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Category Archive: The Short Version

The Short Version: Not Impressed

Posted at 3:04 PM on September 1, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The same 1853 walking tour that brought young Johannes Brahms to Robert Schumann's door, also took him to Weimar for a meet and greet with an even greater star of the day. Like any self-respecting 20-year old, Brahms refused to be struck.

The Short Version: A Fraud!

Posted at 12:38 PM on August 24, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Lee De Forest


Briefly noting the birthday, on August 26, of an American inventor whose most familiar contributions helped make Classical MPR (and everything else on the radio) possible. Once though, he was considered something of a high-tech snake oil salesman —whose electronic elixir turned out to be everything he claimed.


The Short Version: Kickin' Back

Posted at 1:54 PM on July 25, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Something in the concept of vacation was lost in translation for a small, portly but energetic German composer of the 19th century. The idea of kickin' back always seemed to work out as kickin' it up a notch.

Listen

The Short Version: Unfinished

Posted at 4:00 PM on July 19, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Plenty to mourn about this prodigious short-lived talent. He was short-changed in years. We're short-changed in melodies that never were. But, strangely, that patina of poignancy need not apply to the famous, eponymous symbol of the young man's unfinished business.


The Short Version: Tour

Posted at 12:55 PM on July 11, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

When it started more than a hundred years ago it measured less than 500 kilometers. Today, it's more than 3600 kilometers (and three weeks) long. A "cinematographe," or two, from the early days of the Tour.


The Short Version: Lincoln

Posted at 6:00 PM on July 7, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

An introduction to one of the most versatile and accomplished figures in American arts & letters. Introduction because despite his accomplishments, it's very possible you've never heard of him. Yet, for Lincoln Kirstein, what's now a major cultural institution was a just college club. And the first of a series of essential ballet scores by Aaron Copland? His idea.

The Short Version: Making the Mummy Dance

Posted at 6:24 PM on June 15, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Credit the late Thomas Hoving for the line. As director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was part of his job, he said, to breathe life into antiquities, to make the mummies dance. A Polish pianist developed a similar sense of mission when her keyboard interests turned decidedly old-school.


The Short Version: Charity

Posted at 9:15 AM on June 14, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

For Bela Bartok in America, illness and obscurity equaled poverty. A champion of new music gave him work and a paycheck, but expected nothing of particular value.

The Short Version: Trouble Tandem

Posted at 10:06 PM on June 6, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

A master symphonist, staring mortality in the face, pares back his forces.

The Short Version: Third Billing

Posted at 11:29 AM on June 1, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Mozart was down--financially, professionally--in the last year of his life, but not out. For him, a young man with immense talent, time was on his side. His current straits would become the briefest of dips in the market. But we, who can see the past's future, have a different perspective, and sigh for what's ahead.



The Short Version: Humorous

Posted at 7:53 PM on May 26, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Long ago, your health and behavior were, according to the most advanced science, dictated by four humors, the sources of which included blood and bile. But I can never keep black bile and yellow bile straight, and who would want to (not to mention phlegm; as Joe Pesci might say, "Fuggedaboutit!")? But with the help of Carl Nielsen, as well as Mr. Pesci, here are some vivid humorous associations, to make medieval diagnosticians of us all.

The Short Version: Apocryphal

Posted at 11:03 AM on May 23, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: Ludwig van Beethoven, The Short Version

Too well-made for hard-headed reality, they may not in fact have happened as reported. But apocrypha are parables, saying something truthful without necessarily being true.



The Short Version: Essential

Posted at 8:00 AM on May 20, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

He lived before we applied the epithet Genius to musicians of stratospheric talent. We wait on that one for Mozart's legacy, and Beethoven's. He labored in backwaters for petty princes and church fathers. So his personality seems less vivid to us than the anecdote-rich lives of Spendthrift and Storm-Tossed. Yet he remains apart, a kind of bedrock. A few details about this essential artist.


