“Sacre bleu what’s to become of me?” the host of “The Vocal Scene” has gone the way of his pedigree after 9 decades.... George Jellinek’s Hungarian Rhapsody via his orchestra of enlightened canons....
I
Shickelgruber’s histrionics in Munich beer halls, where he rehearsed his genocide was but a foretaste of George arriving at Dachau while General Patton (George S. Scott) and the Third Army Division of his Third Army waited outside ...”Ein volk ein Reich Ein Fuhrer” (1938)
Visiting the gravestone of the Name Detective’s oldest sister Anna: one daughter living in Munich, the other in the States... in her role as a blonde “Professor”, lecturing in History at Hofstra, The nanny for her children was Anna’s younger sister of Baden Baden who escaped Hitler’s genocide by marrying a non Jewish dentist. She distancing herself some twenty years after her Fuhrer committed suicide in his Berlin bunker..
II
A gentle nature, the First Lieutenant commissioned in the field, pursued his passion. Since the age of eleven, he became enamored of Verdi’s “La Traviata” while we chased the “Lone Ranger” via Rossini’s Guillermo Tell Overture”, while dodging cars in Santa Monica on Wilshire Boulevard, hawking the Los Angeles Times and Examiner.
Meanwhile in their own secular way Ucla’s opera desk thru the continental tastes of Jan Popper Lukas Foss and Roy Travis (“Oedipus”). drove their Halley’s comet to a realization of the Viennese vision of the twelve tone genie Arnold Schoenberg with his acolyte Alban Berg, canonizing in “Wozzeck and Lulu:.
The serial compositions was not lost by Rachmaninoff habituating in Santa Monica Canyon or Igor Stravinsky(“The Rites of Spring” “The Firebird”) composing on North Wetherly Drive, Beverly Hills....
In the midst of this avalanche on the West Coast, George Jellinek followed his star to Fidel Castro’s Cuba then into the Big Apple.......
III
Following his instincts our hero met his wife... a dynamic sixty five years...... His career in the New World landing at Wqxr after a tour at a record shop and an intermediary shuttle....
A far cry from those yesterdays in Ujpesi where he first bore fruition. But not only did he come alive he realized his soul, treading softly in the ego trips of the repertory.
IV
Meanwhile treading our own boards in the philosophical boondocks of Hartford&Waterbury, we bumped shoulders at the Yale post office... with a former student from the subbing scenario of Southern California..Eric Sherman of Sherman Oaks , named in honor of Cal Tech’s President. Milliken Junior High.
He introduced us to his Professor of Classics ” Erich Segal....”
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
V
Shaking hands, we both attended Midwood High School in our own yesterdays. His chase as a marathon runner brought him to the Beatles “Yellow submarine” and “Love story” to the William Morris agency. He was on the fast track...glad handing his Eric pumped up with his “Love story” foray and who could blame him ...
6th Beatle from Liverpool? Feigning the rock a bye baby lullaby on the drums?.....
“Goodbye baby in a cradle with the cuddly bear cradle will rock cradle will fall”
VI
Erich the Red he was not. But George Jellinek on his Austro Hungary Big Apple jaunt ... playing out his his fate. Everybody finds their own level..
“Inch by inch it’s a cinch By the yard it’s very hard?.
Right, the 6th Beatle from Liverpool?..... Everybody’s being tested. Erich passing in London at72.......
VII
Traipsing the Yale Coop aisles, Erich saw Mister Smith, the manager, throwing a party for our “Mozart and Mushroom Barley,” a comic one acter performed... Ucla’s Macgowan theatre......
Ruth Ginsberg, an elder Yalie in residence, handed us her copy. “Awsome!”
“Just because I sign our signature in your copy, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to read it.”
“Surreal......my precious .... surreal......”
VIII
Come what may, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart saw the daylight of his birth 256 years ago...his birthplace and a stream of operas symphonies 39th Jupiter clarinet concerto, Requiem dealing with Salieri in the Archbishop’s circle begs the question, doesn’t it, folks.
A wunderkid’s imaginative “perpetual motion” 254 years ago.... buried in a paupers grave while his nemesis of an authority figure Adolf Hitler some hundred and fifty years later buries six million of the human race..
How does one reconcile Shickelgruber’s lifetime with the wunderkids’?
