The 40s: The Story of a Decade (97 page)

Dr. Koussevitzky is, of course, an iron man, and he continues to present programs of the highest merit. The program of a week ago Thursday evening was of magnificent stature. Jascha Heifetz was on hand for a flawless rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. He played with incredible skill and a controlled passion that was quite overwhelming. On Saturday evening, Dr. Koussevitzky, who—for me, at least—is always somewhat inspired, was more inspired than usual. He gave us first
a delightful reading of Roussel’s Suite in F, and then Milhaud’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra No. 1, with Gregor Piatigorsky as soloist. The Milhaud is at once twinkly and profound, and in the hands of Piatigorsky it became a prize of lasting beauty. Dr. Koussevitzky closed the program with a truly monumental presentation of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.” Nothing that Mahler wished to say in this musical poem of life and death was left unsaid by the orchestra or by David Lloyd, the tenor, or by Janice Moudry, the contralto. Miss Moudry’s voice that evening was a voice possessed, and there was in it an unforgettable quality of time past and time to come. Even the camera fiends listened to her, and held off taking their pictures until she was finished.

AUGUST 20, 1949 (ON BENJAMIN BRITTEN)

A
s it happens, I do not hold a membership card in the Benjamin Britten cult, but I am about to apply for one as a result of hearing Britten’s opera
Albert Herring
, presented for the first time in this country a week ago Monday by the Opera Department of the Berkshire Music Center, at Tanglewood. Britten and his librettist, Eric Crozier, deserve some sort of words-and-music Croix de Guerre. For one thing, we are confronted with a believable story, involving believable people. There isn’t an entombed and lovesick Egyptian princess, a tubercular bohemian, or a down-at-the-heels and hairy demigod on the premises. The story, as simple and lovely as a nursery tale, takes place in the East Suffolk village of Loxford at the turn of the century. Loxford has always been a happy, easygoing place, where the boys go out with the girls and occasionally get home a little late and slightly rumpled, but in the eyes of the town’s better element—the local aristocratic dowager, the mayor, the vicar, the leading merchant, the superintendent of police—it is rapidly becoming more wicked than Sodom, Gomorrah, Marseille, and Los Angeles combined. “Something must be done!” cries the mayor. “Strong measures are essential
now
!” shouts the vicar. “Shocking business! I won’t have it!” shrieks the dowager. The town worthies, who are about to choose a May Queen, find themselves completely stumped. No local
girl is considered sufficiently pure. For example, one candidate, Winifred Brown, “went with her cousin from Kent for a trip in a dogcart one Sunday in Lent.” Edith Chase? “Much too flighty. When the postman called one day, she opened the door in her nightie!” And so it goes, through every girl in town. In desperation, the committee decides to choose a May King, and for this dubious honor they select one Albert Herring, a twenty-two-year-old sissy greengrocer, who works for his mama, minds his parsnips, and never, never goes out with the girls. The committee offers him twenty-five pounds, a banquet, and a wreath of orange blossoms. Albert has natural misgivings, but Mama, a harridan, is thrilled beyond calculation and forces him to accept the role. To make a short story even shorter (Crozier, by the way, adapted his plot from de Maupassant’s “Le Rosier de Mme. Husson”), Albert gets quietly potted at the banquet when a rakish butcher puts rum in his lemonade, and subsequently disappears on a stolen bicycle, headed for nearby pubs. Next morning, his orange-blossom wreath is found on the road, covered with mud and crushed, apparently by a cart. It is generally assumed that the dear boy has passed to his virtuous reward, and there is wide-spread lamentation. Albert turns up, of course, quite hung over and uncommonly surly, and tells his mother off. He has become, in the common phrase, a man.

Well, there’s the plot. I have laid stress upon it because Britten, in his most sardonic, witty, and felicitous manner, has laid stress upon it. His score is devotedly attached to the story. He has written, truly, an opera. He has created musically a strikingly engaging village, and he has musically delineated each character with astonishing clarity. In
Albert Herring
, words and music are as one, and the result is triumphant. The night I heard the opera (there were a number of different singers the following night), practically all hands seemed eminently suited to their parts. I was particularly impressed with David Lloyd, the Herring; Janet Southwick, a proper schoolteacher; Eleanor Davis, the dreadful mama; and James Pease, the vicar. Mr. Pease maintained throughout the evening an air of pained piety that was a complete delight, and his voice struck me as being nothing short of extraordinary. My only quarrel would be with Ellen Faull, as Lady Billows, the dowager; she demonstrated a tendency to overshadow her excellent singing with some rather poor acting. Boris Goldovsky conducted the orchestra and, with Sarah Caldwell, directed the enterprise, and he should be given several echoing cheers.

WINTHROP SARGEANT

DECEMBER 24, 1949

A
s a musical instrument, the violin has its limitations. To begin with, it is incomplete. Except in a handful of musical works, like the Bach solo-violin sonatas, it needs an orchestra or, at the very least, a piano to back it up. The number of great concertos written for it hardly exceeds a dozen, and the number of great sonatas in which it shares honors with the piano or the harpsichord is not very much bigger. It is, moreover, one of the most awkward of all musical instruments, in that its bow is an unevenly balanced affair that, unless firmly controlled, plays louder at the heel than it does at the point, and hence has a tendency to distort, with all sorts of inappropriate swoops and swells, the niceties of musical phrasing. A good violinist (and by this I mean a musical violinist) should be judged to a large extent, I believe, by the skill with which he defeats this tendency and forces his instrument to conform to the principles of fine melodic style. Unfortunately, there are very few good violinists.

In general, our particular generation of violin playing has been dominated by what might be called the glamour violinist. I use this term because to me it conveys the quality of surface finish (comparable to the faultless makeup of the female movie star) that is characteristic of the type. Mr. Heifetz, Mr. Elman, and Mr. Milstein, for example, have developed luscious tone and accurate agility of the left hand to a point of perfection probably unmatched in the history of the instrument. Yet I do not find them interesting violinists. The reason is that, for all their cosmetic glitter, they almost never interpret music with a real understanding of its deeper dramatic and emotional content. They shine magnificently in showy concertos by such composers as Tchaikovsky and Glazunov, but the purity and subtlety of style required in a simple Mozart sonata seem to be beyond them. There exist, of course, plenty of unglamorous but musically sensitive violinists, many of whom are members of string quartets, concertmasters of symphony orchestras, and so on. The trouble with these men is that they lack the individuality, dash, and brilliance of
the true virtuoso. In surveying the subject of contemporary performance on stringed instruments, one is led to the conclusion that the only entirely satisfying artist in the field is not a violinist but the cellist Pablo Casals.

All this is by way of a preamble to a discussion of Joseph Szigeti’s performance, with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony last Thursday night, of the Alban Berg Concerto for Violin and Orchestra and the Bach G-Minor Concerto. Mr. Szigeti is not a glamour violinist. He is a large man who crouches over his violin, and he occasionally draws from it sounds that scratch and whistle. He lacks the formidable and immaculate polish of Mr. Heifetz. But he is, despite his mechanical faults, my favorite violinist. He never allows the unwieldiness of the bow to interfere with the justness of his phrasing. He never wallows in beautiful tone for the sake of beautiful tone. He is always intent on communicating the inner substance of the music he interprets, and he accomplishes this task with the most scrupulous regard for emphasis and other subtleties of melodic contour. When listening to him, one can forget that one is listening to a violin and listen to the music.