Missed, but not forgotten music in 2008
BY ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, THE GAZETTE January 3, 2009
...Continued
Baroque recordings arrive by the ton and only a few last more than a minute in the spinner. Fewer still get reviewed. Do I hate baroque music or what has been done to it? Soon enough I shall have another occasion for reflection as the Toronto baroque orchestra Tafelmusik performs Bach's B Minor Mass in Place des Arts, Kent Nagano conducting.
Last month I drew attention to the coming of age - 100 - of the American composer Elliott Carter. His longevity stands, of course, in stark contrast to the pitiably short lives led by most composers in the canon.
Our understanding of the extent of the mortality is clouded by the most spectacular cases: Mozart, who died at 35, and Schubert, gone at 31. Even if we omitted these celebrated early exits, the toll would be alarming.
Last month the Dutch mezzo-soprano Cora Burggraaf, with no intention of making any such thematic point, gave a program for the Andr?? Turp Musical Society that could have been billed as a memorial to short lifespans. She began with Bizet, whose death at 36 certainly deprived the world another Carmen or two, and continued with Berlioz, a composer who made it to our minimum retirement age of 65, but in low spirits and great pain.
Ernest Chausson's death at 44 on a bicycle (he crashed into a wall) can be taken as a freak but Mendelssohn's departure at 38, after a series of "breakdowns" that could have been heart attacks or strokes, is more typical. It did not help his frail constitution that he was predeceased by his beloved sister Fanny, at 41. Schumann, who is now understood to have been a manic-depressive, died at 46 in an asylum in Bonn.
We tend to associate these early deaths, reasonably, with the inadequacies of medicine before the 20th century. Many of these composers, perhaps all, would have lived longer with proper care, right?
Alas, Burggraaf ended her recital with music by Kurt Weill, a prosperous resident of New York City. He died of a heart attack in 1950, a month past his 50th birthday.
Happy New Year!
akaptainis@sympatico.ca
