A Man For All Seasons?

There are music scholars whose names are synonymous with certain composers. One could think of Hermann Abert’s book W. A. Mozart, Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, and the work of H. C. Robbins Landon and his research on Haydn. For 19^th century composers, there is the four-volume classic, The Life of Richard Wagner by Ernest Newman, the magnificent four-volume study of the life of Gustav Mahler by Henry Louis de la Grange, and the three-volume study of the life and music of Richard Strauss by Norman del Mar.

The one name most often associated with composer William Byrd has to be Joseph Kerman. Recently, music historian Kerry McCarthy of Duke University has offered us an insightful, insight-filled, and highly readable book, entitled simply Byrd, on the life and the music of this foremost composer under the reign of Elizabeth I and James I.

William Byrd lived from c1540 to 1623 and produced some of the most original and moving music of the late Renaissance. Like Norman del Mar’s books on Richard Strauss, Byrd is written such that the life of the composer is framed by the works from different periods of his life.

McCarthy begins her book by laying down the historical events surrounding the birth year of William Byrd. The year 1540 was the year “King Henry (VIII) met, married, and divorced his fourth wife, executed the man who had arranged the marriage, and, on the day of the execution, married for the fifth time.” More relevant, but related nevertheless, to Byrd’s life and music, 1540 was also the year King Henry “finished dismantling the monasteries and convents – an act, that, more than any other, marked the real end of medieval England.” The significance here is, of course, that Byrd was Roman Catholic, and remained so throughout his life, in spite of the political climate of the time. By the time Byrd began his musical education under Thomas Tallis, the musical world of Gregorian chants had disappeared forever. Reformers began introducing vernacular services in the 1540’s, and the new ideal for English services was simple syllabic chanting, far from the florid melisma of pre-Reformation church music. “For every syllable a note” was Thomas Cranmar’s famous injunction to church musicians.

From his earliest days, Byrd had business acumen and a “rather hard-headed attitude toward the realities of life.” Perhaps this ability allowed him to survive, indeed flourish, as a Catholic in Protestant England. The young composer knew how to cultivate the interest of the powerful, and knew how to dedicate works of his to “the right people”, Catholic or Protestant. During his first professional position, as organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral, Byrd met and married a local woman named Julian Burley, who was, from all reports, “an unusually stubborn Catholic”, being the first member of Byrd’s family to be prosecuted for recusancy. Byrd’s marriage to Burley may have contributed to his increasingly Catholic convictions that remained with him for the rest of his life.

William Byrd was, of course, best known for his Latin Motets, a musical form that had, by his time, been banished from church service. Byrd’s motets thus became a form of chamber music, “private music to be enjoyed among small groups of connoisseurs.” That said, the composer, ever the pragmatist, also created the Short Service, music written for Protestant worship, and was popular during his lifetime.

McCarthy’s narrative of Byrd’s life is also peppered with quite detailed analysis of representative works of various genres – vocal and instrumental, sacred as well as secular. Rather than disrupting the narrative, such detailed discussion and analysis, I feel, enhance one’s understanding the composer’s life. In fact, the many analyses of Byrd’s works help give readers a fuller picture of both Byrd as a man and as a composer.

On February 22, 1572, Byrd achieved, at a relatively early age, the summit of his professional career, by his appointment as one of thirty-two Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. When Henry VIII dissolved the various Catholic institutions, the Chapel Royal became the place where the best church musicians in England converged. The Elizabethan Chapel Royal boasted the largest choir in England, with up to forty singers for major feast days. A Gentleman of the Chapel received a generous salary, and their appointments were for life – incredibly favourable terms for a musician even by today’s standards.

However, becoming a Gentleman of the Chapel also involved a swearing a solemn declaration that the Queen “is and ought to be, by the word of God, the only supreme governor of this realm…as well as in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal.” The same oath also called for renunciation of “all foreign jurisdictions, powers, superiorities and authorities.” Whatever his mindset was at the time, he was obviously willing to make this very significant compromise, for a Catholic. Being the ambitious young composer that he was, Byrd obviously felt that he had to do what was necessary to advance his musical career.

