by Peter Cates

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s finest poems is My Lost Youth, originally published in his 1858 volume, The Courtship of Miles Standish. Having been raised in Portland, the poet wrote some verses that evoked what must have been for him the then unspoiled beauty of the Pine Tree State’s city by the sea.

“Often I think of the beautiful town/That is seated by the sea;/Often in thought go up and down/The pleasant streets of that dear old town, /And my youth comes back to me./And a verse of a Lapland song/Is haunting my memory still:/’A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts’….

Longfellow powerfully poeticizes certain geographic details of the city – the harbor; “the black wharves and the slips…sea tides tossing free….Spanish sailors with bearded lips…the beauty and mystery of the ships…magic of the sea.”

The poet then evokes his boyhood memories of the city’s wonderful Deering Oaks:

“I can see the breezy dome of groves,/The shadows of Deering’s Woods;/And the friendships old and the early loves/Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves/In quiet neighborhoods.”

Being also a realist even when being a outpouring romanticist, his ability to balance these sides of himself is one of his greatest strengths as a thinker in poetic form and he writes here:

“There are things of which I may not speak;/There are dreams that cannot die;/There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,/And bring a pallor into the cheek,/And a mist before the eye.”
But Longfellow grandly concludes in a bittersweet wistful manner:

“And Deering’s Woods are fresh and fair,/And with joy that is almost pain/My heart goes back to wander there, /And among the dreams of the days that were,/I find my lost youth again.”

The poem is included in the 1989 Maine Speaks anthology.

Two recent viewing experiences:

The 1997 Suicide Kings featured a cast in which the only actor familiar to me was Christopher Walken. He also gave the only decent performance as a Mafia kingpin who is kidnapped by a group of college age idiots and held for ransom.

The film was highly recommended by movie reviewers. I disagree, having found it, except for Walken, a bore.

Another viewing experience is the TV series Madmen, which ran for seven seasons on AMC from 2007 to 2014.

It is a skillfully produced period piece drama depicting the 1960s world of Madison Avenue advertising agencies and their constant high pressure work environments, complete with constantly fascinating period details and surroundings – the dialog, clothing, cars, city streets, constant cigarette smoking indoors and outdoors, suburban gossip, adulteries, very small screen TVs, department store interiors, etc.

The acting of the entire cast is superb; and yes, two performances stand out – those of one agency CEO and founder portrayed by the great Robert Morse (1931-2022) and January Jones who gives an eloquent nuanced characterization of the wife of one of the ad men. She conveys the harrowing emotions of a woman leading a life of quiet desperation.

by Peter Cates

Rosa Ponselle
Barbara Maurel

A 1919 Columbia ten inch acoustic 78 rpm shellac has a very lovely duet of sopranos Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981) and Barbara Maurel (1889-?) performing the very well-known funeral hymn Abide With Me, which was often sung as a special number on non-funeral church Sundays by my father and three of his brothers during the GOLDEN DAYS of my little boy years growing up on China Lake’s non-swimming East Vassalboro side.

This and two other recordings of it, the megahit Victor Red Seal 1915 shellac by soprano Alma Gluck (1884-1938) and contralto Louise Homer (1871-1947); and a 1997 YouTube by Leslie Garrett with a magnificently huge choir and orchestra can be heard via YouTube.

Serge Prokofiev

Russian composer Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953) struggled for well over 20 years with his opera War and Peace and subjected it to frequent revisions, especially when cordially requested to do so by the Central Committee of the Stalinist Soviet Union; portions of it were performed a few times in both small and large halls but a full-scale production was delayed until six years after Prokofiev’s death when a 1959 Bolshoi Opera premiere occurred.

A friend, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), premiered the Cello Sonata and a couple of other pieces. By 1970, Rostropovich had also taken up conducting and, during the mid-1970s after he and his family had been forced to leave the Soviet Union because of his friendship with the exiled novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he was appointed music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC.

In 1986, Rostropovich recorded the complete War and Peace in Paris with a cast that included his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in one of the lead roles on an Erato set of four compact discs. The music is wide-ranging in its emotions with a massive orchestra augmented by extra brass, percussion and simulated artillery fire sound effects in its depiction of Napoleon’s early 1800s invasion of Russia. There are grand marches, choral numbers, moments of sublime beauty, and the colorfully abrasive rhythms and sonorities that exemplify Prokofiev’s compositional genius.

Eugene Ormandy

A 1957 Columbia Masterworks monaural LP, ML 5261, features the consistently great Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) conducting the Philadel­phia Or­chestra in a group of colorful show pieces of classical music- Smetana’s Moldau, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, and three excerpts from Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust. The record has been out of print for decades but its contents can also be heard on YouTube.

