The Battle of Prague

This fall I gave a couple more performances of The Virtuous Virtuoso, one at an art gallery in NY, and one in the Powell Rotunda at UCLA. That performance was on an 1813 piano made by the English maker, John Broadwood; it's just the sort of instrument that you'd find in the home of a particularly genteel character in an Austen novel. It was strange to perform on the Broadwood, particularly because the piano is tuned to period pitch: in other words, a half step down. But it was pretty enlightening to learn first hand what the women I write about actually would've been playing.
Meanwhile, I was hard at work on my first dissertation chapter, which is about the Battle of Prague (the piece that closes my Austen recital program.) My research took me to an archive at Penn, where there's a wonderful collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century piano music, including several battle pieces. My research also consisted of me practicing the piece a lot, and trying to speculate as to just what made this work so popular. Honestly, it sounds pretty silly to my ears; the piece is a host of sonic imitations of battle sounds, like trumpet calls and galloping horses, even cries of the wounded (I describe it in my July 2 blog entry.) The best explanation I have for its incredible popularity is that the work was a way that women enacted battles at home during the Napoleonic wars, which took so many English men far away for literally years at a time. They could embody the events of the battlefield by performing virtuosic feats at the piano. That doesn't mean that listeners never found the work funny. I would guess that most often they did, at least to some extent. In fact, as I read up on the Battle of Prague, I discovered several references to the piece in nineteenth-century fiction, most of which made fun of it. The best of these comes from Mark Twain's novel, A Tramp Abroad, where he describes a horrible performance of the work by a young American girl in a Swiss hotel. You can check it out online at http://www.fullbooks.com/A-Tramp-Abroad-Part-5.html.

Austen Mania!

I keep forgetting to add new entries. But there’s something I’ve been wanting to write an account of for a while, which happened last fall, so here goes.

I spent a good part of 2006-07 in the UK, living in an apartment in Golders Green, North London, while doing dissertation research at the British Library and in several archives around the country. Among the archives I visited was the Jane Austen Memorial Archive, at the author’s former home in Chawton, Hampshire. The first day I spent there was magical from start to finish; I think the memory of that day will leave any Austen fan weak in the knees.

I took the train from London early in the morning. It’s about an hour’s journey to Alton, and once I arrived I had to wait a good fifteen minutes in the freezing November cold for a taxi to take me to Chawton, a neighboring village. The scenery on the train from London reminded me of a film I had seen as a kid called The Railway Children, which, granted, takes place far from Hampshire, in Yorkshire, up in Northern England. I couldn’t stop thinking about the movie, trying to remember details even though I haven’t seen it in probably close to twenty years.

I arrived at the cottage in Chawton by mid-morning. It wasn’t actually my first trip there; I had visited Austen’s home with my mom and sister less than two years before. Most of the cottage is a public museum, where visitors learn about Austen’s life and view her former possessions and those of her family as they wander from room to room. When I arrived, I met several of the staff who run the museum, including the chairman of the board of trustees, Tom Carpenter. We sat in a room downstairs, which used to be the kitchen, drinking tea and discussing my research interests as they related to the archive. I explained that I was chiefly interested in seeing Austen’s collection of sheet music; the author was an accomplished pianist, and her books of music have been preserved and catalogued by the Archive. Tom brought them out from the safe, eight volumes of music for solo keyboard, small ensembles, and voice. Two of the volumes are written in Austen’s own hand; she probably borrowed the sheet music from a friend or relative and, in the absence of a nearby Kinkos, made copies by hand so that she could continue to play the works after returning the scores. Wearing white gloves to protect the pages, I flipped through the volumes, impressed by Austen’s meticulously neat handwriting.

Throughout the day, I would leave the kitchen with one or two volumes, and wander upstairs to the drawing room to try some of the works on the Clementi square piano owned by the museum. Although the piano dates from Austen’s time, it is not the instrument that she learned on; the whereabouts of that piano are unknown. It was incredibly exciting for me to sit there, playing through music in the author’s own hand in the very room in which she used to play.

