On paper the story would seem barely believable. Auto-didact composer spends his entire career virtually isolated from direct contact with music outside of his homeland. Although modern symphony orchestras well-staffed with musicians playing at world-class standards were still decades away in his country, by sheer force of will and love of music he transcended the limitations of his time and place, creating a vast body of work in diverse genres whose ambition was universal in scope: Chamber music, piano works, operas, symphonies, and more. This highly original music piled up over the decades, heard only in the inner ear of their creator. After his death, his manuscripts were packed up, then sent into storage, awaiting the day when intrepid performers would seek it out.
Over 40 years have passed since his death, but it seems that Luis Humberto Salgado’s day may finally be dawning. His cycle of nine symphonies was issued earlier this month in an inexpensive set from Brilliant Classics—the premiere commercial recordings of Salgado’s music. In a review I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I shared my delight in discovering this remarkable music by a man who until recently was Ecuador’s best kept secret. Not that he wanted it that way. Ambition and confidence streak throughout Salgado’s music, practically grabbing and imploring one to listen. But as Michael Meissner explained to me in a Zoom interview last week, whereas Salgado’s musical imagination was seemingly boundless, his promotion of his own work left something to be desired.
Meissner, who is among those stepping up to ensure Salgado’s music is finally heard far beyond Ecuador, has been a faithful friend of Latin American music for over 30 years. As conductor and violinist he has performed across Mexico, Central America, and South America, collaborating with many of the region’s most important soloists and composers. Now living in Ecuador himself, Meissner has been crucial in helping to promote the music of that country’s great 20th century composer. No longer is Salgado’s music mute notes on paper. It is now beginning to emerge into living sound heard around the world.
Meissner talked to me about Salgado’s symphonies, as well as various other works which he has transcribed into digitized scores from extant manuscripts. Throughout he spoke with pride about the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca, which he led in these recordings of Salgado’s symphonies, as well as his hope that together they could do more for this composer whose work has endured neglect for too long.
(My interview with Meissner was conducted in Spanish. Translation into English is my own.)
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Néstor Castiglione: Maestro Meissner, how did your career take you from Germany to Latin America?
Michael Meissner: In 1990, I was hired as concertmaster for the Orquesta Filarmónica de la Ciudad de México, where I subsequently worked for several years. Altogether I lived in Mexico for about 25 years. Then in 2016, I won an international competition to assume the post of music director at the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca. Since then I have lived here in Ecuador. While in Mexico I also spent a lot of time researching Latin American music, Mexican music in particular. Another very interesting composer—unfortunately, I did not have a chance to record his music while in Mexico—was José Rolón. A contemporary and very good friend of Manuel María Ponce, who on the other hand is very well known. Rolón and Luis Humberto Salgado shared a common trait: They were both very self-effacing. They didn’t dedicate a lot of time to promoting themselves or making a fuss about their music. They created what they created, then they waited for society to want to hear and promote them. Which never happened. In the future, I’d like to do more for Rolón.
N. C.: So you arrived in Cuenca and discovered Salgado’s music there?
M. M.: As a matter of course, I soon bumped into his works. His music was the big find for me here in Cuenca. Within my first year here I discovered his music, thanks to my Ecuadorian friend, pianist Alex Alarcón. This aroused my curiosity. And I found that he composed nine symphonies, just like Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler—my God! His last symphony was completed only months before his death. It is fascinating this coincidence between Salgado and his symphonic predecessors with this magic, or perhaps ill-fated depending on how you see it, number 9.
N. C.: His background was unusual in many respects, wasn’t it?
M. M.: He was a man practically unknown who never left his country. Through his brother Gustavo Enrique Salgado—who was a pianist, diplomat, and the first Latin American to attend the Moscow Conservatory—he became acquainted with the music of the 20th century. His brother would return from Europe with suitcases full of scores, treatises, and books for him. Many of his contemporaries, including Latin Americans, had studied in Paris with the likes of Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. Salgado did not, but he never straggled behind. By merely reading scores he managed to reach their same level. It’s incredible what an advanced auto-didact he was. He was even a brilliant writer on music, penning a multitude of treatises, essays, and articles on 20th century music. So despite his relative isolation, figures like Messiaen were not unknown to him. Salgado, therefore, had a very up-to-date knowledge of European music and its latest tendencies.
