The phenomenon of the One-Work Composer seems be dying
out. Forty, thirty, maybe twenty-five
years ago most music-lovers could have easily listed a half-dozen composers
whose names were familiar only through a single work. Pachelbel was synonymous with the Canon, Boccherini with the Minuet, Dukas with Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Bax with Tintagel,
Sinding with Rustle of Spring, MacDowell
with To A Wild Rose, and many
more. I recall from my student days
taking part in a double-bill of operas – The
Telephone and Savitri – for which
the programme booklet (authored by a leading musicologist of the time) suggested
that the audience was being shown that two composers were being revealed as
writing more than just the one work by which everyone knew them then (Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors and Holst The Planets). It was a post-graduate student colleague
researching into the music of E J Moeran who, goaded by a silly comment from me
about the G minor Symphony (the first movement of which I absolutely adore),
surprised me by rattling off a whole catalogue of other compositions from this
much-underrated English composer of the early 20th century, and when
I stumbled across an old Supraphon LP of Trionfo
di Afrodite in a second-hand record-shop in the English midlands back in
the late 1970s I realised, for the first time, that Carl Orff had composed
something other than Carmina Burana (although
even today most music-lovers only know his work in music education beyond that
astonishingly popular choral extravaganza).
Max Bruch used to rile against the fact that everyone knew him only for
his G minor Violin Concerto, while Percy Grainger was appalled at the
popularity of his Country Gardens and
would tell anyone who asked that the piece reminded him of cow pats and compost
heaps.
The demise of the One-Work Composer seems to have begun with
the tercentenary of J S Bach in 1985.
Never known himself as a One-Work Composer, Bach nevertheless has long
suffered from a widespread ignorance of the totality of his output. (Only a few years ago I was doing a
presentation to students in Hong Kong and after hearing several of them perform
one of the 48 asked them to list
other works by Bach; they ummed and ahhed for a while before coming up with
“another Prelude and Fugue” and “Toccata and Fugue”, although details of
tonality were not known.) Coming just
two years after the first commercial CDs had appeared on the market, enterprising
recording companies took advantage of the handy size of the medium, its
extended playing time, the ease and relative inexpensiveness of its production,
its dazzling aural qualities which sometimes encouraged listeners to focus more
on the sound than the music itself and, perhaps most significantly, the
opportunities its packaging gave for extended written support materials, to go
for comprehensivity. Quite literally
they unearthed everything they could find that Bach had - or may have – written,
and committed it all to disc. That
seemed to open the floodgates, and the culture of exhaustive comprehensivity
was born. We now have more CDs bearing
the motto “The Complete Works of…” than one would have thought possible, while
the one or two tiny gaps which the CDs do not cover have been plugged by the
likes of tiny Timmy Tots thumping tunes to tinny sounds (I’ve run out of teasing
alliterative Ts) on YouTube. Bad sound,
bad performances, non-existent background information, inane comments from
pig-ignorant listeners, but at least bringing into the public arena music which
nobody would otherwise have heard.
So today even the most peripheral music-lover will know that
Pachelbel was a prolific writer of chorale preludes, Boccherini wrote some
lovely chamber works as well as a cello concerto or two, Dukas produced La Peri and MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches contain a lot more
charming pieces beyond the opening To a
Wild Rose. On top of that music
scholarship has denied some composers their One-Work status; luckily we all now
know Albinoni’s numerous concertos since the Adagio by which his name was uniquely preserved for decades turns
out not to have been by him at all.
Yet there remain several composers whose reputations cannot seem
to break through the One-Work barrier.
When we see that Litolff’s Scherzo
comes from a work listed as his Op.103 we might reasonably expect that, by
now, several dozen of his works would, at the very least, have got an airing on
YouTube (although that can be a curse; follow this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojcu-g5soPY
for a ghastly experience seemingly filmed on a cheap webcam in an adolescent’s
bedroom - thank God he remembered to put his trousers on before switching on
the camera). On top of that, a truncated
work-list in Grove suggests opus
numbers for Litolff reach as high as Op.106 and that among his published
compositions are no less than 12 operas, five piano concertos and “117 characteristic
pieces” for piano solo. Where are
they? I can find just two of the four listed
Concert Overtures on YouTube (notably Maximilian
Robespierre, Op.55, and Chant des
Belges, Op.101, the latter of which
appears as a bad regurgitation of an existing recording and an unexplained black-and-white
photograph yet no acknowledgment about the origins of the sounds we hear - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p3dwwR494w. In proper recorded sound, in coherent
performances and supported by generous and informative documentation, Hyperion
have unearthed the remaining extant piano concertos (CDA67210 and CDA66889), but
that’s it. Litolff remains, firmly, a
One-Work Composer.
As does Hamish MacCunn.
A fantastic new disc of organ music recorded on the Usher Hall in
Edinburgh and played with great verve by John Kitchen, boasts music by MacCunn,
and this got me very excited. Having
fallen in love with MacCunn’s Land of the
Mountain and the Flood (his Op.3 written when he was just 19) from a
marvellous HMV LP called “Music of the Four Countries”, I have many times tried
to delve deeper into MacCunn’s output, but have largely drawn a blank. Hyperion
have, as ever, done more than most by recording a couple of his other pieces
and some extracts from his opera Jeanie
Deans, but on YouTube you find just a profusion of Land of the Mountain and the Flood (mostly stolen from the existing
commercial recordings), some of which include the deeply perceptive critical
comments of your average YouTube reader (usually as grammatically conscious as
a garden slug) including this dazzling bit of insight from a certain James
Ginn; “I liked the part where the cymbals woke me up” or this hugely relevant
comparison from Zrak23 “part of the song reminds me of Batman 1989 soundtrack?”
