Countdown to Planyavsky at MIT (18 days)

Peter Planyavsky with the author (Brookline, March 9, 2004). Seems odd that the Austrian is drinking the chianti and the Italian is drinking the Weizenbier!

In March, 2004, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Brookline, MA (where I was then Music Director), I organized "HeillerFest," a week-long festival commemorating the 25th anniversary of the death of the great Anton Heiller. Naturally, a "HeillerFest" would not have been complete with Heiller's star pupil, close friend, and future biographer, Peter Planyavsky. The following is an excerpt from an article that I wrote for the July, 2004, issue of The Diapason. The excerpt describes the opening event, a Choral Evensong which I personally tailored with the sole purpose of showing off Planyavsky's improvisational gifts.

"There are two types of performers: those who emit electricity, intensity, and sometimes neurosis, for whom every piece seems a matter of life or death (Caruso, Horowitz, Heifetz); and those who exude mental and physical health, for whom each pieces feels like the first of many encores (Gigli, Rubinstein, Kreisler). Peter Planyavsky is of the second type. The 75-minute Evensong service seemed short. One felt that another twenty-five improvisations could have fallen from his sleeve without any detectable effort.

"There is something Beethovenian about Planyavsky, a certain Viennese ruggedness. It snowed as we walked down St. Paul Street together, yet he seemed unconcerned about his photocopied prelude and postlude which he held, uncovered, under his arm. "In Vienna I always walk around like this, "he explained. He spent not much more than an hour at the Bozeman organ, an eclectic instrument on which the stop names are on plaques next to the stop knobs. I myself occasionally pull the wrong stop! Not only did he never do that, but he had a total comprehension of the organ's tonal resources, as if he already knew how every combination would or wouldn't work.

"I knew firsthand of Planyavsky's brilliance as a liturgical improviser, and I designed the Evensong around it. No trite compline hymns for him; I chose Aus tiefer Not and O Welt, ich muß dich lassen. And while the prayerbook rubric permits a "moment of silence" before the Mag and the Nunc, respectively, I translated "moment of silence" as "three-to-five-minute organ improvisation." The individual improvisations complemented and contrasted each other: the simple effectiveness of his bicinium on Le Cantique de Siméon; the color and fluid virtuosity of his Magnificat; the rich, impenitently German-Romantic O Welt; and so on. Each improvisation seemed to enhance the others." (From The Diapason, July 2004, p. 14)

Peter Planyavsky plays an organ recital at Kresge Auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on Friday, January 27 at 8 p.m. Admission for this grand event is FREE.

Greatest Moments of Singing VI

I couldn't resist but share another supreme example of Caruso in a Verdi ensemble. Here is "Solenne in quest'ora" from La forza del destino. It was recorded in 1906 -- the year some say was Caruso's prime:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntGizYQjht8

The baritone was Antonio Scotti -- Caruso's friend, colleague, and compatriot (Scotti was also Neapolitan). It is said that Scotti was an invaluable advisor to Caruso in many matters of savoir faire. (Caruso, after all, came from peasant stock.)

Greatest Moments of Singing V

Caruso at his utterly glorious best: the famous trio from Verdi's I Lombardi with Frances Alda and Marcel Journet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3578_SBlxo

I love hearing Caruso in ensembles. What a great collaborative musician he was! Then, of course, that was that voice ...

Greatest Moments of Singing IV

Then you had a guy named Caruso ...

I've heard it said that 1906 was Caruso's "prime." Don't know if it's true, but here in any case is the 1906 recording of Tosti's beloved Ideale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w85mS_Z8OAQ

The Italian (& Hungarian) sides of Joe Maneri

Friends,

I know many of you have been waiting for a (to use one of Joe's favorite adjectives) heavy-duty post from me. Certainly the man whom I said was both "one of the greatest musicians of our time" and "like a father to me" was someone about whom I would have something to say.

Well, I still can't bring myself to write it.

A book could, and should, and will, will written about him. Several, I'm sure. But to reduce him to one blog post? It would be easier to arrange a ten-minute piano work entitled, "Highlights from Beethoven's Last Five Piano Sonatas."

I did, however, find a journal entry that I wrote several months back. It is not even the tip of the iceberg -- it is a snowflake on top of the tip of the iceberg. Still, I think begins to hint at the immensity of my feelings:

3 April 2009

Today was the day that I learned that Joe had a heart attack two weeks ago, and now has congestive heart failure. So it's only natural that I wanted to get some thoughts on paper.

I'm sure I will write something about Joe. And I'm sure it will be viewed by some as a student's adulation for his teacher, something not "impartial."

