Julia Child Steps Onto the Stage

OK—I could tell you that the buzz on the island is that the secretary of justice, a guy by the name of Luis Sánchez Betances, ran over to the police station last Friday night, since a buddy of his, Jaime Sifre Rodríguez, who is also a partner in Sánchez’s law firm, got picked up for drunk driving.

In fact, his blood alcohol was .215%, which is high indeed.

Sour minds on the island are wondering what Sánchez Betances was doing there, and some have even gone so far as to breathe aspersions. But relax, dear Reader, there was no impropriety involved—in fact, Sánchez Betances was there to make absolutely sure that the rules were being followed, and that no special treatment was given. He was just there for a friend! Something anyone would do!

And now, of course, warped and twisted minds are attempting to misconstrue a perfectly normal action—how dare they! Here, for example, is an ex district attorney, Osvaldo Carlo:

El exfiscal Osvaldo Carlo dijo en NotiUno que “la mera presencia del secretario de Justicia allí, sin decir una palabra, crea una presión indebida sobre estos agentes de la Policía. Porque, por qué un secretario de Justicia va a estar en el lugar de los hechos si no es para crear un ambiente negativo de la investigación. No tenía ni que decir una sola palabra. Él tenía otras maneras de trabajar con ese asunto que no fuese presentarse allí, porque al presentarse allí iban a sentir la presión del cargo”.

(The ex attorney Osvaldo Carlo said to NotiUno that “the mere presence of the secretary of justice there, without saying a word, creates undue pressure on those police agents. Why? Because why is a secretary of justice going to be there if not to create a negative environment for the investigation? He doesn’t have to say a word. He has other ways of working this affair without being there, because by being there they were going to feel the pressure.”)

Poppycock!

Turning away from such negativity, what’s the deal with Lee Hoiby?

Why, you may ask, am I worrying about Hoiby? Because over the weekend, I was watching Renée Fleming talk about Leontyne Price, who had championed Hoiby’s work. So what was up with Hoiby?

Well, I knew he had a Wisconsin connection, but I didn’t know that he was actually born in Madison in 1926, had studied with Gunnar Johansen, and had later attended Mills College. His compositions draw the attention of Gian Carlo Menotti, who showed them to Samuel Barber. Menotti also invited Hoiby to Curtis to study with him: no small thing, since Menotti was the leading opera composer of the time.

And Hoiby didn’t follow the fashion of the time—which was to compose highly dissonant music. Instead, his music is tuneful, lyrical, and sophisticated. And his specialty? Here’s what he told Zachary Woolfe:

“It was the singers, not the instrumentalists,” he said. “The instrumentalists didn’t know who the fuck I was. I didn’t have any instrumental music played. Singers, you can’t fool them. When they hear a song, they can tell right away if it’s going to make them sound good. And mine do.”

Here’s what Woolfe has to say about the songs:

Indeed, it seems likely that his songs-whose brilliant and varied texts, chosen by Mr. Shulgasser, range from Bishop to Roethke to Stevens to Rilke-will be what last the longest of his work. Perfectly honed little worlds, they benefit most from his modesty. Small shifts, like the opening into ecstatic brightness of the third stanza of “The Message” (set to a John Donne poem), take on a kind of humble grandeur.

In the interview with Woolfe, Hoiby said the following: “All I did was compose. I never went anywhere, I didn’t know anybody. I never went to any parties. I never met anybody. I’m basically not interested in social life, I guess.”

Well, he must have watched television, because his spoof on Julia Child is bang on. In the words of Joseph Dalton:

All of Child’s lovable foibles and self-deprecating humor come through. She puts egg yolks into a pan and then drops it on the kitchen floor and carries on undaunted. She also sets up a race between an electric mixer and a hand-cranked one. Hoiby wisely doesn’t interfere with the chef’s magic. There’s no additional jokes or layers of irony in the tuneful score, which includes a light and colorful orchestration.

And as light as the piece—and the cake—is, there’s also something tinged with melancholy about Hoiby’s work. Is it because I know that he must have been dealing with being gay in a decade—the fifties—that was perhaps the most homophobic of the century? Is it because he never quite attained the celebrity of Gian Carlo Menotti? I feel about him what I feel about Barber: at the end, he must have felt he had given too much, and gotten too little.

