Six Suites by Somebody-or-Other

Well, here’s today’s question: was it Bach or Mrs. Bach who wrote the suites for solo cello—those suites that Casals championed, and about which he said, “they are the very essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music?”

Hunh?

Look, I’ve played them for about four decades, and I’ve gone through several feelings about them. Written sometime around 1720, when Bach had finally found a job that didn’t require cranking out a religious cantata every week—his archduke or prince or elector or whoever being of some protestant sect that disapproved of music—the six suites follow a basic pattern: a prelude followed by four or five dance movements.

OK—so that’s a pattern that Bach followed in the partitas for solo violin. So why should anyone think that it was the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach who had written the cello suites? Because that’s what Martin Jarvis, a Welshman teaching in Australia, is claiming.

His first assertion I agree with: there’s something not quite right about the suites. Here’s how The New Yorker puts it, “He reports that when he was studying the works in his youth he had the nagging sense that they differed from other music by Bach.” And what’s the difference?

Well, to me, the cello suites are a lot less interesting, less complicated, less sophisticated than the solo violin works. Want a comparison? Check out the two sarabandes below—one for violin, the other for cello. And it may be that the—for me—excessively slow tempo of the cello sarabande dooms it to sound plain and unimpressive, but I think there’s something else. If J. S. Bach did write the piece, he wasn’t having his best day.

And I know—that damn Prelude to the G Major suite makes it onto a lot of “top ten classical music” lists, but to me? It’s a snore, which is why I spent years paying it at a breakneck pace, and trying to emphasize the essential chordal nature of the piece. Why? Because there’s absolutely nothing else going on….

As you can see in the third clip, Jarvis isn’t afraid of suggesting some rather dark stuff about Papa Bach. His first wife—did she commit suicide because Bach was fooling around with Anna Magdalena, who would become his second wife, and the presumed composer of the cello suites? And why was Bach ordered to get married, but refused a church wedding? Oh, and then why did the two children of wife number one burn the love letters and day books of Bach and Anna Magdalena?

Beyond all of this, is there any serious evidence that Anna Magdalena, not Johann Sebastian, wrote the cello suites? Well, the only manuscript we have is one written by Anna Magdalena, and the traditional belief is that she was merely a copyist. We do have, however, the violin partitas in J. S. Bach’s hand. And then we have “forensic” evidence: here’s the Independent on the subject:

Forensic analysis of her manuscript handwriting shows that it did not have the “slowness or heaviness” usually attributed to someone who is simply copying but the quick, uncertain hand of a creator.

Numerous corrections to scores written in her hand, signal that she had been composing the works all along.

In the Independent, the cellist Julian Lloyd Weber makes a good point—Anna Magdalena, who was a singer but not, apparently, trained as a string player—had her hands full. From the same source:

Anna Magdalena ran a busy and stressful household. She was pregnant every year from 1723 to 1737, bearing 13 children, seven of whom died in youth. The couple also raised the surviving children from Bach’s first marriage.

In fact, people were quite a bit less fussy about attribution in the baroque era, when Bach, for example, borrowed from Vivaldi and other composers. And however much I love Bist du bei Mir, which everybody thinks is by Bach, I know that it was really written by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. So? It’s still a beautiful piece….

Will we ever know if Anna Magdalena, and not Johann Sebastian, Bach wrote the cello suites? Probably not. But it is true that there are very few female composers, which started me to thinking: Who was the first female composer? Well, I figured it would be Hildegard of Bingen, in the 12^th century, but guess what? There’s the little case of Sappho, born six hundred years before Christ.

Lastly, it has to be said that I am as guilty of sexism as all the rest. I play the suites virtually every day, since it’s what cellists do. I’ve made my piece with them: I neither think they are masterworks nor rubbish. My beef, mostly, is that for them to be effective, we have to give up, give in, and recognize that baroque performance practice has a lot—if not everything—to help us put them across. But how have I been sexist?

By assuming that the suites are lesser music than the other music Bach wrote, and therefore have to be by his wife. No one, by the way, has suggested the opposite—that all of the manuscripts we have in Bach’s hand are simply copies of Anna Magdalena’s work. And however much the idea that Mrs. Bach was a composer, the idea that Mr. Bach was the copyist?

Revolutionary!   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Healing Without Recovery

It’s the day after the hurricane, which came, swirled above my life, threated mass destruction and death, and left, leaving no scars but the tiniest one in my left eye, and greatly improving the landscape. How was it all for you? A normal Tuesday.

