A Toast to the New Year

Better Than Shakespeare?

I told a friend recently that I had no interest in seeing the film Life of Pi because I admired the book so much. But tonight, watching a recording of the San Francisco Opera production of Otello, I realized it's possible to admire both an original and its copy in another medium. In fact, I'm not sure that I don't think Verdi's Otello is even better than Shakespeare's Othello. The SFO production is not ideal -- Johan Botha is neither physically nor vocally what one would want in the title role -- but even a flawed production brings back memories of less-flawed performances, such as Jon Vickers and Placido Domingo in the role, or of the old recording with Giovanni Martinelli as Otello and Ramon Vinay as Iago. And the score itself carries so much of the glory of the opera.

So is Verdi's (and Boito's) version really better than Shakespeare's? No, something is inevitably lost in translation: "Abbasso le spade!" is certainly not a patch on "Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them," when it comes to beauty and wit. And Shakespeare's Desdemona has more depth of characterization than Boito's. But there is nothing in the play that has the impact of the great operatic scene in which Iago goads Otello into an oath of vengeance, especially when performed by two stellar singing actors like Piero Cappuccili and Domingo in this 1976 La Scala production:

Multiculturalism

Tonight I watched an American opera company's production of a German opera based on a play written in French by an Irishman who then translated it into English. It was Richard Strauss's Salome, of course, a production of the San Francisco Opera that I recorded several months ago and just now got around to watching. The title role was played by Nadja Michael, a German soprano who's a better actress and dancer than singer -- she stirred up some real intensity playing around with Jokanaan (Greer Grimsley) both alive and decapitated. It was certainly a more, uh, vivid performance than the only live Salome I've seen, a Dallas Opera performance with Roberta Knie, a rather large young woman but a much better singer than Michael. It must have been in the mid-1970s, because Knie made her American debut in Tristan and Isolde in Dallas in 1975; the Tristan was Jon Vickers.

Here's the final scene from the 1974 film of the opera with Teresa Stratas as Salome, Hans Beirer as Herod, and the great Astrid Varnay as Herodias. The conductor is Karl Böhm.

Mozartiana

Carol Vaness, "Per pietà, ben mio, perdona," from Così fan tutte

Poem of the Day: Percy Bysshe Shelley

To a Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! 

     Bird thou never wert, 

That from Heaven, or near it, 

     Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 

Higher still and higher 

     From the earth thou springest 

Like a cloud of fire; 

     The deep blue thou wingest, 

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 

In the golden lightning 

     Of the setting sun, 

O'er which clouds are bright'ning, 

     Thou dost float and run; 

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. 

The pale purple even 

     Melts around thy flight; 

Like a star of Heaven, 

     In the broad daylight 

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 

Keen as are the arrows 

     Of that silver sphere, 

Whose intense lamp narrows 

     In the white dawn clear 

Until we hardly see -- we feel that it s there. 

All the earth and air 

     With thy voice is loud, 

As, when night is bare, 

     From one lonely cloud 

The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed. 

What thou art we know not; 

     What is most like thee? 

From rainbow clouds there flow not 

     Drops so bright to see 

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. 

Like a Poet hidden 

     In the light of thought, 

Singing hymns unbidden, 

     Till the world is wrought 

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: 

Like a high born maiden 

     In a palace tower, 

Soothing her love-laden

     Soul in secret hour 

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: 

Like a glowworm golden 

     In a dell of dew, 

Scattering unbeholden 

     Its aërial hue 

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view!

Like a rose embowered 

     In its own green leaves, 

By warm winds deflowered, 

     Till the scent it gives 

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingéd thieves:

Sound of vernal showers 

   On the twinkling grass, 

Rain-awakened flowers, 

     All that ever was 

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass: 

Teach us, Sprite or Bird, 

     What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard 

     Praise of love or wine 

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal, 

     Or triumphal chant, 

Matched with thine would be all

     But an empty vaunt, 

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 

What objects are the fountains 

     Of thy happy strain? 

What fields, or waves, or mountains? 

     What shapes of sky or plain? 

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? 

