Greg Stepanich

Songs of the sea come to mind on ferry crossing

Sea chanteys.

That's what I was thinking as I stood on Edmonds-to-Kingston ferry, heading to the Olympic Peninsula for a trip to Port Townsend.

Friday was cool and rainy, dark and windy, especially on the ferry as it glided across the waters off Seattle. Even while I knew that the crossing on such a big ferry, loaded with cars, pickups and SUVs, wasn't comparable to the way the sailors of old felt the sting of salt water as they plied the waves, something about the feel and the look of the water made me want to break into all the choruses of What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?

There are several Web sites that deal with the lore and the lyrics of the sea chantey (here's one), and one of the things I learned on looking this subject up was that there are different kinds of chanteys, though most of the ones I've heard appear to be worksongs. Without trying to call too much attention to myself, I stood on an upper deck of the ferry and tried to sing as many of the Drunken Sailor lyrics as I could remember (Shave his belly with a rusty razor/Ear-lye in the morning), and the truly funny thing is that it sounded good thrown into the face of the sea, and the land ahead, and the shouting gulls and the lowering sky.

Just as some good rock tunes don't sound right unless they're sung in a whiskey-soaked bar, there's something about the basic vigor of the chantey, minor-key modality or no, that suits the outdoors and seems to call for dozens of other gruff voices to join in. It could be just the associated memories we all have of this body of folk music that made me think that, and yet it's hard imagine another kind of music that would work as well when you've got heavy lifting to do all day as you chase the whales.

By the time we got to Port Townsend, I found myself once again wandering into a bookstore, this one the William James Bookseller, a fine purveyor of used tomes (it's mentioned here). I didn't have a lot of time to search, but when I got back out onto Water Street again, I had a volume of Herman Melville in my hand.

It seemed to go quite well with a head full of sea songs.

On a mini-bookman's tour in Seattle

It seems to me that you can judge the quality of a bookstore by the size of its belle lettres and poetry sections. Find a bookshop with good, deep collections of essays and criticism, and you've got a place where the proprietors know something about literature.

By that criterion, the Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle, which I visited Thursday, is a high-quality shop. In addition to its physical beauty, all hardwood floors and soaring cases, it had shelf after shelf of critical essays, and a poetry collection that paralyzed my wallet gland. Too many good choices, which means I'll have to revisit the store later today or Saturday to make some selections.

I'm here in this interesting Pacific Northwest city for a convention that starts Sunday, and also to spend some time with family members. I am acutely aware that as a temporary guest and a newcomer to technology as it is practiced in the 21st century, the first things that struck me followed those PR-inspired tropes that we who live elsewhere associate with Seattle: Computers, coffee, Left Coast politics, great natural beauty.

For example: Before making it down to Pioneer Square for the first part of a planned mini-bookman tour Thursday, I stopped on First Avenue at a place called Online Coffee Co., which promised free wi-fi service in exchange for the purchase of a beverage. And so I went in, lugging my PowerBook, and fired off e-mails to colleagues 3,000 miles away in a very different place.

That's the touristy Seattle vibe, but just as those of us who've lived in Florida a long time know a very different state than our visitors, so I have the feeling of missing out even while I'm taking so much in. Take all that late 19th-century architecture in Pioneer Square, which is where Elliott Bay Books is: What is there about that style that seems inviting? Is it that it seems to personify the solid comfort of the Gilded Age? And what does that part of town signify to natives of the city?

The public markets pose the same question. Across America, we've resurrected the old idea of buying meats and produce in an open-air bazaar, in most places by holding greenmarkets on weekends. In some cities, these markets have become key tourist attractions, somewhat Disneyfied but still authentic; I loved Quincy Market in Boston when I lived up there for the energy and grit that it had.

Here in Seattle, I met the morning like many visitors to the city by watching the Pike Place Market come to life. The guidebooks say it's one of the oldest such markets in the country, and that it took a grassroots civic effort to save it in the 1960s and turn it into the attraction it is today. It's an exciting, vibrant place, and I stopped in front of a produce stand around 8 a.m. to buy nearly a pound of red seedless grapes for the day of walking ahead.

"A little bit of Nature's candy for a pick-me-up?" the man at the stand — where fresh locall asparagus had just come in — said as he rang me up (3 bucks and change). Yes, indeed, I said, and it certainly came in handy and welcome later in the day.

Spread to the sides of the stand were table after table covered with a great riot of floral beauty, as area flower farms set up for the day, offering an incredible variety of flowers in bold, deep colors. The tulips are what I remember best, especially the extraordinary deep purple ones I also saw in little park-lets on my walk through the downtown.

There was seafood, too, of course, in profusion: Huge, fat salmon, with and without heads, enormous Dungeness crabs, some of it wild, some farm-raised, and all of it on ice for someone's strenuous eating.

As I noshed a little at Lowell's, looking out over Elliott Bay, I watched the sun burn away the morning mist and rain and illuminate the mountains in the distance, which I took to be a good omen for a fruitful day of exploration. And so it was.

The second place I wanted to see on my bookman's tour was the new Seattle Public Library, an impressive bit of public architecture by the Pritzer-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. I spent a couple hours there, wi-fi-ing on the fifth floor, looking out through the latticework of blue diamond shapes that cover the building; it's as if you're inside a futuristic waffle cone, looking out.

The floors are connected by hot-chartreuse escalators (as well as stairs and elevators) that lead to the upper floors, here called the Spiral. The upper Deweys are there on floors 6 to 10 (I think), and each of those sections is segregated behind clear walls that you can see but that are hard to get to. In order to get to the 780s, for instance, to take a look at music books and scores, I had to go up and come down the stairs, which was a little frustrating because I could see the place I wanted to go as I rolled by on the escalator.

It's a difficult building to use at first blush, and as this Architecture Week article points out, first-time visitors will have to spend some time getting used to it before they're comfortable. I'm thinking about going back and taking a tour this time so I understand it better, but I have a feeling that the building won't age all that well, striking as it is from the street — and it is striking. There are some Space Age-y concepts, such as the disembodied talking heads in a wall display as you go down to the street level on the escalator. And it appears that the glass-enclosed floors are meant to suggest special respect for those collections as well as a display of abundance (shades of Pike Place again). But it comes through as off-putting instead.

