Griffes on Record

There are some obvious exceptions: Copland, Barber, Bernstein, Gershwin, and Ives–not all equally deserving–who get enough exposure. But what about so many worthy others, among whom, to name only my favorites, count Amy Beach, Paul Bowles, George Chadwick, Rebecca Clarke (granted, English-born), Arthur Foote, and Henry Hadley? And perhaps the most important of all, Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920).

Though he is performed on rare occasions, I have never been able to catch a live performance of his music. Penguin’s New Dictionary of Music puts it succinctly about Griffes: “Overworked, through poverty, and died of pneumonia.” But Penguin is wrong. Though far from affluent–a music teacher at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York–he was not exactly a pauper; and death–horrible at age 35–was caused by empyema, stemming from a combination of emphysema, influenza, and pneumonia.

Yet poverty had something to do with it. Lacking the money to pay copyists for orchestral parts, he sat up nights writing them out himself–this on top of arduous school teaching and private piano lessons to make ends meet. Add to this the excitement of much-delayed recognition in his last year or so, causing nervous as well as physical exhaustion. After a painful illness and unsuccessful operation on his lungs, he died in a New York City hospital on April 8, 1920.

Griffes was born in Elmira, N.Y., on September 17, 1884. He took fitful piano lessons from an elder sister, but not until he was 11 did the family find him a real teacher in the person of the eccentric and redoubtable New Zealand spinster Mary Selena Broughton, professor of piano playing at Elmira College. Since Charles’s father, a shirt-cutter and clothing-store clerk, could hardly afford the youth’s advanced training, which at that time only Germany could offer, it was the devoted Miss Broughton who provided most of the money (which Charles eventually scrupulously repaid) for the 19-year-old’s four years of study in Berlin from 1904 to 1907.

Griffes initially viewed himself as a concert pianist, although he once boasted that he would become the greatest composer in the world. He enrolled at the Stern Conservatory, which he attended fairly regularly for two years, working with some good teachers. For the next two years, he took mostly private lessons, including a dozen or so with Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer of Hansel und Gretel. He also gave piano lessons, although he became aware that he was not going to become a true virtuoso: His hands, he felt, were too small, and he had started too late. Thus, composing became his goal. He made some valuable friendships, notably with a 28-year-old student at the Technische Hochschule, Emil Joel, who became his first lover, and whose knowledge of music and German life proved especially useful. The four Berlin years, Charles sadly noted, passed “frightfully quickly.”

Upon his return to America, Griffes landed the job of director of music at Hackley, which was to remain his underpaid and detested lifelong position. Though his chores were onerous and severely encroached on his composing, Tarrytown was only an hour’s train ride from New York, where he spent most of his free time, absorbing culture, making friends, composing (mostly during vacations), pursuing his homosexual love life, and assiduously promoting his music. Even so, rejections by publishers, musicians, and critics made life difficult–until, ironically, near the end–and made shedding hated Hackley impossible.

What sort of music did Griffes write? While studying in Germany and setting, among others, a great many German poems, his music was largely German-influenced, which at the time meant chiefly Wagner and Richard Strauss. But ever a learner and self-renewer, he fell under the salutary spell of Debussy and Ravel. This was his “American Impressionist” phase, climaxing in such marvels as “The White Peacock” and other “tone pictures.” Next came the Russians, Mussorgsky and, especially, Scriabin. After a brief Amerindian phase, there followed the important Oriental one, chiefly Arabian and Japanese. Finally, what might be called the Modern, represented by Busoni, Schoenberg, Varese, and, perhaps, also Bloch, Milhaud, and Prokofiev.

Here it behooves me to quote Donna K. Anderson, the preeminent living Griffes scholar:

I heartily second the declaration by the American composer and critic Deems Taylor that Griffes’s premature death was “the greatest musical loss this country has sustained.” Only the early demise and lack of spare time prevented Griffes from equaling the achievement of a Barber or Copland. It is worth noting that, upon Griffes’s death, an editorial in the not-always-perceptive New York Times observed, “We speak with pity or scorn of a public that would let a Mozart or a Schubert die and think that those bad old days are gone forever, but from time to time something uncomfortably . . . of the same sort is revealed in the present.”

