Salvaging shelved classics

He was a loser, a mediocrity, the consummate second-rater -- a jealous rival who hastened Mozart’s death by praying for his early demise. At least, that’s how Antonio Salieri comes across in the film and play that mark most people’s first, and often last, exposure to the man and his work.

But to Cecilia Bartoli, the esteemed Roman mezzo-soprano, the Italian composer is not the envious also-ran of “Amadeus.”

“I found the music of Salieri very interesting,” says the singer, whose latest album is a collection of his arias. “It’s full of emotion, full of passion.” The women of Salieri’s operas, she says, are distinct from any others.

“He was a very important figure in Vienna. He taught Schubert and Beethoven the Italian style. I said, ‘This music has to come back to the stage. It’s important.’ ”

A quarter of the pieces being performed this season by the 100 U.S. orchestras with the biggest budgets were written by only five composers, according to a survey by the American Symphony Orchestra League. Henry Fogel, its president, says name recognition among the public falls off sharply after the top dozen or so composers.

But, like Bartoli, a number of musicians are making it their mission to exhume neglected composers through recordings and performances.

The Canadian virtuoso pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin has championed Charles-Valentin Alkan, a diabolically difficult 19th century Parisian who was a contemporary of Chopin and Liszt, and Max Reger, an early 20th century German whose work suggests he might have filled in for Bach at the latter’s Leipzig church. The pianist Jon Nakamatsu recently recorded Beethoven contemporary Joseph Wolfl.

Salvaging the reputations of such composers is “indispensable,” says Joseph Horowitz, a New York-based scholar and consultant. Most classical music organizations, he says, are “like a broken record,” playing the same artists over and over again, transfixed by a small core of masterpieces.

Fogel is also an advocate of opening up the repertory to forgotten composers. He cites Sweden’s Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927), whose “bittersweet Scandinavian romanticism” Fogel saw audiences respond to during his years as president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Besides the pleasures these composers provide, he says, “they give you the opportunity to stop overexposing the masterpieces, which lose all their surprise.”

Reclamation projects

All art forms have canons -- works that are taught, hung in museums, written about critically or performed in concert. History, after all, is told by the winners and their followers. But sometimes a canon can drastically limit the work that all but the cognoscenti know.

Few canons are as narrow as classical music’s, partly because the size and costs of orchestras make them hesitate to take chances with lost works. But the narrowness comes too from the way classical music views its minor artists.

“They’re somehow looked down upon in a way the lesser painters are not,” says William Weber, a historian at Cal State Long Beach who is writing a book about repertory. “I remember going to the Moscow-Paris show at the Pompidou Center about 25 years ago, and everyone was just relishing these paintings by people they didn’t know, both Russian and French. We don’t do that in classical music.”

But art forms have reclamation projects as well. The vibrant tones of Van Gogh, for instance, were virtually unknown during the painter’s lifetime and became an influence only after a 1901 retrospective 11 years after his death. Herman Melville, whose “Moby-Dick” is often called the great American novel, died in obscurity and was uncelebrated until the 1920s.

In classical music, it’s well known that even Mozart experienced periods of neglect and ended, in the words of W.H. Auden, with “a pauper’s funeral in the rain.”

Mozart, in truth, was never entirely forgotten. By the late 20th century, his reputation had displaced that of Brahms, the third B in the trinity that still includes Beethoven and Bach. Starting with the bicentennial of his birth in 1956 and continuing with the 1967 Swedish film “Elvira Madigan,” with its memorable piano concerto, and “Amadeus” in the 1980s, Mozart became not only a famous composer but also a symbol of genius for the public.

Other composers have made even more dramatic ascents, often with the help of a champion. Before Leonard Bernstein began promoting him with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s, Mahler was baffling to many.

“It’s not something that disturbs us anymore,” Horowitz says, “but in Mahler’s time it was very disturbing that you’d encounter passages of sublime music followed by something that he might’ve heard on the street that morning.”

The late-Romantic Bruckner -- previously considered “too German” and with a reputation tainted by Hitler’s advocacy -- ascended not long after Mahler. In the early 20th century, Hindemith was established as a major composer, but he fell substantially only to begin a recent rise among the avant-garde.