In any case, it will be fascinating to see how much or how little the public takes to its library. It's possible that it will be admired as a bold concept but disliked as a functional building, That's happened before. One of the things I remember about visting the Frank Lloyd Wright house Fallingwater was that we were told it leaked all the time, and it certainly did seem damp inside. That would get old fast, no matter how cool those corner windows are.

In the end, I wrapped up my small bookman's tour by grabbing something on impulse, drawn by serendipity. Passing by a bookstore called Wessel and Lieberman, I halted at a cart of used books. On the top, a memoir by Iris Origo, who is warmly praised by Ingrid Rowland in From Heaven to Arcadia, which I've just finished reading. I walked away with the Origo memoir for only a dollar, but in I like it already after only about half an hour of browsing through it.

Last week, I'd never been to Seattle nor had I heard of Iris Origo. But now I'm acquainted with both, and eager to know more. Even when you go far from home, it's the mental journeys you go on as a result that add the most to those experiences.

May free 'Quixote' inspire a mind ready for adventure

In Venezuela last weekend, they were handing out copies of Don Quixote for the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's great novel about the Knight of the Woeful Countenance.

This isn't the place to talk about the quality of Hugo Chavez's government, or his real purpose in handing out the books, but I do like the idea of distributing free copies (abridged, but still) of a classic of world literature. And I like even better the idea that people would get in line to get it.

I couldn't help but think about the government-issued Cervantes last weekend as I at last took in the Norton Museum's exhibit about Spain in the age of exploration.

Somehow the day here in Palm Beach County — deep blue skies, no clouds, a penetrating sun, and the bright, light colors of the buildings — reminded me of nothing more than the Spain that you read about in Cervantes, as the aged, chivalry-besotted old Alonso Quexana makes his way across La Mancha aboard Rocinante. He came alive for me a little more as I wandered the museum looking at the portraits of the Hapsburg and Bourbon kings, their armor and their artworks.

It also occurred to me that Don Quixote has a lot to do with reading in general. Not only is too little sleep and too much reading the source of Quixote's apparent madness, there's also a scene where some of the old man's beloved books are consigned to the fire.

But although it's the reading of overwrought books of knightly feats that send Quixote on his way into more trouble than he would have had he continued his life of gentelmanly leisure, it's also true that without the reading he would never have explored what it is to be on fire in the service of a dream.

Here's hoping somewhere in those lines of readers a mind waits to be inspired and entertained by Quixote's adventures, and that it will enrich his or her life like it did mine, even in translation.

Heading out: I'm off to Seattle for a week to take in a Society of American Business Editors and Writers convention and also spend time with family. I'm planning to blog each day I'm there and I'm hoping to post some pictures as well.

The composer takes a stand: An anti-war string quartet

In recent months, there have been some rather prominent examples of politically engaged art in the world of popular music. I'm thinking of the most recent U2 and Green Day albums, but much of hip-hop is explicity political as well. Country writers have weighed in, too, in the past year or so, and going to a folk music concert pretty much guarantees you're going to hear songs that take a political position.

Classical composers have not been silent, either, and last week, Naxos released the second installment in its series of new string quartets by Britain's Peter Maxwell Davies. Currently Master of the Queen's Music and therefore busy with commissions, he's also in the middle of writing 10 quartets for the Maggini Quartet. These quartets have been commissoned by Naxos, and so they're being called the Naxos Quartets.

This is a most unusual project, but I have to say I love the idea. Naxos is trying to augment the British quartet literature — which makes me wish someone would do the same for a prominent American composer — but at the same time the company is making a commitment to new music and expecting it to sell, too.

The new disc contains the Naxos Quartets Nos. 3 and 4, and they're quite difficult but impressive works. I'm hoping to do a review in which I'll delve a little deeper into the details of these pieces, but for now, I'll note that they are intense, serious, formidable compositions and important listening for people interested in the string quartet as a vehicle for expression and in contemporary classical music.

The third quartet in this cycle was written in March and April 2003, according to the program notes, and was originally intended to explore a plainsong associated with St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, and the mathematical possibilities suggested by several magic squares. "However, during the course of composition," Maxwell Davies writes, "external events affected the Quartet's unfolding: the invasion of Iraq."

Maxwell Davies is strenuously opposed to the Iraq war, and so the quartet is an anguished reaction to the event. Without the political context, it still would be anguished music, and should the quartets hold up over time, program annotators 50 years from now will duly note the composer's response to contemporaneous news events, but then talk about how the piece is put together and whether or not it works.

A late friend of mine, a composer, once told me that he didn't care about the AIDS tribute program around which John Corigliano's First Symphony was written — he thought it was a great piece regardless. And Peter Maxwell Davies' Third Naxos Quartet will have to survive on its musical merits in the long run.

But whatever your position on the Iraq war, I think it's admirable that a composer was so moved to action by what was happening in the world at large that he couldn't follow his original compositional plan: He had to write something that expressed how he felt about the war. In his case, bitterness and rage; in another composer on a different part of the political spectrum, perhaps we'd have a triumphalist response.

Nonetheless, it's good to know someone taking on a fairly high-minded format in the first place felt inspired to editorialize. Composers of classical music often are thought to be too busy pursuing lofty thoughts to engage the world at large, but Maxwell Davies went down into the streets and added his voice to the debate.

It's not likely to change anything in the global political process, but it took courage for him to say what he wanted to say, when he had every reason not to bother — and that's an excellent reason for giving these new works a respectful hearing.

When it counts, the artistic impulse really does matter

Reading through a new collection of essays by Renaissance scholar Ingrid D. Rowland (From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance, just out from New York Review Books), I'm struck by the point she makes about the utility of creation.

In a well-written introduction to the essays on artists and other creative types active during the Renaissance in Italy, she nicely makes the case for the humanities, pointing out that "There is nothing more essential to us than what we carry in our minds." Wars may come and go, but what we think about, what we wonder about, what our body of thought says about us, endures.

Few things are as interesting to me as how humans transmute their experiences into art, how they reflect on what has happened to them, or dream about what they hope will happen to them, through the manipulation of words, of materials such as clay, of sounds thousands of cycles apart, arranged in a given order. Even the most modest piece of art, if it comes from an honestly arrived-at impulse, can have permanent validity.

And sometimes we really need it, as Rowland says:

"Time and again, the people we call upon to face the unfaceable are the artists, the poets, the novelists, the philosophers whose work may otherwise seem so impractical, so detached from the real business of life; the people who produce what for lack of a better word we today call culture."

