“I have no idea why these two pieces seem to be linked, but
there it is. Whenever I hear the Barber violin concerto, I think about the
Shostakovich piano concerto number 2. Which, by the way, Shostakovich later
said ‘had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.’”
“Well, shouldn’t he know?” said Lady. “After all, he is the
composer. So if he says the work has nothing going for it, well, why play it?”
“Because everybody loves it,” I told her. “Especially the
slow movement, which is so gorgeous it’s suspicious.”
“Suspicious,” she said, “why ever so?”
“Oh, it’s the snobbery of classical music,” I told her. “You
know, there’s the famous thing about taste in music and in wine being
essentially the same. Meaning that the less about either, the sweeter you like
it. Anyway, Shostakovich had been writing movie music, and it definitely shows.
In fact, you really want to make a movie just to use the score….”
“Isn’t this the piece he wrote for his son?”
“Yup, and it’s tender and sad. Not surprising, since
Shostakovich had this little problem: he kept getting denounced….”
“What!”
“Everything is—or was—political,” I told her. “So music had
to serve the masses, which meant that it couldn’t stray to far into the
abstract and the obscure. The first time he got denounced was for his opera
Lady Macbeth; the composer had to sit through the whole evening and watch
Stalin grimace, shudder, and finally laugh. At a love scene, of all things.
Then he had to go take a bow, and people said he was white as a sheet. The next
day Pravda came out with the famous headline, ‘Muddle instead of Music,’ and
that put Shostakovich firmly into the doghouse.”
“Dear me….”
“Yes, and then the Great Terror began, and everybody
including his mother-in-law got executed or sent to the camps. Then he crawled
out of his hole and wrote his Fifth Symphony, which restored him to grace. But
there was a second denunciation, and the public humiliation by Nabokov….”
“What? What did Nabokov do?”
“He showed up in New York City, where Shostakovich was
representing the Soviet Union in some cultural conference. And the Soviets had
just condemned Stravinsky, who is definitely a giant in 20th century
composition, and whose music you won’t hear in this blog at all. Sorry—I know
it’s low class, but I’ll take Rachmaninoff over Stravinsky any day. So Nabokov
nailed Shostakovich by asking whether he supported the censure of Stravinsky
and watched Shostakovich squirm. Horrible position, really, and Shostakovich
couldn’t say anything except that he agreed with the censure. Nabokov said the
obvious: Shostakovich was the musical lapdog of Joe Stalin—he put it better,
but it was essentially the same—and Shostakovich never forgave Nabokov.”
“Why not just say….”
“Put it this way: at the nadir of his relations with the
regime, Shostakovich was spending the night outside of his apartment, sitting
next to the lift.”
“What?”
“Well, when they came for him, he figured it would be better
if he were there. Less bother to the family….”
“That’s incredible.”
“It is,” I told her. “Hard for us to imagine the fear and
anxiety. In a way, it’s amazing that Shostakovich ever wrote anything but
movie music. I’m not so sure I would have been so brave.”
“Did it ever get any better for him?”
“Don’t think so. In 1960, he joined the Communist Party, but
no one really knows whether it was a career move, or bowing to pressure, or
just his choice. Anyway, the last 15 years of his life were fairly miserable….”
“Actually, none of his life sounds particular wonderful,”
said Lady.
“It probably wasn’t,” I said. “Apparently, he was
obsessive-compulsive, and a guy named Meyer called his face ‘a bag of tics and
grimaces.’ So it’s hard to imagine that he was ever a completely happy guy….”
“Sad,” said Lady. “Well, then, what’s up with Samuel
Barber?”
“Another sorry tale,” I told her. “He achieved fame
relatively early on, and his work is often wildly lyrical. Not surprising,
since his aunt was Louise Homer, who was a famous contralto at the Met. Anyway,
the violin concerto was written in Europe in 1939. Most of it, that is. But war
broke out, and Barber had to leave and return to the states….”
“So is that why it’s such a melancholy piece?”
“It could be,” I told her. “It was an utterly awful time,
the 30’s. And there is certainly the feeling that a way of life is ending. But
there is also, to me, the feeling of a young man discovering love for the first
time. And since Barber was gay, and in love with fellow composer Gian Carlo
Menotti, well, you have the feeling of a love that is wild and passionate, but
also very much forbidden.”
