St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 51

I. EDUCATION THE, REALM of IDEAS Edited by GEORGE McCUE SUNDAY POST' DISPATCH, FEBRUARY 22, 1970 3D America's First Great Composer 5-Volume Publication Brings New Appraisal of L.M. Gottschalk ONE OF HIS DEVICES came to be known as the "style pianola." This is Gottschalk's penchant for brilliant, fast-moving figurations in the highest stretches of the treble. The battle pieces, of which there are many, are full of this kind of device. There are transcriptions of music by Verdi, Weber, Rossini and others.

The salon pieces often are watery Chopin, while the virtuoso pieces plunge into the Liszt-Thalberg style. Some of the latter, notated on three and even four staves, might be revived with grand effect None of this music is easy to play, even the few pieces that require little technique. To revive this kind of writing successfully, a pianist must have a feeling for the period. Gottschalk's line is aristocratic and requires a very subtle approach. It is an approach not normally in the intellectual or emotional provenance of today's younger pianists.

Certainly Alan Mandel and Amiran Rigai, both of whom have recently made Gottschalk recordings, have little idea of the style, and, with the best intentions in the world, they stomp their way heavily through the music. Eugene List's recording of the early 1950s is better. But to know how this music really can sound, one must go to the archives and pull out such old recordings as Frank la Forge's performance of "Pasquinade" and Guiomar Novaes's of the variations on the Brazilian National Anthem. This is the kind of disciplined freedom needed for Gottschalk and, indeed, for all early romantic piano music. That, and one hell of a big technique.

And the softest and smoothest of singing tones, and the ability to hit a big climax without banging. What, a shame that Teresa Carreno, the greatest woman pianist of the time, never recorded! She had a few lessons with Gottschalk and was constantly playing his music. But she made only a few piano rolls, which are untrustworthy at best, and no flat-disk recordings at all. At least we have the Novaes, one of the all-time great piano records. 1970, New York Tinwe News Senrtra originality, certainly the first to exploit the heritage of Negro, Creole and South American popular music.

Gottschalk's nationalistic pieces have attracted the most attention. As a composer he was European-trained, and his writing reflects what he heard in Paris in the 1840s the music of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Thalberg. But through all this comes something very much Gottschalk's own, and it is no wonder that his exotic melodies and, especially, unheard-of rhythms got musical Europe so excited for several decades. Europe, not the United States. Gottschalk was a prophet without honor in his own land GOTTSCHALK'S TWO MOST famous works were "The Dying Poet" and "The Last Hope." At least, they were originally published under those titles.

Later, the Offergeld Catalogue tells us, they could be purchased more elegantly as "Le Poete Mourant: Meditation," or "Derniere Esperance." Roughly speaking, Gottschalk's piano music breaks down into four categories-nationalism, virtuoso, salon and transcription. By now some of the better nationalistic pieces "Bamboula," "Le Bananier," "Souvenir de Porto Rico" and the likeare beginning to re-enter the repertory. The Arno volumes are full of little nationalistic pieces that pianists today could look at with profit Take Ma Charmante, Epargnez Moi," which starts with a quiet, mournful section that sounds almost like Tchaikovsky, and then insinuatingly slides into a sensuous, even ravishing, slow Latin dance. The piece is a tiny masterpiece, amazingly sophisticated considering its date, and easy enough for an amateur to play. There is American nationalism, too, in which Gottschalk anticipated some of the Ives piano pieces, though, of course, on a more naive level.

There are out-and-out virtuoso exercises. Gottschalk, after all, was a brilliant and ingenious pian-ist, and much of his music reflects his own keyboard approach. By HAROLD C. SCHONBERG NEW YORK THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the death of Louis Moreau Gottschalk passed last Dec. 18.

Arno Press had planned to celebrate the occasion with the publication of all Gottschalk's piano music, and a mighty tribute that would have been. But publication timetables can be erratic, like everything else these days. Even the Long Island Railroad does not always run on time. There were delays in the Gottschalk project, and the five volumes have just come off the press. The five volumes contain 112 pieces and 15 publishers.