Which reminds me of another quintessentially American dichotomy: For all the cheapness of a lot of pop and high culture, for all the lingering disrespect we Americans have for people whom we think live in an ivory tower, writing long poems and abstruse contrabassoon sonatas, we're absolutely drenched in the creative arts.

We not only spend a great deal of mental energy considering the ins and outs of fictional characters created by writers toiling in the fields of Hollywood and New York, we also admire people who make a great deal of money coming up with new works of art, be they episodes of CSI, a country song, or a hot new novel about the trials and tribulations of a twentysomething woman in a big city trying to make a name for herself.

Maybe it's because so much of American art is popular art, and was created out of a moneymaking impulse, that we don't recognize it for what it is. But it's art, it's everywhere in this society, and we call on it all the time. Maybe we'll acknowledge that on a deeper level someday.

The symphonic band: A pillar of American classical music

A footnote in Joseph Horowitz's Classical Music in America, which I finished recently, has me thinking about how a lot of Americans first become acquainted with art music.

On page 390, Horowitz writes at the bottom of the page: "Though they lie slightly outside the scope of this study, bands are not irrelevant to the history of classical music in the United States." He goes on to mention John Philip Sousa, as well as Edwin Franko Goldman and his son Richard, eminent bandmasters all.

But he's still mentioning them only in a footnote; a long footnote, yes, but a footnote.

And yet it seems to me that bands are not only "not irrelevant," I'd argue that for a great many Americans, their first acquaintance with classical music came not through an orchestra but a symphonic band, either through playing in one or going to a live concert in the park.

This is especially true outside the big cities, in the small towns that make up so much of the United States; in my hometown outside Chicago, for instance, the high schools had trouble getting an orchestra together, but that wasn't the case with the bands. And we band members took our music very seriously, not just because we had a large repertoire of canonical orchestral works in arrangement, but because we had a vast, rich repertoire of our own to play, much of it by Americans.

To take a couple examples off the top of my head: Vincent Persichetti, who gets also-ran mentions in books about American classical music, which deal almost exclusively with orchestral music. But to band players, Persichetti is a very important American composer, a man whose pieces, such as his Divertimento and Symphony for Band, were masterworks that you could tackle only if your band was a top-notch ensemble.

Same goes for Alfred Reed, a longtime University of Miami professor and composer. His Armenian Dances, to name one work that stands out in my memory, was a first-rate piece of writing, period, and a guaranteed crowd exciter whenever our high school or municipal band played it (and it was quite difficult).

Or take a non-native composer such as Australia's Percy Grainger, who took American citizenship as an adult. His huge piano career was forgotten not long after he died, and it's rare to hear a Grainger piano work on a recital, or hear one of his orchestra pieces on a concert. But short works like Shepherd's Hey are staples of band concerts, and because of the bands, Grainger survives as a composer.

The sound of the band, even a great one, doesn't have the variety of tone quality you can get when strings are involved. But band music, much more than orchestral music, was the art music the average American knew for generations, and that there has been so much fine music written for the concert band, and that it is so little-known outside its immediate circle of players and composers, is something of a disgrace.

So let's redress that balance a little bit. When we think of American classical music, we ought not be thinking only about works for orchestra and string quartet, about operas and piano pieces. We should be thinking at the same time of the enormous contribution the concert band has made to American classical music, and recognize it as one of the pillars of our music history.

So take a baritone horn player or alto clarinetist to lunch someday and tell him or her thanks for helping keep American classical music healthy and vital for so many years. In our country, the symphonic band is anything but a footnote.

Papyrus tech uncovering more writing by the ancients

Technology is making it possible for scholars to recover writing by some of the greatest ancient classical writers that was thought lost for good (here's a piece about it). Already bits and pieces of work by Sophocles and other legendary earlier writers have come into view, and the Oxford University team that is working on the Oxyrhynchus papyri from which these writings have been discovered are expecting to uncover work by Ovid and perhaps some long-lost Christian gospels.

Obviously, this is something to be widely celebrated in the world of letters at large. It remains to be seen exactly what will be brought forth, but already this is a development that stands to rewrite some aspects of World Civ. I'll be looking for a good overview of what's been found in the days and months to come.

The thing I can't help musing about, though, is the idea that when gaps are filled in, it's at the expense of some very imaginative suppositions about what could have been there originally.

And that makes me think, of all things, of the late Richard Brautigan, whose Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1975) was a favorite of a friend of mine. It's a very silly story, but hilarious at the same time.

One of the key plot elements has to do with a husband and wife whose lives have been ruined by a sexually transmitted disease. Constance can't get over her guilt at having a fling with the man who gave her the disease, and Bob becomes obsessed in his shock with reading a book called The Greek Anthology, which contains fragments of ancient writing that are incomplete but beautiful nonetheless:

"While Constance ate her peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich, Bob read some more to her from the Greek Anthology, now knowing that she couldn't stand it, no matter how beautiful, poignant or wise the poetry was. … 'I know the tunes of all the birds,' he quoted, holding the book in his hands as they lay there naked upon the bed … 'Isn't that beautiful?' he said. 'That's all that's left of a poem. I wonder what happened to the rest of it … ' "

I'm sure Brautigan wouldn't have wanted his spoof to be treated this seriously, but I like this idea of the fragments, and falling in love with the sound of them, and with the ghost of what was lost. In this case, and in that of the Oxyrhynchus materials, so little remained that the words could be nothing more than tantalizing. With the discovery of more text for things that were incomplete, some of that mystery will disappear, some of the possibilities will be closed off.

Maybe that's not worth mentioning, especially because I don't know exactly what they think they're going to have when all is said and done. But a small part of me thinks there's something democratic about having fragments only of some works; when the answers are that large, we're all in the same cultural boat. When more information is filled in, the works retreat into the domain of the scholars, and become just a touch more inaccessible.

I hope I'm wrong about that. This is, after all, our common intellectual heritage, revealing some more of itself with the help of some fancy scientific footwork. I'm hoping it will be widely available through the medium of the Web just as soon as that can be arranged.

There are some other birds, apparently, whose tunes we don't even know yet.

Nielsen at the end: Why keep going?

Ran across an interesting notation in the program notes Saturday night before a concert by the New World Symphony at the Lincoln Theatre in Miami Beach. Two symphonies were on the program, Mozart's 39th and Carl Nielsen's Sixth; the guest conductor of the ensemble was Cincinnati Symphony director Paavo Jarvi.

