So I've Heard

A special place of honor is ordained for the EMI recording of Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos,” first accomplished in 1954 and now at hand  in a two-disk CD reissue. Whatever your feelings may be about the work itself, you have to recognize this performance as one of those rare occasions when everything worked, when every component of an assembled dream cast, and a conductor uniquely responsive to the score itself, became transformed into a performing mechanism simply without flaws.
The cast list should make anyone’s mouth water: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in the title role, Irmgard Seefried as the Composer, Rita Streich as Zerbinetta, the young Hermann Prey as the Harlequin. Herbert von Karajan, already regarded in some (but not all) circles as the first great postwar conductor, was in charge.
Doubts about Karajan’s omnipotence were already in circulation when this “Ariadne” appeared (on a three-record Angel LP album). On records he had already stiff-armed his way through a few Mozart albums and a rather coarse “Meistersinger” from Bayreuth. For this project, however, he was on his best behavior, and the result is a performance so delicately shaped, so subtly woven out of a multitude of elements, that the passages in Strauss’s score that seem like so much padding — some of the argle-bargle in the Prologue, and the mercilessly extended final love duet — seemed this time like integral parts of the score.
The performance is complemented by a full roster of small delights: the gloriously stuffy Major Domo of the great Viennese actor Alfred Neugebauer, the elegant pomposity of Hugues Cuenod’s Dancing Master, the exquisite Echo of Anny Felbermayer, the playing of the Philharmonia Orchestra, whose first-desk players at the time included the legendary hornist Dennis Brain. I know better operas on records, but few  better performances. But why a booklet, for this most verbose opera, with no English text?
If you saw the Long Beach Opera’s production of Karol Szymanowski’s “King Roger” a year or so ago, you might have noticed — despite the  strange production that visited interesting  violence upon  the time or place of the action — that the music itself was an extraordinary experience.
Szymanowski’s huge dramatic pageant, set in medieval Sicily and involving some striking argumentation on the nature of religious faith, embraces a wide panorama of musical influences: Debussy and Stravinsky foremost, with more than a sidewise obeisance of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.” Now, for the first time, we can examine this extraordinary score at its own pace. “King Roger” is now available in a domestic release, two disks on the Acanta label,  from a  broadcast from Warsaw’s National Opera in 1965.
The opera is short — 80 minutes, and don’t believe the mislabeling on the back of the CD box — and the performance under Mieczyslaw Mierzejewski, with Andrzej Hiolski and Hanna Rumowska as Roger and his Queen, is more trustworthy than glorious. So is the recorded sound. The accompanying booklet gives a plot summary and a fair amount of historical background but no text in any language.
These are important, but not fatal drawbacks. The point is that “Roger” — as even the up-and-down Long Beach production suggested — is a great opera, and this release is unlikely to be duplicated from any other source in the near future. Filling out the second side is another Szymanowski score I’ll bet you’ve never heard, the ballet-pantomime called “The Highland Robbers,” full of lusty folkdances and some delicious orchestrations. It’s time we gave Szymanowski the attention he has long deserved., and this album points us in the right direction.
If Szymanowski’s opera languishes in the shadows of undeserved neglect, it is like a neon billboard on Main Street compared to Franz Schmidt’s “Notre Dame,” which turns up — implausibly but admirably — in a West Berlin  performance distributed on the energetic, Los Angeles-based Capriccio label. The much admired Christof Perick is the conductor; the cast includes such well-known figures as Gwyneth Jones, James King and Kurt Moll (as, you might have guessed, the hunchback Quasimodo).
Schmidt (1874-1939) still reigns as the central deity of a small but dwindling cult, mostly in his native Austria. In my student days in Vienna I remember attending a performance of his luridly overstuffed oratorio “The Book of Seven Seals” –  which the audience  absorbed reverently, without taint of worldly applause  — and feeling as if I’d wandered onto some unknown but hostile planet. Confessing my boredom to otherwise rational friends, I found myself looked upon as a blasphemer.
