A Stranger in Several Worlds

I wanted to bring you Handel, that’s what I wanted to do—but could I? In our technical world, shouldn’t it have been possible to run over to YouTube, knock on Joyce DiDonato ’s door, and ask her to sing Piangero la sorte mia, from Giulio Cesare?

So I tried that, and got the following message:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

 A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, show them this information:

AB38WEMsl82BNwFlnjAjN_pSfOuzgzsjh-uXy0c70ARLtmFIagYeFkcKKttC

ALP2h396ZpWP8XoSMkcQ9JGv70FtwSE5jLFTu0SCmDkn4NxfaBz_ZAk0SOmQ

CbZxXa1qKY3oqivKmBYPBY1-BHQ3uEBkBD_PQbMDVw2igi8a_D445LlPl5FS

NBV_hUh6mxXpv8CUIgKG2PaQ9-W8CeGWQB6jUQ6Af6hf6jl144HmIxOfUIay

7sKJxVlvoRMPDsXcqqzFTn1s6nk082qRs1PSbLhWd0IEUogPlHQ5lsUPQfku

jBQgskIc4PhRrS5ojflfavNV4FfT_NFQSUFO0fI5u0ykmWYomVrb_7PkefQD

In fact, that was only the beginning of the message, which went on with twenty lines or so of gibberish that only a team of highly trained monkeys could understand. And speaking of the team of HTM’s—aren’t we being just a bit facetious, over there are Google / YouTube? Granted, a “500 Internal Server Error” is nothing more than a passing cloud in my day, but what if it hadn’t been? What if I had needed, seriously needed, Piangero? There are times you do, you know…..

And it’s no use telling you that Piangero is a knockout of an aria, since what are words, next to the wrenching sadness of the aria? Suffice it to say that Cleopatra—yup, that’s our girl—has lost both a major battle against Tolomeo and has also lost her man, Cesare, as well. And the music is something only a manic-depressive—and a rapid cycler as well—could write. The middle section is as wild as the two outer sections are vein-cuttingly tragic. And DiDonato, who is singing over the top of her game, just nails it.

But it wasn’t to be, Dear Reader, or was it? Because in looking up the lyrics for Piangero via Google, I saw a link for a YouTube clip of DiDonato singing the aria. Would it work if I clicked it?

Cautionary note—following a long tradition, this is undoubtedly bootlegged video from a New York performance, and thank God for it. Yes, the camera bobs up and down and about—at times decapitating DiDonato, at times losing her altogether. But if you can’t stand it, close your eyes and bask. Oh, and if you’d like to know what she’s singing, well—here are the words:

Why then, in one day,
I am deprived of magnificence and glory?

Oh, cruel fate!
Caesar, my beloved idol is probably dead, Cornelia and Sextus are defenceless
and cannot give me assistance. O God! There is no hope left in my life.

I will bemoan my fate
so cruel and brutal
As long as there is breath left in my body. And when I am dead
and become a ghost, I will haunt
the tyrant night and day.

)

And so the Gods who rule over bloggers relented, and let me bring you the clip above. Or who knows—the highly trained monkeys may have come through at last.

Because, for much of the morning, DiDonato declined to sing—sending error messages instead. In fact, everybody at YouTube was spending the morning on the golf course, since I was getting error messages all over the place.

I wasn’t supposed, you see, to bring you Handel, since there was another composer who needed a boost up. And though I’ll listen to the fabulous countertenor Philippe Jaroussky any day, why did I have to listen to him sing works by a guy named Reynaldo Hahn?

Or rather, who was Reynaldo Hahn? Really, if Jaroussky is singing him, shouldn’t I have heard of him? But there he was, the only clickable thing on YouTube this morning. So it was time to check him out, as can you by clicking the clip below.

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Wow, what a find! And what’s the dope on Hahn?

Well, we can start with what Proust said: “everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo.”

True, they were lovers for two years between 1894 and 1896 and then lifelong friends, but it’s still a tribute.

And, in addition to being a fine composer, Hahn—a Venezuelan who later became a French citizen and served in World War I—was a conductor of, especially, Mozart. Oh, and according to Wikipedia, Hahn had “a special gift of attracting important people to his side.”