Death of a Composer

He was one of those lapses—one of those guys I was supposed to listen to one day, one of the composers I was going to get around to hearing. Because for much of the last two or three decades, there wasn’t much time for music, and when there was, it was generally after a dinner with Raf. Not the time you want to be experimenting with music you may or may not like; time instead for music you know will go with the second bottle of wine and the cigar.

So I managed only recently to hear another composer, Henryk Gorécki, whose third symphony everyone—including those normally chilly to classical music—loves. And yes, I had heard Arvo Pärt, especially his Passio; in fact, so mesmerizing or so narcotic is the music that, after a performance, rushing to get to a night shift, I missed the subway train I had taken for years and ended up not at Rush Presbyterian but on the South Side of Chicago.

OK—I’ll toy with you no more: the guy I’m talking about in those first two paragraphs is John Tavener, often lumped with the Estonian Arvo Pärt and the Polish Henryk Gorécki. Why? Because their music has this slow, ethereal, spiritual side that makes you long to be in a student apartment with cheap wine and a joint in your hand. And Tavener fit the bill, since the Beatles featured him on an album. Here’s what The Guardian had to say:

The music Tavener was famous for in the 60s was tumultuous, chaotic, modernist, and radical – another world from the Orthodox-inspired spirituality of his later works. His wacky cantata The Whale was the piece that inaugurated the new-music firebrands of the London Sinfonietta in 1968, and it was also his first release on Apple a couple of years later, with its mix of electronics, football rattles, serialism, crunching dissonance, and even a whip.

It may be the whip, but the description alone had me running for Mozart. And then Tavener got religion, this time in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church. So then the music changed; here, from The New York Times, is his account of what happened:

“I stopped composing,” he said, “and I listened to Indian music, Persian music, all music from the Middle East. I listened to American Indian music. I listened to any music that was based on traditional ideas. That’s when I started to question what on earth happened to this Western civilization and why the sacred seems to have been pushed out gradually by the domination of the ego.”

In fact, Tavener’s disinclination for this music dominated by the ego extended to Johann Sebastian Bach for a time, though by 2007 he was back to playing Bach. And he had had popular success—composing The Protecting Veil in 1988, when cellist Stephen Isserlis performed it at the Proms. Then there was the Song for Athene, sung in 1997 for the funeral of Princess Diana.

And as usual, the more that the general population embraced him, the more the critics sniffed. Here’s Mark Swed, chief music critic of the LA Times, in a generally favorable tribute that still manages to get the headline John Tavener: Composer, Showman, and Spiritual Guide (disclaimer—in the old days, the journalist didn’t write headlines, and so Swed would be off the hook. Now? Who knows?)

That is Tavener's 1987 cello concerto in which the solo part seems to hang in the air, going nowhere and in no hurry for 50 minutes or more, depending on how much the cellist cares to milk the ethereal mystery.

OK—I’m listening to the concerto, called The Protecting Veil, and yeah, I see what Swed means. It’s disjointed loveliness, and that may be the point; Swed says it himself, the essence of Tavener’s work is “seduction.”

And there is something of a showman in a composer who can write and or stage an all night affair called the Veil of the Temple, performed overnight at the Temple Church in London—yes, the same one that figures in The da Vinci Code. Here’s what Swed has to say:

Beginning with a "Mystical Love Song of the Sufis," Tavener made room in "Veil of the Temple" not only for the traditional Christian Trinity but also Mary Theotokos, St. Isaac the Syrian and the Upanishads. Besides vocal soloists and the Temple's large choir, the instruments included the church organ, an Indian harmonium, a duduk (an ancient Armenian flute), Tibetan temple bells, a deep-honking Tibetan horn and a Western brass band.

It was a magnificent night, ending with the dawn illuminating the church's stained-glass windows. The audience roamed the church, found a pew to snuggle in and sleep on or went outside for coffee. Tavener seemed to be enjoying himself greatly, chatting with people, hanging out. It wasn't a party, but it wasn't an overly solemn occasion, either. One went to be amazed, not preached to. It was — again, that word that I thinks fits Tavener's music better than any other — seductive.