It was a minor procedure—nothing like the old days, when having a cataract removed was a one-week affair of lying in bed, patch shielding the afflicted eye, and nurses guarding you around the clock. I would have hated it, and yet, I miss it. Recuperation, recovery of sight, should be marked by something more than a discharge from an ambulatory clinic an hour or so after light and clarity were reclaimed. Nor should it be I putting in the sacred drops, the potent elixirs, the magic potions into the knived or lasered eye, but rather virgins dressed in white, their nursing caps pinned firmly to their hair, their appearance marked by the swish of their starched dresses.

And so I have spent two days progressively seeing more and more. The black of the words on my computer screen, for example, is a revelation: before, they had appeared as my face does in the morning mirror, after my shower. Now, each letter snaps out at me, screaming, demanding to be seen.

Oh, and did I mention that the floor is back to having black and grey tiles, and that grout appears between them? Previously, it had just been grey….

So sight has returned, and I rejoice, and yet… Something is missing. Yes, it’s wonderful that modern medicine has found a way to put a 450$ lens into my left eye in a procedure that lasted only fifteen minutes. Yes, it is wonderful that I walked into the surgery, and wobbled home from it afterward. And certainly, it’s wonderful to hear the doctor say, “no restrictions,” meaning that I could go back to work, go back to playing the cello, go on with my normal routine.

Wonderful—or is it? Because today, I’m tired, listless, a little over-caffeinated but feeling lazy. Yes, the weather—it’s been raining for three days—doesn’t much help. But there’s something else.

I feel gypped. I went through a long period in which I was losing my sight incrementally. This document, for example, is being written at 200% amplification, not the 100% that I used in the past, and always assumed I would use forever. I have had several prolonged fights with an excellent insurance company—excellent except that it had no ophthalmologists on the island. So that involved calling California, and having multiple conversations, all variations of this theme:

Insurance Lady: Marc, you absolutely covered by the plan!

Marc: OK, but my doctor would like to know how much the plan will pay for the procedure…

Insurance Lady: We’ll pay 100 percent!

Marc: Yes, but 100% percent of what?

Insurance Lady: 100% percent of our usual and customary fees!

Marc: And what is that, exactly.

Insurance Lady: 100%!

Marc: but 100% of what? If the doctor charges 10 million bucks for the operation, will you pay 100% of that?

Insurance Lady: Oh no, 100% of our usual and customary fees.

Marc: Ahh, and what is your usual and customary fee for a cataract operation?

Insurance Lady: Well, we can’t tell you that.

Marc: Why not? What am I supposed to tell my doctor?

Insurance Lady: Tell him you are 100% covered! 

It went on for weeks, during which it developed that if they actually told me what they were willing to pay the doctor—what their “usual and customary fee” was—that would amount to a “preauthorization,” which they utterly could not do. So I dithered with the insurance company, during which time life became dimmer and dimmer. It got to the point where I could no longer read the numbers on my cell phone. And then, blessedly, because of the court case Windsor, the company Raf worked for decided it wasn’t going to be in the business of deciding who was married where.

Because it was obviously going to be a Human Resources nightmare—especially for little companies like Walmart, with over a million employees in the United States, and even if you could figure out who was married where, and who was working where, and what that state’s policy was…well, what happens when you transfer that excellent gay manager from Massachusetts to turn around that region in Alabama? Because that health insurance for his or her spouse is a major part of the compensation package.

And so all three components were at last in alignment: we had the blind eye, the surgeon who could unblind the eye, and the company who would pay for it. What didn’t we have?

Well, trawling as I do for things to write about, I came upon Brené Brown talking about vulnerability. That resonated, since lying on a stretcher, moving from slot number three, seeing patient number one get wheeled off, moving to slot number two, only to see the new slot number one get wheeled of, only to arrive at slot number one? Meaning that in twenty minutes it will be your turn to entrust your eye to an essential stranger—though you have looked him up on line, and peered at his board certifications and wondered: were they real, or were they purchased for five cereal box coupons and fifty dollars?

Your mind, in short, knows perfectly well: everything will be OK. Your body, however, is telling you: there’s still time, get the hell OFF this stretcher! You can still write. You’re not walking into too many walls, yet. You can get it done later.

That, Dr. Brown, is vulnerability.

Then I pursued Dr. Brown onto another show, with Jonathan Fields, who has The Good Life Project. And that’s when I broke my vows to Brené, and listened to Fields talking to Sara Gottlieb about biohacking your hormones and reclaiming your life.

So I was fifteen minutes in, when I got the strangest feeling: something is completely disordered. After months of growing progressively blind, a surgeon in less than half an hour has restored my sight, and after one day I can go back to my life. Which should have meant that I could go back to teaching my classes at the island’s biggest bank. I should have stopped writing. I should have stopped worrying about the debacle that was the midterm elections. So where should I have been?