Nice!

And he must have had the gift from an early age, because he was able to enter the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten, even though the Conservatoire frowned on child prodigies, and had refused as a child the great Franz Liszt. In the course of his 72 years, Hahn became, in the words of Wikipedia, a “composer, conductor, music critic, diarist, theatre director, and salon singer.”

Lastly, and tantalizingly, here’s what Wikipedia had to say about Hahn:

By the age of nineteen in 1894, Hahn had written many songs about love; however, his worldly sophistication masked shyness about his own personal feelings. He had close intimate friendships with women, and they were clearly fond of the gallant and charming young composer. Cléopatre-Diane de Mérode, a famous beauty of le beau monde and three years older than Hahn, inspired him to write: "I worship her as a great and perfect work of art". Despite this tribute to her, he reportedly loved her only at a distance his whole life. The famed courtesan Liane de Pougy referred to Hahn in her diary as the "sweetness in her life." Though close friends, their relationship ended when de Pougy married. Hahn famously told her: "Goodbye Lianon. I hate married people." Hahn was a closeted homosexual, even though in his personal letters he was frequently critical of homosexuals and homosexuality.

Is it that last sentence, with the information that he was a “closeted” homosexual (even in Paris, at that date could there have been anything else?), which makes me hear such sadness, such wistfulness in the song? Consider—he was Venezuelan, but living in another country. He was a gay man living in—well, another country. He drops his close friends when they marry. And he seems to have lived a life hidden even until the present day. I’ve heard of all the people Wikipedia lists as having been friends with Hahn, but Hahn?

A dark horse, indeed….

Missing the Miracle

On the face of it, it looks like the classic “oh, fuck” moment. Or maybe like those dreams I still have, at age 57, of taking an exam for a class that I have somehow completely forgotten that I was taking.

So there the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires is, sitting at the piano expecting one concerto, and guess what? Yup, the conductor starts off on another concerto completely.

In fact, I came across this last night as I was lurching out of a sleep to feed a body screaming for carbohydrates—in short, I was half asleep. So I wasn’t entirely sure—had I dreamed this? Was it my own nightmare? Had I somehow switched sexes and instruments?

I can now tell you—yes, it’s real. And this video below, shot in 1998, has now gone as viral as it gets in the classical music world; if not a million hits, it’s got a respectable 724,000. And people are saying, “wow, that’s amazing—she plays a concerto she wasn’t expecting, and she plays it perfectly! That’s incredible!”

Only Stephen Hough gets it right: it is and it isn’t.

Maria João Pires didn’t start playing piano a couple weeks ago—she gave her first recital at age 4 or 5. And she’s been practicing and playing ever since; she’s had half a century of grind at the piano. And she’s played this concerto every season in her life. More to the point, Mozart doesn’t pose the technical challenges that Chopin or—God forbid—Liszt do. So the real deal here is that she remembered a piano concerto, to which I say…

…big deal.

I say this because every musician is walking around with a lot of music stuffed between the ears. I sat down to play Bach suites a few weeks ago after an absence of five years, and did I drag out the music? Confession—I’m not even sure I have the music, since the termites have gotten into a lot of it. I had to throw a lot of music away….

Which meant comparatively little, since most of the repertoire is in my head. And yes, my memory is unusually good, but not that good. And not, of course, as good as it was: I could learn a piece without effort in a day or two. As Hough points out, the real miracle is that Pires is a marvelous pianist, and, as it turns out, an interesting person as well. How interesting? Well, check out this portion of an interview with David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

DPS: But certainly you’ve spent a lot of time alone as a student practicing.

MJP: I never did it because I had no time. I was always very busy with other things…I had children very early and I had to take care of everything. I never had much time for the piano. I was always an amateur somehow. I did the career … it was not on purpose. It was not wanted and it was not very natural.

DPS: But you have such a natural facility for piano.

MJP: I don’t think so. I have small hands. Many technical problems – not many but some. Of course I found my own body language with the piano and my own way of getting out of my problems but they’re still problems. The other thing is I don’t really like to play concerts. I don’t like to be onstage. That’s not a comfortable thing for me.