It grew dark early—one of the more depressing things about winter in England—and Tom popped his head into the kitchen as I was taking a break, asking me if I had any interest in attending a concert that evening down the street, which would include a few works from the collection. The music would be interspersed with readings from Austen’s novels, and, as it turned out, the narrator was Jenny Agutter, who had starred in the film The Railway Children. I felt ridiculous making a big deal out of the fact that I had been thinking of the movie all morning, but it was an amazing coincidence to have remembered the movie for the first time in years that morning, only to see its star later that day.

A few hours later we walked down the road—it was freezing!!--toward the church that Austen used to attend. It, like the cottage, are part of a larger estate which belonged to Austen’s brother; as we walked the half mile down the road, I kept thinking that this was the very same route Austen had taken, probably almost daily, to visit her brother and his family. Prior to the concert, Tom and I attended a reception in the huge manor house in which her brother had lived. While we were there, I talked for a long time with an elderly woman named Diana, who knew a great deal about Austen’s musical notebooks. I kept wondering how she knew so much about them, and after she had moved away to talk to someone else, I asked Tom who she was. He explained that she was actually the person who had donated the notebooks to the archive; she is Jane Austen’s great-great-great-great niece (I believe that’s the correct number of greats.) I nearly cried! I could hardly believe it!

The concert was wonderful, Jenny Agutter and the performers all fabulous, and afterwards a local couple gave me a ride back to the train station. I made it back to London by 11 or so, and home about 45 minutes after that, which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that I had a train ticket to return to the archive early the next morning.

That first day in Chawton was amazing, not simply because I got to ooh and aah over Austen’s possessions, home, and even family members, but because all of that contact was part of my dissertation research. There are a million specifics and facts that you can take from books and primary sources, but there are other kinds of research too, and as I played the piano in Austen’s drawing room, I accumulated knowledge of another kind, which informs my research as much as anything.

The Inaugural Performance of "The Virtuous Virtuoso!"

On June 2, I gave the first performance of "The Virtuous Virtuoso," a conversational recital program of works taken from Jane Austen's collection of keyboard music. (One of these days, I'll get round to posting a description of the project under the link on my homepage!) The venue was the Clark Library in Los Angeles, a former private mansion turned library, with an absolutely stunning music room. The program included works of Haydn, Thomas Powell, Steibelt, Pleyel, Cramer, and Kotzwara. These were the composers known to Austen and other English amateur pianists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, the final work on the program, Kotzwara's Battle of Prague, was the single most popular piece of keyboard music in England for fifty years! Most of us have never heard of it!

Of all the pieces on the program, the Battle of Prague got the most audience reaction by far. The work--which I gave a paper about in Montreal a few days later--is a musical depiction of a battle between Austrian and Prussian troops, complete with the sounds of cannons, flying bullets, trumpets, kettle drums, sword fighting, horses galloping, cries of the wounded, and a host of other sonic renditions of the battlefield. Most of these are labled in the score, and in performing the piece for the first time, I wanted to communicate the section headings to the audience. So, I solicited the help of Bruce Whiteman, head librarian at The Clark, and a musicologist, no less. I constructed about fifteen signs on posterboard, with text such as "The Attack" and "March of the Turks." As I performed the work, Bruce held the corresponding signs in the air for the audience to see. I wasn't sure how this would turn out, but the piece was met with laughter from start to finish, a good sign, I think!

The recital includes a fair bit of talking between pieces, where I tell the audience about the accomplished woman in the late Georgian and Regency periods, and talk briefly about Jane Austen and her relationship to music. I also read a few of my favorite scenes from her novels, where piano playing is particularly important. I wasn't sure how engaging the conversational component would be, nor how smooth the transitions between playing and speaking would be, but I think everything turned out well. At the reception afterwards--a beautiful catered event that The Clark includes with all of their concerts--I met a number of enthusiastic audience members, with loads of ideas and responses. Their thoughts were invaluable, and I'm already at work incorporating their feedback into the program. It was refreshing to see how many of them mentioned the conversational recital format as something they particularly enjoy and respond to; I certainly feel the same way. And it was lovely to hear their enthusiasm for the project and for Austen in general, whose books I've been reading since junior high!

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