COMPOSER MICHAEL SHAPIRO ON ETHNICITY, JUDAISM AND MUSIC
by Lawrence D. Mass
from left: Michael Shapiro, Gottfried Wagner, John Corigliano, William M. Hoffman at Lawrence D. Mass at the home of Michael Shapiro, Chappaqua, 1995. All were co-signatory to a Letter to the Editor published by the New York Times (November 22, 1998) critical of Joseph Horowitz’s troubled NYT review of Marc Weiner’s epochal Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination.
Like his American forbears George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, Michael Shapiro is a distinctively American composer whose works reverberate with the idioms, rhythms, and colors of polyglot, melting-pot America. A glance at his website is like savoring a gumbo. So many ingredients. So much flavor.
He recently completed a large-scale work entitled Voices for soprano soloist, chorus, and chamber ensemble based on Sephardic poetry of the Shoah which will receive premiere performances and recording in Spring 2020 and 2021 in New York City, Washington, D.C., Montclair, New Jersey, and the UK.
His Archangel Concerto for piano and orchestra was recently recorded by pianist Steven Beck with Michael Shapiro conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. His Roller Coaster, originally premiered by Marin Alsop conducting the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music Orchestra, and the entr’acte music from his first opera Perlimplinito, Opera Sweet, A Lace Paper Valentine, were also recorded by the BBC NOW, as have his song cycles by soprano Ariadne Greif. Also, his Second Symphony was premiered and recorded by Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons’ old ensemble, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Michael Shapiro is currently working on a full-length musical theater work called Getting In, story by Greg Sego, a violin concerto for Tim Fain, a work for band called In Every One, as well as 24 piano pieces called Passages based on Torah and Haftorah portions.
His new work for band, Ol’ Mississippi Sings the Blues (a tribute to the great Memphis Blues man Blind Mississippi Morris), was performed last season by lead commissioner, the University of Memphis, Albert Nguyen, conductor, in Memphis and on tour in Tennessee, as well as at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, conducted by David Kehler.
This past year’s performances of Michael Shapiro’s music for the classic talkie film Frankenstein included its European premiere at the Bergen International Festival with a repeat performance by the Dallas Winds conducted by Jerry Junkin and the United States Navy Band conducted by Captain Kenneth Collins in DC. His new operatic version Frankenstein-The Movie Opera is slated for premiere next season, and the instrumental version will be performed all over the United States and Canada by professional organizations and universities.
Along the way, Shapiro’s music has been played in dozens of venues nationally and internationally, with regional and chamber ensembles as well as major university and metropolitan symphony orchestras.
Regionally, he is best known as the Conductor Laureate of the Chappaqua Orchestra where he was music director for 16 years.
Composer Michael Shapiro has given new life to Frankenstein, his operatic setting of which, based on the classic James Whale film, is set to premiere in 2020.
My friendship with Michael Shapiro goes back more than 30 years, when I met him through Gottfried Wagner, great grandson of composer Richard Wagner. Gottfried is best-known as the black sheep of the Wagner family for their being what he considers to have been perpetrators of the Holocaust.
What follows is my interview with Michael, conducted over lunches and via correspondence in the summer of 2019.
Larry: A book project I had planned in the 1980’s, before homosexuality came out of the closet in the music world, was “Homosexuality and Music: LGBT Persons, Themes and Issues in Music and Opera.” It’s a book I did a lot of work for but which was never completed for several reasons, one of which jumps out at me now: the subject is just too diverse, fluid and uncontainable. There are no characteristics that resonate across the great spectrum of LGBT composers the way nationality seems to for music. We are comfortable talking about French, German, Italian and Russian composers and musics but we shy away from talking about “gay music.” Tchaikovsky may have been a composer who was gay, but if we wanted to describe him summarily, we’d say that he was a Russian composer or a romantic composer. In this same vein, we are comfortable talking about German composers — Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert (who may have been gay) and Wagner.
In fact, when it comes to this commonality of what is German or not, there was an epochal development: an essay “Judaism and Music” by Richard Wagner. Just as I wanted to find affirmative and affirming commonalities among LGBT composers and music, Wagner wanted, like Donald Trump, to find and amplify any perceived racial or ethnic differences, in this case between Jewishness and German-ness, if you will, in music. So was Wagner right in his principle of drawing distinctions? Are we justified in talking about Jewishness and music? And by the same token, are we justified in talking about “Gayness in music”?
Michael: Of course Wagner wasn’t right! Wagner’s Jewish contemporaries Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer composed out of their life experiences and who they were (as did Wagner himself and as I do). I learned long ago that one cannot hide who one is when creating music. Who one is comes out in the notes. How deep your thought, how loving the message, how talented you are, how melodious, how learned.
I am a Jewish American born in Brooklyn, NY in 1951, exposed since to my family, my community (secular and religious), the popular and classical music of my time (and times before), to life’s experiences. All of these come out in my compositions. The better the composer, the more these life experiences and the personality of the writer, are revealed.
Larry: OK, So are we justified in talking about Jewishness and music?
Michael: Yes, we are, but not in the way Wagner did in his infamous essay. There are certainly Jewish melodic strains or patterns in my music. Half of my music I would say is directly influenced by my background (my father Sam was a Klezmer clarinetist). This influence is sometimes buried in the phrases (such as in my Second Symphony or Archangel Concerto for Piano and Orchestra). Only more obvious in my pieces derived from traditional melodies such as my Eliahu Hanavi Variations for solo violoncello or my Peace Variations for solo violin.
