Two Cellists, One Departed

Had I been unfair? Had my adolescence so colored my judgment that I had completely misread her? Because the one time I attended a master class with the Canadian cellist Zara Nelsova, I came away convinced: the woman was a dragon.

She was, certainly, a hell of a cellist. Everybody said the same thing: she played like a man. And she had a technique that few could match, the result of natural talent augmented by six hours of practice every day, starting at the age of six. And she attributed much of her success to what she called “long bowing.”

Professional secret—a string player’s success or failure is 90% due to the bow, and how much control the player has over it. And yes, the left hand flying over the fingerboard is important, but what actually makes the sound? The right hand, forearm, and arm.

So the game she had with her flutist father was to see—who could hold a note the longest? Was her bow longer—figuratively—than his breath? And could she maintain the sound absolutely unbroken? Later, the game got expanded: could she start out at the frog of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the heaviest, with the quietest sound possible, and increase it evenly as she moved to the tip of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the lightest? Then, of course, she reversed it—starting out at the tip playing loudly, and decrescendoing as she moved to the frog.

Right—a picture being worth more, certainly, than the words above, here’s an illustration:

Not quite sure what all that’s about? Well, whether you understood it or not, there was no mistaking it: Nelsova’s playing was titanic. Everybody, she owned one of the best pieces of the 20^th century repertoire, Bloch’s Schelomo; she had studied it with the composer, who invited her to premiere it and then record it.

So she was major, but she was also—to my young eyes—a thorough bitch. Because there are musicians who believe in the musical equivalent of the stress interview, which, if you don’t know it, goes something like this:

Boss (smoking largest cigar possible, ignores job candidate for two minutes, and then shouts): WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT!

Job seeker: Um, ah, well…I’m here to apply…

Boss: WHY THE HELL SHOULD I GIVE YOU A JOB IN MY COMPANY!

Nelsova started out light on the youngest students, and got progressively meaner on the more advanced. Finally she pounced on one hapless grad student, who was to play the Prokofiev Sonata.

“JASON!” she kept on crying, as he struggled to play for more than 10 seconds, only to be interrupted by…

“JASON!”

It went on and on, until it became the musical equivalent of dog training.

“You must listen, listen, listen!” she instructed, when she felt that he was playing too loudly, and that the pianist had the more interesting part. So it was fascinating to see her performance the next day, when she came sweeping in in a majestic gown bedecked by pink ribbon; trailing her was her accompanist from central casting, a small, thin, nervous man who appeared terrified of the figure with whom he shared the stage. He never played louder than a mezzo piano all evening, even when he had one of the most ravishing themes Brahms ever wrote. Nelsova, not to be outshone, plucked out the pizzicato accompaniment at full volume.

She had, in short, an ego on steroids, and she must have felt—and you get a hint of this in the last minutes of the clip below—that her job was to toughen ‘em up, throw a barrage of criticism at the kids, season them before they faced the annealing fire. It was the prevailing attitude of her generation: watch Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the famed soprano of the same era, and you’ll see much the same thing.

You were supposed to be tough, you were supposed to be able to take in the criticism, accept it, and believe in yourself enough to withstand what felt like the Nazis marching through Poland. Because when you left the conservatory? Well, there are very few people wearing kid gloves in the world of classical music.

It took me several decades before I got that, and began at last to face up to one of the particularly challenging tasks for a cellist: stepping in front of an audience with nothing and nobody backing you up, and playing solo; here’s what one critic has to say about it:

Four of the five works on his program were written for unaccompanied cello. It takes a lot of (ahem) pluck to play this kind of music. Every note is sorely exposed. There’s no piano accompaniment to hide behind. It’s the musical equivalent of walking a tightrope without a safety net.    

And who is the critic talking about?

Michael Samis, a wonderful young cellist who stumbled upon an unknown cello concerto by the German composer Carl Reinecke, performed it, and had the dream of recording it. So he started a Kickstarter campaign, got the $8500 that he needed, and embarked on the long process of recording the work on the Delos label.

I had pledged some money, and then had waited, checking in periodically on Michael via Facebook. Nor was I surprised when Michael’s dream took longer than—seemingly—expected, because dreams do. Mine had, and at last I had had my book in my hands; a couple weeks ago, I had Michael’s dream in my hands. A CD, you see, is sometimes something more than a piece of plastic enclosed in other pieces of plastic.

