39. A Great Curtain Raiser, A Great Voice, A Frivolity or Two; and A Protest.
Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Grainger, Beethoven.
Do you think that classical music is not for you and you don't know where to start? Or maybe you're a fan already and would welcome a fresh approach. You've come to the right place. Perfect pitch is for everyone. Beginners or experts, whatever your age. Lend Nick Healy Hutchinson your ears for his weekly dose of classical music that will enrich your life.
SPEAKER_00We're going to start today with one of the greatest curtain raisers ever written. Wagner's Prelude to the Master Singers of Nuremberg. If I told you this opera is a good four and a half hours in length, you'd probably think I'd lost the plot if I added that it's not a minute too long. Especially when you get a decent interval in the middle of it to enjoy something more than a tub of ice cream. Of his later works, it's the only real comedy that Wagner wrote, and unlike almost everything else by his hand, it's actually quite a simple tale of earthbound love, wholly devoid of Harry Potter-like wizardry, magic, and fantasies of any kind. This uplifting prelude, laced with a number of the principal themes in the opera, is played here by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Christian Tillemann. A couple of weeks ago, I played you the Aria Dubist Minganza's Heads You Are My Heart's Desire from Lehar's operetta The Lustika Vitva, The Merry Widow. And we heard the fabulous voice of Fritz Underley. Today I want to play another live recording by him in the 1962 production of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onyegin. Although obviously said in Russian originally, this is a German rendition, and I doubt many Russians would be disappointed with this interpretation. Onyegin is an opera which incorporates more of our human conditions than almost any other. Young love, rejection, pride, jealousy, regret, duty, humiliation. It's all there. In the second scene of Act Two, Lensky has arrived to fight a duel against his closest friend O'Neagin, which Lensky has demanded in a momentary fit of rage, believing that O'Negin had been flirting with Lensky's girlfriend, Olga, at her dance the night before. Neither of them want the duel to go ahead, but neither of them has the kindness to say so. So the duel does go ahead, and Lensky is killed. Here is a painfully sad reflection of Lensky's life, his love for Olga and his fear of death. Wunderlich has one of those wonderful voices, which sort of qualifies him as a candidate of phenomenal determinism. He pulls off the sorrow and despair with real feeling, and Tchaikovsky's cascading notes had the lament.
SPEAKER_03Viel weiß, dass du gerade nicht tragest alles kommt von Gott, das Leben nicht beruhigt, wenn du mal machen, der Jung warm, der sonst nicht um die S-Carni. Mir hat für mich sein junger Leben, und das nicht mehr so nicht my justice my artist.
SPEAKER_00How you reconcile those two extremes will remain on a music's eternal dilemmas. But he was by no means alone when it came to unimaginable vices. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the classical music world more depraved than the Australian-born Percy Granger, who became a naturalized US citizen and died in the States in 1961. His father was a serial womanizer and heavy drinker, who had fathered a child with another woman before Marion Percy's mother rose. And she was herself something of a tyrant as a parent, perhaps in reaction to her husband's philandering. Ultimately, she couldn't cope and threw herself out of the window. His own sexual predilections are far too unseemly to value the airwaves of a family podcast, especially when I tell you he developed an interest in self-flagulation as early as 16 years old. Behind these dark secrets, the boy had a talent, especially at the keyboard, which attracted applauded in the States and continental Europe. During his life, he developed a particular fascination for Nordic music and culture, even meeting and befriending Edgar Grieg, whose music he championed. In fact, he met a number of leading composers, including Julius, Halgar, and Benjamin Britton, and in due course was in much demand as a teacher. His compositional output focused largely on abridging some two or three hundred folk songs. He wasn't really taken by the formality of the big romantics, and was much more interested in informal experimentation. The most famous of the folk songs is Country Gardens, a piece he was asked to play so often that he landed up hating it. Another, a blogger dance, he renamed Handle in the Strand, as it was suggestive of a composer and London as a city of musical theatre before the First World War. After the sublime and heavyweight music of Wagner, which we heard at the beginning of the podcast, these are going to come over as almost trivial. But who say they don't have their place and an appeal of their own. Handle in the Strand and Country Gardeners. I played here with delicate humour and a sudden flourish by multiple. Let's finish today with something a little weightier. If you cast your mind back to the 16th century, you'll remember that the Netherlands were being invaded by the Spanish, giving rise to the notorious Inquisition. A nobleman by the name of Count Eggmont had resisted the persecution of the Protestants at Stanford, which led to his arrest and execution. The story of the man's fate is told in Beethoven's Egmont overture. First at the arrest, then probing questioning by the prosecution at his trial on the heavy strings, with some delicate woodwind portraying the failed belief of emergency from his wife and eleven children, followed by the guilty verdict being announced emphatically on the brass and the full orchestra joining in to announce the inevitable death penalty. And even that is portrayed by two swift immediately. But that's not quite the end of it. Beethoven has something else. Written in 1810, the piece reflects his own anger at the occupation of the French and Vienna and the city's ultimate liberation. In the closing couple of minutes of this riveting overture, Beethoven makes it clear that good triumphs over evil, light over darker, as the Spanish are eventually sent a packing a message which resonates loudly over two hundred years later. Egmont has given his life to a good cause, as many have done since as recently as 1943. Beethoven's Egmont Overture is played here by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abado.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for listening to Perfect Pitch with Nick Healy Hutchinson. He'll be back again next week with some more treasures for you, so please do join him then. And you can subscribe to this podcast by clicking on the link below.
