The Bad Doctor

In 1540 or 1541, there was a commotion in Room 5 of the Hotel zum Löwen (German for The Lion Hotel). The rooming house was in the sleepy town of Staufen, situated between the Black Forest and the Rhine plain. Room 5 was occupied by an alchemist, and the blast was basically the equivalent of a meth lab explosion. Rumors soon spread that the Devil himself had arrived to take Johann Georg Faust, aka Georgius Sabellicus, aka Georgius Helmstetter, to Hell.

So the story goes, at any rate. 

I had reached 1857 on my chronological tour de flute parts from the Orchestra Musician’s CD-ROM Library. Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony was up, but I was reluctant to tackle it for a multitude of reasons. Well, three. Firstly, as a high schooler I’d had a lousy experience playing the second clarinet part in a concert-band transcription of Liszt’s Les Preludes. It was awful, all long tones and arpeggios, and I hated it. Reason the second was that I had recently played the flute part of Wagner’s Faust Overture, which is a piece cobbled together from fragments of an abandoned symphony and doesn’t work.  Reason number three was that the Liszt symphony clocked in at an hour and fifteen minutes.   

Being a champion procrastinator, I wound up spending at least five times the length of the Faust Symphony learning stuff about Faust, a story of ambition and consequences that has inspired countless artists. (The Wikipedia page lists more than 200 works in pretty much every genre.) 

Was there a real Faust? Historians seem to think so, although with caveats that include the possibility that more than one traveling trickster might have used this name.

This Faust lived from about 1466 (some sources say 1480, but 1466 is considered more likely) to that explosive day in 1540 or 1541. He may have been raised in Knittlingen, or Helmstett. Helmstett may be more likely, as Heidelberg University records a Georgius Helmstetter attending from 1483 to 1487, but Knittlingen is the one with a Faust Museum, so it has my heart. Faust claimed the title of doctor and wandered about offering his services as a teacher, alchemist, magician, and astrologer. He cast horoscopes and brewed potions and, maybe, wrote grimoires and other books about magic. (Or other people put his name on the texts.) Faust tended to get on people’s nerves and was thrown out of Ingolstadt, Nuremberg, and other towns.   

Faust made and encouraged various extravagant claims. That the dog he traveled with could turn into a human servant. That he could reproduce all of Jesus’ miracles. Abbott Trithemius of Wurzburg, writing to a friend in 1507, called Faust “a vagabond, an utterer of vain repetitions.” Trithemius, who himself claimed magical powers, obviously had personal reasons for his disdain, but I appreciate his sarcastic description of his rival as a “fountainhead of necromancers, astrologer, the second Magus, chiromancer, aeromancer, and pyromancer.” Pyromancy, which is divination by means of flames, may be what did Faust in, in the end. 

The earliest printed recounting of Faust’s exploits seems to be the 1587 chapbook the History von D. Johann Fausten. About five years later came Christopher Marlowe’s hit play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. The big inspiration for the Fausts of the Romantic era, though—the Fausts of Wagner and Liszt, and the rest—was Goethe’s version: Faust: Eine Tragoedie. Goethe’s work is a closet drama, written to be read rather than staged, but it ignited a wave of plays and operas where audiences could see for themselves Faust, Mephistopheles, and Margarete (nicknamed Gretchen), and townspeople and emperors and spirits, plus a big black poodle. 

At the time Liszt finished his symphony, Spohr and Berlioz had produced Faust operas, and many more were to come. Heavy-hitter composers Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Schumann had written songs and symphonic poems on Faust themes.

My feelings about Liszt, both as a composer and as a person, have become more generous than they used to be. I’ve played a number of his shorter works, especially the Hungarian Rhapsodies, in my project, and found them fun. As well, in my reading about other composers’ lives, I keep finding Liszt’s helping hand, offering friendship, advocacy, and money. He assisted the careers of Chopin, Wagner, Berlioz, the Schumanns, Borodin, Grieg, and more.  For someone who got as much adulation and fame as Liszt did (oh, the groupies!), he seems to have been a pretty standup guy. 

