|
Article Excerpt
Ricardo Vines (1875-1943) was a Catalan pianist who carefully amassed and cared for a substantial library of published and manuscript music. Because he was a leader in premiering new music during the years from 1900 to 1930, his library is rich in works from this period. In addition to being remembered for his remarkable technique, Vines is recalled today primarily as a champion of the piano works of his French, Spanish, Russian, and South American contemporaries. As noted by John and Anna Gillespie, Ricardo Vines "would have had a brilliant virtuoso career had he not ardently and actively promoted modern music.... Despite an indifferent, sometimes hostile public, Vines waged a lifelong crusade for contemporary music, repeatedly playing new music which no other pianist would even think of performing." (1) His music library reflects the large number of composers, both well-known and forgotten, who sent their music to the pianist in hopes of having it performed.
After Vines died in 1943, his music collection--including manuscripts, autograph dedications, and inscriptions--was scattered by his family. The bulk of his library, 836 pieces, was purchased by the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, after the purchase it was divided up as a "seed" collection. The purchase has recently been reconstructed as the Ricardo Vines Piano Music Collection and is now located in the Howard B. Waltz Music Library. This article provides a brief biographical sketch of Vines, describes the history and reconstruction of the collection, and highlights its contents. A list of selected holdings in the collection describes some of the most significant pieces individually, including those bearing inscriptions, dedications, and the pianist's markings. Finally, a listing of all the composers represented in the collection is provided.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF RICARDO VINES
Ricardo Javier Vines y Garcia Roda was born in Lerida (Lleida), Spain, on 5 February 1875. In 1885, he became a student of Juan Bautista Pujol in Barcelona. At the suggestion of Isaac Albeniz, his mother brought him to Paris to study in 1887, where he enrolled first as an auditor, then as a full-fledged participant in the Paris Conservatory class of Charles-Wilfred Beriot. (2) There he met Maurice Ravel. The young composers, who were born the same year, may have first met through their Spanish-speaking mothers. (3)
Vines quickly became one of the foremost members of Beriot's class, and was invited to perform his teacher's own works--including a February 1893 performance of a piece he identifies only as "the second movement of de Beriot's concerto," with the composer playing the orchestral reduction. (4) This was probably the Second Piano Concerto, op. 46, judging from a heavily fingered copy of an early publication of that work in the University of Colorado collection. (5) In March 1895, Vines also performed Beriot's Sonata for Two Pianos, op. 61, at the Salle Pleyel with Beriot as the other pianist. (6)
Vines was an autodidact--probably a consequence of a pedagogical system in which young students were given little other than a musical education at an institution like the Paris Conservatory. He taught himself English (specifically to be able to read Poe in the original), mathematics, astrology, palmistry, and any number of other branches of the "occult sciences." He also read extensively from the literature of the time, ranging from the symbolists including Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, and Stephane Mallarme; to the decadents Jules-Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; to Catholic mystics like Ernest Hello; and utterly unclassifiable authors such as the Rosicrucian Catholic Josephin Peladan. Vines shared many of his books--notably Aloysius Bertrand's cycle of prose poems Gaspard de la nuit and the works of Poe and Baudelaire--with his good friend "Mauricio" Ravel.
In company with Ravel, reading two-piano or four-hand arrangements of orchestral scores, Vines discovered new music from the end of the nineteenth century, including the works of the modern Russian composers and the symphonic poems of Cesar Franck. Their musical explorations extended to Emmanuel Chabrier (whose two-piano Valses romantiques they played privately for the composer), Camille Saint-Saens, and others.
Vines premiered Ravel's first piano works, including the Menuet antique (dedicated to Vines), Pavane pour une infante defunte, Serenade grotesque, and Jeux d'eau. There is little question that Vines's brand of pianism, dependent on his exquisite pedaling and command of color, had a tremendous influence on Ravel's development as a composer. Around 1900. Vines became acquainted with Debussy--a friendship that ultimately was to outlast that with Ravel (7)--and seems to have worked a similar magic on Debussy's pianistic style. Vines's influence can be discerned in Debussy's move from the neoclassicism of Pour le piano (premiered by Vines in 1902, but composed before they had met) to the impressionism of Estampes (premiered by Vines in 1904). (8)
Vines quickly found himself much in demand as a pianist for new music, with numerous works dedicated to him over his career, and with premieres of many more to his credit. The number of composer signatures in the Vines Collection testifies to how anxious composers were to give him their works to perform. As Brody noted, a performance by Vines almost ensured a work's acceptance and success. (9) At times Vines's musicality even outshone the great works he premiered. In 1904, the Monde musical critic reported after the premiere of Debussy's Estampes, "One certainly has the right to believe that the three little piano pieces presented by M. Vines--with such mastery and ability--are of very secondary interest." (10) Among his other new-music interests, Vines was instrumental in the public performance of the piano music of Erik Satie, resulting in a 1913 comment that "M. Vines is the ideal pianist for the cult of modernism." (11)
According to the programs of the Societe Nationale and the Societe Musicale Independante, during the years 1898-1930 Vines gave Paris performances--many of them premieres--of works by numerous composers, including Albeniz, Balakirev, Borodin, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Chausson, Debussy, Dukas, Falla, Faure, Glazunov, Granados, Lalo, Musorgsky, Poulenc, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rodrigo, Satie, Tailleferre, and Turina. (12) Many of these composers are represented in the CU collection.
