B Listers
January This month sees Classic FM magazine join its previously entombed radio station sister in the musoc.org Hall of Shame. There are a number of reasons why the magazine is particularly dreadful this month (see the indictment for details), but one of the main ones for its enshrinement as Class(ical) Traitor is the headline publication of a list - yet another list (see 09 Top Ten Top Ten) - of the "The 50 Greatest Composers" in its February issue (actually published early January).
Classic FM as a business (which is pretty much all it is) revels in these lists by nature - the current issue further publishes "the 25 classical composers without whom our heroes [the 50] could not have achieved greatness", the "Classical album chart" (a more misleading title is barely conceivable), this month's instalment of "The 100 classical recordings no listener should be without" and "50 works that changed classical music", "Five of the best: conductors", and its yearly appeal to readers to vote in its notorious "Hall of Fame" (see last year's Classic FM Countdown to the Hall of Shame).
Intriguingly, this latest 50, according to magazine editor John Evans, "are at the heart of everything we do at Classic FM" - intriguing, given that only 15 (JS Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Chaikovsky, Chopin, Debussy, Handel, Haydn, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Vaughan Williams) get anything like the airplay their music deserves. Many more of the 50 receive only cursory recognition, often amounting to a single work (e.g. Tallis's Spem in Alium, Verdi's Requiem), and often in the form of something unrepresentative (Shostakovich's 'Jazz' suites, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, Rossini's operatic overtures).
The rest, including Binchois, Desprez, Dowland, Dufay, Hildegard, Léonin, Machaut, Palestrina, remain virtually (often totally) unknown to Classic FM's listeners and airwaves, either because Classic FM almost completely ignores pre-1600 music; or, in the case of Lully, Corelli, Francois Couperin, Telemann, Rameau and Domenico Scarlatti, because Classic FM largely ignores opera, chamber and solo instrumental music (in favour of orchestral). Or, in the case of Schoenberg, Bartók and Boulez (the only living composer in the list, incidentally), because they're deemed too modern: after all, can anyone imagine the outcry - from advertisers, for starters - if any of Boulez's "Defining Works" (as listed in the main feature), e.g. the Hammer Without Master (Marteau Sans Maître) or Second Piano Sonata, were played on "Smooth Classics at Six" or Simon Bates's morning show?
The sheer idiocy and laziness of the whole exercise is typified by the fact that one of the 25 that the 50 "couldn't have done it without" is, apparently, Karlheinz Stockhausen; yet of the 50, only Vaughan Williams (just), Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten, Bernstein and Boulez survived long enough to be able to be influenced by Stockhausen's music. The idea that any of these apart from Boulez wrote music that has any relationship at all with Stockhausen's is as ludicrous as the lazy journalism that passes for research in this glossy industry brochure.
Music lovers may be tempted to dismiss this list mania as either irrelevant or irreverant, but it's not just Classic FM who are at it: as described elsewhere on this site (e.g. 09 Top Ten Top Ten, Seedy Sales), other previously more 'upmarket' outlets appear to see this as a worthy (= profitable) path to take.
One of these is Gramophone, which itself plumbs new depths in its own February issue with an outrageously entitled "Review of the Decade": little more than a shoddy back-of-envelope list - 10 items, naturally - of "seismic changes" in music over the last decade. In editor and ex-editor James Inverne and James Jolly's ranking, the iPod comes in at number one; the fact that they're promoting this absurdly overpriced gadget aimed squarely at the pop market, with little relevance to genuine music lovers - for whom only the concert experience or the nearest they can get to it (on a hi-fi, through loudspeakers) can do such sophisticated music justice - gives a good indication of the fat business fingers controlling Gramophone and influencing much of its writing and direction nowadays.
These pathetic lists smack above all of modern marketing - a juvenile way of packaging everything, even great composers and their music, so that it can be instantly absorbed by the great buying public. The "50 Greatest Composers" of Classic FM magazine boil down a millennium of magnificent music to a handful of 'brands' that have been selling concert tickets and CDs/LPs for many decades. Similarly, Gramophone's 'Review' tells us what trends we should be following, what bandwagons we should be jumping on (alongside its editors), what's 'vibrant', 'essential' and 'happening'. Industry cheerleaders, in other words; and B listers.
