The Silence of Ainola

OK—today’s problem. What was going on with Jean Sibelius?

He was born in 1865, he died in1957, he was definitely one of the major composers of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. And his last major composition? That would be in 1926.

So why did he stop? Granted, he was in his sixties, but that’s hardly old age. Worse, instead of merely stopping, he actively destroyed his own work. Here’s his wife on the subject:

 "In the 1940s there was a great auto da fé at Ainola. My husband collected a number of the manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the Karelia Suite were destroyed – I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out – and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw on to the fire. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood."[11]

Well, here he is in 1939—he doesn’t look too sad here.

Born in Finland, Sibelius’s father was a Swedish-speaking doctor, and Finnish was always a second language for Sibelius.  After he graduated from high school, he initially studied law, but soon switched to music. And he must have been a fair violinist—he performed the last two movements of the Mendelssohn concerto in public. And he certainly could write for the instrument, as you can hear in the performance below of his violin concerto of 1905.

Not bad, hunh? Chang definitely earned whatever her fee was that night.

In addition to the concerto, Sibelius wrote 7 symphonies, of which the second and the fifth are probably the best known. Here’s the finale of the seventh symphony, which you may be singing for the rest of the week.

Right—then there are the songs, some of which were written for Marian Anderson, the preeminent singer of her day. And below, she sings one of the most famous, Im Feld ein Mädchen singt.

Right—two warnings. The first is that the recording quality is, by our standards, poor. Anderson sounds far away, the vibrato is too wide for modern tastes, but for me at least, all that adds to the essential spooky feeling of the song.

Which you will understand—here’s an English translation of the German.

In the field a maiden sings...

Perhaps her lover is dead;

Perhaps her happiness is ended,

For her song is a sad one.

The sunset fades,

The woods become silent,

But ever, from far away,

The sorrowing song still sounds.

The last note dies.

I would like to go to her.

We would console one another,

So sadly does she sing.

The sunset fades;

The woods become silent.

A great lover of nature, Sibelius lived in the country most of his life, and was known as the Silence of Ainola, his country home. It wasn’t true that he was a recluse; he received visitors but did not leave his home. And Wikipedia shares one of the anecdotes frequently told:

[He] was returning from his customary morning walk. Exhilarated, he told his wife Aino that he had seen a flock of cranes approaching. "There they come, the birds of my youth," he exclaimed. Suddenly, one of the birds broke away from the formation and circled once above Ainola. It then rejoined the flock to continue its journey. Two days afterwards Sibelius died of a brain hemorrhage, at age 91 (on 20 September 1957), in Ainola, where he is buried in the garden. Another well-known Finnish composer, Heino Kaski, died that same day. Aino lived there for the next twelve years until she died on 8 June 1969; she is buried with her husband.

Critical opinion has varied over the years, as tastes and fads in music have changed. Tim Page of the Washington Post may have said it best.

There are two things to be said straightaway about Sibelius. First, he is terribly uneven (much of his chamber music, a lot of his songs and most of his piano music might have been churned out by a second-rate salon composer from the 19th century on an off afternoon). Second, at his very best, he is often weird.

Ouch…. 

Second Shade of Grey—Bach Transcriptions for Piano

The second shade of grey takes us to the father, or perhaps mother, of it all, Johann Sebastian Bach. And it takes us, specifically, to his lyric, or song-like side.

It’s a good way to know Bach, to start to understand him. Because yes, he can be the most cerebral, the most theoretical of composers; he’s a composer that every mathematician loves. But make no mistake about it, he’s also a composer who is surprisingly song-like, who can just deliver up a beautiful melody, something you’ll sing all day.

He was also a guy who was a church musician, so he knew how to serve up, and then dress up, a simple hymn. But let’s go back.

He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a town in Germany, into a family of musicians. His father was director of the musicians in the town, all his uncles were professional musicians. One of them, Johann Cristoph Bach, took Bach in at age ten when his father died (his mother had died eight months earlier), and introduced him to the organ. Bach then attended the St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg, graduated, and then obtained a position as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Ernst of Weimar. He did that for a few years, grew a bit dissatisfied and decided to take a hike.

Literally—he walked 250 miles to go see one of the finest composers of the day, Dieterich Buxtehude in the northern town of Lübeck. Right, that went well enough, and Bach might have been Buxtehude’s successor, but there was a little catch: he had to marry Buxtehude’s daughter—it was a bit like a fairy tale, or at any rate a package deal.

So Bach, presumably again by foot, married his second cousin, and hoofed it to Mülhausen, where he spent a couple of years. In 1708, Bach returned to Weimar, where he began a long career of composing, as well as directing the musicians of the ducal court. He next moved to Köthen, where his employer is a Calvinist; here Bach would write most of his secular compositions. Finally, in 1723, he was appointed director of music in two important churches in Leipzig, which had an important university.

Bach stayed in Leipzig all his life, and progressively went blind. He had an eye surgery that was completely unsuccessful, came down with pneumonia, and died in 1750.

Bach was prolific in two senses; biologically, he had two wives and twenty children, several of whom became important composers in their own right; musically, he wrote 300 cantatas, 2 passions, 2 oratorios, orchestral suites, 6 Brandenburg concerti, and a huge amount of keyboard music.