Well, I will tell you this:

If you went to the home of the greatest Italian chef who ever lived, and you tasted the greatest ravioli ever created by the hand of mankind, and if your reaction was, "Those ravioli are pretty good," that is not impartiality. That is inaccuracy.

If I use superlatives to describe Joe, it shows that he must be very great. If he were not very great, why would I want to write about him? And why would I write with superlatives if he were "normal"?

For to state that "Joe Maneri was within the range of normal" would be an inaccuracy. He was well beyond the range of normal. The only honest thing is to describe a great man with great terms. If through my writing the subject emerges as someone "great," that is not my fault. I am merely reporting a fact.

Joe and I spent many hours -- who knows how many? -- listening to and talking about Italian opera and song. Though Joe had a thoroughly German training with Josef Schmid (1890-1969), his heart and his upbringing were equally thoroughly Italian. At the time it was the furthest thing from my mind that I was "influencing him" in any way. I was simply sharing, and anyone who knew him knew that he was a limitlessly generous man who had a gift for drawing the loves and passions out of those around him. It was natural for his students and friends to share what was in their hearts.

Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana was an opera known and loved by countless Sicilians of Joe's parents' generation. Though many musicians and musicologists persist in thinking of this work as being "crude" and, in the worst sense of the word, "pesanty," Joe found much sophistication in it. I can still hear Joe singing the cello theme that opens Scene II -- that heart-breaking F# minor melody. There is a spot where Mascagni uses an F major 6/4 chord, with the cellos playing an open C. Quite a distant chord in F# minor. Joe told me, "When I first played that chord, I cried."

I had trouble holding back the tears when, following Joe's funeral, I was at the Maneri home, seated at the Knabe piano that used to be his mother's, with the old yellowed score of Cavalleria on the rack. I couldn't bring myself to play Scene II, but I played the Prelude. There are no words for the sadness I felt. I think I was sad in particular because I realized, at that moment, how sophisticated that music really is. Joe was right all along, yet the world was years from realizing it. The story of his life.

I often brought CDs of Caruso and Gigli, singing Verdi, Puccini, and of course Mascagni, but also Tosti. Many times did I play Tosti for Joe on one or another of the various pianos in the Maneri residence. On one of these occasions, Joe said to me, "You know, I have to tell you, I think that Paolo Tosti is really my favorite composer."

Joe once paid me a compliment that, at the time, I didn't think I deserved in the slightest way. Today, I think there may have been some truth in it. He said, "You've influenced my teaching. Before my teaching was too German. But because of you, I put more of the Italian in there."

Another composer whom Joe loved in a way that few people realized was Franz Liszt.

Liszt was a lot like Joe. Liszt had a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of all other music and musicians of his time. Liszt encouraged the musicians around him and treated them with the utmost generosity. Liszt pushed tonality ten or twenty years before the rest of the musical world as a whole started pushing it. Liszt plunged depths of spirituality and profundity, yet his detractors insisted he was "posing." All of that could be said about Dr. Maneri.

Once, I had a beautiful print made of Liszt seated at the piano (see image) and had it professionally framed. I don't remember the occasion; Joe's birthday, maybe? Anyhow, when he saw it, he went wild! He looked at it as if to know everything that Liszt was thinking at the time of the photo. It would be a little cliché to say that "it was like Joe knew him." What it was was: Joe really related to him. And he got very excited every time we talked about him.

Once, in class, Joe unexpectedly asked me to go to the piano and sightread (!) several of Liszt's late, mysterious piano works (Nuages Gris and one or two others). These works profoundly moved and fascinated Joe. After all, they were, in the best sense of the phrase, "ahead of their time."

I knew Joe since I was eight or nine years old, before he became my teacher. In September of 1989, during Orientation Week at the conservatory, many of the teachers gave a please-take-my-class demonstration. I could write a small book just about the demonstration that Joe gave that day! But I will mention only one thing which relates to the discussion about "ahead of one's time."

One very misunderstood aspect of Joe was his total humility, which to many seemed to be total arrogance. It wasn't. For instance, once in class Joe said (verbatim), "I'm so amazing it's scary, and I say that with the deepest humility." There wasn't a shred of arrogance in that statement. Joe gave every nanogram of credit, for every great thing inside him, to the Lord. If you knew him, you understood the simplicity and honesty of such statements.

Anyhow, here we were in September of '89 during Orientation Week. Joe's telling us the story of something that happened only a week before. He was cleaning out his swimming pool, and he combined chlorine with something else, and he couldn't breathe, and Sonja had to rush him to the hospital, and it took five hours for them to get him to breathe normally again. Joe then said -- and he couldn't say it without laughing -- "Had I died, ha ha ha, had I ha ha ha died, it would have set the world back 50 years."