Similarly, the acerb Norman Lebrecht refers to Griffes as an “American prodigy of Mozartian lifespan.” But Mozart and Schubert were more precocious or less burdened by other pressures–Griffes even had to support on his meager earnings his mother and unmarried sister–enabling them to produce a much more copious oeuvre than Griffes, who, moreover, was a perfectionist, endlessly revising his works.

He was, to his credit, a continual evolver, and not only in music. Besides being a charming watercolorist and fair photographer, he read tirelessly and exploringly in four languages. It could be Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande or The Playboy of the Western World (“A wild thing!”) or the travel books of Edmondo de Amicis (“Certainly nobody else’s travel books came up to his. In the Tangier section he says something interesting about the Arabian music”). Coleridge’s “The Wanderings of Cain” would be “a good subject for a melodrama with piano,” and Octave Mirbeau’s sadistic novel The Torture Garden was both repellent and fascinating. As Edward Maisel, his able biographer, mentions in Charles T. Griffes: The Life of an American Composer, he could be “simultaneously reading Dante’s Divina Commedia and Elinor Glyn’s Reflections of Ambrosine and finding both enjoyable.”

Let us consider Griffes’s piano music, some of his finest and most plentiful. Its undoubted climax is the Sonata of 1917-18, revised in 1919. Donna Anderson has documented at ample length the extensive rewriting that went into it, and Maisel provides a lengthy musical analysis. This “shockingly original sonata,” as Virgil Thomson called it, is a seminal work. David Dubal refers to it as Griffes’s “most painful and frenzied score . . . which fully reflects [his] ear for piano sonority and color.” And here is the British music critic Wilfrid Mellers about this “extraordinary” sonata: “Sophisticated as the idiom is, [it is] music of the asphalt jungle [that] could have been created only in America.” Elsewhere Mellers speaks of it as “disturbingly powerful . . . an American parable in musical terms, telling us what happens to the ego alone in the industrial wilderness.”

Well, perhaps.

Faubion Bowers, the Scriabin expert, wrote of it in a 1972 review in the Village Voice:

Evaporating and languid must refer to other Griffes pieces on the program; about the Sonata there is none of that. I like to think of a piece of music as a living organism, with rhythm for its skeleton, melody for its flesh, and harmony as its skin. These must not only be fine in themselves but also cohere perfectly. In Griffes’s Sonata, they do. The work appears on four currently available CDs, of which I have tracked down three.

Denver Oldham, on Charles Tomlinson Griffes: Collected Works for Piano (New World Records) is somewhat choppy and foursquare, but Edward Maisel’s booklet notes are helpful. David Allen Wehr on Charles Tomlinson Griffes (Connoisseur Society) is elegant and poetic, with perhaps the slightest exaggeration of dynamic contrasts. On the two-CD Charles Tomlinson Griffes: Complete Piano Works (Naxos), Michael Levin delivers a well-rounded, solid performance.

Volume One of the Levin CD contains, after the Sonata, Three Tone-Pictures (1910-15), graceful landscape evocations with the kind of titles Griffes would affix a posteriori, to make the music more salable. The De Profundis of 1915 gets its title from a poem by Fiona MacLeod (pen name of William Sharp, a mediocre poet favored by Griffes). It strikes me, not unpleasantly, as sophisticated salon music. The Roman Sketches (1915-16) are four little gems, two of which Griffes later orchestrated. Among them, The White Peacock–based both on a Sharp poem and on an albino bird Griffes admired in the Berlin zoo–is one of his three or four biggest hits, though I am just as fond of The Fountain of the Acqua Paola, water music at its most lyrical. Clouds compares favorably with Debussy’s treatment of the same subject.