Beyond Paris, Ricardo Vines performed in London and Brussels, spreading the gospel of the modern French music of the time in programs calculated to showcase what he considered the best of French music. (13) His strong affinity for the music of the Russian school led to--and was fed by--a tour of Russia in 1900. In the years immediately following he brought the latest compositions of Balakirev, Lyapunov, and other modern Russian composers back to Paris. He also gave the Paris premiere of Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in 1905.
Beginning in 1914, Vines was often away from Paris. He spent much of his time at Bagneres de Bigorre in the south of France. (14) In that same year, the Societe Musicale Independante commissioned Vines to perform French repertory in Berlin. He also began a series of trips to Spain, including annual returns to his hometown of Lerida, and tours of Spain during the years of World War I.
In 1920 and 1924 Vines toured South America, cultivating connections with composers of the nascent national schools in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. (15) His first programs in Buenos Aires in 1920--a series of seven for which he had been contracted before he left Paris--provided a survey of keyboard literature, featuring 212 pieces by some fifty composers. He ended up staying on, in part to recoup expenses that had not yet been fully covered by his initial series of concerts. He subsequently performed throughout the provinces of northern Argentina as well as in Montevideo, Uruguay. His second tour to Argentina in 1924 included numerous collaborations with Argentine musicians and performances of works by Argentine composers.
Between these South American tours, Vines made a point of performing South American compositions in Europe. In 1926, he performed an all-South American program in Paris. In the years 1925-29 he programmed works by Armando Chimenti, Manuel Gomez Carillo, Vicente Forte, Alberto Williams, and other South American composers in concerts throughout France and Italy--apparently performing to small audiences and little applause.
He traveled to Buenos Aires again in 1930 and stayed in South America for five years, visiting Chile (1932-33) and Uruguay (1931 and 1934). He returned to Paris in the spring of 1935. The Vines Collection includes numerous piano works that Vines learned and performed during these sojourns.
Ricardo Vines's greatest role was as a champion of the works of his contemporaries and as the pianist whose playing style inspired many of the most important works of pianistic "impressionism." As a teacher, he also left an important legacy, educating a younger generation in the aesthetics of his own pianism. His most famous pupils were the great French pianist Marcelle Meyer (whose recordings of French repertoire from the second quarter of the twentieth century tell us much about the performing tradition of these works as communicated to her by Vines) and the composers Francis Poulenc (who credited Vines especially for his mastery of the pedal) and Joaquin Nin.
Vines continued his concert career after his return to Paris in 1936, but seems to have gone into a professional decline, the details of which are elusive. (16) He returned to Barcelona but could not re-enter France due to the Spanish Civil War. According to his niece Elvira Vines, his final years were "very painful for him." (17) Unable to make a living in his war-ravaged homeland, he died in poverty on 29 April 1943. (18)
Vines made only a few recordings late in his career. The 1994 compact disc Ricardo Vines and Francis Plante (Opal CD 9857) includes most of his discography--recordings made in 1930 and 1936. This recording includes Vines performing sixteen short works by Scarlatti and Gluck, as well as pieces by Borodin, Albeniz, Turina, Debussy, Manuel Blancafort, Giovanni Troiani, Lopez-Buchardo, and Pedro Humberto Allende.
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE RICARDO VINES PIANO MUSIC COLLECTION
Several years ago, curiosity about Vines grew after staff and students at the Waltz Music Library repeatedly stumbled upon pieces in the circulating stacks with the unique stamp "Bibliotheque musicale Ricardo Vines." Interest increased after a graduate piano student found a manuscript reduction for two pianos of a concertino by Jeanne Herscher-Clement bearing this stamp. A cursory survey of the library's holdings in the Library of Congress's M20s classifications revealed a significant number of scores from the pianist's library, with several bearing inscriptions by the composers. These scores obviously needed to be identified and moved to the library's special collections. But how big was the collection and what did it contain?
Few of the scores had cataloging records that had been retrospectively converted. Also, at the time, no information about the source of this music could be found. Little progress was made for a few years until two boxes surfaced that contained computer punch cards labeled "Vines, Music Library." Punch card readers are now considered antiques, and converting the information to a usable format was considered too expensive. Besides, the numerical cataloging schema remained a puzzle, and the cards were clearly out of order.
A few more years passed before the authors decided to attempt reconstruction of the collection. A bright graduate student was hired, and after only a few hours, the numerical cataloging code was broken. (19) Because the punched data was also typed at the top of each card, the student simply transcribed the data.
Working both with the cards and card catalog, the student completed a first draft bibliography of the collection in about two and a half months. Examining the music was also necessary, because cards for some pieces that are not part of the collection had also been placed in the boxes. Vines's stamp, which he seemed to have used consistently, was very helpful. The collection, which had been estimated at around four hundred pieces, turned out to number over eight hundred.
