POETS | Eliz Bishop in Petropolis (Place, Movie)

Petrópolis is named for the Emperor
of Brazil, Dom Pedro I, who proclaimed 
 Brazil independent from Portugal in 
September 1822, with little pushback.

The film Reaching for the Moon was shown in a U.S. theater (in California) for the first time a few months ago, in December 2013.

It is about American poet Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian architect Carlota (Lota) de Macedo Soares, and their 16-year relationship, from 1951 to 1967.

Most of the time they lived in Petrópolis, north of Rio. They also spent much time together, as noted in an earlier post, at the Pouso do Chico Rei in Ouro Preto, farther north in Minas Gerais, on the Estrada Real (Royal Highway), created during Brazil's Gold Rush.

The bookcase at Petrópolis home, packed
with books by Bishop et al. Note
books by Carmen Oliveira and Robert
Lowell. All photos by JT Marlin, 2014.

Here are some facts about the movie, abbreviated from a post on it in Portuguese by a friend of the family behind the movie:

• The movie's opening and closing shots are in New York. Bishop and Robert Lowell (a shy man who was attached to Quincy House at Harvard; I talked with him at some length while I was an undergraduate) sit on a bench facing a Central Park discussing her poem, and book, “One Art”.

• The movie's title refers to the tall lampposts Lota designed for the Parque do Flamengo. The moon lights up the opening stanzas of Bishop’s Rio de Janeiro poem “Going to the Bakery.”

A sample of the lush vegetation and
water flow outside the writing studio.

• Bruno Barreto made the movie based on a 1995 bestselling- in-Brazil book, Carmen L. Oliveira’s Flores raras e banalíssimas: A história de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop, translated into English by Neil K. Besner (Rutgers, 2001).

• Barreto’s mother, Lucy Barreto, is one of the producers - she bought the rights to the book,  having long been a fan of Bishop’s poetry and having met the couple at a lunch in Fazenda Samambaia, in Petrópolis.

This is a view of Bishop's desk, where
she wrote in Petrópolis.

• Bruno Barreto was at first not interested in a movie, but changed his mind when he saw an opportunity to make a film that would have a more general message, about loss.

• The actress Miranda Otto portrays a shy but sensual Bishop, Glória Pires plays Lota as seductive. Bishop washes her hair while Lota soaks in the perfect white bathtub in the mountains at Petrópolis.

Comment:

Another view of the jungle-like
exterior of the writing studio.

Magdalena Edwards, in a review of the movie, says she tried to get inside Samambaia and couldn't. I can understand this. The main highway north to Minas Gerais is excellent for traveling. But leaving this highway to go up into the hills on steep winding roads can be bewildering.

Also, the owner of the estate used to be away often, winning prizes at dog shows. (There is a pet shop in New York City called Petrópolis that I suspect got its name from the network of kennels on the Samambaia property.)

It was a total coincidence that allowed my wife Alice and me to spend several hours at Samambaia, which unlike the other residences of Elizabeth Bishop is immaculately maintained. It was a privilege that we won't forget.

June 17 - The Ironic Origins of the SAT (with Comment)

The national office of the College Board, founded in
1900. The office is at 45 Columbus Avenue, NYC.

The following was posted this morning by Garrison Keillor on Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1901 that the first standardized tests were administered by the College Board. Before standardized tests, many universities had their own college entrance exams, and prospective students were required to come to campus for a week or more to take exams. 

Since each college's exam demanded a different set of knowledge, high schools offered separate instruction for students based on which colleges they hoped to attend. Some colleges accepted applicants based on how well previous graduates of the same high school were doing at the college. Other colleges sent faculty to visit high schools, and if the high school met their criteria, then they would admit any graduate of that school. 

It was a confusing system, and as more Americans began to attend college, it was no longer practical. Between 1890 and 1924, the number of college students grew five times faster than the growth of the general population. In 1885, the principal of a prestigious boarding school wrote to the National Education Association asking them to reform the system. It took 15 years of discussion, committees, and arguments, but the College Board was finally formed in 1900. Its founders hoped to simplify curricula at the high schools, and make a college education accessible to a wider pool of applicants.  

