SymphonyNow

Among the recent crop of books dealing with orchestral history and repertoire are a substantial tome celebrating the history of the San Francisco Symphony, and two biographies that explore lesser-known aspects of artists who, in their very different ways, have greatly influenced the culture of our time: Richard Strauss and Anthony Burgess.

Music for a City jacket design by NOON

Music for a City, Music for the World: 100 Years with the San Francisco Symphony (Chronicle Books, 271 pages, $45, sfsymphony.org/store) could easily be termed a coffee-table book—but only if the coffee and the table are of extraordinary quality, and the reader prepared for thoughtful reflection. Yes, the posters, program pages, and letters are handsomely reproduced, and many of the photos radiate warmth and joy in music-making. But Music for a City goes far beyond being a feast for the eyes. It features a text by Larry Rothe, the SFS’s longtime program book editor, that thoroughly chronicles each era of the orchestra’s history and sets it in the context of local, national, and world events.

Rothe’s historical account is sprinkled with fascinating sidebars, including one on conductor Henry Hadley. “In 1911,” he writes, “every podium of every major orchestra in the United States was occupied by leaders from the far side of the Atlantic. All the more extraordinary that Henry Hadley, the San Francisco Symphony’s first music director, was an American.” But Rothe goes on to note that Hadley had received a significant part of his training in Germany, and that his “lush, extravagantly colored Romantic style suggests Richard Strauss, who identified Hadley as the only American conductor who really understood the orchestra.” And elsewhere in this chapter Rothe reports that Hadley’s hand-picked concertmaster at the San Francisco Symphony, Eduard Tak, had played under a number of German maestros, including Strauss.

At the time of the San Francisco Symphony’s founding in 1911, Strauss was beginning work on Eine Alpensinfonie, the last of his great tone poems—works that played a major role in shaping the character of the modern symphony orchestra. But as general music director of the Berlin Hofkapelle, he was also near the pinnacle of his career as a conductor. It is on this aspect of Strauss’s creative life, more than on his composing career, that Raymond Holden focuses in Richard Strauss: A Musical Life (Yale University Press, 316 pages, $35).

Richard Strauss: A Life jacket photograph by Edward Steichen

Holden, associate head of research at London’s Royal Academy and a leading Strauss authority, delineates the role that Strauss played in shaping performance practice of the day. While “keen to promote his own works,” he writes, Strauss was “equally keen to champion the compositions of Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. A passionate advocate of new music, he had a conducting schedule often littered with novelties, many of which have since disappeared from the standard repertoire. Perhaps more important, he was a role model for many young conductors who not only willingly absorbed his practices and principles but passed them on to future generations of interpretative artists.” Strauss’s repertoire choices are recorded in scrupulous detail, largely through a lengthy appendix cataloguing his performances as a tenured conductor at numerous orchestras and opera companies between 1885 and 1924. And for the serious student of historical performance practice, among the book’s most interesting appendices is a collection of Mozart and Beethoven scores marked by Strauss the conductor.

If Richard Strauss: A Musical Life reveals the non-compositional side of an artist that has been largely eclipsed by his enduring contributions to the musical canon, conductor Paul Phillips turns that idea on its head in A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess (Manchester University Press, 467 pages, $89.95). “Mention the name Anthony Burgess,” Phillips writes in his introduction, “and people who recognize it are most likely to say, ‘Didn’t he write A Clockwork Orange?’ Those more knowledgeable about his work may recall Earthly Powers, the Enderby novels, or his writings on Joyce and Shakespeare…But mention that Burgess was a composer, and the usual response is a pair of raised eyebrows accompanied by a quizzical ‘Really? I had no idea.’ ”

A Clockwork Counterpoint cover image: Drawing of Anthony Burgess by David Levine © 1987

Phillips’s interest in Burgess the composer was first piqued by the obituary on him that appeared in The New York Times November 26, 1993. It quoted Burgess as having said he’d rather be considered a musician than a novelist, and credited him with “dozens of musical compositions, from operas, choral works and song cycles to symphonies and concertos.” Phillips writes, “Unaware of Burgess’s musical achievements until then, I set out to locate the compositions cited in the notice. As music director and conductor of the Brown University Orchestra, an ensemble perennially filled with musically talented polymaths who excel in a wide range of non-musical fields, I imagined that these students might enjoy playing symphonic music composed by a famous novelist.” Inquiries to Burgess’s literary publishers turned up no scores, however, and Phillips soon abandoned his pursuit. What revived it, two years later, was his encounter with journalist Tess Crebbin, a Burgess fan who had requested permission to attend rehearsals of Phillips’s orchestra in order to educate herself about music. Crebbin introduced him to Burgess’s widow, Liana, who then invited Phillips to organize her late husband’s scores and catalog his compositions.

That catalog runs to sixteen pages in this book, which also includes a discography, a filmography, numerous musical examples, and a thorough examination of much of Burgess’s music in the course of what amounts to a full-scale scholarly biography.

An excerpt from Burgess’s The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard, reproduced in the biography A Clockwork Counterpoint, illustrates what author Paul Phillips calls “a mix of Bachian style with late-Romantic harmony.”

On the podium Phillips has brought several of Burgess’s compositions to life himself, including the Third Symphony, which was given its second performance by the Brown University Orchestra in 1997, more than two decades after the premiere; the Piano Concerto in E-flat, premiered in 1999 at his other podium, the Pioneer Valley Symphony in western Massachusetts; and the ballet suite Mr W.S., which enjoyed its U.S. premiere by the PVS that same year. As we see here, Phillips’s advocacy for Burgess’s music is equally strong in print. “Certainly Burgess was being at least partly ironic,” he writes, “whenever he said that he wished people would think of him as a musician who writes novels rather than as a novelist who writes music. While this remark, which he repeated to the media for at least twenty-five years right up until his final deathbed interview, should not be taken literally, neither should it be dismissed as a joke. The same is true of his description of himself as a ‘failed musician,’ for no failed musician, as he well knew, could have composed his Third Symphony, Mr W.S., the three guitar quartets, or the dozens of other sophisticated scores that he produced.”