Brother, can you spare a dime? Wolfgang a credit to the human race from age 5...child prodigy couldn’t save a pfennig, buried at 35......Hitler on the other hand an authority figure? ... Six hundred pieces of musica......six million into the ovens
A martini? Southern Comfort? Jack Daniels? Straight? On the rocks?
IX
Perusing the freemason Wolfgang in those haunts of Salzburg and Vienna, one tends to forget the prodigy’s sensuality. His sweeping 600 harmonic language plunges are manifestations of his growth and development as a musical genius while the populace goes about their 24-7 unaware... only of Napoleon’s streaking across their Austria Hungary landscape..
How he interpreted his evolving into his harmonics is something left to our “Vocal scene” maestro George Jellinik....36 years in mastering his role. A grand mastery,...hey what!..
X
“Reflect God in the infinite mind,” greeted the CBS commentator on J.D. Salinger passing at ninety one . 24 hours after Mozart’s 256th birthday......
Raised on his “Catcher in the Rye,” the Huckleberry Finn odyssey of the 20th century Holden Caulfield... a drop out from a prep school, who tries to find his way in the pretensions of the Big Apple’s East Side culture vultures............long befor electronic U tube, Face Book, and Twitter.
“From Esme with love and squalor,” Holden’s sister....the Glass family geek stories
“Franny and Zooey” “Seymour” “Raise high the roof beam, carpenter” “A perfect day for banana fish.”
XI
Having made a similar pilgrimage from Pireaus, Athens port,....encountering the New Yorker circulation manager at the Captain’s table,( up from steerage) he led me back to Sutton Place and our grand aunt’s emporium...Goldfarb flowers- on East 57th Street and Third Avenue.. a stones throw from Sutton Place and 400 East... 7th floor...
The store where CBS’s Frank Stanton a and his boss, Bill Paley, would redeem their bouquet chips, scenting their way to flattering ratings....
Eh what, neighbor? Salinger residing at 300 East 57th ....before his flight as a Howard Hughes recluse, hiding out in New Hampshire
Salinger doesn’t have to find his voice thru the tribulations of Holden...., we saw two suicides; off the rooftops of East 57 stately doorman elevator apartment houses......our own grand aunt’s daughter smothered in a blaze......
”Don’t you dare tell me about ego trips,. Wheeling and dealing, snot nose”.
Reflect God in the infinite mind.
XII
Yet neighbor can you reconcile those Ucla bedeviled traipsing from the men’s gym, lead by the bookie extraordinaire Al Sliver, his black convertible Cadillac.. Shifting his gears to the Hollywood race track and the Post and Paddock tip sheets to the forlorn habitue of the Inglewood red cars.
“Whitey Bob Benoit Gene Frumkin the spider foreman “Daddy rocks?” throwing the sheets into the outstretched fingers of the frenzied yearners, searching for themselves thru the George and Dolly crafted odds. from the City of Angel’s Hill Street base of operations.
Where the insurance Alexandria Hotel tycoon on Broadway, a street over, sewing Arrow labels on button down shirts....a caper beyond Post&Paddock or Salinger’s cheese and ham family sorties.
Wasn’t it a company town? Murray Randolph and the Duarte City of Hope in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains....
“Who’s calling”? asked the Murray’s exchange.
“Harry Truman.”
Open sesame ...... the control freak picked up... his own con.. Buying into J.S. Bach’s E mail address.
XIII
We first got wind of The vocal scene” and “First hearing” in 1974. Living on the Coast, hanging by my thumbs..... into the Dutchman’s for their cheese omelettes ...long before cholestrol packing rebel Betty Hutton rollicking fats...
We tuned into Abram Chasens’s K-Usc, the music station across the USC Trojan Horse.......( David Raksin’s “The subject is film music”....Elmer Bernstein, Hugo Friedhofer from Lionel Newman’s sound stages at 20th Century Fox (apres Warner Brothers).. “I’m a fake giant among pigmies”
The Abe Chasens were classical piano players from the Big Apple, his student and wife Constance Keene, was an 88 key Rachmaninoff prelude pro in her own right.....
XIV
A discovery in their own musical bliss , Abe and Constance lived on Wilshire Boulevard in a hi rise , a crow’s fly from Beverly Glen, Westwood, and Hilgard Avenue on the Eastern edge of Ucla’s campus near the Arnold Schoenberg music hall.... his two sons, living off Sunset in Pacific Palisades. Busy counting their papa’s royalties from their publication business,.
Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” and “Lulu” not escaping their musical canon. Their father’s 12 tone heir....