So I managed, eventually, to dive into the Faust Symphony. There aren’t a ton of recordings of this piece. It requires a big orchestra, and an organ, and a chorus and a soloist, and, as noted, it’s very long, but I was happy to find one by Georg Solti, one of my favorite conductors, and the Chicago Symphony, my favorite orchestra. It was an amazing experience, and I loved every bit of it. There are three sections, Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. I had a great time, even when I got lost in the trickier, fast-moving bits of Mephistopheles. Then I listened to it again while I read an English translation of Goethe’s Faust, part 1. And again, as I wrote this essay. 

One great extra about Faust, if you are tempted after watching the movies and reading the books and hearing the music, its that you can do a tour. If you don’t have the budget for a trip to Germany, you might try a visit to the “unabashedly Gothic” Faust Haus, a winery in Napa Valley. Or you can get a cheaper thrill by ordering some beans from Detroit’s Faust Haus coffee roasting company.

I’d love to make a Faust pilgrimage to Germany someday, with stops at the Knittlinger museum,  Heidelberg University, and the Fausthaus in Bad Kreuznach, one of the doctor’s many residences. The Fausthaus has an attached restaurant where one can enjoy a pint or two. The apex of the tour would of course be Room 5 in Staufen, in what’s now the Gasthaus Löwen. There’s a portrait of Doctor Faust carved into the wall! An en suite bath, dark wood everywhere, crimson upholstery, and a dinette set tucked underneath a pair of lovely large European windows! 

It would be expensive, though…I might have to make a deal with the Devil to afford it.

Belly laughs

Hear me mispronounce condescension as condensation HERE!

I was 17, spending an evening listening to records at my best friend Erika’s house, as one did back then. While Erika fiddled around with the record player stylus, taking a couple of tries to get to the start of Track Two, I studied the sleeve of Report from Hoople: P.D.Q. Bach on the Air. The title and illustration were confusing. I was used to various triple-initialed Bach sons, but unfamiliar with P.D.Q. Then there was the photograph: a man with unruly hair and a bowtie, very academic, with a microphone, and with books in the background, but also…he held a half-eaten apple in one hand, and there was a game of solitaire spread out on the desk, next to a paper bag lunch. Fancy and ridiculous.

Track two, “New Horizons in Music Appreciation,” started. It combined two familiar things, the program notes read by the presenters on classical music broadcasts, and the banter of football sportscasters. The mixture was as delicious as the chocolate and peanut butter of a Reese’s cup. To the background noise of an orchestra tuning along with murmured audience chitchat, announcers Pete (Schickele) and Bob (Dennis) set the stage for an oncoming contest between orchestra and conductor, noting that it was a fine day for a match, as there was “not a cloud in the ceiling.” Then the players launched into  the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “And they’re off, with a four-note theme!” Pete exclaimed. He and Bob commented on various matters, such as: themes versus motifs, whether the piece would ever get going, the possibility that principal horn Bobby Corno would be traded after he flubbed a note, unexpected modulations from major to minor, and more.

It’s way funnier than I can describe. Twelve minutes later my sides were sore from laughing. I was going through some tough stuff at home, with my nuclear family melting down, but for a while I was utterly happy with the universe. For the next week or so, I could feel better just by remembering some of Pete’s lines.

Since that day I’ve been a fan of Peter Schickele, the creator of that album, and of Schickele’s alter egos: the mythical composer PDQ Bach (old Johann Sebastian Bach’s last and least child) and Professor Peter Schickele, “musical pathologist,” the academic who “discovered” PDQ.

Schickele had an extensive career as a composer of serious music. I speak of him in the past tense because he died this week, on January 16, 2024. Peacefully and at home. As himself, so to speak, Schickele wrote more than 100 works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, voice, and other combinations. Several of them are clarinet works. I own his beautiful clarinet trio in my music library and hope to perform it someday. He also scored films and TV shows, collaborated with Joan Baez and other folk singers, and served as a composer/lyricist for the Broadway show Oh, Calcutta. On Schickele’s website, these compositions are color-coded blue.