That, too, was a humble statement. Joe was merely stating the truth.

Shakespeare is my therapist III

"And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."
(As You Like It)

I have a love-hate relationship with the city. Being within striking distance of people and institutions is so essential for one's "career." Yet the city discourages the fostering of the very skill or product that said career is banking on.

Take a singer. (It took all my restraint not to append the word "Please" thereafter. For I know singers. But in any case, take a singer.) Singer goes to Manhattan, in order to "make it big." To make it big doing what? Singing. And what are the elements of good singing? Breathing. Relaxation. A true sympathy with the emotions of the music. And so forth. Well, how the hell are you supposed to breathe in Manhattan? There are more poisonous gases in the air than oxygen. Relaxation? No comment. And sympathy for emotions? I'm going to suggest that Manhattan is not the ideal place on earth to develop that commodity.

Yet Manhattan is the place where the famous voice teacher is, the one who is going to reveal to you the secrets of Caruso and Nellie Melba and Adelina Patti and Gigli. The teacher who, for your convenience, accepts all major credit cards. (I'm not joking. There are voice teachers in New York who accept credit cards. In Boston there are lawyers who still don't accept credit cards!)

But what if that teacher does not keep as many secrets as you think? What if there are aspects of Caruso's art that are revealed only in the rural suburbs of Naples? The sound of the dialect being spoken ... the smells and tastes of the food ... the attitudes ... and most importantly, that feeling in the air -- that certain something that makes you feel like making music? I felt it the first day I was in the province of Naples. It's like a chemical in the air that just doesn't exist in other areas of the world.

But what about the important and influential managers back in New York? But if you're going to market something, that something has to be of a certain quality to start with, or else why market it? That quality is obtained by exposure to "tongues," "books," "sermons," and "good." What if those four things are more plentiful in the country?

Now that the Internet is becoming more diffuse, we are becoming a society that goes beyond what I dreamt of in the early 90s, before the discovery of Cyberspace. I dreamt that if I could get my career to the point that I could live off of royalties, all I'd need was an address. That address could be in a village in Sicily as easily as in Manhattan. But how do you accrue such royalties? Well, today there is a whole other stratosphere of possibility: living in Sicily and building a career while you're there. With CIC I correspond with composers in countries all over the world, most of whom I have never even met. With a computer and Internet access, it is all possible. There's nothing I've ever done with CIC that I could not have done in an Alpine village.

The difference is in the quality of my product. When I smell the aromas of smoked Würst'l wafting through the Alpine air, my mood to make music is twice what it is here. When I see the mountains reflected in the lake, so much music rushes through my head that I could never write down all of it. These are the truths of music, not the hypocrasies of Conservatory professors perpetuated from their professors and the professors before them. I live in the city not to receive these truths but to market them. But if the Internet could permit me to do both from the same location ...

The most idyllic place I have ever played was neither in the south of Italy nor in the Austrian Alps. It was Altenberg, about a half-hour from Cologne. Downtown Cologne resembles Downtown Boston in so many ways. Modern. Dirty. Depressing. Sure, there is that small matter of the Kölner Dom. But the day I visited it, the Cathedral was so infected by "public haunt" -- and by seminarians holding plates that said, "Für den Dom" -- that I doubt a moment's feeling of prayerfulness would have been possible there.

But travel 17 kilometers -- 10.5 miles -- 25 minutes by car -- and you are in Odenthal. You are in the middle of a postcard. Trees all around. The babbling brook. The castle in the hill. You couldn't hope to be anywhere more beautiful on Planet Earth. And in the northern part of Odenthal is a section called Altenberg, where there is a High Gothic cathedral -- right there amidst the trees! (See the photo if you don't believe me.)

One of the best parts of an organ tour is when they give you the key to the church, and you're all alone -- you, the organ, and the music that you're free to make on it. Being closed up in that particular Cathedral, the moonlight seemed to blend with the tones of the four-manual Klais organ. There were no people around to disturb it -- no clergy to cry about money, no parishioners to complain that the hymn was too loud or too soft or too fast or too slow or too overdone or too unfamiliar. Take away people and you have the silence of truth. Add people and you have the white noise of fiction.

During my practice breaks, I walked to Odenthal and was part of the postcard. In America you walk out of the church, and there's K-Mart.

So is there a way to learn the truths of music in this type of environment and also make the connections in order to market the music created from these truths? With a good laptop, perhaps so.