This week’s blog, then, comprises a selection of entries in the Naxos catalogue that feature fools. We’ll hear some shorter examples by way of starters, and gradually work our way to a group of more substantial items.

Our opening number is an arrangement of a song written in 1944 by the major author, but lesser known composer, Paul Bowles (1910-1999). April Fool Baby is a nonsensically comical poem by the American author Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), who was a major influence on Bowles. The dotty text is well matched by Bowles’ jaunty rhythms. This arrangement of the song for piano duet is by Andrey Kasparov. Here’s the text of Stein’s poem:

It seems to be a note to she the sweet sweetie
But actually it’s April Fool to tender she
My sweetie
She is all me my sweetie
April full of fool which is me for my sweetie
Dear April which made she to be
All to he
April Fool to his sweetie which is she
Tenderly excessively sweetily
My April Fool baby

April Fool Baby (8.559786)

Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev

Next, we have a quick nod to the folly of alcohol addiction in a song by the 19th-century Russian composer, Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev. Its title, Kak naladidi: durak, translates as ‘They keep calling me a fool’ and appears in a collection of ten songs from 1895-96. The sardonic poem urges a drunkard to turn from ‘green wine’ (vodka) to water, whatever the likely consequences.

They keep calling me a fool (8.572218)

Peter Breiner
Photo: Guinara Samojlova

From Balakirev to The Beatles now in a song arranged by Peter Breiner in 1993 as part of his ever popular first volume of Beatles Go Baroque. Arranged for chamber orchestra in the style of a Handel concerto grosso, Fool on the Hill describes the fool of the title as a solitary figure, misunderstood by others, but actually a person of wisdom:

Day after day
Alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him
They can see that he’s just a fool
And he never gives an answer

But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning ‘round

Fool on the Hill (8.990050)

Jean Sibelius

Sibelius’ output of incidental music for the theatre began in 1898 with King Christian II, a historical drama written by his friend, the Swedish dramatist Adolf Paul. Although the play was a great success at the time, it has now disappeared from the repertory, with only the music surviving the test of time. The narrative centres around the love of Christian II (whose rule extended over all three Scandinavian countries) for a Dutch girl from a humble background. The music originally consisted of only four movements, although Sibelius was later encouraged to add a further three. We’ll hear the last of those original four movements, titled Fool’s Song of The Spider. You can follow this link to contemplate the complete text. Meanwhile, here are the words of the first verse in translation:

In the green field behind a wild hedge,
under the brooding heat of the sun,
Crouches a spider so black and so fat,
in the grass and fixes her gaze.
Then sunlight catches her and she begins to
thread and to twist and spin it until it is dark,
and she weaves herself a web, so strong and so dense,
so light and so airy,
in which to catch and torment every soul
until it lies dead in the threads.

Fool’s Song of The Spider (8.573299)

Now to a scene from David Schiff’s opera, Gimpel the Fool. Schiff recalls the genesis of the work, dating from the time when he was a graduate student in music composition at the Manhattan School of Music.

David Schiff

“One of my courses was Opera Composition. For our final assignment we had to write the libretto for a short opera. I decided then to write a libretto for an opera based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s most famous story, Gimpel the Fool. I went to a reading that Singer was giving of his stories and asked him afterwards if he would give me permission to write such an opera; he said that he was sure there would be no problem.”

At the opening of Act I we find Elka, Gimpel’s wife of twenty years, on her deathbed. She confesses that their six children are not his. Stunned and shocked, Gimpel tries to understand how he let himself be deceived. From his earliest childhood he had always believed everyone. He was an orphan and given to the baker as an apprentice. The townspeople of Frampol told him that the Czar was coming, that the moon had fallen down, even that the Messiah was coming to town – and he believed them. The rabbi advised him that those who told him lies were the fools, not Gimpel, for they would lose the world to come.