Right? Right!
XV
Constance Keene Brooklyn born soul, her technique so flabbergasted Arthur Rubenstein that he entrusted his brethren to her dazzling sonority . No control freak was she......blowing the maestro away.
”Reflect God in the infinite mind”
XVI
When “First hearing” appeared on the Ucla campus....Wow! A major case ‘W’... we flew across the hills via the freeway or Beverly Glen, to get a Facebook tete a tete with Edwin Downes, Lloyd Moss Karl Haas Irving Kolodin and Jan Popper of the school’s opera workshop
Their charmed circle and mucho big chemistry was inspirng, the give and take of their dialogue was but a reflection of God..... the infinite mind playing out ....a campus where Plato and Joshua Royce shared the mortar and bricks at Royce’s entrance.
‘The world is a progressively realized community of interpretation’
XVII
If we may..... one more digression before we go back to George’s “Vocal Scene” ....his birthright being Budapest, his papa having a restaurant ,the gypsies playing on weekends, the stream of refugees before Shikelgruber’s genocide was played out....”Ein volk ein Reich ein Fuhrer”
Joe Marton, a friend from gymnasium days,.... relatives came to Beverly Hills....Eva Marton, Rose, Andre and George, the second unit director “King Solomon’s mines” and their writer friend from Vienna Gina Kaus ......Richard Burton Jean Simmons “The Robe”, the London born actress passing January 22 in Santa Monica, age 80.
Having said that and enduring the Hungarian goulash that came with the Budapest flavour (Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood) is it any surprise that “The Vocal Scene” and George Jellenik endured.......
XVIII
Having sat next to his colleague, Bob Sherman, at a streaming of Orestes’s odyssey from Crete where he came to grips with the MINOTAUR......
Nostramus and Flatbush Avenue, the reality scene for 20th century Harry Gideonses Brooklyn college, the Bedford Avenue campus being the home for Irwin Shaw’s :”Bury the Dead” Brando in his “Young Lions” Senator Robert Dole Leonard Taubenblatt’s WW2 service. The Name Detective’s own research into his Generals Omar Bradley Marshall and “Ike’ s geneology....
Already ensconced at WQXR Bob Sherman has his “Listening room” and welcomed “The vocal scene”.aboard for 36 years.
“Unbelievable” as they spout and sashay at Holden Caulfield’s 300 East 57th Street, the Vedanta mantras and their karma tripping the East Side’s pretentious feathers...
Bigger..than Ginsy’s five o’clock shadow at the gym on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue I, heralding Richard Nixon’s of Whittier California.....
”Nixon’s burger”,the drive in, Tricky beholden to Howard Hughes(“Slim”) for $50000 in making the drive in “competitive”. with Hula Hut on La Habra’s stretch of Whittier Boulevard.
“Every man has his price or a guy like me couldn’t exist.”
XIX
Meanwhile our renaissance man from Budapest made his presence known at Wqxr ,his soft spoken way and tacht never ruffling any egos at the old reality scene on West 43rd Street or the new studio at 122 Fifth Avenue.
Those expatriates from the Apple’s music halls - Archie Leach “Madame butterfly” Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck ( Ruby Stevens, Erasmus Hall), Mae West Solly Biano (**Jack L.’s backhand in doubles) his talent coordinator, Lionel Stander (six marriages,...”but my fifth was the best. Like Beethoven’s Fifth”) consumed by Hollywood’s horse flesh and their “ crunching numbers ” in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety.
**“Solly, why open a new can. Let’s use the old balls.We don’t have to put on the dog,” said the Chief. ”Whom are we trying to impress? Disraeli and his butler?”(George Arliss)
Aside from 88 year old William Randolph Hearst’s (slipping away on his estate’s fourth floor) Louella Parsons, her Hedda Hopper copycat (LA Times), Jimmy Fidler, Walter Winchell, Sheila Graham, a gossip columnist in her own right (ministering to the needs of “The Last Tycoon” F Scott Fitzgerald) at the Strip’s ‘Garden of Allah’
XX
A man’s man, George and his Hedy, their daughter Nancy, nurtured their classical roots...moving from Hollis to Long Island to Hastings carrying with them the maestro’s voluminous record collection.... Halley’s Comet of family and friends from his Budapest long lost youth.
A life of reverence and a far cry from Beethoven’s “Ruin of Athens”. More like Rossini’s “William Tell” playing as long as Italian horse operas endure.
