Y ou are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein remarked to Ernest Hemingway, who then

turned around and used that sentence as an epigraph to close his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.

Later, in his posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway elaborated that Stein had not invented the locution “Lost Generation” but rather merely adopted it after a garage proprietor had used the words to scold an employee who showed insufficient enthusiasm in repairing the ignition in her Model-T Ford. Not withstanding its grease-stained origins, the phrase lingered in the language as a descriptor for the brigade of American art-ists who spent time in Europe during the 1920s, most prominently in Paris. It is particularly applied to writers—Heming-way, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, and their ilk—who, having made it through the World War I years, found the City of Light to be financially affordable, intellectually stimulating, and far enough from home that oats could be sown wildly without long-lasting effect. Some suggested that the appellation “Lost

Generation” conveyed the idea that these literary Americans abroad were left to chart their own paths without the compasses of the preceding generation, since the values and expectations that had shaped their upbringings—the rules that governed their lives—had changed fundamentally through the Great War’s horror.

We are less likely to find the term Lost Generation applied to the American expa-triate composers of that decade. In fact, young composers were also very likely to flee the United States for Europe during the 1920s and early ’30s, to the extent that one-way tickets on transatlantic steamers seem to feature in the biographies of most American composers who came of age at that moment. Perhaps they appeared less lost than their literary counterparts. The writers, after all, were heading to Europe to follow their muses directly, not to enroll in creative-writing seminars. The composers, on the other hand, were mostly going to study, to sip at the trough of the Great European Musical Tradition as transmitted through the enlightenment of an up-to-the-minute teacher. For Americans that usually meant Nadia Boulanger, who was

78 october 2009

Americans in ParisLike Hemingway and Fitzgerald, composers Marc Blitzstein

and George Antheil were a part of the 1920s

“Lost Generation.” Two recent Del Sol Quartet

recordings focus on their little-known chamber music.

“

by James M. Keller

AmericanMasterpiecesChamberMusic

79

chief acolyte of the new ways of Stravinsky, and who in 1921 welcomed into her studio both Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, two of the first in a succession of fledgling American composers that would soon include Roy Harris, Elliott Carter, David Diamond, Douglas Moore, Walter Piston, Louise Talma, Elie Siegmeister…the list goes on and on. Of course many of them had a grand time in France, but so long as they were in Boulanger’s studio they fol-lowed a strict regimen of instruction that, it really does seem, kept them from getting quite as lost as the writers often did.

One of the young composers who passed through “the Boulangerie” in those early years was Marc Blitzstein, though his time there was brief. In late October 1926 he wrote to a friend: “I have started studying composition with Nadia Boulanger, an incredible Spartan woman; her musicianship is limitless, she is entirely charming, and she likes me.” Little more than three months later he moved on to Berlin to seek instruction from Arnold Schoenberg—also a brief experience and, according to Blitzstein, one fraught with “a series of wrangles and frustrations.” Nonetheless, Blitzstein did go into the record books as the only American to study with both Boulanger and Schoenberg, figures regarded as aesthetic polar opposites.

By the fall of 1928 Blitzstein, just 23 years old, had returned to the United States. Not until the following decade would he seize his niche in history, with the fabled 1937 premiere of the play-with-music The Cradle Will Rock. Intended for the Federal Theatre Project but inde-pendently produced by Orson Welles and John Houseman, this brave work was effectively suppressed by the government on its opening night at the theater where it was to have played, but managed to move, with its audience, to a new venue some twenty blocks distant for an ad hoc rendition that became the stuff of theater legend.

Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony (a World War II piece, though not premiered until

1946) and his opera Regina (premiered in 1949) made a mark in their time, and his 1952 translation and adaptation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera earned great acclaim. But apart from those, Blitzstein remains largely unknown to today’s music-lovers. In fact, he may be more famous for his death than for his life: while prowling for a gay encounter in the tough harborside bars in Martinique he was brutally attacked by three sailors and died of the injuries thus sustained.

A new recording by the Del Sol String Quartet (on the Other Minds label), titled First Life, gives a much-deserved airing to Blitzstein’s music for string quartet. That tiny chapter in his catalogue comprises only two pieces, and so the “complete string quartets” are paired with several of his solo-piano works (played adeptly by Sarah Cahill) to eke out the CD. As repertoire goes, the quartets are certainly under-exposed. The first is called “Quartet for Strings: Italian,” and although it dates from 1930—which is to say from his post-Boulanger peiod—Blitzstein sent a copy of the score to Boulanger, who pro-nounced the piece “wholly admirable” and pledged to try to have it programmed in Paris, an event that did not come to pass. Instead the piece was premiered by

the Philadelphia Society for Contemporary Music in 1931 and after that went unheard

for decades. In fact, its revival became possible only after the score was unearthed in 1980 in a collection of Boulanger’s papers housed at Harvard.

