Giuseppe Verdi

by Peter Cates

Verdi

Rigoletto

Walter Goehr conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Chorus and soloists; The Opera Society, Inc.; M111-OP9; 2 ten-inch lps, recorded early-to-mid ‘50s.

Verdi’s Rigoletto, along with Aida, and La Traviata, are arguably his three most popular operas. It is also the only opera I have seen in any Met productions, once in their 1966 touring appearance at Cony High School, locally in Augusta, and in 2007 at the Lincoln Center stage in New York City (The pair of $25 tickets my daughter purchased had us sitting in the top row of the highest balcony where we could touch the ceiling standing up and everybody on the stage below were tiny ants.).

It received its 1851 world premiere in Venice and was composed in 40 days. The plot involves a depraved womanizer, the Duke of Mantua; his evil court jester, Rigoletto; and Gilda, the one decent person in this trio. A summary of the original Victor Hugo story line can be easily googled and is classic operatic melodrama and tragedy. The musical numbers include the immortal Questa o Quella and La Donna e Mobile for the Duke of Mantua tenor and the exquisite Caro Nome for Gilda’s soprano.

Soprano Hedda Heusser and tenor Paul Conrad are far from household names but they sang beautifully, and the underrated conductor, Walter Goehr, led a very good performance. The Opera Society, Musical Masterpiece Society and its parent label Concert Hall were mail order record labels, along with another subsidiary Jazztone, and I have found sizable numbers of their releases at yard sales and thrift shops.

I am not sure if this performance is on YouTube but others are, for those interested listeners. It is also a very good beginner opera for the adventurous.

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I started watching Netflix’s Narco this past weekend and am already on episode eight of the first season. The series dramatizes the career of the evil Pedro Escobar (1949-1993) whose criminal empire reigned over Columbia with terror until his just death in 1993 and of a fictitious DEA agent, Steve Murphy, whose narration provides historical context. Wagner Moura’s Escobar and Boyd Holbrooke’s Murphy are very well acted with a superb supporting cast, documentary footage of the last 50 years is interspersed and the production logistics are pulled off magnificently.

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I recently posted a selection by a native poet, Grenville Mellen. Here are the four quite nicely worded opening lines of his impassioned The True Glory of America:

“Italia’s vales and fountains,
Though beautiful ye be,
I love my soaring mountains
And forests more than ye.”

Guido Cantelli

by Peter Cates

Felix Weingartner

Felix Weingartner

Felix Weingartner (1863-1942) was the first conductor to record all nine Beethoven Symphonies, and the four Brahms. He was friends with Liszt, Wagner and Brahms; was music director of the Vienna Philharmonic for over 20 years; composed large amounts of his own music; and taught and wrote about conducting and other musical and non-musical subjects, having a special interest in astrology, the occult and theater. He guest-conducted extensively to the U.S., Soviet Russia and Japan. Finally, he was married five times.

His most distinctive quality as a conductor was the naturalness of it; one felt as though he/she were hearing music as the composer wished it to be heard. I recently listened to a re-issued LP of his very good 1938 London Philharmonic performance of the Brahms 3rd Symphony, a piece that I recommend as the best one of the four for listeners experiencing Brahms for the first time. And this recording and sizable numbers of the others can be heard on YouTube.

Guido Cantelli

Guido Cantelli (1920-1956) was drafted into the Italian army, when it was forced to fight alongside the Germans against the allies during World War II. He refused to, out of a matter of conscience, and thrown into a labor camp; by pretending to be sick, he managed to escape and worked as a bank teller with forged papers until the war’s end.
Having already showing incredible promise before as a pianist – he was in a jazz combo for a while – and a conductor, he started again doing concerts and opera at various Italian venues, such as the La Scala Opera House in Milan, where Arturo Toscanini spotted the young man and was so impressed that he took him under his wing like a long-lost son and gave him concerts and recording dates in New York with the NBC Symphony.

As a conductor, he had a phenomenally high level of inspiration, passion, elegance and precision, much like Toscanini, Reiner and Szell and yet had his own individuality in terms of an ear for the most wondrous hidden sonorities in whatever piece he was interpreting. I am now listening to a superb 1954 recording of Debussy’s La Mer, a piece in three sections that evokes the movements of the sea. It can be accessed on YouTube by budget-minded music lovers who are not collectors, unlike me.

On November 24, 1956, just one week after he was appointed music director at La Scala, Guido Cantelli was killed in a plane crash just after taking off from Paris’s Orly Airport on his way to New York to conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. He was only 36 and left behind a wife and baby son. The 89-year-old Toscanini was never told of his death and passed away of a stroke on January 16, 1957, less than two months later.

Henry David Thoreau

by Peter Cates

American Country Classics

A Columbia Musical Treasury
6P 7157, six LPs, released 1980.

Columbia Musical Treasury was an offshoot of the Columbia Record Club, later known as Columbia House, and it released numerous, moderately-priced record sets of best-selling artists, such as Percy Faith, Dionne Warwick, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or musical genres like classical, easy listening, gospel, big band and country and western, the last category fitting the above title in a truly authentic manner.

American Country Classics contains 60 selections that span from Roy Acuff’s 1936 hit, Wabash Cannonball to harmonica virtuoso Charlie McCoy’s 1972 Orange Blossom Special (McCoy is the only one of all the contributing artists still living, at 79.). It includes the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower, Red Foley’s Old Shep, Hank Thompson’s Wild Side of Life, with Kitty Wells’s rebuttal, It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels, Margaret Whiting’s and Jimmy Wakely’s Slipping Around, and Jean Shepherd’s A Satisfied Mind.