That oratorio, should you care, is also on records, but “Notre Dame” is considerably more fun. Come upon it without prior knowledge, as I did during a recent broadcast, and you’d swear you’d discovered something unknown from Wagner’s middle years — a couple of missing acts of “Lohengrin,” perhaps. The libretto — from Victor Hugo’s novel, of course  –  is co-authored by Schmidt himself, with Leopold Wilk. There is, at least, plenty of action, some grand choral scenes, and a pathetic if amusing attempt by the composer to evoke the medieval setting of the novel through some naive archaisms.
The opera dates from 1906, had a middling success at its 1914 Vienna premiere, and still shows up there from time to time (most recently in 1975, with Julia Migenes as Esmeralda). The recording is from a radio performance which, considering the meagre visual suitability of Gwyneth Jones as the seductive dancing girl, is probably just as well. To my surprise, I find the music almost constantly pretty, sometimes rather stirring. Considering the recent fate of Victor Hugo in the musical theater, I would endure ten performances of “Notre Dame” over one return visit to “Les Miz.”
Georg Buchner’s “Wozzeck” was first performed in Vienna in the same year as the “Notre Dame” premiere. We don’t know — but can surely guess — what the rising young genius Alban Berg might have thought of the Schmidt opera, but we know of his bedazzled reaction to “Wozzeck,”and have its fruition in Berg’s operatic setting of Buchner’s text. It’s late in the day to proclaim Berg’s score as one of the  masterworks of this century.
Claudio Abbado’s new Deutsche Grammophon recording takes the full measure of this surging, harrowing drama. It comes from a live performance of last season’s new production at the Vienna State Opera, and, of course, the in-person quality of the sound adds much to the vibrance of the final product. I have never been partial to the steely esthetic that seems to inform the Pierre Boulez recording of “Wozzeck” — the only version, of several formerly available, to survive into the last Schwann catalog. Abbado’s is altogether superior; the emotional spectrum, from the accents of private horror to the grisly shadow-dances in the Tavern Scene, is broader, and the sweep is irresistible.
The cast is superfine: Hildegard Behrens as Marie, Franz Grundheber as Wozzeck, Heinz Zednik and Aage Haugland as the grotesque Captain and Doctor. The photographs in the accompanying booklet are enough to make one ache to see this production in person. From the fine print on the album cover I glean the information that the performance was also televised.
“Wozzeck” is a difficult opera to approach, although the rewards are overwhelming. It is simplicity itself, however, beside the contents of another recent DG release, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Samstag aus Licht” (“Saturday from Light”).
Since his early  electronic pieces at the experimental lab in Cologne in the  1950s, Stockhausen’s stature as the guru of the artistically outrageous and the artistically possible has never been challenged. It may be, as in the case of that other pioneer John Cage, that his eventual fame will rest upon the paramaters he has devised for musical experiences, rather than the music itself. In any case, his creativity has been well documented, most of all by Deutsche Grammophon, whose recording engineers have dogged his footsteps almost from the start. (His recordings do not, however, linger in the domestic catalog for very long. You need friends in Europe to help catch up on such past treasures as the spellbinding “Sternklang” or the “Mantra,” which have come and gone on the local lists.)
Stockhausen’s major project in recent years has been an operatic cycle called “Light,” which when completed will consist of seven separate works — one for each day, each a score of considerable dimension. Perhaps “operatic” is the wrong word; what Stockhausen has in mind is more like some gigantic ritual, with Eternity the real subject matter. “Thursday,” whose central character is the Archangel Michael (interpreted, as near as I can figure, by a solo trumpet) was completed and recorded (also on DG) five years ago; now comes “Saturday,” nearly four hours long, built around the figure of Lucifer, Bringer of Light.
The work involves magic, vast spatial effects, and infinite forbearance. You know that deep thinking is taking place, and the curtain parts often enough to reveal the product of a phenomenally complex creative instinct. The great moments in “Samstag aus Licht” — except for one special moment — have a direct power which, for all its abstruseness of design, can hold you spellbound.
The performance, under La Scala auspices, was actually given in a Milan sports arena, involving as it does spectacular lighting effects, sounds racketing around a vast enclosed space, a large chorus, solo players and, as principal performers, a huge college marching band — in this case, the entire University of Michigan Symphony Band deployed around the hall. Just as noise, therefore, and  as remarkable recording, this is exhilarating stuff. Whether the exhilaration will last through four hours, however, is something I leave to you to decide.
