— vignettes by Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Rachmaninoff, Glazunov, and Tchaikovsky, exciting and nostalgic by turn, inevitably given their full due.
Heifetz is also consistently top-drawer in what might be described as capital-V “Violin Music”—the works of Wieniawski, Vieuxtemps, Sarasate, Kreisler, and Paganini. Not all of these pieces are necessarily capital-A Art, but they provide heroic challenges for a violinist. Heifetz’s command of his instrument is virtually flawless, of course, but he is not satisfied with mere athleticism. He never forgets that this is music, after all, and he plays it with neither undue grandiloquence nor flashy “Look at Me!” condescension. Pity the listener with heart so hard that the Bruch Concerto and “Scottish Fantasy” no longer stir a misty tenderness.
Heifetz’s Bach was controversial, even before the early-music movement had established its strictures. The 1946 recording of the Concerto for Two Violins is a stunt —Heifetz plays both solo parts—and not a very successful one; the piece profits from two distinct personalities weaving around each other, in surprise and symbiosis. (A later reading, with Erick Friedman, one of Heifetz’s rare students, is also less than persuasive.) Heifetz recorded all the solo sonatas and partitas in 1952; the performances are fast, strenuous, bristling with nervous energy, and, to this taste, rather brutal. He places an emphasis on attacks and contrasts, to the detriment of line and continuity.
Some Bach performances from 1935 are more musical. Indeed, as a rule of thumb, when one has a choice between two competing Heifetz recordings of a given work, it is likely that the first version will be preferable. A case in point is the Mozart Concerto No. 5 in A (K. 219). Heifetz recorded this three times, in 1935, 1951, and 1963. The later performances have their strengths (and some of the weaknesses we find in the 1952 Bach solo pieces) but the 1935 recording (with Barbirolli) is sublime, from the unaccompanied, triadic entrance of the violin, so pure and serene that it seems to emanate from another plane of understanding—“above the battle,” in Romain Rolland’s phrase—through the cheerfully industrious reiterations of the concluding rondo. The central movement is particularly beautiful—long-breathed and exquisitely nuanced, with a grace and gentle stillness strangely enhanced by the burnished antiquity of the recorded sound.
It is unfortunate that Heifetz’s only recording of Mozart’s Divertimento in E-flat (K. 563) should have been made with the constrictions of the 78-RPM disc so obviously in mind. The performance—by Heifetz, William Primrose, and Emanuel Feuermann—is artful and lively (even though the tempos will sound stressed to latter-day listeners) but this is music that takes time to unfold, and the neglect of Mozart’s indicated repeats diminishes it. Put another way, we need more than thirty-three minutes for this particular piece.
Heifetz was an uneven collaborator. The late series of Heifetz–Piatigorsky chamber concerts (with admirable musicians such as Primrose, Jacob Lateiner, and Leonard Pennario) are some of his worst records. A sense of hurry prevails, the Heifetz tone all too often takes on a wiry astringency, and on some occasions the playing is downright sloppy (a ghastly violin/cello arrangement of the Stravinsky “Suite Italienne” should never have been released). The 1961 performance of the Schubert “Cello” Quintet sounds uncomfortably like a disappointed violin concerto, as does a Mendelssohn octet dating from the same year. Heifetz’s influence on his fellow musicians was sometimes baleful; Primrose made a spacious, elegant, and altogether cherishable recording of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante (K. 364) with the American violinist Albert Spalding, but when he came to record this work with Heifetz, his playing was distinctly agitato (as was Heifetz’s own) and the result might be described as “Dueling Fiddles.”
Yet there are some marvelous collaborations in the Heifetz discography. I am especially fond of the Brahms Sonata in D minor (op. 108) that he recorded with the brilliant young American pianist William Kapell— two fiery temperaments in full force, relentlessly goading each other on, yet somehow maintaining a unified lyricism. (Heifetz and Kapell had planned to record all three Brahms sonatas; after Kapell was killed in a 1953 plane crash, the violinist lost interest in the project, and so Heifetz’s way with op. 78 and op. 100 can only be imagined.) The piano-violin-cello trio recordings with Artur Rubinstein and Emanuel Feuermann (and, after Feuermann’s death, with Gregor Piatigorsky)—Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky—are empathic, honey-toned, and justly famous. If some of these “Million Dollar Trio” recordings are now period pieces—and they are definitely of their time and place—that period now seems a golden age, one that we may only look back upon with affection and wonder.
In general, Heifetz’s recordings of Beethoven’s ten sonatas for violin and piano are fleet, furious, charged with dramatic tension—“shot from guns,” as the old advertising slogan might have had it. This manner is most effective in the later sonatas, with their inherent Sturm und Drang; I prefer a more genial, expansive, playful approach to early Beethoven, whose sense of humor has long been undervalued. Mention should be made of Heifetz’s two principal accompanists, Emanuel Bay and the long-suffering Brooks Smith; the latter was a superb partner—necessarily deferential (throughout their twenty-year association, Heifetz never permitted Smith to call him by his first name) but always musical, always precisely there.