I love the character of Professor Pete (whose compositions are color-coded orange). Professor Pete’s academic home was the (fictional) University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. As the discoverer of PDQ Bach, Professor Pete devoted his career to finding and performing ever more PDQ Bach works (color-coded gold).

Both Professor Pete and PDQ commonly appropriated other composers’ tunes into their works. As Professor Pete notes, composers stole from one another all the time in the Baroque and early classical eras. PDQ became original through incompetence, since he was terrible at remembering exactly how the themes he borrowed went. The humor in a PDQ Bach work comes in many forms. Funny instruments, such as a fog horn or a snack vending machine. Standard instruments altered or truncated, such as a trombone using a bassoon reed instead of a mouthpiece. Melodies that get stuck in a sequence or resolve clumsily (or not at all). Unexpected modulations.  And puns, oh so many puns. There are also laughs arising from the difficulties that afflict performers from time to time: running out of breath, hitting a wrong note, getting lost, trying to play a line that goes outside of the instrument’s range, etc.

Schickele knew well what he was satirizing. He grew up mostly in Iowa and North Dakota. He was the only bassoonist in Fargo, North Dakota, and the only music major at Swarthmore College, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1957. Then he earned a master’s in composition at the Juilliard School in 1960. While at Juilliard, he studied composition with Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti. Schickele loved the music of Spike Jones, a bandleader of the 40s and 50s who specialized in spoof arrangements featuring unexpected transitions, cowbells, burps, gunshots, comedic vocals, etc. Jones’s work inspired Schickele to organize humorous concerts at Julliard, starting in 1959, which became an annual event and went public in 1965.

Report from Hoople, released in 1967, was the second PDQ album. The first had been a live recording of a 1966 concert in Carnegie Hall. Many albums followed these two, and a book, The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach, of which I own two copies, and which I’ve read many times, each time getting more of the jokes. Most importantly, there were many, many live concerts to come. I have personally attended three PDQ Bach concerts, each hosted by Professor Pete himself. The Professor was always late enough to have to enter with the aid of a rope, swinging from the first balcony to the stage. Things went uphill from there. From playing some of these pieces myself, I know how challenging they can be, especially with having to keep a serious face—the humor doesn’t work if the performers are giggling through the notes. Also the music itself can be challenging. For example, see the “Sonata Abassoonata,” where the bassoon soloist has to play bassoon and piano simultaneously.

I met Peter Schickele in person in November of 1995. At that time I played in a Boston-area group called the Metropolitan Wind Symphony. The MWS and wind bands in some other parts of the US had commissioned Schickele to write a piece. He produced Metropolitan Wind Serenade, five movements that paid tribute to the commissioning groups’ locations. The Boston movement was the first, “Summer Day on the Banks of the Charles.” My husband Dave—at that time, my boyfriend Dave—and I played in the second clarinet section, with Dave doubling on ambulance siren for the Serenade and receiving some personal coaching from Schickele on the fine points of the siren part. Schickele was friendly and patient. Like a lot of composers I’ve met, he was quieter than his pieces. 

For people who are unfamiliar with PDQ or Schickele or Professor Pete, it’s difficult for me to pick a favorite. The good news is that these compositions are easy to find on Youtube. The Beethoven 5 Sportscast is a classic, of course. One PDQ piece I come back to, always with delight, is Oedipus Tex, a version of the Oedipus myth, but done with a Western twist. The action is set in Thebes Gulch and stars Oedipus Tex (his friends just call him Ed), Billie Jo Casta (Queen of the Rodeo), and the Okay Chorale. It’s well worth checking out.

Although there were other trends at play, Schickele and PDQ came along at a time when classical music was due for a bit of deflating. The music itself was fine, glorious, sublime, but it was time to rethink the condescension and gate-keeping of that world. Adding fun is helpful. It sells tickets, even. And sometimes a listener will chance on another sublimity: that rib-straining, universe-cleansing laughter that fixes everything, for a little while.

The game

I sit, pulse pounding, the engine running, a hundred yards from the bridge. A single lane over a canyon, with rocks and a river far below. It’s twilight. A woman off to the side raises the starting flag. I try to remember to breathe. The woman lowers the flag and I stomp on the accelerator. Across the bridge, farther up the mountain, are the headlights of my opponent. Howells. Both of us careen at breakneck speed towards the abyss.

