Day 13--Bowing to Madness

“Well, I’m flying blind here, which is what happens when the Internet decides to hit the golf course. So I can’t definitely tell you that Schubert actually cooked up the song cycle, but in a way, it really doesn’t matter. The point is that nobody—to my mind—ever did it better than Schubert.”

“Song cycle?” asked Lady.

“Yup—a collection of ten or twenty songs (or lieder in German) that tells a story. Think of each song being a chapter of a novel or novella. A cool idea, but a little daunting. Because classical musicians work themselves into dithers and blathers about the two major song cycles of Schubert: Winterreise, which is unbearably bleak, and Die schöne Müllerin, which is just bearably bleak. I know, I know—I’m not selling this stuff so great….”

“Why do I fear you’re going to tell me about them?”

“Well, you might consider Ian Bostridge…”

“I always do.”

“Then you’ll know that Bostridge wrote a whole damn book about Winterreise. So that got him appointed as a guest lecturer at his alma mater, either Cambridge or Oxford—sorry, but is it my fault that I’m Netless? Anyway, the point is that in the course of researching the book, he came across another PhD in history. (Besides being arguably the world’s greatest lied tenor, Bostridge is an expert on 16^th century witchcraft. The British have these little talents, you know….)”

“Indeed—and can he tat?”

“Probably, as well as macramé. Anyway, the other dude asked Bostridge why he was spending his time on so recherché a topic as Winterreise. And Bostridge said something like, ‘Winterreise is the Sistine Chapel of music.’ So sooner or later, we all have to grapple with it. In my case, of course, I conveniently used my descent into madness to explore Winterreise. In fact, if you have to lose your mind, Winterreise is really the best accompaniment to doing so. It’s like having the munchies when you’re stoned….”

“Dear me, and is the record store open today?”

“Not a problem, since Bostridge has recorded a whole documentary on Winterreise. It was filmed, by the way, in the ruins of an English Victorian madhouse, and guess what? At the end of the whole affair, the place was miraculously restored to life, and completely filled with sadistic staff, jeering spectators, and lunatics, drooling and pulling the straws from their hair. Quite Hogarthian, not that that’s a word. But you know what I mean….”

“So what happens in Winterreise?”

“Utterly nothing, though it takes seventy minutes or so to endure the thing. Right—I see you looking for the exit ramp….”

“Have you considered, Marc, that I’m recently post-op? That my surgeon even now wants me to be on bed rest? And you want me to suffer seventy minutes of descent into madness?”

“You should do it at least once. Because Winterreise is described, usually, as one of the first and certainly one of the finest portrayals of a deep and interior journey. Which is to say that Schubert set sail in stormy seas well ahead of Freud. Who can say no to that?”

“Well….”

“So Winterreise is the saga of a rejected lover, who’s leaving the village at night, slipping away without farewell. And then, every damn thing he sees reminds him of a new and terrible facet of his misery. There’s the frozen stream, the linden tree where he and his beloved met, and then the weathervane. You can guess what that symbolizes….”

“Marc, dear, I am a poet….”

“Right. So at the end, the wanderer encounters the hurdy-gurdy guy. That being a poor blind (I think) beggar who makes his bread cranking out a single, dreary tune. So having nothing better to do, the two join up and set off looking for even more desolation, and today they’re still out there, frostbitten and desolate, having traversed Siberia countless times and having found even it too hideously tropical. Yes, the whole trek has lasted a bit over two centuries, and guess what? It just keeps getting colder and colder!”

“Could this be why classical music….”

“No, spring never comes for those two, but here’s the good news. According to another great singer, the baritone Matthias Goerne, this song cycle is actually the more cheerful of the two! Because the other cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin, has the hero singing a love song to the river. Nor is the hero (in this case a miller) sitting by the side of the river. No, he’s very much in the river, and he ain’t getting out. See? Wandering around in the snowy bleak vastness for all of time is definitely better than suicide, right?”

“Do people actually pay….”

“Well, I flew all the way up to New York, so I could hear Goerne sing his way through Winterreise via Carnegie Hall. Oh, and they had put plastic over the carpeting and chairs, since most of us were slashing our wrists, if not our jugulars. They had attached razor blades to the programs, you see….”