Not only did this new position brought Byrd to the center of English musical life, he, along with Thomas Tallis also managed to negotiate a royal patent for the printing and distribution of music in England, allowing them “to edit and publish music in England for the next twenty-one years.” This monopoly even extended to the printed staff paper on which musicians made their manuscripts. Byrd never made secret of the fact that he was a Catholic, although he “was never publicly active as a Catholic composer in the way Tallis had been.” Obviously those in power valued his genius as a composer enough to overlook this one little “flaw” in the man.

There is an intriguing chapter in the book entitled Byrd the Reader, outlining the books found in the composer’s quite eclectic collection. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Byrd’s collection of books included some extremely anti-Catholic publications. Included in this collection (his name was inscribed in it) was The New Arrival of the Three Graces, which contained a tirade against “the wicked government of papal dignity.” The author wondered aloud why Byrd, as a “convinced Catholic”, would fill his library with anti-Catholic and Protestant books. Perhaps, McCarthy said, they were there as a “decoy to mislead anti-Catholic spies and government officials.” Or was the composer just interested in current political issues in England and abroad, so as to know what he would be up against? There are no satisfactory answer to these questions, nor would there ever be, but the speculation makes for fascinating reading.

The years around 1580 were difficult ones for Byrd. He was under constant suspicion of illegal Catholic activities. His “(l)etters were intercepted, his property was searched, fines were exacted, and he might even have been kept for a short time under a relatively mild form of house arrest.” Byrd automatically became of “the usual suspects” whenever a Catholic plot was uncovered. The author speculated that his position at court might even have been suspended for a time. In the late 1580’s, he published Psalms, Sonnets and Songs, as an effort to redeem himself. Dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton, a royal favourite and Lord Chancellor of England, and contained music set to a “star-studded roster of poets” like Raleigh, Sidney, Oxford, Ariosto, and Ovid. There was much detailed discussion about the significance of various texts, as well as analysis of some of the songs. For instance, Byrd’s elegy on the death of Thomas Tallis, Ye sacred Muses, is actually a translation of a lament on the death of Josquin des Prez by his student Nicolas Gombert. The final line of Byrd’s elegy, “Tallis is dead,” was “borrowed” directly from Gombert’s elegy, “Josquin is dead.”

Byrd’s most overtly Catholic musical protest has to be his “grave and elaborate” song, Why do I use my paper, ink, and pen? The song appears superficially to be a tribute to Christian martyrs of the past, but is in fact a “notorious twenty-stanza lament on the execution of the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion in 1581.” The poem had always been controversial, the printer of the original poem was arrested and had his ears cut off, and John Bolt, one of Byrd’s associates, was interrogated about the piece as late as 1594. A song such as this one, as well as the motets he published under his two books of Cantiones, were bold and risky gestures, “that prefigured his even greater boldness in published three Latin masses a few years later.” Many of the Cantiones “are anguished confessions of sin, pleas for rescue from tribulation, or laments over the fall of an allegorical ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘holy city.’ It is hard to avoid the conclusions that many of them were inspired by Byrd’s distress at the increasingly dire predicaments of the English Catholic community.” Whether the gloomy mood of many of these motets were Byrd’s songs of lamentations for his fellow English Catholics, or whether he was just sharing in the English Renaissance taste for melancholy and introspection is difficult to determine. The author warned us against deducing too much about Byrd’s mindset from the dark colours of many of the motets. Although it is difficult for the composer not to have been affected by the affairs of the world around him.