The collection's provenance, however, remained a mystery. How did the Catalan pianist's music wind up in Boulder, Colorado? The date and cost were found in a memo of 20 October 1954 authorizing the purchase of the collection for $275. (20) One possible motivation for splitting up the music and putting the collection into circulation was also found; 1954 was the year when the College of Music began offering its D.M.A. degree. (21) No other information was given in the memo, and its recipient, Warner Imig, a former dean of the college, did not recall the collection or the details of its purchase. Nevertheless, Imig suggested that retired chair of the piano department Storm Bull might recall something about the purchase. (22) Bull, despite being eighty-nine years old, had a mind like a steel trap. Indeed, he was able to help.
Bull recalled that he had been the person who had seen the collection advertised in a dealer's catalog and had instigated its purchase. Unfortunately, he did not recall the dealer's name. He also remembered that a second lot of Vines's music, primarily manuscripts, was offered in the same catalog. The university was unable to purchase this second lot because of the cost. Further, Bull related that the number of lesser-known composers represented in the collection, specifically those from South America, was the impetus for him to start compiling his three-volume Index to Biographies of Contemporary Composers during his tenure at Boulder. (23)
To date, the dealer has still not been identified, but two main possibilities exist. Based upon clues in the writings of Elaine Brody and Esperanza Berrocal, the music was possibly offered by the Parisian antiquarian dealer Pierre Beres. Brody mentions a special list issued in New York which "included the portion of Vines's library that was sold in the United States." (24) Berrocal also mentions Beres, stating that "The French auctioneers Beres and Griland also bought part of Vines's scores" from the family. (25) Collector Hans Moldenhauer (1906-1987) bought his Vines manuscripts from Samuel Orlinick of the Scientific Library Service in fall 1954. (26) This may have been the lot of manuscripts that Bull recalled, and the date of Moldenhauer's purchase, fall 1954, matches that of the CU collection. Moldenhauer's collection is now held primarily by Harvard University and the Library of Congress. (27)
In addition to the manuscripts from Vines's library in the Moldenhauer Archives, there are also two other libraries holding scores once owned by the pianist. The University of Delaware holds a set of thirty-five manuscripts bearing Vines's stamp. Information regarding the provenance of these manuscripts is not currently available. (28) In comparison, the Hans Moldenhauer Archives includes a total of twenty-eight manuscripts from Vines's library. There is also a set of ten scores (including three manuscripts) located in Lerida in an archive dedicated to Vines at the Auditori Municipal Enric Granados. The family reportedly donated these after Vines's death. (29) With the exception of a notebook at the Library of Congress that was shared by Granados and Vines, none of these collections contain manuscripts by major composers. (30)
The next steps in the reconstruction of the Boulder collection involved cataloging the newly identified scores and checking the holdings of those titles to determine if the items in the collection are rare or widely held. A total of nearly two hundred of the newly identified scores required original cataloging. Online records for all titles in the Vines Collection are now both in CU's local catalog (Chinook, http://libraries.colorado.edu) and in OCLC's WorldCat union catalog. About half of the titles are reported in WorldCat as unique to CU Boulder.
OVERVIEW OF THE COLLECTION
The Ricardo Vines Piano Music Collection at the University of Colorado includes 836 pieces of sheet music accumulated by the pianist from the 1880s through the 1930s, and with few exceptions containing music actually composed and published during those years. Only two of these items are manuscripts. The first is the Herscher-Clement concertino mentioned above. The second, the Berceuse by Armande de Polignac, is a combination of printed and manuscript music, with the handwritten sections likely the work of the composer. (31)
An overview of the contents of the collection gives an idea of the wide spectrum of music from the period that has failed to enter the standard repertoire. While it is easy to see why many of these pieces have been neglected, there are also many treasures to be found. Vines's tastes and circle of acquaintances were broad, but his sympathies seemed to lie strongly with music that was stylistically within the French orbit. Outside the large number of French scores in the collection, it includes music of many Russian, Spanish, and South American composers, along with scores from Hungary, Holland, Italy, Belgium, and even Greece. (32) In the case of Russian composers, Vines was under their influence in his young years, and later served as a kind of ambassador bringing new Russian piano music to Paris. Two important South American composers who had studied in France--Alberto Williams and Pedro Humberto Allende--may have helped Vines establish himself in South America and, in turn, been helped by his performances of their music. (33)
The vast majority of the scores in the collection are clean, with no markings. Many of these also bear a stamp (usually "Hommage des editeurs" or "Hommage de l'auteur") indicating that the copy was given to the pianist for perusal or to encourage his interest. In most cases, it would seem that Vines was not interested. The significant number of items that have markings in Vines's hand were evidently performed or at least studied with the intent of performance. Of course, many works that Vines premiered were published only after the first performance, and in those cases the presentation copies given to Vines--many signed by the composers--bear no markings in his hand.
It might seem remarkable that Vines's markings are still clearly identifiable after nearly fifty years in the Waltz Library circulating collection. Very likely the lack of records in the online catalog coupled with the obscurity of much of the literature combined to preserve most of them. Vines's markings are most commonly, and not surprisingly, fingerings. In his younger years,...
|