Writing about how Nielsen wrote the Sixth toward the end of his life, annotator Jim Svejda tells us Denmark's greatest composer was a bitter man in his final years, having had to keep working at teaching jobs to keep the kroner coming: "...not long before his death in 1931 he said in essence that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't."

I wasn't aware that Nielsen felt that way, and that gave me pause. Nielsen is a national hero in Denmark, and worldwide his reputation continues to grow, for the very good reason that he was one of the most original composers of his time, a man who crafted a unique voice and whose pieces sound as fresh and daring today as they did they day they were written.

It's true that Nielsen was ill with heart disease for about the last 10 years of his life, which undoubtedly colored his view of things. But it's sad to think that after having given what he did to the world's musical literature, he looked back and wished he hadn't. Which makes me wonder: What is it that keeps artists going in the midst of hardship? Is it merely a fanatical belief in self?

If Nielsen had been able to be treated with contemporary heart medications that would have pulled him back out of his bed, would he have returned to the writing table to crank out a Seventh Symphony?

The music world has many stories of composers and other artists insisting on creating amid the most appalling reasons not to. Franz Schubert, for instance, racked with syphilis, hair falling out, his skin covered with a rash, pains shooting up and down his body, and the absolute knowledge that he was going to an early grave: Surely the normal response would be to get as comfortable as possible and try to stave off the end, and concentrate on the writing when you felt better, if ever you did. But here he was, writing anyway, listening to all that great music in his head and hoping that would be enough to redeem the talent he felt he'd been given.

Nielsen kept writing up until his last moments, so there was still plenty of interest for him in pursuing the challenges of his craft. Nonetheless, you wonder what it is about the great artists that drives them back to the arms of a goddess that has inspired them but continued to take from them without giving, not even bothering to loan them a little bit of scratch to make the rent, just at least until they get back on their feet.

New classical music 'travel guide' has abundance in brief

A new book out this month in the Eyewitness Companion series from Britain's Dorling Kindersley Ltd. offers a look at classical music in what is more or less guidebook form, and it's a lot of fun to gaze on.

The book, simply titled Classical Music, looks and feels like a high-end travel guide — it's only 8.5 inches tall and 5 inches wide, but it's thick at 512 glossy pages — and is most unusual in that it runs through the entire history of art music with thousands of pictures and charts, including photos of almost every major composer of the past 1,000 years.

After introductory chapters on the elements of music, instruments and performance standards, the book examines seven periods of musical history, beginning with plainchant and Guido d'Arezzo and ending with contemporaries from Thomas Adès to Arvo Part. Every page is stuffed with photos, and each composer biography has birth/death dates, nationality and numbers of published works, all accompanied by little icons.

There are "Milestones" boxes with entries on major events in the composer's life (under "Life and Music"), and if the composer is considered more significant, there are little synopses of several "Key Works," with icons indicating what the piece is, how long it lasts, how many movements it has, and what it's written for.

For instance, the entry on Francois Couperin (1668-1733, French, 126) has a short piece of text on the Vingt-Cinquieme Ordre from his suites for harpsichord. The readout under the name of the piece reads: Solo harpsichord; 17:00 (icon of an hourglass); 5 (icon of open pages); and a tiny icon of a horn, meaning it's a solo work. The biggest figures of classical music get several pages to themselves, but many of them get only half a page, and still others get only a quarter.

I don't think this is a bad way to get acquainted with the world of classical music. The photos range widely, and are taken from every cultural indicator you can think of. There's a tiny still from the film Brief Encounter for the entry on Rachmaninoff (spelled Rachmaninov here), for example, because that movie used his Second Piano Concerto.

The entries for the most important composers begin with a full-page picture, often from nature or some other landmark: Mozart is accompanied by a peacock in full display; Berlioz scowls across from a moody shot of gargoyles atop a cathedral; Schumann gets a closeup of some yellow lilies; Mahler appears to be looking at a massive iceberg; Ives is prefaced by a band at a college football game; Gershwin, inevitably, gets vintage New York City at night.

The book is credited to 14 writers and editors, chief among them series editor John Burrows, though the production team that had to dig up all these art elements must have been quite large, even if a lot of these images are more readily available on computer databases than they used to be.

It's a fine book to browse through, and perfect for short attention spans. The texts seem to largely be accurate, and there's little shying away from some of the sadder aspects of composers' lives, such as syphilis (Schubert, Donizetti, Smetana, Wolf — but not Delius, interestingly enough, where it's just a "debilitating illness.") It's fascinating to see the faces of all these composers, some of whom I've never seen (Henri Duparc, Moritz Moszkowski) in all the years I've spent studying this music.

The publishers are asking for $30, and I think it's worth the money. American composers are well-represented here in this very British book, which is gratifying. There are errors, which is understandable given the enormous amount of information that's been stuffed inside these covers.

In particular, the picture on page 302 with the mini-bio of the Hungarian pianist and composer Erno von Dohnanyi is that of his grandson, Cristoph, who used to lead the Cleveland Orchestra (you can see the real Erno on this Hungarian site, which is very interesting in its own right — check out the entry on Gene Simmons).

Arm yourself with an iPod or a bunch of CDs and start browsing through the guide. The best thing about a book like this, while it can't replace deep immersion in the life and works of these writers, is that it shows in a short space the vastness of the creation at hand.

Sunday night concerts tough for Monday warriors

A busy weekend of reviewing for me, catching the Dresden Staatskapelle (good, if somewhat eccentric at times) on Sunday night, and double bassist DaXun Zhang's recital (revelatory) Monday night.

These were interesting events, but I was reminded during the Dresden program that I'm not the world's biggest fan of Sunday night concerts.

Maybe it's my sleepy suburban Midwest upbringing talking here, but Sunday's a school and work night, and I've always preferred going to Sunday concerts sometime in the afternoon. That way, you can go to the concert, enjoy it, get back home, have some dinner or finish up some yard work, and you've got the whole evening to get ready for Monday.

If you're at a concert on Sunday night, though, your weekend essentially is over at around 6, because you've got to get ready and be in your seat by 8 p.m. If there's a long intermission, or it starts late, or there are a sheaf of encores, it's well past 10 when it's over, and at that point you're on the cusp of bedtime.