Gene Pitney

Singer Gene Pitney (1940-2006) achieved much success among adolescents with such early ‘60s rock and roll hits Town Without Pity, and Only Love Can Break A Heart. His 1966 LP Blue Gene (Musicor MM 2006) has his rough-edged but riveting renditions of Burt Bacharach’s 24 Hours From Tulsa – for me, the best item on the album with Bacharach doing the arrangement; the very high quality title song; and covers of I’ll Be Seeing You, Autumn Leaves, Answer Me My Love, Maybe You’ll Be There (a hit for Gordon Jenkins in 1948 on a Decca 78) etc.

Remington

Remington was the first inexpensive classical record label and started issuing its $2 releases in 1951. A 1952 three record set of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto was taped in Florence by names known only to opera buffs but ones who were very good – baritone Ivan Petroff as the hunch-backed, vindictive title character, soprano Orlandina Orlandini as Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda, and tenor Gino Sarri as the Duke who comes courting Gilda on the sly because he is detested by her father.

It is also an opera breathing with phenomenally beautiful arias and other set pieces and choruses and its story line gets on with it.

Erasmo Ghiglia conducted the ensemble of soloists, choristers and orchestral musicians in Florence more than 70 years ago and it too is available for listening on YouTube.

by Peter Cates

Harry S. Truman

The 33rd President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), upon being sworn in as FDR’s vice-president, was told by his mother, “Now you behave yourself.”

Like every other president since George Washington, Truman was, warts and all, a character. A highly controversial 1974 book, Plain Speaking, by Merle Miller (1919-1986) has Truman recounting a number of fascinating stories about his life.

One in particular recounts his problems with General Douglas MacArthur (Old soldiers never die, they just fade away!). It seems that MacArthur had a very high opinion of himself and treated Truman as a small town hick from Missouri. He also disregarded several orders from Truman which included talking to the press out of turn and trying to provoke a full scale war with Red China.

Truman finally fired MacArthur and the before and after repercussions have been extensively documented elsewhere. Truman commented that he fired MacArthur for insubordination, not because he was a dumb [son of a gun, censorship of the other word Truman used instead of gun because this is a family newspaper]. He also stated that if generals were jailed for stupidity, three quarters of them would already be there.

Truman’s daughter Margaret published her own biography, simply titled Harry S. Truman, in 1973 and provides some hilarious details of her parents later years in Independence, Missouri. One tells of Truman’s own laziness about mowing the lawn, instead wanting to hire a neighborhood kid, against the opposition of his wife Bess, who could be just as stubborn.

One Sunday morning, Truman told his wife he was going to mow the lawn. Bess quickly realized that people would be driving by their house on the way to church and would see the former president of the United States mowing his lawn on the Sabbath Day instead of going to church. She decided to hire a neighborhood boy.

When Truman was vice-president for a few short months, he rarely saw Roosevelt. However, a photo was taken of them having lunch at the White House; Truman later commented that Roosevelt was already showing signs of his failing health and that, when the latter lifted the cup of coffee to his mouth, he kept spilling it due to his shaking hands.

FDR kept Truman in the dark about a lot of national security issues, including the Manhattan Project, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, but Truman made the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believing that it would force Japan to surrender a whole lot sooner than otherwise.

At the 1944 Democrat Convention, Roosevelt’s decision to replace vice-president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman became known as the Second Missouri Compromise.

by Peter Cates

Charles Adams Prince

From August 1915, a ten-inch acoustically recorded shellac (Columbia A1882) presents Prince’s Band under the direction of Charles Adams Prince (1868-1937), Columbia’s highly-accomplished musical jack of all trades and a relative of former Presidents John and John Quincy Adams.

The two marches are Under a Peaceful Sky and R.B. Hall’s New Colonial March.

R.B. Hall (1858-1907) was a Maine native, having been born in Bowdoin­ham, and resided in the Pine Tree State most of his life. But his marches achieved renown in this country and, even more, in England, bandleaders and listeners there frequently believing that Hall was an English composer despite efforts to inform otherwise.

The marches are not that musically captivating but they do pass the six to seven minute duration nicely; the performances are perky, precise and imbued with conviction; and the 1915 acoustic sound is quite vivid. Interestingly, Hall’s March was used in later years by Palo Alto, California’s Stamford University as the melody for its school fighting song, whatever that means.

Both sides can be heard via Internet Archive.

Oscar Shumsky

Violinist Oscar Shumsky (1917-2000) was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish parents and started playing at 3 years old, giving his first public performance at seven with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

He was invited personally by ArturoToscanini, when he was 21, to join the NBC Symphony in 1939.