An amateur? Well, as a Buddhist, Pires is saying it, but the rest of the world is. Here, ripped off from her biography on Deautsche Grammophon is a quote from The Times of London:

“I can’t think of a pianist with a more ideal command of Chopin’s style. Pires trips through the roulades with filigree dexterity, but her tone is so thoughtful, serious and weighty that they arrive with immense emotional profundity.”

OK—so an amateur with “filigree dexterity….”

Also an amateur who won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in 1970, and who has performed around the world ever since. Although not, incidentally, much in the United States: she was reluctant to play or travel to America during the Bush years.

And an amateur who really prefers to share the stage—her peeve with Chopin is not the pianistic difficulties he presents, but that he started the piano recital; it has bedeviled her all her life.

And in a field dominated by, well, dominating personalities, Maria João Pires is self-effacing. Or rather, her focus is outward—here’s what she says later in her interview with Stearns:

People care about careers and themselves and all the business that is around music. And that is, for me, somehow, nonsense. Art has nothing to do with that. Competitions take the soul out of the musicians. And the first moments you want to make music in your life it’s for reasons other than business. And in competition you feel like you have to kill someone to have his place. This is horrible. This is not art. So I would like to give young people the possibility of taking the mission of the society in the world. Not fighting against that but finding new ways. I’m not saying to change the world. This is very pretentious. What better than to have artists in projects in many places in the world where problems are big. It’s not decent that we’re eating a lot and having a lot of luxury and people are dying because they have no food or no water. Our mission should be to try to change things. And art is something that can give people their dignity back.

She started a school in Belgais, Portugal, and the experience wasn’t…well, wait. She says she learned a lot, and she might be, as a Buddhist, the last person to describe the experience as bad. At any rate, she applied for Brazilian nationality, and her relationship with her native country may be strained.

There are pianists who somehow win your heart, who manage to take on the prodigious technical demands on the piano, and throw them off completely. Martha Argerich is one, Radu Lupu another. They’re people who know: it’s not about them, still less about the piano. It’s all about the music.

Two Musicians, One Message

Well, I’m not immune to it. I have a dark side; I can feel envy, jealousy; the dark night of the soul occasionally visits me. So that may be why I had an absolutely negative reaction to the TED Talk that Ji-Hae Park gave today.

Park is first of all a wonderful violinist—she’s got a stunning technique and plays with terrific energy. She started off the talk by playing Vivaldi, and she nailed it. Then she spoke, and it was all over for me. She had, you see, struggled many years from depression, and then she had realized: the amazing power of music! So then she got cured, and went on to play at Carnegie Hall! Oh, and she was playing the Petrus Guarnerius of 1735, which a German foundation had lent to her.

So her message was play, play your life! Music will change your life, it had lifted her out of depression, now she is playing all the major halls, and prisons and leprosaria as well! And at the age of 28, she has decided to do a crossover album, a merge of rock and Baroque music.

I should be nicer; I should be able to have some empathy. I know something of depression myself, having been intermittently suicidal for many years; I also know something about music, having played the cello, also for many years. So why was I so antagonistic to Ji-Hae Park?

Well, we could start by saying that even in the darkest hours of my depression, music was never able to lift me out of it. Lexapro 20mg or music? Sorry, it was only the Lexapro that did it.

Actually, the cruel trick of depression is that you cannot do the things that you need to do to get better. So when I was really depressed, I couldn’t even listen to music—I was too depressed, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.

The other thing that unnerved me about Park was the difference between her orgiastic energy when playing, as opposed to her little-girl affect when speaking. Is it a cultural thing? Is it my prejudice?

And why did I feel—it was only about her? Curious, I turned to a clip of her playing Beethoven Spring Sonata. Of all compositions, it’s one that is absolutely democratic; the piano is fully the equal of the violin. But even when the piano clearly has the theme, Park never steps back, plays her supplemental stuff quietly and lets the piano shine. She’s always on top.

Last rant—why do classical musicians always get so defensive? Why do we think that by adding a drum and sweetening up the music, we can get other people to love classical music? We’re just giving the message—no, we’re not good enough.

