Mythical Composer’s Work Spurs Esoteric Pieces by UCI Professors

While many classical composers labor in obscurity for their entire careers, Adrian Leverkuehn simply struck a deal with an influential friend to win his fame and fortune.

Leverkuehn, the mythical character who sold his soul to the devil in return for musical acclaim in novelist Thomas Mann’s “Dr. Faustus,” is the “featured composer” at tonight’s concert in UCI’s Fine Arts Village Theatre. The program will include two original and somewhat esoteric works actually written by UCI music professors Peter Odegard and Zelman Bokser that were inspired by pieces written by Leverkuehn’s character in “Dr. Faustus.” Two more familiar works, discussed extensively in the book as models for the composer, also will be presented--Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32, performed by Willem van Overeem, and Schubert’s “Der Wegweiser” (“The Sign Post”), sung by bass John Weiss.

(Tonight’s concert is being presented in conjunction with a Thomas Mann Symposium co-sponsored by UCI’s German department and Humanities Institute to celebrate the donation of a large Mann collection to the school’s library. The conference ends Saturday with a presentation of scholarly papers on Mann’s “Dr. Faustus.”)

Margaret Murata, a member of the UCI music department faculty, calls tonight’s performance “a brief summary of the music in the life of Adrian Leverkuehn.”

“It’s a combination of great traditional music from the 20th Century,” said Murata, who produced the concert. “It would be nice if the concert inspired some people to read ‘Dr. Faustus’--it’s very deep and it addresses questions we still have today in the world of art--but primarily I want the program to show that the musical descriptions in the novel are real. They’re not fantasies. They can be turned into real music (that represents) a period when people were trying to do something new and still communicate.”

To select the concert program, Murata pored over Mann’s 1,000-page novel and passed on to Odegard and Bokser a list of all the pieces created by Leverkuehn before the character’s death in 1940. Program notes for tonight’s performance are pulled directly from Mann’s novel and describe each piece in great detail.

“The challenge for our composers was to write in a style that is not current,” Murata said. “They had to imitate a style of modern avant-garde music that was popular in the novel’s period. And I think they’ve both been pretty successful with it.”

A Leverkuehn puppet opera, said to be based on the life of St. Gregory as told in a medieval Roman manuscript, inspired Odegard’s contribution to the concert.

“Basically, the story mentioned in the book has nothing to do with the real life of St. Gregory. . . . He was a singularly dull personality as far as material for a story goes,” Odegard said. “But in the Roman tale, his life is given elements of classical and biblical mythology.”

Briefly put, the story describes St. Gregory as the son of a royal brother and sister. When his father is killed, the baby is set adrift and raised by a poor monk. As a young man, he wanders the world, eventually returning to his mother’s kingdom and saving it from certain destruction. He marries his mother and rules successfully until he discovers his true identity, then promptly leaves the kingdom in search of penance for his sin. A fisherman takes him to a distant rock far into the sea and chains him there to repent for the next 17 years.

From this rather lengthy tale, a short scene was created between Gregory and the fisherman, detailing the conversation between the two men as Gregory is chained to the rock and left alone with his sins. The aria will be sung tonight by Weiss and John Gerhold, with a taped accompaniment performed and engineered by Christy Coobatis on a MIDI synthesizer.

How could Odegard, a flesh-and-blood composer of the ‘80s, ghost-write for a fictional artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

“I basically picked a style that I thought was commensurate with what Leverkuehn would have done,” said Odegard, a member of UCI’s music faculty since 1966. “Actually, there’s been speculation that Mann based Leverkuehn’s character on Alban Berg, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg who was involved in the development of the 12-tone system (a departure from the traditional harmonic system), so my puppet opera is primarily a late 19th-Century style with some areas that may lean toward the 12-tone system.”

But there is a certain measure of fun too.

“There are also a few elements in it that are right out of the music hall,” Odegard conceded. “You have to admit the story does have some humorous overtones. By overstating the thing, we give sort of a subtle dig to the idea of someone being chained to a rock for 17 years and presumably loving it.”

Bokser, conductor of the UCI orchestra and an accomplished composer in his own right, has created a string quartet based on a Leverkuehn work described in “Dr. Faustus” as his most esoteric work, containing, as Mann puts it, “no thematic variations, developments, variations, and no repetitions. . . . Polyphony predominates in the extreme. . . .”

“It was pretty difficult writing a piece that lives up to that description,” said Bokser, who joined the UCI music faculty last year. “How often do you write a work after the program notes have been written?

“I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to Mann’s text. For example, this string quartet literally has no melodic repetitions. It was especially challenging because I’ve always been interested in orchestration as a tool, and this piece has no element of that whatsoever. It’s been quite an experience.”

Bokser’s composition will be performed tonight by members of the University of California San Diego String Quartet.

According to Murata, the two other pieces on tonight’s program also are highly symbolic of Leverkuehn’s life and times.

“Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 is a very unusual work,” Murata said. “It has no third movement and a long series of theme and variations. In the novel, it creates a parallel between Beethoven and Leverkuehn as they both stepped over the normal bounds in their careers. And Schubert’s ‘Der Wegweiser’ is a key element in the novel because it . . . represents a signpost at a crossroad, or a time in the composer’s life when he must decide which direction he will take.”

‘DR. FAUSTUS’ CONCERT

Tonight, 8:15 p.m.

Fine Arts Village Theatre, UC Irvine

$3.50 to $6.

Information: (714) 856-6406 or (714) 856-4942.