“Marc….”

“Well, it was about that bad. The thing is that at the end of the 70-minute ordeal, the whole audience just sat there, twinnly wondering if the whole affair had finally ended, and if it could get any worse. Then there was a storm of applause, of course….”

“Ah yes, and how do you spell relief?”

“Oh, it a merry old thing, is Winterreise. One could blow it off, of course, except that…”

“I think I know what you’re going to tell me….”

“It’s an absolute masterpiece. It starts out with the words, ‘a stranger I came to the village, and a stranger I left.’ Or words to that effect. And then, over twenty songs or so, it’s unrelenting. Each song is a jewel, and each song plunges you deeper and deeper into the soul of this anguished soul. Is it pretty? No. But who hasn’t made that journey? Or perhaps, who isn’t making that journey? Even worse, who isn’t awaiting—and dreading—that journey?”

“Well, some of us….”

“It’s an interesting experience, undergoing Winterreise. Ever wanted to be Edvard Munch’s The Scream for seventy minutes? Boom—Winterreise is your ticket!”

“Deeply rewarding to know….”

“There is, of course, just a little hitch….”

“What! First you want me to go plummeting into madness and misery, and now you’re throwing hitches at me?”

“Yup—unless you’re fluent in German, and lucky enough to have a singer with impeccable diction, you’re really going to have to have a good German / English translation. Otherwise, the thing will seem completely contrived and ridiculous. And even with the translation….”

“Yes?”

“Well, it’s an acquired taste. And it also requires a great singer. And oddly, even the greatest singers in the world may not work for you. For years, I thought I couldn’t listen to lieder because…well, because of Dietrich Fischer Dieskau.”

“And he would be?”

“God as trumpeted through a baritone voice for most of the 20^th century. According to everyone but me. Really, his voice always sounded too big and blobby to me. And to tell anyone that was as bad as admitting that Mozart didn’t do much for me. But then I heard Goerne, and later Thomas Hampson, and I totally got it. And now, of course, Matthias Goerne is the voice I want to hear as I lie dying….”

“Marc, honey….”

“Yes, write this down, Lady, and put it in a place where you won’t forget! You’re in charge of the audio in case a truck mows me down, right here in front of the café?”

“Are we being just a bit morbid, Marc?”

“Winterreise brings it on.”

“All right, and the miller guy?”

“Die schöne Müllerin is basically the same thing, without the winter and with the twist that the miller has competition from…and I dare you to guess!”

“No, Marc….”

“Yup—the hunter! Sorry, you women always say that you like the nice guy, but guess who wins in the end? Hah! The big stud—that would be the hunter—walks into the song cycle a third of the way in, and it’s all over for Mr. Nice Guy! Not, of course, that he does anybody any favors by just jumping into the river and getting it over with. Nope! Schöne Müllerin may be the first song cycle in the Western Musical Tradition (always wanted to write that), but it’s by no means the most abbreviated or primitive. No, no—Schubert doesn’t pull the heart strings, he gets out the tugboat!”

“And you listen to this stuff?”

“Do you read Leaves of Grass? War and Peace? Well, these song cycles are just the same—long, difficult, and completely worth it. And just the way you won’t read Tolstoy on the bus going back home from work, one day, you really won’t get the song cycles overnight. But it’ll be worth it….”

“Was it for you?”

“No, not really.”

“What!”

“You don’t come to these works on your own: you’re brought to them. Life puts you in positions where they are inevitable, and where they must be faced, welcomed, cursed, and incorporated. No serious person gets through life unscarred. And no serious listener gets through life without these two song cycles.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Deadly. I tackled Müllerin when I had reached that age when I knew that my dreams—or at least some of them—would never come true. And of course, Winterreise came to me at one of the lowest points in my life.”

“Yeah?”

