Twenty years ago today, the world mourned the passing of conductor Robert Shaw. Shaw was a towering figure of the American classical music scene beginning in the early 1940s when he prepared choruses for Arturo Toscanini.
I had the great good fortune to sing with Mr. Shaw on two occasions in the 1990s. Those two periods were among the most profound experiences of my musical career and my adult life.
Carnegie Hall, January 1995
Despite having only three years of experience as a choral singer, I somehow passed an audition to participate in one of Mr. Shaw’s annual workshops at Manhattan Center Studios, capped with a performance at Carnegie Hall. The program included two short Brahms pieces—Nänieand Gesang der Parzen(Song of the Fates), as well as Paul Hindemith’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Making the week extra special was that my wife Jane and our good friend Dina Weiss were also at the workshop, as were several of our choral conductor friends from Washington DC.
The week of rehearsals leading up to the concert was truly eye-opening—and ear-opening. All hundred-plus of us singers sat in two concentric circles of chairs, with Mr. Shaw and the piano in the center. I was impressed by his building-block approach to learning a piece of music. First and foremost, his admonition to the chorus was that “we all need to do more listening and less singing.” We were encouraged to try to fit our voices into the “sleeve of the sound.”
Mr. Shaw felt that you can’t properly perform a piece if you start trying to sing the text and music at the same time; there are too many factors that have to be mastered. So we started with an afternoon of speaking the words in rhythm, attending to unified vowels and emphasizing certain ending consonants. The next day, we sang the notes, but counting “one-and-two-and-tee-and-four-and” on pitch instead of using the text. It was only after we’d mastered the words, rhythms, and pitches separately that we were allowed to put them all together.
Mr. Shaw also moved singers from one vocal line to another depending on the emphasis that a melody or harmony needed. Every singer was assigned a number. “You start with the highest soprano and the lowest bass as the end points, and then every voice in between is up for grabs, in terms of being able to be moved around.” If you were Bass I number 5, you might double a tenor line for a few measures and then drop back to the Bass I part, then move to Bass II a few measures later. Practically every singer’s score was marked differently as a result, and one’s music looked like a complicated roadmap of arrows and highlighting.
His vocal imagery was extremely evocative. At the opening section of the Song of the Fates, Mr. Shaw told the tenors and basses to “make a sound like a nightmare, something that would frighten Hitler as he slept.” In another section, “Think of the downbeat as a hot plate; touch it lightly and get off of it right away!” And he did become frustrated with us on many occasions. Once he yelled out, “Tenors, sing in head voice, not that carnival crap!”
Most profound to me was the sense of community and obligation to humanity that he espoused throughout the workshop. “The most successful choral works are requiems or masses, because they speak of things that affect all mankind.” And, “Rich people have a moral duty to share their wealth with society. After all, their fortunes were really built up of other people’s money. You all have the gift of musical talent. It wasn’t something you earned, it was given to you by your parents’ genes and your surroundings. Elitism carries with it a sense of responsibility to one another. You must share your gift to make the world a better place.”
The concert itself at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, January 15 was almost an afterthought following the intense week of rehearsals. Everything you have imagined about performing at Carnegie Hall is true. The graceful curves, soaring lines, and high domed ceiling made me think of it as a cathedral for the worship of music. Standing on stage, I felt a connection reaching back to the Romantic era, when Tchaikovsky and Mahler conducted there.
Mr. Shaw was weeping as we sang the opening lines of the Brahms Nänie: “Even the beautiful must die.” He seemed distracted, and even cued the singers one measure early at one point. We didn’t know until after the concert that his wife was deathly ill. Indeed, although she had been at Saturday’s dress rehearsal, she was too sick to attend the performance. She died the week following the workshop.
How could he possibly have conducted that program under those circumstances? I felt embarrassed that we had intruded on his final week with his wife.
Shaw’s Final Missa Solemnis, September 1998
On August 17, 1998 The Washington Chorus’s office called to tell me that J. Reilly Lewis needed a few extra basses to sing the Beethoven Missa Solemnis at the Kennedy Center, with the Cathedral Choral Society and National Symphony under Robert Shaw. Was I interested in helping them out? You bet I was!
We had an intense two weeks of rehearsal under Reilly to prepare for Mr. Shaw’s arrival in the first week of September. Anyone who has sung Beethoven knows that he had no mercy for singers, and it was a struggle to get the piece in shape in such a short period of time.
Mr. Shaw seemed more than a little concerned about our preparedness during our piano rehearsals with him in the first week of September, but he also offered words of encouragement. There were just too many rough spots to fix in the brief time that we had together. I was nervous.
