Dana Suesse, The “Girl Gershwin” (or was Gershwin the “Boy”

Nadine Dana Suesse (/ˈswiːs/; December 3, 1911 – October 16, 1987)

About a week ago, I looked in the local “Little Library” about a block from my house and found a disc called “Jazz Nocturne, The Collected Piano Music of Dana Suesse.” I think a music critic must live nearby, because virtually every time I peer in, someone has left CDs. Those aren’t uncommon finds, of course. What is out of the ordinary, however, is the type of discs my “secret Santa” leaves.

He or she leaves jewel boxes primarily containing classical music. Again, I’m sure that’s not so uncommon. What surprises me, though, is the provenance — a lot of the music are by composers I’ve never heard of. A lot of the discs are by eastern european modern or pre-modern composers. There’s a lot of opera, and while sometimes it’s by composers I know, it might be a piece I’ve never heard of, like Mozart’s “The Dream of Scipione.” There aren’t any present day discs, probably because CD sales have pretty much evaporated with the advent of online streaming services like AppleMusic or Spotify.

When I put on this album, the most extraordinary music popped out. It sounded like a mashup of Ravel, Debussy, Gershwin. These were all the influences of the time, of course, but it sounded so fresh and alive and new. Take the piece below, Scherzette (“whirligig”).

“Scherzette (“whirligig”)”

You can read Suesse’s Wikipedia entry and see that she was a child prodigy & a brilliant improviser, she studied with the same teacher as Gershwin, and she had a successful career writing popular songs like “The Cocktail Suite: I: Old-fashioned,” and “You Ought to Be in Pictures.”

“The Cocktail Suite: I: Old-fashioned”

I’m happy to find these discs because since there’s only one classical music radio station in my town. That station pretty much cleaves to the standard repertoire of known pieces that they play ad infinitum, which they know aren’t going to upset rush hours drivers on their way to the daily grind (think Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” Beethoven’s “Sixth Symphony,” Rachmaninov’s “Piano Concerto Number 3,” etc.)

If not for the “Little Library” mystery donor, I never would have heard of Dana Suesse. One thing that puzzles, and actually make me kind of angry, is why I had never heard of her before. After I found the disc, I told a friend of mine, and classically trained bass player who’s now also in her 60s like me. She had never hear of Suesse either.

Do any of you know why she never got the kind of recognition after World War II, that people like Gershwin got?

Maria Callas sings Alfredo Catalani

“Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far away”) from Catalani’s opera, “La Wally”

Does Maria Callas need any introduction? A Greek-American soprano born in 1923 in New York, she became arguably the greatest soprano ever. Her mother and father had a tempestuous marriage, and her mother returned to Greece with Maria and siblings in 1937. Recognized for her musical precociousness, her mother, a social climber, forced her to sing starting at age five, and upon returning to Greece, tried to enroll her in the Athens Conservatoire, but she was rejected because she hadn’t been trained in the fundamentals of singing. Her mother then offered to pay a voice teacher at the Greek National Conservatoire to tutor her. After realizing the natural talent, the teacher took Callas on, refusing to let her mother pay for the lessons. Marias studied with the teacher for two years and made her public debut at the age of 15 singing an aria from Tosca. Her mother then secured another audition with the Athens Conservatoire, and this time, she was accepted, though she put off enrolling for a year so she could finish her degree at the National Conservatoire. She had her first operatic debut in 1941 in a small role in Franz von Suppé’s Boccaccio. She became renowned in Greece and it was recommended that she move to Italy to firmly establish her career as an international performer. Instead in 1945 she chose to move back to America, where she quickly took her place beside the two other great Metropolitan Opera divas of the time–Renata Tebaldi and Zinka Milanov. In the 1950s, she had a feud with Tebaldi and had this to say about her rival at the time.

“My admiration of her is of the fullest, and I am happy for her success. If I hear her sing well, I am the first to cheer her. But I live in another world. She is a vocalist of a certain repertoire. I consider myself a soprano—one who does what they used to do once upon a time. My repertoire, by God’s will and nature’s blessing, is complete. I have contributed to the history of music. I have taken music that has long been dead and buried and have brought it back to life again. If the time comes when my dear friend Renata Tebaldi will sing, among others, Norma or Lucia or Anna Bolena one night, then La Traviata or Gioconda or Medea the next—then, and only then, will we be rivals. Otherwise it is like comparing champagne with cognac. No—champagne with Coca-Cola.”