“I had given my mother her death. All right—with the help of a lot of other people, but it felt as if I were the one most often wearing the executioner’s hood. And then I had lost my job—with all of its security, its benefits, and its…well, you know about the comfort zone, right? So there I was, floundering. I began to write, and that meant facing who I was, who I should have been, what had happened to me and what I had done to others. I could have—maybe I should have—gone back to my old job. Instead, I willed myself to madness.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Utterly. I had seen my mother chose to stop drinking and eating. She had been brave, and she had met death in her home, in the greening Wisconsin woods, after only eleven days. She hadn’t put herself or us through the horrors of a nursing home. And if she had had that strength, at the end of her life, I could have it in my fifties. So I decided that yes, even if I had to do it in Puerto Rico, I would take the winter’s journey. And of course, I did go mad….”

“Was that when you had the panic attacks?”

“That’s what we called them. Who knows what they were?”

“Meaning?”

“We live in our Western world, and yes, I took and still take my handful of Western medicine—all the blues and beiges and greens—every morning and every night. Elsewhere, perhaps, the elders would have stripped me, painted my face, ordered me to sip from the enchanted bowl, and…”

“…and?”

“…sent me deep into the jungle, where no man has trod, and no man could trod. Each of us has his mountain, or his own path up the sacred mountain. And each of us will meet the individual beast—unknown to and unseen by any other—who will block the way, stop the heart, consume the flesh, and free us.”

“That was Winterreise?”

“That was Winterreise.”

“Are you free now, Marc?”

“Ahhh….” 

        

Final song--Des Baches Wiegenlied" ("The brook's lullaby")--of Die schöne Müllerin, sung by Matthias Goerne.

 

Final Song--Der Leierman ("The Hurdy-gurdy man")--of Winterreise, sung by Ian Bostridge.

Day 12--Sleeping with Psychotics

“Now then, I have no time for folderol. I’m almost criminally busy with the vexing problem of Schubert. In fact, I am, as a coworker from the south side of Chicago once told me, busier than a cat covering up shit. So I have no time to put you into my blog today. Sorry, but that’s how it is!”

The ever-absent Lady, who is never and always around, recoiled in horror.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Anyway, why does it always have to be horror from which we recoil? Why can’t we recoil from sin? Or recoil in ecstasy? Anyway, that’s hardly the point. Where have you been?”

“Sleeping with psychotics,” I told her. “If you must know….”

“What! Marc, you’re a married man!”

“The circumstances were unusual,” I told her, “starting five days earlier, when I was strip-searched, and then bidden to squat with my butt touching my ankles. Then I had to stretch my arms out, close my eyes, and cough. Unremarkably, I performed this task superbly, though no videographic evidence exists to attest to the fact. True, it may not have been YouTube-worthy, but at least Instogram....”

“You know, Marc, you couldn’t be normal, because what would you write about?”

“I wonder about it, sometimes. I imagine that there is a huge bronze Buddha, somewhere hidden deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The lucky or accursed chosen who stumble upon it get to rub the Buddha’s stomach, and their wish is granted. Would I trek to find the Buddha? And would I wish to be normal?”

“Well, if it meant not having to sleep with psychotics….”

“True,” I said. “Though I was gently initiated into the whole affair. My first psychotic—sorry, but I do feel possessive towards them—was accompanied by a male orderly. So as I was lulled to sleep by the siren or sirens of two milligrams of Ativan—perhaps the most compelling reason to believe that God exists—the orderly quite courteously shepherded the lunatic away from me. (He tended to like hovering over my bed, being given to strange sights, things invisible to see….)”

“Ah, the majestic words of John Donne,” Lady remarked, “and did you ride ten thousand days and nights….”

“Sure felt like it,” I told her. “Anyway, when the orderly showed signs of fatiguing, and the madman showed signs of very much not fatiguing, I gently excused myself, and went to sleep in the seclusion room.”

“You slept in seclusion!”

“The best room in the hotel,” I told her. “It was quite secure and yet unlocked. It was sort of like having a pied-a-terre in Paris. Anyway, that only lasted a couple of nights, and then they kicked me out. So I had to go back to a regular room—nothing lasts forever, my dear—but fortunately, I didn’t have a roommate. Until the last night.”

“Marc, honey….”

“That’s when José Miguel arrived, fresh from another institution. So there he was, but where were the transfer papers? Where was his medical and especially psychiatric history? And what medicines was he disposed to take?”