If you have to write a piece of criticism after the concert, then you're pushing midnight before you can get out of work mode and attempt to salvage that hours-in-a-hammock feel you want for the day before you have to return to Cubicle Village.

But as it turns out, the Sunday night event is actually an old staple of American concertgoing.

At this fascinating site run by the Museum of the City of New York, it says that Sunday night concerts were popular a century or so ago because any other time during that day would have broken laws that forbade performances on the Christian Sabbath.

As I look at the first photo, for Ted Mark's Big Sunday Night Concert at the American Theatre, taken in 1901 or 1902, I know I'm looking at some people who are going to be very tired in a couple hours, having put in a long day of family duties, probably having heard an interminable sermon earlier in the day, and leaving themselves only a fraction of available time to turn down the lights and get everyone off to bed.

Our ancestors were hardier people than we are, and they had to adjust for Sunday night concerts because that's the way it was in the pre-shopping mall blue-law days. But today, we're so multitasked that it doesn't seem right to give up a Sunday evening if you've got to get up early in the morning.

That's not to say there aren't any Sunday afternoon concerts hereabouts; there are plenty. I would just prefer that all of them were that way.

So, please, concert organizers: Instead of a Sunday night series of musical events, how about a Working Stiff Series of concerts that occur only on Sunday afternoons?

We are but warriors for the working day, and we will thank you.

Days in which the past — the real past — came back

For all the cogitating we do about how much the world has changed, and how much it will continue to do so under the influence of technology, it's amazing how respectful we all are in the face of tradition.

That's not a surprising view coming from a guy who writes about classical music and likes to read old books, but I think the period through which we're now passing sets some kind of record for the past coming alive again.

Three things come to mind:

1. The death of the pope, of course, the most recent representative of an institution that literally reaches back 2,000 years, to the dawn of Christianity. Soon, we'll be trying to figure out what direction the cardinals are going to go, if just for sporting or political reasons. Although they've been selecting popes even longer, the first time they were locked up to make the decision was in the wild and woolly days of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. That was in 1241. And we still live in a world in which a bunch of cardinals lock themselves up to pick a super-cardinal.

2. The marriage of Charles and Camilla. In addition to all the historic appurtenances of the places they were married and blessed, as well as the 14th-century pedigree of the choir that sang for them, there's the British monarchy itself, which has roots in the late 11th century, and despite the Cromwell experiment that followed the first unlucky Charles, is with us still.

3. The death of Prince Rainier III. The Grimaldi family has been in charge in Monaco since the 13th century, and the principality itself is one of only seven statelets that survived the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire.

I guess all these things have to do with monarchies of one kind or another, or simply ancient Europe in general, but what's interesting to me is how we humans fall in line with the rhythms and assumptions of vastly earlier, vastly different times. They were wondering what the king was doing tonight 900 years ago; in the heat of an Italian summer more than 760 years ago, citizens were waiting to see who the cardinals would choose; and 700 years ago, they were curious about what the Grimaldis were up to.

It's sort of like the journey into our agrarian past that we take when we go to an old-fashioned county fair or a greenmarket. When we do that, we're doing what generations upon generations of our ancestors were doing, and probably with much the same kind of thought process: Blessed Jesu, but I could use a flagon of mead about now. It sure is hot in this sun.

There's something comforting about it, it seems to me. When a bunch of unrelated humans can gather somewhere, all with the same basic question — Hey! Anything going on here? — it makes us all a good bit less mysterious. And it also suggests that for all the complaining we do about how antique some of our civilizational accoutrements are, we still retain a basic affection, even an atavistic, unquestioning respect, for these archaic things.

It may be that we've found no better way of enshrining some of the larger needs and longings we have. Or maybe we're present at the last gasp.

Music for papal funeral presented a challenge

I'm not sure there's anyone who's all that interested, but various pieces on the Web indicate that some of the music for the pope's funeral was composed for the occasion by the pontifical music director, Giuseppe Liberto, a monsignor from Sicily (here's an interview he did last year with the National Catholic Reporter).

So some of this music we heard early Friday (we taped it at our house) was brand-new contemporary Italian sacred music. Much of the music for the funeral sounded gently modern and appropriately serious, which had me thinking about how a composer responds to something like this.

If you're the pontifical music director, do you cater the music to the preferences of the late John Paul II? Do you write just like yourself and offer that as your tribute to his memory? Or do you attempt to reflect the high points of the pope's mission and incorporate musical styles outside the European tradition? I suppose in the last case, that would be seen as theater more than solemnity, but the mass itself is a form of symbolic theater, so I don't know that it wouldn't have been appropriate.

Maybe we'll see some compositions over the next few years that will attempt to salute John Paul that way, maybe along the lines of John Adams' El Nino, a polyglot collection of eclecticisms that buzzes with a youthful faith.

Religious music has been a critical part of the world's art as long as music has been around, and occasionally composers respond with masterpieces. I'm not as familiar as I should be with the Mass in C of Beethoven, but it's certainly a staple of the choral literature. The man who commissioned it, Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, hated it, calling it "unbearably ridiculous and detestable" when it premiered in 1807, but it's a fine work (that again, I need to get to know better), and the Delray Beach Chorale has paired it with the same composer's Choral Fantasy for a concert Sunday afternoon at the First Presbyterian Church in Delray Beach.

The Choral Fantasy, written a year later, is great fun, an outside-the-box mix of piano concerto and choral song with a big tune that's a dry run for the Ode to Joy. The two works are billed as part of the chorale's Festival Beethoven; I've been invited and might drop in (if I do, I'll be doing double Beethoven duty: His Sixth is on a program with the Brahms Fourth on Sunday night at the Kravis in a concert by the Dresden Staatskapelle).

Thinking about Liberto's music reminds me of several friends, some of them no longer with us, who kept house and home together by being church musicians. I did a lot of church music myself as a teenager, and it proved to be excellent training for future musical challenges. Writing music for a pope's funeral isn't the kind of assignment you'd look forward to, but it does present some interesting problems. In any event, I think Liberto did a decent job, and the music fit the occasion well (some of his other music is available here at this Italian site).

'The Little Prince": In need of a bit more melody

Tuned into PBS last night for a performance of The Little Prince, the opera by Rachel Portman based on the fable by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. PBS showed a filmed version of the short work — which premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 2003 — on its Great Performances series.

