Music – Gregg Fedchak

Whiskey, Cigarettes,Sex, and Perfection

Written by Gregg Fedchak on March 25, 2025. Posted in Books, Music.

The life of a classical music musician is in some ways wilder than the life of a rock star.

The anxiety is heightened by the fact that rock musicians can thrive on a lot of musical and personal mistakes. Mistakes can get classical musicians canned.

Which is why the late cellist Janos Starker lived long enough, despite his taste for drink and smoke, to write a memoir of his nearly 90 years. He was close to perfect musically. And, it seems, as a man, despite his genuine humbleness.

Starker believed that consistency – steady, non-showy quality – is the greatest attribute both of great musicians and of himself. Not, actually, perfection. But . . . perfection is what he came close to with that philosophy.

He spent the 1950’s as the principal cellist for conductor Fritz Reiner’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

conversation with jános starker — ***Janos Starker***

Reiner ran his orchestra as a private fiefdom. He could hire and fire at will. By all accounts, Starker was one of the few who never had to worry about that. He was, like Reiner, consistently good. As in NO mistakes good. And he was a solid, as Reiner himself was. Two workmanlike colleagues, all of one mind, all business.

So it was quite a scene when Starker made one big, loud boo-boo at one of the last Chicago rehearsals before he left for teaching and solo stardom.

The entire orchestra laughed at the boo-boo, since it was a fact that for 9 years Starker had made none, even in mere rehearsals.

Reiner threw his baton on the floor and screamed.

“Am I not allowed to make one mistake after 9 years?” Starker plaintively asked.

No, no you are not allowed to make mistakes in any serious musical situation. Which probably explains why the classical music world is so loopy and why you need so many whiskeys and cigarettes.

Patti Niemi wrote about her own severe performance anxiety in her memoir, STICKING IT OUT: FROM JUILLIARD TO THE ORCHESTRA PIT.

I got nervous reading the thing, probably because I was on the spot a number of times as a trumpet player in band, stage band, and orchestra as a kid. There was one moment when I had to “start” a piece for an Area All-State orchestra with a rather difficult high note.

I had botched it several times in rehearsal. At the concert, a French horn player turned to me and said, “You’d better hit it.”

And she meant it, too.

I did hit it. The conductor winked at me and smiled. But I realized then and there that music performance was not a lifestyle for me.

Niemi’s book is brilliant in the way it makes true panic come alive. Her case was made infinitely worse by her being a woman in what was a traditionally male position. And by the difficulty all percussionists have with finding a safe place to rehearse. After all, you need to be something like 2 miles away from all but the most amenable people to “stick it” for hours on end.

And finally sex.

Whereas Starker is discreet about sex in the pits – as discreet as his magnificent playing – the whole point of Blair Tindall’s MOZART IN THE JUNGLE: SEX, DRUGS, AND CLASSICAL MUSIC is such “misbehavior”. The only time Starker mentions sex, it’s when he says that Reiner sat him in the dead middle of the orchestra, such that Reiner blocked his view of the pretty ladies in the audience that Starker had a penchant for eyeballing during his rests.

MOZART proves that while sex and drugs may be a side benefit for rock, pop, country, and jazz artists, it’s more of an escape valve from the kind of tension and stress that Niemi writes about.

MOZART IN THE JUNGLE is a tad sad, even disturbing. It makes one yearn for a life as an accountant, or a night janitor. Apparently classical musicians don’t make love so much as toss themselves randomly at passersby.

Starker’s book even contains some of his short fiction, and his adventures with rare and costly cello models. His book is a great read, and he’s a down-to-earth fellow with insights up, down, and sideways on the musical history of the entire 20th century, well into our current one.

Niemi reads like a horror story, in a good way, if you’ve ever had any experience making music in front of live human beings. It may also make you feel better about giving it all up, although things work out for her in the end.

Tindall?

Tindall is like looking at a three alarm fire. Fun, but only at a distance.

Col. Klink’s More Famous Father

Written by Gregg Fedchak on February 25, 2025. Posted in Music.

I remember how surprised I was as a kid to find out that Werner Klemperer – Col. Klink on TV’s Hogan’s Heroes – had a father who was more famous than he was.

werner klemperer bob crane hogan's heroes — ***Werner Klemperer and Bob Crane,*** *Hogan’s Heroes*

(Notice the massive baton Klink is wielding. Some things run in families.)

I tried to resist the urge to mention actor Werner, but it was useless. Hogan’s Heroes was a program with an impossible premise – a comedy about prisoner of war camps, World War II, and Nazis – that it pulled off exquisitely.

Otto’s life was also brilliant, but erratic and much, much more difficult.

c 1920 otto klemperer — ***a young Otto Klemperer***

Klemperer was a direct line to the great 19th Century German conductors such as Mahler. His breakthrough came as director of the Kroll Opera House in Germany, which performed mostly avant-garde music in the early 1930’s, composers such as Hindemith and Stravinsky.

berlin, kroll oper — ***Kroll Opera House, Berlin, about 1930***

Then, in 1933, Otto fell backwards off a podium and suffered a brain injury. Always a manic-depressive, what we now call bipolar, the accident made things worse.

The manic stages lasted longer, usually for years at a time. Then came prolonged depressive periods of years duration. Throughout it all, the one constant, when not literally laid up from physical mishaps, was his conducting. Sometimes it suffered, sometimes it was transcendent.

But it was always difficult.

In 1939, he was operated on for a large, non-malignant brain tumor. I’ve never been able to find out if the growth may have been a result of his fall off the podium.

In any case, though ostensibly cured, he became mentally more unstable, became even more accident prone, had to escape Nazi Germany (he was Jewish, then Catholic, then Jewish again – his religious life was as interesting as his music and his psyche), had an unfulfilling period in the United States (which he loathed as barbaric and money-grubbing), fell into disfavor politically in the McCarthy era (he was a leftist suspected of Communist sympathies), set himself on fire while smoking in bed and made it worse by dousing the flames with camphor oil, breaking bones, and on and on.

His life was, in essence, a long run-on sentence. One in which he heroically endured.

And then he blossomed in his old age. He discovered the joys of the recording studio.

köln, wdr rundfunkstudio — Studio work allowed him less taxing touring schedules and documented his work for all eternity. He was the EMI label’s biggest classical music draw at a time when classical music was a big seller. Today, you can buy 100 CD box sets of his work, and, of course, stream it or get the LP’s.

He conducted and recorded almost until his death at 88 in 1973.

He dragged a 19th Century monolithic, monumental conducting style into the mid-late 20th Century. He was a giant of a man physically and temperamentally, fearsome to musicians but also respected. His sense of humor was sharp, too.

That’s where Werner got his skills.