No Wisdom Here

Well, well—so here it is, the end of May and, astonishingly, nobody has asked me to give a commencement address. Isn’t that weird? Surely, surely, there has to be some school out there—for dental hygienists or nail technicians, anything, really, will do—that needs to hear my words of wisdom!

Of course, I tell you this since I have just watched Joyce DiDonato address the 109^th graduating class of Juilliard (video below). So that made me think: do I have any wisdom—wanted  or not—to give the world? Could I do as well as Joyce did, which, in a word, was excellent? After all, she covers a lot of territory in her four points, which are (and sorry to be a spoiler):

1.     You’ll never make it (that is, perfection in the arts is unattainable, so do what you do for the journey, not the destination….)

2.     The work will never end

3.      It’s not about you

4.     The world needs you

Point four, in fact, was something that I had just learned from Lucía, the lady who serves me great coffee in exchange for two dollar bills: a trade I’m always willing to make.

“You made me feel so much better last week,” said Lucía. “It was finals at the university and I was totally stressed out. So I just came and hear you play Bach suites, and I totally chilled out.”

OK—I play every day, and guess what? It’s no big thing for me, the sound of my cello is a familiar to me as the sound of my voice. So I don’t have the experience of someone never expecting to find a cellist in a darkened corner of a shop playing Bach from memory. But I frequently get comments like, “hey, that was fantastic,” or, in the case of the high school kid who drifted in and listened for twenty minutes, “hey, you play really well.”

My reaction?

Damned right I do!

There’s no vanity in it, as there would be if I had anything to do with it. Well, OK—I do have to show up, the cello does have to get stuck somewhere in front of me, and yes, I put in the famous 10,000 hours of practice that pretty much will take you where you need to go. But here’s the thing: I have had complete conversations with Lady while playing the cello and not missing a note. So somebody out there tell me: who’s playing?

(Note to Joyce—Hah! Bet YOU can’t do that!)

That, in fact, is another element of point number 2: it’s not about you. Joyce meant, I think, that we’re servants, of the listener, the play-goer, the opera fan, whoever has chosen to reward us with their time and, in some cases, their money. But I think there’s something that every one of us knows: when you’re in a flow—that magical, mystical moment when everything is happening just right—the paradoxical feeling (at least for me) is that I’m not doing anything. And I have had the feeling, by the way, while writing, as well as while playing the cello.

Today, no—flow isn’t something that I can turn on and off. Although it has to be said, it can be courted, lured, coaxed almost. The first thing to do is to decide, it’s OK to have a Piatigorsky day:

Let me explain: The famous Russian cellist played once for Casals, and how did it go?

Terrible.

And how did Casals react?

Extravagant praise and hugs.

So Piatigorsky left, thinking ‘hypocrite.’ And then, a couple of years later, the two met, and Piatigorsky asked the maestro why he had praised the terrible performance he had given.

“You played the triplets in measure 371 of the Dvorak in a way that I had never heard, never even imagined. And as an artist, I have to be grateful for and value every beautiful note or phrase. Let the others count up the mistakes, our job is to count the successes.”

(Note—the above is my, perhaps faulty, paraphrase of Casals’ actual words….)

The point? Having a day when it’s just average, whatever it is you’re doing, is perfectly OK. And that, by the way, is the open door through which flow, well, flows in.

“It’s about showing up,” I tell Montalvo, who has explained that he’s blocked, he can’t write, the muse isn’t speaking. So I tell him: this is what writing is. Then what do I do? Pound an imaginary keyboard on the table.

Montalvo is almost fatally 21 years old, which is by definition “high-risk” time. And Montalvo, having stolen a 3,000 dollar blue macaw, needs to get his act together fast, since he’s on probation, and in a drug rehabilitation program. So I’m doing adventures in paternity, which is a new one for me. So what did I tell him, what were my points of wisdom? What, in short, was my commencement address?