The game, of course, is Chicken. Chicken is a zero-sum game involving two players on a collision course. The way to avoid a crash is to swerve, but to swerve is to lose. To collide is also to lose. The winner gets everything. Those who swerve maintain life and limbs but are also awarded the title of coward.

Chicken is a stupid game, a monstrous pursuit. In most aspects of my life I’m a swerver. With my neural wiring and temperament, swerving is the smart strategy, though not nearly as smart as avoiding the game altogether. What’s the damage in being called a chicken by the likes of the people who want to play the chicken game?

Yet here I am again on the narrow mountain lane, do or die. Why? I could blame Howells. He’s the one who wrote the St. Paul’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.

The Mag and Nunc, as everybody in the choir calls them, are traditional song texts based on Bible passages from the Gospel of Luke. Composers have been setting music to these texts for hundreds of years. In the Anglican tradition they’re paired for Evensong services. We’ll be singing the St. Paul’s Mag and Nunc in just a couple of weeks.

Herbert Howells is a 20^th century English composer who taught at the Royal College of Music for many years. He died in 1983 at the age of 90, leaving a vast catalog of works, including many pieces of Anglican church music. He’s kind of a giant in the choral sphere, and he set the Mag and Nunc texts twenty times. The St. Paul’s Mag and Nunc was composed in 1950, and our Music Director calls it one of Howells’ “more challenging” pieces. It has jazz chords and Tudor rhythms and Stravinskyesque melody lines, plus lots and lots of tritones (aka the Devil’s interval).

That is to say, it’s gorgeous and weird. And finding the notes when the underlying harmony has as many as seven separate pitches has been…scary. Singing is so dependent on being able to hear where the notes are. No buttons or keys or tone holes to help, just the ears and, sometimes, brute muscle memory. Will the alto line get into my head in time? I study the score, listen to other performances, play it on piano, sing it again and again. All the tricks.

The music itself of course doesn’t care if I flub a note or get lost. Nor will Howells be spinning in his urn at Westminster Abbey.

I once wrote an essay in which I described music as the safest, loveliest space. This characterization was both deeply true and utter shite. It’s a lovely thing to lose myself in a piece, working to understand it and get my fingers around it and discover the music in those squiggles on the page. Add a deadline—an upcoming Evensong, say—and there’s nothing particularly safe about it. But it is exhilarating.

Sometimes, I suppose, I am the kind of person who wants to play the chicken game…

The bridge trembles beneath my wheels. Howells has stopped a car’s length from the brink. I brake and our cars kiss, bumper to bumper. He looks just like his photos: bushy eyebrows, deep-set eyes, wavy hair brushed back from his forehead. A professor’s face,waiting for an answer. “The notes are there,“ I say. I think I see him smile.

A Present

Sister and brother Michaela and Sam came this week for their first lesson of 2023. They’d been to their grandparents in Bulgaria, and Mickie brought me a present from their travels: a souvenir pencil with the top fashioned into a G clef.

“They saw it and immediately thought of you,”  their mom said, “because everything in your house is music.”

The pencil was almost as interesting as her comment.  There are a fair number of pencils in this kind of design, often in lollipop colors; I’ve seen them online and in many music shops. My pencil, though, was a subtly sparkly gray, midway between silver and pewter. It was embossed with a Mozart autograph. I do appreciate a signature on a signing instrument. It was wrapped in cellophane and tied with a silver ribbon.

The signature is notable for a z whose tail goes down and down, three quarters of the way around the pencil’s body, like Don Giovanni being dragged to Hell. Mozart didn’t always draw this kind of z; some of his autographs mix cursive and print (like I do!), and often his z is neat and small and the flourish—he always adds a flourish—is elsewhere.

I didn’t remember what a cursive z looked like. (I had to deduce it from context clues) A proper cursive z is basically a y that’s had a terrible day. To form it you make a big curved hill on the line, then a little pointy hill, then a looping tail underneath.