In fact, the only thing he didn’t do was compose an opera, as Handel, his exact contemporary, would do. Nor did he, like Handel, travel extensively, either to Italy or to London. Though well known in his lifetime, he wasn’t not particularly celebrated as a composer, but instead as an organist. The fame came later, when Mendelssohn, most conspicuously, champions Bach’s compositions.

Right—that’s the man. What about the music?

Well, here James chooses a lovely song, written by the Italian composer Alessandro Marcello. Originally, it was part of Marcello’s oboe concerto—Bach freely borrows it, and transcribes it for piano. Have a listen:

Transcriptions were popular in the 19^th century—everyone had a piano, everyone wanted to take a nice choral or orchestral piece and play it at home, in the evening, on the piano. And so lots of Bach’s best tunes got transcribed. And Bach himself borrowed liberally from his fellow composer, as they did from him. Here’s another famous song, Bist du bei Mir, which Bach lifted from the composer, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel:



Bist du bei Mir, in fact, is song expressing the melancholy sentiment: “if you are with me, I will go gladly to my death; oh, what a pleasant end it would be, for your hands to be the last things my faithful eyes were to see, as they close my lids to rest….” Or words to that effect. And as you can hear, it’s a knockout.



There’s more, much more, and it’s all well worth exploring. I will, more fully, in my other blog, Words on Musick. But it’s a beautiful spring day, in New York City. All of the flowering tree—the crab apples, the cherry trees, the redbud—are in full bloom. Time to turn from sonic loveliness to visual delight!
But I send you one last clip—a piano transcription of “Sheep may Safely Graze.”

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. 

Mendelssohn

Susan wrote me an email—did I know of any recording of the complete 12 fugues for string quartet by Mendelssohn?

Actually, I had never heard of the work, so I did what anyone—including Susan, I’m sure—would do. And yes, the clip below from YouTube is what I found.

Also yes, four of the fugues were recorded by the Vogler Quartet. But the other eight? Yet to be recorded, it seems.

It’s both surprising and unsurprising that Mendelssohn wrote these fugues when he was 12 years old. Surprising because they are very complex and very mature—far from what you would imagine even the most talented 12 year old could do. Unsurprising because Mendelssohn was a child prodigy who went on to champion the work of another composer, also of fugues as well as much else—Johann Sebastian Bach.

Susan knew of these works because of the remarkable work of Stephen Somary and his Mendelssohn Project, which has located some 270 pieces of music hitherto unpublished and unknown.

And it’s total justice that Mendelssohn has this champion, since he got a completely bad rap for years. Yes, his music was played—we’ve all heard the violin concerto, the Italian Symphony, Fingal’s Cave. But the critical judgment was that Mendelssohn was conservative, a little light—not the heavyweight that Brahms, Schumann, Schubert were. George Bernard Shaw, in fact, came out and said it: Mendelssohn "was not in the foremost rank of great composers," he wrote in 1898.

There are a number of reasons for this. Paradoxically, Mendelssohn was wildly popular in his time, and that has always cast a bit a suspicion—can a composer be that popular and still be any good? Was he catering to the crowd?

The second strike against him—he was Queen Victoria’s favorite composer, and the two in fact met and made music together (she was a passable singer). More support for the theory that there’s something a bit sentimental about the music.

But the most important factor might simply be racist. Mendelssohn was Jewish, though in fact he was baptized and raised as a Christian. But he pointedly refused to hide his Jewish origins, despite his father’s wish that he use the name Bartholdy, instead of Mendelssohn.

And three years after Mendelssohn’s death at 38, Richard Wagner published a savage attack on the Jews in general and Mendelssohn in particular. The essay, entitled Jewishness in Music, used Mendelssohn as the best example of why “there is no place for the Jew in music.” Yes, he was skilled, he was facile, but he “has shown us that a Jew can possess the richest measure of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture ... without even once through all these advantages being able to bring forth in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect we expect from music".

We’ve rejected the racism—but have we kept, wittingly or not, the critical judgment of Mendelssohn? Isn’t it time to rethink, and to rehear?

I’ve always thought so, and have been happy that others do as well. What I didn’t know was the tremendous amount of music that was unpublished. Why? Because Mendelssohn was well off, under no pressure to publish. He also died quite young; he may have been too busy composing to worry much about publishing.

So he was prolific, and left scores of manuscripts unpublished. What happened to them?

Here, racism strikes again. In 1936, the Nazis forbade Mendelssohn to be played publicly, and most of the manuscripts, located in the state library in Berlin, were taken secretly to Warsaw or Krakow. When these cities fell, says Somary, the compositions were dispersed in any way possible, and ended up throughout the world.

Right—so is it any good?

Well, Somary says yes. Frequently, an unpublished piece has a reason to be unpublished, but not in the case of Mendelssohn. In fact, the version of the Italian Symphony that we all know is the wrong version, not the revised version that Mendelssohn wanted published.

It might be time as well to start hearing some of the chamber music besides the famous octet. I listened recently to five minutes of the 6^th String Quartet, and it was enough to send me straight to Amazon—I needed that music.

For years Bach was unplayed, almost unknown, until Mendelssohn came along. How fitting that Mendelssohn, unfairly treated, should have found a champion himself.

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.”