Klarinet Archive - Posting 000960.txt from 2000/07

From: HatNYC62@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Re:Learning practices (was Mozart's wife and Carl Maria We ber)
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 15:20:51 -0400

I will take this as a legitimate question and not merely an attempt to annoy
me. I didn't mean to imply that Dvorak was in any way German by birth or even
in training. However, it is impossible to ignore, I hope, that his strongest
musical influences, aside from the folk music of his homeland, were Brahms
and Wagner. Brahms and Dvorak were friends, shared the same publisher, and
thus Dvorak was asked to contribute a companion to Brahms's Hungarian Dances.
Thus came the Slavonic Dances, some of his very greatest work.

I hope I will not be the first person to point out to you the incredible
similarities between Dvorak's 7th symphony and Brahms's 3rd Symphony. This
applies to a lesser extent between Dvorak's 6th and Brahms #2. Another
striking feature of the 7th and 8th symphonies is their occasional forays
into wagnerian harmonies. This is particularly striking in the slow movement
of the 8th Symphony, which makes direct allusions to Die Meistersinger.

It is for these reasons that I group Dvorak with the general term "German
Music." Although Dvorak's essence as a composer is firmly rooted in Bohemia,
his real idols in terms of form, harmony and, perhaps, orchestration in
Wagner's case were German. Solid old German school which stressed musical
fundementals that both Wagner and Brahms represent, even though they do it
quite differently: Counterpoint, Harmony, Form, Orchestration. Dvorak
represents this in his symphonies as well.

Thus, it should not be surpising to learn that orchestras which have a rich
tradition playing the works of Wagner or Brahms would also have unique
insights into Dvorak. Some of these would come from performance traditions
within the ensemble, and some would undoubtedly come from the conductors who
conducted these works in the earliest times, some of whom knew the composers
personally. In the case of the Vienna Philharmonic, they were among the
earliest to play the Symphonies of Brahms and Dvorak. They were also
familiar, in their day jobs at the Staatsoper, with the music of Wagner, and
probably the operas of Dvorak as well. Members of the orchestra knew Brahms
and Dvorak personally, etc. Unfortunately, this same orchestra was changed
forever by the Nazi era and many links to the past were forever lost. This is
the same for many German orchestras, and orchestras in occupied Europe as
well. Certain conductors never conducted there again, etc.

So when we want an unbroken performance tradition direct from the composers
(or as close to the time when the composers were living as possible) we must
turn to pre-WW II recordings of "German" orchestras. These include several
American orchestras which started their existence with heavily German staff
(Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York). Now, all of the American
orchestras eventually became what we now recognize as "American Sounding."
But they did so at different rates. Philadelphia scrapped its German roots
very early on, under Stokowski. But Chicago remained heavily German until the
early 50s.

Listening to old recordings of this music, you will hear something different
about the way they play. There aren't really words for it, but it is
different and you can tell it's different. I think it is most true (and thus
most audible) with Wagner, because so much political baggage has been heaped
onto this music over the years (and I don't mean that to take lightly what
Wagner's music came to represent to some pretty evil dudes).

I hope some of this will be identified with what you are learning in school.
I know I learned very little in music school, in the academic sense. I was
hoping other schools were better,

David Hattner, NYC

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