Arno Press is a reprint house, and has made photo offset reproductions of first or early editions of the Gottschalk pieces. Very good paper has been used, and the thick volumes are so bound that they open easily on the piano rack. Vera Brodsky Lawrence (remember the twopiano team of Brodsky and Triggs?) edited the series, and there is a lively biographical and bibliographical introduction by Robert Offergeld, the Gottschalk authority. Republication price for the five volumes is $175, and after March 31 the price will be $225. Arno's address is 330 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y.

10017. IN THE MEANTIME, Offergeld has been working on a complete catalogue of Gottschalk's music, a project that has taken him over two years. Unfortunately, this catalogue raisonne, a tremendous piece of Gottschalk research, has not been reprinted in the Arno publication. But the Stereo Review, 1 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016, is making it available to anybody who sends 20 cents in stamps to cover mailing costs.

The set is the climax of the recent revival of interest in the life and music of Gottschalk (1629-1869). It always has been accepted that tine New Orleans-born Gottschalk was America's first great pianist. Now we have come to realize that he was also America's first great composer: the first with any degree of Ten-foot effigies of Lawyer, Judy and Doctor in Center Opera production of Harrison Birtwistle's "Punch and Judy" i3 Opera At Minneapolis Imagination In Birtwistle's 'Punch and Judy' African Sculpture Show Sets The Record Straight Grass Roots Rampant By HAROLD BLUMENFELD MINNEAPOLIS PUNCH AND JUDY, Harrison Birtwistle's opera, was given its American premiere at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater by this city's unique and Now-minded Center Opera Company. Musically, Birtwistle's piece is picayune, dry and fussy. But he has happened on an engaging text: Stephen Pruslin's libretto is a game-like series of grisly murders told in the language of nonsense verse, baby-talk and whimsy and enacted within the visual framework of a puppet-show.

"Dancy baby turny. Watch Daddy singe and burny. Into fire throw and watch it glow, So bouncy baby burny." Punch, babysitting, has become vexed with Baby and throws it into the fire. Wife Judy returns, finds Baby's smouldering remains and confronts Punch with a word-game: "A cause for fear." "A pyre, a bier." "A bier, a wake." "A life at Annoyed, Punch leads Judy to the Altar of Murder and stabs her to death. The murder ritual completed, Punch mounts Horsey and goes off in quest of Pretty Polly, the ideal beauty.

(That is, he climbs on a swing; black-leotarded Mimes place the forward section of a Ride-A-Cock-Horse between his knees and swing horse and rider off on their Journey.) Punch finally wins Poll after four such trips, each of which follows upon another sequence of ritual slaughter. Birtwistle's score establishes its own relationship between the naive and the psychotic, musically bearing out the Petit Guignol of the text. Either the voices will sing innocent little nursery-rhyme ditties or they will leap about in cascades of post-Webemian pointillism. The orchestra of IS will either emit dry little inarches and waltzes in the early neo-classic vein or will kick up an avant-garde storm of careening instrumental runs. THE CENTER OPERA'S production overwhelms the viewer with its rampant imagination, virtuosity and grotesque vis ual splendor.

Punch and his victims are depicted in two simultaneous scales the cunningly costumed life-sized Pinocchios of the singers, and mammoth plastic and wool effigies serving as the singers' doubles. The live action thus has a gargantuan echo in the dollying and trucking of these droll Frankensteinian monsters. Punch stabs Judy's effigy while Judy registers the pain. Her neck is placed in a noose, but it is her huge alter ego that gets hanged: It is hoisted aloft, where it hovers ominously, soon to be joined by the plastic blow-ups of Punch's next victims, the Doctor and Lawyer. (Inadvertent witnesses to the first crime, they must be silenced too.