The seller on the tag, Smile GmbH, had listed a Viennese street address on the label. Vienna is a truly “everything music” place, much of it featuring Mozart. I’ve not been to this city yet. When I go I want very much to visit the Mozarthaus, which is a museum and performance space that’s been made out of a building that Mozart and his family lived in for nearly three years. (The Mozarts didn’t live anywhere for very long. They moved around a lot, sometimes just a step or two ahead of their creditors.

Mozart’s apartment is just 7.7 km distant from Smile, or about 19 minutes in current traffic conditions, according to Google. One floor contains art, manuscripts, instruments, and other exhibits. Up a flight of stairs is where Mozart resided, in four good-sized rooms. I watched some online tours of the apartment, which today is furnished with antiques and replicas to suggest what the space might have looked like in Mozart’s time–although then, of course, the items would have been the newest and most fashionable things the Mozarts could afford. I loved the games tables, and, especially, the big, beautiful windows. It being January, though, I wondered how much winter cold those windows would let in.

I showed the gift to Dave and Sonny and considered taking it to choir rehearsal the next evening. However, when I tried writing with it the weight of the clef made the balance wonky. The eraser erased, but only if I held it sideways and sawed at the paper. I was afraid I might poke my or another alto’s eye out, so I left the Mozart pencil at home.

 A good decision, as it turned out, since the overhead lights in the rehearsal hall weren’t working that evening. The church is an old building with lots of additions and accretions, and something’s always going slightly wrong. The current difficulty was fuse-related. Wall outlets were working, so lamps had been scrounged from various church offices. The little circles of light gave the room, already a Yankee grandma space, a great-great-grandma vibe, but also left  many shadows that could eat a gray pencil with subtle sparkles.

For now the Mozart pencil will live in the coffee cup on top of the piano, which also houses functional pencils and my action figure of Beethoven. Beethoven studied with Mozart for a while, and he’s one of the composers who helped turn Vienna into an “everything music” city. I hope the cup will be a happy little home for the two of them.

A Whole Lotta Beethoven

It’s Spring Forward morning. At choir rehearsal the singers were clearly feeling the lost hour of sleep. We trudged in with our coffees at a little past nine, eyelids at half mast. Entrances and vocal lines that had been solid on Thursday night were tentative or just plain wrong. A frisson of unease spread through the choir stalls.

The music director was calm and reassuring. “Don’t worry if you make a mistake in the service,” she said. “I’ll probably make some myself. We’ll get to the end together, no matter what!”

Were we heading for a train wreck? I’ve been in many of the musical sort, ranging from bumps that might slosh a bit of tea onto a dining-car table to running full off the rails. I didn’t expect anything too terrible to happen to the offertory anthem, though. Most of the choir members have been singing together for more than a decade. They’ve had lots of experience with ordinary blips. Entrances in the wrong place or the wrong tempo or missed entirely. Confusion ensues, everybody gets a short-lived adrenaline hit—a terror-fed bolus of attention—and then things settle back into order. Every performance has a chance to go minorly or magnificently wrong—but also a chance to go magnificently right. That’s part of what makes live music so thrilling.

Not everyone has been in a total derailment where things break down so completely that you need to start over.  (I have, more than once.) However, even some apex musicians have had that experience.

Let’s set the Wayback Machine to 6:30 on the evening of December 22, 1808. We’re in Vienna, at the Theater an der Wien, where the 38-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven has organized a benefit concert. At this performance Beethoven, along with an orchestra, a choir, and various vocal soloists, will premiere four new pieces along with some older works. The show will last around four hours in total, with a single intermission. This feels very long to twenty-first century rear ends, but nineteenth century audiences often went to concerts of this length. They were made of sterner stuff, I suppose—and also they were somewhat more able to move around during performances than people in a modern concert hall.