1.     You don’t have to fight every fight

2.     You should think before you speak

3.     You should get a schedule and stick to it, especially if you’re not working

4.     You should do something that enriches you (listening to music, exercise, whatever) the first thing in the morning

5.     If two or more people are telling you something, they’re probably right

6.     “Slow and steady” wins the race

7.     Everybody is the hero of their own life

8.     Nobody, on their deathbed, has ever said, “I wished I had worked harder:” it’s always about love and relationships

9.     That said, what you achieve and what you have are relatively unimportant

10.  If it’s a choice between doing what you “should” do and having fun, seriously think about having fun….

OK—confession: I really had to stretch for ten points. Hmm—could it be that it’s just, as well, this curious lack of invitations to give a commencement address?

Music from the Camps

I had known about it for years, and had even read memoirs about it. So when The New York Times announced that Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest survivor of the Nazi camps, had died I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had been a pianist, and had been one of the lucky few whose music had saved them from the gas chambers. The Nazis, having a love of music and a need for publicity, decided to, well, not kill two birds with one stone. So they set up Theresienstadt, which would be a feeder camp for Auschwitz, and also would be a model camp featuring the best of Jewish cultural and intellectual life.

Nothing illustrates the enormous and horrifying paradox that was Nazi Germany better than their relationship with music and the Jewish musicians who played—often—the great works of German / Austrian composers. But let The Guardian tell the story:

In 1943 the Nazis struck upon two entwined ideas. One was to stage Brundibár, a children's opera composed in 1941 by Hans Krása, invite a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross to see it, and let these distinguished guests be the judges of what they saw. The children sang, the orchestra played and the Red Cross was delighted, underwriting Terezín with its international authority and a clean bill of health. Within days, almost the entire cast of children had been shipped "East" to the gas chambers.

The second scheme was to produce a documentary entitled The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, for which Terezín was cleaned up and grotesque sequences filmed in which apparently happy inmates, in reality doomed to die, play football and cultivate market gardens. And of course there is music: the Terezín Orchestra plays, under the baton of its founder and conductor, Karel Ancerl. Here, his genius is exploited for a nauseating propaganda purpose – "but he could not do otherwise," recalls Anka. But she knew him differently, for who he really was, her memories both intimate and epic.

Better, consider the story of Herz-Sommers, as The New York Times describes it:

Music spared Mrs. Herz-Sommer a similar fate. One night, after she had been in Terezin for more than a year, she was stopped by a young Nazi officer, as Ms. Stoessinger’s book recounts.

“Do not be afraid,” he said. “I only want to thank you for your concerts. They have meant much to me.”

He turned to leave before adding: “One more thing. You and your little son will not be on any deportation lists. You will stay in Theresienstadt until the war ends.”

And so Herz-Sommers had the paradoxical privilege of being allowed to live, though she had to escort her mother to the deportation center for the “East” in Prague (small wonder—she called it the worst moment of her life), and see her husband in 1944 transferred from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and then to Dachau, where he died.

Perhaps because of the music, she never turned bitter. The Times quotes her thus:

“It was propaganda,” she later said. “We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year.”

But for Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who played more than 100 concerts in Terezín (the Czech name for Theresienstadt), the sustaining power of music was no less real.

“These concerts, the people are sitting there — old people, desolated and ill — and they came to the concerts, and this music was for them our food,” she later said. “Through making music, we were kept alive.”

“Making music” I assumed to be the act of interpreting somebody else’s music, but I was only half right. Because there was music being composed, too—and a special music it was. Because Czechoslovakia had a special, dual musical heritage. Yes, they were deeply influenced by Germany, studied there and played its music. But there had also emerged a distinctly Czech school: Smetana, Janácek, and of course Dvorak, who straddled both worlds. Here’s what The Guardian has to say:

Listening to the new Nash CD, and earlier recordings of the Terezín works by the La Roche Quartet, the Pavel Haas Quartet of Prague (Haas died in Auschwitz in 1944) and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, one gets a very strong sense that not only were great composers murdered in gas chambers, but also that a whole greater than the sum of its parts was summarily eradicated: a distinctively Czech school of music – bursting with talent, energy, innovation, yearning and wit – poised to flourish and reinvent the national music in the world of postwar modernity.

Of course it never happened, but those few composers who did survive – mostly gentiles such as Bohuslav Martinu – offered a hint of what might have been but never was, with his extraordinary blend of Bohemian romance and modern rigour. However, the saplings of that truncated Prague Spring did very briefly grow, could be heard and were heard – en route to the gas chambers.  