They are fatally perforated by a giant syringe and a quill pen, respectively.) The most fanciful of Punch's crimes is that visited upon Choregos an ominous-looking character in whom Mephisto and a commenting Greek Chorus are combined. Punch clobbers him with a trumpet, smashes his brains with two huge mushroom-like cymbals and crashes a giant lopsided drum over his skull. The omnipresent Mimes wheel out a big black coffin-contrabass. Choregos is loaded in, his extremities protruding. Punch "plucks pizzicati of panic and glissandi of gore" on the coffin-strings as poor Choregos expires in pain.

Punch wins Poll. With the effigies of his victims hanging hugely in the air above, he joins her in a final love-duet. (Amor omnia vincit: shades of Monteverdi's amoral "Poppea" finale.) "Punch and Judy" is an operatic "Stru wel-Peter" a bloody, sadistic tale told as if it were as blameless as Mother Goose. THE LONG ONE-ACTER should be X-rated for children (as "Struwel-Peter" has been in post-war West Germany). But most adults will probably rate the piece as generally too and musically too for their tastes.

Music and text unfold in many short cellular units, some of them recurring symmetrically within each sequence of Murder and Quest. There are a few telling musical moments: Judy's exquisite Passion-Aria, Polly's witty, stratospheric coloratura Rhapsodies, and the Adding Song Quartet, "A fractured skull, ssjL Is JJ 1 By WALTER BARKER WASHINGTON DESPITE DECADES of effort to free African art from the realm of anthropology and the misleading tag, "primitive art," it is still too often carrying the cross of both. It seems to wind up in the basement galleries of the museums behind glass cases looking faintly like an exhibit in a museum of natural history. As Horst W. Janson rightly points out, "primitive," is an unfortunate word suggesting the original condition of mankind, overburdened with conflicting emotional overtones.

A show that does a lot to set the record straight is "African Sculpture," on view this month at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Ironically it too suffered the fate of much African art and was installed in the basement galleries leading to a criticism by some Washington black artists that the installation is "crammed, It also unfortunately received the conven- tional "primitive art" display technique complete with Broadway lighting. Although it unquestionably deserves better, it rises above these obstacles to make its point that it is art, not artifact. The show also points out that African art, far from being primitive, must be regarded as on par with high art of all civilizations. The 200 works chosen by William Fagg of the British Museum conclusively demonstrate a significant contribution to world civilization.

It is about time. More than a half century ago Modl-gliani, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, and a core of other great artists arrived at this conclusion. The energy, directness, structural frankness, intensity and extremely a bleeding face! uiiai. ui una iiiuoiv.7 is narrow-gauge, monochromatic and cu- riously static, despite all the vocal and in-' strumental goings-on. Pruslin Punch's age at "half past but Bir- twistle's score makes him a latter-dayV Pierrot Lunaire, reflecting the half past "Jw midnight of varicose post-serialism.

The significance of the Center Opera Company far transcends its relative isola- tion in the northern Midwest. Its import-, ance is out of all proportion to its budget (only $130,000) and scope (four produc- tions a season, in some 40 state-wide per-formances.) Its pioneering work in pro--- duction design and in the fostering of new. works far outweighs the records of com-NJ panies with much larger physical and fi--nancial resources. The Center Opera has scored brilliant bull's-eyes with "Punch" and with other recent ventures. There has, been a magical production of Britten's "Midsummer Night's and just a year ago, the premiere of Eric Stokes's wildly inventive collage-opera, "Horspfal" a multi-level, cinematic work in which the saga of the American Indian is traced 1 since the advent of the White Man.

But much is risked in zeroing in on the new; and on occasion, even the Center Opera will be off target The production of Werner Egk's "17 Days 4 a recent work was, like "Punch," an American premiere. But typical of Egk (his name is an adopted one, standing for "Ein Grosser the score is, dull, pointlessly busy and pretentious. Lying in a post-romantic quagmire some- j' where between Schreker and the worst of. Strauss, it contradicts the comic inten- tions of its Calderon-based libretto at ev- ery turn. (The unfunny text deals with the Circe interlude of the "Odyssey." It con- tains an admixture of pseudo "Ariadne" love scenes between Ulysses and the n-J ohantress, and animal acts, a la "The Magic Flute," involving mariners the enchantress has transformed into lions, monkeys, "14 Days" represents a club-footed kind; 'V of German humor which is not exportable west of the Rhine.