The 1960s saw Satie and Vivaldi evolve into mass-market figures, while the Czech Janacek came out of nowhere to become a rare 20th century composer who doesn’t scare audiences.

In the early 21st century, the process continues: Beethoven and Tchaikovsky hold steady, especially in orchestral programming, while Shostakovich -- once derided as a Stalinist stooge -- rises as Prokofiev falls. Some composers have never taken. Did 2003’s Berlioz centennial help establish the inimitable Frenchman as an audience favorite? It’s too soon to tell.

Yet either way, the Masterpiece Club is far too exclusive, Horowitz says. “What happened in this country, in a nutshell, is that classical music became a culture about the act of performance instead of being about the creative act.” That critique animates his influential book “Understanding Toscanini: A Social History of American Concert Life.”

“This is a mutation -- it’s very unhealthy. I date it from around World War I. When we redirected our attention around ‘the great conductors’ and ‘the great pianists’ and ‘the great orchestras,’ that was a sure way to guarantee the eventual obsolescence of classical music. It’s an unhealthy high culture that’s not grounded in the creative act.”

The dogmatism about the unassailable greats actually began a century earlier, says Weber, and is bred into the marrow of classical music. In the 1820s, a group of rigid tastemakers defined real music as pure, noble, serious. “It was a moral thing that came out of the proto-revolutionary mood of the early 19th century: You had these intense idealists whose tradition stayed put.”

They broke with the 18th century tradition in which both heavy and light music -- a “miscellany” of short and long pieces -- made up the typical concert.

By the 1820s or so, classical music saw itself as a beleaguered minority art that had to be defended from commercialism and “lesser” music, says Weber, who would like to save Busoni and Gottschalk from obscurity. “Schumann was fired by the radicalism of the era: ‘We shouldn’t have to accommodate ourselves to bad music. We will only listen to the best.’ He’s going against the established principles that you have to work with other people’s tastes. And by the 1860s, he’s won.”

The thrill of the chase

Just as musicians rise in a variety of ways, their reputations fade for numerous reasons.

Sometimes the cause is national allegiance, which hit Europe hard in the 19th century. The Italian-born Salieri, Bartoli says, suffered from the stirrings of Austrian and Germanic nationalism. “Composers like Beethoven and Weber made up the new era,” she says. “And the Italian style of opera was not in style.”

Something similar happened in the United States in the early 20th century. “Copland and others who went to France after the first world war didn’t like German music,” Horowitz says, “and wrote off an entire generation of American composers as Germanic clones, which is what most of them were. The big exception was George Chadwick, who was in fact our first important national symphonist.”

But nationalism can spur rediscovery as well. The young Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has recorded a disc of piano music by forgotten composers born about the time of Norway’s 1905 independence, among them Geirr Tveitt, whom he calls “a Norwegian Bartok, traveling around the country with a tape recorder, asking people to play their folk tunes.”

The album, “The Long, Long Winter Night,” earns Andsnes as many comments from musicians and fans as his more mainstream work, he says.

Similarly, the lack of established Spanish composers sent the Catalonian violist Jordi Savall on a journey into the Siglos de Oro -- the Golden Centuries -- between 1400 and 1700. Those years produced not only Cervantes and El Greco but also composers such as Francisco Guerrero and Juan Navarro.

Savall also looks for music from the 12th century Catalonian troubadours, the Sephardic Jewish diaspora and the Spanish colonial period in the New World -- eras in which the music took on African and Arabic accents.

“What we found interesting,” he says, “is how Spanish music accepted music from other cultures and incorporated it into its own tradition.”

The performers who set about reclaiming reputations tend to be motivated by curiosity -- by the excitement of a mystery or the thrill of the chase.

Pianist Nakamatsu, a former high school German teacher, kept coming across references in Beethoven biographies to a once-popular composer named Joseph Wolfl and wondered what his work sounded like.

“I never saw anything about him on his own except for a dissertation by a 1920s German scholar,” he says. But after days poring over scores in the British Library, he began to reconstruct Wolfl’s work; last fall, he released an album of it on Harmonia Mundi. Besides enjoying the “storm and stress” of the sonatas, he sees it as important to understanding the sound-world of Beethoven’s era.