The five other pieces on this CD are no less charming, although the transcription of the Barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffmann strikes me as unnecessary, and the Prelude in B minor is interesting mostly as proof that, at age 15, Griffes was already impressive. Echoes of Chopin and Liszt, Griffes favorites, crop up here and there, mostly to good effect. No one has mentioned Delius, though I detect parallels–and why not, given that both composers were Anglo-Saxon Debussyists?

Outstanding among the items on Volume Two is Griffes’s most popular work, The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan. The Three Preludes (1919), Griffes’s last, unfinished work, were intended to be five; they are brief, intelligent doodles, signposts toward new horizons. Highly characterful, however, are the Three Fantasy Pieces. “The Barcarolle” (1912) rocks melodiously, but rises to a couple of impassioned climaxes, even as the tide and waves may rise. “The Notturno” (1915) conveys compellingly a night of reined-in yearning and wistful meditation. “The Scherzo” (1915) starts with controlled intensity and culminates in sheer rapture. Various further, separate items round out this diversely alluring, magisterially played disc.

Alas, no single CD is devoted to Griffes’s many superb contributions to the art song. There are, however, four flavorous specimens included on Deborah Voigt’s recent All My Heart (EMI), with Brian Zeger on the piano. “The Half-Ring Moon,” to words by John B. Tabb, about love’s triumph over death, is langorously elegiac. “Pierrot,” its lovely lyric by Sara Teasdale garbled in the booklet, has sprightly music to match the poet’s bittersweet irony. “Cleopatra to the Asp” (Tabb again) aptly hails death’s triumph over the pangs of foiled love. “Evening Song,” to a poem by Sidney Lanier, conveys movingly, against a background of dying day, love’s permanence.

The two available CDs of Griffes’s orchestral works–with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony (New World Records) and JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic (Naxos)–feature some of the orchestral songs, though penny-pinchingly without texts. The Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod (1918) show how inferior poems can be ennobled by magisterial settings. They are all lovely, but one of them, “The Lament of Ian the Proud,” is considered, Meisel tells us, Griffes’s finest song by one critic and “surely one of the great songs in the English language” by another. They are sung decently by Barbara Quintiliani on Naxos, and even better by Phyllis Bryn-Julson on New World. Among the composer’s most mature works, they are justly praised by Anderson for their “rhythmic vitality, sharply dissonant harmony, bold conception, and gripping power.”

New World also offers the masterly baritone Sherrill Milnes in the early, nice, but derivatively set Four German Songs, as well as in Song of the Dagger, a powerful setting of a fierce Romanian folk poem about bloody revenge, with the voice and the piano in intricate counterpoint. The Four Impressions (1916), to poems by Oscar Wilde, are pretty enough in themselves, but the music does not quite match the meanings as it should; nor does Olivia Stapp’s uneven singing do full justice to them.

We come now to the orchestral music. Naxos offers chiefly orchestral versions of piano pieces. What with Griffes’s gift for orchestration, almost in the Ravel-Strauss league, these come off more impressively than the piano originals. The White Peacock is, of course, a popular favorite, and it gets a suitably impressionistic reading from Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic. Their Bacchanale (based on Scherzo) and Clouds are similarly winning. But the Three Tone-Pictures and Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan come off somewhat better on New World than on Naxos, even though the former is an analog recording transferred to CD. Ozawa’s Bostonians simply play better than Falletta’s Buffalonians, and Ozawa’s faster, crisper pacing also helps.

From Naxos, however, you get digital sound, and the only available recording of the enchanting Poem for Flute and Orchestra, which, as Maisel reminds us, is “regarded by many as Griffes’s most fulfilled and mature production.” With Carol Wincenc as the impeccable soloist, this marvelously moody, by turns wistful, melancholy, and exultant ten-minute score, is alone enough to make the Naxos CD a must.

It is sad that Charles Griffes couldn’t earn a better living from his compositions, sadder yet that he died so young. But it would be almost equally sad if you did not realize how much you would be missing by not acquiring these recordings.

John Simon writes about theater for Bloomberg News.