Sets and costumes, indeed the whole visual aspect of the show, was quite beautiful, and slavishly faithful to the drawings done by the French aviator who brought the golden-haired alien royal to life in 1942. The singing was generally very good as well, and extra credit has to go the children's chorus and 12-year-old Joseph McManners in the title role.

The libretto also followed the book quite closely (with the omission of the drunkard's planet, or asteroid), and it ended with a follow-your-dreams aspirational finale that avoids Saint-Exupery's adult melancholy but which is conventionally appropriate for a piece of children's theater. The music was played by the BBC Concert Orchestra, David Charles Abell conducting.

The only big problem with the opera was Portman's music. She's a British film composer with many scores to her credit (she won the Oscar for Emma in 1997) and the music she has composed for The Little Prince is delicate, pretty, and very pleasant. But it doesn't have much in the way of memorable melody, and for a show like this, that's important.

This opera had the same sound throughout, rarely breaking out of its modal English manner and remaining essentially in first musical gear. You could hear bits where something fresh and diverting was called for, such as the when the Fox explained to the Prince how they could found a friendship: But if you tamed me. Here was a perfect opportunity for a different kind of tune, a more excited rhythm, a novel series of chords. But what we got was more of the same.

That's not to say that there weren't good moments. One I liked was the chorus of roses, which was a fleet waltz with a bubbling scale figure that opened up the texture a bit and gave your ears something to pay attention to. And overall, The Little Prince is a well-crafted, well-orchestrated, gentle piece that works admirably well with the dramaturgy.

It's only that it lacks the key element that most operas still need: Good melodies. And those are the hardest things to write.

Some operas don't have much in the way of direct melody, but compensate with gripping drama: Wozzeck, for example, or Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The Little Prince, however, is an odd but touching story that seems to me to cry out for a strong melodic fabric to knit the action together.

I know I sound like the worst kind of hidebound traditionalist, but that's not what I'm after. I'm not saying operas need to be like Puccini to work. It simply struck me that here was a piece of theater that would have been more effective than it admittedly was had the music been better.

Giuseppe Verdi used to search for the right musical tinta, or color, for each of his operas so that the arias and ensembles would fit organically into the story, unlike much Italian opera of his time, which had tunes that could have gone in any of their composers' operas, and sometimes did. But Verdi tried to just as hard to find the right melody to move the action along, too, and that's almost as much a function of being a wise theater person as it is being an inspired composer.

The opera is not successful on the most demanding musical grounds, but it is nevertheless a decent tribute to Saint-Exupery. I greatly enjoyed Stacy Schiff's 1994 biography of this singular writer (Saint-Exupery: A Biography), and in my copy of her book I marked this passage, which follows Schiff's description of how The Little Prince came to be written:

Saint-Exupery's was the brand of purity possessed by two sorts of people: children and monks. He had plenty of faith but little investment in religion … He said repeatedly that if he only had religion he would retire to a monastery …In his habits he seemed ill-suited for such an existence, but in his last years especially he appeared a man with a stubborn faith in search of a place in which to invest it. Publicly he clung always, on all levels, to a dignifed idealism.

Schiff also tells us that one of Saint-Exupery's ways to kill time while waiting to fly a mission was to sit at the piano and roll oranges (or lemons, or hard-boiled eggs) over the keys, which he called Oranges sur le piano, and which she refers to as "faux-Debussy." Maybe that would be an interesting thing to try: Write a score for a Saint-Exupery-inspired opera with the sort of chance music its non-musician author composed.

I enjoyed The Little Prince, but I wish I'd enjoyed it more. For me, it shows that no matter how many old theater traditions have been set on their ears in the past century, an opera still needs distinctive music that stays with you after all the sets have been struck.

Naxos ruling raises copyright questions

The New York Court of Appeals has ruled that there is a common-law protection for some legendary recordings made in the 1930s, and for which the copyright has expired.

The case affects a label beloved of classical music fans, Naxos, which has issued restorations (though you can't get them now on its Web site) of historic performances by Yehudi Menuhin, Edwin Fischer and Pablo Casals. All the recordings were made in Britain in the 1930s, and entered the public domain there 50 years later. Naxos and Capitol Records,a division of EMI Group PLC (the modern successor to The Gramophone Co. Ltd., which made the original recordings), have been fighting in the courts since 1999 over these performances, and the case now goes to the federal courts.

So far, it's Naxos 1, Capitol 1, with Capitol in better field position at the time out. Stay tuned.

There's an important royalties question here — Capitol's attorney told the Associated Press that the ruling, which favored Capitol, could make royalties available to the artists or their estates for recordings made before 1972. This was a public domain dispute that technology brought into the open, but there's another important question here, too: Sometime very soon, the nations of the world are going to have to get together and decide how copyrights should be protected in the age of file-sharing.

I don't see any way out of it but a broad-based Internet tax, frankly, maybe BBC-style as part of the purchase price of a computer. It's not a popular position, but I don't see how the rights of creators can be protected for their work, or become creators with the eventual expectation of being paid, unless there is a pool of money somewhere where people can be compensated.

I guess a lot of this has been addressed the way iTunes does it, but no doubt there's still a lot of music out there that's being passed around without any royalties getting back to the people who wrote the pieces in the first place. I imagine that what will happen is that most of this will have been judged to have been taken care of by the widespread use of iTunes and similar setups, and the rest will be written off as the cost of doing creative business.

But I still think an international copyright convention is probably overdue at this point.

According to court documents, the recordings in question are: Menuhin playing the Bruch Violin Concerto, recorded Nov. 25, 1931; and the Elgar Violin Concerto, in a recording made July 5 and 14, 1932; Casals playing the Bach cello suites, in recordings made from November 1936 to June 1939; and Fischer playing the two books of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, in recordings made between April 1933 and August 1934 (Book I) and February 1935 and June 1936 (Book II).

A standout afternoon of Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky at Lynn

This past weekend, I dropped in for a concert at Lynn University, which absorbed the former Harid Conservatory a few years back.

I was delighted by what I heard, and I've posted a review below. I also wanted to mention that Lynn has begun offering free downloads of classical performances from the conservatory on its Website: Click here.

Whether or not it's the first such library of free performances from a conservatory, I don't know, and I haven't had a chance to download any of the files yet, either. But I do hope the performance I heard Sunday afternoon soon will be available.

Here's my review:

There are some chamber music pieces so passionate it's a wonder any room can contain them.