(Nice one, Zrak23; after that intellectual effort you can go back to snorting your
cocaine now.) MacCunn was by no means as prolific as Litolff, the worklist on Grove showing nothing higher than an
Op.30, but surely something should have emerged to rival this one work’s
popularity. A piano recital on Divine
Arts by Scottish pianist Murray McLachlan (dda25003) finds a few piano dances,
and there is a setting of “O Mistress Mine” on an obscure CD on the Atma label,
but that’s it. Kitchen’s organ piece, far from being a new discovery of a
hitherto unknown work by MacCunn, turns out to be a masterly transcription by
Jeremy Cull of - yes you’ve guessed it - Land
of the Mountain and the Flood.
So we are left with the inescapable conclusion that, despite
all the efforts to release into the public domain recordings of every note
written by every composer, some composers must forever languish under the
heading of One-Work Composers. And, as
that category continues to shrink, it lends a certain distinction to those,
like Litolff and MacCunn, who remain known to the world through one dazzling
and, it would seem, unrepeatable moment of creative genius.
Dear Dr Marc,
ReplyDeleteGreat to see you are back on line !
Your article reminded me of the (probably apocryphal) remark attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham (and doubtless to others too) that “Bach really only wrote two works: a slow one and a fast one, and if you listen carefully you will hear that the fast one is just the slow one speeded up”.
In literature, you do indeed get one-work writers such as J D Salinger or Harper Lee. Strictly they are one-published-novel-writers, and they may have produced a copious output of non-published non-novels, such as essays, letters or other writings. In music, it is hard to think how someone could write a major work without having learned their trade through vast numbers of earlier minor works. If we count small works, and the Greensleeves legend is to be believed, perhaps Henry VIII would literally be a one-work composer. But in general, we must be saying that a one-work composer is a composer who has one work that is far more widely known than the rest of their output.
Your article gives two possibilities, and I would raise that to two-and-a-half:
1) Some composers were inspired to write one piece whose quality is way ahead of all the rest of their output, and this is all that deserves to be remembered, or
2) Public attention has focused on one piece and ignored others of equal quality by the same composer, for some largely random reason.
The “and a half” possibility is the tragic case of the silver swan: composers such as Juliusz Zarebski who fell ill and died just as he seemed to be finding his voice. After a decade of increasingly mature piano works, his last work was a single outstanding piano quntet.
Your observations of Litolff and McCann point towards the first possibility, while the case of Bruch might be the second. But I suppose until someone takes the time to unearth, learn and record more of these obscure works, we will never really know. I was delighted when recordings came out of C V Stanford’s symphonies, and his cello concerto on Naxos and Hyperion a few years ago, but I cant find anyone else with much enthusiasm for them. I’m equally keen when recordings of Miaskovsky’s sometimes rather “wacky” symphonies come out, but he does not seem to be growing in popularity - it is hard work getting anyone that even wants to play through his chamber music.
As an optimist, I lean towards the second explanation for public popularity of music. I think that most people need to hear a piece several times before it grabs them and, consequently, works that are more played are going to be more heard, and therefore more popular. This creates a snowball effect. A widely repeated public event, or a TV series or film will feature a work, and its popularity will mushroom. Obvious examples are the first few bars of Also Spracht Zarathustra, the “Rach 3” for a while after the film Shine, or his 2nd piano concerto after Close Encounters. For me, long ago, the last movement of Beethoven’s first symphony was introduced via a very odd children’s TV programme in the 1970’s about an egg called Ludvig.
Anyway, if true, this snowball theory is good news, because it suggests that the popular repertoire is just an almost-random selection from an equally rich sea of less well-known works. So, just like Amazon points out, if you like Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, you might enjoy Coleridge-Taylor’s late violin concerto. And if you like Murrill in E, you may want to try his second cello concerto.
Yours Dr Peter.
Great to hear from you again.
DeleteIn the interests of accuracy;
1. Harper Lee's second published novel - "Go Set A Watchman" - is being publihsed amidst much controversy.
2. King Henry VIII did not compose Greensleeves.
3. Whatever Amazon.com might say in its inane computer-generated preferences, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast is only part of a trilogy which is rather more relevant to those who like choral music than any of his many purely instrumental works.Just because Amazon don't have a copy in their warehouse does not mean to say that it does not exist. (Search out A Tale of Old Japan for Coleridge Taylor choral music at its most exotic.)
4. To be a one-work composer, that work needs to be widely known and, frankly, I don't think Juliusz Zarebski's Quintet falls into that category nor, indeed, the music of Herbert Murrill whose organ Carillon is the only work by which organists know him, while his Evening Service in E is the only work by which cathedral choirs know him, and who is pretty well unknown by just about everybody else!.
Wow, you must have had a bad day !
ReplyDeleteAnother one-work composer has just come to mind: Hely-Hutchison and his Carol Symphony.
A very Merry Christmas to you Dr Marc.
yours
Dr Peter
How about Richard Addinsell and his so called "Warsaw Concerto".
ReplyDeleteReasonably popular, generally nothing else by him known at all.