Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and Music

1. A Self-Made Composer

3 Chapter 1 A Self-Made Composer john beckwith brian cherney As a child, I recall that I had some nightmares. And now in my senior category I have another nightmare. I thought I was through with nightmares—at my age I shouldn’t be having any nightmares. But I still have a nightmare that some nosey person is going to discover a piano concerto composed by Mozart at the age of two. Now, when the CBC gets hold of this darn thing, they’re going to push it and they’re going to sell it; it’s going to be the most national exposure ever, and we can forget about Canadian music for a while. Now that’s my nightmare. Now it’s been obvious to me for some years that Mozart is in the category of most programs “but first, a divertimento by Mozart.” That’s a sugar pill apparently and I’ve never made that particular category, despite the fact that I’ve written more divertimenti than Mozart. Actually, I’ve written twelve of them but I never quite made that sugar pill category, and I’m a little bit jealous, because Mozart certainly has become a Canadian citizen, and he’s become the number one Canadian composer. All you have to do is look at the catalogue of recordings. And that brings me to a recording that was made by the CBC Vancouver Orchestra as a birthday present for me about four years ago. It was a recording of four of my divertimenti: Nos. 1, 4, 3, and 7. It was supposed to be a birthday gift for me, which is very nice, except that it was never released, and I got a bill for $11,500, if I want that released. That’s the only time in my life that I got a birthday present with a bill. —John Weinzweig, speaking at a round-table discussion of CBC music producers , members of the CLC, and a panel of arts administrators, Toronto, 2002 4 a self-made composer T hese remarks, delivered spontaneously to a gathering of members of the arts community in Toronto towards the end of his long life, give a vivid sense of what mattered most in John Weinzweig’s professional life: the status of the composer in Canada. His drive to establish and maintain a prominent place for Canadian composers and their music stretched over a period of some sixty years. His remarks reveal much else about the man: his dry, acerbic humour (springing in no small measure from a sense of outrage), his characterization of European music (especially Mozart, for whom he seemed to have a special animosity) as “sugar” (presumably used to mollify and sweeten up recalcitrant radio listeners), and his firm sense of the importance of his own unique contribution as a composer to the musical life of the country. In the early years—especially in the 1940s and 50s—he was considered a radical figure, advocating the use of “modernist” techniques, which constituted a fundamental departure from the prevailing romanticism, largely a British import. In an interview with the journalist Frank Rasky in 1981, Weinzweig characterized himself as a“radical romantic”:“I’m a radical romantic . Some of my colleagues think I’m mellowing with age. Nonsense! … I love an old-fashioned folk tune and jazz that really swings. But I’ve always been a musical adventurer, … a rebel.”1 Later the phrase “radical romantic” was adopted by Larry Weinstein as the title of his documentary film about Weinzweig and by Elaine Keillor as a subtitle for her book-length study of the composer.2 The pairing of these evidently contradictory terms may be alliterative and neat, but as a summary of his musical personality it is inadequate and misleading.His work became less“radical”as new avant-gardisms appeared in the 1960s and beyond—not all of which he espoused. The “romantic” aspects of such early scores as The Whirling Dwarf reflected the repertoires he studied and performed in his youth. Later works had hints of personal feeling (irony, pathos) which might suggest a “romantic,” and which could have their basis in another self-characterization, as “a dreamer.”3 However, his mature scores accord scarcely at all with the musical tenets of Romanticism. Born in Toronto on the eve of the First World War (11 March 1913), John Jacob Weinzweig lived long enough to experience a number of shifts of style and aesthetics in the music of...