Well, Tavener was felled by Marfan syndrome, which I knew about because at one time Abraham Lincoln was thought to have suffered it. And it seemed likely—Marfan sufferers are unusually tall, with long limbs and bony fingers. And they’re prone to at least thirty generally horrible conditions, among which is that you may have sudden cardiac arrest at any time. In short, you’re a time bomb, which does have some psychological consequences; here’s what he told the Times:

“It attacks the main valve to the heart, it attacks the eyes, it attacks the mind — there isn’t much it doesn’t attack,” he told a Times interviewer during one of his rare visits to the United States. “And the big danger of Marfan is that you can suffer a rupture at any time, and you go quickly. So I suppose I live with the thought of death very much in front of me, and this may well have a bearing on the way I think generally.”

Right—I can see that. And now the life is over, and the critics are wondering: where shall we put him? Top drawer? Showman? Hack? Celebrated for the wrong reasons? Mystic minimalist?

Where does he go?

Nor is it the case that history will judge, since history has a way of being rewritten, revised, reworked. Bach was forgotten until Mendelssohn came along. Vivaldi soared in the 70s and has fallen since. And some worthy composers are routinely neglected.

But the conundrum to me is that old one: the separation of popular and serious. Is it always the case that music that is accessible to the masses and loved by them is necessarily inferior? Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Copland’s Appalachian Spring—can anyone deny their musical worth? Yet even these masterpieces have just a little tarnish on them—the serious listener should be listening to Barber’s Essay for Orchestra, or Copland’s Third Symphony. What if Tavener’s music was great and popular?

Or what, perhaps, would happen if we stopped worrying about great? A man of the cloth in a Davies novel defends “bad” religious art—the sweet, androgynous Jesus with his bleeding heart exposed. Right, it’s not a Tintoretto, but if all the Marías and Josefas and Pilars love him and come to Christ through him…well? Isn’t there a place in the world for bad art, of which there is a lot more than good art? Shouldn’t we leave our snobbery at the door, as we welcome the common folk in? Tavener’s music appealed to people. Punto. So get over it….

I once saw a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, which made a gazillion dollars and was a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts and was translated into every language included Bushman Click and three languages invented just for the purpose. Oh, and NASA shot copies of the book into all corners of the universe, so amazing and so successful it was. I exaggerate, but that’s how it must have felt to her. And then what was she supposed to do? How do you top that? I imagine her sitting down to write her next book, and starting out with the first word, “the….” Instantly a chorus of disapproval swells up: “a disappointment,” “not on the same level as…,” “after her first book….”

So Tavener’s music will live or die, and that’s as much as he or any of us will know about what we spend our lives doing. We go on for a time, Gentle Reader, and then?

That’s it….

Paid Too Much (reposted)

I wrote this exactly one year ago today. Here it is, once again. Enjoy!
------

Samuel Barber, 1910 to 1981. Well, those are the official dates. But Barber poses a question. What happened to him from the fiasco of his opera Antony and Cleopatra in 1967 and his death in 1981?

“His last years were beset with depression and alcoholism,” says WikiPedia.

Right, the last fifteen years of his life—and what should have been the culmination of his creative life.

My impression was that he had created most of his work early, and then burned out. But in fact, it’s not true. Up until the early 60’s, Barber composes steadily, slowly, and richly.

Richly being the operative word in at least two senses. The guy didn’t seem to need money. Yeah, he taught for a couple of years at Curtis, where he had studied. But he hated it, so he quit!

Why doesn’t that sound familiar?

He was what used to be called comfortable—an amorphous term that might mean anything from loaded to able to slide by to the end without having to worry. Parents were from West Chester, and Gian Carlo Menotti, with Latin volubility, described it as a cesspool covered with a thin but unbreakable layer of gentility. Drinking, incest—the old story.

At age 9 or so, he writes a letter to his parents, saying “don’t tell me to go play football.” He’s already sure that he’s a composer.

Or was he? At Curtis, where his parents sent him as a high school student (guess they got that message…), he also excelled as a pianist AND a baritone. But composition won out.

He also was good with languages, which is why Curtis asked him to befriend Menotti, who knew Italian and French, but no English. So they spoke French together.

Well, I wonder about all of this because Eric, a Facebook friend, posted a clip of Leonard Slatkin conducting the famous Adagio for Strings. If you have a quarter of a century to spare, I recommend it; it’s about as slow as evolution.

Still, it was a thing to hear, this morning at four AM, when I arose with the violent urge to eat…yes, coffee ice cream. 

Later in the day, I began to worry myself about Barber. The Adagio is the most famous by a light year of his work. It’s the only piece most people will ever know. Yet it’s comparatively early. What would it be, to be known for this single piece, and have the rest of your work ignored?