The Short Version: A Nicotine Stain on His Index Finger

Posted at 5:09 PM on May 16, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The boy from Lucca came from a long line of musicians. A lot was expected of him, but not nearly as much as he delivered. Along the way, he passed through the "just a kid" phase, combining keyboard wizardry with petty larceny. One early habit, though, common to millions, he would indulge till his dying day.


The Short Version: Close Call

Posted at 8:00 AM on May 13, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

How many irreplaceable imaginations, unknown and therefore unmourned, have been erased by the political and military vagaries of their times? By way of evasive answer, meet one of the luckier ones, well-known and therefore unmourned, the products of whose imagination are etched, indelibly, in ours.

The Short Version: Fish 'n Chips

Posted at 6:00 AM on May 10, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

A snapshot of hard times against a backdrop of dreams, as the industrial revolution geared up.


The Short Version: The Blue Train

Posted at 8:00 AM on May 6, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The men who did the fighting in France--1914-18--may have been glad enough to escape the Continent. But among civilians, the four war-quarantine on the British home front created a mania for travel, preferably to hot places.

The Short Version: Thrashed

Posted at 12:12 PM on May 2, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Joseph Haydn was a genial fellow, almost to a fault. He bore a hundred indignities, chief among them his employer's organizational chart, which ranked him on a level with the kitchen staff. But you have to wonder if there aren't limits even to a good man's good humor. Because nobody likes to hear that the ends justify the means, when the means hurt like the dickens.



The Short Version: Bavarian Idol

Posted at 11:00 AM on April 28, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Anton Bruckner was earnest, pious, ingenuous, and capable of slavish devotion to those he admired. But one above all did he most desire to serve, glorify, flatter, be noticed by.

The Short Version: Domestic Scene, chez Heartbreak

Posted at 12:43 PM on April 26, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

In the composer's conception the opera was good, in early performance a flop, in posterity one of the greatest. But death intervened between steps two and three, left him bewildered and believing that his greatest achievement, wasn't. The soldier from Seville wasn't the only one unmanned by the girl in the tobacco factory.

The Short Version: Smoke and Fog

Posted at 9:30 AM on April 22, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The official observance of Earth Day began in 1970. But an ancient city with pollution problems noted in the 13th century--and which coined the word long associated with murky L.A. skies--says: what took you so long?


The Short Version: Advice

Posted at 4:44 PM on April 15, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The possible reactions of listeners to musicians are myriad: delight, disdain, astonishment, awe, disappointment. But, active concern about divine retribution?

The Short Version: Ox

Posted at 11:47 AM on April 14, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

A stint in the French diplomatic corps landed Darius Milhaud in Brazil during World War I. His music bore a slight Portuguese accent ever after. But the more famous his works became the more their language bred unauthorized etymologies.

The Short Version: Bacon Lane

Posted at 10:08 AM on April 11, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

An essential 19th century composer not only was born on the wrong side of the tracks, but cruel trains repeatedly ran over his childhood before he escaped to the wider world. To say he survived, quite a bit worse for wear, might be putting an unforgivably sunny spin on things.

The Short Version: Diz

Posted at 8:00 AM on April 1, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The Accidental Poet from Lucas, Arkansas once said to a professional critic of his syntax, "A lot of folks who ain't sayin' 'ain't,' ain't eatin'. So, Teach, you learn 'em English, and I'll learn 'em baseball." Those were the days! It's time to play ball again, so here's a minute recalling the joyously irremediable Ghost of the Gashouse Gang--paired with his musical soul mate. A composer who also made an art out of sayin' ain't, and dared you to have a problem with it.

The Short Version: The Republic's Greatest General

Posted at 8:01 AM on April 6, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The birth and growth of a revolutionary call to arms.

The Short Version: Now, Back in the Day . . .

Posted at 8:59 AM on April 4, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The concert hall has long been a sort of secular cathedral, where bad behavior--i.e, giving vent to scabrous human impulses like coughing and sneezing--might get you punished by scolds and cold stares. But in the arcadian past the experience seems to have been more unbuttoned. Like a day at Target Field, complete with beer and brats and Max Patkin-style clowning.