Flat on my back in a hospital bed, with the blinds carefully drawn to shield against the harmful, blinding light, with doctors appearing carefully to peer into my eyes, and with nurses gently, oh so gently, turning me to my side, so that they could give my nightly backrub.

We have perfected medicine so much that we have eliminated a crucial component of healing, and that is recuperation. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s non-productive. But I wonder if, indeed, it is. I spent one day recovering from the morning’s surgery. The next day I was listless, irritable, and completely unproductive.

Today, I have to worry about biohacking my hormones, and it might be a good thing to do. I definitely should check into it. But I’m too tired—not in body but in spirit. Know where I really want to be?

…in bed!

        

A Strong Coward

It was a day when I was considering, intermittently, Brené Brown, a social worker and researcher in the topics of vulnerability and shame. She went viral a year or two ago when she did a TED talk, during which she mentioned that she had had  breakdown, at one point on her in her life. She even had a slide—with the very word BREAKDOWN in 52-point font. She then stayed home, mortified that she had outed herself in front of 500 people! 500 people—complete strangers—all walking around with the news: Brené had cracked up.

What saved her? It might well be her humor, but perhaps it was something greater—if possible. Because she’s not afraid to use her insight, even when it is not entirely blowing in her favor. There was the time, for example, when a man brought three of her books at a book signing, and provided the names of his wife and two daughters. The man then expressed interest that Brown, in her work on invulnerability, didn’t discuss men.

“I don’t work with men,” said Brown.

“How convenient,“ said the man, “because my wife and two children would rather see me die on top of my white horse than see me fall.” He went on to say: it’s not other guys, not the coaches, not the dads who tell us to suck it up, go on with our lives. It’s the women.

Not that men don’t have their problems, too. What women grapple with—their own Mt. Everest—is to be the perfect woman: nice, sweet, athletic, head of a major corporation, still finding time to take the children to school and the zoo and attend EVERY school performance, and ohh…a sexual tiger in bed for her husband. When, completely inexplicably, the woman stumbles under all of this weight, what do guys tend to say? “Don’t look at me! I emptied the dishwasher last week!” (Note to guys: the right answer is, “I know honey, I know. You’re doing an awful lot. No wonder you’re tired…”)

Well, did I get that message? Was I willing to put my vulnerability out there? Because I had to have a cataract surgery, yesterday, and they had told me: call your doctor to find out what time you’re supposed to be there, Did I call on Friday, the day I had done the preadmission? Nah, I waited for Monday, the day before the surgery. Surely, the office would be open, someone would answer the phone and have the answer.

Were they at the beach? Paying dominoes and drinking beer? So was I on for surgery or was I not? And what was going to happen if I dragged an adult with me, and then the whole thing was off?

And the adult thing pissed me off, because I had been the adult in the very same place when Raf had his knee done. And there are only two things you need to know: the clinic has found a way of funneling arctic jet streams directly into their waiting room, and they have extensively worked and succeeded at proving the relativity of time, if not space. This they do, by seating the “adults” in an uncomfortable room and providing them with a blaring television, which is showing variants of murder or violence.

“November 4^th, that’s a bad day for me,” said Mr. Fernández, who has a dislike of hospitals. So then the question became: tell him, hey, it’s not gonna be so great a day for me, too, and I did it for you, you’ll do it for me! Alternative: find someone else, and give Raf a break.

Guys discount their feelings: it’s part of what we learned growing up. So given that the surgery obviously wasn’t going to start until at least 10—in fact, it started at about 11:30—why was I going to ask Lady from the coffee shop to be with me at 8:30, which I had finally learned from the papers I had signed was the time I was to arrive? I knew—from peering at the schedule sheet at the doctor’s  office that I was number three—and I knew from speaking to the doctor that the operation took 30 minutes. So I told Lady to come in at 10—she’d still have to wait too long, but at least not as long.

This was a problem from the moment I walked in the door—how had I gotten there? Well, I had taken then bus. And if my friend didn’t come? Well, they couldn’t operate without my friend being there.

“Yes, you can,” I said. “there are things called cabs, and anyway, you’re giving me instructions, which I can read, and there’s also that fact that I’m a nurse, and quite capable of assuming my own care once I get home. And if you’d like, I’ll speak to the legal division of the hospital and sign a waiver absolving you corporately and professionally and personally from any damage resulting from not having any of my friends waiting for hours in the waiting room.”

