A Sacred Non-Believer (reposted)

Revisiting a post published on February 2, 2013…. Enjoy the music!
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Right—let me at least acknowledge the news, so that you know that I, son and brother of newspapermen, have done my job. One person is dead in Ankara, Turkey, in a terrorist suicide attempt. Protesters in Egypt have attacked the presidential palace. US army suicides are at a record high, and so, by the way, is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, at least since 2007.

And I could tell you, since I was compelled to watch it, that Muslim fundamentalists are attempting to enforce Sharia law in parts of London. Actually, it’s happening all over Europe, in neighborhoods that are heavily Muslim.

Here’s the question—does any of this make you feel better?

If the answer is no, then you really should check out the clip below. First of all for the quality of the performance—these are some skilled guys, in particular the first cellist, who looks like he’s only recently been toilet trained. But wow, what a musician!

Then there’s the piece itself, which is some of the most gentle, tranquil music Brahms ever composed. And it’s one of those pieces that you know but somehow never hear. Then, of course, you do, and you immediately say, “I’m gonna listen to that much more often!” It’s that old friend that you really love but somehow never see….

Brahms is one of those guys you love or hate—and several of my friends, including Mr. Fernández, are in the hate camp. “There’s something he does in every composition where the violins are screeching or maybe it’s the harmonic progression but it just drives me nuts,” he reports.

I, on the other hand, absolutely love the music. Nor am I alone—Brahms was popular in his own lifetime, and died a wealthy man, though he was born in poverty. What sort of poverty? Well, his father had to play piano in dance halls, according to Wikipedia.

Which may be employing euphemisms; I always heard that it was brothels. Brahms himself acknowledged that he had a little difficulty with women, perhaps because of his father’s professional activity, perhaps because his mother was seventeen years older than his father.

Then there’s the other theory—Clara Schumann. It’s undeniable that they were devoted to each other, and Brahms spent the two years following Robert Schumann’s death bucking up Clara. He moved into an apartment in her house, and gave up pretty much everything—concerts and composition. So, our inquisitive modern mind wants to know—were they an item?

Gentle reader—there are some places you don’t go.

Or rather can’t, since both Brahms and Clara burnt their letters.

Nor was that the only thing destroyed—there’s the twenty string quartets that Brahms decided weren’t up to snuff. Legend has it that he ripped up a number of attempts at symphonies, too—he had the weight of Beethoven’s Ninth always on his back.

He was rich, but he lived simply. He took long walks, carrying candy for the children, but was grumpy at times to his friends. A story often told about the E Minor cello sonata has the cellist screaming, “I can’t HEAR myself!” Brahms, thundering away at the piano, shouts back, “you’re lucky!”

He writes a requiem that is among the most moving works of sacred music, but doesn’t, apparently, believe. It worries Dvorak, who writes in a letter, "Such a man, such a fine soul—and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!"  

There’s a school of belief that says that the real essence of Brahms are the little works, the small works—not the symphonies. Hearing the sextet below, I begin to think that may be right.

A Demented Violin Concerto

Well, is it any good or is it—as Menuhin thought—a historical footnote, the missing link in the violin repertoire?

Yehudi Menuhin, one of the great violinists of the last century, was referring to the Schumann violin concerto, which dates from 1853—a year before Schumann gave in to syphilitic madness and jumped into the Rhine. Fearing that he would harm his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann who had long supported him creatively and financially, he asked the fisherman who rescued him to take him directly to the sanatorium. He died in 1856.

That’s part of the story. The other part? Joseph Joachim, a friend of both the Schumanns and Johannes Brahms, and the greatest violinist of his day. And so the concerto was written for Joachim, who played through it, and was less than impressed. In fact, he suspected the music was part of Schumann’s madness; allegedly, he called the work morbid. And he wrote the following words in a letter to a friend:

The piece has ‘a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy’, though ‘certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist’.

Joachim never played the work in public, and later convinced both Brahms and Clara Schumann that the work wasn’t worthy of publication. Joachim kept the manuscript, and left it in his will to the Prussian State Library, with the instruction that it was not to be played until 1956, 100 years after the composer’s death..

