Sunday, 22 February 2004
Dear Mr. Ciampa,
I really appreciate your efforts to mark the 25th anniversary of my father Anton Heiller’s death on 25th March this year. Thank you also for inviting me to contribute a few words to the programme, and I am of course delighted to do so.
The various upcoming events will honour this special musician both in his musical output and in his humanity.
It is especially lovely for me that Anton Heiller’s music is still meaningful to people today and capable of moving them deeply. It is in my estimation a sign of particular validity if sacred music of the 20th century is able to evoke intense sensations in today’s listeners: Heiller had an extremely warm character--as an organ teacher, artist and as well as a human being. He wrote formally assured, expressive and inimitable music, which is born out of a great empathy with, and love for, his fellow man. At the same time his music always has an explicit spiritual purpose: Heiller put the letters S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria) under every single one of his works, demonstrating his gratitude and humble awareness of the great gift that had been bestowed on him. He adopted this expression of sincere thanks from his great role model J.S. Bach, whose genius and unerring faith determined Heiller’s life.
It is a great joy for me to know that, so many years after my father’s death, his music is still alive, and meaningful. Time and again it meets with deep resonance with audiences, and it is disseminated by his former students and their pupils, as is the case in this five-day HeillerFest in Boston.
Anton Heiller died at the early age of 55, but his musical output lives on in countless recordings. The inherent power and beauty of his unique compositional style is evident in the growing appreciation of his music, and the fact that so many new audiences are drawn to it. I want to take this occasion to thank all those who have contributed to the dissemination of his work, be it as teacher, organiser of concerts or performer.
I wish you and all those involved in the HeillerFest every success and especially a warm reception by your patrons.
With thanks, and greetings from Vienna,
Dr. Bernhard Heiller
In 1986 I was a fifteen-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. My well-meaning parents and teachers thought I should have the best teacher money could buy, so I was assigned the most famous piano teacher and groomed for the piano competition highway. One day I announced that I was quitting the piano and taking up the organ. What happened next is a miracle at which I continue to marvel. At NEC there was only one organ teacher who taught pre-college organists, so by default that’s whom I was sent to. That teacher’s name was Yuko Hayashi. Among her numerous teachers, there was only one whom she clearly worshipped. His name was Anton Heiller. Yuko doesn’t advocate listening to recordings, yet she said to me, “Never imitate anyone--except Heiller.”
Fifteen years later I read an interesting article on improvisation by Christa Rakich. I e-mailed her, and we decided to try a few improvisation lessons. Soon she became a treasured mentor and friend. During one lesson I started talking about Heiller, and discovered that Christa had studied with Heiller.
For both women, Heiller was the one and only god. I cannot express the debt I felt I owed this great man. An opportunity to repay my debt arose when I learned that both Peter Planyavsky and Massimo Nosetti, two of the finest organists of their respective countries, were both going to be in the United States in early March, 2004. It meant celebrating the Heiller anniversary a few weeks early, but nonetheless I jumped at the opportunity to lure these two great artists to the Boston area. It was especially crucial to get Planyavsky, who is acknowledged (even by the Heiller family) as Heiller’s most important disciple.
Christa Rakich agreed to play a Bach recital in conjunction with her “Tuesdays with Sebastian” series, thus cross-publicizing the two projects. Equally enthusiastic was Stephen Roberts, a Heillerian whom I knew electronically but not personally. Given his reputation, kindness, and proximity within driving distance of Boston, I knew I needed to enlist him.
I did not, for one moment, intend for this little festival to be THE Heiller Festival; I planned it with the full assumption that other cities would sponsor much grander fests with much larger budgets. It was impractical, for instance, to feature many of Heiller’s compositions (though composing was only one aspect of Heiller’s multifaceted career). Still, I owed Heiller a debt, and I was going to repay it with my own personal resources and in my own way.
Monday
Choral Evensong
with Peter Planyavsky and the St. Paul’s Choir
There are two types of performers: those who emit electricity, intensity, and sometime neurosis, for whom every piece seems a matter of life or death (Caruso, Horowitz, Heifetz); and those who exude mental and physical health, for whom each piece feels like the first of many encores (Gigli, Rubinstein, Kreisler). Peter Planyavsky is of the second type. The 75-minute Evensong service seemed short. One felt that another twenty-five improvisations could have fallen from his sleeve without any detectible effort.
There is something Beethovenian about Planyavsky, a certain Viennese ruggedness. It snowed as we walked down St. Paul Street together, yet he seemed unconcerned about his photocopied prelude and postlude which he held, uncovered, under his arm. “In Vienna I always walk around like this,” he explained. He spent not much more than an hour at the Bozeman organ, an eclectic instrument on which the stopnames are on plaques next to the stopknobs. I myself occasionally pull the wrong stop! Not only did he never do that, but he had a total comprehension of the organ’s tonal resources, as if he already knew how every combination would or wouldn’t work.
I knew firsthand of Planyavsky’s brilliance as a liturgical improviser, and I designed the Evensong around it. No trite compline hymns for him; I chose Aus tiefer Not and O Welt, ich muß dich lassen. And while the prayerbook rubric permits a “moment of silence” before the Mag and the Nunc, respectively, I translated “moment of silence” as “three-to-five-minute organ improvisation.” The individual improvisations complemented and contrasted each other: the simple effectiveness of his bicinium on Le Cantique de Siméon; the color and fluid virtuosity of his Magnificat; the rich, impenitently German-Romantic O Welt; and so on. Each improvisation seemed to enhance the others.