One moment, however, is precious. During the recording sessions the band members, apparently restless and, perhaps, absorbing the spirit of native Italian pit orchestras since time immemorial, stop playing and start yelling about unfair overtime. The mild-mannered Stockhausen tries desperately to sweet-tongue them, to no avail. Some flunky from La Scala is summoned; he speaks no English and scolds the musicians for not knowing Italian. The situation ends in what sounds like a standoff. The album notes, maddeningly explicit in detailing the complexities of Stockhausen’s system of interrelated thematic elements, offers few clues to this real-life situation.
To the credit of Stockhausen, a practiced hand with musical “happenings” and other performance-art phenomena, most of the episode, from the outbreak forward, has been left on the recording. It is one of the moments in “Samstag aus Licht” whose high dramatic impact is evident to all.

Steve Reich has done it again. Natter on  all you want on the subject of
minimalism, its musical style on a treadmill, its major composers likewise. Yet here is Reich’s “Different Trains,” introduced last December at New Music America in Miami, out now on a new Nonesuch release, bearing the welcome news that Reich, at least, has retained his power to turn corners and face new horizons.
A description runs the risk of sounding simplistic. Given, after all, the easiest cliches about the minimalist musical language, the image of the train comes quickly to mind: chug, chug, chug, clickety-clack. Reich has written his piece for the Kronos Quartet, with an overlay of sirens, bells, train whistles both American and European, and an underlay of taped voices, both straight and electronically processed, talking about trains — about the great speedy trains of the past, the doom-laden trains of the wartime concentration camps, the dying-out of train travel in our own time.
The result is an exuberant latter-day tone-poem, lasting just under half an hour, overpowering in its sheer energy far beyond what my superficial description might suggest. The mix of voices and instruments is, for Reich, both old and new. The tape-loop processing in some of his first pieces — the boy’s repetitions in  “Come Out” for example — created a strange sense of subliminal melody; you came eventually to hear the cadence of the words rather than the words themselves. That happens again in “Different Trains” — in, for example, the words of an old train conductor remembering how things once were — and the music of the words forms a taut counterpoint with the playing of the quartet.
From the earlier pieces dominated primarily by the sense of repetition and slow, almost imperceptible change — “Come Out,” the first extended version of “Drumming,” up to the magnificent “Music for 18 Musicians” of 1976 — to his present tightly, almost classically structured scores, Reich has gone through a steady stylistic growth. The explosive energy of the large-scale ” Desert Music” of 1984, and the smaller, even more exuberant Sextet of a year later, were reined in by something new in Reich: a passion for clear, audible musical structuring. In place of the ongoing, open-ended expansiveness of the early works which seemed sometimes more to stop arbitrarily than actually reach a logical ending,  we got these new, tight pieces with tunes that kept coming back to round off the proceedings in an almost Mozartian way; the “Desert Music,” with its A-B-C-B-A over-all design, is as clear as any 18th-century Rondo.
But, like the classical masters, Reich has the artistic insights to make this kind of structuring seem both well-balanced and surprising. in “Different Trains” the verbal narrative determines much of the over-all shape of the work. Yet the musical changes superimposed on that dramatic structure, the marvelous sudden shifts of harmony, rhythm and tone-color, create the propulsiveness, that zooms past the mileposts and sweeps us along.
I don’t know if “Different Trains” is any kind of masterpiece in the cosmic sense — whatever that might be. Enough that it is a terrific, beautifully managed half-hour of musical exhilaration. So, on what is for me a somewhat lesser level of accomplishment, is the companion piece on the disk, Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” for guitars, written for and played by Pat Metheny, another in the series — along with “Vermont” and “Manhattan” Counterpoints — in which one live performer plays one part live against a multi-track tape of his own playing of several (ten, in this case) other parts. The music is attractive, somewhat predictable if you know the other Counterpoints, and makes for some terrific cover art: guitar necks against railroad tracks.