OK—here the story gets seriously weird. Two grandnieces of Joachim—one improbably named Jelly D’Aranyi, the other Adila Fachiri—both violinists, decide to go to a séance in London in 1933. And guess who comes sailing through? Yup—Robert Schumann with instructions from the beyond. Yeah—“play my concerto,” or words to that effect.

First problem—where the hell was it? OK—round two, and this time Joachim comes through with the info. And so the sisters hightail it over to the archives and dig the concerto up. And they swear until their dying day that they had no idea that the piece existed.

(….stop that sniggering out there!)

The trail went cold until 1937, when the music publisher Schott sent the manuscript to Yehudi Menuhin. And he announced that he would give the world premiere in San Francisco.

You can guess what happened. Yes, Jelly stepped up and claimed right of first performance—hadn’t it been she who had been tipped off from the beyond? (You might wonder why Adila, the other sister, didn’t stake her claim—at least, I wonder…. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t say…)

It might have been interesting to see how the struggle developed—but sadly, the Germans held the copyright, and they decided it should be one of their own, Georg Kulenkampff, should premiere the work. So Menuhin gave the American premiere, and Jelly gave the London premiere—one critic said, “of this dismal fiasco, the less said the better.”

Since then, the work has met with divided opinion. Some have called it a violin concerto without the violin. And one senses what Joachim felt—it’s the work of a man whose mind is slipping. It may lack coherence, ultimately; but there are still beautiful moments.

In short, it’s a thing to hear….

    

Fourth Shade of Grey—When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.

Only Lacking One Thing

Well, I nearly fell into the trap—and shame on me. For a fleeting moment, I thought about calling this post on Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister, “The Other Mendelssohn.”

The problem being that, in a sense, she was. Not in talent, nor in creative power, nor as a pianist. She had all the goods her brother had, absolutely everything except for one thing.

He had a Y chromosome; she had none.

For all the culture in the Mendelssohn family, the highbrowed German Jewish cultural and intellectual firepower wasn’t enough to free Fanny from what was “most important.” And that would be running the household.

Here’s Fanny’s father, writing in 1820, when she was fifteen:

Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.

Here’s Fanny brother, Felix:

From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.

Ouch—all the velvet gloves in the world can’t take the sting away from that slap in the face.

She made only one appearance in public at the piano, and that was to premiere her brother’s piano concerto. And yes, her music was played at family gatherings, but when it came time to publish, Felix thought it really would be better if her work appeared under his name. And so it was a bit thorny, the problem that arose when Queen Victoria proposed to sing her favorite of Mendelssohn’s songs, Italien. But he confessed—it really was his sister’s song.

She was free until age 24, when she married an artist, William Hensel, and then had a child. At the end of her life, in 1846, she decided to publish her single opus, a group of songs. Tragically, she died at age 42 of a stroke; her brother, grief stricken, wrote his last string quartet, dedicated it to her memory, and then suffered the same fate six months later.

She was the granddaughter of a famous philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. She in turn was the grandmother of a philosopher, Paul Hensel, and a mathematician, Kurt Hensel.

And no, apparently her husband wasn’t musical; he couldn’t sing the single note in a performance the family mounted. His talents were in the graphic arts; he became the royal court painter. Here is his sketch of Fanny.

I look at it and wonder—are we seeing Fanny, or the Fanny that her soon-to-be husband wanted to see? Was she really that demure, that conventionally pretty?

Sadly, unlike Clara Schumann, who had to get out there and work, Fanny had the comfortable life of a prosperous hausfrau. But she was by no means unproductive—she left over 460 compositions.

Most of which are songs, or small pieces for the piano. Yes, she has several sonatas, a couple of quartets, the piano trio, which you can hear below. But unlike Clara Schumann, no piano concerto, no larger works. One wonders—was the sexism so ingrained that a lady composer could write songs—the equivalent of embroidery or speaking a bit of French—but not symphonies? Or was it practical—who would perform a symphony by a woman composer?

She seems an enigma, does Fanny—much more difficult to read than Clara Schumann. Both were gifted pianists, gifted composers. Clara was the breadwinner, and toured Europe while taking care of Robert. Yet she stopped composing at age 36, before half her life had passed (she died at age 76). And yes, Robert might—and note that word “might”—have been the greater talent in composition.