Once we saw how easy it was to fool Gimpel… (8.669010-11)

Gustav Holst
© HNH International

Gustav Holst composed his one-act comic opera The Perfect Fool between 1918 and 1922; it parodies the conventions of romantic grand opera, especially Verdi and Wagner. It did not prove a success and all that remains in the current repertory is the music for the opening ballet, performed as a separate suite. The fact that audiences found the story confusing probably accounts for its failure. The part of the Fool, for example, consists of only one word. A possible symbolic interpretation of the work posits that the role of the Princess symbolises the world of opera, while the Fool represents the British public. Whatever, Holst’s colourful score for the dance sequence is irresistible and is cast in the following structure:

Andante (invocation)
Dance of Spirits of Earth (Moderato – Andante)
Dance of Spirits of Water (Allegro)
Dance of Spirits of Fire (Allegro moderato – Andante)

The Perfect Fool (9.80222)

Dmitry Shostakovich
© HNH International

When Stalin died in 1953 the conditions for film-making in the Soviet Union changed almost overnight. Censorship and supervision eased, and new party directives demanded at least 150 productions annually. Among the directors active at the time was Grigori Kosintsev, better known in western countries for his fine Shakespeare adaptations of Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970). During pre-production for the latter, Kosintsev sent a memo to Shostakovich, who had been commissioned to write the film score: “There should be no stylisation of antiquity. It should be the language of contemporary art which you use to express the contemporary world.”

The Ten Songs of the Fool from the incidental music that Shostakovich wrote for a stage production of King Lear in 1930 certainly seemed to anticipate that concept. Our final audio extract is taken from a volume that includes the music for both the stage and screen versions. Writing about that recording, Classical Net wrote:

“The CD contains the music for a stage production done in the 1930s as well as for the 1970 film. The tone of the two scores differs wildly. The earlier production grins like a skull, with the heavy satire idiosyncratic to Shostakovich. For example, at one point the Fool breaks out into “Jingle Bells”, to different words, of course.”

Ten Songs of the Fool (C10397)

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The challenge had me scratching my head, until I realised that today, Friday 13th July, marks the opening of the 2018 BBC Promenade Concerts; so the festival’s planners clearly found no fear in a phobia of the thirteenth. The First Night of the Proms’ programme features Holst’s The Planets Suite, his popular extravaganza for large orchestra and female choruses. Holst originally scored the suite, however, for four hands, two pianos. Such a drastic reduction in forces put me in my mind of Mahler’s Song of the Earth, which Arnold Schoenberg reduced to a version for voices and chamber ensemble in order to air it at his Society for Private Musical Performances. This was founded a century ago, on 23 November 1918, to give a devastated post-WWI musical scene the chance to become acquainted with modern music.

Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia. Unfortunately for him, he was born on the 13th day of the month (in September, 1874) and died, even more fatefully, on Friday 13th July, 1951. He was aged 76 (7 + 6 = 13). Let’s hear part of that arrangement of Mahler’s song cycle (8.573536) with the closing part of the last movement titled Der Abschied (The Farewell).

Before we leave Schoenberg, let’s take the opportunity to hear part of his last completed composition. This was Psalm 130 (13 + 0 = …), De Profundis, for mixed chorus (8.557528), which Schoenberg finished in 1951, the year of his death (1 x 9 + 5 – 1 = …) but wasn’t performed until some three years later. The structure of the piece is formed not only by combining pitched choral singing and spoken choral declamation, but also by contrasting passages of pure speech with passages of pure singing.

Another composer whose birth and death both fell on dates that attract attention was Rossini. Born in a leap year (on 29 February 1792) Rossini, like Schoenberg, died on a Friday the 13th, in 1868. Also like Schoenberg, he was aged 76. Remembered mostly for his highly successful operas, Rossini actually stopped composing in that genre in 1829, when he was only in his late 30s. Although his ink didn’t totally dry up, he did treat himself to a long semi-retirement after that watershed. Among the pieces that filled the latter part of his life were the Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), a series of piano solos and other chamber pieces.

In 1867, Rossini began organising these compositions that had been accumulating over the previous ten years or so into fourteen albums, motivated not just by tidiness, but also by a clear-cut objective relating to their publication. He intended his wife, Olympe, should be able to sell the pieces to publishers on the most advantageous terms possible after he had died. Pianist Alessandro Marangoni has been recording all these works for Naxos, and the final two volumes of this edition are scheduled for release in November.

Let’s enjoy a dose of eccentricity from the fourth volume of Rossini’s compilation, which has four items of hors d’œuvres – radishes, anchovies, gherkins and butter, followed by four desserts – figs, almonds, raisins and hazelnuts. The title for the raisins movement is Raisins – To my little parakeet (8.573107). The bird betrays something of a military background in its own additions to the score, including commands to shoulder arms, present arms and to fire, and songs of smoking and drinking. I don’t make this up, you know. Here’s the proof.