The new compositions are the composer’s fourth piano concerto, his fifth symphony, his sixth symphony, and a Choral Fantasy. The old stuff includes excerpts from the Mass in C and a concert aria. As well, Beethoven will improvise a solo piano fantasia on the spot. It sounds daunting, but amazing! Two of my three favorite Beethoven symphonies! Piano concerto four, almost as good as piano concerto five! The gorgeous Mass in C. And the Choral Fantasy, which serves as a sort of preview of the ninth symphony. Beethoven is playing all of the piano stuff himself.

Things aren’t looking as good as they might, however. The very best musicians in Vienna are playing at a different benefit concert this evening for their guild’s widows and orphans fund. One of the vocal soloists has backed out at the last minute. Beethoven has hired a pickup orchestra, but they aren’t the greatest players and he’s clashed with them so much that they’ve locked him out of the rehearsal room. He’s found a substitute soprano, but she’s young and suffers—as he will discover, too late—from debilitating stage fright. Worse, he’s not quite finished writing the Choral Fantasy. It opens with piano alone, so he’ll just noodle for 24 measures or so. Maybe 32 or 64 measures.

Worst of all, it’s fricking cold in the hall that night. Every audience member complains about it. It’s not the best setting to introduce pieces that are revolutionary rather than simply new. Beethoven and the others make it through to the final number on the program, the Choral Fantasy. Everybody’s on stage: Beethoven, the orchestra, the chorus, the soloists. The ink is barely dry on the parts.

At a last-minute run-through Beethoven has eliminated a repeat of one of the sections. The orchestra remembers this. Beethoven…does not. He takes the repeat. Because the piece has only been thinly rehearsed, it takes time for the orchestra to realize they’re in a different spot from the soloist. As an orchestra member I’ve been through this situation a number of times. Soloists sometimes have memory lapses. Or they will have a variation of such and jump ahead a few measures. Because these are concertos that are well known and usually adequately rehearsed, the orchestra can jump to the new spot, sometimes so smoothly that the audience can’t even tell.

Not so for the Choral Fantasy, which careers off the rails and down the mountainside. The concertmaster stops the piece and calls out, “Again!”

From the string ranks behind him comes a question: “With repeats?”

“Yes!” They begin again.

I told this story in the little hall behind the sanctuary where the choir gathers before the service. It got a laugh. People traded other train wreck anecdotes. A Stravinsky concerto where the piano soloist came in a beat early—which, given the composer, proved fatal. A chorus concert where the conductor turned to the audience after six disastrous measures and said, “This never happened!” and started again. A performance of Bolero where someone tripped on a wire and all the stand lights went off.

We don’t know if Beethoven made much money from the 1808 concert. The event was his final appearance as a piano soloist with orchestra, but that was almost certainly due to his increasing deafness. The hearing problems didn’t stop him from writing music. The best was yet to come.

It’s a famous concert to this day and has been recreated—in its repertoire and duration—by many fine orchestras. I don’t know if any of the tribute performances have chosen to reproduce the negatives: the temperatures, the soprano’s quavery aria, the Choral Fantasy breakdown. I hope to go to one of these shows someday and find out… As for the choir, we made it through the anthem just fine, with a bobble here and there. We compared notes, post-service, over coffee and pastries. All of us were eager to sing another day, and another, and another.

Chamber music

We’re having some issues scheduling family ensemble this week. Sonny’s still adjusting to increasing his work hours to full-time, and he’s feeling the change more than he expected. At his request we switched from Thursday afternoon, our customary time, to Friday. Die Schoepfung, Erster Teil, would need to wait an extra day.

Family ensemble started as a once-per-week trio when Sonny was nine and had just begun learning clarinet. Before then my husband Dave and I—who met in a concert band’s first clarinet section—had often played duets, two clarinets or clarinet and piano, but not on a formal basis, just whenever we felt like it. We wanted to give our kid, who we could tell was hella talented, a bit of a challenge. In the beginning we played simple arrangements from the Rubank Chamber Music for Three Clarinets, Vol. 1, for a half hour or so, taking turns to choose the pieces.