Well, I was forgetting Vanessa, his first opera, which was a spectacular hit. Right—not on the order of Les Miz, but the operatic equivalent. The piano concerto was well received, the violin concerto as well.

And then came the fiasco of Antony and Cleopatra. The production was terrible; parts of the score were written almost hours before the performance; the orchestra and chorus was unprepared. Apparently, the performance, which was to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home, was filled with hotshots (Imelda Marcos was there!) who couldn’t have cared less. It was broadcast on radio live, and you could hear stage hands shouting “go” or “move it.”.

Here’s Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, on the ordeal:

“Not one of the stronger plays” (!) he wrote. The production was staged to gaudy excess by Franco Zeffirelli, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s play into a libretto. The opera’s huge sets broke the stage turntable in the new theater during the rehearsals-the weight of the pyramids and the sphinxes literally crushed the new stage, and in all this chazerei, Barber’s luscious music got lost (Leontyne Price was trapped inside a pyramid and her displeasure is evident in a TV film made during rehearsals).

Savvy readers of this blog will pick up a little fact more important—sorry, Leontyne!—than Price being trapped in a pyramid. Go back, and check that little fact thrown away in a relative clause.

Zeffirelli wrote the libretto.

What?!

Franco Zeffirelli?

Why did Barber permit it? His reputation was secure, and his finances as well. Why did he accept this commission when he knew that Vanessa had taken him five years to write, and he needed to produce Antony in two? What was he thinking of—the sharp, gifted man who was, by the way, acutely sensitive to text?

It almost seems a death wish, in fact, it all but literally was. He ended his decade-long relationship with Menotti, he drank heavily, he fell into depression. A friend who was in musical circles in the 70’s in New York told me that his parties were, well, both famous and infamous.

As I read about the Adagio, I came across a perceptive article entitled “The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.” The author disputes the common theory that Barber’s homosexuality had anything to do with his deep melancholy. Menotti was welcomed by Barber’s parents, friends, associates. They lived together for many years. Why should it matter, then?

But I wonder. A highly sensitive man, who has fought and suffered and lived a quiet, seemly life—a life worthy of West Chester, Pennsylvania—hits the 60’s and what happens? His world, for which he has paid dearly, collapses. Women are burning bras, not taking Valium washed down with vodka. Blacks are demanding jobs other than porters on the railroad.

Gay men are holding hands on the street.

He had paid too much, gotten too little.

Wouldn’t you reach for the bottle?

"Strange, but the Adagio in the string quartet version becomes both more personal and almost redemptive at the end...."

A Voice of Incomparable Price

One of my favorite authors once wrote a line to the effect of “the person you have become, through sheer hard work and adversity, is just as much if not more the true self than the person you started out as.”

Robertson Davies wrote the line referring to a young soprano, but the person who brought the line to my mind was an old soprano: Leontyne Price. And what an amazing soprano! Take a listen to a relatively unknown aria—Song to the Moon, from Dvorak’s Rusalka.



OK—now you can hear why BBC’s Music Magazine in 2007 listed her among the 20 best sopranos. (She came in number four, after Callas, Sutherland, and de los Ángeles.)

And she has an interesting story—she was born in Laurel, Mississippi to parents of limited means. Which, oddly, may have been a break; the schools were strictly segregated, but she has fond memories of the teachers, all of whom were devoted to their students. (In one anecdote, Price admits that the Home Economics teacher had told her, “Leontyne, you’ll never be a great housekeeper.” Somehow, Price manages to make this remark self-deprecating and funny—as she is all throughout the interview.)

So Price, as an older teenager, worked cleaning for a prominent white couple—who were sufficiently impressed to ask Price’s parents if they couldn’t send her off to Juilliard. With their help—as well as a benefit concert from Paul Robeson—she got there.

Like Marian Anderson, born thirty years earlier, Price made her career in Europe before attacking the United States. And when she got there, as she tells New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini, she had faced some of the toughest critics and audiences in the world. So when she was to make her Metropolitan Opera debut—was she fazed? Yes but mostly no. However, she did have a little prayer: Jesus, you got me into this; now, get me out!

Well, Jesus came through—she got a 42-minute ovation; it was one of the longest ovations at the Met.

