Word: musicically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Boris Vladimirovich Asafiev, 64, Stalin Prizewinning Soviet musicologist and composer (his work is little known outside Russia), chairman of the powerful Union of Soviet Composers (to which Prokofiev and Shostakovich apologized last year for their "bourgeois, antidemocratic" music); in Moscow...
Wrote Hindemith later: "I had given the best that was in me [but] this best . . . was not good enough . . ." He had, however, glimpsed "the ideal of a noble music, as nearly perfect as possible, that I should some day be able to realize . . ." Since then, pudgy Composer Hindemith has stolen minutes and hours from other composition (and more lately from his duties as a professor at Yale) to perfect Marienleben. He rewrote some songs as many as five times, reworked individual passages as much as 20, strengthening and humanizing the vocal line...
Last summer, Hindemith thought he had finally approached his ideal. Manhattan's New Friends of Music asked famed Mezzo-Soprano Jennie Tourel to give the new Marienleben its first performance. Jennie, as good as they come in skill and agility of voice, took a run over the score and gulped. Even after revision, the score was the most difficult Jennie had ever seen. But, she says, she couldn't shake off the beauty of Rilke's poems and the challenge of Hindemith's powerful music. With Pianist Erich Itor Kahn, she worked on it, finally, after...
Last week, an audience in Manhattan's Town Hall got to hear the music that had become "a real labor of love" for both Mezzo Tourel and Composer Hindemith. Incandescent with devotional power and warmth, much, if not all, of Das Marienleben made far easier listening this time. Most listeners found it "noble music" indeed. Japed Jennie, tired, but flushed and excited by the music and the ovation: "Let's go back on and do it again...
...other artists who also rejected free society." Gentlemen, you are talking nonsense. No one cares about Wagner; he has been dead a few years; he has not been invited to symphony Hall; whether or not he was disgusting 100 years ago cannot possible matter to us. His music lives, has a beauty and entity of its own as it comes to us through the medium of contemporary performers...