Indeed, Byrd’s Three Latin Masses published, “discreetly as small pamphlets, with none of the elaborate prefatory materials found in his other books.”  In setting the Mass to music, Byrd was “doing something no English composer had done for thirty years.”  It appears amazing the risk he was taking, given the political and cultural risks involved, not to mention possible damage to his career. When the last of the three Masses had been published, Byrd “made the definitive turn away from court and city,” and moved his family to the rural Essex community of Stondon Massey. The attractive there was primarily the family of Byrd’s wealthy Catholic patron, Sir John Petre. Almost immediately, Byrd and his family had been noticed as “Catholic dissidents who refused to attend services at the local parish church.” Like the motets, it is tempting to speculate if their writing was influenced by Byrd’s subsequent decision to have closer relation to the underground Catholic “diaspora”. What we can say with some certainty is that these Masses mark this watershed moment in the composer’s life, after which he devoted even more of his efforts in service of his faith.

It was during his stay at Stondon Massey that Byrd entered his final phase as a composer, composing some of his later instrumental works, as well as his magnum opus - Gradualia. Gradualia was absolutely unique in that music was set to a series of special Latin texts, making up the Proper of the Mass, texts that change from day to day, a real luxury since the music would be sung just once a year on the appropriate feast day. The first volume of Gradualia was published in 1605, but publication of the second volume had to wait until 1607, the reason being the discovery in November 1605 of the Gunpowder Plot – a “narrowly foiled attempt by a group of Catholic extremists to assassinate King James and most of his government by detonating kegs of gunpowder during the ceremonial opening of Parliament.” Such was the climate against which the music was written.

The author pointed out that composing Gradualia was a labour of love for Byrd, who seemed “to have enjoyed writing almost every note.” She added that a “constant danger of discovery and persecution” kept the English recusant world from producing artistic works of lasting value, and that Byrd’s Gradualia “may well be the greatest exception to this rule.”

The death of William Byrd in 1623 marks the end of an entire generation of composers. Naturally, composers following Byrd “had no living memory of pre-Reformation sacred music and barely knew the older traditions of English secular song.” By the end of Byrd’s life, many of his Catholic contemporaries had already left England because they found the situation at home intolerable. Although popular in his lifetime, Byrd’s music lost its popularity after his death, and it really wasn’t until the Tudor music revival of the early 20^th century, and perhaps the advent of recordings, that people began to appreciate his music once again.

Did Byrd sacrifice everything for his Catholic faith? It does not seem so. Not everything. The Jesuit William Weston claimed that Byrd “sacrificed everything for the faith – his position, the court, and all those aspirations common to men who seek preferment in royal circles as means of improving their fortune.” The evidence does not support those assertions. Byrd retained his court position until the end of his life, and he remained a member of the royal household, “with all the benefits that entailed.”

Nevertheless, it must be said that Byrd’s life would have been far easier had he abandoned his Catholic faith and made himself a loyal member of the Church of England. And it is evident that some of Byrd’s most sublime and original music are music written for the “house chapels and secret meeting places of his fellow Catholics.”

William Byrd was also “not the mild-mannered ecumenical figure imagined by a biographer such as Edmund Fellowes”.  According to McCarthy, “By his forties Byrd was effectively flaunting his recusancy in public, which could not have been a comfortable position for a professional courtier. It is also worth recalling that his family background was (and, beyond his own household, remained) thoroughly Protestant. He was as much an outsider among his relatives as he was at court.”

In her conclusions, McCarthy seems to express some surprise that as a Catholic, Byrd was a man “hungry for scandalous news, intrigued by political and religious polemic, preoccupied with legal minutiae”, as well as a man of “vile and bitter words.” I do not pretend to know enough about the composer to defend him against these charges. Perhaps he really was such a man. I can only relate a story about Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who was rebuked by a friend for behaving badly when he was supposed to be Catholic, whereupon Waugh responded, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”

With hindsight, it is often all too tempting to judge a man by his actions. Many musicians have had to use their art to serve government and regimes they have no sympathy for. As a devout Catholic, Byrd devoted his talent and energies in service of the English Protestant establishment, and prospered from it. Some may call him an opportunist, but Byrd’s success in the English musical establishment gave him some degree of freedom to dedicate his talent towards his own Catholic community. In the mean time, he gave to the world some of the most original and beautiful music of his time. If history cannot judge him kindly, we should at least give him credit for doing his best under impossible circumstances.