They dug their heels in, I dug my heels in. And I had learned—again—the real power of hospitals. This was an eye surgery, but I still had to put on that blue gown, that ties in the back but not low enough so that everyone can see your butt as you go to the bathroom. So we had a little fight about that—during which I pointed out that if they needed to do CPR—they could grab hold of the front of my shirt, and pop all the buttons open faster than they could untie the strings behind my back.

I also learned, of course, after the first stranger passed and put drops in my eyes, that it was time to do some patient activism. So the second time around? I reached out my hand, stated my name, and said I was glad to meet him.

This worked—since it’s how the world outside works. I then asked what drops he proposed to put in my eye were, inquired what their purpose was, and mentioned that another gentleman had already done so. Right—so everyone got the hint.

I was, in short, assuming charge of my health care, but was I assuming charge of myself? Because I was now in the third stretcher from the door, and it was clear—first it would be the stretcher closest to the door, then number two, then number three.

Which is what I was, and which was a good thing and a bad thing. Because this was a normal day for everybody—I remembered the banter among the nurses quite well, as well as the habitual actions that were almost bored. The nurse taking my blood pressure? It wasn’t her first time….

And so I relived the whole thing from the other side, being the horizontal one, the one with too much time, instead of being the vertical one, rushing to get everything done.

I was wheeled out of the recovery room to the operating room but not into the operating room, since the surgeon and anesthesiologist were discussing: what to have for lunch. It was after eleven, at that point, and I was still without my breakfast. So I protested that, and they had to agree: it was a bit unfair.

“You remember what you said, just before surgery,” said my ophthalmologist, when I saw him today. Well, I took a chance and told him what I had been planning to say:

You have done this surgery before, haven’t you doctor?

Right—gotta keep the troops entertained….

Did I pass, or did I fail? All of the personnel found it astounding that I was willing to be picked up by a friend, but not willing to put her through five hours of pointless waiting. For Lady, when she came, spent fifteen minutes reading and signing a form saying that I should rest, not pick up heavy objects, put medicines in my eyes every four hours, and not rub my eye vigorously. All the stuff, in fact, that I had agreed to do—and signed off on—the week before the surgery.

I had decided to be strong, to ride that white horse, not to show my feelings, not to demand that Raf come, or that Lady pick me, my blanket in my hands to fend off the cold. She and I could have chatted and laughed in the waiting room, but not in the recovering room, where I spent a good hour and a half before and after surgery. And that is where the demons occur. Yes, you know that every consent form ends in “possible complications may include mild irritation…. anaphylaxis and death.” And yes, you know that the mild irritation is 80% of patients and the anaphylaxis is about 0.008%. But these numbers are for the nurses whizzing past you.

So I did it, mostly, alone. Also true, everyone does it mostly alone. At least us guys, who were sitting with their wives in the waiting room. And yes, Brené, they were not expressing their fear, worrying about death, telling their wives—just in case the worst happened—that she had been the light of his light, he had never stopped loving her.

The conclusion is obvious: I could face down a surgery without family and friends. But tell people I was scared and needed someone there?

Didn’t have the balls!

         

On Opera and Courage

Anxious Readers, I bring you a sigh of relief: The Metropolitan Operas high definition broadcast of Carmen did not disappoint. Yes, we’re three of ten: the opera was set in the 1930’s.

And guess what? It’s now something of a relief, this surety that I have when I walk into the movies to see the opera. There will be popcorn, to which I will succumb. There’s the illicit Coca-Cola—more a tankful than a glassful—which I can slurp despite the disapproving eyes of Mr. Fernández, because guess who bought the tickets? And then the opera will start, and do I have to worry about seeing Egyptians and pyramids—that’s Aida—or poppies and the steppes of Central Asia (Prince Igor)? Absolutely not—the elephants will be strolling down Broadway, as happy to be out of that hot dusty desert as all of us men-of-a-certain-inclination were to escape our dreary Midwestern towns. Even elephants deserve a chance at the Big Apple!

So really, it has a certain comfort, like eating your mother’s tuna fish casserole—you remember, the noodles, the can of tuna, the can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the soggy potato chips on top. Oh, sorry, forgot the frozen peas: that’s the vegetable! You wouldn’t, of course, ever make the damn thing, but you if your mother came out of the kitchen bearing mussels lightly sautéed in virgin olive oil dressed with raspberry vinaigrette on a bed of radicchio? Please.