The concerto was everything the excerpt had promised: lyrical, virtuosic, and lush. And then we came to a remarkable piece for solo cello: the Bloch Prelude Number One. Michael was treading on Nelsova’s turf, but why not? She had died a decade before, in New York City, where she had taught at Juilliard up until her death: somebody has to carry on the baton….

And curiously, Michael seems to be the guy to do it—the technique is there, but so is the big, beautiful, lush tone, and the temperament to be unabashedly romantic. It’s curiously refreshing, in an age of increasingly safe, correct performance practice, to hear somebody with a musical personality.

So the verdict is definitely in on Michael. But Nelsova?

…still not sure.

Sunday Paranoia, Resolved

It was too much, I decided. After all, if everybody on the west coast of North America will have to be evacuated, and they’re not worrying, why should I? Shouldn’t they be writing intemperate, fiery screeds to the Japanese government, demanding that an international team of scientists / experts be given complete control of stabilizing the failed—and melted-down—reactors at Fukushima?

Warning to any readers out there—Fukushima, the nuclear power plant that sustained major damage from the tsunami following the earthquake in April of 2011, seems to evoke two reactions, the first being indifference. And the second? Complete, rampaging paranoia, as you can see in the clip below.

OK, I admit it—I fall into the second camp, since no, I don’t trust the Japanese government in the least to come out and say to the world, “Ooops, sorry, but the situation is completely out of control and we have absolutely no clue about what to do, and so everybody on the West Coast? You’re fucked.”

Well, I justify this by the fact that at least two respected scientists feel the same way: Dr. Helen Caldicott, who revived Physicians for Social Responsibility; and David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, activist, and broadcaster. 

And what do they say?

That we are not just on the edge of the precipice but hanging over the void, with gale winds behind us.

Anything, you see, can happen. The cleanup will take decades to complete—they just covered Chernobyl a month or two ago, and the meltdown occurred in 1986. So Suzuki points out that if there is an earthquake of 7.0 or more, reactor four will collapse, and the amount of radiation released? Here’s one writer:

According to the Nuclear Regulation Authority, there are 1,533 spent and unused fuel rod bundles in the cooling pool that contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in 1945.

Right—an earthquake is just one unfortunate event. There’s also the fact that the ground around the reactor is saturated, and the building is unstable, and may collapse even without an earthquake.

Then there’s the possibility that the fuel rods, which TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and raise your hands anyone out there who believes those guys know what they’re doing….) is trying to remove, will get dropped, will be jammed into position, will lose their cooling system, will jostle one another and all of that? 14,000 Hiroshimas!

Or maybe a little less, because we also know radioactive water from the plant is spewing into the ocean, so maybe it’s only 13, 999 Hiroshimas! Whew, what a relief.

Oh, and who’s doing all this work? Well, from the same source cited above:

The shortage of qualified workers has been an opportunity for the yakuza. Gangsters have stepped in to supply labor to subcontract to TEPCO's contractors. The yakuza's labor pool is the most desperate men in Japan. They are poorly trained, suffer from wage theft, and are over-worked and demoralized. TEPCO is enabling the yakuza because management is unwilling to cut profits to pay competitive wages.

Guys?

‘It’s too much,’ I think, ‘ so I’ll do what I always do, when I can’t cope anymore and it’s too early to start drinking.’ So I went over to bother Lady, which is permissible since she has been painting houses from the days dinosaurs roamed the earth, and can easily chat and paint.

So we recreate what Harry, my friend who grew up half a century ago in Old San Juan, told me was a typical Sunday afternoon.

“People would sit for hours at a time in each other’s houses, talking, chatting, sometimes just sitting. You would pass by, and they’d just be sitting there in silence. And time seemed to stretch out—the afternoons were infinities. No worries, no anxieties, no rushing around or doing errands. Just sitting with family and old friends….”

Well, yesterday it was a new friend, since Mary Anne, a neighbor of Lady’s and a woman of a certain age, strolled in, bearing frozen yogurt. We smile at each other.

“How can two really important people in my life not know each other,” asks Lady; to a gringo, this is plausible. To a Puerto Rican? Completely crazy.

So now we shake hands, and discover: Mary Anne is a music lover, a painter, a professor.

“Marc is a cellist, and a writer. He plays Bach every day at five in the Poet’s Passage, and gives whatever money people throw into the case to charity.”

“You gotta do it,” I tell Mary Anne, “all cellists have to play an hour of Bach every day.”

“Yeah?” says Lady. You can tell she’s not buying in….

“Absolutely,” I tell her. “It’s like the Spaniards: they have to read a chapter of Don Quixote every day.”

Now she’s really not buying in….