Thus, a whole nascent musical tradition was lost. But what had it been? How did the music from Theresienstadt sound? Tantalizing to think about, and especially so when considering the words of one particular composer, Victor Ullmann, who died in the camps in 1944. Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about him:

The particular nature of the camp at Theresienstadt enabled Ullmann to remain active musically: he was a piano accompanist, organized concerts ("Collegium musicum", "Studio for New Music"), wrote critiques of musical events, and composed, as part of a cultural circle including Karel Ančerl, Rafael Schachter, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, and other prominent musicians imprisoned there. He wrote: "By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon. Our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live."[3]

I turned, as always, to YouTube, and sure enough, it was there: the Third String Quartet, written in 1943. And how did it sound?

Well, it’s music I admire more than like. It’s also music that is tightly reasoned, well-crafted, highly serious; this composer let’s you see why one of the foremost composers of the time, Arnold Schoenberg, thought so highly of Ullmann. It’s music that refuses to sink to bathos or cheap sentiment.

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.”

A Bow to a Bow

Well, it was a revelation, and I’m happy to say it was a good one.

I had to taken my bow to my luthier—and if you don’t have a luthier, you should get one, if only because it adds total class to be able to say “my luthier.” Of course, you could be a little clearer by saying “string instrument repairman,” but in a choice between clarity and class? No contest….

Actually, his name is Rodrigo, and he’s a totally cool guy. More to the point, he’s a serious luthier, having studied at Indiana University’s Violin Making and Repair Program. So he was the person to whom I fled, several years ago, when I detected the perfect round hole, about the diameter of a pencil point. What was it? I knew too well—a termite.

“I’ll have to freeze your cello for a couple of weeks,” said Rodrigo.

He explained it all carefully. Did I listen? Of course not—I knew it had to be done, I knew he was the man to do it. But how was I going to live for the next two weeks, imagining my cello in a meat locker?

Two weeks later, I was back in his taller, or workshop (OK, how about atelier?) And while I fully expected the cello to sound as good as it had before, it didn’t.

“It sounds much, much better,” I told him.

“The concert master of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra used to take his violin to New York for the least little thing,” his mother boasted, “now, he won’t let anyone but Rodrigo touch his violin….”

Mothers get to say stuff like that.

So there I was on Monday with a bow that had its hair firmly attached to the frog (yup—bows have frog: that’s the black thing under the player’s hand; it has a screw in it, so that you can tighten the hair.)  The problem? The hair had popped out at the other end of the bow (logically called the tip).

So there were two orders of business, beyond getting the bow fixed. The first was to ask about getting a baroque bow—very important, since I’m doing Bach and Beer every day. And the baroque bow is designed to do so something very important: messa di voce. It’s when a sustained note starts quietly, gradually becomes louder, and then becomes soft again. Done right, it’s ravishing.

As I knew he would, Rodrigo had the answer, with the happy news that a good baroque bow wouldn’t cost me too much—under two hundred bucks. And if my father had collected Leica cameras, can’t I collect bows?

The next order of business was to see if Rodrigo had a spare bow lurking around, waiting for the errant cellist to drift by and claim it. Well, it turns out that Rodrigo has a seriously good bow—which he would lend Yo-Yo Ma, maybe—and another bow, a French bow with German weight. Guess which one I got?

There’s a difference between what you know intellectually and what you know experientally (well, computer, if Sarah Palin can do it, why can’t I?). Because when I start playing with that bow, it was what Stanley said to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire: “baby, we’ve had this date from the very beginning!”

“The bow is more important that the instrument,” said a cello teacher to me when I was in my teens. So why had it never occurred to me: I had a very good cello, but I had never gone from what were essentially student bows to a better bow.

And if your cello is your sound, your bow is your voice. Or perhaps your speech, since the bow was somehow, miraculously suggesting nuances that I hadn’t thought of. I swear—that bow was telling me how to play Bach.

Bach—which I was playing because I had grown tired of killing myself playing stuff like the Dvorak concerto or the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations. They’re great pieces of music, but for the cellist? It’s a battle: one cellist against 100 musicians. I had gotten tired of working so hard, and besides, it’s strangely unusual how infrequently the Berlin Philharmonic or the London Symphony are calling me these days….