In this century, very few of our most celebrated performers have done much for the music of their time; the obvious exceptions—Koussevitzky, Stokowski, Rostropovich, Pollini—merely prove the rule. It was left to a young unknown named Louis Krasner to bring us the violin concertos of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, to Albert Spalding to commission (but not play) the Roger Sessions concerto and to play the first performance of the Samuel Barber concerto.
Still, several concertos were fashioned for, then played and recorded by Heifetz— pieces by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Louis Gruenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklos Rózsa, and William Walton. The last of these is probably the best of the bunch (and it is the only one to have entered the repertory), although the Korngold and the Rózsa have a sumptuous “Hapsburg in Hollywood” majesty, and Heifetz’s recording of the Gruenberg is rightly prized as an extraordinary example of violin velocity. Heifetz never recorded anything by Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, or Bartók; he played only minor works by Shostakovich, Milhaud, and Stravinsky; he may have been entirely unaware of the music of a newer generation of modernists. He did well by Ernest Bloch, however—wailing, rhapsodic performances of the two violin/piano sonatas—and he made one album of sonatas by Howard Ferguson and Karen Khachaturian (Aram’s nephew) with his University of Southern California colleague Lillian Steuber.
The forty-sixth and final box in The Heifetz Collection deserves some special attention, for it was not only the violinist’s last recording but his last public performance anywhere (October 23, 1972). The entire recital, a benefit for USC, was preserved, something that would have been unthinkable in 1917. Aside from that, the program— in both its planning and its execution—was not markedly different from one Heifetz might have offered decades before.
From the beginning of the Franck Sonata —rapt, centered, directly linear in its phrasing, immaculately aristocratic in its bearing—there can be no mistaking the artist. The Richard Strauss Sonata, a product of the composer’s sixteenth year, follows immediately, and Heifetz brings pride and surging power to this brash youthful declaration of genius. Alfred Frankenstein, who was covering the concert for The New York Times, thought three movements of the Bach E-major Partita were “absolutely perfect”—and so they were, from Heifetz’s subjective standpoint; certainly he does exactly what he wants to do with them, and purists be damned. And, finally, there are the encores, including Debussy’s “La Plus que lente” (which Heifetz had first recorded back in 1925), some Bloch, Kreisler, Rachmaninoff, Ravel.
The same old stuff? Perhaps. But there is something noble about Heifetz’s constancy. He knew what he wanted and he spoke his piece; if it was essentially the same piece at seventy-two that it was at seventeen, so be it. Few performing artists have exercised such meticulous control over their creative lives, in such a tumultuous era. (One wonders, sadly, whether a “new” Jascha Heifetz would be recognized by the record companies—would he be deemed hip enough? would he have the right hairdo? would he have “attitude”?) In any event, eight years after his death, Heifetz’s life story can still be told in something like the “two lines” he gave to Deems Taylor. But The Heifetz Collection speaks volumes.
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I don't think I'd change much in that piece today. I hope it is helpful to you. As for the Kennedy Center Honors, I suspect the reason Heifetz never received one is the fact that he wouldn't attend the ceremony to pick up the award -- an absolute rule of the game. This is surely the reason Irving Berlin never received a K.C. honor either.
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Fairfax, Va:
Was just in Montreal and the Gazette there noted the passing of Mr. Schonberg. He had apparently visited a number of times and reviewed (favorably) the MSO (or OSM, if you prefer French).
It was also mentioned that Mr. Dutoit (sp.?) may take over in Pittsburgh, even though audiences in Heinz Hall a sparse. Apparently the PSO has a very substantial endownment to keep the afloat, becasuse the ticket sales do not.
P.S. Heard the OSM in an outdoor concert and even in that rough setting, their sumptous sound came through. How do you feel about their recordings with Mr. Dutoit?
Tim Page: Montreal is a wonderful city -- and yes, it is a fine orchestra. I was sorry that the split between Dutoit and his players was so acrimonious, as they made a lot of fine music together.
I know nothing about a Dutoit appointment in Pittsburgh. It is a wealthy orchestra, albeit one that is going through some administrative difficulties right now. It would seem a good match.
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Alexandria, Va.: Re the Kennedy Center Honors: What happened to Paul McCartney? They announced the honorees this afternoon (I'm writing this on Tuesday) and Sir Paul was not listed. I thought he was being honored this year as a deferment from last year.
Any news?
Tim Page: I'm tempted to say that the Kennedy Center recovered its senses. With very few exceptions, I'm not a McCartney fan, and the thought of giving him the honors before, say, Brian Wilson, is galling to me. My idea of hell would be to be locked in a room playing nothing but McCartney's post-Beatles greatest hits -- and even a lot of his Beatles stuff has started to wear thin.
I can forgive a lot for "Blackbird," though -- and a few others. It's funny: on a recent drive to New York, we were playing the White Album and "Martha My Dear" came over the speakers. Now, I've always liked that song myself, but my wife Julieta said "Wow -- you can hear the beginning of Wings, all in this one song." And she was right -- the self-congratulatory cutesiness, the fascination with old British music hall song (Ray Davies did it better), the over-elaborate orchestration, and so on. I still like the song, but it sure led down the road to perdition.