 Chamber music originally was music composed “for the home” (rather than for the church or the theater) and still commonly refers to works that use a small number of players, usually six or fewer, one on a part. Probably humans have made music in this fashion for as long as we’ve  existed, though the earliest surviving parts for instrumentalists are from the 15^th century. Being in a big wind ensemble or chorus or orchestra is tremendous fun and very good for you (highly recommend, 10/10), but in my experience, playing music in more intimate settings is the best way to grow as a musician. There’s no one standing on a podium, stick in hand, picking the pieces, setting the interpretation, tempos, and balance, and helping everybody start and stop together. Chamber musicians have to make these decisions for themselves. Each player has to be confident and independent while also being attentive and cooperative. Confidence, independence,  attention, cooperation. Those were qualities I wanted to nurture in Sonny as well as in myself.

Readers familiar with Die Schoepfung, which tells the creation story from Genesis, may wonder how just two people were going to manage to play Part One, which lasts nearly 40 minutes, consists of 14 segments (an introduction plus various recitatives, arias, and choruses), and is scored for a full orchestra and choir, plus three soloists. (Joseph Haydn, who wrote the work, was inspired by Handel’s similarly monumental Messiah.) We have a plan.

Haydn had been included in our family ensemble quite early on. Once we moved to Vol. 2 of the Rubank clarinet trios there he was, represented by an Allegro. As Sonny switched to bassoon and family ensemble got into more technical pieces, we played many more Haydn tunes. There were tons of them. Haydn was, by necessity as well as inclination, a prolific composer of many genres of music. He wrote operas, sonatas, oratorios, concertos, trios, quartets, and symphonies. He’s considered the “father” of the symphony and the string quartet. Born in 1732, Haydn spent much of his life working as Kapellmeister (music director) for the wealthy Esterhazy family. As Kapellmeister he managed in-house musical activities, which included conducting, composing, and performing. In 1790 his salary and duties were reduced for economic reasons (as is too often still true, musicians tend to be the first thing to be cut from a budget). However, by this time Haydn was famous throughout Europe, and his new contract with the Esterhazys allowed him to publish and profit from his compositions independently. He traveled to London in 1791 and was enormously successful there. In 1795 he returned to Vienna and began work on Die Schoepfung, while also managing to compose nine string quartets, a trumpet concerto, and six masses. The oratorio premiered in 1798 and was an instant hit.

It’s simply marvelous music. I played it for the first time in Chicago when I was about Sonny’s age. This was a Korean-language production in a windswept northwest neighborhood. The orchestra was small, just one on a part for the winds, though Haydn had scored it for pairs of clarinets, oboes, and bassoons and included a third flute and a contrabassoon. As a clarinetist, a thin wind section was a plus. The clarinet had only recently been introduced to orchestras in Haydn’s time. Composers weren’t used to its sound or what it could do, and as the first clarinets had only five keys, their capabilities were limited. Haydn used my instrument much more sparingly than flute, bassoon, or oboe. The oratorio has some beautiful  writing for the clarinet, but also a lot of tacet (meaning “sit this one out, clarinetist”) numbers. With one on a part I could cover second flute or oboe instead of doing nothing. The performance itself turned out to be spectacular, a happy memory that’s stuck with me for decades.

We mostly discontinued regular family ensemble during Sonny’s college years. Then the pandemic hit midway through his final senior semester. Wind players were persona non grata everywhere—to some extent this is still true, even in 2022—but at least we could play together at home. We shifted the focus, since Sonny was eventually planning to do a fair amount of orchestral work. Also, by now we were a bassoon and flute duo, since Dave has stopped playing clarinet and I’m trying to improve my flute playing. Therefore, on Thursday afternoons we work through orchestral repertoire, skipping around the centuries. Tchaikovsky, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Copland, Handel, Mozart, Schumann, Haydn, Schubert, and others.

I’ve found a Schoepfung recording from 1992 on the Euroarts Channel (another 10/10 recommend). Peter Schreier conducts the Scottish Chamber Orchestra along with some fabulous soloists (Edith Mathis, Christoph Pregardien, Rene Pape). The location is Lucerne and is beyond gorgeous. A couple of hours from now, we’ll assemble the instruments, crank up the speakers, and play along. Karaoke, yes, but with the two of us in the chamber and Papa Haydn’s notes, there’ll be some music made as well.