Although part of Oxford University Press’ friendly-sounding Master Musicians series of books, I do not believe this current volume is for the casual reader. However, for those with an interest in this great English composer, as well as the political climate against which he was working, the reader will be richly rewarded.

Revisiting a Tradition

What is it about George Frideric Handel’s Messiah that the Advent season seems incomplete without it? More than any other musical works, Handel’s Messiah has become synonymous with the Christmas season. And so, every December choirs and orchestras, professional and semi-professional, put on performances of this enduring masterpiece. Whatever the quality of the singing or playing, every performance of Handel’s Messiah is sure to bring in the crowds. In Vancouver, the three major choirs usually take turns performing the work in consecutive years.

This year, I elected to attend the Messiah performance given by the performing forces of the University of British Columbia’s School of Music, comprising of the University Singers, and Choral Union, and the UBC Symphony Orchestra.  Soloists for the Oratorio were drawn from the voice department of the school – wonderful opportunities for the young singers of the school.

Although not using any period instruments, the performance was a strong and authentic one. The two choirs acquitted themselves admirably, especially in the many fast melismatic passages, where they carried off with lightness and with panache. It was a nice touch to include counter-tenor Shane Hansen in Part Three’s recitative (“Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written; Death is swallow’d up in victory.”) and duet (“O Death, where is thy sting?”). The soloists gave credible performances of their various recitatives and arias, the highlight being soprano Stephanie Nakagawa’s performance. Of all the soloists, I felt that she had the most mature voice and musicianship. Moreover, I got the feeling that she meant the words that she sang.

Far worthier and more knowledgeable writers have already written about the greatness of Handel’s Messiah. For me, what was most moving was to see the young singers in the two choirs, who must all be, at this time of year, overwhelmed by assignments and exams, taking time out for the many rehearsals and the performance. Many of the singers, especially in the Choral Union, are not even Music majors. Yet they were there, students of every background and ethnicity, singing with conviction those words in praise of the glory of God and the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. It does not matter what one’s religious convictions are, Handel’s Messiah is not just a piece of music where beautiful words are set to beautiful music, but part of a tradition in our human culture, our civilization, our very being. This, I believe, is something that we must never take for granted. To erase that would be to erase part of the history of humanity.

We live in what some have termed a “post-Christian society”, in a time when Christianity is gradually being pushed to the margins of society, where one’s Christian faith is not something to be brought up at dinner parties, at risk of opening up oneself to ridicule. Judging from the reaction of the very enthusiastic audience, I can only conclude that these words from the Bible still resonate within us, consciously or subconsciously, whether we choose to admit it or not. It gives me hope to hear this music being performed in the very secular environment of a university.

But that evening, we live in a world where music was just what it is, something that transcends our existence, and connects us with the past.

A Young Old Soul

In the very crowded field of outstanding young pianists today (and getting more crowded every year), there have been many recent performances that succeed in impressing us with his or her pianistic prowess. Far more rare is a young artist who moves us, not with technical wizardry (which he has plenty of), but with depth, with artistry and musicality.

Such an event took place in Vancouver yesterday, with the Canadian debut of Kuok-Wai Lio, under the auspices of the Vancouver Recital Society. Mr. Lio played an artistically and technically demanding programme of Janáček, Schubert, and Schumann. I do not recall being so moved by a young pianist’s playing since the first time I heard Ingrid Fliter many years back.

Mr. Lio began his recital daringly, with a performance of Leoš Janáček’s four-movement piano cycle, In the Mists. Not being intimately acquainted with the piece, I can only guess that the composer named his work a “piano cycle” instead of “sonata” so that he didn’t feel bound by any constraints of musical structure. Indeed the piece sounded very free-flowing in its ideas, very colourful and beautiful, and highly imaginative. I did detect the influence of other composers, most notably in his use of harmony, which somehow reminded me of the harmonies Chopin used in some of his later Mazurkas.