The composer has laid yet another of his perennial eggks, and not even the Center Opera's men'' could put this humpty-dumpty piece to- gether again. The mistake of "14 Days" was offset by "Punch" and, earlier this season, bys "Oedipus" and "The Sphynx" a strike ing experiment in total musical theater, in which the singers aleatorically embel-f lish a given set of texts with an entire ga-i" i mut of improvised vocal sound and cho-" reographic movement. The current Min--. neapolis season will be rounded out with the premiere, later this month, of "The" Wanderer," a folk-opera based structurally on Oracle 56 of the "I Ching." Now only in its seventh season, the Cen-, ter Opera has established itself, alongside Hamburg, as one of the world's important bastions of new opera. It is high time itsi major productions were toured through-' out the United States, for the company is a phenomenon that must be seen to be be-' lieved.

Exhibit "SEVENTY PRINTS FOR '70" Noted American and European Prlntmaken Thursday, Feb. 26 Miru March 2, p.m. Gallery of th L0RETT0-HILT0N CENTER WEBSTER COLLEGE 5 ei GUARNERI STRING QUARTET M0N.i MARCH 2ND 8:30 P.M. SHELDON AUDITORIUM 1 3148 Washington Blvd. ADMISSION 2.75 (Students with Identification 11.50) Tfcfcats of Ethical Socfaty, 9001 Clayton Road, Wf" 1-0955) Watftlnaton Univ.

Ticket Office Women's lulldln 4uspfcei, Ethfeel Society FOR NEW THRILLS Read the Travel and Resort pages every Sunday. You'll find many interesting stories and advertise-ments about where to go, what to see and do on your vacation. ST. LOUIS PDST-DISPATCH Bronze seated figure of a man, photographed at village of Tada on a river bank of Nupeland, Nigeria an inner calm omy are well understood and defined. There is about this portrait something of the inner calm associated with images of Buddha.

Only a people with sophisticated knowledge of casting and firing metals could accomplish a work of this nature. THIS EXHIBITION is both a happy and a sad occasion. While it marks the glorious heights of African civilization, it also marks the near collapse of its great tradition in the visual. arts. African art that resisted the onslaught of climate, tribal warfare, decay and the white ant is bending to the effects of colonialism, racism, civil war, nationalism and the attendant weakening of the tribal system that was its strength.

Visitors to the show will be stimulated by the genius of African art, saddened by the uncertainty of its future. "African Sculpture" will be on view at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, March 21 through April 28, and at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City, May 16 through June 2L Seven St. Louis Places in National Register A ST. LOUIS COUNTY HOUSE, the Louis Auguste Benoist residence designed by George I. Barnett and completed about 1854, is the frontispiece illustration of the newly published "National Register of Historic Places." The 352-page book is the first edition of the National Park Service Inventory of structures, objects, sites and districts that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology and culture.

Oakland, the Benoist house at 7802 Genesta Street, Affton, is privately owned. Six other St. Louis landmarks are in the National Register. Listed as National Historic Landmarks are the Anheuser-Busch Brewery, Eads Bridge, the Golden Rod Showboat and the Wainwright Building; listed as historically significant are the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, Old Post Office and the Benoist house. Besides these St.

Louis and St. Louis County listings, there are 48 other items in 32 counties. The National Register may be purchased from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C, 20402, for $5.25. 1 fine design sense of African art were fed directly Into the mainstream of modern art.

Our own tradition of modern art has therefore a debt to Africa, and visitors to this show will be struck by the many close resemblances to modern works. THE QUALITY LINE in this African sculpture exhibition is extraordinarily high. Fagg has edited with a real eye toward esthetic standard, and the result is moving and memorable. Skipping over national boundaries he picked work from 150 tribes, the real base of African work and thought. The heroic and tragic Ibo are represented, as a result, by only two works.