With thy clear keen joyance 

     Languor cannot be: 

Shadow of annoyance 

     Never came near thee: 

Thou lovest -- but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep, 

     Thou of death must deem 

Things more true and deep 

     Than we mortals deamm, 

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

     And pine for what is not: 

Our sincerest laughter 

     With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 

Yet if we could scorn 

     Hate, and pride, and fear; 

If we were things born

     Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 

Better than all measures 

     Of delightful sound, 

Better than all treasures 

     That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness 

     That thy brain must know, 

Such harmonious madness 

     From my lips would flow 

The world should listen then -- as I am listening now.

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

 
I don't know whether to prefer the Shelley version or the Johnny Mercer-Hoagy Carmichael version. But then I don't really have to choose, do I?

What I'm Listening To

George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess. Willard White (Porgy); Cynthia Haymon (Bess); Harolyn Blackwell (Clara); Damon Evans (Sporting Life); Bruce Hubbard (Jake); Cynthia Clarey (Serena); Marietta Simpson (Maria); Gregg Baker (Crown). Glyndebourne Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, conduced by Simon Rattle.

I'll never give up my fondness for the old Leontyne Price-William Warfield highlights album -- on which Price not only sings Bess's arias but also Clara's "Summertime" and Serena's "My Man's Gone Now" -- but this complete version is undeniably one of the great opera recordings. The cast is superb and the choral and orchestral work outstanding, but the real genius lies in Simon Rattle's conducting. Seriously, if you don't own this one, you should. (The video below is from a made-for-TV version available on DVD, with Haymon and White, conducted by Rattle.)

What I'm Listening To

Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes. Jon Vickers (Peter Grimes); Heather Harper (Ellen Orford); Jonathan Summers (Balstrode); Elizabeth Bainbridge (Auntie); Forbes Robinson (Swallow); Patricia Payne (Mrs. Sedley). Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Colin Davis.

I can't help thinking of this as Britten's greatest opera, though really what I'm thinking of is the breathtaking power of Jon Vickers' singing and acting. I've never heard the recording with Peter Pears, for whom the role was written, though I'm told that there are those who prefer Pears's interpretation, including the composer, who is said to have walked out on Vickers's performance. But no tenor that I know of had a greater control of dynamics than Vickers, who could sing with both hushed intensity and clarion brilliance. For me, he's the definitive Tristan and Siegmund and Florestan -- and Grimes. This recording, incidentally, has no libretto, but that's no real handicap -- you can find one online here.

What I'm Listening To

Benjamin Britten, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Brian Asawa (Oberon); Sylvia McNair (Tytania); Carl Ferguson (Puck); Robert Lloyd (Bottom); Ian Bostridge (Flute). London Symphony Orchestra, New London Children's Choir, conducted by Colin Davis.

I have to confess that A Midsummer Night's Dream has been spoiled for me, at least musically speaking, by Mendelssohn. It's what I expect to hear whenever I encounter the play, thanks largely to Warner Bros. and that mad 1935 version with Mickey Rooney as Puck and James Cagney as Bottom. Nevertheless, Britten's version, with its wonderful orchestral variety, grows on me every time I hear it. I sometimes wish that Britten had had Shakespeare as his librettist for everything, instead of people like Myfanwy Piper. (Someday I will find out how to pronounce "Myfanwy," and stop thinking "my fanny" every time I see it.) This is a lovely recording: Sylvia McNair is a sweet-voiced Tytania, Brian Asawa a commanding Oberon, and Robert Lloyd acts splendidly as Bottom. But in some ways the biggest surprise is Ian Bostridge, whom I'm used to thinking of as a rather arty singer; but he's hilarious as Flute/Thisbe.

Song for a Friday Night

What I'm Listening To

Benjamin Britten, Death in Venice. Peter Pears (Gustav von Aschenbach); John Shirley-Quirk (The Traveller, et al.) Members of the English Opera Group, English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Steuart Bedford.

Is it boorish to wish that Britten and Pears had been a little less devoted to each other? As in Billy Budd, it seems to me that the vocal writing in Death in Venice is superior for every part except the one composed for Pears. Here, it's the multiple roles for John Shirley-Quirk and the chorus of minor characters that make most of the vocal impact. Yes, Pears is dramatically intense, but if his voice had had more range and flexibility, mightn't the part have been given more musical challenges, resulting in a greater emotional variety? Still, this is a fascinating opera, here given what must be a definitive performance -- so why is it hard to get in the States?

