Festivals: Romantic Revival

Undulating across the stage, eight shapely young ballerinas mimicked the sensuous rhythms of a belly dance. Portraying Bedouin tribesmen, a chorus of 150 men sang a lusty hymn to Allah. At sunrise, the wailing voice of the muezzin filled the concert hall, summoning the faithful to prayer. “O lonely night, last forever,” crooned a tenor, looking across the moonlit sands. “You’ve made me learn to live and love.”

These Rombergian sights and sounds at Butler University in Indianapolis were not a revival of Desert Song but of much hoarier musical fare: the symphonic ode Le Désert by Composer Felicien David. Grand-père of all pseudo-Oriental musical concoctions, the piece was an instant hit after its 1844 Paris premiere, and its popularity, in part, inspired such works as Delibes’ Lakmé and Verdi’s Aida. So much for success. By the end of the century, both David and Le Désert were considered as out of date as a daguerreotype.

Better Than Brahms? So, alas, are most of the other antiquities performed this month at Butler’s second annual Festival of Romantic Music. The six-day exercise in musical archaeology opened with the lushly sentimental overture to The May Queen, a cantata by the English composer William Sterndale Bennett. His fellow Victorians regarded him as better than Brahms. Today he is one of the forgotten men of English music. The years have been equally hard on other romantics on the Butler program. Belgium’s Henri Vieuxtemps was perhaps the greatest violinist of his day, but until Cellist Jascha Silberstein performed his Cello Concerto in A Minor, it had never been heard in the U.S. Sigismond Thalberg was Liszt’s great rival at the keyboard and a composer of considerable skill. Yet his lively fantasy on The Barber of Seville, exuberantly played at Butler by Pianist Raymond Lewenthal, is now a rarity.

The festival tested musical fortitude as well as memories. For performances of Offenbach’s ballet Le Papillon, which has never been given outside the Paris Opèra, Butler teachers and students spent hours reconstructing the orchestral parts from a copy of the original conductor’s score. “I’m going to die,” exclaimed Indianapolis Symphony Conductor Izler Solomon in mock horror when he was handed the 435 pages of Paderewski’s Symphony in B Minor, which took nearly seven years to compose. Solomon cut the thunderous, brass-filled nationalistic epic to a manageable 33 minutes and turned it into the showpiece of the festival.

At times, the jog down the byways of the romantic era seemed not worth the effort. With utter seriousness, Butler’s dancers performed the ballet from Meyerbeer’s 1831 opera Robert le Diable, a spooky medieval tale that pits a young knight against the seductive forces of the Devil; about the best that can be said for it is that the knight ultimately triumphs. In an attempt to convey the lacquered elegance of a 19th century Paris salon, chamber music soloists performed in a drawing-room setting. They were surrounded on stage by formally attired Indianapolis socialites seated on sofas and settees about as overstuffed as much of the music.

Think Young. Nonetheless, the festival was more than an exercise in camp. As conceived by Frank Cooper, 29, a piano teacher on Butler’s faculty, it gave modern concertgoers a rare opportunity to evaluate the musical staples of a century ago. It also displayed the extraordinary technical proficiency of the romantic musicians. Gifted virtuosos themselves, 19th century composers delighted in numbing their audiences with stunning pyrotechnics—as Violinist Aaron Rosand showed as he swept restlessly across the stage during Eugene Ysaye’s Sonata in A Minor, a sardonic paraphrase of the medieval chant Dies Irae. “You can’t do this sort of thing tongue in cheek,” explained Pianist Lewenthal, although he did just that when he put on a velvet-trimmed cape and top hat to take bows after his florid performance of Charles-Valentin Alkan’s surprisingly discordant Sonatine in A Minor.

Cooper himself has no illusions about the quality of all the works performed, but he is sure that the musical world is on the verge of a major romantic revival. “We are in an age of involvement,” he says. “Think of our young people: their long hair, their odd dress, their idealism. How like the romantics.”