Nor is having Prince Igor being Al Capone the worst that could happen, since here is what The New York Times had to say about a production by Peter Sellars of Don Giovanni:

YOU remember Mozart's ''Don Giovanni.'' That's the opera in which the Don Juan of the slums interrupts his singing of the Champagne Aria to take a heroin hit in the arm from his pimp and connection, Leporello. Donna Anna also requires a quick needle during her ''Non mi dir'' before she can launch into the coloratura section of that aria. Elvira, a Madonna clone, rolls back and forth across the stage like a bowling ball while making a hash of ''Mi tradi.'' And you certainly will recall how Giovanni sits on a stoop outside a slum building in what may be Spanish Harlem, enjoying his last supper (a Big Mac and fries) as a big-box radio pumps out those great 18th-century dance tunes. That, of course, leads up to the famous ''Stoned Guest'' scene in which the dissolute Don is pulled down into a sewer by a small girl, playing Lolita to his Humbert Humbert.

Full confession: small hailstorms of resentment have occasionally afflicted my days, when I realize that absolutely everybody in the world has had their book reviewed by The New York Times. But me and my iguanas? Are we so trifling, so insignificant? Mere chopped liver?

Now I see that there may have been that silver lining, because here’s a summation from the same review:

Evidently operating under the assumption that this 200-year-old work cannot speak to a modern audience unless it is trashed, trivialized and sensationalized, Mr. Sellars turns it into a depressing parade of easy jokes and vaudeville turns.

And here I have to say: however much that review ruined his day, Sellars had it coming. Because I checked out the first twenty minutes or so of the production—for this did God make YouTube—and yes, it made me remember my happy years in New York in the rough parts of Spanish Harlem. But the music of the time was hardly Mozartian, nor were the plots of the lives any of us were living at the time.

What was it like? Take a look!

So if we didn’t get Carmen as Lady Gaga or José as a character from Almodovar, we were lucky. It has to be said, though, that seeing that twenty-minute distillation of 1980’s New York made me nostalgic. The city was gritty, ugly, dangerous, and alive. If you were gay, and if you had any kind of a spine, you were protesting—if you weren’t emptying bedpans and putting cold compresses on your lover’s brow. Or often, your best friend or even just a friend, because who knew when it was going to be you—there in that bed with the pneumonia—and who knew when the disease would have so ravaged the city that there were no lovers, no best friends, but no one, nobody, to do for you what you were doing for others. Which is why you were throwing blood on the steps of the New York City Department of Health, throwing ashes of dead AIDS victims on the White House lawn, doing sit-ins at the CDC.

Maybe that’s why I’m a little underwhelmed that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, came out as a gay man. Here’s The New York Times in gushing-effusion mode:

I give Tim tremendous credit for finally coming out publicly. None of us can know how personally difficult this may have been for him. But for someone of his age (he turns 54 on Saturday), from the Deep South (Alabama), who’s chief executive of what’s probably the most obsessively followed company in the world and who purports to be a private person, it couldn’t have been easy.

Know what? Coming out is easy, since you do it every day, virtually. I did it last Friday, when I wrote down Mr. Fernández’s name as my husband on a preadmission form—or rather, about thirty of them. So I sat back, and wondered which María or which José would have an issue with it. And—surprise—nobody did! Damn, I was spoiling for that fight.

So we always do this thing—Marc and Raf came out and cleared the way for a whole bunch of other people, including people like Tim Cook and Ricky Martin. And then, when they finally join the rest of us, we have to applaud? Look, at age 54 he’s younger than I am, and sure, the Deep South was a more daunting place for gay people than Madison, Wisconsin. But where is Cook now? In California—and his industry is hardly the most homophobic. If Cook were 80 and coming out in rural Alabama, I’d paid full tribute.

And isn’t there something a bit classist, this assumption that the rich and famous are risking more and thus more worthy of applause when they come out? Suppose Cook had had to resign, as did the gay CEO of British Petroleum, John Browne. Cook would still have—I presume—more cash than most of us, more resources than the rest of us, a softer fall than the rest of us. I doubt if Cook would have landed in a soup kitchen, but for many ordinary gay people living in places where they can lose their jobs and their housing for being gay? The soup kitchen is their only recourse….

In fact, I don’t have much issue with Cook, who at least had the grace to say:

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others.

Right—it was something we all heard in those days: I’m not an activist, I’m not really a political person….. Want the translation? I’ll just hide here in my closet, until you guys make it safe enough to come out. The answer to that idea, by the way, is that as long as there’s a chance you or anyone could get AIDS, you’re a political person. So get over it, sweetheart.

It’s totally amazing that 32 states have marriage equality, and I’m thrilled that—perhaps—I can get married in Wisconsin. But I’m worried that in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, there probably is some kid who is terrified—with very good reason—of coming out. There are always more fights than there is energy or time to fight them, which is why we have to choose the fight well.

Did we?