Not being an artist, I’m in no position to say who was the more talented—Fanny Mendelssohn or her husband. But here’s the deal.

I also can’t say who was more talented—Fanny Mendelssohn or her brother. 

A Sacred Non-Believer

Right—let me at least acknowledge the news, so that you know that I, son and brother of newspapermen, have done my job. One person is dead in Ankara, Turkey, in a terrorist suicide attempt. Protesters in Egypt have attacked the presidential palace. US army suicides are at a record high, and so, by the way, is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, at least since 2007.

And I could tell you, since I was compelled to watch it, that Muslim fundamentalists are attempting to enforce Sharia law in parts of London. Actually, it’s happening all over Europe, in neighborhoods that are heavily Muslim.

Here’s the question—does any of this make you feel better?

If the answer is no, then you really should check out the clip below. First of all for the quality of the performance—these are some skilled guys, in particular the first cellist, who looks like he’s only recently been toilet trained. But wow, what a musician!

Then there’s the piece itself, which is some of the most gentle, tranquil music Brahms ever composed. And it’s one of those pieces that you know but somehow never hear. Then, of course, you do, and you immediately say, “I’m gonna listen to that much more often!” It’s that old friend that you really love but somehow never see….

Brahms is one of those guys you love or hate—and several of my friends, including Mr. Fernández, are in the hate camp. “There’s something he does in every composition where the violins are screeching or maybe it’s the harmonic progression but it just drives me nuts,” he reports.

I, on the other hand, absolutely love the music. Nor am I alone—Brahms was popular in his own lifetime, and died a wealthy man, though he was born in poverty. What sort of poverty? Well, his father had to play piano in dance halls, according to Wikipedia.

Which may be employing euphemisms; I always heard that it was brothels. Brahms himself acknowledged that he had a little difficulty with women, perhaps because of his father’s professional activity, perhaps because his mother was seventeen years older than his father.

Then there’s the other theory—Clara Schumann. It’s undeniable that they were devoted to each other, and Brahms spent the two years following Robert Schumann’s death bucking up Clara. He moved into an apartment in her house, and gave up pretty much everything—concerts and composition. So, our inquisitive modern mind wants to know—were they an item?

Gentle reader—there are some places you don’t go.

Or rather can’t, since both Brahms and Clara burnt their letters.

Nor was that the only thing destroyed—there’s the twenty string quartets that Brahms decided weren’t up to snuff. Legend has it that he ripped up a number of attempts at symphonies, too—he had the weight of Beethoven’s Ninth always on his back.

He was rich, but he lived simply. He took long walks, carrying candy for the children, but was grumpy at times to his friends. A story often told about the E Minor cello sonata has the cellist screaming, “I can’t HEAR myself!” Brahms, thundering away at the piano, shouts back, “you’re lucky!”

He writes a requiem that is among the most moving works of sacred music, but doesn’t, apparently, believe. It worries Dvorak, who writes in a letter, "Such a man, such a fine soul—and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!"  

There’s a school of belief that says that the real essence of Brahms are the little works, the small works—not the symphonies. Hearing the sextet below, I begin to think that may be right.

Two Women and a Masterpiece

Well, it was a lesson in comeuppance. I prided myself on being musically literate, well-heard or well-listened, or whatever the musical equivalent of well-read is. But there is a problem with being a musician: you have to learn how to play the instrument. That means that you sit in tiny little rooms with terrible acoustics and try to hear yourself since, of course, there is a tuba player on your left and, inevitably, a trumpeter on your right.

That gives you an excellent excuse to do what you really want to do, which is put the cello down and go hang out and listen to another cellist who somehow has managed to get not just the adjoining practice rooms free but also an entire AISLE empty. So you hang and listen to him or her.

“Wow, that sounds GREAT!” you exclaim completely falsely when he or she comes out, ostensibly to go to the bathroom but really to drive you away. That’s OK, because now you can go hang out with your friends and say snakes and toads (sapos y serpientes—a good Puerto Rican expression) with your pals.

“Yup, the Dvorak…”

“What, she can barely play The Swan!”

“Heard it!”