You can respond to this article at any time by emailing gro.cosum@srettel. See right for details.
Faut Pas
January No one attending a concert, listening to the radio or perusing a CD booklet can fail to be struck by the internationalism of art music. Composers from all corners of Europe, North and South America, Australasia, even occasionally eastern Asia and other regions, are all part of the standard art music repertoire.
However, one of the things that can give rise to charges against art music of elitism or exclusivity is the preponderance of foreign names and terminology, a natural corollary of multilingual cosmopolitanism (and in sharp contradistinction to the ubiquitous American or British English of pop). The foreignness of foreign composers' names is naturally unavoidable, but many titles of music works and other terms seem to have lingered inexplicably untranslated for decades and even centuries. Newcomers and detractors alike could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that such nomenclature persists to exclude at worst, at best to confuse - reinforcing the prejudice that art music is primarily the domain of a cliquish band of illuminati.
There's no doubt that coteries of broadcasters, critics, composers and music industry bigwigs do exist (and thrive - neoliberal capitalism depends on economic, political and cultural oligarchies); and ironically, whilst there is a concerted effort by the media industry to draw new listeners into 'classical' music (as they call it) - as an underexploited market, naturally - once there, those listener-consumers inevitably find themselves in a strange world where the flowery, affected and often vacuous language of music journalists presupposes the sovereignty of the performer, and the enjoyment of art music becomes subjugated to an endless discussion of the finest nuances of supposedly competing interpretations of musical works. But such an arrangement is almost tailor-made for the business of selling CDs and concert tickets.
One notable way in which this rarefication is perpetuated is through the abundant use of foreign titles where there is no earthly reason that they should not be translated into the local language and always used in translation. Why should (for example) English-speaking audiences be expected to remember (and pronounce) Schubert's Schwanengesang or Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toit, or French-only speakers Ives's Three Places in New England or Holst's Egdon Heath?
Naturally, when a composer gives a work a title that is not his or her first language, then that language should (with few exceptions) always be used by speakers of any language, out of courtesy and to protect artistic integrity - the title being an important aspect of the work, having been chosen by the composer (admittedly sometimes preciously) for a particular effect or association.
But when, for example, a German composer (born or adopted) gives a German title, then it should be translated into English for English-speaking audiences, French for French speakers, and so on - so that the title has the same effect and meaning as it does for the composers' same-language compatriots. Ravel's La Valse is not La Valse to French audiences, it is (in effect) The Waltz. There's no element of 'foreignness' whatsoever; therefore, assuming the universality of art, there should be none for speakers of other languages.
A second effect of this unnecessary and bogus use of untranslated titles is that of very often making an ass of anyone lacking multilingual prowess (the huge majority of Americans, British, Australians, French, Italians etc) attempting to render a phrase or even a word in the original language. With few honourable exceptions, broadcasters are wont to make a hash of French, German, and especially Russian and other east European names, rendering them often unrecognisable to native speakers.
In fact, the case of Russian underlines the spuriousness of the whole business. There seems to be a historical favouritism directed towards French, German, Italian, Spanish and English: titles (aside obviously from those that are proper names) in other more 'exotic' languages, like Polish, Czech, Hungarian or Finnish are almost never given in the original language (Smetana's Má Vlast being a lonely and inexplicable exception). Russian is a perfect case in point. Chaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are three of the world's most performed and recorded composers, but how many of their original Russian titles are ever heard or written (even in transliteration) outside Russia (and Ukraine and Belarus)? The answer is zero. Why?
Surely, if this linguistic pluralism is not spurious, all languages should be equally treated. Or might it be that the middle-class cliques who dominate art music journalism and the media in general know no Russian or Czech or Hungarian, but most certainly do have a smattering of one or two of the historically dominant international languages, picked up at university or perhaps from frequent trips to western Europe (to second or third homes, even), and, in the style of many well-to-do opera-goers, love to show the world how cosmopolitan they are?