Beginning today and throughout this week in 1901, the first standardized college entrance exams were given to 973 students at 67 locations (plus two more in Europe). More than a third of the students were from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Students were tested in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The tests were essays, not multiple choice, read by a team of experts in each subject. The experts met at tables in the library of Columbia University, and the essays were graded as Excellent, Good, Doubtful, Poor, or Very Poor. 

Columbia was one of the main forces behind the conversion to standardized testing — of the 973 applicants, 758 were applying to either Columbia or its affiliate Barnard. For the next couple of decades, the tests were in use but were not widely accepted. Only a small fraction of incoming freshmen took standardized tests, and there were only 10 colleges that admitted all of their students based on the test — some colleges looked at the test, but also provided their own entrance exams, and happily admitted students of any qualifications if their parents were donors. 

The early tests were considered "achievement" tests because they tested for students' proficiency in certain subjects. A couple of decades later, the College Board switched to "aptitude" tests, intended to measure intelligence. There were mixed motives for this change. On the surface, it made college admittance more fair and accessible to students whose high schools didn't teach ancient Greek or prepare students specifically for college. 

But the biggest proponents of intelligence testing were college officials who were concerned about the rapid influx of immigrants — especially Eastern European Jews — to their student body. A Columbia University dean worried that the high numbers of recent immigrants and their children would make the school "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement," and its president described the 1917 freshman class as "depressing in the extreme," lamenting the absence of "boys of old American stock." 

These college officials believed that immigrants had less innate intelligence than old-blooded Americans, and hoped that they would score lower on aptitude tests, which would give the schools an excuse to admit fewer of them. In 1925, the College Board began to use a new, multiple-choice test, designed by a Princeton psychology professor named Carl Brigham, who had modeled it on his work with Army intelligence tests. This new test was known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The first SAT was taken in 1926. These days, more than 1.6 million students take the SAT each year.

Comment

When I applied in 1955 for transfer to an American high school from one in England, I was required to take the high-school equivalent of the SAT. No surprisingly, I was the only person at my school taking it. My examiner, Fr. Timothy Horner (who subsequently came to the United States and headed up St. Louis Priory), relished the instructions, which were intended for huge halls of examinees. "All students will now pick up their pencils in their right hand. At the signal, all students will break the seal on the exam booklet and will begin answering the questions."

Garrison Keillor doesn't say it, but the irony is that the SAT tests showed that the undesired immigrants were highly intelligent. The alumni-children legacy preference continued, but I am told that official records show that it was not available for alumni children applying for scholarships. The idea seems to have been that if Harvard's continuance is partly dependent on wealthy donors, those that cannot afford to send their children without financial aid are not part of the relevant population.

Today, the highly intelligent applicants for whom an alleged quota exists at top universities are reportedly (see my letter of 2012) those whose parents immigrated from Korea, or those applying directly from Korea. In Korea, educational achievement is highly valued, and Harvard is a top brand.

OBIT | Willem Mengelberg, Concertgebouw Conductor 1895-1945

Willem Mengelberg (1861-1951)

I have written on the Boissevain.us website about the connection between the Boissevain family and the Concertgebouw, and the hiring of William Mengelberg.

In brief, it was an inspired selection. Mengelberg became a great interpreter of Mahler's work.

The Boissevain Foundation Bulletin has an excellent article on Charles E. H Boissevain, eldest son of the publisher of the Algemeen Handelsblad, and the family's involvement in the creation and sustenance of the Concertgebouw.

An earlier issue of the Bulletin described the relationship between Willem Mengelberg and Charles E. H., who served on the Board of the orchestra. They had a falling out and Charles resigned with a protest.

Mengelberg, 1902

It was a bad move for Mengelberg because later, after World War 2, he needed all the friends he could. He did not have enough to save him from having his honors and his pension taken away by the Queen for what was described as his collaboration with the German Occupation. Mengelberg did what the Brits said to do – he  kept calm and carried on. His defenders pointed out that Mengelberg saved many Jewish musicians from deportation, but that was not enough to save him. His worst punishment may have been his exile to Switzerland, where he died. He never led an orchestra again after the end of the war. The charges against him were made in the heat of the postwar Hatchet Days and many feel that Mengelberg was mistreated–but, if true, it is understandable given the pain and losses of the Dutch during the Occupation.