“Don’t tell me nobody….”

“These little things happen,” I told her. “But fortunately, José Miguel stopped speaking Gibberish (the native tongue of Gibber) and pleaded, in clenched Spanish, for 40 milligrams of Haldol!”

“Why is it, Marc, that every statement of yours arouses at least three questions? In what way was his Spanish clenched?”

“There’s a kind of lockjaw that accompanies high doses of antipsychotics,” I told her. “I’ve forgotten the name of it, but I remember it from my old nursing days. Anyway, what I did remember was…”

“Yes?”

“…that the normal dose of Haldol is 5 milligrams.”

“What! And he was on 40?”

“Yup! Oh, and he was also on mega-overdoses of an anti-depressive. So there I was, wondering which would manifest itself if he were to remain untreated. I was voting, of course, for the depression.”

“Rather uncharitable of you…”

“Would you have preferred psychosis?”

“Well, you do have a point….”

“Anyway, the nurse knew just what to do, and scurried off. And then she came back yielding a medicine cup, the contents of which were…”

“Sing it to me.”

“…two Benadryl! Yup, she was feeding the equivalent of Nyquil PM to a madman! Well, you could have cut the sense of relief with a machete!”

“And so you retired to the lure of seclusion?”

“Nah, by this time the madman and I had made friends. He had lived and worked for seven years in New Jersey, which may have been a worse fate than requiring 40 mgs of Haldol, and however much of the anti-depressive. Anyway, I was supposed to be de-institutionalized in the morning, so I decided to chance it. And indeed, the magic of Benadryl prevailed once again! I think of doing a little testimonial for them. Or perhaps it was just my soporific company. Anyway, the next morning did indeed come, and Mr. Fernández came and collected me. See? I’ve lived once again to hear mermaids singing…”

“You certainly are doing Donne today….”

“Did, doing, Donne,” I told her. “Whoever heard of a poet who was also a principal part? Anyway, that was so last week. Moving forward, as we used to say in corporate America, what’s to be done—or Donne—with Franz Schubert?”

“Must anything be…whatever?”

“Certainly,” I told her. “The failure to act on Schubert is a principal cause of the malaise—always like them Frenchie words—of cultural America.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well, first of all, there’s an incredible amount of music that the guy wrote. Here I am, struggling along on day 12 of a book, but Schubert managed, in the course of fifteen or twenty productive years, to write over 800 songs, nine symphonies, two major song cycles, fourteen or fifteen string quartets, and I don’t know how many piano sonatas. Amazing, when you think of it….”

“Noted,” said Lady, busy not being there.

“And then there’s the fact that we tend to think of him as a cheerful, filled-with-sunshine composer. Maybe because he could certainly write a pretty tune. But really, Schubert is dark, dark. Beethoven could be sobbing away, at times, but he was always essentially normal. And when he wasn’t sobbing, he was shaking his fist, or raising his finger, or doing something healthy. And even Schumann—who is probably our next problem, dammit—is healthier than Schubert. And given that Schumann had his mind rotted out with syphilis, threw himself into the Rhine, and then begged to be taken to the madhouse….”

“Marc, dear, have you considered that, well, it may be just a bit unhealthy to listen to all this stuff? Have you thought of heavy metal?”

“A serious point. Anyway, Schumann’s later works can be a little extreme, to say the least. But Schubert, to me at least, goes from being absolutely paradisiacal to…well, omnicidal.”

“Omnicidal?”

“You know, homicidal / suicidal / fratricidal / genocidal….”

“That violent?”

“At times, yes,” I told her. “I recently listened to the slow movement of his next to last piano sonata—your Internet is sloughing off today, so I can’t tell you which—and the middle section reminded of nothing so much as an autistic child banging away at an open piano. It was completely wild, weird, and unsettling. I listened to it with my jaw sweeping the floor and thought, ‘and this is the guy who wrote the Unfinished Symphony?’”

“I don’t suppose it was syphilis?”

“It almost certainly was, and by the way, has anybody ever written a treatise of the relationship between syphilis and creativity? Damn, I wish your Internet would come back!”