“Well, run over to Spain when you go off to France in a couple of weeks, and you’ll see: all the Spaniards are sitting around reading Don Quixote.

I get a look….

“Anyway, if you don’t play your hour of Bach every day, they don’t let you call yourself a cellist….”

“Yeah?”

“Yup, they take away your license…”

“You got a license?”

“Of course I have a license! Good Lord, Lady, do you know what damage could be done, having a lot of unlicensed cellists buzzing around out there! I’m a board certified cellist, licensed by the American Society of Cellists!”

Nobody believes me, of course, but is that the point? I am waving my mouth as ladies waved their decorative fans a century or so ago: not to much effect but prettily. So a beautiful man strolls in with his four-month old baby—named Abel, and no, I didn’t ask and neither should you—and I have to go talk to him, because who doesn’t like new fathers, especially beautiful ones? And then Naïa strolls in, with her hair looking like one half of a giant dandelion, very much gone to seed.

So Lady goes to deal with that, and I kiss everyone except the one I really, really, want to, and then it’s time to go home.

Oh, and by the way? It’s true about the Spaniards reading a chapter of Don Quixote and how do I know…?

Harry told me!

Tropical Koan

Susan sent me an email, having read a review of a book on the depressing topic of…depression.

“Depressing,” because, according to the article—well, here’s a quote:

At any given point, 22% of the population exhibit at least one symptom of depression and the World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will have led to more worldwide disability and lives lost than any other affliction, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, accidents, and even war.

Well, I turned to the review, and was stopped in my initial tracks by the first sentence:

“Depression is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals,” legendary psychologist Martin Seligman observed in his essential treatise on learned optimism.

Yeah? So who is Martin Seligman, legendary though he may be? And what the hell does he know about depression? Has he ever been trapped in a toilet stall, has he ever had a crying jag he couldn’t stop, has he ever sat at a computer and looked at the screen and felt his mind turn to mush and realize that his thinking has slowed so far down that his thoughts can’t make it up to the surface? So that email that he has to write? He can’t concentrate, he can’t focus—all he can do is sit there numbly and mutely and hope that, in some way, the governor will sign the reprieve. Because, let’s be clear—there is no chance whatsoever that anything he does will affect in any way how he is feeling. Why? Because he is not feeling.

Or is he? Because he’s been crying, sobbing, and he’s been ruminating.

Maybe you don’t know….

Ruminating is not—not where he is—pondering a problem deeply. No, ruminating is the incessant—shouldn’t it be incesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssant?—repetition of a single thought. Today it’s “I want to die.” Yesterday it was “I can’t think.”

Sure, Styron did it better than anyone—myself included—in his book on depression Darkness Visible. But don’t think that he or I or anyone can get this one right. Why? Because, by its nature, depression defies description. It’s a black hole, where any light shone into it is lost, consumed. And when, at last, the master of the universe relents and you’re out, the very memory of it has been consumed as well.

So the legendary Martin Seligman has pronounced himself on depression—how very nice! At best, it accounts for one and only one of the many depressions. Because when I went from 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams of one drug and began to take 15 milligrams of another, guess what? I began humming to myself as I rode to work.

I’m lucky; as I understand it, the serotonin reuptake inhibitor basically floods all of the brain, and all the receptors, with serotonin. And some of those relate to mood, and some relate to other things having nothing to do with mood. Which means that some people get lots of side effects and remain depressed; the lucky ones like me get relatively few, but a blessed lift in mood.

So do I come down on the side of chemicals, medicines, physiology? No, because what you do with your life changes your brain. That I learned one afternoon as I saw a group of people wearing new clothes—and really terrible ones, at that—waiting to be photographed by a clearly professional photographer.

The “models,” however, were just-as-clearly not professionals. But who were they, I wondered, as I pondered them standing around on the beach under the palm trees? And where was I?

Lolling on my back in the water, after a day of writing and playing music and taking a walk and listening to Monteverdi. I hadn’t made a dime that day, but I was happy. And the people on the beach? They were Wal-Mart employees, who had been chosen to be the models in the newspaper advertising insert.

I had worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and for many of them I was lethally depressed. I was laid off; I went into crisis. I got out of the crisis and put myself on a schedule, a schedule I still follow. And I was at that moment splashing in the blue Caribbean waters, watching a group of prisoners from a prison I had escaped.

“Escaped,” because merely being laid off would have been “paroled” or perhaps “released.” But the prison I had escaped from wasn’t Wal-Mart—I had escaped from a brutal, decade-long battle against myself. I had willed myself to go to the brink of madness, to stand on the precipice and grant the Gods permission to push me into it.