The following excerpts from posts by Arthur Bloomfield are reviews of recordings of the music conducted by William Mengelberg and give a flavor of what he served up to his Amsterdam fans. It also shows the program going on during the Nazi Occupation.

For the full notes by Bloonfield, see
http://www.morethanthenotes.com/read-the-book/willem-mengelberg.

The excerpt that follows is abbreviated to focus entirely on Mengelberg; occasionally the punctuation is corrected where the writer's meaning is clear but the parsing is a puzzle.

[Joseph] Willem Mengelberg, like Henry J. Wood, spent half a century with an institution classifiable as a national monument: from 1895 to 1945 he was  music director of that earthy and elegant orchestra, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.  Like Arthur Nikisch he was an early example of the commuting conductor and regularly departed Holland 1907 to 1920 for concerts in Frankfurt. I see him devouring a score by the window of a first class compartment (smoking, of course!) while an international express reverses direction in that wonderful station by Cologne cathedral. During most of the next decade he spent part of each year as chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, ultimately sharing the chiefdom with Arturo Toscanini, the Toscanini who won the inevitable battle for titular supremacy at the corner of 57th and Seventh. 

But Mengelberg didn’t slink back to Amsterdam tail between his legs and become a parody of his former musical self as some commentators have written. That opinion, as Lytton Strachey would have put it, amounts to “oceans of bosh.”

There was, though, a certain impatience with Mengelberg, a Toscanini Need, on the Philharmonic board all along, although the portly little Dutchman with the seven-button vest and a prodigious mop of hair had raised the orchestra’s standard significantly and developed a large following. Mengelberg’s exasperatingly talky rehearsals can’t have helped his board room image. As Winthrop Sargeant, the New Yorker critic who played violin in the Philharmonic in the Mengelberg era has written in Geniuses, Goddesses and People, he had “an endless fund of very pedantic theories on how to train a symphony orchestra” and “in homely, paternal lectures delivered in a unique Holland English” told the nail-biting Philharmonic musicians about the values of “goot orchesterspielen,” demanding of them, in quasi-injured tones, without awaiting an answer, “Vy do you make doo-doo when I tell you to make too-too?” But the Philharmonic sat out the talk and proceeded to play for Mengelberg quite divinely — detractors to the contrary.

Soured on Toscanini-ized New York, Mengelberg remained in Europe after 1930, recording for Columbia until the Depression cut into recording budgets, then for the German firm Telefunken. With the coming of the war Mengelberg accepted the Nazis to the point of occasionally heiling you-know-who and going to Germany, at least for a while, to conduct and record – meanwhile saving at least 16 Jewish members of his orchestra and getting in hot water for defying the ban on playing Mahler. And for his departure from the patriotic straight and narrow he was exiled at war’s end  — luckily he had a chalet in the Swiss Engadine — the sentence originally for life then commuted to six years which, thanks to an embarrassment-saving Providence, he did not quite complete.

Dutch-born of German parents, Mengelberg seems to have welcomed the Nazis out of some old-school romantic notion about a marriage of Germanic peoples, also with a “see no evil” desire — human nature! — to preserve the status quo of his position and his orchestra, which to a large extent he did. After all, who else was supposed to mind the most talented flock of musicians in the western half of occupied Europe if not this man who was as popular in Holland as Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra would become in the United States. Music is the best revenge.

Dr. Berta Geissmar, Wilhelm Furtwaengler’s Jewish secretary, has written in Two Worlds of Music about the kindnesses extended by Mengelberg on her Amsterdam visits in the late Thirties and there are other examples of his natural non-partisan good-heartedness. Politics bored Mengelberg out of his skin. He lived, in a sense, on his own special island, a monarch among invaders as well as a prince among friends. He was 100 pct. Soul and his soul was drenched in music. With virtually every performance he was living in the music’s lining and hurling himself at the barricades of interpretation, eyes blazing, popping, watering, like some opthalmological wonder, with an inscrutable inner glee about them suggesting Harpo Marx, no other. And Wow, that clenched left hand reaching the heavens to cue the brass! It’s not surprising that Otto Klemperer, rejected by the Third Reich, conducted a memorial concert for Mengelberg in Amsterdam shortly after his death.