Rant over, I will hazard a guess at the answer to your question. I imagine McCartney couldn't make it to the ceremony one more year and, as I noted above, that is an absolute requirement for receiving the award.
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Washington, D.C.: Tim, while I am saddened by the death of Harold Schoenberg, I cannot say I admired his work. If he didn't understand a composer's music (which included almost everything post-1910), he was ill-disposed towards it. Critics such as Dick Dyer (who got his start from Peter Davis) could win the respect of new music composers, even in disagreement. But H. Schoenberg had neither the open-mindedness nor the technical chops of a Dyer or a Thomson. Yes, many people in New York "owed" him. Perhaps that's enough for posterity.
Tim Page: As I mentioned, I disagreed with a great deal of what Harold wrote -- and mostly about 20th century music and unorthodox performances (his famous slam of Glenn Gould was probably his worst moment). Still, I learned to read Harold critically -- and on the music he loved, he was very good indeed. Or so it seemed to me.
Almost every critic is demonstrably "wrong" about some things. Virgil Thomson couldn't stomach Sibelius. Cecil Gray hated Strauss. Chopin hated Schumann's music -- amazingly enough, since they were close friends. Ned Rorem dislikes Berlioz.
I knew an editor in New York who would only print positive articles by a certain drama critic who was known for his vitriol. He thought the negative reviews were so out of line -- frothing at the mouth, really -- but admired the skill that this critic brought to his descriptions of things he loved, and so kept him in the magazine.
And the same with Harold. He was wrong about a good many things -- and his negative reviews usually found him writing at less than his best. But he made the things he loved come alive vividly and unforgettably. And there is something to be said for that.
Any other thoughts?
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Fairfax, Va: There does not seem to be any evidence that the slide of Classical music into oblivion is waning. Radio stations discontinue the format, symphony and opera componies fold, recording dries up. Where will this end? Do you think it is possible it could disappear completely, at least in the US ?
Tim Page: It won't disappear completely but it is certainly trimming down.
The internet will replace radio, I think. And a good deal of medium-sized orchestras will fold, but the larger ones ought to survive. Some fresh thinking is desperately needed.
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Washington D.C.:
Tim,
I'd like to help your statement about Prokofiev's "War and Peace." Some operas contain much excellent music, but don't stage well--this was the point of Joseph Kerman's "Opera as Drama". Consider Schoenberg's "Moses and Aaron." W&P is also good music on an un-stageable subject, but let's not lump it together with John Adams as candidates for worst opera ever. Please reconsider.
Tim Page: I didn't like much of the music in "War and Peace," but then one of my own "blind spots" is most of Prokofiev. Then again, I love Pfitzner's "Palestrina" which was all but unanimously condemned when it was staged by the Lincoln Center Festival a few years back. Different strokes...
And I don't know if it was cruel to mention "War and Peace" with John Adams. As I said earlier, I know people who are profoundly moved by "Nixon in China" and even "The Death of Klinghoffer." Who knows how it will all sort out?
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Fairfax County, VA: To the gentleman from Arlington: Please, please... Get involved! We need you! The only thing I would add to what Mr. Page said is, first invite a professional musician or two to lunch and just ask questions and listen. It's a very different turf where, by definition, the bottom line can't be measured in dollars.
Tim Page: Yes -- a very important point. Yet I had the sense that the gentleman from Arlington had already realized that this involves a very different kind of "salesmanship."
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Washington D.C.: My quarrel with Schoenberg extends to his progeny at NYT who can't stomach 20th century music. My view, to borrow a phrase from Bruno Latour, is that in music, we have never been modern. Bach's fugues are incredibly cumbersome to play and listen to, yet NYT's Rockwell will, in the same article, praise Bach, and slam recent composers for being "cerebral." Bach's fugues are not cerebral?
Tim Page: Rockwell? I can't think of another critic after Thomson who has been so supportive of new work, of all kinds, in all genres. Now, Don Henahan was a different matter...
Again, critics can't like everything. But John Rockwell was probably the most catholic and curious critic writing for a major paper in the 70s and 80s, and I still read him with enormous appreciation.
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Washington, D.C.: Do you think Leonard Slatkin will renew his contract with the NSO when the time comes? If not, who would you like to see take over and what direction do you think they should take the orchestra?
Tim Page: I helped run an orchestra for a year and it is not an experiment I plan to repeat. Whatever happens between Slatkin and the NSO is up to them. All I can do is report my impressions, as honestly as I can.
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Nani, Texas: I introduced my granddaughters to classical music via the old Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, et al cartoons which I fortunately taped quite a few years ago. My and their favorite is "Rhapsody Rabbit" wherein Bugs performs Hungarian Rhapsody on a grand piano accompanied by a tiny mouse running up and down the keys. You don't see such detailed animation or experience such glorious music on today's cartoons.
Tim Page: No -- the Golden Age of the Cartoon is surely past. I still have some hope for classical music, though.
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Tim Page: And that finishes up another on-line chat. I'll be back with you again in another two weeks, when this cool, clement day in Nova Scotia is just a memory.
Till then...
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washingtonpost.com: That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion.
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