“Now, now,” said Lady.

“Then, then,” I responded, “so here we have this pudgy little Viennese guy, who was never married but deeply loved by his friends. Which leads to the speculation, of course…”

“Of course.”

“Well, probably only his hairdresser knew. Anyway, his work is as amazing as it is unfathomable. Sorry, but that’s just me….”

“So how did you come across Schubert?”

“Well, I was young, fifteen or so, and had already begun my war with the cello.”

“You had a war with the cello?”

“For decades,” I told her. “It was a witch’s cauldron, boiling and spewing, that got poured down onto me and the cello. I was gay and didn’t know it. Or perhaps I did know it, but couldn’t believe it was happening to me. Or rather, it was never going to happen to me. Am I making sense?”

“Utterly not.”

“That’s how it was in those days.  Well, and then I had a cello teacher whose train was substantially larger than mine, and was coming down the track at considerable speed. And right toward me….”

“Really?”

“He emphasized technique, emotional restraint, and an intellectual approach to playing. And of course I had NO technique, and wanted to play pieces that were way beyond me. He was a great teacher for young, female cellists who wanted to be music teachers. But for a young, gay-male, hyper-confused kid who wanted to be the next Rostropovich? He came down hard, and suggested that if I ever shaped up, I might get into a grade B orchestra. You know, something like the Dade County Symphony….”

“Dade County has a symphony?”

“No—so that’s how bad I was. Or he thought I was. Or I thought he thought I was. Did I mention that it was a rather confused time of my life?”

“Might that be why you sleep so well with psychotics?”

“Very likely so. Anyway, I was sent off to a music camp, and part of that was chamber music. Meaning music played by two to ten other musicians. So there I was, with four other guys, and there the music was: Schubert Quintet in C Major. Do you know, there may be a god after all? Because I thought it would be the simplest, easiest affair—nothing more than doing plink plunk plunk, plink plunk plunk for forty minutes or so. But it was nothing like that at all….”

“Do you plink plunk plunk well?”

“All cellists do,” I said. “Anyway, we tottered off at the beginning, stumbled—most of us—to letter A…”

“What’s all that about?”

“Well, in the likely event that all of the musician are not gods, at some point you’re going to have to stop and regroup. So sheet music comes sectioned off into A / B / C, etc. Anyway, we lurched onto letter B, which is when the clouds parted, and the beaming, benevolent face of god appeared, sending his choirs of angels to caress benisons upon us all.”

“Letter B was that good?”

“Letter B was unimaginatively good. And the rest of the movement was as well. And then the second movement? Well, Arthur Rubenstein wanted it played at his funeral, and he was a pianist, dammit. So he passed over the entire piano repertoire and chose this piece. Anyway, at a certain point, a man who became a second father to me—well, one of my many second fathers: I’m lucky that way—strolled into the room. And he told us that the quintet was from that last, amazing year, and he told us the story of—I think—Dame Myra Hess. And she had said about Schubert and that horrible / heavenly year, ‘he knew he was sick, he knew he was dying, and I know he knew what heaven was….’”

“That beautiful?”

“Shall we?” I said, and the great C Major quintet filled the air….

          

(The actual music starts eight minutes into this clip. But Joel Krosnick's introduction is superb. In fact, had I heard it before writing the post, it could have saved me a morning's work....)

A Month of Music, Day 11

“I have no idea why these two pieces seem to be linked, but there it is. Whenever I hear the Barber violin concerto, I think about the Shostakovich piano concerto number 2. Which, by the way, Shostakovich later said ‘had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.’”

“Well, shouldn’t he know?” said Lady. “After all, he is the composer. So if he says the work has nothing going for it, well, why play it?”

“Because everybody loves it,” I told her. “Especially the slow movement, which is so gorgeous it’s suspicious.”

“Suspicious,” she said, “why ever so?”

“Oh, it’s the snobbery of classical music,” I told her. “You know, there’s the famous thing about taste in music and in wine being essentially the same. Meaning that the less about either, the sweeter you like it. Anyway, Shostakovich had been writing movie music, and it definitely shows. In fact, you really want to make a movie just to use the score….”