Perhaps a clue to Mengelberg’s wartime indiscretions, sinful and virtuous, may be found in a character summation supplied by one of the wisest ever of conductors’ wives, Doris Monteux. As she writes in It’s All in the Music, Mengelberg was “one of the most fascinating personalities I ever met; he was at the same time kind and generous, unkind and small, bombastic yet gentle, childishly naïve, foolishly proud and pompous yet ridden with a feeling of unworthiness, religious yet at times positively hedonistic. Truly a more complex character never lived.” Could this be the Victor Hugo of the podium? And this is significant: Mengelberg’s gramophonically captured oeuvre with its oceans of drama, bombshells of soul and complexity of line – his performances could, to borrow a phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson, be “strewn with cutting flints” — is not inconsistent with Mrs. Monteux’ amazing list of adjectives.

Fascinating fellow indeed! It was a review copy of Mengelberg’s re-released Heldenleben from 1928 that started me thinking about writing this book, oh about 30 years ago, and it’s never struck me as strange that the chief impetus for 94,173 words with more up the road came from this source, a small man conducting a beautiful performance of a big piece by his friend Richard Strauss while the Seventh Avenue subway rumbled – sometimes audibly! – underneath Carnegie Hall. 

Now, a chronological survey of Mengelberg on record, virtually all the performances with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. “Live” performances are noted as such . . .

1-4-1926 — WAGNER’S RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES: elegant and inexorable, the wind whistling through the Philharmonic — and the companion piece from this session in the Chapter Room of Carnegie Hall is a rollicking, carnivalesque MARCHE SLAV of Tchaikovsky, full of buzz and lift . . . and 

Now Mengelberg has travelled, perhaps on the old S.S. Rotterdam, to Holland . . .

6-10-27 — WAGNER, LOHENGRIN ACT 1 PRELUDE: A lilting, highly charged performance, rather slow, flowing like Burgundy and containing at least one captivating detail, a deep breath inserted at the end of bar 49 just before the timpani crescendo into the music’s BIG CLIMAX. It’s rather as if the performance is about to dive off the high board and for a moment considers the importance of landing just right . . . And from the same session: 

From this Amsterdam session: a charming WALTZ from TCHAIKOVSKY’s SERENADE with coy upbeats, snappy oom-pah, ravishing playing by soloistic violins, plus an OBERON OVERTURE by WEBER claiming a very slow delivery of the lyric second theme which Weber, aha, marked dolce within an allegro con fuoco context.

6-24-35 — GLUCK’S  ALCESTE OVERTURE: Glazed eyes in the violins make for a tearful introduction to this sober charmer. Mengelberg proceeds with a velvety tension.

10-6-38 (a “live” performance) — RAVEL, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, SUITE NO. 2: Very interesting, Mengelberg begins at about four-fifths Ravel’s quarter = 50, then with utter atmospheric logic eases closer to the composer’s marking when a few bars later the score indicates that little by little daybreak comes. It’s as if you can see the good Lord checking the metronome in his grey-haired hand as He turns on the day poco a poco, at the speed of light (well, emerging light), making nature’s accelerando . . .  At all events Ravel, Mengelberg and Whoever collaborate to create a mellifluous opening more languor-dipped we could not imagine – come to think of it, not only is day’s awakening portrayed but that of the lovers as well, a good orchestral yawn leading to a good little accel. Then in the first stages of the Pantomime Mengelberg out-Ravel’s the composer’s generous requests for rubati and manages the most laid-back transition imaginable before the great flute solo, itself so airy and undoctrinaire in this performance, its first chair protagonist seems happily lost in some pastoral nirvana. Ravel, incidentally, was a great fan of Mengelberg’s way with his music. Mahler and Richard Strauss are others who put their trust in his charged baton and those demonic eyes.