N. C.: Which explains why his music wanders into such adventurous paths after his earlier nationalist works.
M. M.: From the 1930s he was already deeply immersed in the atonality of Schoenberg. He was well-acquainted with the works of Berg and Webern, among many others. But his education as a composer was for the most part self-made. He started out as a nationalist; in his almost 50-year trajectory as a professional musician, he never ceased being a “nationalist” in the sense that he never stopped loving the music of his homeland. This amalgam of folkloric inspiration with the most advanced European compositional techniques heard in his major works throughout the 1940s is his great achievement. This is unique. There were some for whom Salgado was not sufficiently nationalist because he used European forms like the symphony, whereas for others he was too nationalist. Therefore, there are works where this nationalism is very prominent; in others it is present only in a veiled way, almost abstracted. And in some works, like the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, they are hardly discernible at all. But this isn’t a definitive path from nationalism to absolute music. He always maintained this source of national inspiration and never deprecated it. His final concerto for guitar he remains totally a nationalist. In fact, it’s called the “Ecuadorian Concerto.” As with all the great composers, his “passport,” so to speak, no longer mattered. Stravinsky, no matter how abstract he got, always sounded Russian; Beethoven was always German. But we don’t categorize them as nationalists. Their music is considered the patrimony of the world. So it is with Salgado, who was a universal and authentic genius with a distinct musical character, like all the greats. Despite the refinement of his art, he never abandoned his homeland, in a sense.
N. C.: So his music was national and universal.
M. M.: Yes, Salgado used national influences—pentatonic scales, rhythms, certain coloristic motifs—but he never quoted any folk music. In the first page of his First Symphony it reads: “Original themes by the author.” That was his whole career. As Ecuadorian as his themes were, the folkloric elements were entirely of his own invention. He accomplished the same with the influences from European music, using twelve-tone rows according to his own pleasure. Always in the background of each movement there is some tonality. He even states the key signatures in the first four of his symphonies. He never abandoned certain symphonic principles, mainly maintaining a tonal order in the background, despite his advanced harmonies. His personal style absorbed what he found, then transformed it into something personal. He is not dominated by ideas, but rather it is he who dominates the ideas.
N. C.: Who were some of the influences on his music?
M. M.: Wagner was one of his idols. From him he learned the art of seamless transitions, which one can hear displayed in his single-movement symphonies. He also was indebted to the examples of Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt. Salgado, by the way, was a consummate pianist.
N. C.: Were any of his scores available in print?
M. M.: There were no printed scores, so in 2017 I had to go to the archives where his manuscripts were stored in Quito at the National Archives of Ecuador (ANE), scan them page by page with my phone, and then transcribe them. Each symphony has approximately about 300,000 notes. It was barely two years later, with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca, that a complete cycle of his nine symphonies was performed and recorded. We had the honor of being the very first orchestra to record all these works. In a very short time I fell in love with his music. I also scanned the manuscript of his operatic trilogy about the fall of the Roman Empire. Fantastic music. I have conducted the premiere of the first installment, Eunice. The final two remain: El centurión (The Centurion) and El tribuno (The Tribune). Altogether Salgado’s catalog of works is vast: Over 150 scores. We are not talking about mere songs, but mostly large-scale works with multiple movements. His national opera, Cumandá, is an immense work comprising 600 pages. Imagine that. It’s five hours long, like something Wagnerian. Or the trilogy of operas I just talked about. How many major composers in the 20th century composed operatic trilogies on a single theme? He had such an expansive spirit.
N. C.: Returning to the symphonies, these had never been played integrally?
M. M.: Never had all his symphonies been played in Ecuador, let alone abroad. The reception history of his works was as meagre as his publicity, since there were so few performances. So his name is still not well known. But the same thing that happened to you happened to me while reading his scores: I fell in love with this genius. Pieter van Winkel, the artistic director of Brilliant Classics, was also impressed by his music. I remarked to him that we had here recordings of an incredible composer whose work was being played with great commitment by our orchestra.
N. C.: Were any of Salgado’s symphonies played while he was alive?
M. M.: Virtually none of Salgado’s music had ever been played in his presence, except supposedly for the Sixth, although there exist no contemporary comments about that fact. He conducted the second movement of the First and the first of the Eighth with the orchestra of the Conservatorio Nacional de Música, by no means a professional ensemble. It was all he could do for his symphonies during his lifetime. There is an anecdote wherein he showed the Fifth in 1967 to Proinnsías Ó Duinn, then music director of the Orquesta Nacional de Ecuador, who replied that it was “impossible” to perform for his orchestra. Which was certainly true, because the orchestra back then had maybe 40 musicians, and no instruments such as the English horn, bass clarinet, harp, even double bass—the large apparatus which Salgado’s music demands was lacking. His own comments about the musical atmosphere in Ecuador did not help. “I doubt that I’ll ever hear one of my works played properly in my own country,” and other such remarks didn’t endear him to many. A lot of people took it as an affront to the nation. But it was true. There was that notion that his music was untouchable, too difficult, too abstract. Even until very recently. That’s why in a way Salgado was kind of a Don Quixote: Despite the limitations he faced at home, he composed his music for another orchestra, another country, another time. His music awaited more favorable conditions to be played because during his lifetime they simply didn’t exist.
