A Gem and "Opol" - Théodore Gouvy and his Puzzling Nephew

Nationalism is a fickle beast, especially when opera is involved.  The musical climate of post-revolutionary France was, much like Italy, dominated by opera, and substantial instrumental music wasn't given the press or acceptance it deserved (leaving good composers like Louise Farrenc in the proverbial dust).  The symphony especially suffered, as no scene took off from Napoleon's favorite composer son, Étienne Nicolas Méhul, who was called France's Beethoven in his lifetime, apparently in vain.  Berlioz didn't even get them to budge, which is a bit shocking now considering how popular his work is today.  That being said, you'd think a nationalistic crossover artist wouldn't get any support among the birth of Empire.  Well, you'd be partly right.

That jaunty number closed off the Fantaisie Symphonique by Théodore Gouvy (1819-1898), born in what is now Saarbrücken-Schafbrücke on the Franco-Prussian border and eternally split between the French and German cultures he shared.  He wasn't able to get French citizenship until he was 32, and in the meantime studied privately.  Becoming a master of chamber and symphonic forms, he gained much recognition behind the Instro Curtain (Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and Russia), but never held water in France.  Which is odd, because those other countries seem to enjoy opera just fine, but France and Italy couldn't care less for lyric-less tunes.  This would change with César Franck, but his change would be so big, coupled with the vast stormcloud that was Wagner, that Gouvy once again didn't stand a chance.  With as much invention, charm, and formal command as he possessed, his work was still firmly planted in previous generations.  But for those in the mood, it's all there - mastery of orchestration, astonishing harmonic depth, infectious subjects, and genuine, revelatory surprise.  Check out the section at 3:16 for an ass-flattening pastorale.  I was introduced to Gouvy via his third Symphonie, which I'd be more than happy to show you here if it would ever show up on YouTube, and contains all those traits and more.  But then maybe I'd run out of room to show off his chamber work.

That'll change your socks for ya.  Recording his considerable oeuvre has only been in swing since the 90's, with 23 CDs to his name listed on Amazon.  Aside from scattered labels such as Sony Classical and Lorraine, the big mover/shaker is CPO, who have made a name for themselves reviewing the grand and unknown among Romantic and early-20th century composers and don't make any false moves with their five-disc broadside (including that Symponie nr. 3 I was talking about).  They've focused on pieces involving orchestras, so the works he's (arguably) most known for - piano duet - had to be taken care of by others, namely the Duo Tal & Groethuysen.

The resurrection of his work is inspiring, but even that may not uncover the second entry here.  A useful technique for uncovering artists in a search engine is to search for the publisher and browse their authors.  Editions Maurice Senart is a goldmine for impressionism, so while trundling their stuff in the Sibley Music Library at Eastman School of Music I found this:

Notice anything?

Beg your pardon?

No, this isn't a practical joke on the part of the good ship Sibley.  A quick search on Worldcat, a database for university libraries that will pretty much turn up every score and recording in existence, shows six works under that name (plus duplicate listings).  Wikipedia had nothing, and Grove Music Online came up cold.  However, the answer was in store for me on another, less informative site: YouTube.

Phillip Sear is one of those blessed individuals whose adoration for obscure (mostly mid-to-late 19th century) composers is only matched by his persistence.  He'll soon have 2,000 videos of himself playing from the nearly endless solo piano rep, mining the vast quarries of IMSLP, Sibley and CosandScores.  This recording, taken from the set Tableaux du Caucase, comes with the best information I've yet uncovered on M. Ygouw.  Opol Ygouw is a pseudonym, taken from the letters of the composer's real name: Léopold Gouvy.  Léopold (1871-1968) was a nephew of Théodore's, and lived in the same big house as him, but certainly didn't write the same music.  The three works I was able to see are dripping with impressionist technique, and reveal a curious voice with a flair for drama.  Check out the boffo opening to his cello sonata:

His six works were published from 1921 to 1924, putting him ahead of Abel Decaux in terms of oeuvre but still behind Paul Dukas.  I know of the French tradition of composers who wrote fewer, more perfect works rather than a lot of crap, but this may be pushing it.  I still have no idea why he wrote so little music, but what he did leave is at least pretty interesting.  I also haven't the foggiest why he didn't use his real name; perhaps the backlash against his uncle was so strong in his lifetime that it was dead to the industry.  If anybody who's reading this knows more I for one would like to hear it, because he seems just eccentric enough to shine through the sands of time.  At any rate, his uncle's music is out there to find, and if you see any opols at Sotheby's I'd say they're a good investment.

