Ravinia 2023 Issue 2

Lawn Clippings By John Schauer Plus ça change ON JULY 14 , Ravinia Chief Conductor Marin Alsop is conducting Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony in an innovative presentation, with new musical interludes between movements and an updated text in English for the famed choral finale. But before you scream “Sacrilege!” consider that there is historical precedence for both of these features. It was not unheard of in the 19th centu- ry for short chamber pieces to be performed between movements of a larger symphony, and in December 1989 Leonard Bernstein dipped at least a toe in the waters of text revision when he performed the work in Germany to mark the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. For that occasion he changed the word “Freude” to “Freiheit,” turning the “Ode to Joy” into an “Ode to Freedom.” Like Bernstein, Alsop will leave Beethoven’s music untouched, but other works in the past have not been so lucky, at least in the view of this curmudgeon (and I wear the title with pride). To cite but one example, Vivaldi’s ubiquitous “Four Seasons” concertos have appeared at Ravinia in a number of guises. In 1998 violinist Vanessa-Mae transformed the third movement of the “Summer” concer- to into what she called “a contemporary track that would sound unlike anything that had gone before!” In 2003 Jeff Lederer recast the concertos as “Los Saisons” for Jimmy Bosch’s Salsa Dura ensemble; 2013 saw Max Richter’s “Recomposed” treatment, which used chunks of Vivaldi’s original as building blocks within a larger electronic edifice. [Richter’s music, fascinatingly, has begun to take root in film and TV where Vivaldi’s has been a perennial favorite, recently appearing on soundtracks for the likes of Bridgerton and Chef ’s Table .] I’m willing to concede the sincerity of these folks’ endeavors, something I cannot do for the creators of the infamous “Hooked on Classics” collections of the early ’80s that strung together dozens of classical snippets over an unyield- ing disco beat. It was the musical equivalent of having a dressmaker refashion Jacqueline Kennedy’s iconic inauguration gown into a thong bikini. Most of the adaptors with serious intentions have been motivated by a situa- tion that has concerned music administrators since before I entered the field over 40 years ago, namely the wish to attract new audiences to classical concerts. If the means of achieving this are rarely agreed upon, the need to do so is pretty widely accepted. So I was completely taken aback some years ago when a co-worker questioned the very need of preserving our classical music heritage at all. Other forms and types of music in the pop realm, he pointed out, come into fashion and go out of style. Why, then, he wondered, would it be such a bad thing if we simply let go of classical music altogether? As horrifying as that suggestion was—and is—it caused me to consider that, in a way, that same in-and-out-of-style phenomenon actually has been reshap- ing the classical “standard repertoire,” which is not as immutable a monolith as some might think. During my years of music history studies, I began to sense that many books on the subject are highly misleading, because they primarily focus on the music that appeals the most to us today, and I raised more than one professor’s eyebrows when I suggested we should instead be examining compos- ers who were most highly regarded in their own time. Heard much music lately by Telemann, Salieri, Cherubini, or Meyerbeer? Neither have I, but those composers were once internationally celebrated as the masters of their era. Today they are but footnotes or curiosities exhumed for the sake of novelty. And conversely, idols before whom musicians genuflect today were not always held in such high regard. Consider Mozart, who nowadays is lionized as perhaps the greatest musical genius of all time, but of whom musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon wrote, “I always considered Mozart something quite alone and beyond other music. … I ought to say that this view was then [in 1939] considered not merely eccentric but almost lunatic.” And when legendary conductor Sir Thomas Beecham wanted to conduct Così fan tutte in London in 1911, he faced a steep uphill battle, noting, “Few had ever heard of it, and fewer still seemed acquainted with the music.” That was a situation Beecham was able to change. But other things he could not. After he appeared in 1941 on the Ravinia po- dium, from where he could hear the train passing during his concerts, Beecham caustically dubbed Ravinia “the only railway station with a resident orchestra.” So if you hear the Metra train roaring by during the delicate “Adagio molto e cantabile” of Beethoven’s Ninth, you can take comfort that some things, at least, remain reliably constant. John Schauer is a freelance writer who actually did enjoy a lot of disco back in the day but mercifully has moved on. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 3 – JULY 16, 2023 20