It wasn’t a psychiatric crisis—or perhaps it was. I had been an angry, impossible steward for a man who had been given great gifts. I had raged at myself, scolded myself, belittled myself, bitten myself….

But wait—it wasn’t “myself.” Because I had had nothing to do with it—I could no more write a book or play the cello than I could scale Mount Everest. My job was to feed him and give him as much water as he needed and exercise him and put the cello into his hands and sit him at the computer and then GET THE HELL AWAY! He’ll play perfectly well on his own.

Wrong—he’ll play infinitely better. Because you know all that criticism for all those years?

Sorry—but it was shit.

The person you see occupies a middle position. I came to know a presence, which to me was the wind. And from this presence, which I call Domine, the cellist gets his talent, and the writer as well. My job is to get him in front of computers and embracing cellos.

I take him to the dentist—just as I brush his teeth. At the end of the day, I read what he’s written, or I listen to him play. ‘Where did that come from,’ I wonder. ‘He’s so good,’ I tell him. ‘Wow!’ I say.

I had made my life a koan, which, for the benefit of my red-squiggling computer, I will define, via Wikipedia:

A kōan (公案?)/ˈkoʊ.ɑːn/; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Korean: 공안 (kong'an); Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen-practice to provoke the "great doubt", and test a student's progress in Zen practice.

What is the music of a mute cellist?

What happens when the music goes away?

Should it matter if he plays better without the instrument than with it?

None of these fanciful statements are true. I was simply holding on to a small thread of faith, which I could only grasp by observing with agonizing detail how I went about my life. I lost the ability to use a computer, and then stared at my fingers until I could connect my right first digit with an icon that was on my dock. I looked at the icon, absorbed the blue, noted that the downward slash of the small part of the “W” is superimposed over the upward slash. But am I supposed to do a double or a single click?

How many Word documents had I opened before?

And why was I doing it?

I wanted to change something so fundamental about myself that I required a reboot. “Put the detergent on the sponge,” I told him. We were doing dishes—which he generally did by wasting water, slopping water all over the floor, and not paying attention. Now, I had to tell him how to wash the dishes—first you put the soap on the sponge; then you lather, as it were, the coffee cup; then you place the cup with soap still on it on the side of the sink; proceed to the next cup.

The important thing?

There was no abuse in it. Just patient directions—completely explicit, clear, detailed. He didn’t know how to do prosaic stuff, and had been too impatient to learn. And I had berated him for decades about the stuff he really could do.

I blew it a few times; so did he. He was holding on, too, to the thread. Perhaps more than I, he had heard the wind through the palm trees, heard the fronds stir to life, appreciated the swaying green against the constant blue, felt the hand caressing his brow, smiled, looked up, and said…

…Domine.

Music Awaiting a Musician

OK—there are three factors in the video, and curiously, two of the three happened at roughly the same time. So—based purely on alphabetical order—let’s start with Bach first.

‘Easier said than done,’ I think to myself as I look at the screen in front of me. How in Hell do you account for a guy who had genius matched with beaver? Because the sheer amount of what Bach produced is numbing—and guess what? Besides the two passions and the two oratorios and the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations and the six Brandenburg Concerti, oh, and the don’t-forget-the-200-or-so-cantatas…

Add to this the fact that a lot of music has been lost—according to one scholar, there must have been over 100 cantatas that are unaccounted for. And here’s what Robert Newman said:

Reference is made around the time of Bach’s death to him having composed ‘many’ magnificats. There are several lost Passions. And there is the known loss of at least 15 secular cantatas, many of these written for marriages, civic functions, etc. Though it’s commonly believed these works were somehow scattered amongst Bach’s sons and later lost/destroyed there are enough clues to suggest these works may actually have survived and may one day be rediscovered. Horror stories of music being used to wrap meat, or used by house servants to light fires (as in the case of at least one stage work by Schubert) may not have been the fate of these works.

If memory serves—and it may well not—we may only have 60% of what Bach actually wrote. At any rate, Bach wrote a lot of sacred music, which he had to, being employed by various churches at different times of his life. But by a happy fact—happy at least for cellists—Bach grew tired of his position in Weimar as konzertmeister and wanted to move on. And however much he was a genius, he scored somewhat lower on the scale of emotional intelligence. Here’s Wikipedia:

In 1717, Bach eventually fell out of favour in Weimar and was, according to a translation of the court secretary's report, jailed for almost a month before being unfavourably dismissed: "On November 6, [1717], the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge."