N. C.: Your liner notes mention how challenging Salgado’s music is to play.
M. M.: Salgado’s music is very complex. It is for the most part highly chromatic, even atonal, not diatonic. This is a big problem for the strings especially as his phrases don’t fit well under the hands. They’re very expressive, but almost go against the nature of his instruments. His parts don’t have the natural ease of, say, a symphony by Brahms. Furthermore, famous classical symphonies have been played countless times by countless orchestras. There exists a performance history, prior knowledge of these works. None of this exists with Salgado. We’re pioneers here. For an orchestra whose daily work isn’t recording, this was a very great endeavor for the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca. Moreover, Salgado makes very exacting instrumental demands in his symphonies. Among his quirks is writing extensive cadenzas for solo instruments. A difficult cadenza for solo violin lasting 28 measures is tough-going even for a seasoned concertmaster. Really his symphonies are teeming with cadenzas; above all for flute, violin, and harp. These are very challenging and they are among the new elements Salgado added to the history of symphonic writing. Especially for the strings, his instrumental demands are often beyond reasonable. In a few places I was forced to intercede. In the Third there is a section where the second violins rest while the first are playing a passage leaping octave after octave. Quite impossible. However, distributing this passage between first and second violins provides the same result for the listener while making the passage much more manageable for the violins. Salgado himself would have probably modified it if he had been given the chance to hear the work. Or there is a cadenza for four cellos which sometimes reaches into the register of the violins. I don’t think even in Berlin this passage could be played cleanly as it is rather difficult. But by distributing the parts across all the strings and letting them fall into the natural registers of their respective instruments, this passage loses all of its “impossibility.” Without violating the spirit of Salgado, I hope. If anything, it probably helps him to obtain a decent result in performance.
N. C.: What are the state of the manuscripts currently?
M. M.: Salgado’s son, Fausto, managed to sell the entirety of his father’s archive to the Ecuadorian government in 1997. The Central Bank of Ecuador (BCE) had a library where his papers were stored. Anybody interested could walk in and look at them, including myself. We put on some gloves and that was it. The very friendly library staff would take your request as to what score you wanted to see, then allow you to photograph it. Now the procedure has changed a little, so the librarian himself scans them and hands them over to you. But a lot of things are missing. The original version of the Ninth Symphony, for example, I could not find and had to settle for another version. The Sixth is in a sorry state. Very dirty and almost illegible. But who would dare to criticize this? It would be like criticizing Beethoven for such things. What is needed is a professional musicologist utilizing up-to-date archival methods to store these manuscripts. Not separating the papers as they are now with bond paper, which has acids. What is needed is onionskin paper, which is neutral and low in pH. But we are very far from this. Because of limited resources, we don’t have advanced methods of state-supervised archival preservation. There are no climate-controlled buildings, for example. Salgado’s papers were loaded up atop one another in cardboard boxes, inside of a building without climate control, which threatened to collapse in the event of a major earthquake. In fact, they were removed from the ANE building following the Peru earthquake of 2019, which was also felt strongly in Ecuador. I believe they are now stored at a military building. This is still a precarious situation even with the symphonies. Half of the finale in his First Symphony is gone; the orchestral score of his Fifth is totally lost. I had to reconstruct the orchestration from a piano reduction.
N. C.: How difficult was it to orchestrate that symphony from the surviving piano score?
M. M.: To orchestrate a symphony by Salgado at first seemed like a sacrilege to me, but soon after looking at the piano score I could hear the instruments. The score seemed to naturally suggest itself which instruments to use. So there wasn’t any kind of science to this process. Salgado makes everything so logical that the instrumentation almost came of its own automatically. Of course, being familiar with his later symphonies I also knew his taste for instrumental combinations that, for lack of a better word, one could describe as “experimental.” For example, he colors one of his themes with English horn, bass clarinet, and trombone. An incredible combination which few composers have tried. Or in the Fourth with its piccolo and contrabassoon. Notwithstanding the seeming clash of colors, these were always assembled logically. He was a great inventor of sonorities. In the last installment of his operatic trilogy, he introduces a mage, a strange figure shrouded in mystery, by way of an ondes martenot. So he even makes use of electronic instruments, that’s how far he went. Salgado feared nothing. And all of his experiments come off. The sonorous results are always totally convincing.
