One of the hallmarks of Western classical music is its sheer resilience, its ability to renew and refresh itself as an art form even as its core repertoire continues to speak—over years, decades, and centuries—to the soul and intellect of humankind. This resilience is manifest in many ways, many of which were illustrated in the year 2004 in classical music.
In the spring, while scholars were preparing the art exhibit Botticelli and Filippino: Grace and Passion in 15th Century Florentine Painting in Florence, a music specialist from the University of Toronto noticed that the notes on a scroll in Filippino Lippi’s painting Madonna and Child with Singing Angels corresponded to an actual Renaissance song. When that song was transcribed and performed at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi at the start of the exhibit, it marked the first time that “Fortuna desperata” had been heard in 500 years. In January, Ottorino Respighi’s opera Marie Victoire, which was written before World War I, received its world premiere at the Rome Opera House. When it was presented in October in Essen, Ger., Felix Mendelssohn’s comic opera The Uncle from Boston was heard for the first time since the composer created it in 1823, at age 14. A four-minute work for organ, Voluntary on Tallis’s Lamentations, written by Benjamin Britten in 1940, debuted at the London Proms; and a 40-second piece by Edward Elgar, Smoking Cantata, received its world premiere in a broadcast by the BBC Radio 4 program Today. These pieces had been discovered in various European archives in recent years. Other works that had been seemingly lost to the world were similarly recovered, including a wedding cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, which had been missing for 80 years, and the manuscript of Sergey Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, which had disappeared shortly after the composer wrote it in 1908.
Even as older pieces were being reborn, new works were being heard for the first time. Following the success of his first opera, Dead Man Walking, in 2000, composer Jake Heggie unveiled his next, The End of the Affair, at the Houston (Texas) Grand Opera in March. Other operas receiving premieres included Ishmael Wallace’s The Stranger, Grigori Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank, and William Bolcom’s A Wedding; the last made its debut as part of the commemorations of the 50th anniversary season of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Fittingly, given the subject, in Jon Gibson’s opera Violet Fire, based on the life of magnetism-and-electricity mastermind Nikola Tesla, performers were wired with microphones, and the energy waves from their bodies were picked up and telecast onto an onstage video screen during the debut in February.
New instrumental works were also presented for the first time, among them Elliott Carter’s Dialogues (which the composer described as “a conversation between the soloist and the orchestra”), George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 3, and Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird. Even as these and other new works were appearing, announcements were being made about works that loomed tantalizingly on the horizon. British composer John Tavener, whose pieces traditionally drew heavily from his Russian Orthodox faith, told the media that in 2005 he would premiere a new choral work based on the 99 names for God in Islam. The first complete performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour-long Licht operatic cycle was scheduled to be presented in 2008 in a €10 million (about $13.3 million) production.
In a unique attempt to keep new pieces in the repertoire, conductor Sir Simon Rattle announced that he would be the patron of the Encore project, in which works that had recently received their premieres but had since gone unperformed would be revisited by London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra over the next four years. Not content only to reinvigorate newer works, Rattle offered a singular slant on one of the warhorses of the classical repertoire, Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 watershed work Le Sacre du printemps, by adding surrealistic visuals to his performance of the piece at the Berlin Film Festival in February. The English National Opera announced that it had commissioned the Asian Dub Foundation, a group of pop-electronica artists, to write an opera about Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, which would debut in 2006. Meanwhile, in Halberstadt, Ger., an intrepid group of musicians added two notes to their performance of John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP (ASLSP being an abbreviation of Cage’s instruction that performance of the piece be “as slow as possible”), which was scheduled to continue on a semiannual basis for the next 639 years (in the performance’s next installment, in March 2006, two notes were to be subtracted).
Various musical milestones were also marked and celebrated in 2004. In March Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, arguably the most famous classical music artist of his generation, gave his final performance on the operatic stage in a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. At the end of that performance, Pavarotti’s 379th with the company, the sold-out audience gave him an 11-minute standing ovation. In February the Met’s general manager, Joseph Volpe, announced his retirement from the company that he had led for 40 years; his successor, record executive Peter Gelb, was named later in the year. Without relinquishing his post as the Met’s music director, conductor James Levine raised his baton at a concert in October as the first U.S.-born music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. On December 7 Milan’s newly renovated La Scala had a gala reopening with a production of Antonio Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta, which had not been performed since it was commissioned for the opera house’s original opening in 1778.
The London Symphony Orchestra celebrated its 100th season, while Chicago enjoyed two 100-year commemorations—of Orchestra Hall, the home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and of the Ravinia Festival, for which the New York Philharmonic gave a special performance. The original members of the Guarneri String Quartet reunited for a tour that marked the ensemble’s 40th anniversary. Conductor Gerard Schwarz was honoured for his 20th anniversary with the Seattle (Wash.) Symphony Orchestra, and Kent Nagano was offered accolades for his 25th year at the helm of the Berkeley (Calif.) Symphony Orchestra. Seiji Ozawa, for 29 years, until 2002, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, returned from his post at the Vienna State Opera to the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts to take part in a performance marking the 10th anniversary of the concert hall that was named for him. Composer Antonin Dvorak was honoured by orchestras around the world on the centenary of his death.