There are several gems that may have been hits in their day but I was hearing them for the first time. The lesser known covers of certain classic songs stick out: Bob Atcher’s I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes, Jenny Lou Carson’s Jealous Heart, the Pinetoppers Mockin’ Bird Hill, and Slim Whitman’s Indian Love Call, which is light years different from Nelson Eddy and Jeannette Macdonald’s old Victor 78. And selected first timers such as the Flatt and Scruggs Cabin on the Hill, Merle Travis’s So Round So Firm So Fully Packed, and Carson J. Robison’s Life Just Gets Tee-Jus, Don’t It? worked their spell.

This collection and the Smithsonian one of Classic Country Recordings both filled huge gaps in documenting an important musical legacy of our nation’s history.

Country legend Hank Williams (1923-1953) made an astute comment about Roy Acuff (1903-1992), whom Williams and many others considered the father of country music, during a 1952 interview: “He’s the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn’t worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.”

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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), of Walden fame, wrote the following passage about his hike through the Maine wilderness during the 1840s:

“Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable ‘Nature’, or whatever else men called it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over ‘Burnt Lands,’ burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump ……When I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and unhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there…. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night…..Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific- not this Mother Earth that we have heard of.”

E. A. Robinson

by Peter Cates

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Towards the end of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s two years at Harvard (ones during which he took several literature courses, enjoyed them thoroughly and was happy to get Bs with no ambition for higher grades at all), the poet wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek June 21, 1893, letter to his friend, Harry Smith : “I suppose this is the last letter I shall ever write you from Harvard. The thought seems a little queer but it cannot be otherwise. I try to imagine the state my mind would be in had I never come here but I cannot. I feel that I have got comparatively little from my two years but still more than I could get in Gardiner if I lived a century.”

Robinson regarded his childhood in Gardiner, Maine, as, at best, hellish boredom and emotional deprivation but, because, his father had died the previous year, he felt it was no longer feasible to attend Harvard and instead returned to the family homestead, trying unsuccessfully to be a farmer, and working on his writing.

However, in 1896, he moved to New York City, lived as a gentleman pauper, developed his creativity further while cultivating literary and artistic friendships, and paid for the publication of his first book, which sold very few copies. After a few more years of struggle, he completed a second volume which was better received by the public and read by President Theodore Roosevelt who liked it, and gave Robinson a position in the New York State Customs Office, with a salary of $2,000 a year and minimal responsibility so he could concentrate on his writing .

Robinson slowly but surely achieved fame, won three Pulitzer Prizes for literature and was the consummate gentleman to women, who fell in love with him but were warmly rebuffed for their efforts. He remained a confirmed bachelor until his death, at 65, from cancer in 1935.

A much read favorite poem of mine is Mr. Flood’s Party, a heart-rending depiction of loneliness during which an old man is getting drunk, possibly on New Year’s Eve, at his farm a few miles from the village where he has lived all his life; all those dear to him have died and the current crop of citizens do not acknowledge his existence.

He is partying with himself for company:

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.’ He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: ‘Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.’

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.

The remaining four stanzas can be read here.

Another writer who lived in Gardiner, Laura E. Richards (1850-1943) was a very close friend of Robinson’s, as was the American artist, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885-1968), who may have been the poet’s closest woman friend during his last 15 years and did paintings commemorating his memory.

A Robinson quote: “Life is the game that must be played.”

by Peter Cates

Stanley and Macdonough

O Morning Land

recorded June 8, 1908; side 2, the Haydn Quartet – God Be With You Till We Meet Again, recorded June 12, 1905. Victor Record, 16399, ten-inch shellac, acoustically recorded 78.

Frank Stanley

Baritone Frank Stanley (1868-1910), who died of pleurisy at the age of 41, duetted with tenor Harry Macdonough (1871-1931) on the hymn, O Morning Land. Both men recorded a number of sides during the acoustic years, and they had magnificent voices, Macdon­ough’s tenor having astonishing high notes that would have given his younger, more well-known contemporaries, Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) and John McCormack (1884-1945), some competition.

Side 2’s Haydn Quartet consisted of four singers who founded the group in 1896. By 1905, one singer had been replaced and the line-up for the recording session consisted of tenors John H. Bieling (1869-1948) and Macdonough, baritone S.H. Dudley (1864-1947) and bass William F. Hooley (1861-1918). The well-known hymn, God Be With You, was given the kind of well-honed performance that has made records of the Quartet highly prized collector’s items to the present time.

Harry Macdonough

In researching old 78s, I have found out that the same catalog numbers on records were often used for different takes of the same selections, sometimes a different selection and different artists. The original wax or metal masters would get worn out from copying discs and new recordings would be necessary. For example, one collector of old John McCormack 78s told me that McCormack recorded the same title three different times over a ten-year period for the same Victor catalog number. The particular number of the take would have a tiny inscription inside the groove between the playing surface of the record and the pasted label. One of the takes was a priceless rarity while the other two were relatively easy to find.

The online 78 research database on Google mentions my record as having two different releases with inscription numbers to match. The one on my copy, 4366, was for the first takes, while a different quartet, the Orpheum, was utilized for the re-recordings.