One, a handsome wood carving of a seated man richly decorated with geometric shapes, is notable for a complex structure, headdress, support and symbol ic devices. This cult figure symbolizes self-confidence, the ability to take on all comers, the aggressive, practical, mas- ciiline power source that fascinated Afri cans of all tribes. For the Ibo in bis defeat of the moment today, it is sadly concluded that this belief has led him to tragic consequences. More than a third of the exhibition is devoted to masks, and their size, eyecatching images, and designs combined with naturally theatrical qualities to dominate the exhibition on first encounter. Actually mobiles using an assemblage method of construction in many cases reeds, bones, cloth, bells and wood), they were designed to be seen in motion, ducking, bobbing, and weaving while carried high over the heads of the gathered tribe.

They were also meant to be experienced against a background of drums, hand clapping and chanting. Seen as silent stabiles they are somewhat disadvantaged. Even so they are striking. A LARGE BAGA mask weighing nearly 80 pounds is impressive among dozens of stunning masks on view. When carried on the shoulders by a dancer concealed in a wide envelope of fiber underneath, it must have been a formidable sight What it symbolized was also formidable.

The gradual curves of head, features, shoulders and breasts were a poetic metaphor for the very source of life Itself. This "Goddess of Increase" says a great deal about African views of life, some of which are surprisingly close to modern physics and theology. The goddess's design is based on the exponential curves found in the growing, but nonliving parts of animals, horns, tusks and beaks. These curves and spirals In their equiangular or logarithmic progression Increase geometrically. The Africans saw in this progression, this increase, the evolution through time of all life.

Matter for them was static, only the great force of life energy itself gave matter form and meaning. Thus material life was the ground of their being, their space-time continuum, a world in motion, the outward expression of the life force. They believed, like the laying on of hands in Christian liturgy, that these forces could be contacted and channeled, and as was the case in many civilizations the dance ceremony in which the mask played a central part was liturgical in purpose. Paradoxically, there exists a naturalistic tradition in Africa that produced figures rivaling the naturalistic tradition in the West. One such work, "Seated Figure From Tada," described by Fagg as "the most remarkable work of art ever found in Africa south of the Sahara," is a bronze seated figure of a man.

At ease, yet erect in posture," his back muscles sag, the fatty tissue clearly defined. Head-to-body proportion is correctly set at one to seven; facial structure and anat- OIL A Startling New Film on Fidel and Cuba Today IN COLOR WEDNESDAY, FEB. 25 8:30 P.M. GRAHAM CHAPEL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Admission $1.00 at Deer Sponsored by the latin American Studtci Commlffe 7 I fs-r WHEREVER YOU CO Sat fha Pott-Dispatch Trovtl wd Kasart aoqas vary Sunday for all kinds at traval intormatiM Large Baga mask, its features a metaphor for the source of life Irish Textile Show TRISH an exhibition of textiles designed by Jack Lenor Larson, will be featured at the Art Gallery of the Spanish International Pavilion March 3-29. The show is sponsored by the Craft Alliance Gallery, 6640 Delmar.

The tweed fabrics, mostly suitable for upholstery, were woven in Ireland on Irish looms by Irish craftsmen, using Irish wools. Larson has studios in the United States, Europe and Asia. "Irish Awakening," coming to St. Louis at the instigation of Muriel Helfman, a member of Craft Alliance, is funded partly through private donations. Larson will deliver a slide-illustrated lecture about textiles on March 19.

5- i Mm "Beach With Bathers," a light-hearted pen and ink drawing from the show of 63 works by Jean Dubuffet, opening Thursday at the City Art Museum. The contemporary French painter, sculptor, draftsman and printmaker usually works in series, treating such subjects as city and landscapes, people and animals, overpopulation and pollution with wry distortions and delayed-action wit. The show is from the Museum of Modern Art, augmented by loans from St, Louis collections and the Gty Art Museum. Admission will be $1 for adults, 50 cents for students, children free; no charge on Tuesdays. 4t.