I’ve seen the famous Ernie Kovacs commercial for Dutch Masters a few dozen times, at least, and never noticed the string quartet. Not that they were in the commercial, the one known as “Haydn”, the one that won Kovacs and co-director Joe Behar an award the first year the Clios were given out in 1959. Something else.
One aspect to the music in the commercial is incorrect, although it wasn’t known at the time of production. Another is spot on, and that’s what i just noticed, while watching the commercial on a big screen at the Ernie Kovacs Day commemorative program at the Trenton Museum on May 22nd.
The famous string quartet that some people only know because of the Kovacs cigar commercials is not by Haydn. It turned out that this and a few others composed around the same time and long-attributed to Haydn were composed by Roman Hofstetter. But this discovery did not occur until 1965. So, Kovacs gets a pass on the mis-attribution.
[Note: this is not who Leonard from The Big Bang Theory was named after. He’s named for Robert Hofstadter, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics.]
What I noticed last Wednesday in the auditorium in Trenton, viewing the commercial for the umpteenth time, was the way the string quartet was playing. A lot of times when you see musicians in a commercial or a TV show, it’s blatantly obvious that the performers hired are not musicians. (Don’t get me started on people you see in commercials or TV shows portraying orchestra conductors, who appear to be trying to wave out candles on a birthday cake without any sense of rhythm.)
Not so with Kovacs. For instance, according to Edie Adams, Ernie hired actual ballerinas for the “Swan Lake” ballet performed by a company of gorillas on his special Kovacs on Music (NBC, 1959).
If you take a good look — if I may use that expression — at the string quartet in the “Haydn” commercial, you’ll notice that the gentlemen on stage are actually playing their instruments. Not only that, that are playing exactly what we’re hearing on the soundtrack. Look at their fingers. It’s not a performance recording, but they are actually “lip-syncing” to the recording, or doing their best to do so.
This meant there was audio playback for the shoot, and it’s all one long take. It’s carefully timed so the acting, the comic business, the long pan from the audience to the quartet, is done so it lasts the right number of seconds. And Ernie went to the trouble of hiring a professional string quartet to play the Adagio Cantabile movement of the Haydn/Hofstetter quartet in synch with the recording. All for a minor detail that maybe, maybe, musicians who were watching might notice. But they probably wouldn’t.
Heck…I only caught this now after 20 years.
The Ernie Kovacs Centennial Collection DVD box set is available from Shout Factory and other online retailers. The Ernie Kovacs Record: Centennial Edition will be released July 5, 2019 by Omnivore Recordings. For more insight about the concept of items hiding in plain sight, please check out this book by Ben Robinson.
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Nothing in moderation. Now THAT’S koo-krazy…..But not surprising if you consider the source. These are the imperceptible details that a even musician of your calibre would need 20 years and 50 viewings to notice but that which made Ernie authentic to the Nth degree fahrenheit. And it wasn’t a deal to him to actually explain it later, wax rhapsodically about it later, “…and then I wrote.” If you got it, you got it. Didn’t matter to him, if I may be permitted to draw a conclusion. He just knew what had to be done to make it real in service of the laugh, the point. Very Buster-like of him. It’s up to the artist to provide not for the audience to decipher. And it all goes to character and integrity. I’ll also assume that the ‘live-on-tape” method of producing was selected as the best means hearkened back to his skill honed to perfection in the very unforgiving days of Live TV of the fifties, The Live shows I had worked on wouldn’t even had considered that way. Remember Regis lamenting that the “Live…” show live would come on at 58 minutes but when it needed to be recorded with for a future broadcast, it be often one “stop-tape” after another.
And Ben, was this the commercial Ernie & Co won the Clio for? You reminded me of how I would sit with my father watching “Take a Good Look” and his monthly specials and look forward to the commercials more than you would at the Super Bowl. And like every Masterpiece, can see it over and over again.
So much thanks to you & Josh for the Ernie Day in Trenton. So much thanks for letting me see ‘The Ernie’s” large on a DaLite Screen – or was it Radiant Silver Renticular? – with an audience who gets it. For letting me explore more deeply the sensibilities that developed so early in my being and resonates these decades and decades. How it dovetailed with my appreciation later.
“Nothing in Moderation” executed with great discipline, skill…..and fun.
“Everything in Excess.” Guess I got him to blame for that.
I’ll thank HIM for that on a Ouija Board.
PS: Eight years ago this Memorial Weekend, you were kind enough to be my specail guest star at my party of twenty to introduce your Ernie DVDs and some of the Lollos Tapes. And one of the kindness compliments I ever received – and don’t go my gray hair, I’ve been around decades – was you telling me how sensitive I was in my selection of the Best of Ernie for an audience of basically newbees. That is of the highest compliment.
I remember The Ernie Kovaks show on NBC. I must have been 8 or 9 or 10 years. And while I don’t remember more than some names, such as The Nairobi Trio, and Percy Dovetonsils I do always recall the outro, where a picture of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Draper’s Guild shown on screen with the Hofstetter music in the b.g. I found a recording of it, out of copyright, at the Internet Archive. It’s named: Hofstetter: String quartet in F op.3 no.5 mov.2 and is here: https://archive.org/details/2LenerSQColL16389/2+Lener+SQ+Col+L1638-9.flac – thanks for the memory
Yes! For decades this piece was considered to be something by Haydn, but musicologists determined that it was by Hofstetter. There’s a blog post about this here.