What I'm Listening To

Benjamin Britten, Billy Budd. Philip Langridge (Vere); Simon Keenlyside (Billy Budd); John Tomlinson (Claggart). London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Richard Hickox.

I've never seen Billy Budd onstage, but I'm told it can make a powerful impact. This recording, however, seems dramatically slack. Langridge, Tomlinson and especially Keenlyside make solid efforts to bring the characters to life. But Langridge is handicapped by one of those high, thin, grainy English tenor voices that make you wonder why Vere is held in such awe by his crew, and Claggart's menace is undermined by the wobble in Tomlinson's voice. This is also one of those opera recordings that are stingy on the dynamics, so that the quiet opening is almost lost unless you bump the volume up.

That said, the recording is almost worth it for the power and nuance of Keenlyside's singing and acting. His version of "Look, through the port comes the moonshine astray" is heartbreaking. Keenlyside's Budd doesn't seem to be available on YouTube, but here's a fine version of "Look, through the port" by Dwayne Croft from the 1997 Met production. In the second part, the Dansker is Paul Plishka.

A Little Less Mossy

We music lovers mostly know what some of those notations like piano and fortissimo mean. Even things like Un poco meno mosso. But the Germans (of course) like to do it their own way, with things like sehr lebhaftig. Fortunately, David Pesetsky, a linguistics prof at MIT, has compiled a list of translations of the composer's markings in the score of Mahler's First. It certainly clears up a lot of things about Mahler. I mean, who knew it was all about spit valves?

On the Road Again

I can drive! Did it twice today, to the grocery store and tonight to the clinic. And it went OK. Yeah, there were a couple of moments when I flinched, discovering something on my left that I hadn't seen a moment before. But reviving a skill that has lain dormant for four months is still a kick.

In honor of that moment:

The Keys to Genius

The following review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS:
Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano
By Katie Hafner
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., $24.99

Concert pianists are notoriously temperamental, but with good reason: so are their pianos. Why else would J.S. Bach specify a “well-tempered clavier”? The modern piano is a jury-rigged contraption consisting of a multitude of tiny moving parts and a lot of steel and wood that has to be twisted, warped and tortured into just the right shape and structure. And it needs constant tuning, twiddling and tweaking to maintain the sound the pianist wants. No wonder that Glenn Gould, who twisted, warped and tortured himself into a great pianist, had such a love-hate relationship with the instrument that he referred to as an “intriguing mixture of pedals, pins, and paradox.”

It’s ironic that the pianoforte, as the instrument had been named because it could play both soft and loud, is now known as a piano: Virtuosi from Liszt to Lang Lang have mostly exploited the forte. But Gould wanted a piano that would sound, as he put it, “a little like an emasculated harpsichord.” He detested the Romantics, and once said his favorite composer was the 16th-century Englishman Orlando Gibbons. After a long search he found the cleanness of tone and quickness of action he wanted in a Steinway concert grand with the designation CD 318.

Katie Hafner is eloquent about why Gould loved CD 318 so much – so eloquent that one wishes her book included a discography of the recordings he made on that instrument. (His two most famous recordings – the versions of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” he recorded in 1955 and 1981 – were made on other pianos.) “A Romance on Three Legs” is partly a biography of Gould, partly a history of Steinway & Sons, and partly a story about how technique, tastes and technology propelled the evolution of the piano. It’s also a tribute to piano tuner Verne Edquist, whose exquisite sensitivity and technical inventiveness manipulated CD 318 into an instrument almost as eccentric as Gould.

Gould insisted on using a battered old chair that had been sawed down so it was six inches shorter than a standard piano bench. He was a hypochondriac who insisted on keeping the room temperature at 80 degrees year-round, and once sued Steinway because an employee gave him an admiring pat on the back that he claimed had dislocated his shoulder, but his nose-to-the-keyboard posture must have caused many of the aches and pains of which he complained. He was a terrifying driver, who once quipped, “It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.”