The Del Sol is among the most enthu-siastic and persuasive champions of little-known American repertoire, and it brings its accustomed skill and dedication to this work. Howard Pollack’s excellent program notes describe the opening movement as propulsive, but the Del Sol also invests a large measure of delicacy in its interpreta-tion; even at full volume, the group conveys a tip-toeing quality in the movement. A wry Allegretto follows that would make a fine accompaniment to a Charlie Chaplin scene and that, in the sparseness of its material and its parodistic references to popular and overblown styles, suggests Virgil Thomson. A vigorous Presto possibile (again shades of Thomson) serves as an interlude on the way to the finale, a broad Largo that is affecting in its introspective, chordal character. It’s far from a life-changing piece, and the composer himself apparently did not consider it an important work, Boulanger’s benediction notwith-standing.

More impressive is Blitzstein’s Serenade for String Quartet, from 1932, a work that Copland helped usher to its public pre-miere at Yaddo in upstate New York. This quartet would become a cause célèbre, an object of critical scorn because each of its three movements is plotted at the glacial tempo of Largo. Reviewers seemed to become universally blinded (or deafened) by this and to have paid sparse attention beyond the tempo markings. In fact, the music is impressive, although at five-plus minutes each the three movements do offer a consistent mood rather than an obviously variegated one. Still, they are hardly identical. In the Del Sol’s interpre-tation the opening Largo is tortured and anguished, wearing its dissonance heavily. The second, in contrast, has a more sus-tained tone of hymnic elegy, and its sound is very different from what surrounds it,

since the instruments play throughout the movement with mutes on (at least so it sounds). The final Largo is more inherently contrapuntal in its process than the earlier movements had been, seeming almost Bachian in its inspiration and its pensive character, though in the context of Modernist dissonance.

The piece was a failure at Yaddo, and the succession of three Largos became notorious in new-music circles. Though he maintained his enthusiasm, Copland ended up offering a bit of practical advice: “Always cajole a listener, never frighten him away. I mean it seriously.” Pollack

suggests that this advice may have been the reason for Blitzstein’s changing the movement headings at some later date to Allegro Moderato, Larghetto, and Andante Maestoso. The Del Sol String Quartet hews to the original Largo markings, and I don’t doubt that this is ultimately to the piece’s benefit. Still, I wouldn’t have minded a bit if, instead of the solo-piano works, this recording had included an alternate reading of the Serenade at the revised tempos. I’ll bet the Del Sol would have made that sound good, too.

I do find it surprising that the idea of three slow movements in a row was con-

sidered so untenable among forward- thinking listeners in 1932. (Probably they were unaware that Haydn done pretty much the same thing—though with eight movements—in his Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, back in 1787.) The hallowed vessels of musical structure were being smashed right and left about then, and I must say that I feel Blitzstein did his smashing with considerable elegance. He ended up taking a philosophical stance on the whole matter, indeed one that may underrate his achievement, as we see in a comment he made two decades later:

I once wrote a “Serenade for String Quartet.” The three movements were marked “Largo, largo, largo,” and I came in for a lot of ribbing from colleagues and critics. It was an honest attempt at making music, however. It seemed to me that the modern spirit in music had reached a point where the “spectre of boredom” became the guiding devil of composers: pieces were short, so the lis-teners wouldn’t get bored; not only short, they changed their pace and manner and harmony and melody-styles every few bars. This piece wouldn’t, I maintained; and fell into the same trap, only in reverse. I wrote a long piece that didn’t change.

Cc

In 2005 the Del Sol issued a recording of—again—the complete works for string quartet by another of the Lost

Generation composers, George Antheil (also on the Other Minds label). Of all the American composers in Europe, Antheil is probably the one who most meshed with the Lost Generation literary world. After study with Ernest Bloch in New York he headed off to Berlin (where he crossed paths with Stravinsky), then to Paris (1923-27), and then on to Vienna before moving back to the United States in 1933. Though he was born in 1900, only five years before Blitzstein, he went to

80 october 2009

Blitzstein in Dubrovnik, circa 1932

Europe as a fully active composer rather than as a student, and the audacity of the works he produced there—including the Airplane Sonata, Jazz Sonata, and especially Ballet mécanique (an icon of musique concrète)—positioned him as the most conspicuous of all the avant-garde Americans abroad. In Paris he seems to have had rather little to do with the Americans inscribed at “the Boulangerie” (Thomson was an exception, at least for a while), instead spending his time with the likes of Joyce, Pound, and Yeats.