~PNK

To Charm and Soothe - the Edward R. Benjamin Award for Restful Music

Most composition contests are loud, whether by design or by insecurity.  The young, nameless figures who populate their Hopefuls are under pressure and anticipation, making sure the judges know that each and every note is bursting with creative energy and grant-winning spirit.  This all too often results in pieces which leap out of the page and smack the committee across the face for even thinking John Q. Mozart from Scuttlebum State University wouldn't be up to snuff*.  Keeping that in mind, it's always special to see a contestant putting their reputation on the line to show off something gentle - not unworthy, just gentle.  These pieces never win, of course, but it's a real show of character for an artist to trust so much in their more modest work to put it right up front and beam as if it were their only child.  So what if there was a contest dedicated entirely to those pieces?  There was, from 1953 to 1971, and it was exclusive to the Eastman School of Music.

Edward R. Benjamin (1897-1980) was a Southern Industrialist whose work took him to Louisiana, North Carolina, and many places in between and afar.  He was also an ardent patron of serious music in the South and elsewhere, and believed that life should be lived surrounded by beauty.  And no other kind of music transfixed him such as that which "charms and soothes", calming, rich works that invoke restfulness in the listener.  Arguably his most lasting contribution to the world of music was his founding, with the help of Howard Hanson, a highly esteemed composer and director of the school, the Edward R. Benjamin Award for Restful Music, an annual contest for Eastman students to award the best piece (or pieces) to invoke those qualities Benjamin held so dear.  In 1958 Hanson decided to record nine of the winners for one of his contract albums for Mercury Records, Music for Quiet Listening, and with the reprinting of the record in 1994 (with a few other tracks to fill out the CD) it's the last anybody heard of the contest and most of the winners.  That reissue is now out of print, which is a shame - it's both historically interesting and quite lovely.

Unlike many high-profile contests, the Benjamin Award draw exclusively from a single student body, and upon reviewing the nine I had only heard of two people, one of whom in very brief passing.  It's a fine reminder that just because somebody enters into a higher education program it's no guarantee they'll make the alumni hall of fame in their field.  Some of the winners stuck it out in the classical field, becoming professors at Eastman and elsewhere, while others left the highbrow behind, such as Bill Pursell, who went on to be a pop pianist and session musician.  The only two figures I'd heard of, Ron Nelson and Martin Mailman, largely eluded fame by gaining recognition in music for wind band, a surefire way to get performances but not widespread acknowledgement.  And even with the later success of the contest winners none of the pieces on this disc have gotten any lasting recognition.  Sadly, their brief time in the sun was written in to their very being, but not by any effort of the composers.

One issue with the compilation is having to listen to each piece in a row.  Some compilations lend themselves to a full sit-down; not this one.  The historical fascination in this kind of set is its function as a snapshot of the prevailing influences and ambitions of young composers during the greatest boomtime in American classical music.  That being said, hearing all nine of the works together creates a pleasant blur.  I don't intend to diminish the quality of the works by mentioning their self-similarity; it's an expected trait when era-binging and I don't hold it against the composers.  They're students and haven't fully developed their voices (and may never), so its natural for there to be overlapping qualities, and none of the pieces were written with the intention of ending up on a compilation album of its peers.  All of the works owe some of their existence to the granddaddy of all modern adagios, Gabriel Fauré's Pavane, as well as Maurice Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte.  To quote the album's liner notes, they "possess a thoughtful serenity and a calm emotion devoid of cloying sentimentality," and aren't "morbid or dull-toned or cloudy."  I think it's best to approach each piece on its own terms, perhaps taking in one with a fine scotch and leaving the rest for other times.  The recording team thought each piece should stand on its own within the confines of an LP, recording each with a simple, high quality technique that allowed the purely musical qualities to come to the fore.  For such modest music a lot of people care very deeply about its due treatment.

It's probably fitting that the contest was suspended in 1971, at the very end of academia's acceptance of the profitable and popular brand of American classical music that had dominated during the previous three decades.  So ubiquitous was this style that some of the works on this disc wouldn't be out of place in a serious 50's Hollywood drama or TV show.  I think its also fitting of not only the works' bid for singularity but also the all-too-predictable obscurity of the album that I was only able to find one of the tracks on YouTube.  Its composer, Ron Nelson, is known almost exclusively for his powerful band piece Passacaglia on B-A-C-H.  As with that piece's homaging bent, his Sarabande: For Katharine in April (1954 winner) seems to channel the spirit of Ravel, not so much in the Pavane but for The Enchanted Garden, the final movement of the Mother Goose suite and one of my several dozen votes for the most beautiful piece of music ever written.  If you do find the disc my other recommendations would be Bill Pursell's Christ Looking Over Jerusalem and Paul Earl's And on the Seventh Day...  For now, here's the Sarabande, and I hope that we can all find time for quiet listening in our lives - some of us certainly need it.

~PNK

*One of my favorite stories to this regard was when my undergraduate band professor and his star pupil returned from a band conference.  The band director announced to the wind ensemble, "I have seen the future of band music, and it is very loud."  The pupil told m about John Mackey's piece Asphalt Cocktail, the climax of which involved a percussionist throwing a metal trashcan full of chains onto the stage.  He also retold another professor's joke about a piece that made his penis fall off.