Somehow this fact never got mentioned in the conservatories I went to….

Right—so Bach landed on his feet and found himself in Köthen, at Prince Leopold’s household. And fortunately, Leopold was a Calvinist, which meant that music was sparingly used in services; Bach therefore had some time to write secular pieces. And it’s from this period that we get the violin sonatas, the cello suites, the orchestra suites, and—best of all—the Brandenburg concerti.

It was a period of flux, when string instruments were shifting from the viols to our modern instruments. And any cellist today knows that intuitively—one of the suites requires retuning the instrument (the A string gets tuned down to a G), and the last suite—which, dammit, is the best—goes into the stratosphere and is a demon to play. So it’s clear: whatever instrument these pieces are meant for, it’s not our modern cello.

In fact, the most recent research indicates that the suites may have been written for a cello da spalla—which, as you can see in the second clip below, was a smaller instrument that was slung abound the neck and played somewhat like a violin.

And now the action shifts considerably south, to Cremona, Italy, where Antonio Stradivari was enjoying his “golden period,” which lasted from 1700 to 1720 or so. And one of the instruments he created was a viola—an instrument slightly larger than a violin, for which there’s shamefully little music.

There are also damn few Stradivarius violas—only ten, in fact, and the other nine are in institutions and are unlikely to come up for sale. (There are, by the way, over 500 Stradivarius violins, so the fact that this viola is going for sale is major news in the rarified world of viola players. And the price—or at least the price that Sotheby’s hopes to get for it?

45 million bucks.

Is it worth it? Well, as you can hear below, it has a glorious sound. And physically, the instrument is in remarkable shape—almost as if the instrument had been delivered yesterday: no cracks, no major repairs, the varnish intact. So if you have minimally 45 million dollars to spare….

So at roughly the same time that Bach was composing his suites, Stradivarius was creating his viola—probably the greatest viola we have. Enter David Aaron Carpenter, a 28-year old violist who is…

…undeniably proficient, technically. But both the viola and the Bach seem to be products to be used for spreading the David Aaron Carpenter brand. The “musicality” seems as learned, as artificial, as forced as the gestures of old-time opera singers.

It could be envy, of course. Look, both Carpenter and the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken have a command of their instruments that I will never have. They both must have struggled years to attain their proficiency. But why am I left thinking…

…what for?

David Aaron Carpenter plays the Macdonald Viola

Try and Maybe

“Who the hell is playing that Bach suite,” I asked Raf, the excellent gentleman at the café who gives me great coffee. Well, Bach now lives on iPhones—in this case Raf’s iPhone—so he was able to tell me.

“Rostro… …povich.. Some Russian guy…”

Could it be true? I went to YouTube to see, or rather to hear. And yes, the same Rostropovich that could be ardent, heroic, tender, raging, mythic, you-add-your-own-adjective in the Dvorak concerto was not so much playing the Bach suite as assaulting it.

Look, his was an age that knew relatively little about baroque interpretation…well, that’s what I was about to write. But then I looked up Anner Bylsma, who is famous for playing both the modern cello and the baroque cello. And yes, he plays in what is now tiresomely called “historically informed performance,” or sometimes “historically informed style.” And he’s only seven years younger than Rostropovich….

Back up for anyone who didn’t spend time in music conservatories in the seventies or eighties. Generally, students were taught to play music essentially the same way. True, if you were playing Bach, you weren’t supposed to have the lush, rich tone of Rachmaninoff. You aimed for simplicity, clarity, articulation; with Bach especially, you tried to bring out the musical ideas: the counterpoint, the harmonic progressions, the lines and phrases.

Into this picture emerged a new group of players whom everyone accused mentally and occasionally orally of being unable to tackle the technical challenges of the classical / romantic literature. Because let’s face it—the Dvorak concerto is not something you give to a beginning student. However, any kid in high school can saw his way through a Bach solo cello suite. They’re just not that hard.

And so the new group specialized in playing baroque music, learning the historical performance practices, refitting their instruments, using gut instead of metal strings, adopting a convex instead of a concave bow. And in those years, there was a lot still to be learned, and a lot of controversy about what was and wasn’t authentic.

The historically informed performers (hey, let’s call them HIPsters!) tended to bunch together and look down on the rest of us—or so it felt to me at least. And they also tended to play in ways that—however deadly correct—were completely uninteresting and unmusical.

The good news? Most of us grew up, began to listen to each other’s playing, and began to find out ways to make music that was—apparently / supposedly—consistent with what Bach and other Baroque composers might have wanted. But the point was that it was music, not an exercise in historical performance.