Larry: And by the same token, are we justified in talking about “gayness” in music?
Michael: I am not sure what this means. Is Aaron Copland’s unfussy orchestration the result of his being a gay Jewish boy from Brooklyn or more likely the influence of Boulanger and Stravinsky on clarity of musical thought? Is Tchaikovsky’s golden orchestration a result of his closeted gay life or more likely, the result of composing in the elaborate and gilded culture of Czarist St. Petersburg?
Larry: Clearly, like me and a majority of serious music lovers, Jewish and non-Jewish, you were smitten by Wagner’s art. And also like me and others, but far fewer, you came to an understanding and acceptance of the seriousness of Wagner’s anti-Semitism.
This seems likewise to have been the case with your close friend and colleague of decades, Gottfried Wagner. But Gottfried has been a lot more careful not to indulge memories or feelings of having been thus smitten. He’s like Parsifal, determined at the risk of his own life never to allow arts of seduction to prevail. Have you ever known Gottfried to admit to having been seduced, like you and me, by the music and art of his great grandfather?
Michael: Gottfried has remarked to me that the only Wagner opera he likes is Tristan. It is a love story with no political or anti-Semitic overtones, no xenophobia; just a tragedy.
Larry: If someone were to refer to you as a “Jewish Wagnerite” and ask if that were an accurate description, what would you say?
Michael: I would object. As I have mentioned to you, I am a musician and am in awe of Wagner’s great talents as an orchestrator and the creation of sounds as no one else has ever created. But I am repelled by his message of hate. There is nothing warm in Wagner’s music. He is always passionate but it is ice cold.
Also, my Jewish background is not tied in any way to those Jews who pre-War took the pilgrimage to Bayreuth and prayed to the great god Richard.
Larry: What is your sense of the world of Jewish Wagnerism and Jewish Wagnerites?
Michael: If such world contains a denial or ignorance of his abhorrent messages, then it is the practice of a kind of self-hate. Interestingly, Theodore Herzl had some of these traits. His appearance in top hat and tails in front of the Kaiser was almost Wagnerian.
Larry: Do you think Jewish Wagnerism has been good for the Jews?
Michael: I don’t think so. It’s hard, however, for a Jewish boy from Brooklyn in the 21st Century to put himself in the mind of Gustav Mahler in the early 1880s when his student friend Hugo Wolf and he stood near Wagner briefly in Vienna.
Larry: What I’m asking is something more global. Has all that devotion to Wagner by the Hermann Levis, Mahlers, Soltis, Levines, Bernsteins, Barenboims, and countless other distinguished Jewish conductors and artists brought Jews and the worlds of music and culture to a more elevated place of understanding and transcendence?
Michael: Although there are examples or residue today of Jewish Wagnerism in some people, I think the Shoah knocked that concept on its proverbial tuchis.
Archangel Piano Concerto, Recording Project by composer Michael Shapiro with Steven Beck, pianist, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Larry: Your latest piece is called Archangel. What a wonderful subject. Wikipedia notes that Archangel Michael is mentioned three times in the Book of Daniel, and that the idea that Michael was the advocate of the Jews became so prevalent that, in spite of the rabbinical prohibition against appealing to angels as intermediaries between God and his people, Michael came to occupy a certain place in the Jewish liturgy.
Archangels are apparently common as well to all the major and various minor religions. Beyond your being Michael, Jewish and gifted as a composer, what drew you to this subject?
Michael: I was first drawn to the idea of the Archangel when I was reacquainting myself with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. His description of the casting out of Satan from Heaven and rising up with his demons against the forces of the Archangel Michael rang deeply. The epic story of the battle between good and evil rages on — in the arch of our lives, and beyond.
Larry: Are you, Michael Shapiro, one of our archangels? Are you an intermediary not only for Jews, but for the world?
Michael: I am drawn to the idea of righteous people (in Hebrew tsaddikim) fighting in their way against evil. My piano concerto is in two “parts” rather than movements. Part One depicts the war between the forces of good and evil (depicted in Paradise Lost, and Book Two portrays Adam and Eve (and the Serpent) in Eden and their being cast out into the world we all live in, a world of the rise of mechanized evil (the Shoah being the prime example), and the resistance against tyranny.
Larry: What can you tell us about your new opera Frankenstein? why it’s still relevant today?
Michael: First, James Whale’s great early talking film starring Colin Clive and Boris Karloff had no music. In 2002 I wrote the score which is played live simultaneously with the picture in movie theaters and concert halls. Its instrumental versions (chamber orchestra, full orchestra, and wind ensemble) have received over 50 performances worldwide including the European premiere at the Bergen International Festival in Norway, a recording by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the UK, and about a dozen performances every year throughout the US and Canada.
The new operatic version uses the Latin Requiem Mass as its libretto. The Requiem Mass is about Resurrection. The Latin is magisterial and beautifully written. The film is also about, among other things, resurrection and the war between good and evil, as well as a doctor who plays at being G-d. The juxtaposition of the Requiem text with the film I believe will be potent.
Larry: Also, does it have relevance to our dialogue about Jews and music?
Michael: One of the movie’s great themes is the depiction by James Whale of the Monster as “the other,” not an unfamiliar theme for Jewish people (or Wagner’s Wandering Jew, The Flying Dutchman).
Larry: Does Archangel have comparable relevance?
Michael: It has the relevance I have programmed into the piece. The relevance that it is our responsibility to fight against darkness in any way we can. My piece is not only a depiction of this struggle, but I hope a warning.