Multiply this by four years and you have—if lucky—a Bachelor’s in Music, affectionately called a BM. If you have spent enough time in the practice rooms, you may be able to make a career as a musician. If you have spent enough time in the halls, you’ll also have learned a valuable skill. Scratch that word “valuable” and replace with “essential.” Because with the curious exception of those at the absolute top, the average musician is backbiting, hypocritical, insecure, and frequently backstabbing. And cellists, I’m sorry to say, are the worst.

Now then, you’re in an orchestra. That means you are likely to play perhaps fifty odd pieces over and over again for the next forty years. Yes, I exaggerate, but not by much. And you may never listen to any other music again.

OK, look, maybe it’s different now. But it was very uncommon thirty years ago to meet a string player who had listened to Dichterliebe (my red squiggling friend, there ARE some things you don’t know), perhaps the most famous of Robert Schumann’s song cycles.

So I was quite smug, since I thought that having heard a lot of Schumann, I could comfortably be sure there were no surprises. Which is to say, I could ignore the rest of his life’s work. So I was surprised to discover, yesterday, that there was a piano quintet that is well…

…major.

Actually, more than major. It’s at the pinnacle, it’s sitting up there on Mt. Olympus with the gods, and of course EVERYBODY knows it but Marc.

It was written in 1843 in Schumann’s chamber music year (well, I did know about that, though I learned of it only recently), and was first performed, as you would expect, by Clara Schumann, the preeminent pianist of her day.

Although it may not have been she, it might have been Felix Mendelssohn, whom Schumann idolized. Clara was sick for either the first or second performance, so Mendelssohn sight-read for the event.

“Only a man can play this piano part,” said Schumann of the piano quintet opus 44. But the legend is that he said it in a moment of jealousy. She was the hot item; he was on occasion asked if he could play the piano too. (Answer, by the way, is yes—but by no means as well as she….)

She was one tough lady. Her father was very strict, and she was programmed from childhood on to be a concert pianist. She bumps into Robert Schumann as a teenager, and he is smitten. They marry, against her father’s wishes. Robert, of course, goes nuts, and spends the last two years of his life in the madhouse. That might be enough hardship for the average Jane, but the gods apparently seemed to think she needed more. Wikipedia time!

Her family life was punctuated by tragedy. Four of her eight children and her husband died before she did, and her husband and one of her sons ended their lives in insane asylums. Her first son Emil died in 1847, aged only one. Her husband Robert had a mental collapse, attempted suicide in 1854, and was committed to an insane asylum for the last two years of his life. In 1872 her daughter Julie died, leaving two small children. In 1879, her son Felix, aged 25, died. Her son Ludwig suffered from mental illness, like his father, and, in her words, had to be "buried alive" in an institution. Her son Ferdinand died at the age of 43 and she was required to raise his children. She herself became deaf in later life and she often needed a wheelchair.

“Punctuated by tragedy?” How about “saturated?”

Well, she was the breadwinner all her life since Robert was, in his words, “always living in the realm of the imagination.” An excellent place to be, except a dinner time….

And however caring she could be, she spoke quite frankly. She is “hostile”—in Wikipedia’s words—to Liszt. She is “scathing” on Wagner. She calls Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony “horrible.”

It was the custom of the time for pianist to include one or two of their one compositions—she does that, but gives up composition in midlife. But she does more—instead of the showy pieces common in recitals of the time, she treats her audience seriously, giving them the real stuff.

OK—let’s do a better job here. These are the composers she played early in her career: Kalkbrenner, Henselt, Thalberg, Herz, Pixis, Czerny. And here are the guys she played later: Chopin, Mendelssohn, Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and—duh—Robert Schumann.

Oh, and by the way, she teaches for many years at the conservatory. Here’s our friend again:

In 1878 she was appointed teacher of the piano at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, a post she held until 1892, and in which she contributed greatly to the improvement of modern piano playing technique.

Just reading about her makes me yearn for a nap.

Fitting, then, that the pianist in the clip below is a woman at the top of her game. One hopes that Clara—her work done at last, the money brought in, the household organized, the students taught and the concerts played—is sitting, doing nothing, hearing without the need of playing, seeing another woman as able as she playing her husband’s great music.

Her husband, “who is always living in the realm of imagination.”

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.