Two such works, the piano trios of Felix Mendelssohn and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, were heard to the fullness of their Romantic majesty Sunday afternoon in a standout concert at Lynn University's Amarnick-Goldstein Concert Hall. Three Canadian musicians — pianist Maneli Pirzadeh, violinist Claude Richard and Lynn's own Johanne Perron on cello — gave extremely powerful readings of these two important works in performances that seemed to completely involve the audience as much as the musicians.

Pirzadeh, who like Richard teaches at Montreal University, was a special find: This is a pianist of power, of fire, and of nearly unblemished accuracy; both trios have extremely demanding piano parts, and Pirzadeh played them beautifully, propelling her colleagues headlong into the heart of these difficult compositions with bravura.

Mendelssohn has often been slighted as a composer of immense skill who nonetheless was not able to compass the full spectrum of human emotion. His D minor trio, Op. 49, written in 1839, presents a side of Mendlessohn that gives the lie to that assessment of him as an artist of the genial surface. This trio is a dark, anguished work, full of sweeping melodies, forceful emotional tableaux, and huge contrasts.

From the first impassioned cello statement of Mendelssohn's melancholy opening theme, the three musicians gave a unified, fully committed performance. Perron and Richard both produce the same kind of tone, a tone of cutting, nervous intensity that is ideal for music like this that demands — and takes — center stage. It's a narrow, tightly focused kind of sound that also showed itself to good effect when the two were playing unison passages: each note was precisely drilled and set out, as if two very conscientious engineers each were bringing an overheated train safely home.

This also was a reading of tremendous energy. Time and again, you could hear the two string players sailing along above a cascade of crystal-clear notes from Pirzadeh, and these weren't just the notes in the right hand above some unobtrusive oom-pah in the left. Here, all of the registers of the piano were alive, which made the music seem to be burning from within, almost as though the flame that forged the piece had been reignited on stage.

Small details were scrupulously attended to, such as the little pizzicato asides in the finale, which nevertheless were full of life, and in that same movement, the varied colors that were brought to each repetition of the singsong minor thirds that are an important part of the thematic material. Overall, the three players leaned toward the big gesture, often playing all out with gigantic waves of sound.

It was, actually, something of an overwrought reading of this work, one that skirted the edge of hysteria. But it also was enormously exciting, and I really can't think of another time I've heard this piece played with this kind of edge-of-the-seat emotion.

The Tchaikovsky trio (in A minor, Op. 50, completed in 1882) that comprised the second half of the program has long been a favorite of audiences and players for its abundance of beautiful melody and its extravagant drama. One of the best things about Sunday's performance was that the basic musicianship was so solid, and the sense of identification with the composer's idiom so complete, that listeners could focus on the quality of Tchaikovsky's invention, particularly in the large theme-and-variations second movement.

As in the Mendelssohn, there were no major problems to speak of, just minor intonation glitches and the odd smudged piano note. And again as with the Mendelssohn, this was a Tchaikovsky of breadth and force; his mournful themes were given all the room they needed to speak their piece, and the composer's architectural landmarks were emphatically marked.

I would have liked to have heard some more contrast in the second movement variations to relieve some of the tension, a case in point being the mazurka variation. Pirzadeh played this admirably but a bit pushily; I think the piece would have benefited from a feeling of relaxation here, letting the music dance more than it did. Trio members also took slightly long pauses between a couple of the variations, which took away some of the momentum the players had built to those points.

But by the end of the piece, as Pirzadeh tolled the sad, deep chords that bring the trio to a hushed conclusion, there was a palpable feeling of spent energy among the musicians. The audience responded rapturously to this performance, as they had done in the first half for the Mendelssohn.

It was overall an exceptional afternoon of chamber music, and one that embodied the all-or-nothing spirit of Romanticism in a strong and distinctive way.

Seeing the pope: Remembering Boston, 1979

From Jonathan Kwitny's Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II (1997):

In Boston, the pope was greeted by First Lady Rosalynn Carter, some other dignitaries, and a pelting rain. Before half a million very wet people on the Boston Common, he chose a theme more reminiscent of Mrs. Carter's husband than any other politician of the era: "Faced with problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility:escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. But today I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape..."

I was one of those half million soaked people on Boston Common that day in October 1979 when the youthful pope visited Boston, where I was in my first year of music theory and composition study at Boston University. I'm not a religious person, but it was an event that dominated the news for days before his arrival and I seem to remember many of us students heading down to the Common to see what this was all about.

Having been raised a Catholic, it was a bigger deal for me than for my friends, but I think everyone there probably has durable memories of the event. It still stands in my recollection as unique, the visit of a spiritual monarch, symbol of a powerful force in the life of humanity, and a living link to 2,000 years of Western civilization. For a lot of people, however, the pope and the Church represent retrograde thinking and resistance to change, and no doubt these issues will be debated with vigor in the weeks to come. I'm not taking sides now, either.

But as much of the world stands at least metaphorically in St. Peter's Square looking up at the papal apartments, I'm thinking about that wet day in Boston and remembering a few things:

a. The rain. I was sitting up on a hilly part of the Common, looking down on a temporary altar. I don't recall much about what it looked like, except that I think it was vaguely modern and somehow protected from the elements. I think there must have been some sort of covering over the crowd closer to the altar; the rest of us were in the outdoors as the rain came down. It was one of those days when you get drenched to the bone and it takes forever to get dry, and I remember seeing the water running down from the hill and turning everything into mud.

b. I sat next to some very nice students from Boston College with whom I blabbed mercilessly before the pope came out (they had umbrellas, too, unlike foolish, unprepared me, who had to impose on them to share, which they did). I wanted to keep talking during some of his address and the mass — I seem to remember there being one — but even though we were a long way from the action, the crowd where I sat only whispered if they talked at all. During some of the prayers, I looked over at my temporary friends, and one woman in particular, to see their reaction. All had eyes closed, hands locked in prayer, embodiments of devotion in the middle of a continual drizzle.

c. The pope himself spoke with a strong, deep voice, heavily accented. I think he cracked some joke about the weather, but I remember the gist of the speech Kwitny quoted in his book, and I especially recollect him saying "Chooooooose liiiiiiiiiife," pronouncing "life" more like "loyfe." I couldn't see him up close from where I was, but I seem to remember him moving around quite a bit on the altar/stage.

d. The whole atmosphere out there on the Common was something like a large church social. I got off the T near the Common with lots of people bearing blankets and picnic baskets, and while it was something like going to a pop concert, it was more subdued than that. People were excited and talkative, but somehow quiet at the same time.

