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….. 

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.”