Asked to describe her voice, Price admits to being a spinto—a rare breed of soprano who has a flexible, lyric voice that can be pushed to a more dramatic, powerful voice. Here’s Price singing Vissi d’Arte, from Puccini’s Tosca.

And just to hear a dramatic soprano perform the same aria—here’s the incredible Birgit Nilsson, a dramatic soprano who could single-handedly take on an orchestra of 120 furiously playing instrumentalists, plus a chorus of dozens, and still make herself very much heard. Oh, and do it for five hours, and repeat the whole thing the next day.



She had thought, initially, to be a recitalist, and she had a close friendship with the composer Samuel Barber, who wrote his Hermit Songs for her. And though another one of Barber’s masterpieces, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, was premiered by another soprano—Eleanor Steber—Price has a special affinity for the piece. Like both Barber and the lyricist James Agee, Price’s father had just died. And so this piece—a nostalgic look at parents on porches, small-town life, kids playing amid the sounds of crickets—had special meaning for Price.



And it was for Price that Barber composed his second opera—an opera that still attracts controversy: Antony and Cleopatra, which the Metropolitan Opera commissioned to open the new hall in 1966. It was a fiasco—Franco Zeffirelli created a ghastly stage setting, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the stage machinery was acting up. At one point, Price got stuck in a pyramid and couldn’t get out. But there she was—still singing away!

Barber never quite got over it—he drank more and more, and wrote less and less. Price shook it off and went on with her career—she sang her last performance in 1997—and she was seventy at the time. That, for a singer, is extraordinary.

I’ve no idea how old she was when she did the interview below with Tommasini, but she’s clearly no spring chicken. Yet she sings in the shower every morning, and gets up to the F above high C. Then she tells herself two things—if she can do that F, her high C will be right there. Oh, and also that yes, she has the energy to go downstairs and eat breakfast.

She is, after all, an extraordinary artist—noble, funny, self-deprecating, and yet keenly aware that she has had both a great gift and has worked mightily to use it well. W. Somerset Maugham, in a short story, portrayed a great singer as a kind of monster of egotism and ruthlessness.

Price is the absolute opposite.

Remeron 15 mg PO HS

Taí asks how I am doing.

Which person is she asking? For while most people have two personae, I have three: the waking, the sleeping, and the up-at-three-in-the-morning.

Up at three in the morning is nothing unusual, I know. Guys who worry about their mortgages, their jobs, their teenage kids—they all get up at three. And in this life, who’s not worrying about something?

My getting-up-at-three is slightly different. I take a pill, Remeron 15 mg PO HS, that is something like a date rape drug—it knocks me out, only to wake me up at three. And then, I am sacked with a craving for sweets. I’ve done coffee ice cream (Haagen-Dazs, $5.99 at CVS), jelly beans, (Jelly Belly, 30 flavors, $3.49 at CVS), mozzarella cheese (not a sweet, I know, but diabetes runs in the family, so I forced the change) and last night, pineapple chunks (so does high cholesterol, so I’m trying this).

The other unusual thing is that while up, I’m not in that three-in-the-morning worry state. I’ve done that, I know that; no, I’m quite happy, though I’d rather be back in bed, asleep. But I munch on, and sated, frequently fall asleep in my chair. I awaken (marginally) just enough to (usually) lurch back to bed.

This is not a problem—what is a problem is what this drug does remarkably well to avert. And that is depression, which is the worst disease possible in terms of the quality of life.

Nor is that me—that’s the word from an article I read years ago. It seems that you can have anything, diseases as terrible as Lou Gehrig’s Disease or Huntington’s Chorea and still have a better quality of life. Not having any major diseases to date, I can only trust the authorities.

But at three in the morning, I am frequently trawling the Internet, stumbling on interesting webpages, and emailing them to myself. This is my only clue, when I wake up four hours later, of who and what I am and have been doing. It’s my one glimpse into my shadow self.  And last night, apparently, I was listening to “Sure on this Shining Night,” by Samuel Barber.

It’s a song that is impossible not to love. And it comes with a story, which I must have read last night:

No doubt the popularity of "Sure on the Shining Night" was amplified by Barber's frequent retelling of an anecdote that directly involved the song. In 1979, Barber had just moved into a new apartment in New York City and needed to call home. He was trying to reach Gian Carlo Menotti, whom he knew was visiting the apartment. However, upon trying to dial the number from the telephone booth, Barber realized that he could not recall the newly established phone number. The composer contacted the operator for assistance who initially refused to provide Barber with the number, but confessed that she possessed a "weakness" for "Sure on this Shining Night" and requested that Barber sing the song's opening phrase to confirm his identity. Barber complied and was rewarded with his telephone number!