11-9-39 (“live”) — MAHLER FOURTH SYMPHONY (with Jo Vincent): Listening again to this landmark performance after many years I’d forgotten how much fun it can be, how supremely spontaneous it sounds — at the saucy opening, for instance, which comes on so sweet and coy. This is a performance of maximums, many moods and flavors from the impulsive to the terribly nostalgic, the ineffably tender to the catastrophic, all bound by the power and conviction of their projection and faithful always to the characterized time kept by a composer whose score is full of specified rubati, molti espressivi, don’t hurrys, abrupt changes of tempo, the anti-metronomical components of the human condition. Some listeners – perhaps those who like their curries mild? — will be offended by the extremely extended upbeat to the opening movement’s first theme, but those of a less somber bent are free to enjoy the amorous atmosphere produced therewith, the music like playful lovers eyeing ravenously each other’s lips before the theme itself uncoils to an embrace. So there! What Mahler proposed to Mengelberg for this moment was “let’s pretend we’re starting up a waltz in Vienna.”

The scherzo of Mahler’s Fourth with its spectral violin tuned a tone high originally carried a title translated as (I borrow William Mann’s English) Brother Death Strikes Up. Mahler thought the movement “mystical, bewildering and weird” and never has it been moreso than in Mengelberg’s performance whirling and buzzing at a hasty 152 eighths to the minute, short swiping violin staccati conjuring a nightmare of pests. Surely this is more speed than Mahler’s in a leisurely motion indicates, but the face of the music says 152 no less persuasively than the 116 another great Mahlerian, Jascha Horenstein, elects, more or less, in a creaky-courtly performance, fascinatingly resigned. Mahler said that the negatives of the scherzo are disentangled in the great poco adagio that follows, but considering the harrowing paces through which he puts his poignant second theme the process is not an easy one. Mengelberg is immediately in very deep, in a kind of ecstasy of sadness, seizing an extra moment of awe when he adds a fifth beat to the second bar of the opening theme wherein espressivo cellos come bearing l-o-n-g notes. In the process he barely averts a diminuendo taking a right turn into infinity.

. . . And from the same concert, one of the early performances of BLOCH’S VIOLIN CONCERTO, with Joseph Szigeti. A tad melodramatic perhaps but strong, this is fetching music. Coming as it does from an era of bountiful symphonic innocence this grand-scaled piece suggests Bartók as written for a Western. Why, the wide open orchestration is as spacious as Monument Valley. Violinist and conductor are perfect partners, rhythmically strong, keeping the rhapsodic element under control. Especially haunting: the suspended perfumed pentatonicism of the slow movement.

And from the BEETHOVEN cycle spring of ’40:

4-18-40 (“live”) — FIFTH SYMPHONY: The most interesting thing about this Fifth is Mengelberg’s care to keep the timpani part alive and kicking in its partnership with those squirmy S-curving violins during the suspenseful transition from scherzo to finale: occupied from measure 324 with Beethoven’s Morse code it settles at 336 into a picket fence of repeated C’s, sempre pp all the way to 367 says the score. That is just a bit too uniform for Mengelberg and he elects a small subito diminuendo at 336, followed by a little crescendo at 339. From such minor detail Mengelberg like some Flaubert or Tolstoy of the airwaves builds the intake of nuance to fuel an ever-vital performance.

4-21-40 (“live”) — SECOND SYMPHONY: Like Oskar Fried, Mengelberg sees the three themes of the second movement as terraced upward in tempo. For Fried’s clockings of about 58, 72 and 80 beats, substitute in Amsterdam 56, 66 and 72-76. [Link is disabled - click on link at top to hear.]

And I like the tension of a first movement tempo held a couple notches below Beethoven’s stated 100.

And back in Amsterdam, swastikas alas in the stalls . . .

10-3-40 (“live”) — FRANCK SYMPHONY: Full of tautness and snap, a performance here in which the Mengelberg-led players of the Concertgebouw characteristically become actors in a drama, the trombones rasping like brass dragons, the timpani a schoolboy on a spree. Meanwhile Mengelberg’s deputy, Eduard van Beinum, was wooing a lighter and more abstract virtuosity from the same players other subscription evenings. The finale of this Franck broadcast is especially treasurable for the rich and transparent string counterpoint, a perfect fulfillment of the composer’s molto legato at the beginning of the development. And note: a Telefunken recording Mengelberg made of Franck’s symphony a few weeks later is not as fluid as this broadcast, its feistyness is less attractive.