Hafner’s signal achievement in the book is to turn CD 318 itself into just as much a personality as Gould. Never mind that she has also demonstrated that CD 318 is just wood, steel, ivory and felt. We come to feel about CD 318 almost the way Gould did: “‘He talked about his piano as if it were human,’ fellow pianist David Bar-Illan commented.” So when CD 318 is injured in a fall … uh, damaged by being dropped, we’re shocked, and we especially empathize with Edquist, who has to break the news to Gould.

Hafner lives in the Bay Area, writes for the New York Times, and has published books about computer hackers and Internet pioneers, among other things. Some readers will complain that she touches too lightly on Gould’s faults: his undeniable gifts that were vitiated by self-indulgence; his interpretations that occasionally departed wildly from the composers’ intent; his decision to stop performing before audiences for the last 18 years of his life, and to concentrate on recording, in which mistakes can be edited out, making him appear to be technically flawless.

But the book is less a critique of Gould than an examination of an essential relationship, the one between artist and medium, as magnified by one artist’s obsession. Hafner’s book belongs to that gee-whiz genre perfected by writers like John McPhee, Susan Orlean and Mary Roach: books that tell you everything about subjects – oranges, orchids, corpses, pianos – that you didn’t know you wanted to know anything about. And for readers familiar with Gould’s recordings, or those with a curiosity about how things like pianos get to be the way they are, “A Romance on Three Legs” is a source of delight and illumination.

A Matter of Time

Happy New Year from

Willie Nelson

Dooley Wilson

Cyndi Lauper

and me.

A Little Night Music

k.d. lang

A Cure for the Blues

Songs and Their Singers, Part Five

This review originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.

BING CROSBY: A Pocketful of Dreams - The Early Years, 1903-1940
By Gary Giddins
Back Bay Books, 736 pp., $17.95 paperback

Strange to say, Bing Crosby needs this biography. Other major white male jazz/pop singers who were eclipsed in the rock revolution of the '60s managed to re-emerge. Frank Sinatra's bad-boy behavior kept him hot. Tony Bennett hung with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and got certified as hip by the MTV generation. Even Mel Tormé benefited from Harry Anderson's worship of him on ''Night Court.'' Of course, they were around to help revive their reputations, while Crosby, who created the style of singing that made them famous, died in 1977. So Crosby got dismissed as a nostalgia throwback, like the Andrews Sisters, or a bland middle-of-the-roader, like Perry Como. At worst, he was regarded as a cultural imperialist who made his fortune by ripping off black musical idiom and making it palatable for white audiences. Or he was just that old guy who played golf -- before Tiger Woods made golf cool.

Gary Giddins' task, then, is to persuade us not only that Crosby was ''the most influential and successful popular performer in the first half of the twentieth century'' but also that the work he left behind him deserves our continued respect, admiration and emulation. This exhaustive -- and occasionally exhausting -- biography takes us up to 1940; Giddins plans to tell the rest of the story in another volume. But the Crosby of the '30s is the essential Bing Crosby, the one whose achievement was summarized by bandleader/clarinetist Artie Shaw: ''He really is the first American jazz singer in the white world.''

It was a very white world in which Crosby grew up. He was born in Tacoma, Wash., and raised in Spokane, and on his father's side, he could trace his lineage back to passengers on the Mayflower. His mother's Irish-Catholic heritage and religion prevailed over his father's, however: Bing was raised a Catholic and attended the Jesuit-run Gonzaga High School and Gonzaga University. But he dropped out of law school at Gonzaga and headed for Los Angeles with a friend, Al Rinker, whose sister, the singer Mildred Bailey, was breaking into show business.

The vaudeville duo of Crosby and Rinker became a trio, the Rhythm Boys, with the addition of Harry Barris, and soon they were featured performers with Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. In 1930, the Rhythm Boys appeared in the movie ''King of Jazz,'' a showcase for Whiteman that flopped but launched Crosby's film career.

The association with Whiteman, the self-styled King of Jazz, does nothing to help Crosby with either those who regard him as a cultural imperialist or those who fail to think of him as a jazz innovator. Whiteman's ''jazz'' was slickly orchestrated stuff, not the ebullient, improvisatory music we think of as echt jazz. But Giddins is content to face the simple fact: ''African-American innovations metamorphose into American popular culture when white performers learn to mimic black ones.'' Crosby, under Whiteman's aegis, became ''the first in a long line of white musicians who popularized real black music . . . for a white public. This was ten years before Benny Goodman launched the Swing Era, thirty years before Elvis rocked.''