Right—a nice image, the composer singing his most famous song in a phone booth in New York.

Oh, and by the way, Gian Carlo Menotti was visiting? If so, Gian Carlo had been visiting for half a century, since the two met at Curtis as students, and they had been life companions ever since.

From Barber, I must have drifted off to Rockwell Kent, because I found that I had sent off the following illustration:

Nice, hunh? Then I sent on this:

Hmmm—pretty erotic; was Kent gay? Right, so I looked him up, and the answer is no—he had three wives, five kids, and was sexually promiscuous.

But his work must have reminded of another artist, Paul Cadmus, and boy, was he gay. Take a look at this:

Mmmmm. How about this:

All that and he can read, too! Now then, where’s that famous one, you know, the guy on the bicycle…. 

You talking about this?

Well, I must have been falling asleep. But why was I even up in the first place?

Because of this….

Fifth Shade of Grey—A Walk on the Slow Side

OK—if you’ve been to more than ten weddings in your life, you’ve heard it: the Pachelbel Canon. What’s interesting is that, up until the 70’s, nobody had ever heard of it. Then, it was everywhere—especially after the movie Ordinary People used it.

Two things about the piece—it’s got a ground bass, the musical way of saying that the cello plays the same damn thing over and over. Trust me, any cellist who doesn’t have the Pachelbel Canon memorized has a serious problem.

And yes, it’s a true canon. Nope, it doesn’t fire a ball—it has three violins all playing the same thing two bars apart. It a more sophisticated version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It’s a bit ironic that Pachelbel is known, now, for just one work, because in his life his music was well known and well received. But there’s a lot of music, only a bit of which I’ve listened to. So let’s start, yes, with the famous Canon.  

And here, because I couldn’t resist…..

Right, so it may just have gone over the edge, there, but it’s actually in the good baroque tradition, which was to deem the written music as a starting point, never an end, for playing. So yes, there was always room for invention, for throwing in a new riff, for ornamenting. Music at the time was like jazz—much more open.

OK—enough Canon. How about a chaconne?



The chaconne is a musical form that takes a short fragment of music and spins off endless variations of it. And this chaconne has a ground bass, as did the canon, and as do many chaconnes.

Oh, and speaking of chaconnes, there’s a great chaconne by Monteverdi. Here it is, with our old friends from L’Arpeggiata.

OK—that was a bit not on the slow side. But how’s this—the famous Adagio from Albinoni?  
  

There are other famous adagios—not the least of which is Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But that’s the work of a different day!

Music Insanely Good

OK—today’s problem: what to do about Robert Schumann.

There’s no question that something was going on, neurologically or psychiatrically speaking. The guy died in 1856 in an insane asylum. Two years previously, he attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine—he then asked the fishermen who rescued him to take him directly to the asylum. He had warned his wife Clara earlier that he feared he might hurt her.

Right—so he’s not quite your average, happy guy. Nor has he been for a long time. One theory is that he contracted syphilis when at the university, and that it lay dormant until turning into its tertiary state in his last decade.

The diagnosis at the time was dementia praecox, later known as schizophrenia. But a theory more prevalent, today, is that he was bipolar, or manic-depressive.

And there is certain weirdness in the late works. Of which, I may say, I only know one; that, for reasons which should be obvious, is the A minor Cello Concerto.

OK, maybe not as well as Clara did. She was, as you remember, not a lazy girl. She was certainly one of the finest pianists of her time (once, on tour with his wife, Schumann was asked, “oh, are you a musician too?”). She bore eight children, two of whom died in infancy. She cared for Schumann until the end, and was with him when he died. In addition, she composes, and composes well.

So she knows a thing or two, our Clara, or rather Robert’s Clara. And she brings a critical eye—or ear—to anything she hears of plays. So what’s her take on the cello concerto?

Clara Schumann's evaluation of this work, written on October 11, 1851, a year after it was composed, is still valid today. "I have played Robert's Violoncello Concerto again and thus procured for myself a truly musical and happy hour," she recounted. "The romantic quality, the flight, the freshness and the humor, and also the highly interesting interweaving of cello and orchestra are, indeed, wholly ravishing -- and what euphony and what sentiment are in all those melodic passages!"

