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From ‘The Moldau’ to the Mississippi, a flood of images

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Times Staff Writer

I went to Czechoslovakia in a fourth-grade music appreciation class. Of course, it was only in my head; I was listening to “The Moldau,” by 19th century Czech composer Bedrich Smetana. It depicts the course of the Vltava, or Moldau, river through Bohemia, from its most pastoral passages to its fiercest rapids. At the time, I didn’t know that Bohemia had become part of the Czech state in 1918 or that the Vltava flows through Prague. But I started thinking about Smetana’s homeland, seemingly so far away and cryptic, and I still mean to see it someday.

Music has a way of putting places in my mind’s eye. Listening to it, together with reading, is almost as good as traveling -- and better in the sense that you don’t need tickets or suitcases.

“Music lets you travel through time and space while you sit in your chair,” says John Mauceri, conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

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I love going to the Grand Canyon with Ferde Grofe’s 1934 “Grand Canyon Suite” and rambling over the Left Bank to George Gershwin’s 1928 “An American in Paris.” Some years ago I drove the back roads of West Virginia accompanied by Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” trying to decide whether the music or the scenery pleased me more.

I can’t hear anything by Richard Wagner without thinking of Germany, except “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the composer’s nationalistic signature from “Die Walkure,” the second opera of the “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle. Thanks to its use in the film “Apocalypse Now,” that music inevitably transports me to Vietnam by helicopter.

Claudia Macdonald, a musicologist at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, said the rise of nationalism in the 19th century helped spark the composition of music associated with place. An example of this is Robert Schumann’s “Rhenish” symphony, which claims the Rhine Valley, oft contested by France and Germany, for Deutschland -- in music, anyway.

These days, on Rhine River cruises, the “Lorelei” song is played when vessels pass a 433-foot promontory near the hamlet of St. Goarshausen, where a nymph lured boatmen to their deaths, according to legend. When I heard it there last December, it sounded tacky and cliched, one of the dangers of place-associated music.

How long must San Francisco suffer one crooner or another pining about having left his heart there? It embarrasses me to admit I once let myself be totally undone by a bad recording of Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York.” A New Yorker at the time, I was on a bus headed for Buenos Aires and desperately homesick. By the time Sinatra got to the part about his “vagabond shoes,” I had tears in my eyes.

Classical music critics started looking down on pieces that tell a story or describe a place in the late 19th century, conductor Mauceri said, never mind what they would think of “New York, New York.” They preferred more abstract music, ostensibly about nothing, like the work of Johannes Brahms.

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Mauceri has conducted Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot” at La Scala in Milan, Italy; Kurt Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins” in Berlin just before the fall of the wall in 1989; and the score for “The Wizard of Oz” at the Sony sound studio where it was first recorded. He has a different feeling about music with geographical associations. They work on two levels: Certain pieces, such as “The Moldau,” were specifically written to summon up places. Others have a spiritual connection to place because of their composers’ DNA.

“Everything Beethoven wrote is about Germany. It was in the water, wine, beer and bread,” Mauceri says. “His only opera, ‘Fidelio,’ is set in Spain, but there is nothing Spanish about it.” Mauceri also knows that some pieces of music transcend their ostensible stories and settings.

In 1989, while rehearsing Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” with the Scottish Opera in Glasgow, he took the composer on a driving tour of the Highlands as Max Steiner’s score to “Gone With the Wind” played on the car stereo. “It’s big, emotional, a huge landscape in music,” Mauceri says. “Lenny loved it.”

Some music is more about traveling than destinations. Remember all the classic car tunes of the 1950s and ‘60s? And Arlo Guthrie’s 1972 recording of “The City of New Orleans,” by Steve Goodman, recalling vintage trains that clatter along the Mississippi River from the Windy City to the Big Easy? And “America,” a travel ballad by Simon and Garfunkel, with such haunting lyrics as: “ ‘Kathy, ‘ I said, / As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, / ‘Michigan seems like a dream to me now. / It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw. / I’ve come to look for America.’ ”

A lot of music, from Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” to Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” is trying to find this country, it seems. Folk singer and composer Woody Guthrie spent most of his life searching, driving, hitchhiking and riding the rails around America. The fruits of his travels were such songs as “Do-Re-Mi,” about Dust Bowl migrants of the ‘30s trying to get to the Eden of California, and “This Land Is Your Land,” almost as familiar as our national anthem.

I could go on, never leaving the range of my CD player. But I need to pack my raincoat for a trip to London town, where it’s bound to be foggy.

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