I watched the clip below twice.

Right, then I turned to another musician, and had the opposite reaction; I was moved to tears by the story he told. And notice, please, the music Gupta chooses to play—two pieces by Bach, the most cerebral music for the violin. Right, his technique isn’t anywhere near Park’s. But I suspect his heart is bigger by far.



And I was curious, as well, about the piece Park felt was insufficiently interesting and had to be jazzed up. I knew the piece—La Follia—and I knew that many baroque composers had written variations on the tune. In fact, Wikipedia tells me, over 150 composers have used the theme, among them being such non-Baroque composers as Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

But here’s the un-rocked version.

You choose....

A Norwegian Song Cycle

First scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Beethoven. What are your chances of guessing what we’ll hear?

Not very good, I’m afraid—besides the nine symphonies and the five piano concerti and the violin and triple concerti, there are roughly half a dozen other orchestral works, mainly overtures.

Second scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Grieg. And here, you’ll very likely be able to pin it down in the first three guesses. It’ll be the piano concerto, Peer Gynt, or possibly the Holberg Suite. Unless you’ve got a conductor willing to scrounge into the forgotten corners of Grieg’s repertoire, that’s all you’re likely to hear.

So Grieg falls into that enigmatic category—you might call it famous but not well known. He certainly has his place in the pantheon, but only for a handful of works. And given that he died at age 64, shouldn’t we know more music of his? He had to have been doing something other than writing merely three pieces in nearly half a century of creative life.

Yes and no. He wasn’t a very healthy man; a lung condition he picked up at age 17 plagued him most of his life. He was also a conductor, and worked for many years with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he served as music director from 1880 – 1882. But he was unusual for his time in not producing a symphony, except for an early work that he suppressed.

He was, said one commentator, a man of little works, almost a miniaturist. He struggled even to produce a string quartet, although he came up a creditable one—Debussy, not an easy man to please, thought highly of it.

He got around, this man from Norway who studied in Leipzig, disliked the rigidity of the system, and went back to his native land. He met Liszt, who was impressed with him (and sight-read the famous piano concerto and invented a reduction of the orchestral score—they were giants on the earth, some of those guys…). He also met Tchaikovsky, and was struck by how sad he was.

You could—perhaps fancifully—say that he met me this morning on the daily trot, when I was cruising my iPod for something new to listen to. It’s a discipline for me, now—how much new music can I listen to? For years, I was buying CDs of interesting music that I never found time to listen to. Well, now’s the time.

And so it had been with a CD of Grieg’s songs, as sung by Anne Sofie von Otter. And instantly I was struck by the rich harmonies, the deftness of the piano part, the freshness of the music.

What I didn’t know was that I was listening to a song cycle, indeed the only song cycle that Grieg ever wrote. And what, you ask, is a song cycle? A musical form that crops up with Beethoven and is still going on—a group of songs that are meant to be performed together, often because they are telling a story, or are thematically linked. And the 19^th century was a sort of golden age for the song cycle: Schubert with his Winterreise and  Die schöne Müllerin; Schumann with Liederkreis, Dichterliebe, Frauenenliebe und Leben.

Grieg wrote the song cycle Haugtussa over a three-year period, and mind you, the work only lasts 25 minutes. But it was worth it; Grieg later wrote that it was his best effort in song. Sadly, though, in the YouTube clip below, we’re missing the one crucial component of a song cycle—the lyrics themselves.

So here is what will have to suffice, a brief description of the work from Wikipedia:

Haugtussa opens and ends with the nature mysticism of "The Enticement" and "At the Brook". The second extended stage includes the two melancholic portraits "Veslemøy" and "Hurtful Day". Between them the climax is reached in the central love songs "The Tryst" and "Love", which have a cheerful, pastoral approach, and approached and transitioned from in, respectively, "Blueberry Slope" and "Kidlings' Dance". The main character, the Veslemøy, is a shepherd girl who has abilities that others do not have and therefore can not find a place for her personality in rural communities. She turns to nature for answers to her desires and questions. During the course of the text she falls in love with the boy Jon, and "Hurtful Day" describes her feelings when she is deceived by him. In the last song, "At the Brook", which is often compared with the last song of Franz Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin or Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe,[4] she seeks refuge by a mountain brook, musically represented by a rhythmic figure on the piano. From verse to verse, Grieg gradually changes this passage using different harmonizations.