Well, I said we grew up, but did we? Because my current feeling is that the “early music people”—as we used to call them—have gone on, learned, and started to create some astonishingly beautiful music. Bylsma, for example, recorded the Bach suites twice: in 1979 and then again in 1992. And while I’ve heard criticism of the recordings from HIPsters, the recordings are out there and should be listened to, especially if you’re in the business of playing the suites.

That said, why was the young conservatory (I presume) student I heard playing his cello in the New York City subway rendering a Bach suite in exactly the same way as did Casals, all those many decades ago when he was championing the works? Has performance practice become fossilized? Are we to go on playing the suites as Casals played them for the rest of all time?

The curious thing is that—reportedly—Casals was never particularly satisfied with his recordings of the suites: he felt, as I recall, that they were all too slow.

For years, I disliked the suites, and felt that they were greatly inferior to the solo violin sonatas and partitas. Still, I played them, since they occupy a central place in the repertoire. And more—they are to cellists as the Bible is to Christians. There are other religious writings, as there are other pieces of music for the cello. But for many of us, a part of every day is given over to Bach, even if we don’t play Brahms or Beethoven on that day.

And now? I’ve started to like them a lot, and only discovered why yesterday. I was in the café, recording myself—but that wasn’t it. I was on a small stage, across from which was a long mirror. I thus had a perfect chance to watch myself play. And what did I see?

‘What was the big deal, for all those years’ was what I thought when I first saw myself. Because there was nothing physically difficult, nothing strained in my arms or neck or torso. My fingers were making funny little movements up and down on the fingerboard; my left hand was making funny little movements sideways with the bow. Wildly, for a moment, I conceived the idea that anyone, anywhere, could be taught in ten seconds to play the cello as well as I was playing. Silly little movements here, silly little movements there—presto, you’re a cellist!

It wasn’t that I made it look easy—it was that it was easy. I could have been playing the fastest movement, and still have given you directions to Plaza las Américas, our largest mall.

That was part of the equation. And the second part? Well, I turned to a clip of the Master himself—Casals—giving a master class to a young cellist at the University of California, Berkeley. The cellist plays correctly, if somewhat unimaginatively; Casals responds simply by playing the same passage as he would play it.

Sadly, however great he was as a cellist and as a musician—he was a bit lacking as a teacher. Yes, any student can hear that his teacher plays better than he or she does: he knows that, that’s not the point. The point is how to get to the level of the Master.

The student was playing the opening of the Brahms E minor sonata—a wonderful, expansive, Brahmsian theme. I heard what Casals was playing, and the difference between his rendition and the students: Casals was being metrically precise, giving each note its proper length, and playing strictly in time. In addition—ever so slightly—he was emphasizing the first and third beats. The effect was to give the passage the feel of a dirge, of something solemn and majestic that drove to a climax.

Casals could play it; he couldn’t explain it. And as I saw myself yesterday, I realized that I had taught myself what I believed about the suites. I had thrown out most of what people had told me, I had played them in wildly different ways in various tempi, and various styles. I had made them beautiful, I had made them ugly; I played them as I might play Brahms, or as I imagined Bach would want me to play them.

I stopped caring, you see. There have been other cellists, who have played them better than I. There will be other cellists, who will play—perhaps—them much better. But you know what? I don’t care, nor do I need to. And in that space, that freedom from the tyranny of teachers or the disapproval of audiences, I made my peace with the suites.

“Oh, no; oh, no!” cried Casals to the student. “Don’t separate the notes at all, don’t separate them at all!”

I winced.

I grew up with a lot of “don’t,” you see—with an occasional “do,” added for good measure.

I now live in “try” and “maybe.”

On Failure—Or Not

Well, the work of this morning was supposed to be to tell you about failure, since Lady, Mr. Fernández and I had not so much been to the opera last night as we had been Igorred.

As in Prince Igor, the opera by Borodin that the Metropolitan Opera is putting on for the first time in nearly 100 years. So we went, all of us, to the broadcast at the Metro Theater. The broadcast (or rebroadcast, in this case) is absolutely better than actually going to the Met, since try eating popcorn at the Met! Oh, and another small advantage—you can see the singers, without having to shell out 300 bucks…..

“How long will this last,” asked Lady, who was attending for the first time. Four hours, I told her, wildly over-exaggerating, or so I thought—it actually clocked in at 4 and a half hours, and that was without the curtain calls (we scrambled out of the theater to grab the last bus home).