Kuok-Wai Lio appears to be a quiet and unassuming young man, but from the first notes, Lio mesmerized me with his playing. There is a luminous quality to the sound he makes on the piano. Within minutes, I realized that I was in the presence of a young master. The playing commanded our complete attention without clamoring for it. Lio, I believe, is very much “his own man” in his musical ideas.

Franz Schubert’s Four Impromptus, D. 935, made up the final work of the first half. Unlike many of today’s young keyboard titans, Lio took the time for the music to develop. At the same time, the music never dragged, but flowed beautifully and logically. The many transitions, in mood and in tempo, within each of the four pieces were masterfully handled. Lio’s interpretation of these very familiar pieces did not remind me of anyone else’s playing. His ideas were completely original, but never idiosyncratic, and they made complete musical sense.  I believe Lio is one of those rare artists who draw our attention to the music, and not to him or his personality.

Lio’s playing of Robert Schumann’s elusive Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, once again reinforced my impression that we were in the presence of an extremely rare talent. One of Schumann’s lesser played works, the piece has an inner beauty that makes it very difficult to bring across. I believe it was Busoni who said that a musician must, during a performance, lose and find himself at the same time. From beginning to end, Lio was completely absorbed in the shifting moods of Schumann’s sound world, a man completely lost within the music, but at the same time seeing clearly the way before him. His playing of the work’s two final sections (Wie aus der Ferne; Nicht schnell) was meltingly and heartbreakingly beautiful. 

After repeated curtain calls from an enthusiastic audience, Lio rewarded us with the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, giving us a tantalizing taste of what a performance of the complete work would be like.

No amount of designer clothing or brand name runners can give young artists depth and maturity. This young pianist already possesses such qualities in abundance. In one article I read about Lio, conductor Donato Cabera, who worked with him, called him “an old soul”.

Hearing his performance yesterday, that is exactly how I would describe Kuok-Wai Lio.

Benedetto Lupo

Pianist Benedetto Lupo made his Vancouver recital debut yesterday (he had previously appeared with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra) in a daring programme of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. I say daring because even though both composers are often audience’s favourites, the works Mr. Lupo programmed could hardly have qualified as crowd pleasers.

Towards the end of his life, Johannes Brahms wrote four sets of short piano pieces. For me, these pieces are really a distillation and culmination of Brahms‘s entire career as a composer.  For me, these are some of the most intimate pieces of music Brahms ever wrote, and even a great Brahms pianist like Arthur Rubinstein, who made beautiful recordings of this music, avoided playing them in recitals. Benedetto Lupo certainly set himself a challenge when he programmed both the three pieces in Op. 117 and the seven pieces in Op. 116 in the first half of his recital programme.

On top of the varying technical challenges in each of the pieces, there is, in the piano music of Brahms, a fine balance between the horizontal and the vertical aspects of the music. In addition to moving the music forward, the artist must bring clarity to the multi-layered texture of the score. As conductor and pianist André Previn said, there is, in Brahms, always a beautiful melody struggling to get out.

Lupo lavished each of these pieces with a beautiful sound at the piano, and exhibited a fine sense of direction in the music. He managed to highlight the many layers within the music, while never making the music sound heavy or lacking in forward motion. The near-capacity audience rewarded the pianist with the greatest gift a musician could ask for – silence.

I was very grateful for Benedetto Lupo, both for programming Tchaikovsky’s Grand Piano Sonata in G Major, Op. 37, and for speaking to the audience before the performance. While I know of the work’s existence, as well as of recordings by pianists such as Richter, I was hearing the work for the first time yesterday. Lupo pointed out that the sonata was written at about the same time as the composer’s fourth symphony, and therefore the element of fate plays a large part in both works, thus, in the pianist’s own words,  the “obsessiveness” in many of the themes. He also shared with the audience the observation that the beautiful second subject in the first movement is actually based on the Dies Irae, from the Catholic Latin Mass for the Dead.

