You might call our story “The Case of the Missing Manuscripts.” It has all the elements of a great detective novel: European émigrés in Hollywood, two bitter rivals, a tragic fire, an unexpected revelation, even some forensic reconstruction. But instead of a hardboiled “private eye” solving a Byzantine murder mystery, we have a group of musicians and musicologists putting together the scattered pieces of a significant American work once thought lost.
That work — the Genesis Suite — will be heard in live concert for the first time in over 60 years on Thursday, May 29 and Saturday, May 31 at Benaroya Hall. Noted actors F. Murray Abraham and Patty Duke will narrate, and the Seattle Symphony and the University of Washington Chorale will be conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Visuals will come courtesy of Dale Chihuly.
The performance is the centerpiece of the Seattle Symphony’s “Coming to America” festival, which runs May 28—June 7, and celebrates composers who have come to this country in search of refuge, artistic liberty and new possibilities.
Seven different composers each contributed a movement to the Genesis Suite: Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Alexandre Tansman, Ernst Toch, and Nathaniel Shilkret. All were Jewish except Stravinsky. All except Shilkret had left Europe during the prelude to World War II and the Holocaust. They settled in Los Angeles, where many important European artists and intellectuals had gathered. Many refugee composers found work writing music for the film industry.
The Genesis Suite was the brainchild of the New York-born Shilkret, a composer, conductor and clarinetist who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s. Shilkret and Castelnuovo-Tedesco met when both were working at MGM Studios during the war. They discovered that they both shared a long-standing desire to write music based on the Bible. Shilkret then conceived of a set of “musical frescoes” synchronized to spoken narration.
The two men decided to collaborate, and invited other composers to participate as well. Each composer chose a different episode from the first eleven chapters of Genesis, and worked independently. Shilkret paid each a $300 commission.
The last two composers to join the project were the archrivals Stravinsky and Schoenberg, two titans of opposing styles who thoroughly despised each other. Schoenberg, originator of the serial (12-tone) method of composition, contributed the prelude, depicting the pre-creation chaos. Stravinsky was secretly paid $1000 for his “Babel” setting, which concluded the piece. Rehearsals were arranged so that the two would not meet. Once, when they accidentally showed up at the same rehearsal, they kept to opposite sides of the room.
In late 1945, conductor Werner Janssen’s orchestra gave the Genesis Suite its only public performance, and also recorded it. Critical reaction at the time was mostly negative, citing the work’s cinematic conception and disparity of styles, and the lack of thematic unity between the movements.
Another problem may have been the narration, according to Dr. Neil Levin, artistic director of the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music. (Levin will be in Seattle for the performances.) It was declaimed in an archaic 1920s style, which didn’t go over well. And the idea of seven composers writing a single work may have seemed especially “eccentric” at the time as well.
Today’s concert-goers are used to more eclecticism and have heard far more wide-ranging musical styles. They will likely find the work a fascinating exploration of the palette of musical expression available at the close of World War II, before postwar avant-garde and Cold War politics changed the musical scene forever.
In the 1960s, a fire at Shilkret’s house destroyed the Genesis Suite’s score and parts. Copies of the Schoenberg and Stravinsky movements existed elsewhere, but the other five movements were deemed lost. Then, in the early 1990s, musicologist James Westby found a copy of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s movement in the composer’s papers. Intrigued, he contacted the other composers’ families, and Milhaud’s score turned up as well.
Then Westby had a hunch. He had discovered that Shilkret held the copyright to the complete work. Might the missing three movements be filed at the U.S. Copyright Office under Shilkret’s name? Indeed they were. But the recovered scores were highly condensed, with only skeletal notes on instrumentation.
Enter the Milken Archive, which acquired the Genesis Suite materials. They hired Pat Russ, a Hollywood orchestrator with experience restoring classic film scores. Russ listened to the 1945 recording, studied each composer’s style, and painstakingly reconstructed the orchestrations of the Toch, Tansman and Shilkret movements.
“When we rediscovered the piece, everyone in the classical world was terribly excited without even hearing it,” said Levin. “These are good composers, and their craft is first-rate here. Nobody is saying it’s the greatest piece of the 20th century, but put together, it’s unique.”
Levin added that while the Genesis Suite does not use traditional Jewish folk or liturgical music, the intent is clearly “to tell the story from the point of view of the Hebrew Bible.” It has the “strong influence of Hollywood, in the best sense,” and also has echoes of the stories of how each émigré composer adapted to their new country.
In December, 2000, Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz recorded the Genesis Suite music with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. Later, five actors recorded the narration, and the work was released on Naxos American Classics (8.559442). The recording is one of several that Schwarz has made for the Milken Archive — others include Kurt Weill’s The Eternal Road, Herman Berlinski’s Avodat Shabbat and Milhaud’s Service Sacré.
Schwarz is very excited about bringing the Genesis Suite to Seattle. Mindful of the original criticisms of the work, he thought that adding a visual element would help to unify the movements. Schwarz turned to Dale Chihuly, whose glass sculptures had appeared behind the mysterious doors of Bluebeard’s Castle when the symphony performed Bartók’s opera last year. Chihuly selected a number of his works that complemented the music and texts, and worked with a videographer to record them.
The resulting visuals will be projected onto several “metallic, obelisk-like pieces hanging from the ceiling,” said Schwarz. “What Dale did was very subtle, very elegant, and very beautiful. He’s not mimicking the music…rather, he has brilliantly integrated this video into the work…and as a result, the piece is clearer in its artistic intent.”
Along with the Genesis Suite, the concert also features violinist Stefan Jackiw performing Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D. Korngold was a Viennese-Jewish musical prodigy who had penned several operas by his mid-20s. He moved to Hollywood in 1934. The concerto, written in 1945, represents a cross-fertilization between Korngold’s cinema and concert careers, written in a late Romantic vein, with several of the themes taken from his film scores.
Also heard will be the Symphony No. 3 by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, who spent the latter third of his life in exile from both Nazism and Communism, mostly in the United States.
Genesis Suite restored
