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.