One of Dvorak’s contemporaries, Gustav Mahler, figured prominently in the classical music categories at the year’s Grammy Awards. Recordings of his Symphony No. 3 won separate Grammys for best classical album (by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony) and best orchestral performance (by Pierre Boulez and the Vienna Philharmonic). At the same ceremony, iconic American pianist Van Cliburn was honoured with an award for lifetime achievement. New Tonalist composer Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy—based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest—won the Pulitzer Prize for music, while film composer John Williams and diva Joan Sutherland were among the recipients of the year’s Kennedy Center Honors presented by Pres. George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush at the White House in December. In October Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena was named artist of the year at the 27th annual Gramophone Awards in London. The young Chinese piano sensation Lang Lang (see Biographies) was named a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in May.
Other milestones of a sadder sort occurred as well. The world of film and musicals lost Oscar-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith in July, Elmer Bernstein and David Raksin in August, and lyricist Fred Ebb in September; among conductors, Iona Brown died in June, Carlos Kleiber passed in July, and Hans Vonk was taken by Lou Gehrig’s disease in August; Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi died in December; French baritone Gérard Souzay died in August, and American baritone Robert Merrill succumbed in October (a loss for the world of baseball as well as opera, as Merrill sang the national anthem on opening day at Yankee Stadium every year); Indian sitar player and composer Vilayat Hussein Khan died in March; and the Israeli composer Naomi Sapir Shemer, who wrote inspirational and art songs, died in June.
The year was not without other moments that ranged from the eccentric and frivolous to the downright comic. Bugs Bunny turned up on a video screen at a concert in August to “conduct” the Cleveland (Ohio) Orchestra in a program that included such classical favourites as What’s Opera, Doc? and The Rabbit of Seville. The concert, dubbed Bugs Bunny on Broadway, drew the largest audience of the orchestra’s summer season. String players of the Bonn (Ger.) Beethoven Orchestra were not kidding, however, when they sued the orchestra in March. The musicians maintained that the string players had more notes to play than their counterparts on other instruments and that they therefore deserved a pay raise. There was, as usual, the yearly controversy at the Bayreuth Festival in Bavaria. This time it involved a dispute between Christoph Schlingensief, who was directing a production of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, which was booed by the opening-night audience, and his leading tenor, Endrik Wottrich. The former charged that the latter was a racist because he allegedly objected to having black singers in the cast; Wottrich responded by calling Schlingensief a “Nazi.” Diva Elisabeth Schwarzkopf went both of them one better (or worse), however, by admitting that she had been a member of the Nazi Party during the Hitler era. In her memoirs, Les Autres Soirs, published in July, Schwarzkopf wrote that she joined the party in the 1930s as “a strictly administrative gesture.”
A documentary that debuted in September speculated that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the legendarily foul-mouthed and uncouth musical genius, might have suffered from Tourette syndrome, an inherited neurological disorder that can cause involuntary grunting and other vocal tics as well as a compulsion to utter obscenities. Scientists in Salzburg, Austria, began the process of unearthing the bodies of Mozart’s father, maternal grandmother, and niece to glean DNA samples that might prove that a skull at the city’s International Mozarteum Foundation was that of the composer himself.
Great Britain, however, was the stage for the year’s most celebrated musical flap. In March world-renowned American soprano Deborah Voigt was dropped from an English National Opera production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos because her girth was deemed too substantial to fit into one of the costumes. Wags weighed in with all manner of bad jokes, of course, but the incident also raised serious artistic questions, such as whether operatic heroines necessarily had to be fashion-model svelte.
Their foibles notwithstanding, the music makers of 2004 outdid themselves with the music they made. The year included a wealth of recordings that brought new life to a wide range of works. Nagano led a force of 200 performers in an incisive recording of Leonard Bernstein’s stylistically sprawling Mass (Harmonia Mundi), while Ozawa offered elegant readings of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony and Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (RCA).
Nikolaus Harnoncourt revealed new aspects of the young Mozart’s budding genius in his set of the composer’s Mozart: Early Symphonies (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi), and violinist Nigel Kennedy displayed his impassioned virtuosity on Vivaldi II (EMI). Two recordings released by RCA provided new insights into two of the greatest masters. A new addition to the label’s reDiscovered series featured recordings that the 19-year-old Itzhak Perlman had made for his debut record in 1965. The recordings, which were shelved at the time, were finally released in 2004. They documented the intensity and abandon of the young violinist at the start of his illustrious career. The fabled voice of tenor Enrico Caruso finally received the orchestral accompaniment it was originally denied on gramophone recordings, owing to technological limitations in the early 20th century. On Caruso: amor ti vieta: Great Opera Arias, the original recordings with piano accompaniment were augmented by a modern orchestra, and 21st-century listeners were thereby allowed to hear Caruso as his contemporaries had in the concert halls of his day. These recordings, like so much else that came to life—or back to life—in 2004, captured the timelessness not only of the music itself but also of those who served it.