The Passion of Gilbert Kaplan

Some years ago I had a friend who told me that one of her goals in life was to sing in a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. You know the Carmina Burana, it’s that deeply stirring choral work that you hear in movies all the time as Vikings land their boats on the rugged shore of a country they are about to rape and pillage or as a band of Knights Templar saddle up to invade the Holy Land. Lots of deep chanting and escalating tension. Actually Orff composed Carmina Burana as a vocal exercise for voice students to help them build up strength in their lungs and throat. Listening to it, I’m sure it worked.

Anyhow, my friend talked about this a lot. One day I read in the Gloucester Daily Times that Chorus North Shore was holding open auditions for a performance of Carmina Burana. I called my friend immediately and said, “Here’s your chance.” She was strangely quiet. I offered to go to the audition with her. She made excuses. Finally, I realized she wasn’t going to do it so I dropped it.

Gilbert Kaplan is not that sort of person.

Gilbert Kaplan made a good career for himself in the publishing industry and, in fact, was so successful that he had the resources to pursue the passion that engulfed him. Early in his professional career a friend had invited him to attend a concert of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, called The Resurrection. Kaplan was enthralled. He went out and bought a recording. He played it and played it and played it and, as he went about his career and his life, he thought endlessly about it. A dream began to form in his psyche. Someday he would conduct Mahler. He would conduct The Resurrection.

This is quite a goal for a man who knew virtually nothing about music and had never even so much as taken piano lessons. But he didn’t see those things as impediments.

Finally he came to the place in his life where he could afford to take time out from career and everything else and hire someone to teach him to conduct --- but to conduct one thing, The Resurrection. It took him a year to learn the music note by note, page by page but he was the sort of man who knew how to focus himself and to discipline his mind. Within a year Kaplan was ready to accomplish his goal.

That was just twenty-five years ago in 1982 at New York’s Lincoln Center. His performance was so enthusiastically received that one of his reviewers said it was one of the greatest interpretations of Mahler’s Second that he had heard in a quarter century of reviewing music. Kaplan was triumphant.

He went on to perform all over the world --- in London and in Vienna where he received resounding applause and overwhelming appreciation. Kaplan had not only conducted the Second Symphony and achieved his goal but had become one of the world’s leading authorities on that piece of work. Today he is on the faculty at Julliard School of Music where he lectures on Mahler’s Resurrection. In the world of music he may well be the world’s most specialized specialist.

I only heard this story recently. Yesterday my copy of the Second Symphony conducted by Kaplan and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra arrived in the mail. It is on the CD player now. It is magnificent though I realize coming from me that doesn’t mean much. The story was told to me by my friend Gordon Goetemann, a distinguished artist who is himself possessed by that same piece of music. He is preparing an exhibition of paintings based on it.

There are two things that I think about when I hear these stories. What must it be like to fall so in love with a piece of work that it becomes your sole focus and passion and what does that say about you as a person? I think it is beautiful, admirable and speaks of a spirit capable deep commitment and intensity.

But, even more, what must it be like to be able to create such a work? Mahler seemed to have a capacity to reach into people’s souls. I wore out a copy of his 9^th Symphony at one period in my life.

To me music has always been the most mysterious of all the arts. I love it but I don’t understand it at all. But then that is often the situation with all our most enduring loves.

Thanks for reading.