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.