I wrote effusively about Harold Shapero’s “Symphony for Classical Orchestra” when Andre Previn and the Los Angeles Philharmonic revived it in 1986 and, better yet, repeated it two seasons later. American music does have a past, some of it glorious, too much of it forgotten. Now Previn and the Philharmonic have recorded Shapero’s  work on New World Records (along with a lesser make-weight, the “Nine-Minute Overture”); hear it as a supremely beautiful large-scale work rescued from the dust; hear it, even, as a source of national pride, a commodity that gets a rather severe shaking these days.
Shapero composed the work in 1947; it was played and recorded not long afterwards by his Harvard schoolfellow Leonard Bernstein, with a pickup orchestra. Previn’s 1986 revival (part of the  ATT-financed program for rediscovering American orchestral music that also underwrote the return of  Roger Sessions’ marvelous Second Symphony) was the first performance in over 30 years. Why?
Shapero wrote the work at a time when American music was in the grip of a neoclassic passion. Stravinsky was the absolute god, and his major acolytes included the younger Elliott Carter, along with Irving Fine, Lester Trimble, Bernstein himself for a quick sideswipe, and Shapero. The passion was short-lived. Shapero’s marvelously inventive symphony, a strange but workable synthesis of Stravinsky and, of all unlikely bedmates, Beethoven, fell out of style before it had any real chance of making headway. The intense braininess of the work appealed little to the more illustrious proponents of new American music, Leopold Stokowski or, in his last years, Serge Koussevitzky. Aaron Copland’s and William Schuman’s  extroverted Americana was more to their taste.
Time has mellowed our historical perspectives, and it’s easier to see the overwhelming forces that motivated this marvelous Shapero symphony four decades ago. I demean nothing, I hope, when I state that this recording stands as Previn’s most distinguished, most valuable accomplishment to date. It’s fortunate that, unlike the way these things usually work, Shapero has lived to see his masterpiece exonerated. He turns 70 next year.
And Mel Powell (did you notice?) turned 65 last year. What a presence, this white-haired eminence, with the robust, eloquent boom-boom of his speaking voice and the quieter eloquence of his lapidary, exquisitely fashioned music. That long musical life of his, a “different train” with many way-stations, comes to focus in his great late scores: the days of playing jazz piano with Benny Goodman, the prismatic glints in his electronic tinkering, the ruddy wisdom of a lifetime.
Music Masters has given us a garland of recent Powell, six works most of them first heard at CalArts, where Powell now teaches. A song-cycle to the multi-hued, aphoristic poetry of Mark Strand shines kaleidoscopic lights on the wonderful words, and Judith Bettina sings enchantingly. The bygone (sob!) Sequoia Quartet moves lovingly through the thickets of the 1982 String Quartet; the Sequoia’s first violinist, Yoko Matsuda, participates in two other brief works. Rachel Rudich’s flute resounds in another short work like a light in a dark wilderness.
This is, then, a glorious record of small but strong delights; 45 minutes in the company of a warm-hearted tone-poet,  congenial and witty. Why is there so little wit in today’s music? Mel Powell makes us wonder.

Reinhold Moritsevich Gliere died as recently as 1956; his musical style suggests a much earlier date. His memory is kept alive by two works, one tiny (a dance from his satiric ballet “The Red Poppy”)  the other huge (the Symphony No. 3, subtitled “Ilya Murometz”). Neither is what you’d call a masterpiece worthy of the inner circle, but now “Ilya” is back in circulation, via a new recording, the first in many years. If you were worried that the world was running out of big, noisy, gorgeously resounding Russian romantic orchestral nonsense, here is music to replenish the dwindling stock.
The work was first performed, in Moscow, in 1912. Its inspiration is a Slavic myth about — as if you hadn’t already guessed — a legendary Russian hero. Ilya is a mighty warrior who roams the landscape challenging all evildoers to mortal combat and chopping off their heads. Drunk with power  and victory, Ilya and his cohorts challenge a contingent of heavenly troops, who defeat the earthlings and turn them to stone. (Moral: lay off the hard stuff.)