There’s no definitive explanation for the reputation of Friday the 13th, but one widely accepted is that it refers to the 13 people – Christ and his 12 Apostles – who gathered for the Last Supper on a Thursday, which was followed by Christ’s crucifixion the following day, on a Friday. That latter scene was dramatically painted by György Kurtág in his six Songs of Despair and Sorrow (CD93.174). Here’s the fifth song, Raspjatije (Crucifixion). It sets a text by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, that translates as follows:

Magdalena beat her breast and sobbed,
The belov’d disciple turned to stone,
But there where stood the Mother, silent,
No one so much as dared to turn his eyes.

Let’s clear the mournful air by returning to the programme for tonight’s BBC Proms concert, on Friday 13 July. Preceding Holst’s The Planets is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Toward the Unknown Region (8.557798), a setting of part of Walt Whitman’s Whispers of Heavenly Death. When both Holst and Vaughan Williams considered themselves creatively ’stuck’ in the early years of the 20th century, they decided that they should both set this same text and jointly select the winner. Vaughan Williams was duly awarded the palm. Here’s the concluding section of Vaughan Williams’ song for chorus and orchestra, that radiates an optimism even superstition cannot withstand. By the way, did I mention that Vaughan Williams died aged 85 (8 + 5 = and so on … )? (This subject is now closed. Ed.).

Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.

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Stanford’s success as a founding professor of composition at London’s Royal College of Music is reflected in an impressive roster of student names that came under his influence. They include Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss and Herbert Howells, nurtured by Stanford into a richly sown artistic field that, ironically, contributed to his own relative obscurity after the turn of the twentieth century.

Stanford was born 164 years ago today, 30th September 1852, into a respectable and musical family in Dublin. His talent for music was recognised early and, after an education at Cambridge University and lessons from Carl Reinecke in Leipzig, he was soon making an impact on Britain’s musical scene with works such as the impressive First Symphony (8.570356). It’s easy to understand how the gorgeous Andante tranquillo movement helped it to win second prize at a competition for British symphonies in 1876. Stanford’s seven symphonies constitute a central aspect of his lifetime’s achievement as a composer, and one of the most popular of these has been the Third Symphony (8.570355) subtitled ‘Irish’. Stanford acknowledges his Celtic heritage in the work, with a significant part for harp in the opening of the third movement.

Stanford’s church choral music secured an enduring legacy for him, with Anthems and Services such as the Te deum laudamus (8.555794) still very much in use in churches today. His large-scale works for choir and orchestra, however, have been unduly neglected. Recorded for the first time by the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland in 2004, the Requiem (8.555201-02) was composed in memory of the painter Lord Leighton, who died in 1896. The artist’s stature is reflected in a work that rivals the great Requiems of Berlioz and Verdi in terms of scale, something which can be heard in the funereal gravity of the final Agnus Dei et Lux aeterna.

The latest addition to Stanford’s discography in the Naxos catalogue is released this month and features three more rarely heard works for choral forces and orchestra (8.573512). The Resurrection was his first major choral work, written during that period of study with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig and anticipating Mahler’s use of Klopstock’s eponymous poem in his ‘Resurrection’ Symphony. The dramatic, at times almost operatic and Wagnerian Stabat Mater is a cantata with two purely orchestral movements suggestive of a large-scale symphony, while Song to the Soul contains some of Stanford’s most exhilarating utterances, though it was never performed in his lifetime.

Chamber music also forms a significant part of Stanford’s output. These works include light and entertaining pieces such as the Irish Fantasies (8.572452), the third of which is a cleverly constructed Jig. Stanford’s ambitions, however, went much further than this: dating from 1918 his Third Piano Trio, “Per aspera ad astra” (8.570416), reflects some of the pain of colleagues who lost their lives during World War I. This is music more from the era of Brahms than of the year that saw the creation of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale or Bartók’s Second String Quartet, a stylistic mismatch that accounts for Stanford’s music being seen as old-fashioned. Listened to without prejudice in our times these are works that, as biographer John Porte pointed out, can be enjoyed as “sonorously scored, classical in outlook, and [containing] many passages of an expressive and somewhat poetical freshness.”

Although we’ve focused on 30th September as Stanford’s date of birth, we’ll end by briefly acknowledging Virgil Thomson, who died on this date in 1989 at the grand old age of 92. Thomson’s Cello Concerto (8.559344) recalls his Missouri roots in its keenly expressive second movement, Variations on a Southern Hymn. But he is perhaps best remembered for his film music, and in particular for his musical illustration of the 1936 documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains (8.559291). Did you ever hear a more accurate portrait of lumbering Cattle than his?

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