What’s good about the clip? It has the wonderful Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter singing at her best, and that “best” is nearly unbeatable. And how fortunate we are that von Otter is Swedish, and can thus sing in a language most other singers wouldn’t tackle.

Which leads me, perhaps, to the last strike against Grieg—he’s Norwegian, he’s identified as a nationalist composer, and ever so slightly looked down on. However much the piano concerto gets played, among musical snobs—and you don’t have to be told that snobbery is rampant in classical music, do you?—Grieg isn’t considered in the absolute top drawer.

But listening to this song cycle, I think he is….

With a Nod to Shirley Jackson

It’s curious to think about—I’ve probably spent more time listening to this song than Schubert spent writing it. The manuscript is, if the website I stumbled upon can be trusted, a single sheet of paper. It was published some two decades after it was written. Liszt transcribed it—as he did so much else—and Primrose as well. Not surprising, if you’re a violist, you gotta do a little borrowing to fill in the repertoire.

That was a cool, cool paragraph written on the day after a bloodbath. And by cool I mean not hip but emotionally chilly, neutral, stepped-back and slightly ironic.

Which is not how the rest of the nation is feeling. People are in shock. The New Day has discovered that a little girl with connections to a town on the east side of the island was killed. Boricua Blood in the Tragedy screams the front page today.

And people are saying the usual. Evil, we are told by CNN, visited the town of Newton, Connecticut, yesterday.

Yeah?

Or was it a paranoid schizophrenic who had access to semi-automatic rifles?

I’m skipping this one. I’m assuming that if we had wanted to do something about it, we would have. I’m forced to conclude that there is something in my countrymen that wants slaughter, that relishes in the bloodshed, that thirsts to see anguished families and a weeping president and destroyed lives.

Why don’t we celebrate it?

The Spanish—a more honest people—go happily to their bullfights, and delight in seeing the bull downed in a pool of blood.

Well, we could do the same thing. Every Saturday, at random, a school somewhere in the nation is picked—will it be yours? Your children’s? Your grandchildren’s?

No matter, Friday night you will not sleep. Little children will beg to sleep with their mommies. “I’m scared, Mommie,” they’ll whisper.

Go back to bed, it will all be all right.

But you’re not sleeping either.

Because after all, it could be your child, your daughter, your sister.

Right, school chosen. Now we have to know the grade, the classroom.

Hey, do it in real time.

Add some excitement to the game.

How long does it take for the killer to walk from his home to his car? How long is the drive? How long to search for parking, to unload the guns, to pull the mask over his face?

Half an hour?

Forty-five minutes?

Right, so now we have the kids in the school. Everybody is there—teachers, principal, kids. Everybody is in their places.

Waiting for the slaughter to begin.

The media is filming. Relieved parents in other towns all across the country are cracking the first beer.

Better than Monday Night Football!

It’s old, our bloodlust. The Romans, seeing the Christians fed to the lions.

The gentry, viewing the mad raving at Bedlam.

Maybe it’s time to say it. We love to see the young butchered, the blood splattered on the chalkboard, the entails underneath the little desks / seats.

Love it.

Death and destruction and blood and tears.

Makes us feel good.

Or some of us. Because who’s going into that school?

The killer.

Also chosen by lottery.

A card-carrying member of the NRA.

Litany for the Feast of All Saints

Rest in peace, all souls,

Those that have done with care and suffering,

Those that have fulfilled a happy dream,

Those sated with life, those scarcely born...

All who have passed from this world to the Beyond,

All souls, rest in peace.

Souls of loving-hearted maidens,

Those who shed uncounted tears,

Whom false lovers deserted,

And the blind world cast out...

All who have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.

And those that have never smiled on the sunshine,

But beneath the moon waited, on thorns,

To see God one day, face to face

In the pure light of Heaven...

All souls that have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.