As storybook symphonies go, “Ilya Murometz” has its own great stock of dimwitted fun. Gliere builds interestingly, devising a tangled skein of leitmotives for the various characters in his vast panorama, and coloring them to match the unfolding of the action. The result is a marvelously colored, rich tonal fresco, beautifully orchestrated. I would put it up against Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred” or Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Scheherazade” as an exemplar of good, lusty story-telling through imaginative musical means.
The work is long, over 90 minutes in this complete recording under Harold Farberman (with London’s Royal Philharmonic, the orchestra that happens to be visiting these parts this very week). Those of us who know the work at all probably learned it through the old Leopold Stokowski recording on 78’s, which was cut back to about half that length. Agreed, you have to love this kind of overstuffed fustian to endure Ilya’s less-than-heavenly lengths. I admit to a soft spot for the work, and have combed the catalogs for years, hoping for its return. Farberman, a journeyman conductor who once led the Oakland Symphony during some not particularly distinguished years, holds the work together and makes no egregious errors. The recording, on the British Unicorn-Kanchana label, does the work full justice.
Russian music on a far higher intellectual level comes on two recent releases on Sweden’s BIS label, both devoted to music of Alfred Schnittke. The belated discovery of Schnittke in the West, along with his astounding colleague Sofia Gubaidulina, can be ascribed to the current thaw in cultural relations with the Soviet Union, although in Schnittke’s case we have had a few inklings of his high qualities through the advocacy of the violinist Gidon Kremer. He is, in any case, an extraordinary creative artist, not easy to describe but unforgettable in the power of his music.
One record contains three Schnittke Concertos: for piano with string orchestra, for oboe and harp with string orchestra, and a Concerto Grosso that pits small ensemble against large orchestra. The scoring suggests modest, baroque-ish pieces, but the results are otherwise. For sheer violence, an onslaught of sound at once brutal and marvelously controlled, I know no recent new music the equal of this 1979 Piano Concerto. The performances, by the very young New Stockholm Chamber Orchestra under Ulf Forsberg, are full of the kind of life-force that evolves when young people take on young music.
The second BIS record includes music for larger ensemble: a work with two titles (Concerto Grosso No. 4, Symphony No. 5) lasting about 40 minutes, and a stupendous orchestral exercise, called “Pianissimo,” that lasts about 8 1/2. The Concerto/Symphony was completed only last year. Again, you are first dazzled by the sheer technique of the man, the mastery over startling musical ideas that borders on arrogance. The work is full of quotes and near-quotes; wisps of melody that could almost, but not quite, have come out of Handel come and go like passing puffs of smoke; now you hear it now you don’t. Schnittke has a great passion, apparently, for using his own music as a kind of critic’s notebook, crammed with wry and compelling observations on the past. (On another new record, a Kronos Quartet anthology on Nonesuch, there is Schnittke’s Third Quartet, an  exigesis on Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” with patches of the original work reworked and commented on until old and new composer seemingly function like close contemporaries. This, too, is an amazing work.)
“Pianissimo” dates from 1967/68; it bears its own amazement. More than an essay in quiet orchestration, it is a powerful, tightly packed emotional statement — composed, do not forget, in a far less beneficial creative climate in the Soviet Union than exists today. Performances on this second record are by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi. Both records are superbly recorded, further benefit to the performers and to the composer himself.
Schnittke turns 55 this year. His fame in the past year, thanks to his two East Coast visits, both to attend major presentations of his own music, has spread rapidly in this country; I don’t hesitate to rank him among the leading composers of his generation. The next good news is that all his symphonies, including the wildly eclectic First that was the show-stopper of the Soviet-music Festival in Boston last March are now being recorded on the Melodiya label, distributed here by Mobile Fidelity.
On two fat Erato albums the ebullient Slava — Mstislav Rostropovich to you — conducts music of his great friend Serge Prokofiev: all 7 symphonies on one album, the opera “War and Peace,” its four-hour expanse uncut, on another. The symphonies form a fascinating body of work, spread more or less evenly through the composer’s life, from the youthful cheekiness of the “Classical” Symphony to the Seventh, the work of a tired soldier who has apparently surrendered to Stalinist brainwashing and composes merely to keep his pen from rusting.