Hamelin, a consistently adventurous pianist, is fascinated with the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- when Romanticism was growing unsteady but Modernism hadn’t entirely come into being.

“That’s really where tonal harmonies started to go in all kinds of directions,” he says, “leading to breakdowns, or breakups. And I’m sensitive to harmonies above all else.” His greatest success probably has been with Alkan, whose cult status he’s helped enhance.

“I do believe he would have been a major force if he hadn’t become a recluse,” Hamelin says. “He never played his major works in public. By 1888, when he died, he was forgotten.”

In some cases, neglected composers can send a musician delightfully out to sea. Andrew Manze, the English violinist who’s helped revive Italian Baroque figures such as Tartini, Geminiani and Pandolfi, has come across scores that have a single notation on a page with little else to guide him.

“It’s very exciting to work on music that doesn’t have a tradition of how you perform it,” he says. “A 17th century piece won’t typically give you any help in how fast to play the music. There’s very few dynamics, few louds or softs. They were written for musicians who improvised a lot, so there are great gaps. Sometimes they just say ad libitum.”

Manze compares the process of playing a lost Baroque piece to performing a jazz solo or a new work of contemporary music. “But the composer is long dead, so you have to guess. I love the idea of playing a modern world premiere of something composed 300 years ago.”

Blaming the presenters

For Manze and most crusading artists, there’s a record label executive who helps projects happen.

Hyperion Records, esteemed for its Romantic piano concerto cycle, was founded in 1980 by Ted Perry, an Englishman so dedicated he drove a cab to keep the operation afloat. The huge success of an album of the previously unknown 12th century religious poet Hildegard of Bingen -- with sales now above 300,000 -- has helped to underwrite Hyperion’s eclecticism.

“We now have a devoted following of people who will buy the label as opposed to the composer,” says Robina Young, artistic director for Harmonia Mundi USA, which releases work by Manze, Nakamatsu and the medieval music group Anonymous 4. “Many times they don’t know the composer, but they trust us musically.”

While Harmonia Mundi and Hyperion are connoisseur’s labels with pricey CDs, the budget label Naxos, headed by Klaus Heymann, offers the wide-ranging American Classics series. If Cage and Walter Piston are too well known, how about Elie Siegmeister?

“Appreciate the irony -- that it took a German based in Hong Kong to launch the most ambitious documentation in sound of American composers,” says Horowitz, who has served as an unpaid advisor to Naxos.

Heymann, who also has begun a series of American Jewish music in collaboration with the Santa Monica-based Milken Family Foundation, says it would be impossible to release records like his if standard repertoire didn’t pay the bills. “On the rare composers you rarely make money. The rarities are like the spice in the food.”

The major labels, for their part, now do far less work with nonstandard repertoire than in previous years. “When I started recording in 1990, Virgin Classics was as interested in fringe repertoire as standard,” says pianist Andsnes. “But those were good times for the recording industry.”

However mixed the picture in recording, the one in the concert hall is bleaker. With the exception of festivals, in which obscure music is programmed separately from ensembles’ main seasons, such composers are heard only sporadically in concert halls, especially those that seat thousands.

Both Bartoli and Nakamatsu appeared in Southern California last month, and in both cases they performed standard repertory. Hamelin can’t get arrested in the U.S.

“When you’re a soloist, you’re largely at the whim of the presenters,” says Nakamatsu, who will present a Wolfl sonata in May at a Beethoven Festival given by the San Francisco Symphony. “When an orchestra asks you to perform, it comes with a program as well as a date.”

Similarly, Gerard Schwarz of the Seattle Symphony once championed neglected American symphonists of the 1930s. These days, Seattle is more likely to intersperse new works among generally conventional choices.

Many critics of this state of affairs blame classical music presenters, who point to economic pressures and the need to lure audiences with “populist” programs. Others say musicians are less curious than they should be.

“Most musicians don’t realize it’s out there,” Manze says of nonstandard repertoire. “Most musicians are not that interested in music -- they’re interested in their own ability. This is a big generalization, but they don’t think about repertoire. They line it up and do it.”

Manze, like others, makes clear that he’s not looking just for unheard music but for music that stirs him.

“I think the greatest crime,” he says, “is being boring.”

Scott Timberg can be contacted at scott.timberg@latimes.com.