10-13-40 (“live”) — BRAHMS’ FIRST SYMPHONY: For me one of the most exciting Brahms Firsts ever. If there were a Michelin Green Guide for orchestral music it would surely note the angry but regretful opening, the slow launch of the big and rocking crescendo from just after Letter A, the catching of the piano espressivo oboe in deep thought after the sforzando beginning of bar 29, the huge linger in the cellos as they descend, mimicking that oboe, toward the first movement allegro. In said main allegro the lyrically rich second subject becomes quite slow much earlier than usual – think that glorious yawn of the third horn just before Letter D – and before it’s done, all that skimpy underwear so to speak of Brahms’ lightly-scored orchestral fabric, will have reached down, convincingly, as low as half tempo. In the finale Mengelberg invents for the steaming cellos and double basses a crescendo just as the timpani recedes into the landmark più andante with its famous horn solo f sempre e passionate — something in that bar 29 just has to give! Granted there’s too much stop and start in the glorious theme of the finale’s complicatedly marked allegro non troppo, ma con brio, but how about the delicious cooing of those connubial oboes in the second subject, they could be amorous cats.

10-27-40 (“live”) — TANNHAEUSER OVERTURES This remarkable October at the Concertgebouw – with Mengelberg balking at the Mahler ban and the musicians trying to ignore all the Nazi uniforms in the hall – continues with the most interesting of the three Mengelberg TANNHAEUSER OVERTURES extant, the others being “studio” versions from 1926 and 1932. 

Willem Mengelberg - Tannhaüser Overture (Wagner ... 

www.youtube.com/watch?v...

YouTube

Sep 13, 2011 - Uploaded by petrof4056

Concertgebouw Amsterdam conducting by Willem Mengelberg. Rec. 9th May 1932.

Richard Wagner - Ouverture "Tannhäuser" conducted by ... ► 5:59

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q...

Jun 4, 2009 - Uploaded by herblich1

Willem Mengelberg conducts the Concertgebouworkest, playing the "Tannhäuser " ouverture by ...

Wagner ... - AllMusic

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Find album reviews, stream songs, credits and award information for Tchaikovsky : Symphony No. 5; Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture - Willem Mengelberg on ...

WAGNER, R.: Overtures / STRAUSS, R.: Don Juan ... - Naxos

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Naxos Records WAGNER, R.: Overtures / STRAUSS, R.: Don Juan (Mengelberg) (1926-1940). Wagner, Richard. Tannhauser: Overture (Dresden version) …

Mengelberg conducts Wagner, Strauss, Mahler 8.110855 ...

www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/.../Mengelberg_wagner.htm

Willem Mengelberg Richard WAGNER (1813-1883) Tannhäuser Overture ( Dresden version) (1845) Lohengrin – Prelude to Act I (1850) Die Meistersinger von …

Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture

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Sep 27, 2005 - FREE SHIPPING on orders of $25 or more. Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5; Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture by Opus Kura, Willem Mengelberg.

Mengelberg: Wagner / R. Strauss / Mahler - iTunes - Apple

https://itunes.apple.com/ie/.../mengelberg-wagner-r.../id19090532

Preview songs from Mengelberg: Wagner / R. Strauss / Mahler by Willem ... Tannhauser Overture (Dresden Version), Willem Mengelberg, 13:29, Album Only  …

iTunes - Music - Mengelberg: Wagner / R. Strauss / Mahler ...

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Preview songs from Mengelberg: Wagner / R. Strauss / Mahler by Willem ... Tannhauser Overture (Dresden Version), Willem Mengelberg, 13:29, Album Only  …

Virtually unique in this Wagnerian’s experience is the final chapter 1940-style, salvation appearing in the trombones in elegant climactic augmentation while Mengelberg’s puckish accomplice at the timpani, the same one apparently who has amused us with phraseological derring-do in other Mengelberg performances, proceeds to turn somersault upon somersault, giving this overture with his incredible dance of the drums a diabolical finish. Precisely what this slamming, bouncing drummer does with the figure that recurs thirteen times at least in succession (and is, amazingly enough, scarcely audible in recordings of Klemperer and Furtwaengler et al. although Markevitch buys into it) is to attack with maximum relish the initial roll of each statement, and, with no less pizzazz, employ Wagner’s innocent tag of an eighth note as the vigorous and un-lapsing upbeat to each crashing renewal to come, not the mere adjacent thing it generally is. [Music link disabled. Click on link at top to access.]