In between, there are amazing works: the ice-cold brilliance of Nos. 2, 3 and 4 (with No. 3 fashioned from parts of “The Fiery Angel”), the warm, accessible neo-romanticism of No. 5, the almost mystical passion of No. 6, as subtle a work as Prokofiev ever fashioned.
Rostropovich knows the music, and the performances he draws from the French National Orchestra are stylish and well-balanced. Perhaps he takes the “Classical” more seriously than its composer did; perhaps he could loosen a top button before taking on the finale of No. 5, where the element of humor is somewhat underplayed. On the whole, however, this is as distinguished a job of conducting as Slava has ever contributed too the record industry; these are records to cherish.
With some sense of relief I happily announce that the worst record of the current year has already been released, thus ending the suspense more than ten months early. The record is on CBS, and it contains songs from Walt Disney movies sung by — ready? — the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I mean…there are things in life that you immediately recognize as ultimate, definitive, and the sound of those close-to-400 voices raised to trace the  musical patterns of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” simply has to be one of them.

Did the world really need a Tenth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven? Apparently so, says a British musicologist named Barry Cooper, and who’s to say he’s wrong?
Nothing would please me more, in fact, than to be able to greet this mangled, crippled, stillborn  product of Dr. Cooper’s fantasizing as the very Tenth we (some of us, anyhow) have so long awaited and prayed for. Alas, as a man of rock-ribbed conscience annealed in the crucible of a New England upbringing, I cannot. Last week in this space I cited this deformed monster     — recorded on a new MCA release by Wyn Morris and the London       Symphony Orchestra –   as the booby-prize entry among last year’s records; duty demands that I elaborate.
Out of Dr. Cooper’s imaginings, and founded on the flimsiest scraps of evidence, has come a single 15-minute symphonic movement, its musical substance vaguely reminiscent of other Beethoven scores (the “Pathetique” Sonata, for one). In a half-hour lecture that fills out the recording of this brief movement, Dr. Cooper ingratiatingly describes his source material: some fragments here and there in Beethoven manuscripts, some equally fragmentary references in letters to the existence of, or plans for, a possible symphony in the key of E-flat. Dr. Cooper talks in the genial, earnest style of your basic tweedy scholar; you have to listen fairly carefully to recognize the off-putting mix of fact and hoo-hah in his reasoning. At very least, he sounds like a man who desperately wants there to be a Beethoven Tenth; you end up profoundly sad that there isn’t.
And there isn’t. If the stitched-together pastiche were, indeed, an authentic Beethoven score, we would have to revise our estimate of the composer drastically downward. The timing is wrong; an idea with one sort of thematic potential is too often allowed in Dr. Cooper’s version to crawl ignobly under fences and land in alien territory. The noble Mozart once created a piece called “A Musical Joke,” which took off enchantingly and knowledgeably after amateur composers who, by starting phrases they cannot properly resolve, continually  paint themselves into corners. At least Mozart’s   inept village composers are comical; Dr. Cooper’s Beethoven isn’t even that.
The byways of music are cluttered with the scraps of projects begun and abandoned, sometimes for reasons easily discernible, sometimes not. Some composers — Brahms, for one — had the good manners to burn their abandoned manuscripts, thus denying to later scholars like Dr. Cooper the ghoulish pleasure of reassembling their bones. Franz Schubert, less tidy, began, but never completed, not merely one “unfinished” symphony but five or six, including one manuscript that he literally took with him to his deathbed. Why would he abandon such a considerable body of work, including the  B-minor symphony whose surviving, completed two movements are one of music greatest treasures? Probably because he needed money, and because he recognized that an unknown composer, still in his 20s, didn’t have the chance of a snowball in you-know-where to interest an orchestral management in music so bold, so advanced for its time. (Would a composer in Schubert’s situation be any better off today? You know he wouldn’t!)
In Schubert’s case we can fall back on these facts about his economic hardships to justify a certain amount of latter-day  tidying up of his abandoned material. In any case these surviving sketches, some of which have also now been pieced together into performable music, are the soul of coherence next to Beethoven’s henscratchings. We know, furthermore, that Beethoven’s creative method consisted of constantly reworking, revising, sketched material after it had been first written down; it’s fascinating, in fact, to follow the evolution of some well-known Beethoven themes from their clumsy first fashionings.