It's hard now, even though it wasn't that long ago, to recall how big these sorts of big events were; everything now has been shrunk somewhat under the pressure of 24/7 news and the concomitant explosion of media. We tend in our time to recall events partly as the broadcast media mediate it, with their pictures and interpretations interlarded with our own.

For years I had the dark blue T-shirt I bought that day, on which was written something like "Pope John Paul II, Boston, October 1979," and which had a portrait of the pope's face on it. It fell apart years ago, which is too bad, because it was a tangible reminder of the day, and I'd like to have it now.

But what really sticks with me after all this time is that here was a leader who was trying to make his church more of a presence in the lives of his congregation. His intellectual strength is evident in his writing (I reviewed Evangelium Vitae when it came out in book form back in 1995), and his commitment to his message of respect for life profound, whether you agree with him or not.

Last year, I took in the papal exhibit at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, and found it fascinating, from the creepy medieval relics — bones from a papal ring finger, a piece of skull belonging to Pope Gregory the Great — to the little mundanities (small shoes, big chairs) that bring these long-vanished figures back to life. I think what will probably remain in this pope's case is his wider significance as a world politician rather than just the representative of his church, which in a way makes him a throwback to the popes of centuries ago, who were temporal leaders as well as chiefs of religious bureaucracies.

For some, John Paul II's influence was beneficent, for others, it was baleful. Again, I'm not weighing in either way, but I did in this time of news watchfulness want to offer a dispatch from my past to join the countless memories we'll hear in the coming days.

I do think it's fair to say that all of us on the Common that day knew we were in the presence of someone with energy, passion and determination, and someone who would make his mark on the world at large. And that he did.

Kreisler's hoaxes still make attractive music

Technology has made it possible for all sorts of musical fakery, lip-synching being the least of it. These days, thanks to the wonder of silicon chips, what your ears tell you you're hearing is often not what it really is at all.

I think you can tell when the string section and mournful English horn solo you hear in the background as the hero looks over the wreck of his burned-out house (where not so long ago he was so deliriously happy) is actually coming from one guy in a darkened studio playing a keyboard, but it's getting tougher. One giveaway is a certain sort of regularity in the decay that sounds metallic to me, but I might be regularly fooled and not have noticed it.

That's why it was comforting during the Oscar broadcast to see the filmed snippets of the composers putting together pieces of their scores, waving batons in front of orchestras and directing choirs of people with their noses buried in manuscript. Ah, real musicians. No computers here.

But who knows? Maybe that was all staged for the benefit of suspicious union reps.

And yet there once was a time when it was a little harder work to fake people out, and one famous example I can think of in honor of April Fool's Day is that of the great Austrian, later American, violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962). Kreisler was one of the giants of the violin, and still is considered so today. In addition to the many recordings he left behind, violinists still program his salon pieces and arrangements, mostly for encores (he entered the Vienna Conservatory at 7, his theory professor there for three years was Anton Bruckner).

But early in his career as a soloist, Kreisler began programming obscure short works by well-known and rarely heard composers, mostly from the 18th century. Several of these pieces, which Kreisler claimed he'd discovered, were published in 1905. About 30 years later, however, Kreisler admitted that he'd made it all up, and that the pieces by Couperin, Martini, Francoeur, et al., were actually composed by none other than Fritz Kreisler.

He said he'd done it to beef up his repertory and make his recitals stand out from those of other ambiitious violinists, but his revelation caused an uproar. "(Critic) Ernest Newman, a former admirer, wrote two articles in the Sunday Times accusing Kreisler of unethical conduct," writes Colin Kolbert in his notes to an EMI disc of Kreisler playing his music, "but Kreisler's response was to challenge him to write some more such pieces if he thought it so easy."

The critical consensus seems to be that it's fairly easy to tell something's not exactly above board when you match the music to its supposed author, but I'm not so sure. Today's listeners benefit by having a vast amount of recorded music available to them in which they can immerse themselves and get to know a composer's work. But audiences orf more than a century ago, with recordings in their earliest days and radio still experimental, would have had to rely on what professional performances they could hear live, and if they or their friends were musically talented, what they could play themselves.

So I think it'd be harder to know if you were hearing the real thing or not. If the great touring violinist announced from the stage that he'd been tracking through the libraries of Europe looking for musical gold, and he'd found some and here it was — well, why wouldn't you believe it?

Listening now to a few of these pieces, there's a hint of fin-de-siecle Viennese swing in the faux-Couperin and Beethoven, but what's impressive is how seriously these piecesare crafted. He's playing it straight, and that gives the music a chance to shine. On that same EMI disc is a scherzo for string quartet, ostensibly by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, an Austrian contemporary of Haydn and Mozart. It's thoroughly charming, and while the tremolandi and the pizzicato ending might be a shade on the wink-wink side, the melody itself is Classical. So, basically, are the harmonies, and so is the form, and overall, it's a delightful little piece.

The crux of the thing is that Kreisler was a talented composer. You couldn't pull something like this off if you didn't know exactly what you were doing. Not having done more than minimal research for the purposes of this entry, I don't know what else he had to say about composing these works. I like to think that while he found a clever way to be a master of repertory no one else knew but all enjoyed, he also used this opportunity to test his compositional skills.

After all, he was basically writing commercial music, and had he done film scores for a period dramas, no doubt he would have felt right at home. What he did wasn't exactly fair to his audience, but the test of this nervy move is that these pieces continue to live on, and for good reasons: A high level of craftsmanship, attractive melodies and textures, and a gift for getting an emotion across in a brief, polished package. Those aren't inconsiderable attributes, and he was right that it isn't easy to do.

I suppose this falls into the same category as the art hoaxers, the greatly talented painters who mimicked the works of artists such as Vermeer. Or maybe Ossian, the putative ancient Gaelic bard whose epic poems were discovered in the 18th century, but whose life and works turned out to be the invention of a contemporary Scottish schoolteacher named James Macpherson. Beethoven, for one, adored Ossian, ranking him with Goethe, Schiller and Homer.

There, I suppose, is the power of art, even when it enters the public arena disguised as something else, or presented by someone as charming as Fritz Kreisler.