It's good to remember that Crosby was raised in an era when the minstrel show and blackface performers like Al Jolson were tolerated. Today we cringe at production numbers such as ''Abraham'' in the 1942 movie ''Holiday Inn.'' In it, a blacked-up Crosby and company sing the praises of the Great Emancipator for an all-white audience, while his African-American cook sits on the back porch and sings to her children about how Lincoln freed the ''darkies.'' But as Giddins points out, Crosby also made an effort to integrate black performers such as Louis Armstrong into his films, and was frustrated: Armstrong's performance in the 1938 film ''Doctor Rhythm'' was cut in deference to Southern audiences. Crosby repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Armstrong, calling him ''the greatest pop singer in the world that ever was and ever will be forever and ever.'' The easy camaraderie in the duets Armstrong and Crosby recorded is evidence that the tribute was genuine -- and genuinely appreciated.

Of course, sounding genuine was Crosby's forte. There has been no surer master of the media -- from recordings to radio to film and TV -- in which he appeared. ''More than any other performer,'' Giddins observes, ''Crosby would ride the tide of technology. He dominated records, radio, and movies throughout a career that would parallel the development of those media in ways ever more suitable to his talents.''

He had the good luck to be starting his career just as recording shifted from acoustical to electrical reproduction of music. Before the development of the microphone, recording artists had to bellow into great horns -- a technology unsuited for the subtlety and intimacy characteristic of a performer like Crosby. Then came radio, on which the bright, high sound of the tenor was less welcome than a mellow baritone like Crosby's: ''Higher voices are better for reaching theater balconies, but lower ones are more appealing in living rooms,'' Giddins notes.

Crosby took each medium and shaped an agreeable persona for it. Like no singer before him, he made singing seem as natural as speaking. The voice that people heard on records and the radio had established his sex appeal, so when he moved into film it didn't matter that he was balding, paunchy and jug-eared. Moreover, he resisted Hollywood's efforts to make him conform to conventional ideas of good looks -- once he established himself at the box office, he rejected the practice of gluing back his ears, and chose to wear hats rather than toupees to cover his bald spots.

Giddins is one of the country's foremost jazz critics, so it's no surprise that his detailed accounts of Crosby's recordings are sensitive and illuminating. He succeeds brilliantly in his chief task of persuading us of Crosby's worth as a performer. But he's also a masterly biographer -- he has written about Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker as well -- who compiles an astonishing amount of information and turns it into a readable narrative. Admittedly, there are some boggy spots -- I learned more about the making of movies like ''Waikiki Wedding'' than I really needed to know. Giddins also tends to lose sight of the off-mike Crosby -- the husband and father -- in his focus on Crosby at work. We learn that Crosby got his drinking problem under control, but that his first wife, Dixie, didn't, and we begin to sense that there are problems at home -- but then we're off on the road with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour again.

And sometimes Giddins' attempts to summarize Crosby's importance bring him perilously close to cheerleading: ''No other pop icon has ever been so thoroughly, lovingly liked -- liked and trusted. Bing's naturalness made him credible to all, regardless of region, religion, race, or gender. He was our most authentic chameleon, mirroring successive eras -- through Prohibition, depression, war, anxiety, and affluence -- without ever being dramatic about it. He was discreet and steady. He was family.''

That was the image, at least. After Crosby's death in 1977, the iconoclasts, including his son Gary, went to work on biographies whose allegations of abuse and infidelity tarnished his reputation as husband and father. But Giddins' biography is focused on how Crosby created a persona, and only to a lesser extent on what lay behind the mask. Rehabilitating Crosby's artistic reputation is higher on Giddins' agenda than sorting through the dirty laundry, but if he takes the story beyond 1940, things will doubtless have to come out in the wash.

If you ever need a definition of sprezzatura, just take a look at these two pros performing Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah?” in “High Society”:

Songs and Their Singers, Part Four

This review originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.

THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF IRVING BERLIN
Edited by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet
Knopf, 530 pp., $65

When he was asked to name the greatest French poet, Andre Gide gave a Gallic shrug and said, ''Victor Hugo, alas!'' And if you wanted me to name the greatest American songwriter, I'd have to say, reluctantly, ''Irving Berlin, alas!''

Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers were more gifted composers. Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and Johnny Mercer were probably better lyricists. But nobody was better at doing both, at putting both words and music together, than Berlin. In the golden era of American popular song, 1920-1950, the only other similarly gifted composer-lyricist was Cole Porter. (Frank Loesser, also a brilliant composer-lyricist, belongs to a slightly later era, the '40s and '50s.)

Berlin beats Porter partly because of longevity (and hence volume of output): He was born in 1888 and died 101 years later; Porter's dates are 1891-1964. But Berlin was also a more versatile songwriter. There's no denying that Porter's melodies are abundant and his lyrics have sophistication and wit. But too often Porter fell back on his forte: the catalog song -- ''You're the Top,'' ''Let's Do It'' and virtually the entire song score of ''Kiss Me Kate'' -- brilliant strings of one-liners set to simple, catchy melodies.

Berlin could write catalog songs, too: ''Doin' What Comes Naturally'' from ''Annie Get Your Gun,'' for example. But just dip into the new anthology, ''The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin,'' to see what else he could do. There's the most popular song in history, of course: ''White Christmas.'' And the anthem given new currency after the events of Sept. 11, ''God Bless America.'' But there are also tender ballads (''Always''), sexy show-stoppers (''Heat Wave'') and songs of social comment (the anti-lynching ''Supper Time''). He wrote the most sublime of all the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance numbers, ''Let's Face the Music and Dance,'' as well as Astaire's jaunty signature song, ''Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.''


Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

In his greatest Broadway score, ''Annie Get Your Gun,'' Berlin went from parodies of hillbilly music, ''Doin' What Comes Naturally'' and ''You Can't Get a Man With a Gun,'' to the sweetly lyrical ''The Girl That I Marry,'' ''They Say It's Wonderful'' and ''I Got Lost in His Arms,'' and of course the indelible show-must-go-on anthem, ''There's No Business Like Show Business.''

And Berlin did it all without the benefit of Porter's Yale education or George Gershwin's studies with classical musicians: Berlin left school in his early teens, and he never learned to read music. Famously, he could play the piano only in F-sharp, so he had a special piano built that allowed him to compose in other keys.

When a composer collaborates with a lyricist, sometimes the words are written first, and sometimes the tune. When he was working with Larry Hart, Richard Rodgers would write the melody and Hart would fit the words to it; but Rodgers' next collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, preferred to write the lyrics and let Rodgers supply the music. Berlin's imagination seems to have fully integrated both words and music, so that no one can guess which came first. The effect in his best work is that of speech blossoming into song.

How many lyricists could have fitted words to the quirkily sprung rhythms of Berlin's ''Puttin' on the Ritz,'' for example? (Try tapping out the rhythms of the song yourself to see what I mean.) Yet Berlin did it twice, first with the ''Harlem'' version of 1927 -- ''That's where each and ev'ry Lulu Belle goes/Ev'ry Thursday ev'ning with her swell beaus/Rubbing elbows.'' Later he revised it with the more politically correct lyrics usually heard today: ''Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper/Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper,/Super duper.'' Each version is a tour de force of word fitting; doing it twice is miraculous.


Fred Astaire

And then there are songs that are so originally yet organically structured that only a mind producing both the words and music could have conceived of them. Consider the astonishing dramatic shifts in mood and melody found in ''Cheek to Cheek'': The song starts with the dreamy ''Heaven/I'm in heaven'' theme, which it repeats, then breaks into the buoyant ''Oh! I love to climb a mountain'' theme, repeating it (''Oh! I love to go out fishing''). And then, suddenly, there's the ecstatic command to ''Dance with me'' -- before the singer settles back into the dreamy first theme: ''The charm about you/Will carry me through/To heaven/I'm in heaven. . . .'' The song was written, of course, for Astaire and Rogers to dance to, but it stands, or rather dances, on its own.


Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

So why be reluctant to acknowledge Berlin's genius? For perhaps much the same reason that Gide sighed when he had to endorse Hugo: a feeling that so prodigious an output is a sign that quality was sacrificed in favor of quantity. Rodgers and Hart, Porter and Harold Arlen were more consistently sophisticated in their songwriting, and at their best, touched on emotional complexities that seem absent from Berlin's ballads. Gershwin and Ellington and Billy Strayhorn forged a link between dance hall and concert hall; Berlin thought for a time of writing an opera, but nothing came of it. Kern's ''Show Boat'' and Rodgers and Hammerstein's ''Oklahoma!,'' ''Carousel'' and ''South Pacific'' set benchmarks for the musical theater that Berlin never quite reached.

And there's also a sense that enormous public adulation -- Berlin was honored with everything from an Oscar to a Medal of Freedom -- has to be built on crowd-pleasing schmaltz and sentimentality. But there's great artistry even in Berlin's crowd-pleasing.

Many of us may be uncomfortable with the politics of ''God Bless America'' -- Woody Guthrie, you may recall, wrote ''This Land Is Your Land'' in reaction against Berlin's anthem -- but it's a prime example of Berlin's skill at writing for the human voice. (It must, however, be sung simply and sincerely -- not with the faux-soul note-bending that Celine Dion inflicts on it.) When Kate Smith's creamy contralto sails into those big open vowels of ''oceans,'' ''foam'' and ''home sweet home,'' who can resist?

This huge volume includes the words to every one of the more than 1,200 songs Berlin wrote -- from ''Marie From Sunny Italy,'' copyrighted in 1907, to a lyric called ''Growing Gray'' that's dated Sept. 2, 1987, seven months before his 100th birthday. Editors Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet, Berlin's daughter, supply commentary on many of the songs and on the shows and films he wrote them for, and the book is full of pictures of Berlin and the productions on which he worked.

It's also a wonderful document of changing American musical and theatrical tastes, from the now-disgraced ''coon songs'' -- as well as other Tin Pan Alley songs stereotyping the Irish, the Italians and the Jews -- to the giddy revues of the '20s, the movie musicals of the '30s, the book musicals of '40s Broadway, and the increasingly marginal role played by Berlin's kind of music in the '50s and afterward. ''The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin'' is an essential volume for anyone who loves American popular song.

Songs and Their Singers, Part Three

In commenting on Wilfrid Sheed's book, I pointed out that he had omitted Kurt Weill. This review, which originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, makes the case for Weill.

KURT WEILL ON STAGE: From Berlin to Broadway
By Foster Hirsch
Limelight, 416 pp., $20 paperback

Kurt Weill led two lives, and Foster Hirsch looks at both of them in ''Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway.'' There was Weill the classically trained composer, who teamed up with Bertolt Brecht in the avant-garde of the Weimar Republic and gave the world ''The Threepenny Opera'' and ''Mahagonny.'' And there was Weill the Broadway composer, whose musical collaborations with the likes of Maxwell Anderson, Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and Alan Jay Lerner paved the way for the achievements of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

For once, Fitzgerald's much-quoted line about there being no second acts in American lives doesn't seem to apply. Weill's second act was his life in America, which he embraced with the enthusiasm of someone who had found the promised land: At his death in 1950 he was planning a series of musical works drawn from American literature and had started work on songs for a musical version of ''Huckleberry Finn.'' (I think maybe I'm glad we were spared Weill's proposed musical based on ''Moby-Dick.'')

In 1946, Weill had written a letter in protest when Life magazine referred to him as a ''German composer.'' But there were those who thought the move to America in 1935, and the subsequent involvement with Broadway, deprived music of a serious composer. (On the other hand, remaining in Europe would likely have deprived music entirely of Weill, who was Jewish.)

Virgil Thomson was among those who thought Weill was slumming. In an article for the New York Herald-Tribune in 1941 about Weill's biggest American hit, ''Lady in the Dark,'' Thomson lamented that Weill was no longer working with writers of the quality of Brecht, and even suggested that the strengths of ''The Threepenny Opera'' and ''Mahagonny'' had been Brecht's words, not Weill's music. In those works, Thomson noted, Weill was ''parodying cheap sentiment,'' but Thomson found his music for ''Lady in the Dark'' ''just as banal as before, but its banality expresses nothing.'' (It may be worth noting that Thomson had also panned ''Porgy and Bess'' -- he was not particularly tolerant of composers straying from what he saw as their proper spheres.)