Thus, even if Dr. Cooper’s source material did come from Beethoven’s plans for a new symphony — and the matter is by no means clear — he has tried to evolve full-fledged organisms out of crude embryos, a feat both artistically and biologically impossible. (At that, some of his claims are. to say the least, suspect. He claims to have exhumed some 200 bars of authentic material from  Beethoven sketches — about 40 percent of the total work he has brought forward — but fails to note that several of these measures are actually second versions of first attempts.)
What disturbs me the most, in all of this, is the insidious mix of pseudo-scholarship and media hype that such projects engender. Musicology is a fragile science. At its purest, scholars huddle in dimly-lit rare-book libraries, poring over ancient codices and developing extended dissertations on, say, the symbolic intent of the recurrent E-flat in the 14th-century Belgian liturgy. At its liveliest, in contributes the valuable news about long-lost and important rediscovered music, such as all that new material in  Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” that greatly enhanced last fall’s production at the Music Center.
If Dr. Cooper had restricted his discoveries to finding a clutch of lost symphonies by, say, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, the musical world would have said “harrumph” and gone about its business. But Dr. Cooper has decamped on Beethoven territory, which is like setting up a burger joint in St. Peter’s Square, and it becomes incumbent for the musicologists of the world to clean out their own stables.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, however. I couldn’t advocate casting into limbo all existing latter-day completions of old-time incomplete scores, since that would lose us such honorable scores as Berg’s “Lulu” (whose last act was completed from an elaborate scaffold left by the composer) or Mozart’s Requiem (whose completion by Mozart’s pupil Sussmayr is beautiful but controversial). It would also lose us the undeniable, if far more questionable, attractions of a whole wad of Schubert completions by another British musicologist, Brian Newbould, which also have some musicologists up in arms.
I love the Newbould pseudo-Schubert — all recorded, by the way, on Philips, in rather frigid but clean performances by Neville Marriner and his Academy of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields — in a way I cannot accept the Cooper Beethoven. At least they [ITALsound [ENDITAL plausible; Newbould has done his stitching on larger scraps of fabric and with stronger thread. His completion of the Seventh Symphony, from a sketch in which Schubert indicated at least one musical line in every bar of a large-scale four-movement score, gives us a clear picture of the young Schubert’s growing orchestral mastery. And that work from Schubert’s last days on earth, a three-movement score containing many holes in the outer movements, embraces a bleak, shattering slow movement that takes its composer to a peak from which a vast musical panorama comes into view, stretching from a deathbed in 1828 Vienna to the wild visions of Gustav Mahler eight decades later.
That work of Schubert, by rational listing, is also a Tenth Symphony. So you never can tell.

Old Sourpuss has finally made it. His “one indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of man” — that being Richard Wagner’s own modest appraisal of his “Ring of the Nibelung” — has now achieved its ultimate consecration. Would the old boy be proud to learn that, starting right now, anyone with the requisite bucks can acquire the totality of that staggering creation at his local video emporium: the sights, the sounds, the “total artwork” of its composer’s imagining? You know he would!
This videodisk “Ring,” complete in four volumes with an extra documentary disk detailing the genesis and making of the whole project, is the 1976 Bayreuth production which first showed up on PBS in 1983 to honor the Wagner centennial. Perhaps you taped it at the time, intricately calculating how, by changing recording speed and alternating tape lengths, you could get each uninterrupted act onto a single cassette. Perhaps, like me, you promised yourself frequent private reruns, sitting spellbound as all 15 hours of Wagner’s titanic drama sailed past on the tube. Perhaps, like me, you haven’t actually touched those tapes in all these years.
Anyhow, now you can toss them. The electronics boys have been predicting lately that we were due for a resurgence of the laser-videodisk, that altogether superior method of video recording that has muddled along as a poor relative to videotape all these years. There is no clearer confirmation of these predictions than these “Ring” disks, issued on Philips (which also produced the audio versions of the same performance). The sight, the sound (digital stereo, of course), the whole impact is, in a word, stupendous.
