May Music

Let me give you a hint, a kernel of advice, if you ever decide to do anything as inadvisable as write a daily blog. The first months will be easy, the next months will find you praising yourself for “professionally” practicing your craft. In the end, you’ll spend large amounts of time groping for material, and feel that you’re simply writing the same thing over and over again.

Short version—it gets stale.

Anything does, you know, if you do it repetitively. Musicians know that one—you love, you absolutely love the Dvorak Concerto, that first week you’re finally allowed to play it (it’s pretty mean…). You’ve been listening to recordings of it for years. Flash forward five months or—to put it better—150 hours of practicing the damn thing later. You dread the hour you have to spend on it—you’d rather play scales.

The other thing is that you cannot, you really cannot be in a rage all the time, because look—aren’t the lives of your readers hard enough? Are they turning to you for a rant, a diatribe, every morning? Nah—you can get away with a bit of it, but a steady diet is a turn-off.

What do you do then, after a week of raging at the National Rifle Association and agribusiness? Especially when North Korea is hovering to send missiles into South Korea, when Puerto Rico is about to be downgraded to junk bond status, when a jewelry store across the street from you is intermittently blaring its alarm into your apartment, your ears, and especially your sleep? Oh, and the owner of the store, which is closed, is in the United States, and the only thing you can do is talk to the employees of another jewelry—this one open—owned by the same guy. The employees there assure you they’ll try—never an assuring word—to get in touch with him.

I’ll tell you what you do. You tell yourself—this is the best part of being old—that you’ve seen a lot, been through a lot. There was the day your mother died virtually in your arms. There was that morning when your lost your job—that was OK—as well as your connection to 500 people who were friends / students / functionally your children (not OK). The day, years ago, that you sent off your lover to Puerto Rico, where he had to live and where you couldn’t, and walked through the longest terminal in O’Hare with the stupid, dentist office music welling behind you, and you thought the credits would start rolling. The movie, the life, was over.

Then you go to YouTube and try to figure out—if there were a piece of music that was absolutely quintessential, what would it be? You’re thinking this way because you’ve just heard the end of a work by Schumann, and were struck immediately by another work by Schumann, the first song of Frauenliebe und -leben.

That makes you remember the first time you were introduced to lieder, which—don’t get thrown off here—is nothing more than the word in German for song. You were eighteen, alone, living away from home for the first time. You didn’t know what you would make of your life, and worried what life would make of you. Because it felt, you know, that it was more likely that life would shape or misshape you; you weren’t the kind to go out, grasp circumstances, sculpt the world to your liking.

Let me turn around here and get back into the first person….

So there I was that day, in Boston, with my aching shoulders—practice an instrument for five hours a day and the smallest tension leads to knotted muscles—and my tired ears listening to the radio. I had come to study cello with the best—or so he said—cello teacher in America, a man with a method that had become a sort of cellist production line. You got on and four years later were bumped off, ready to spend the next forty years playing the standard orchestral repertoire—maybe a hundred pieces in all. It was already clear—I was falling out of line.

And then, someone was singing—an opera singer, I thought. And I didn’t like opera—or singers at all. There’s always been an animus between instrumentalist and singers. Mention the phrase, which used to be in common use, “musicians and singers,” as in, “musicians and singers, assume your positions,” and watch the singer bristle….

Then, the singer on the radio, having been rumbling around in her low range, soared effortlessly up to a pure, shimmering note: a feather on the breath of God. And I was hooked—I had to hear that singer.

I was broke, so I sat in the cheapest seats in the theater, and heard Jessye Norman sing—yes, as you suspected—Frauenliebe und –leben. In English, A Woman’s Love and Life. It’s classic Schumann, totally melodic, at times joyful, at times melancholic. It follows the story of a woman’s love from the beginning until the end—“Now you have caused me pain for the first time,” sings the mezzo, after her husband has died.

And it’s music, I think, for a young man or woman. However much I wouldn’t go back to it, there is something wonderful about discovering life and love for the first time in your twenties. The sun has never shined before on a young man but you, the moon has never streamed its silver before on a boy and girl, holding hands, stopping to kiss in doorways, dancing in the empty streets.

There’s also, of course, music for the old—music which could only have been written by someone who had suffered and endured, seen life ebb and then flicker out, suffered mourning and resignation and finally acceptance, and a cold joy. For me, that was the greatest of the Schubert song cycles, Die Winterreise, and that was the music I turned to, as I lost my mind following losing my job following losing my mother. And it’s music that I haven’t been able to hear since. (In fact, I’ve barely heard Schubert this year.)

But Schumann, what of Schumann? In case you want to feel guilty for being seriously unproductive (or underproductive), I give you this fact—in one year alone, Schumann wrote not one but the three greatest song cycles of his career. And arguing whether Winterreise is better than Liederkreis is like arguing whether War and Peace is better than Brothers Karamazov—any decision would be subjective, and who cares? They’re masterpieces.

The year was 1840, sometimes called Schumann’s “year of song”; Schumann had just won a long battle to marry the love of his life, Clara Wieck. And that comes through in the music, as well as the poetry—this is a young man writing.

Or in this case singing. Because I decided that the first song of the Frauenliebe und -leben is really sort of meaningless, listened to alone; so much of it is setting up the mood, and also the structure (the theme will be heard at the end). So why not dig up Fritz Wunderlich, an amazing tenor who died at just age 35 from falling down the stairs at a guest’s cottage. He virtually owns Liederkreis.

“In the Wonderful Month of May,” it’s called, and really—that’s all you need to know…..