Shumsky also had a phenomenal memory. Once, after hearing violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) play a cadenza that the latter composed for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, the younger man played it by heart shortly after that concert .

During the 1960s, Shumsky collaborated with pianist Artur Balsam (1906-1994) in the complete Mozart Violin Sonatas for the mail order record label Musical Heritage Society, of which I have one LP of Sonatas K 454 and 481. The music is among this composer’s finest.

Some of these recordings can be heard via YouTube.

Shumsky also had an avid interest in photography and became a close friend of Ansel Adams.

Artur Balsam taught several summers at Blue Hill Maine’s Kneisel Hall during the 1970s.

by Peter Cates

George Raft

Having for so long equated actor George Raft (1901-1980) with his role as the Saint Valentine’s Day killer/bootlegger Spats Columbo in the 1958 comedy Some Like It Hot, I found it interesting to see him in a good guy role in the 1952 film noir Loan Shark. He portrays a just-released ex-convict Joe Gargen who simply wants to live a quiet life and mind his own business.

Through his sister’s husband, he lands a job at a tire plant.

Unfortunately, he finds out there’s a gang of loan sharkers preying on workers there and at other plants. And after his brother-in-law is killed because he tries to rally workers to fight back, Joe decides to go undercover to find the individuals behind the operation.

The script was written by Martin Rackin, who also did a superb one for 1950s The Enforcer with Humphrey Bogart. And with a very good support cast, including Dorothy Hart, Paul Stewart and John Hoyt, the movie is highly entertaining.

Black List

I am watching the 10th and very unfortunately last season of NBC’s Black List starring James Spader as Raymond Reddington, a master criminal who knows everything there is to know about every other criminal and becomes a secret informant for a secret branch of the FBI.

In its 10 seasons, Spader constantly steals the show with his wit and insights.

Elevator Music

A 1995 book entitled Elevator Music, by Joseph Lanza, is the first to provide a history of easy listening. Its practitioners in the U.S. include the orchestras of Lawrence Welk and Mantovani, the synthesizer musician Yanni, pianist Richard Clayder­man and Celtic New Age singer Enya, etc. With all due respect to individual talent, this brand of music making from them relaxes people, provides background noise and even works as a sleeping pill.

According to the author, easy listening came in with early radio and one of its inventors Lee De Forest believed “in the physical existence of a universal medium termed either, …’those silent etheric voices, which seem often less of nature than of the spirit realm.’…..Merging the language of science and fantasy, we can infer that from ether came ethereal music” – thus a jump from ethereal to elevator music that lifts the passive listener to the shining stars of the solar system and its dreamland. Enough said!

Hunter Thompson

The late writer Hunter Thompson (1937-2005) created the term Gonzo Journalism which is a form of journalism having little to do with objectivity and more to do with the subjective participation of the reporter and whatever the point of view is being conveyed by him.

In his crazily witty 1988 book A Genera­tion of Swine, Thompson not only mentions the well-known fact of Benjamin Franklin flying his kite during a thunderstorm and getting a shock but also blubbering like a baby every time a thunderstorm occurred after that experience, which just might be a fabrication of Thompson’s imagination.

Rachmaninoff

I wrote some months ago about composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s desert island melodic masterpiece, the Second Symphony, and how it has generated several distinguished recordings during the last 80 years, including four different ones by his close friend Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

A recording from September 19 and 20, 1994, and released by the BBC Music Magazine featured the late Edward Downes (1924-2009) conducting the BBC Philharmonic in a performance that glows with a consummate combination of power, beauty, rhythmic pulse and a shining array of exquisite details . And copies are available from Internet vendors such as Ebay and Amazon.

During the last two years of his life, Downes had been going both blind and deaf, and suffering from other health problems after hip replacement, totally dependent on his younger wife Joan’s caregiving.

Meanwhile she had come down with pancreatic cancer and had just a few months to live. Both believing that life under these conditions was no longer viable, they jointly terminated their lives at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland, with their son and daughter in attendance, on July 10, 2009. Downes was 85, Joan 74.

An example of classy easy listening done with good taste is a budget-priced LP on the t$2 RCA Camden label which was a subsidiary of the parent label RCA Victor. Its producer Ethel Gabriel organized a group of skilled singers known as the Living Voices who recorded numerous albums with different arrangers such as Nashville’s Chet Atkins; the superb Anita Kerr who passed away last year at 95 and whose records with her singers are consistently lovely; and several others.

A 1964 LP, Living Voices Sing Moonglow and Other Great Standards, has ten favorites from the ‘30s and ‘40s Great American Songbook – the title song, Solitude, I Get a Kick Out of You, My Funny Valentine, These Foolish Things, etc.