Fifteen hours of the “Ring”? That’s an arcane exercise, of course; even Wagner planned the cycle to allow for a night’s sleep between sections. But I cling to the memory of once wandering into a series of rooms at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, flooded by the sound of the classic Solti recording that was being played continuously that whole summer, pouring down from loudspeakers into  rooms carpeted with bodies wall-to-wall, tuning in, turning on, blissed out.
Neither this proletariat stretched out on a museum floor, nor you and I in private ecstasy in front of a video monitor, exactly conforms to Wagner’s elitist image of his ideal audience; never mind. The “Ring” is the easiest to approach of all Wagnerian dramas. Its musical style is less forbidding than that of “Tristan” or “Parsifal”; its story infinitely more universal. You can prove that latter point in at least two ways.
One way is by contrasting Wagner’s own dramatic vision to the way Patrice Chereau has staged the work here: an industrial setting of Wagner’s own time, with the Rhine surging through a massive hydroelectric plant, the dragon Fafner an oversize child’s toy on wheels, the chorus done up in workingmen’s garb, Wotan in a Victorian frock coat. The discrepancy may be enormous, but the work remains intact.
Another way is by matching up the paraphernalia of Wagner’s plot with a latter-day legend of comparable appeal, the scenario of George Lucas’ “Star Wars.” The similarities are inescapable: the brother-sister protagonists, the son-vs.-father clash of swords, the klutzy young Siegfried as the wide-eyed, kid-next-door Luke Skywalker; the Jedi Force as the Power of the Ring. I cannot shake the feeling, in fact, that if Wagner were here today he’d be at work in the Lucas magic factory up in Marin.
Wagner does, indeed, demand much from his audience. He saw himself as communicant to a select inner circle, whose minds could somehow be purged of all earthly thoughts (especially, of all thoughts of opera as it had been before Wagner had come along to redeem the world and its art). He demands, furthermore, our undivided attention, our willingness to follow the dismembered themes and melodic fragments that bind his drama into a seamless whole. We can fight off sleep during the endless stretches of pure haggle: Mr. and Mrs. Wotan nattering at each other about marital fidelity, Wotan and Mime playing at 20 questions. But, finally, it is Wagner himself, in that endless torrent of music as mighty as any on earth, who makes it all worthwhile.
For it is Wagner himself, his own cynicism and bitterness toward everyone else on earth, who shapes this particular retelling of the universal legend — the rise of mankind, the redemption, the fall —
into an artwork of a grandeur beyond anyone’s power to evaluate. The clarity of Chereau’s staging has offended traditionalists, and with some justification. Yet the hard edges of his visual realization is not only ideally suited to video (as other traditional, dark, pictorial productions probably wouldn’t adapt at all); they also, for a video audience, clarify marvelously well the fearful symmetry of Wagner’s story, his interlocked chain of treacheries that, like the Ring itself, eventually comes full circle.
Still, the hard clarity of Chereau’s dramatic plan does match up marvelously with Pierre Boulez’ musical conception. If this lacks the sublime oratory of certain surviving ancient treasures — the amazing Clemens Kraus radio tapes from Bayreuth now available on Rodolphe, with Hans Hotter’s Wotan in sublime estate, or the two dim-sounding but oddly gripping Wilhelm Furtwangler performances on LP — the urgency in the Boulez performance stems most of all from his astounding command of musical detail, his ability to set the most complicated music into exact perspective.
All this seems gloriously clarified, deepened in impact, on this  stupefying videodisk reincarnation. Somehow, the quality of this reproduction gets me past some of the shrillness in Gwyneth Jones’ Brunnhilde, and the wobbly Siegfried of Manfred Jung — even in their duet at the end of “Siegfried,” the one time in all 15 hours when you might be tempted to turn off the video.
Uneven it may be, pricey it surely is ($90 for each of the four parts), this “Ring” seems to me a treasure beyond mundane considerations. Stay with it, at least once, until the end, as the flames consume the last vestige of the glory of the Gods, the surviving earthlings face bleakly out into the void where you and I sit as passive observers, and the final flicker of lambent Wagnerian lyricism — the theme of Redemption through Love — wells up from the orchestra, somehow to rekindle human hopes. Resist that moment; I dare you.