Some of the Mr. Shaw’s notes that I wrote in my score included:
- Just because a measure is divided into 3 or 4 or 8 beats doesn’t mean you divide the energy of that measure into 3 or 4 or 8 parts. Each beat has to carry the full energy of the entire measure.
- The right note at the wrong time is the wrong note!
- When you make a diminuendo, become more articulate, not less.
- (on an eighth-rest before the choral cry of “Miserere”) This rest has a lifetime of experience in it.
- That was pretty close to good.
- That was almost good enough to be no good.
- The last time I did this piece, I wrote myself a note: “Remember, Beethoven was a deaf pianist!”
- Forget the audience. The fact that they have enough money to get in doesn’t entitle them to understand and appreciate the piece.
- One so seldom hears this piece all the way through. We always rehearse it in sections. Hearing it all the way through scares me to death! It’s like being in Anchorage, Alaska. Every once in a while, the clouds clear away and you can see all of Mt. McKinley from top to bottom—all 25,000 feet of it.
- This piece is an incredible search—not for Godhood, but for Man-hood.
At the second orchestra rehearsal at the Kennedy Center on September 9, Mr. Shaw was absent. He was too ill to attend. The NSO’s conductor-in-residence, Anthony Aibel, led us through the rehearsal.
I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at the Concert Hall for our opening performance the next night. But to my great relief, Mr. Shaw was there. During warm-ups he told us, “Don’t worry; the doctors have assured me that if I drop dead, my pacemaker will keep right on going. If it happens in the middle of a section that’s 60 beats per minute, that’ll be even better—you can just keep on right as if nothing had happened!”
And to try to bring our focus back into the Concert Hall from the distracting uproar in Washington over that day’s release of Kenneth Starr’s report recommending the impeachment of President Clinton, Shaw said “Aren’t you glad we get to do something realtonight?”
Looking back on my journal from that concert, I see that I was a little dismayed at the rough spots in the performance. But I remember none of that now. I’m left only with the glow of having sung one of my favorite pieces under Mr. Shaw’s direction.
Tim Page of the Washington Postwrote the next day,
A perfect “Missa Solemnis” probably exists only in the mind, as the score is almost impossibly strenuous for soloists, chorus and orchestra. I have found that even the finest performances are best understood as sublime springboards into a mystery that we must find a way through ourselves.
With its stratospheric fugues, excruciatingly exposed solo passages and mercurial shifts of mood, the “Missa Solemnis” is not tidy and it takes a brilliant organizational musician to hold it together.
Shaw met the test, with a spacious, reflective, carefully considered and lovingly executed interpretation, realized with four balanced soloists, a galvanized chorus and the NSO in full glory.
We sang a second performance on Saturday, September 12. Mr. Shaw seemed to be feeling much better that day, and he was more engaged with us than he’d been at our first concert. As the chorus walked off stage after the show, Mr. Shaw met us in the wings, shook hands with each of us, and presented each of us with an autographed copy of the playbill.
What a classy, classy man.
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine
Four months later, I read that Mr. Shaw had died of a massive stroke in Connecticut. Our performances of the Missa Solemnis were the final ones that he conducted of that piece. How fortunate I felt to have been there.
J. Reilly Lewis said, in Tim Page’s obituary of Mr. Shaw on January 26, 1999:
“He was every man’s musician because even as he soared above us and inspired us and was a figure bigger than life, he also walked amongst us and would have no part of cult worship.” Lewis recalled one of Shaw’s favorite sayings: “Singing, like sex, is far too important to leave to the professionals.”
After one of our rehearsals at the Carnegie Hall workshop, Mr. Shaw held a question and answer session with the chorus. Someone asked him, “Do you consider yourself a teacher?” His response was, “If I’m smart, I don’t consider myself at all.”
His admonition for us to share our talents with the world inspired me to form an employee chorus at Freddie Mac in the spring of 1995. We sang together for five years at company gatherings and community outreach events. Several people in the group told me that they looked forward to our noon Tuesday rehearsals more than anything else during the work week. I still feel that founding that group was one of the top achievements of my entire career.
I’ve had the opportunity to perform with many great musicians and conductors. Most of them impressed me with their deep-seated conviction that they are doing something for the betterment of our world. They strive to be the best they can be, because through their art they inspire us to see that there is something bigger and nobler than ourselves that we all carry within us.
The divine spark in each of us, when nurtured and shared, becomes a light of hope for humanity.
Thank you, Mr. Shaw, for being a force for good and beauty in this world.