Bookshelf

Patti Lupone: A Memoir

By Patti Lupone with Digby Diehl

Crown Archetype

336 pages, photos; $29.99

• During a show Patti Lupone gave in Toronto last year with Mandy Patinkin, she asked the audience to suggest a title for her upcoming memoirs. The title she ended up with, Patti Lupone: A Memoir, sounds decidedly low-key. That’s surprising, because there is nothing low-key about Lupone.

In her memoir Lupone is feisty, funny and daring – just as she is on stage. Notoriously combative, she is at the same time willing to expose vast layers of vulnerability. More than once while reading this, I wondered why she was sharing a particularly uncomfortable bit of information.

As she details her struggles for good parts, favourable contracts, and positive reviews, she writes, “I truly believe you learn more from failure than you do from success.” I found her descriptions of the never-ending struggles to get into a character especially interesting. But the one thing she has never had to struggle for is appreciation from audiences. In fact, her main battles seems to be with herself.

Lupone’s initial big-time success came with the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. But after premiering Webber’s Sunset Boulevard in London in 1992, she was dumped from the Broadway opening in favour of Glenn Close. Lupone was devastated – and evidently still is. It’s a messy story, with Webber as the duplicitous villain. But her career thrived with hit shows like Les Misérables, Sweeny Todd, and, most recently, Gypsy. Along the way there were small but special shows like her now-legendary Saturday midnight cabaret at a New York nightclub called Les Mouches while she was doing Evita on Broadway in 1980 (Ghostlight Records recently issued a live recording).

Webber gets top billing on her list of despised colleagues, but there’s also Bill Smitrovich, her co-star on a tv show she appeared in for four years, Life Goes On, and Chaim Topol, who was briefly – though none too briefly for her - her co-star in one of the many flops she was involved in, The Baker’s Wife. Her list of those she loves is much longer. It includes fellow Juilliard student and former boyfriend Kevin Kline, frequent co-star Patinkin, playwright David Mamet, teacher John Houseman, director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for Gypsy and directed her in it, and her husband Matt Johnston, who sounds like a remarkably balanced, supportive guy.

Lupone can sound either self-deprecating or self-serving – or both, even in the same sentence. But what always saves her here is her ability to find something wonderful in every experience, good or bad. That’s one of the many delights of this revealing and thoroughly enjoyable memoir. Conversational in style, it reads like an extended interview. In fact, Lupone has recorded it for an audio CD. I haven’t heard it, but I imagine it would be terrific to experience this memoir with Lupone’s spoken voice.

Evita is completing its run at the Stratford Festival with final performances on
November 1, 2, 4, and 5 at 2:00pm, and
November 6 at 8:00pm.

At My Sweet Recall: The Letters of Edward Johnson and Beatriz d’Arneiro (1906 – 1908)

edited by Gloria Dent

572 pages, photos; $45.00

This extraordinary volume of letters was given a dramatic debut when Canadian tenor Ben Heppner and actress Barbara Budd read from it at the recital Heppner gave for Stratford Summer Music this past July. Heppner’s recital, a tribute to the legendary Canadian tenor Edward Johnson, was called Edward and Beatriz: A Love Story, and the letters were written between Johnson and his wife-to-be, Beatriz d’Arneiro.

When they met, Johnson was a twenty-eight year-old singer from Guelph, Ontario making his first visit to Paris. D’Arneiro was an aristocratic Portuguese pianist, seven years older, who was living there. After Johnson returned to North America to pursue his career, their already intense relationship continued to develop through these letters.

In her letters, d’Arneiro writes things like, “To live like I am living, it is better to die.” She constantly demands greater emotional commitment – and more frequent letters. “Why should I count on hearing from you regularly? Why should I count on anything at all in life?” But she never forgets her new role as his vocal coach, writing, “Remember all my instructions about your voice.” She even calls herself his “spiritual mother.”

Johnson does bristle. He writes, “You have “roasted” me, my work, the music, the public, the company I am associated with, everything! Why?” But he nonetheless thrives on her rigorous musical regime, writing, “You were a God-send to me this summer. What I have accomplished!... And you were at the bottom of it.” Her devotion also seems to work its charms. Just three weeks after they meet, he writes, “It makes me feel badly that you are unhappy and I would so love to see you happy.” And later, “You are my main stay and strength.”

Dent, a historian and musician, sets the stage for each step in their relationship with brief commentaries. She identifies the many notable characters who appear in these pages, like tenor Enrico Caruso, composer Franco Alfano, Guelph poet John McCrae, who wrote “In Flanders Fields, and pianist Artur Schnabel, who d’Arneiro inexplicably calls “a piece of inflated conceit”. In an epilogue, Dent tells how d’Arneiro died just ten years after they married. Johnson never remarried. Right up until his death in 1959 he continued to credit her with his many successes.

Since being quoted in Ruby Mercer’s 1976 biography of Johnson, The Tenor of His Time, these letters had lain in the archives of the Edward Johnson Foundation in Guelph until Dent discovered them. She has done a remarkable job of compiling and editing them, though I did find the eccentrically organized index confusing to use. Not only do these letters make compelling reading, but they can now claim their rightful place as a significant chapter in the history of Canadian music.

Music and Sentiment

by Charles Rosen

Yale University Press

156 pages, score excerpts; $24.00 US

Many performers write well, and a number of writers on music play an instrument well. But I can’t think of a musician as accomplished as pianist Charles Rosen who writes about music as brilliantly as he does.

In Music and Sentiment, Rosen takes an exhilarating look at the ways composers represent feelings, and how what they do can both move us – and delight us – so deeply.

