Perfect setting for 'The Lindbergh Flight''
The world became a smaller place on May 21, 1927. The day before, Charles A. Lindbergh had piloted a plane dubbed the Spirit of St. Louis down a Long Island runway, laden with fuel and little else. A day and a half later he landed in front of frenzied throngs in Paris, having become the first pilot to make the transatlantic journey alone.
Lindbergh's triumph brought forth a burst of cultural homage, including scores of songs and a dance craze. One of the odder tributes was "The Lindbergh Flight," a cantata for soloists, chorus, and chamber orchestra by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Weimar culture's original dynamic duo.
The Cantata Singers are offering a rare revival of this unusual piece on Sunday, as a benefit concert to open their Weill-centric season. They do so in an even more unusual venue: The Collings Foundation Aviation Museum in Stow. The Collings is a private museum that houses a collection of antique and modern airplanes, as well as automobiles. "The Lindbergh Flight" will be heard in a large hangar that houses planes dating from pre-World War II to the Vietnam era.
Commissioned for a contemporary music festival and premiered in 1929, it's a peculiar entry in the vaunted Brecht-Weill collaboration. Drawing heavily on Lindbergh's own account of his journey, Brecht's libretto fairly glows with wonder at his achievement and the technological promise it signifies. A speaker introduces each section, and Lindbergh's role is given to a solo tenor. The chorus represents a variety of characters, from the crowds in Paris to the inclement weather the pilot encounters. ("I am a phantom/Reckon with my presence/You will get to know me/I am the fog.")
If you think this seems a far cry from such dark and sharply satirical masterpieces as "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" and "The Threepenny Opera," you're not alone. "It really is very bizarre, no question," says David Hoose, the Cantata Singers' music director, "but it's charming and quaint, and it's delightful and fun."
It also has a rather tortured history. Weill reportedly fell behind on the music, and the first version of the piece included numbers written by both him and Paul Hindemith. Weill, who had very much wanted to write the piece himself, was unhappy with the collaboration, and about a year after the premiere he completed his own version, which, Hoose says, is "much more heartfelt and impassioned and coherent" than the joint effort.
An additional revision came years later, one whose basis was political rather than aesthetic. Shortly after Weill died, Brecht rewrote the libretto so as to erase any mention of Lindbergh, whose anti-Semitic comments and resistance to the United States entering the war revolted him. He changed the name of the piece from "Der Lindbergflug" to "Der Ozeanflug" ("The Flight Over the Ocean"), and the tenor's first line went from "My name is Charles Lindbergh" to "My name is of no importance."
The alteration dovetailed neatly with Brecht's Marxism, converting the flight from an individual achievement to one of mankind in general. The revision was short-lived, however, as Lotte Lenya, Weill's widow, quickly overruled Brecht's changes. Hoose says the Kurt Weill Foundation now mandates that the piece be performed with the original text. (The Cantata Singers will use an approved English translation.)
What of the music for this strange piece of travel music? Hoose describes it as falling between the astringent vocabulary of Weill's earlier concert works and the later Broadway music. "It's completely tonal, very approachable, with terrific tunes," he says. "It has that very poignant sense of harmony that was always there but became much more evident as time went on.
"We think of a lot of those pieces like 'Mahagonny' as so bitter," he continues. "This isn't bitter at all - just openhearted. . . . It's certainly of its time," he acknowledges. "But that doesn't mean it doesn't speak to us." He draws a parallel with some of the antique cars housed at the Collings Museum. "You see that car and you think, 'Gosh, what was that time like?' But you're very moved and thrilled by it. It's not dismissible at all. It absolutely speaks to us."
Sunday at 3 p.m. 617-868-5885, cantatasingers.org
They are family
An early highlight of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's music season is a collaboration between the outstanding young pianist Jonathan Biss and his mother, Miriam Fried, a violinist on the faculty of New England Conservatory. This Sunday they begin a two-concert exploration of the violin sonatas of Bartok and Brahms. Sunday's pairing features the first sonatas of each composer: the Bartok knotty and abstract, the Brahms a paragon of sunny lyricism.
Sunday at 1:30 p.m. 617-278-5156, gardnermuseum.org