Well, it was a thing to have done to one—the first act alone came in at an hour and forty five minutes, and half of that was spent in a long hallucinatory scene set in a blaze of poppies (12,500 artificial, spring-loaded poppies—so loaded since the dancers were energetically crashing their way through the famous Polovtsian Dances {well, famous to all but the computer, my little red-squiggling friend….})

You see, Prince Igor, a twelfth-century figure, has made the fatal mistake of going off to fight the Cuman / Polovtsian tribes, despite having received a blazingly clear message from the heavens that it was a damn fool thing to do. OK—not so blazing, since the celestial tidings came in the form of a solar eclipse. But what sort of operatic moron goes off to war right after an eclipse? Hellooo!

Well, the predictable happens, but does Igor pick himself up, dust himself off, and get back to the world of the living—which in this case is to be a prisoner? Although not, since his captor seems to be a perfectly splendid man—and a khan, no less—who insists on treating him as a guest, even to the point of offering him one of the Polovtsian maidens. Oh, and he suggests that they go off and conquer all Russia together. Quite a reasonable offer, given that look—Igor isn’t bringing to the table much clout in the way of bargaining.

Right—so while Igor is moping around refusing to escape (since he’s a prince, get it?  And escaping, you see, is for the less exalted than he—therefore he’ll just sit around being operatically moody, which will draw out the opera…)

Now where was I?

Right—Igor is moping, but his wife’s brother? He’s having a great old time, stealing maidens from their havens by night and plotting to overthrow his brother-in-law by day. While all of this is going on, the khan attacks and—guess what!—the city falls. So now it’s one chicken salad wrap, two large coffees, one bag of popcorn with some illicit-but-oh-so-good Coca-Cola (suck it up, Bloomberg! Hah!) later, and now we’re in the fourth act / fourth hour—which is a scene of utter devastation!

Well, let’s go further—utter devastation, social ruin, economic collapse, and a profound, vast, bleak spiritual wasteland, from which no one will escape.

The Russians just love this stuff….

Igor, it seems, has now decided to escape, presumably so that he can come back when it’s entirely pointless (except, of course, to be in the final act). Obviously, being treated as the honored guest of the khan is insufficiently hair-shirted, especially when there is now the devastated city which he once ruled to mope about in. So there he is, Russianly catatonic, contemplating his and his city’s ruin, when two old souses come upon him, and decide to ring the bell, and get the citizenry (in this case the Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera—handy, hunh?)

Well, the wife is happy to see him, but Igor? Unlike all the operatic characters who are told not to speak to their loved ones but cannot, Igor ignores his beloved, so steeped in grief is he. So now it’s the crowd’s turn—very useful, since the chorus is now on overtime, and you might as well use ‘em—and soon they’re dancing about and tossing Igor in the air like a fraternity prank.

At last—and I do hope nobody in the audience last night was afflicted with hemorrhoids—Igor spins off, and lurches around for a minute or so in what appears to be a near-psychotic break. Then he takes hold of himself, goes to a crate and begins to lug it to the side. Gradually, the others join in—moving the rubble to the side, beginning the process of cleaning up.

“That was it?” asked Mr. Fernández, puzzled about how he had passed the last five hours of his life. The steppes of Russian, you see, are slightly chillier than Hollywood.

So I thought about it all this morning, over coffee. And it’s a curious thing, the need of my country—despite having experienced it several times—never to have admitted defeat.

Let’s face it—we lost Vietnam. And Iraq? Afghanistan? Even our war on drugs? The American dream?

Yes—we’ve been attacked. But have we ever experienced the devastation of a ruined landscape / countryscape, coupled with the bitter taste of knowing that another nation has invaded and conquered? Have we gone through what so many nations around the world have endured?

‘I know about defeat,’ I thought, remembering four or five auditions that I completely choked. Each time it was the same—the disbelief of being gob sacked in the psychic solar plexus, the wailing of despair and frustration, the shame of calling friends and family and announcing that, yes, once again, I had failed. Reader—some things repetition does not make easier.

“We thoroughly enjoyed it,” said the tourist yesterday, handing me ten bucks for the organizations I support by playing Bach suites in the café. The story, you see, has a happy ending—I’m playing better than I ever have. More importantly, I’m playing in public, enjoying it, and tackling the solo suites without having the aid of another musician (often a pianist) to bolster me. It’s just the instrument and I.

People drift past, off to the bathroom. Often, I shift to another point in the bow, to allow them to pass. The parrot squawks. People take photos—shooting a red flash of light into the middle of a sarabande. Casals was right—a café is excellent practice for a developing musician, whatever his or her age….