Yesterday, I was in New York City and paid a visit to Academy Records and CDs on 18th street. There I snagged this 1963 vinyl recording of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat, one of my favorite pieces of music.

On my way out the door, I noticed a bin of free records, I looked in and found a treasure trove of works by Ravel, Faure, Brahms, and various female composers. Among them was this gem–a old Angel Records compilations of famous arias, including today’s featured piece, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far away”) from Catalani’s opera, “La Wally.”

Those of you who saw the 1981 movie Diva,a modern take on film noir thrillers, by Jean-Jacques Beineix will recognize this aria, whose performance of it by American soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez. It’s a great pot-boiler with romance, suspense, zen buddhism, and a menacing bald villain.

La Wally is the name of the protagonist in Catalani’s opera. In the last scene, she throws herself into an avalanche. Because this is so hard to depict in a theatre, the opera is rarely performed. Too bad. I’d love to see if Catalani had written any other such transportive arias.

Cai Yan: Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute

Here is Cai Yan’s entry on Wikipedia.  She appears as number 3 on Wikipedia’s list of female composers.  Cai Yan was born around 170 AD in China.  The daughter of a famous scholar, Cai Yang, she also studied calligraphy, poetry, and music, and was married off at the age of 15. Her first husband died, she returned home, and was subsequently captured by nomads during civil wars.  Cai Yan lived among them for twelve years and had two sons.  It seems there are three poems that she wrote detailing the sorrows of living among barbarians.  Eventually, she was ransomed by a chancellor in the name of her father.  He wanted her back because she was the last surviving member of her clan and he needed to appease the spirits.  I managed to track down three of her poems that were translated and published in 1983.  (Cai Yan and the Poems Attributed to Her, Hans H. Frankel Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews Vol. 5, No. 1/2 (Jul., 1983), pp. 133-156)).  A search on youtube for her works yielded two versions of Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute, which is today’s piece. If you scroll down below it you’ll find a translation of the “Eighteen Songs.” The article said the text was in Creative Commons. Here is the Youtube performance of “Eighteen Songs….”

September 10, birthday of Henry Purcell (1659)

I first heard Henry Purcell‘s music on the sound track to an X-rated film. It was Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” It was 1971; I was 16; and I was under the influence of one of the smartest people in my high school, who was captain of our swim team. You had to be 18 to see an X-rated film, so I and a few others on our swim team read the book.

Life magazine had a photo spread about the film, which stoked with our desire to see it, and when it finally reached the backwaters of South Bend, Indiana, where I was born we had to go. Of course, I couldn’t because I was under age and my friends said not to worry, they would tell the cashier at the box office they were my chaperones. The woman wouldn’t budge, and I didn’t see it. They did, and we all started acting like Burgess’ “droogies.”

On weekends we’d get drunk and engage in our own acts of “ultra-violence” like blowing up mailboxes, throwing rolls of toilet paper on the trees of cheerleaders’ parents’ houses, doing donuts (driving onto the lawn of a cheerleader’s parent’s house, spinning our wheels and turning the car in a circle).

It wasn’t until the ripe old age of 35 or so, that I got a chance to watch it on VHS tape (what we used to watch in the olden days before Netflix and youtube.) It actually disgusted me. Maybe because now I had two daughters, I did not find the scenes of rape choreographed to Rossini’s overture to “La Gazza Ladra” artistic. True it was a dark satire on the police, politics, education, school caning, and class of the UK and how that system created the main character. When the opposition party discovers that Alex has been brainwashed, they use him as a tool of propaganda and make him a celebrity. This still happens today–politicians only care about the down-trodden when they can blame their lot on the other side, as we’ve seen in many global elections.

Since I was underage, I could only enjoy the film through the book and its soundtrack. It was created by the composer Walter (now Wendy) Carlos (of Switched on Bach fame).

The piece that probably haunted me the most was Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” which Carlos had heavily modified. Below is Carlos’s version besides a more traditional one. Which do you like?