From the march-like first subject in the first movement, to the ferociously difficult final movement, the sonata could not have found a greater champion than Lupo. Under the wrong hands, this work can sound like repetitive and meandering. The young pianist played the entire work with an incredible sense of purpose and unity, and with an utter neglect for the fearsome pianistic challenges lay down by the composer. Under his hands, the logic as well as originality of this unfamiliar (to me) work by a very familiar composer became quite apparent.

In this already crowded field of outstanding pianists, Benedetto Lupo is an artist that has much to offer, and one that I would love to hear again. Lupo’s programme reminded me once again the vastness of the piano literature, and that there are still relatively unknown masterpieces in the pianistic canon waiting for both artists and audience to discover.

Revisiting Schnabel's Beethoven

I finished listening to Artur Schnabel’s recording of Beethoven’s thirty two piano sonatas. No, it was not some macho thing where I did it in one sitting. Over the last few weeks, I have been listening to one or two sonatas a day, and the experience has a revelation.

Today, when there are dozens of complete recordings of these iconic works and with pianists rushing to recording them once they reached their 18^th birthday, it is difficult to imagine the significance and impact those first recordings had.

In Harold Schonberg’s entertaining (but not always accurate) book, The Great Pianists, the writer devoted an entire chapter to Artur Schnabel (even Arthur Rubinstein had to share a chapter with his archrival and sometime friend Vladimir Horowitz), and entitled it “The Man Who Invented Beethoven.”

It took Schnabel several years, from 1931 to 1935, to record all the sonatas.  Listening to them again today, the performances are, to me, just as valid, moving and, for lack of a better word, right. I once heard the comment that piano playing today has become either anonymous or idiosyncratic. Schnabel’s playing is neither. And hearing these recordings remind me how standardized, even generic, music making has become today.

Unlike other Beethoven “specialists” of his time, pianists like Wilhelm Backhaus, Rudolf Serkin, and Wilhelm Kempff, to name just a few, pianists who carry the torch of the Germanic tradition of piano playing, Schnabel never hesitated to take chances in his playing. In many of the faster movements, Schnabel played with an absolute feeling of reckless abandon, making the performance extremely thrilling. Don’t get me wrong, Schnabel was very much interested in the details, as well as the structural integrity of the music, but he was not an artist who saw only the trees and not the forest. It is music-making that was, and is, spontaneous and very much alive. Hearing these performances, I couldn’t help but feel that Beethoven himself must have played in a similar way.

Schnabel’s Beethoven recordings were made in the days when editing was not possible, and much has been made of Schnabel’s many wrong notes in his recordings (and in his live performances as well). Schnabel had as remarkable a technique as any of his colleagues, then and now, but he was simply not interested in merely playing all the correct notes.

Note-perfect performances, a norm in our times, can be detrimental to the recreation of great music. Pianist Murray Perahia reminds us that perfection is not only an impossible but dangerous pursuit.

In Arthur Rubinstein’s memoirs, My Many Years, the pianist was quite dismissive of Schnabel’s playing. This is unfortunate, because there are remarkable similarities between the playing of these two great artists – the same generous, unforced tone at the piano, and a remarkably similar approach to the score. It is interesting to note that the recordings of Rubinstein, the Romantic pianist par-excellence, sounds more restrained, even careful, and more “Classical”, in his Beethoven recordings than Schnabel, who is remembered as a great classicist. It reminds us once again that great artists can and should never be categorized. As much as Schnabel was a thinking pianist, he was after all a product of the 19^th century. In his playing, he was not a rigid tempo player. He was never hesitant to give the music breathing space, or shifting the tempo within a movement. For me, Schnabel’s music-making is closer to that of a Fürtwangler than a Toscinini.

Today’s musicians – not just pianists - can do worse than to consult and enjoy Schnabel’s Beethoven recordings. It is not so much a matter of imitating the way he played, but it is a glimpse, a looking back, into a different approach to art, and to music.

More than just a historical document, Schnabel’s recording of the Beethoven sonatas – from the opening upward “rocket” motive in the F Minor sonata to the ethereal final pages of the C Minor, Op. 111 - is part of our heritage as musicians, not to mention some of the most exalted and inspired music-making ever put on vinyl.