But the bow was having none of that. It wanted a robust, full sound—or maybe it was that just by using the weight of my arm, the bow produced a wonderful, warm sound.

It was, as I say, a revelation. Equally revealing was how much I didn’t know about bows, or bow makers. I knew that François Xavier Tourte (1747 – 25 April 1835) was a big name among bow makers, but I didn’t know that he’s big enough to be called, “the Stradivarius of bow makers.” (If so, my computer is less than impressed—“Tourte” gets red-squiggled, whereas “Stradivarius” sails right through….)

Not only was he a fine maker, but he was the father of the modern bow: he lengthened it, devised the little screw that tightens the tension of the hair, and also came up with a new way to make the curve of the bow. Previously, it had been carved; Tourte cooked up the idea of heating a straight stick of pernambuco, and then, on the edge of a wood table, carefully producing the curve.

For all this, he deserves to have his picture in Iguanas; here he is, in an engraving from 1818:

  

 Nor did I know that the experimentation with the bow is still going on, until I stumbled across Benoît Rolland, a Frenchman of—quite logically—the French School. Because there are, you see, at least three distinct schools of bow making: the French, German and English schools. I get this from a sentence from Rolland’s website:

A musician can sense whether a bow belongs to the French, German or British traditions.

But it occurred to me: shouldn’t there be an Italian school, since the modern violin originated in Cremona, Italy? But it appears no—the origin of the modern bow occurred later, and happened simultaneously but unconnectedly in France and England (John Dodd was the Tourte of England…).

At any rate, Rolland studied at Mirecourt, sometimes called “the Cremona of bow making” and was awarded the prestigious Maitre Archetier d’Art, which beyond sounding totally cool, has only been awarded a few times in history.

Nor is that the only thing Rolland has won—he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012—and they don’t hand those babies out like candy. Why did he get it? Well, the quote below is drawn from his website:

Initially using marine technology, he conceived the first carbon fiber bow of concert quality. Bringing the project one step further, he invented a new generation of bows including a tension mechanism that allows the performer to adjust at will the camber of the bow. The bows embodying this invention were awarded First Prize Musicora in 1994 (also selected for Musicora Anniversary, 2004), and are distributed under the trademark Spiccato®.

Right—so I’m a bit more knowledgeable about bows and bow making. What don’t I know? How I could possibly give Rodrigo’s bow back to him.

Sorry—that’s not Rodrigo’s bow.

Not any more….

So here’s what I going to say to him: “Rodrigo, you’d better let me buy this bow, because I really don’t want to have to steal it!”

Easy Playing

I knew that he did it—I didn’t know that he did it so well, and to such an extent.

Because there he is, the preeminent cellist of our day, Yo-Yo Ma, playing baroque cello, and playing it damn well.

It may not look like it to you—but there are real differences in the equipment and the technique. First, the strings are gut—not the metal strings that the modern cello has. And that accounts for the softer sound.

Second of all, the endpin—the metal rod that goes from the bottom of the instrument to the floor—is not there. And that means that the instrument has to be cradled in between the legs, a feeling which I, at least, enjoy.

The bow is radically different: here’s one writer on the subject:

Italian music was light and airy, requiring agility and rapidity. German music was more introspective; tempi were slower, and the music frequently required individual string players to produce true chords.

These two musical styles were reflected in the violin bows. The Italian bow was slim and light, the bow strings fixed in relatively high tension, while the German bow was highly arched, and the string tension was fairly loose. In contrast to the Italian technique of holding the bow lightly from above with curved wrist, the German bow was held with the thumb placed under the bow strings. In this way the player could tighten or relax the bowstring tension at will. A tighter tension in the bow was used for single string, single melodic line playing, while a relaxing of the bowstrings' tension permitted playing on two or more strings simultaneously, and thus of course, the playing of true chords.  

The instrument is also held differently—more vertically, with the pegs near the left ear, not behind it.

But one of the most important elements of baroque playing is that the pitch is different. To start with, the A—the note that the oboe plays at the beginning of a concert to tune the orchestra—is not the 440 Hz, but varied from 392 to 465 Hz. But generally, the A was much lower—which contributed as well to a softer, darker sound. And so the standard among baroque players has settled at 415 Hz.