In the new book, Hirsch aims to rehabilitate Weill's post-Berlin reputation -- not without some difficulty. For none of Weill's works for the American theater has been as enduring as the mordant ''Threepenny Opera,'' which, in Hirsch's words, ''is one of the great theatre works of the twentieth century.'' In contrast, Weill's most successful Broadway show, ''Lady in the Dark,'' Hirsch admits, ''has slipped into a historical limbo from which it is likely never to emerge.'' Still, the fault is not Weill's: The book for the show, by Moss Hart, has dated badly -- it's filled with Hart's naive enthusiasm for the wonders of psychoanalysis and a sexist condescension toward career women.

Most of us will never see a Weill show -- ''Johnny Johnson,'' ''Knickerbocker Holiday,'' ''One Touch of Venus'' and ''Love Life'' have fallen into that limbo of theatrical non-performance with ''Lady in the Dark.'' Only ''Street Scene'' and ''Lost in the Stars'' are occasionally revived, usually in the opera house. (Weill, who was bowled over by seeing ''Porgy and Bess'' shortly after arriving in America, wanted to create American operas that existed, as Gershwin's does, on the boundaries between the operatic and musical stages.)

Still, Hirsch argues that Weill's artistry remained high and his influence was profound: ''No other Broadway composer except Stephen Sondheim has been to so deep and true a degree a collaborative dramatist, and no other Broadway composer except Leonard Bernstein (with a leaner catalogue) has so successfully closed the distance between the concert hall and the musical theatre.'' (Um, well, what about George Gershwin?)

Today, Weill's reputation rests not on the shows but on the songs he wrote for them. We may have forgotten ''Knickerbocker Holiday,'' but almost everyone knows at least one number from it: ''September Song,'' probably in one of the three near-definitive renditions of it by Frank Sinatra.


Frank Sinatra

The most famous interpreter of Weill's songs was his wife, Lotte Lenya. Hirsch reports that Lenya was once asked how her husband's music should be sung. '' 'The way I sing it,' she snapped.'' But wonderful as Lenya's performances are -- her vibrato sets up a buzz in the brain -- Weill's songs have been persuasively performed by an impressive variety of artists, from opera singers such as Teresa Stratas and Dawn Upshaw to non-singers like Walter Huston and Gertrude Lawrence, the star of ''Lady in the Dark,'' whom Hirsch describes as ''the poorest singer who ever became a major musical-theatre star.''


Lotte Lenya in Die Dreigroschenoper

If you have doubts about Weill's gift as a composer of songs, listen to performances like the young Tony Bennett's ecstatic 1956 recording of ''Lost in the Stars.'' Or Lena Horne singing with a voice made of velvet about sails made of silk in ''My Ship.'' Or the wonderful melding of Carmen McRae's slight astringency of tone with the seductive vocal line of ''Speak Low.'' And Judy Garland, whose forte was heartbreak, never found a better vehicle for showing it off than ''It Never Was You.''

As the title suggests, the book is very much about Weill's life in the theater; Hirsch is particularly good about putting Weill's theatrical career in context -- he tells us what else was playing on Broadway alongside Weill's shows. But the composer's life apart from his work doesn't command much of Hirsch's attention. In part, this may be because Weill didn't have a particularly colorful private life. But he was surrounded with people -- Brecht, Anderson, Hart, Lawrence, Lerner, Elia Kazan and others -- who were colorful enough that the book never entirely bogs down into ''and then he wrote'' cataloging.

Weill's relationship with Lenya, his one and only wife, could be fractious -- each had extramarital affairs. But they were devoted to each other in their fashion, so much so that Hirsch's book goes on well beyond Weill's death to document Lenya's efforts to keep his music alive until her own death in 1981.

Hirsch has picked up the torch from her, and I think he's succeeded. If you're like me, his book will send you in search of forgotten and previously unheard performances.