Skipping and singing my way down the Yellow Brick Road in my own private Oz of remembrance and fond celebration, I come to the third in my series of articles on records that made a difference to me either when growing up or when I was a young adult. With that, I arrive at:
Mozart: 46 Symphonies
Karl Böhm conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, on Deutsche Grammophon
The first volume of the two-box set, as I recall it from the Peabody record library
I was a student at Peabody from 1972 through 1975. During those years the school mandated a fair amount of required music listening, both through the Music Theory program and its weekly Listening Lab, as well as the Wednesday noon concerts where attendance was obligatory. One could bemoan the whiffs of fascism emanating from all that herding and requiring, but even though I quickly learned to gripe and groan about it (hey, I wanted to fit in), those Peabody brahmins who came up with the idea were doing hayseed kids such as myself a badly-needed service. I got to know a lot of music during those concerts and listening lab sessions, stuff I may never have explored on my own without some kind of guide.
Maybe a kid with a broader musical education would have been bored silly, but not me. My musical education—I use the term lightly—had been narrow and self-directed. The evening listening lab was in particular revelatory. In 1972 very few students were likely to have copies of the listening materials from the Norton Scores, given that the selections came on an expensive, bulky set of LPs. So our best course of action was to traipse into a 2nd floor classroom, have our attendance taken, and dutifully get out our Norton Scores while the Music Theory graduate assistant played records from the LP set. Nowadays we’d do the equivalent via online listening, setting up playlists on the Naxos Music Library or subscribing to some other similar service. But in 1972 we all sat there and listened, as though at a concert. That was good. On the other hand, we couldn’t listen to stuff we liked more than once.
That’s where the Peabody record library came into play. In those days it was located in a half-basement room that you entered directly on Mt. Vernon Place, right in the front of the school. The walls were covered with shelves of LPs, and in the center of the room was a long table, each station with a turntable and a headphone amplifier. You checked out your record and a pair of headphones at the desk, and then you were free to spend as long as you wanted. That room was a haven for me, its magic lessened but not ruined by the sullen, ill-tempered graduate student who usually worked the front desk. (Recalling that noxious asshole is an unpleasant side effect of rummaging through old memories, I suppose.)
The Norton Scores included La ci darem la mano from "Don Giovanni" as well as Symphony No. 40 in G Minor in its entirety. My experience of Mozart up to that point had been limited to a few pieces I had been assigned by my teacher Max Lanner in Denver. I had also heard the D Minor Piano concerto frequently, thanks to the young lady in Dorothea Seamann’s piano studio (my Denver piano teacher before Dr. Lanner) who had her lesson immediately before mine. (Her name was Condoleeza Rice. I wonder what ever happened to her…)
Mozart hit me like a blunderbuss salvo, peppering me with amazement and thrilling me down to my ignorant little toes. I made a beeline for that Peabody record library and began absorbing Mozart like no tomorrow. Those Karl Böhm recordings of the symphonies were a convenient starting-off point; I recognized his name and the orchestra, and that big comforting Deutsche Grammophon box added yet more interest. So for my first Christmas after having left home for college, I asked my folks if I could have that record set. And they got it for me—a recent re-release that packaged the former two-box set into one massive set of all 46 symphonies, with a beautiful white textured cover and the famous Lange portrait of Mozart.
Now here’s an odd thing. I still have the big box of LPs. The box has seen a bit of water damage but the records are probably still OK. I don’t really need to keep it because the set is available easily enough in a nice remastered edition on CD for a tad under $80. I can even download it from Deutsche Grammophon’s website in mp3 format for all of $34.99, although they don’t offer it in FLAC, doggone it. But I haven’t gotten it. My tastes in Mozart playing have changed, and I prefer the precision and clarity of Mackerras in Prague, the chamber warmth of Marriner with St. Martin’s, the crisp sizzle of Bardiner with the English Baroque, the solid mid-ground and impeccable musicianship of Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra.
But I will be forever grateful to that magnificent Deutsche Grammophon set, and those opulently cushioned and exquisitely well-played performances that did so much to bring some sophistication to a hopelessly adolescent ear.