10-31-40 (“live”) — RACHMANINOFF SECOND PIANO CONCERTO (with Walter Gieseking): An elegant performance, as one would expect with this soloist. The recapitulation of the regretful second theme in the finale is slower yet than in the exposition, the effect absolutely heartbreaking. “This time it’s really goodbye,” the music in this interpretation says quite distinctly, as if to preview that celebrated British film Brief Encounter in which, several years later, this concerto played butler-and-maid so to speak for the nice couple whose commuter-train affair has no future. . .[Music link disabled - click on link at top to access.]

Now as for Rachmaninoff’s encounter music – there is, no news, a lot of this sexy stuff in his oeuvre, hear it not only in pretty themes but sperm-delaying harmonic prolongations. Hormonal prolongations? What to make of it now that there’s scholarship out there suggesting Rachmaninoff was a closet gay?

And hear this: Rachmaninoff expert Max Harrison quotes Frank Howes writing of a performance of this concerto in which its composer sitting at the Steinway “reversed every one of his own markings.”

2-27-44 (“live”) — BRAHMS’ THIRD SYMPHONY: Mengelberg must have realized this would be his last Brahms Third ever. The nostalgic melody of the third movement is prolonged as if he were desperately afraid to let . . it . . . go. An echo of Toscanini, actually.

Now listen to Bernard Shore the BBC violist writing in The Orchestra Speaks - he’s more substantive about Mengelberg than the Winthrop Sargeant we quoted a few pages back. He tells, for instance, of how his left hand was responsible for the entire range of expression and for balance: “His left hand may appear rather hard and unyielding but can none the less be made wonderfully sensitive and is capable of inspiring the most exquisite tenderness.” Great kindliness, Shore says, could appear on Mengelberg’s rugged face, and he writes of how he would turn at rehearsals to that celebrated “art of dissertation” instead of instilling fear in the hearts of the “victims” cowering perhaps before his throne of perfection. Shore insists these dissertations for all their sometime Polonian air (hot air?) were full of sound matter. Demands, for instance, for the utmost warmth and life in the vibrato. And they took, he says, “far less toll of the precious energy of the orchestra than the incessant demands for white-hot playing made by such a conductor as Koussevitzky whose rehearsals are like a series of terrific concerts.” Mengelberg, says this observant violist, would become “a geyser of energy, (seeming) to increase in stature upon the rostrum, inspiring the orchestra to its utmost power.” Those eyes were at work! Yes, says Shore, Mengelberg in that seven-button vest was right on when he announced: “There ees nothing I do not know about der orchester.”

Well, have we mentioned the second horn in the trio of the scherzo in Mengelberg’s Eroica from the early  Forties? When do you really hear, and with such pirouetting raciness, that pair of eighth notes in the seventh bar? Mengelbergian gold from Beethoven’s mine.

. . . And an encore: I’ve just heard Mengelberg’s Mozart F major piano concerto from 10-13-40 with Willem Andriessen and it’s too interesting to pass up. In terms of the scant tempo modification Eduard Van Beinum could be on the podium, but the aura of the performance with its shot of drang is pure Mengelberg. In the opening movement and the finale too, right up to its Papageno/Papagena pa-pa-pa-pa finish the inflection is all about making this music that can sound so innocent suggest one of Mozart’s dramatic concertos in the minor, the D minor, say, or the C minor. Relief comes in the slow movement where those Amsterdam woodwinds sound like nature’s chirpy emissaries . . . And oh there’s that Beethoven Emperor Concerto with Cor de Groot from 5-9-42, another early evening concert due to the wartime blackout. Mengelberg’s habitual tap-TAP on the lectern is a call to arms here. Absolutely regular in tempo but full of snap, an edge-of-Vesuvian urgency, the first movement seems bolder, and shorter, than ever.