N. C.: Speaking of the ondes martenot and your earlier mention of Messiaen, did Salgado ever maintain any correspondence with musicians outside of Ecuador?
M. M.: I'm not aware that he had any contacts outside of Ecuador. There has yet to be a catalog of his correspondence. I must confess that the few days I had in Quito, I had only time enough to scan the symphonies, then later the concerti and operas, which was laborious enough. I did see boxes in which there were letters, newspaper clippings. But a lot of work needs to be done in order to make a registry of all his papers. Some researchers may know of individual items.
N. C.: Were the recordings on the Brilliant set made from copies of the manuscripts?
M. M.: Some were. The first edition of the symphonies was produced privately by me. Here they are! [Meissner holds up a large, blue hardcover book.] There are only three copies because they are expensive to produce. Before recording the nine symphonies beginning in September 2019, I moved forward with my private edition of the symphonies, and we were able to program them one by one. Learning with the interpretation and trying to find the Salgado sound. We programmed them in three concerts during that same month. The hall was full and the audience knew they were hearing something historic. My friends in Quito—Pablo Guerrero, Alex Alarcón, and the one who has done the most research, Guillermo Meza—have already published a few of his works, mostly piano scores. The concerti are already edited on my computer. But what we need is a publisher, somebody with a reputation that will ensure these works are heard. We’re going step by step. Soon the tome I just showed you will be seeing the light of day with a wider public, hopefully. There are certain details which are difficult to hear and can only be grasped by reading the scores. For example, in the development of the Fourth, there is a moment when the main theme is heard simultaneously in retrograde, a crab canon. Not just that, but a little before that the trombone introduces a contrapuntal theme which is then heard at the same time with the aforementioned theme and presented itself in a crab canon. My God! It’s almost like magic, or like an overflowing of compositional science.
N. C.: Like in his Third Symphony.
M. M.: Yes. Why did he write a symphony in the “Rococo style?” That wasn’t even his main goal as a composer. That it is “Rococo” is a fib, because its movements are inspired by dances from the previous era, the Baroque. Not a single movement really belongs to the Rococo era. But if we understand “Rococo” as it was originally meant—that is to say excessive, exaggerated ornamentation, or even irregularity—then that is the key. Otherwise, how are you going to make “Rococo” music with an orchestra of 70 musicians? Everything is intentionally anachronistic and ironic. In that symphony, to me, the inspiration in the 18th century replaced momentarily his preoccupation with Andean music. Therefore it’s another kind of compositional exercise, wherein he uses alternative sources of inspiration, and mixes it with advanced techniques. However, the last movement coincides with the rhythm of the albazo andino, an ironic coincidence which Salgado must’ve been aware of. There is a very strong bond between the Latin American and the European in this intellectual exercise.
N. C.: Is there more Salgado in the offing from Cuenca?
M. M.: We hope to record more for Brilliant, yes. I think there has been a good reception for these recordings. The discs haven’t been released yet in Ecuador. A friend of mine brought it to me from the United States. My mother in Europe had a copy before I did! A great fortune that Brilliant picked up this project and guaranteed an international audience. Salgado composed seven concerti: Three for piano; one each for cello, horn, and guitar. That would be another wonderful chapter in this tale, another set of three CDs. We have played many of these. All but the solo violin part has been lost from his Violin Concerto; his Viola Concerto has been completely lost. The loss of much of his music is a shame. But I’m hoping that these discs improve the standing of Salgado.
N. C.: You speak like a genuine convert to Salgado’s cause.
M. M.: It was a great gift in my life to discover this music. He was one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. Why such arrogance continues to exist about Latin American music is beyond me. One could also just as well qualify Copland and Ives as being merely local phenomena. In my opinion, the United States has yet to produce a composer like Revueltas, for example. They can’t touch him. At the moment I’m writing my doctor’s thesis on Salgado’s symphonies for the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar. His work doesn’t let me rest! I’ll continue researching and playing to wherever it takes me. His music is really one of the most gratifying discoveries of 20th century music in recent times.
Michael Meissner with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca (Courtesy of Michael Meissner)
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