There are stylistic differences, as well. The tendency of the baroque era was to ornament heavily—whatever got written on the page was meant as a guideline, not a Bible. So a performer was free to ornament, and did so.

When I first moved to Puerto Rico, I played in a baroque group, and the experience was a revelation. It was hard, initially, to limit the vibrato, and to create the long, expressive notes that start softly, grow slowly, and then recede again. Most difficult was tuning—the high leading tones and major thirds of modern playing vanish when playing baroque.

But there’s something tantalizing about it—it is the simplest, easiest playing in the world.

“I never want to work so hard again,” I said to the violinist of the group. She knew exactly what I meant: a large, major Romantic work like the Dvorak Concerto is less a piece of music than a battle. To play baroque music is…well, to play.

The last question, of course, is whether Ma gets away with it. Has he really mastered the baroque cello? I drifted over to Amazon.com to check on what the audience was saying.

Predictably, Ma has his critics. But me? I’m convinced!

A Sacred Non-Believer (reposted)

Revisiting a post published on February 2, 2013…. Enjoy the music!
----------------------------------

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.

Not Your Average 11-Year Old....

I decided not to let it in. Yes, it’s totally stupid; yes, it’s destructive; yes, it’s unnecessary. But this pretty little head decided not to stress out about the government shutdown. And guess what? I also decided that if all the wise heads in Washington couldn’t avert a shutdown, then I might as well shut down too. So I went to the beach this morning, lolled in the water, and watched green palms float against an azure sky. Shutdown!

And yesterday? Well, I discovered the first opera that Mozart ever wrote—a 70-minute affair all in Latin on the story of Apollo and Hyacinth by Ovid. Mozart wrote it when he was eleven, but as the conductor, Ian Page, pointed out, you stop thinking about that. Why? Because, as you can hear in the clips below, the music is terrific. 

I came upon the opera because I had spent part of the afternoon with Philippe Jaroussky and Nuria Rial, two tremendous young singers who work remarkably well together. Jaroussky, at age 35, is in his prime as a counter tenor—and he’s thoroughly in charge of his voice, which is gorgeous. And he seems to be one of the golden boys for whom everything came easy: he started singing when he was 18, and by 20 he was a professional. And his career has soared. And just to prove how spectacularly unfair the gods can be, Philippe happens to look like this….

OK—full disclosure: all of this would be enough, ordinarily, to make me hate him. But I’m over it—I told you about that beach, didn’t I? And in many ways, not to have struggled and flopped—as I certainly did, and both—is to have missed out on some good lessons.

And yes, for anyone wondering—Jaroussky sings on my team….

And Nuria? Well, she’s Catalan, and is utterly expressive in renaissance and baroque music. And with that Jackian sense of fairness that increasingly is coming out, here she is:

At any rate, I spent yesterday afternoon busy with Rial / Jaroussky, listening to this really smashing concert. And why not? The world was spinning out of control, crisis was imminent, the wolves were howling at the door. Why not spend the afternoon with some extraordinary musicians playing some ravishing music?

In fact, I’m giving you, dear Reader, permission right now. Cancel your life for the next hour and a half, put your index finger on that arrow, and surrender to some of the most beautiful music I know. And no—don’t feel guilty! Call the boss and lie outrageously—invent an excuse. Consider all the time Victorian ladies spent having sick headaches—whole days prostate! You can take an hour and a half….

You know what? In the scope of things, not much matters except for art and music. In a hundred years, no one but a few scholars will know about the great shutdown of 2013—and very few will care. But people will still be listening to Mozart and Monteverdi, and reading, of course, Life, Death and Iguanas.

And you know what I like? These musicians just don’t force it—their playing is as free and effortless as it looks. It’s the best thing about baroque music; you don’t have to work that hard, you don’t have struggle to be heard over 100 musicians behind you, twenty or thirty of whom are blasting brass players, as you labor away at the Dvorak concerto.

Which is what I felt yesterday, as I toddled my way through a Bach suite. I remembered Joyce DiDonato working with a young singer, and telling him, “don’t worry about making a big sound, just think about creating the conditions to make a big sound….”

