If you happened to catch last Monday's blog, you know that I spent it introducing one of the silliest pieces in the piano literature, a piece called "The Battle of Prague." And while it is not, shall we say, one of those pieces that will have a lasting impact on your soul, or that will make a rewarding musical travelling companion through life, nonetheless, I ought to at least let it speak on its own terms, and in this respect, I think I may have given you the wrong impression. You see, I am a professional pianist, and...
I professionalized it.
Having spent all of those hours practicing scales and arpeggios, learning to play quickly and cleanly, tackling thorny passages with ease, naturally I gave the "Battle" the kind of treatment it would get from an experienced soldier of the piano. But that isn't how you would have been likely to hear the piece played in its day. Most of the people who bought the music were amateurs, and probably not even very gifted ones at that. They would have struggled over the repetitive left hand figures and rush through some of it, only to drag in other places. The worthlessness of those figures, taking many notes to say very little, got short shrift in my account, where I flew past those bits of formulaic triteness so that your ear may not have had enough time to sufficiently digest the complete lack of musical nutrition. In other words, I may have inadvertently oversold the piece.
My Battle was over in 12 minutes, and I actually enjoyed it. Perhaps you did also. But I think you will enjoy this entry as well. It is from a gentleman in Poland, on an upright piano in his home. The tempi are much slower, although since he skips the repeats, his version is only a minute and a half longer than mine. He misses notes, gets tangled up a few times, and makes the piece seem more daunting generally. But I'm not linking to his video to make fun of him. Far from it. I think you will enjoy his version. For all the "battle fog" it's really much better than most of the performances you would have heard in the 19th century even from a technical standpoint, and it will give you a more genuine sense of what the piece would have sounded like in the hearing of most people, since, I am sure that most concert professionals never played it, and most people don't own seven-foot Steinways, to say nothing of their complete non-existence in 1790. All the more, having visited this gentleman's Youtube channel, complete with videos of his grandchildren and snow and holidays, I couldn't help getting a warm feeling from this fine family man who enjoys life--family and food and music.
What's more, he has taken the trouble to label each of the parts of the score so you can see what is written there as he begins each section. This is much less intrusive, I think, than yelling them out in performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2CJEiQP2C8
At the complete other end of the spectrum is a video from a professional ensemble, performed impeccably by strings and piano. Several passages have had additional parts added to them which is quite an improvement. You'll want to listen to the piano in this recording--it is a real "fortepiano," the kind of piano that would have been around in 1790, before pianos got steel strings, metal soundboards, and grew to such proportions. It has a very different sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dma-5NbZdkU
If you happen to survive all three performances, mine and the other two, you will have invested over a half-hour doing battle with this strange piece, which is still much less time than someone who was actually in the Battle of Prague itself, and I'm sure the results will be much less fatal.
Showing posts with label Kotzwara. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kotzwara. Show all posts
Monday, March 30, 2015
Monday, March 23, 2015
This is how little girls got to play soldiers in the nineteenth century
I started programming my upcoming piano recital with a serious question in mind: what are the merits of "program" music, and how does a composer draw inspiration from something besides the interplay of notes and phrases? But things shortly began to veer off into the ridiculous.
That, obviously, is one risk of trying to make music tell a story; it is like unto concretizing metaphors, double entendres, bad puns, and all manner of linguistic tricks that start to wear thin after a while because the focus is on the language itself and not on what it is trying to point to beneath its dazzling surface.
And if Erik Satie's little escapade didn't warn you of that (though Satie was clever enough to recognize it), let's dive into a little Kotzwara.
I wrote about him nearly ten years ago, shortly after moving to Champaign-Urbana. An item in the news stirred him from his deserved slumber. Some folks were upset that a cellphone ringtone was topping the charts in England, and I wrote an article that suggested that this was hardly a new low in the annals of public taste. What I dredged up to support my argument was a piece of piano music called "The Battle of Prague," published in 1790, which went on to become a huge bestseller for half a century, and even got mentioned by name in two of Mark Twain's books, so embedded in the culture it was.