The Short Version: Mr. Toad's Enthusiasms

Posted at 2:05 PM on March 30, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

We do take to heart, dear reader/listener, Mr. Mencken's assertion that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. The complexity at hand being Robert Schumann's personality--a very complex thing indeed. But this is The Short Version, where time is a tiny tyrant. Allowances must be made, corners must be cut, though great sighs may be sighed. The simple, the neat, the wrong of it, therefore, reside within.


The Short Version: Restoration's Son

Posted at 1:32 PM on March 28, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

After a decade without a king, England dusted off the throne for Charles II. The celebrated and notorious Restoration featured a riot of pleasures and pains, plus the brief reign of England's greatest native-born composer for centuries to come.


The Short Version: Credit Where Credit is Due

Posted at 8:45 PM on March 22, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Running away from fiscal responsibility, a future musical Titan stumbles into an inspiration-- thanks to some rowdy sea shanties and the geology of the Norwegian coast.

The Short Version: Association, Disordered

Posted at 2:19 PM on March 14, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

We're all poets at heart. With information lacking, the curious title of a lovely song floats more naturally, indelibly in our imaginations as a poetic will o' the wisp than as a logical reference to its gritty origin. Long live the buoyancy.


The Short Version: Horn of Punditry

Posted at 2:18 PM on March 10, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Mozart, famously, thought a lot of the bassett horn. So, in a way, did one late 19th century author in search of a character. Until he heard the sound of it.

The Short Version: Mr. Rodgers (and Mr. Hart) Welcome a New Neighbor

Posted at 2:19 PM on March 7, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Sometimes an imperfect command of the language can result in extraordinarily direct and efficient communication, as in this groundbreaking theatrical collaboration of the 1930's.


The Short Version: Operatic Empathy

Posted at 12:03 PM on March 4, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

I suppose getting really caught up in a character isn't so unusual. Especially one as vividly voiced as Mozart's Papageno in The Magic Flute. But really, I'm going to think twice next time before lending a shoulder at the drop of a feigned tear. You know, fool me once. . . .

The Short Version: There's Hommage, and Then There's Oh, Man!

Posted at 1:02 PM on February 24, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Awhile back, in the classical world, it seemed as popular as "Six Degrees of . . ." That is, finding references to, gestures toward, downright quotations of classical pieces showing up in film scores and popular music. Flattering for the masters, really, and a sign of good taste on the part of the "samplers." A number of the most famous examples involved scores by John Williams. Not this one.

For your consideration, a theme which, after tryouts on the Castilian high plain, went straight to Broadway.

The Short Version: The Very Model of the Very Model

Posted at 1:06 PM on February 22, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

Not even the most ingenious imaginations operate in a vacuum. They're in the world, and their achievements often hang on how well they transform the fodder of history, gossip, or the headlines. William Gilbert, for instance (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame), found inspiration for one of his most memorable characters in reports of a busy and blustery soldier serving the Empire.

The Short Version: Mencken's Number One

Posted at 1:32 PM on February 14, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

We've been asking you to weigh in on your top 10 composers (find the polling place at classicalmpr.org, open till Friday afternoon). If the redoubtable writer and critic (and music lover) H.L. Mencken hadn't lived and died in a staunchly analog age, he would have logged on and let us know (with trenchant notes) what he thought.

I can't presume to report how Mencken would have voted numbers 10 to 2, but he gave strong hints about #1.

Here's the Short Version:

The Short Version: Plan B for Berlioz

Posted at 3:45 PM on February 11, 2011 by Bill Morelock
Filed under: The Short Version

The Renaissance goldsmith and adventurer Benvenuto Cellini may have been the godfather of self-promotion and celebrity culture. His famous autobiography gilded his exploits and shocked with its frankness.

French composer Hector Berlioz thought Cellini's life would make a blockbuster opera. When audiences yawned, Berlioz regrouped, and refashioned themes from the Cellini opera into one of his most popular works.


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