Current CCC Concert Posts

An Ode to the Great Peter Schickele–and His Great Creation P.D.Q. Bach

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Photo by Peter Schaaf; accessed via “Conversation with Peter Schickele/PDQ Bach“

Here’s the thing, folks: If you’re funny, no one takes you seriously. But in order to be funny you have to be serious about whatever it is that you’re known for being funny about. (You may have to read that sentence several times.) And nowhere does this seriousness about humor apply more than in the area of music. You can’t be a funny musician unless you’re a serious musician to begin with. Just take a moment to think about great comic musicians of the past if you don’t believe me. Spike Jones played multiple instruments and had the impeccable timing that comedy requires. Victor Borge was a fine pianist. And . . . Weird Al Yankovic is a great performer. The humor is an added layer on top of the virtuosity and has had to be rehearsed relentlessly.

So it was with Peter Schickele, who was a very serious musician indeed. He had a master’s degree in composition from Julliard and was an excellent bassoonist. Okay, well and good. He might have ended up spending his life playing the bassoon in a symphony orchestra (which would have been perfectly fine, of course, if perhaps not terribly remunerative) had it not been for his early introduction to the music of Spike Jones. He heard a recording of Jones’ “Serenade to a Jerk” at age 10 and “was smitten by the King of Corn’s use of outrageous instruments and sound effects—like car horns and goat bleats—to burlesque popular songs.”1

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Felix Mendelssohn Takes to the Woods and Celebrates Autumn

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Image provided via Wikimedia Commons–oil portrait by Edward Magnus, Berlin State Library

We don’t typically think of Felix Mendelssohn as a great outdoorsman nor as a composer of intimate songs. He’s associated most commonly with big orchestral works, notably his symphonies and concerti. His second area of expertise is in the area of big choral works, either his own (Elijah) or those of J. S. Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn was pretty much single-handedly responsible for getting Bach’s great music back into the public sphere, starting with his direction in 1829 of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion in Berlin. Mendelssohn was only 20 at the time, and for the rest of his short life he was profoundly influenced by Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, his final large-scale masterwork achievement completed before his death, was written very much in the style of the Passion. (If you’re curious about how and why this young man was so taken with a Baroque composer whose works had completely fallen out of favor, you can’t do better than to read this article that lays out the whole chain of transmission. Key sentence: “Only the advent of an extraordinary individual could redirect an entire society’s attention towards a forgotten composer.”)

But enough of that. What about these outdoorsy songs? Well, I honestly don’t know why the rather frail young man who suffered from chronic ill health all his life liked being out in nature; I would have thought that he’d stick close to home and its comforts. But he wrote a whole set of lieder that were subtitled “To be sung outdoors” (“Im Freien zu singen”) and actively sought out lyrics to be used. In one letter he asked for his friend the poet Karl Klingemann to “send me a song or a pair, to be sung in autumn, or better yet in summer, or in spring, on the water or in a meadow or on a bridge, or in a forest or garden. …” And we do have one description in a letter to his mother of a time when Mendelssohn indeed got to fulfill his dream of an open-air concert:

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In Taberna/In the Tavern

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“In the Tavern” by David Teniers the Younger, 1610-1690, from The National Gallery of Art, public domain

One of the most popular concert choral works of the 20th century is Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. I’ve written a book about it, and I’d encourage you to take a look if your own group is involved in a performance. Below is a version of a chapter about one selection, “In Taberna,” which we’re including in an upcoming concert called “Harmony and Hops,” all about the joys of Germany and drinking, in whatever combination we can come up with.

This particular piece is part of a larger section of Carmina that is also titled “In Taberna.” In that section Orff includes some texts about the joys of drinking, gambling, and lust. It’s fair to say that it’s this section that has given Carmina as a whole its scandalous reputation of being sacrilegious, but in reality none of these pieces are directly about church institutions at all. That whole connection stems from the fact that the set of original medieval manuscripts from which the texts were taken happened to be found in a monastery. But even the piece “Ego sum Abbas/I Am the Abbot” isn’t about a real abbot at all but about an “abbot of the drinkers” who presides over a parodical “Drinkers’ Mass.” So don’t take any of this too seriously!

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Why Is Mendelssohn’s Name Sometimes Listed as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy?

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(Image accessed via Library of Congress website)

Note to my readers: This post is a chapter from the book I wrote about Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, which I was privileged to perform with my own choir a number of years ago. This coming October the Cherry Creek Chorale will be performing one of Mendelssohn’s songs in a lovely, varied program titled “Harmony and Hops.” I’ll be writing specific posts about our selections, but in the meantime here’s this material on one of our composers:

I remember seeing this version of Mendelssohn’s name on a piano piece I was (very unsuccessfully) working on, and thinking, Is this another Mendelssohn? You’ll see both version of Felix’s last name used. So what gives? It’s a very complicated, and fascinating, story that concerns itself with Jewish culture in Europe and the role of anti-Semitism.

To begin with, Felix’s grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, came to Berlin from a small town in Germany in 1743 at the age of 14, even though that city’s society was very hostile to Jews. He managed to become quite prominent in the philosophical and literary world, beating Immanuel Kant in an essay contest sponsored by the Berlin Academy. Frederick the Great even granted him the title of “Protected Jew,” which guaranteed his right to live peacefully in Berlin. (But of course this distinction only makes the lowly status of most Jews even more obvious by contrast.) Moses is a worthwhile historical figure in his own right and was hailed as the “German Socrates.” He devoted much of his later life to writings that eloquently supported the idea of religious freedom, saying that the state should not seek to control the religion of its citizens.

But even such a respected and beloved figure as Moses Mendelssohn couldn’t wipe out the widespread anti-Semitism in European culture. So Abraham, Moses’ son and Felix’s father, took several steps to distance himself and his family from their Jewish heritage. One of those actions was to adopt the surname “Bartholdy,” an action suggested by Abraham’s brother-in-law, Jakob Salomon, who took the name from a property he had acquired. Abraham urged Felix to drop the Mendelssohn name and just use Bartholdy, but even though Felix was baptized as a Protestant and married a minister’s daughter, he refused to drop his use of Mendelssohn. It’s never possible to know exactly what was going on in the mind and heart of someone from the past (or even someone in the present), but it seems to me that Felix wanted to honor both aspects of his background. Most of the time, his public knew him as Mendelssohn without the Bartholdy, but sometimes both names were listed. And that inconsistency has carried over until today.

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