Musoc.org has listed below some of the commonest titles that are regularly left untranslated for English speakers for no apparent reason, in radio listings, CD booklets and concert programmes; in some instances an English translation is bizarrely almost never heard or seen (Debussy's La Mer or Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, for example). This list is representative, and does not include subtitles, nicknames or historical mistranslations, nor does it recommend pronunciations; these related issues will all be dealt with later.
Appropriate translations have been given alongside the original titles. These cannot of course be enforced, but the English-speaking art music world wo do well to follow them if they wish to try to dispel charges of elitism.
- Hector Berlioz
- Symphonie Fantastique Fantastical Symphony
- Les Troyens The Trojans
- Grande Messe des Morts Great Mass of the Dead
- La Damnation de Faust The Damnation of Faust
- Les Nuits d'Eté Summer Nights
- Georges Bizet
- L'Arlésienne The Girl From Arles
- Frederic Chopin
- Etude Study
- Prélude Prelude [i.e English word/pronunciation]
- Ballade Ballad
- Claude Debussy
- La Mer The Sea
- Images Images [i.e English word/pronunciation]
- Jeux Games
- Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune Prelude to 'The Afternoon of a Faun'
- Gaetano Donizetti
- Lucia di Lammermoor Lucia of Lammermoor
- Paul Hindemith
- Kammermusik Chamber Music
- Mathis der Maler Mathis the Painter
- Jacques Ibert
- Divertissement Entertainment
- Erich Korngold
- Die Tote Stadt The Dead City
- Gustav Mahler
- Das Lied von der Erde The Song of the Earth
- Das Klagende Lied The Lament
- Des Knaben Wunderhorn The Boy's Miracle Horn
- Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen Songs of an Itinerant Journeyman
- Darius Milhaud
- Le Boeuf sur le Toit The Ox on the Roof
- La Création du Monde The Creation of the World
- Claudio Monteverdi
- L'Incoronazione di Poppea The Coronation of Poppea
- Orfeo Orpheus
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Così Fan Tutte All Girls Do It (That Way)
- Die Zauberflöte The Magic Flute
- Giacomo Puccini
- Madama Butterfly Madam Butterfly
- Maurice Ravel
- Rapsodie Espagnole Spanish Rhapsody
- La Valse The Waltz
- Tzigane Gypsy
- Valses Nobles et Sentimentales Noble and Sentimental Waltzes
- Miroirs Mirrors
- Joaquín Rodrigo
- Concierto de Aranjuez Aranjuez Concerto
- Fantasía para un Gentilhombre Fantasia for a Gentleman
- Gioacchino Rossini
- La Cenerentola Cinderella
- Il Signor Bruschino Mr Bruschino
- Petite Messe Solennelle Little Solemn Mass
- Camille Saint-Saëns
- Danse Macabre Macabre Dance
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Gurrelieder Gurre Songs
- Erwartung Expectation
- Verklärte Nacht Transfigured Night
- Franz Schubert
- Winterreise Winter Journey
- Schwanengesang Swan Song
- Robert Schumann
- Fantasiestücke Fantasy Pieces
- Kinderszenen Scenes of Children
- Dichterliebe Poet's Love
- Jean Sibelius
- En Saga A Legend
- Bedřich Smetana
- Má Vlast My Homeland
- Johann Strauss
- Die Fledermaus The Bat
- An der Schönen Blauen Donau On the Beautiful Blue Danube
- Richard Strauss
- Der Rosenkavalier The Rose Cavalier
- Also Sprach Zarathustra Thus Spake Zarathustra
- Ein Heldenleben A Hero's Life
- Metamorphosen Metamorphoses
- Giuseppe Verdi
- Il Trovatore The Troubadour
- Otello Othello
- Heitor Villa-Lobos
- Bachianas Brasileiras Brazilian Bachianas
- Richard Wagner
- Das Rheingold The Rhine Gold
- Die Walküre The Valkyries
- Götterdämmerung Twilight of the Gods
- Carl Maria von Weber
- Der Freischütz The Marksman
You can respond to this article at any time by emailing gro.cosum@srettel. See right for details.