From his European years date three of the four works the Del Sol plays. His Lithuanian Night, from 1922, is a genial two-movement work that, at three and a half minutes, in no way outstays its welcome. The first movement seems born of the tango salon, while the second is a scurrying and muted Presto that is a quite blatant salute to Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet (from 1914). A full Antheil string quartet followed in 1924, and although it was performed, under the title Ungariana, the composer ended up destroying the score. Parts of it may survive in his Quartet No. 1 in One Movement, from 1925-26 (dedicated to Natalie Barney), a deeply dissonant piece of experimental mien that in the course of its fifteen minutes switches constantly from one temperament to another— precisely the sort of thing Blitzstein later bemoaned. Antheil’s Quartet No. 2 (dedicated to Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company) followed in 1927. “Probably this quartet is a parody, but a parody, pray tell, of what?” mused Pitts Sanborn, the critic of the New York World-Telegram, when the work was given in New York the next year. Certainly it encapsulates considerable tart-ness, with the first movement incorporating an extended and highly spiced fugato, the second seeming a sort of Schubertian rumination, the third (Rondino Scherzino) perhaps being a take-off on both Mozart and (oddly) Brahms, and the minuscule

finale—I think the best movement—again leaping like a hyperactive dream into the chamber-musical past.

Reviews of the Second Quartet were not positive. Part of it was Antheil’s own fault. He had become a master at manipu-lating journalists for the sake of personal publicity, and journalists, with their long

memories, tend to hold grudges towards people who do that. In his famous auto-biography Bad Boy of Music, for example, Antheil writes about a trip he took from Paris to North Africa just before the premiere of Ballet mécanique. “Our plan,” he recalls, “was to have me lost in the Sahara for a month or two, apparently eaten by lions

81

George Antheil in Paris, 1929

or tortured to death by savage Bedouin tribes.” The newspapers bit, and the head-lines about a composer thus devoured did much to publicize the impending premiere. Antheil continued:

I remember very well that the inter-national press blackballed me for some years after 1925 for having died in the Sahara and then not staying dead. …I pause here only to warn any prospective publicity seekers, however meritorious their objective, to forever and a day refrain from dying with the mere objective of making the front pages. For if you do not really die, you will be amazed by the number of your closest friends who will deeply resent your returning to the world of the living again—especially after they have copiously and publicly slobbered all over the place concerning you, what a great guy you had been, etc., ad nauseam.

Nonetheless Antheil persevered. The Six Little Pieces for String Quartet, from 1931, are presumably musical portraits of personalities he encountered in the arts colony of Woodstock, New York. Little they are, with three of the movement last-ing less than a minute each and the other three not very much longer. But they cover a good deal of Modernist geography, and the Del Sol makes a compelling case for their viability on concert programs today. I am not aware of any other recording of the Six Little Pieces. The Mondriaan String Quartet has released the other Antheil works (on the Etcetera label), but the Del Sol comes off as more engaged with this repertoire. Indeed, the Other Minds CD booklet includes interesting commentary from the four members of the Del Sol, in the course of which we learn that in preparing this recording they delved into the available sources and ended up grappling with a great many inconsistencies among sketches, revisions, scores, and parts—some of those variations being diametrically opposed.

But, oh Antheil! I find him one of the most frustrating of composers, in that his early daring and brilliance did not survive through his maturity. Already in the 1930s he turned into a neo-Romantic and the new scores he produced seemed in-creasingly pointless. He became fascinated with folksong, he strove to produce “The Great American Symphony,” and he turned out a ream of scores for film, radio, and television. As the CD’s long and reward-ing program essay by Mauro Piccinini puts it, “the vigorous rhythmic homophony of his Paris works is accordingly replaced by the tuneful attractiveness of his neo-romantic compositions: his intent to shake the world with defiance gives way to a desire to synthesize America emotionally, concentrating more and more on the expressive powers of music.”

And so we have the String Quartet No. 3 of 1948, a sort of Prokofiev-in-the-Wild- West confection. It’s hard to imagine this populist potboiler issuing from the same pen that had produced the Quartet in One Movement two decades earlier. (A com-peting release, by the Fine Arts Quartet on the Naxos label, goes the full ten yards in trying to make this piece sound like echt Dvorák; but we already have enough Dvorák string quartets.) Compared with the earlier work, the Quartet No. 3 sounds profoundly insignificant. It is probably “better turned out” technically, but it now longer aspires to greatness. Or perhaps

Antheil had come to believe that the questing of the Lost Generation had led up a blind alley; that, much though a com-poser might try to escape them, the norms of Classicism were so elemental that they would prevail in the end; that individual-ity of voice did not ultimately count for much.

James M. Keller is Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. His book Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide is in preparation for Oxford University Press.

82 october 2009