This, taken from a Kennedy Center program note for the piece.

To me, it’s a work that really requires the right cellist. Whereas the piano concerto pretty much runs itself, the cello concerto is quirky. Lyrical, yes. The third movement is playful, indeed. And the second movement is moving.

But the first movement?

My first reaction is that it’s all over the map. Oh, and where in the world is it going? Because the moment you settle in for a nice tender phrase, the cellist slashes out a D Major arpeggio—a whiplash of energy. And then he goes back again.

There are cellists who can play it, make sense of it, make you like it. Yo Yo Ma, to my surprise, is one. He gets the lyricism, he gets the energy, he can mold the two.

The surprise, here, was listening not to Ma but the recording of the Andante movement of Clara Schumann’s Trio opus 17. And seeing, of course, the photos of the great pianist and composer herself.

I’ll listen to it, again. But I think my reaction will be the same.

There’s music that just misses the jumping off point, the point where you say, “WHAT! What did he just do!” It can be an unexpected modulation, a chord sequence that’s off the chart, a melodic line that’s so unbearable—and so devoid of the bar-line—that you can’t sing it. (That was my experience of the second movement of the Barber Violin Concerto—it drove me crazy until I realized what it was….)

There’s also music that has all the craft, all the skill, and abundant talent. You listen with pleasure. You know that you are in good hands.

What I heard in Clara’s work is a composer in full command of her abilities. But not a composer who will surprise you.

And Robert?

Next to his wife’s work, he both suffers and shines. For all the times he seems to drift aimlessly, there are moments when the score flashes as if doused with gasoline…

…lit by a spark of genius.

Music and poetry, parallel

Hey, wanna be 16, have a perfect body, and be drunk on young love for the first time again?

Well, I only did one-third of the above equation, so I can’t be sure. But I’m imagining that that’s the feeling that the second movement of the Barber violin concerto replicates.

If the authorities knew about it, they would illegalize (dammit, of COURSE that’s a verb!) it—music so lush, so lovely, it could almost be movie music.

Being Barber, it has a dark side. Hearing it for the first time in my life today, I almost felt that another composer had entered the movement at the end, hijacked it, and destroyed it. But after repeated listening—I may cancel my classes this afternoon just so I can continue listening to it, that’s how good it is—the answer is no.

It hangs together, and is emotionally true. What Barber was working through, I don’t know. But it has all the grief of the Adagio for Strings, and is considerably more complicated.

It may be the time—the piece was composed, or at least conceived, in Switzerland in 1939. Within months, Americans were advised to leave: the war was coming. So Barber sailed home in September of that year, only to find that his father was seriously ill.

Barber wrote the piece on commission—apparently, he got 600 bucks for this masterpiece. But there was a problem. The guy with the money wanted the piece for a violinist named Iso Briselli, (neither my computer nor I have heard of the guy, it appears) who was his ward. And Briselli’s violin teacher thought that the first two movements were ”unviolinistic.” So it got to be a sort of composition by committee, with everyone writing letters to the money-bag to argue their point.

Then Barber said to hell with it—take it or leave it.

Good for him.

Or maybe not. The third movement—which was one of the bones of the contention—is, yes, a little strange. I’m not sure it goes well with the previous two movements. I’m not even sure what it’s about.

But listening to the first two movements, I begin to think that only an outsider—someone intrinsically, inchoately different—could have written this. And I begin to think that Barber’s nature was essentially conservative.

He was always derided by all the camps for, well, not belonging to a camp. He was attacked as being a “neo-classicist.”

I think he’s first and foremost a lyricist. Remember, he was the nephew—and apparently quite close to—of a famous contralto in her day, Louise Homer. And is it a coincidence that yesterday, I spent the afternoon singing one gorgeous melody from the cello sonata, which I had just heard?

Nope.

Take away the lyric stuff and there’s not much left to Barber, says one critic.

But hearing the second movement, I’m not so sure. 

Whatever was going on with Barber may have afflicted others as well. Something troubled me about the date—September, 1939. Then I realized.

Here it is:

September 1, 1939

By W.H Auden

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism's face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

"I will be true to the wife,

I'll concentrate more on my work,"

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the deaf,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.