Did it come easily? No. But if it came at all, it came from the devastated landscape of failure. And if I had denied that I had failed? If I had fallen for the rationale—perhaps real but not true—that no gringo could land a job with a Puerto Rican orchestra?

There are times, I decided, when you need devastation, failure, dirt in the mouth. That’s the only landscape from which to travel to other, better places.

Enter Susan, who wrote a comment on yesterday’s post, saying that she’d not heard of the French countertenor, Philippe Jaroussky. ‘Hmm,’ I thought, ‘how can that be?’ So I turned to YouTube, and came by chance on the clip below.

However many decades it took this bear of little brain to figure out his instrument, it took Jaroussky only a couple of years to go from starting to sing to conquering the world of song. And why shouldn’t he? He’s young, mouth-wateringly cute, and the voice?

But as you can see below, it’s the completely natural—and funny—way he approaches his music that carries the day. He has not, it looks, travelled the same paths that I have trod, at least not in music.

I rejoice for him, as I rejoice for the failures that—bitter as they were—led me onward to a world of such joy….

Why Are Female Poets Nuts?

I came on it in two ways. The first occurred last Sunday, when I was coaching a student on a poem by a poet unknown to me: Jane Kenyon. Paradoxically, the poem is called Happiness:

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                  It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Well, it was that image, that “wineglass, weary of holding wine,” that stuck in my mind. So much so, that it wasn’t the name of the poet but her image of the wineglass that allowed me to track Kenyon down.

And if Kenyon knew about happiness, it was hardly the neighbor who dropped every morning for coffee, gossip, and laughter. For Kenyon, happiness was the ghost she saw slipping into an abandoned house at dusk.

How depressed was she? Well, consider a famous poem: Having it Out with Melancholy. The first stanza clues you in pretty quickly:

When I was born,

you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery,

and when we were alone, you lay down

on top of me, pressing

the bile of desolation into every pore.

Kenyon, born in Ann Arbor but living in New Hampshire, died early at age 47 from leukemia. But the question troubling my afternoon today is whether she also suffered from the Sylvia Plath effect.

The idea goes back to Aristotle, if not before, but got named in 2001 by James C. Kaufman; Wikipedia has this to say about it:

Kaufman's work further demonstrated that female poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other class of writers. In addition, female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other eminent women, such as politicians, actresses, and artists.

Well, looking at the 20^th century, it’s not hard to see that there were seriously troubled women out there, often writing extraordinary poetry. Besides Plath, there was Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale, and not so much a raft as a cruise ship of others.

Writing, in fact, is on the list of the ten most depression-prone professions. But it seems that female poets outstrip all others for being nuts. Why?

Well, unless you have the fortune to be born with…well, a fortune, poetry is a pretty awful profession. And what happens if you don’t particularly want or like to teach?

You’re also digging, digging into some of the messiest terrain around—your own psyche. Worse, there’s the terrible fact that there is all too often an inverse relationship between a poem’s intrinsic worth and its financial worth. Which is to say that bad poetry sells.

Then there’s not much support out there for being a poet. Novels are sexy, everybody venerates a Hemingway or Steinbeck. But a poet, who has produced a slim little book of sixty poems or so—the fruit of two years of sitting alone with her thoughts and feelings? It sort of pales next to a 600-page novel.

Right—so now we get to chicken and egg: does the poetry create the madness, or do crazy people decide to become poets? Well, the age-old question has now been solved, and by a Harvard man no less. Here, from the American Psychological Association, is what the authors have to say:

There isn't a link between mental illness and the actual process of creating, says psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, MD, of Harvard Medical School, who has studied Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and other highly creative individuals. Rather, he argues that mental illnesses such as anxiety, thought disorder and depression disrupt the cognitive and emotional processes necessary for successful creativity.

I agree—but there’s something that has to be acknowledged: it may be that the depression of creative people is distinct from the depression of the rest of us. Business people, plumbers, doctors have some external yardstick against which they can measure themselves. But creative people—and especially artists and poets—have no such thing. The question, “am I any good?” awaits by the bedside in the morning, perches on the shoulder for the rest of the day, sours your morning coffee, and stalks you, side by side, throughout the day.

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life—resolve the issue with the cello, that had led to self-inflicted bites on my arms, and three or four spectacular choked auditions. In the space of two or three weeks, I went through madness and came out the other end.

Two or three weeks?

Sorry—a lifetime….