This book started life as a series of lectures. I don’t know whether it’s Rosen’s oratorical skills, his special insights as a virtuoso performer, or simply his way with words, but he manages to conjure up a story-line as absorbing as that of a powerful novel, with the hint of a resolution in the end. Not that he would – or even could – offer a “special code” for relating a composer’s score to specific sentiments. “Any theme,” he writes, “can be given whatever emotional significance the composer chooses if he knows how to go about it.” In one of his many examples, he points out that “Liszt, in his Sonata for piano, can make any one of his motifs sound successively diabolical, amorous, religioso, majestic, transcendent, or what you will.”

Rosen is a passionate advocate for modern music. But by the time he reaches the end of the 20^th century, he sees various dogmatisms competing against each other. “A representation of sentiment,” he observes, “is not equally efficient in all of these rival trends.” Among those trends he considers less efficient, he targets in particular neo-tonal music. Because of its “understandable delight in using perfect triads”, he finds, “all large-scale richness of expressive tension has been drained away.”

Despite his disclaimer at the beginning that “understanding music in the most basic sense simply means enjoying it when you hear it,” Rosen makes a persuasive case for learning more about the basic materials of music. The more we understand how music works, the more we appreciate it – and the more moved and delighted we can be by it.

No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”

by Kyle Gann

Yale University Press

268 pages, photos; $24.00 US

At the premiere of John Cage’s controversial 4’33” at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, pianist David Tudor sat at a piano with the piano lid closed for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. He touched the instrument only to open and close the lid between each of the three moments. The performance created an uproar. Two years later, at the first New York performance in 1954, Cage’s own mother asked composer Earle Brown, whose work was also on the program, “Don’t you think that John has gone too far this time?” But today, as Kyle Gann shows in his thoughtful look at the backround of this ground-breaking work, it has become not just a repertoire staple but a cultural emblem. It has even been recorded numerous times.

Gann quotes a letter Cage wrote to publisher Helen Wolff, whose son, composer Christian Wolff, also had a piece on the Woodstock program. Cage writes, “The piece is not actually silent ... it is full of sounds, but sounds which I did not think of beforehand.” Audience members – through the incidental noises they make in response to the piece – become part of the composition.

By examining the ideas that influenced Cage in 4’33”, not just from music but also from the visual arts, dance, philosophy and religion, Gann shows how Cage came to write this work. Gann emphasizes that it put Cage ‘in on the ground floor as an innovator”. But in fact, when Cage wrote this piece, he was already well-known as the inventor of the prepared piano – though he hadn’t yet developed his chance techniques.

When it comes to looking at the ways 4’33” influenced the culture of our time, Gann discusses the work of composers like Canadian R. Murray Schafer, whom he calls “the so-called father of acoustic ecology.” But he could have expanded his discussion to include all the creative arts and philosophy, since Cage’s influence ranges widely.

I enjoyed the way Gann, a composer and critic, considers his own experiences with Cage’s music, which started when he performed 4’33” in his high school piano recital. Part of the charm of this elegant book lies in his ability to show how Cage’s landmark work blurred the distinction between art and life, opening up new worlds of sound for him as well as for so many listeners.

@thewholenote.com.

Working with Bernstein
by Jack Gottlieb
Amadeus Press
383 pages, photos; $24.99 US

“Is this book biased? You bet it is!” writes Jack Gottlieb in this memoir of his years spent working with Leonard Bernstein. As Bernstein’s assistant, on and off,  from 1958 until his death in 1990, Gottlieb worked on Bernstein’s concerts, scripts, program notes, orchestrations, recordings, compositions and  books, and picked up his laundry.

Gottlieb is candid about Bernstein’s always spontaneous, frequently volatile and sometimes shameless behaviour. Gottlieb describes LB, as he refers to him throughout this wonderful “grab-bag” of a memoir, as “passionate, profligate, overextending himself, taxing his associates.” One of Gottlieb’s diary entries reads, “Later LB upsets me by saying I’m a disappointment.” But he remains fiercely loyal to the man and his music. In fact, Gottlieb heads up the Leonard Bernstein Office today.

He creates a portrait of Bernstein in all his genius, exuberance, and irrepressible energy. Bernstein was driven by what Gottlieb calls “a burning need to communicate,” and Gottlieb covers the full range of his remarkably versatile accomplishments as a composer for Broadway, the concert hall and the opera house, conductor, pianist and even lyricist.

Everyone who ever met Bernstein, it seems, has a story. Even the FBI has their own dossier, because of his notorious political activity. But nobody’s anecdotes are funnier or more revealing than Gottlieb’s. Clearly his ability to appreciate the wry side of situations helped him survive an intense working relationship with a very complex man.

Gottlieb, a composer himself, includes his own program notes for many of Bernstein’s works. In their clarity and commitment to Bernstein’s own method of using purely musical values rather than programmatic references to talk about music, they promote appreciation of lesser known works like Gottlieb’s favourite, The Dybbuk, as well as under-estimated late works like Arias and Barcarolles and A Quiet Place.

Gottlieb provides the full text of the notorious yet misunderstood disclaimer Bernstein addressed to New York Philharmonic  audiences in 1962 before conducting Glenn Gould in Brahms’ Piano Concerto No.1 in D-. “I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist’s wholly new and incompatible concept,” Bernstein said, in part, “and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould.” At the same time, Gottlieb provides a look behind the scenes before the concert as Gould, who Gottlieb describes as “a luminous pianist but quite messy about his appearance”, gets a haircut and grooming from Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, at the Bernstein apartment.

Given that Bernstein never, unfortunately, wrote his own memoirs, this contribution from such an observant, witty and loving associate – and his collection of personal  snapshots - is all the more treasurable.