Right—as a very bad Buddhist, I got that. Which is why yesterday I was listening to the resonance of the instrument, and not trying to make any sound louder than that resonance. Why? Because as long as the instrument is resonating, the sound is free, and is just as loud as it needs to be. 

I played half an hour, and then put the instrument down. I’m halfway to where I was in my prime—in a couple of weeks I’ll be there. Let them buzz and do, as the poet said—I’m shutting down!
 

A Voice of Incomparable Price

One of my favorite authors once wrote a line to the effect of “the person you have become, through sheer hard work and adversity, is just as much if not more the true self than the person you started out as.”

Robertson Davies wrote the line referring to a young soprano, but the person who brought the line to my mind was an old soprano: Leontyne Price. And what an amazing soprano! Take a listen to a relatively unknown aria—Song to the Moon, from Dvorak’s Rusalka.



OK—now you can hear why BBC’s Music Magazine in 2007 listed her among the 20 best sopranos. (She came in number four, after Callas, Sutherland, and de los Ángeles.)

And she has an interesting story—she was born in Laurel, Mississippi to parents of limited means. Which, oddly, may have been a break; the schools were strictly segregated, but she has fond memories of the teachers, all of whom were devoted to their students. (In one anecdote, Price admits that the Home Economics teacher had told her, “Leontyne, you’ll never be a great housekeeper.” Somehow, Price manages to make this remark self-deprecating and funny—as she is all throughout the interview.)

So Price, as an older teenager, worked cleaning for a prominent white couple—who were sufficiently impressed to ask Price’s parents if they couldn’t send her off to Juilliard. With their help—as well as a benefit concert from Paul Robeson—she got there.

Like Marian Anderson, born thirty years earlier, Price made her career in Europe before attacking the United States. And when she got there, as she tells New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini, she had faced some of the toughest critics and audiences in the world. So when she was to make her Metropolitan Opera debut—was she fazed? Yes but mostly no. However, she did have a little prayer: Jesus, you got me into this; now, get me out!

Well, Jesus came through—she got a 42-minute ovation; it was one of the longest ovations at the Met.

Asked to describe her voice, Price admits to being a spinto—a rare breed of soprano who has a flexible, lyric voice that can be pushed to a more dramatic, powerful voice. Here’s Price singing Vissi d’Arte, from Puccini’s Tosca.

And just to hear a dramatic soprano perform the same aria—here’s the incredible Birgit Nilsson, a dramatic soprano who could single-handedly take on an orchestra of 120 furiously playing instrumentalists, plus a chorus of dozens, and still make herself very much heard. Oh, and do it for five hours, and repeat the whole thing the next day.



She had thought, initially, to be a recitalist, and she had a close friendship with the composer Samuel Barber, who wrote his Hermit Songs for her. And though another one of Barber’s masterpieces, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, was premiered by another soprano—Eleanor Steber—Price has a special affinity for the piece. Like both Barber and the lyricist James Agee, Price’s father had just died. And so this piece—a nostalgic look at parents on porches, small-town life, kids playing amid the sounds of crickets—had special meaning for Price.



And it was for Price that Barber composed his second opera—an opera that still attracts controversy: Antony and Cleopatra, which the Metropolitan Opera commissioned to open the new hall in 1966. It was a fiasco—Franco Zeffirelli created a ghastly stage setting, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the stage machinery was acting up. At one point, Price got stuck in a pyramid and couldn’t get out. But there she was—still singing away!

Barber never quite got over it—he drank more and more, and wrote less and less. Price shook it off and went on with her career—she sang her last performance in 1997—and she was seventy at the time. That, for a singer, is extraordinary.

I’ve no idea how old she was when she did the interview below with Tommasini, but she’s clearly no spring chicken. Yet she sings in the shower every morning, and gets up to the F above high C. Then she tells herself two things—if she can do that F, her high C will be right there. Oh, and also that yes, she has the energy to go downstairs and eat breakfast.

She is, after all, an extraordinary artist—noble, funny, self-deprecating, and yet keenly aware that she has had both a great gift and has worked mightily to use it well. W. Somerset Maugham, in a short story, portrayed a great singer as a kind of monster of egotism and ruthlessness.

Price is the absolute opposite.