Kotzwara's battle piece was an early entry into a genre that was to glut the market for years after--the idea that the noise and glory of a great an messy enterprise could be represented by one only moderately talented player was an idea that sold a lot of music. Trumpet calls, canons, guns, were easy to imitate on a piano. Canons, particularly, didn't take a lot of practice. Mr. Kotzwara's piece turned out to be disappointingly polite: many of the other entrants into this kind of piece wrote loud, low clusters for the flat of the hands, the kind of thing that two-year olds naturally produce once they can reach the keyboard.
Then there was the fog of war. I have a book entitled "Men, Women, and Pianos" by Arthur Loesser, in which one section is devoted to a description of this literature. It is very entertaining. In referring to such effects, produced mainly by random notes with the sustaining pedal to the floor, Mr. Loesser reminds us that "a good deal of young lady battle fog was probably quite unintentional."
What makes the piece really ridiculous, besides the trite musical material itself, is that everything is supposed to represent some aspect of the battle, and is captioned accordingly in the score. When I play this in recital I'm thinking of having persons hold up signs, maybe two at a time, pointing to each hand, as indeed, sometimes the left hand represents galloping horses while the right hand is busy being people hacking each other with swords.
The real Battle of Prague was, of course, no laughing matter. And what it had to do with the English piano music buying public I have no idea. But they loved it. And as silly as it is I intend to have a good time playing it in recital in a few weeks.
here it is:
The Battle of Prague by Francisek Kotzwara
That, obviously, is one risk of trying to make music tell a story; it is like unto concretizing metaphors, double entendres, bad puns, and all manner of linguistic tricks that start to wear thin after a while because the focus is on the language itself and not on what it is trying to point to beneath its dazzling surface.
And if Erik Satie's little escapade didn't warn you of that (though Satie was clever enough to recognize it), let's dive into a little Kotzwara.
I wrote about him nearly ten years ago, shortly after moving to Champaign-Urbana. An item in the news stirred him from his deserved slumber. Some folks were upset that a cellphone ringtone was topping the charts in England, and I wrote an article that suggested that this was hardly a new low in the annals of public taste. What I dredged up to support my argument was a piece of piano music called "The Battle of Prague," published in 1790, which went on to become a huge bestseller for half a century, and even got mentioned by name in two of Mark Twain's books, so embedded in the culture it was.
Kotzwara's battle piece was an early entry into a genre that was to glut the market for years after--the idea that the noise and glory of a great an messy enterprise could be represented by one only moderately talented player was an idea that sold a lot of music. Trumpet calls, canons, guns, were easy to imitate on a piano. Canons, particularly, didn't take a lot of practice. Mr. Kotzwara's piece turned out to be disappointingly polite: many of the other entrants into this kind of piece wrote loud, low clusters for the flat of the hands, the kind of thing that two-year olds naturally produce once they can reach the keyboard.
Then there was the fog of war. I have a book entitled "Men, Women, and Pianos" by Arthur Loesser, in which one section is devoted to a description of this literature. It is very entertaining. In referring to such effects, produced mainly by random notes with the sustaining pedal to the floor, Mr. Loesser reminds us that "a good deal of young lady battle fog was probably quite unintentional."
What makes the piece really ridiculous, besides the trite musical material itself, is that everything is supposed to represent some aspect of the battle, and is captioned accordingly in the score. When I play this in recital I'm thinking of having persons hold up signs, maybe two at a time, pointing to each hand, as indeed, sometimes the left hand represents galloping horses while the right hand is busy being people hacking each other with swords.
The real Battle of Prague was, of course, no laughing matter. And what it had to do with the English piano music buying public I have no idea. But they loved it. And as silly as it is I intend to have a good time playing it in recital in a few weeks.
here it is:
The Battle of Prague by Francisek Kotzwara
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