Right Clint Eastwood? Right!...
“Thank you for having me, George,” said the belle of bel canto Marilyn Horne as she appeared on the Vocal Scene. before her foundation got its roots.
”Where have you been, Marilyn?” their chemistry so combustible as she spoke of her European conquests....her “Semirandi...her interpretations at the Dusseldorf opera house, down from the Adlerplaza ‘1630' #6 Mertengasse in theAlstadt (“Old City”, the eleven children Adler base of peddling,...reeking from the Lodz ghetto)
The descending chords of Schubert’s Third Symphony a few yards from Heinrich Heine’s poetic landscape..
XXI
Could Atwater Kent, retired to his Bel Air mansion, judging the Metropolitan Opera auditions envision such an “over the moon”.... Arlene Auger, raised in South Gate, our Long Beach Boulevard bus to our Lindbergh Junior High , passing her rites of origin on its daily whirl.
After getting her elementary teaching license at Long Beach State, she strove mightily into her own vocal scene..German opera houses. Duet(s) with Cecilia Bartoli.
Singing wunderkid’s “Exultate Jubilate” at Prince Andrew’s betrothal with Sarah Ferguson at Westminister Abbey....
“A solitary artist who not only gives pleasure to her audience but also instruction for her colleagues.”
Hers was an exemplary career by any standards She sang beautiflly for more than half a century She sang great music, never bowing or pandering to public taste.(Tim Page’s obit)
She was an artist, steady and serious to the end. Bach Mozart Faure ,,Renee Fleming Karen Holvik sang in tribute.
XXII
In real time.... a toast to the thirty six years of the “The vocal scene”.. A colossal that tumbles civilizations ......
Dame Joan Sutherland.... Composer Philip Glass on his day job, hack license on hold , his credibility tested, with Nadia Boulanger in Paris....“ George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”
XXIII
Birgit Nilsson “Addiode Passato” Grace Bumby Susan Graham grammy in hand..... Victoria’s farewell ( Verdi’s“La Traviata”)
Heaven never endows human beings with a full life undisturbed by travail....Schller.
“The Vocal Scene” 36 years of mesmerizing canons..
Andras Schiff (1974) Victoria de Los Angeles Marilyn Horne Joan Sutherland Brigit Nilsson Carlos Bergozzi Jan Peerce Richard Tucker Enrico Caruso (1909 records) Robert Merrill Luciano Pavorotti Jussi Bjoerling
Cecilia Bartoli Grace Bumby Leontyne Price Lily Pons Andre Kostelanetz “Stokie” George Szell Lauritz Melchoir Ruggero Leoncavello James Melton Renata Tebaldi Monserrat Cabile Tariana Troyanos Rosa Ponzelle Beverly Sills (“Blossom Silverman”) Susan Graham Renata Scotto
Renee Fleming Carol VanNess..Nicholai. Ghetti Dorothy Kirsten James Morris Placido Domingo...( staffers June Lebell.. .... Nimet Habachy, (“the sultry Continental herself.” )
Enzio Pinza Roberta Peters Mirella Frenzi Maria Callas Kirsten Flagstad Eily Ameling George London Erich Leinsdorf Sherill Milnes Anna Moffo Leonard Bernstein Samuel Ramey Eleanor Steber Jon Vickers Jose Carreras Teresa Berganza Deborah Voight Lawrence Tibbett Richard
Tauber Marta Eggerth Jarmila Novotna Rudolf Bing Fritz Wunderlich Issac Stern Regina Resnek
Leonie Rysanek Leonard Warren Paul Plishka Franco Corelli Barry Tucker Tito Gobbi Mario Del Monaco Marina Arroya John McCormack Robert White the mighty Fyodor Chaliapin Ben Heppner Licia Albanese Ruth Laredo Regina Crespin George Cehanovsky Rise Stevens Duke Ellington Katherine Battle Gertrude Lawrence Paul Robeson of the canon..
And none other than Staten Island soprano Eileen Farrell.... married to a Big Apple policeman..... Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist finding his way.... teaching romantic languages, at Columbia.
Boys High’s “The quiet city”....Aaron Copeland...Park Avenue and Juilliart., William Schuman
And the maestro in his sublime Riverdale digs... ..... Arturo Toscanni
Revisiting George Jellinek’s “36 years of the Vocal Scene”...February 2, 2010