“Was it?”
“It’s so hard to know,” I said. “Yes, it was. And Barber had
been born into comfortable circumstances, and then found himself in New York
and Philadelphia. And really, when you think of it, practically everyone
in the classical music field was gay. Barber, Menotti, Copland, Bernstein,
Hoiby. I have a couple of friends who were living in New York at the time, and
who got invited up to Barber’s house, which he shared for many years with
Menotti. Both my friends reported that the parties were pretty drug-fueled, and
tended to turn into orgies.”
“Ah yes, gay men….”
“They can be fun,” I told her. “But only in small amounts
and at a certain time of life. Otherwise, the whole affair becomes joyless. And
joyless was a fairly good description of Barber’s life, at the end.”
“Why? Was he denounced too?”
“Actually, he was in a way. And like Shostakovich, it was an
opera that brought him down. Anthony and Cleopatra, which he wrote to open the
new Metropolitan Opera House, and which was severely panned.”
“Was it that bad?”
“Probably not, though people try to revive it, periodically,
and it always seems to get the same reviews. Flashes of great music, write the
critics, which mean pages of not-so-great music. Anyway, the real problem seems
to be that the director was Zefferelli, and he went nuts (as he often did). So
it was completely overblown, and the sets were so heavy that they broke the
stage. Nor did it help that Leontyne Price—who was at the top of her career—got
trapped inside a pyramid, of all things. So there she was, poor dear, knocking
around in the pyramid and trying to get out….”
“No, Marc….”
“Yup, and I think they had to bring down the curtain, and
attack the thing with crowbars. Or maybe not. Anyway, The New York Times came
out and said it was ‘a
hair-curlingly awful production. … The night has gone down in the annals of
opera as a landmark of vulgarity and staging excess. Mr. Barber’s score, as we
discovered from subsequent exposure to revised excerpts in concert and on records,
was to a great extent an innocent victim of the over-all fiasco"
“Ouch….”
“Yes, the virtues of obscurity—is it better to be ignored or
slammed?”
“Well, there is a third option,” said Lady. “But I presume
that there was some licking of the wound to do.”
“Worse than that: Barber started to hit the bottle, and even
though he puttered around with the score, it never quite got off the ground.
Sad. He died at the comparatively early age of 70, and was buried in his
hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Sort of sad, that….”
“Why so?”
“Well, it’s almost as if he never quite escaped. He could go
to Europe, he could live with Menotti in upstate New York, but in death, he was
still dragged back to his roots. You know, one of Barber’s best-known works is Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which is this
tremendously lyrical and poignant piece of music and poetry. You know, it’s the
world of childhood and small town America. But also tinged with the death of a
father. Which is a good enough metaphor for what Barber have felt, growing up
in his comfortable but conservative small town.”
“Do we know that?”
“Of course we don’t. Sadly, we have to imagine a lot. And
you know, it’s very likely that being gay was not the only thing going on with
Barber. In fact, Menotti says that Barber’s family welcomed him, but he soon
saw that the proper exterior covered a lot of ‘terrible things.’ Among which he
listed alcoholism and incest….”
“Time for another ‘ooops.’”
“Sadly, it does tend to be a package deal. Anyway, Barber
was probably by nature morose and repressed—wouldn’t you be?—and adding being
gay didn’t help. There is something about respectability, isn’t there?”
“Well, well—two sad men,” said Lady. “A shame, since they
were obviously gifted. Although I sometimes think that happiness is of no great
use to an artist.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Barber apparently never had to
work: he just composed. Granted, he probably made money from his compositions,
but there’s always the feeling that he had a nice nest egg, somewhere. And what
a boon! He never had to teach in a conservatory, or write movie music. No—he
was luckier in some ways than Shostakovich. But both men, I think, had demons
aplenty, and suffered in their various ways. Hard to know which is worse, the
internal or the external demons. Though both men had both sorts….”
“Well, maybe it’s the old question: are you better off being
a race horse or a plow horse?”
“On that, I have no information. I can tell you, however,
that it’s a special corner of Hell…”
“Yes?”
“…to be a race horse put to work as a plow horse!”