Boston is predominantly an Early Music town. The St. Paul’s Choir, a mixture of professionals and volunteers, gravitates towards Romantic repertoire. We do little Bach and nothing modern. What, then, would I choose for an anthem for the Evensong? The two most obvious composer choices--Bach and Heiller--were immediately eliminated. (The four section leaders did sing Heiller’s O Jesu, all mein Leben for the Introit.) After weeks of dilemma, the idea came to me: “Behold God the Lord passed by,” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. In the “tempest” of America’s classical music industry, amidst all the “mighty winds,” “earthquakes,” and “fire,” Heiller was that “still, small voice.”
Tuesday
Masterclass with Peter Planyavsky
The organ world is susceptible to fads. This wouldn’t be a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that the partakers of the fad don’t realize that it’s only a fad. Theirs is the way of “truth;” all that came before was unenlightened and uninformed. Then fifteen years pass and a new fad with “new truths” comes along. What about the proselytes of the old fad? Oh, they were unenlightened and uninformed.
Planyavsky discussed this problem briefly but eloquently. He compared the passing trends, both in organbuilding and organ playing, in a humorous but devastatingly accurate way. What will organbuilders’ and organists’ next trend or fad be? Planyavsky left the question unanswered, in favor of a much more interesting topic: MUSIC! Rather than seek truth in ephemeral fads, he finds it in the music itself. In this respect he is very much Heiller’s student.
“Bach was young! The Duke was young! They were having fun!” Thus Planyavsky pinpointed the meaning behind the Bach/Ernst Concerto in G, which was played in dazzling fashion by the 16-year-old Wunderkind, Jacob Street, a longtime student of John Skelton. Planyavsky hasn’t time for pretension; he’d rather spend his energy calmly pointing to the heart of the music.
The other three students’ playing was equally fine. Two Rakich students, Jason Cloen and Ed Broms, offered excerpts from the Clavierübung. And Nobuko Ochiai, a student of Peter Sykes, amazed us with Heiller’s fiendish Tanz-Toccate. Even Planyavsky seemed impressed that she carried it off on a two-manual tracker with no pistons!
The masterclass was followed by an elegant reception, organized by the church folk. Those expecting the ubiquitous chips and dip were treated to curried chicken and other delicacies, washed down with wine and Sam Adams Winter Lager. In attendance were all five of the HeillerFest performers, as well as several Heiller students (notably John & Carolyn Skelton and Yuko Hayashi).
Wednesday
Recital by Stephen Roberts
Stephen Roberts is one of nature’s gentlemen. Even if he weren’t, he would still be one of the finest organists and organ pedagogues in America. Were it not for the encouragement, advice, and insightful humor contained in months of voluminous e-mail correspondence, I could not have pulled off the HeillerFest.
No adjective weaker than formidable is appropriate to describe Stephen Roberts as an organ recitalist. He is a strong technician who rarely drops a note, yet not a phrase lacks style or musicality. I was humbled by Roberts’ preparedness. His copiously marked scores revealed that every nut and bolt had been taken apart and put back together again. Yet the concert sounded fresh and spontaneous, as if he were playing for a friend.
The highlight of the recital was Roberts’ interpretation of Heiller’s Ecce lignum crucis, a work that he studied thoroughly with the composer. (Roberts played from a score that bore the composer’s signature at the bottom.)
Thursday
Lecture/Concert
by Massimo Nosetti: “Heiller: His Influence in Italy”
At age 44, Massimo Nosetti is one of the most revered organists in Italy, and the four-manual Zanin organ (1990) which he designed for the Basilica di Santa Rita in Turin is considered one of Italy’s finest. Nosetti is everything you’d expect from a Northern Italian male: not a hair out of place, not a wrinkle in his impeccably tailored suit, and his charm makes one feel like a close friend.
Like Stephen Roberts, Nosetti has an impressive command of organ technique and registration. Yet the two recitals could not have been more different. Nosetti is the embodiment of Italian musicmaking: the wide palette of color, the intrinsic lyricism, the unerring timing, the omnipresent life and charm, the emotional sincerity--all the traits that one expected from a great Italian singer or violinist during the Belle Époque. In an era when the most famous classical superstars have the least ethnic identity in their playing, it was gift to be able to hear an all-Italian program, played by an all-Italian musician.
Nosetti’s well-paced and informative talk was conducted in English--a language in which Nosetti told me he is self-taught--quite incredible, given his wide vocabulary and total comprehension. (It helps that he is categorically fluent in Italian, French, German, and apparently Spanish as well.) Both recital and talk traced the history of Italian organ music “from the harpsichord style of the 18th century, to the operatic style of the 19th century, to the Neoclassic style of the 20th century.” Naturally, he covered 20th-century organ playing and discussed those two great pioneers, Bossi and Germani. But what was surprising was the extent to which Heiller’s Italian reputation rivalled even that of Germani. The “Holy Trinity of Haarlem”--Heiller, Marie-Claire Alain, and Luigi Tagliavini--was venerated also in Italy, it seems. In addition, it turns out that Heiller spoke very decent Italian and conducted masterclasses in that language.
Friday
All-Bach Recital by Christa Rakich
That Christa Rakich was a Heiller student is always apparent, both in her Teutonic playing and in her devotion to J. S. Bach. Rakich’s all-Bach recital was presented in conjunction with “Tuesdays with Sebastian,” a project in which she and Peter Sykes are playing all of the keyboard works in thirty-six concerts over three years, on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. As a point of trivia, there is only one work that will have been repeated: the Passacaglia. I all but begged her to end the HeillerFest with it. I just couldn’t imagine fnishing off the week with any other masterpiece.
No one who knows Christa Rakich was surprised by the masterful handling of the entire recital. Several of us remarked at how “easy” the Trio Sonata in C sounded. And the playing of the Passacaglia had at least one trait in common with Heiller’s: the entire work felt like one uninterrupted crescendo, from beginning to end. n