“Isn’t this the piece he wrote for his son?”

“Yup, and it’s tender and sad. Not surprising, since Shostakovich had this little problem: he kept getting denounced….”

“What!”

“Everything is—or was—political,” I told her. “So music had to serve the masses, which meant that it couldn’t stray to far into the abstract and the obscure. The first time he got denounced was for his opera Lady Macbeth; the composer had to sit through the whole evening and watch Stalin grimace, shudder, and finally laugh. At a love scene, of all things. Then he had to go take a bow, and people said he was white as a sheet. The next day Pravda came out with the famous headline, ‘Muddle instead of Music,’ and that put Shostakovich firmly into the doghouse.”

“Dear me….”

“Yes, and then the Great Terror began, and everybody including his mother-in-law got executed or sent to the camps. Then he crawled out of his hole and wrote his Fifth Symphony, which restored him to grace. But there was a second denunciation, and the public humiliation by Nabokov….”

“What? What did Nabokov do?”

“He showed up in New York City, where Shostakovich was representing the Soviet Union in some cultural conference. And the Soviets had just condemned Stravinsky, who is definitely a giant in 20^th century composition, and whose music you won’t hear in this blog at all. Sorry—I know it’s low class, but I’ll take Rachmaninoff over Stravinsky any day. So Nabokov nailed Shostakovich by asking whether he supported the censure of Stravinsky and watched Shostakovich squirm. Horrible position, really, and Shostakovich couldn’t say anything except that he agreed with the censure. Nabokov said the obvious: Shostakovich was the musical lapdog of Joe Stalin—he put it better, but it was essentially the same—and Shostakovich never forgave Nabokov.”

“Why not just say….”

“Put it this way: at the nadir of his relations with the regime, Shostakovich was spending the night outside of his apartment, sitting next to the lift.”

“What?”

“Well, when they came for him, he figured it would be better if he were there. Less bother to the family….”

“That’s incredible.”

“It is,” I told her. “Hard for us to imagine the fear and anxiety. In a way, it’s amazing that Shostakovich ever wrote anything but movie music. I’m not so sure I would have been so brave.”

“Did it ever get any better for him?”

“Don’t think so. In 1960, he joined the Communist Party, but no one really knows whether it was a career move, or bowing to pressure, or just his choice. Anyway, the last 15 years of his life were fairly miserable….”

“Actually, none of his life sounds particular wonderful,” said Lady.

“It probably wasn’t,” I said. “Apparently, he was obsessive-compulsive, and a guy named Meyer called his face ‘a bag of tics and grimaces.’ So it’s hard to imagine that he was ever a completely happy guy….”

“Sad,” said Lady. “Well, then, what’s up with Samuel Barber?”

“Another sorry tale,” I told her. “He achieved fame relatively early on, and his work is often wildly lyrical. Not surprising, since his aunt was Louise Homer, who was a famous contralto at the Met. Anyway, the violin concerto was written in Europe in 1939. Most of it, that is. But war broke out, and Barber had to leave and return to the states….”

“So is that why it’s such a melancholy piece?”

“It could be,” I told her. “It was an utterly awful time, the 30’s. And there is certainly the feeling that a way of life is ending. But there is also, to me, the feeling of a young man discovering love for the first time. And since Barber was gay, and in love with fellow composer Gian Carlo Menotti, well, you have the feeling of a love that is wild and passionate, but also very much forbidden.”

“Was it?”

“It’s so hard to know,” I said. “Yes, it was. And Barber had been born into comfortable circumstances, and then found himself in New York and Philadelphia. And really, when you think of it, practically everyone in the classical music field was gay. Barber, Menotti, Copland, Bernstein, Hoiby. I have a couple of friends who were living in New York at the time, and who got invited up to Barber’s house, which he shared for many years with Menotti. Both my friends reported that the parties were pretty drug-fueled, and tended to turn into orgies.”

“Ah yes, gay men….”

“They can be fun,” I told her. “But only in small amounts and at a certain time of life. Otherwise, the whole affair becomes joyless. And joyless was a fairly good description of Barber’s life, at the end.”

“Why? Was he denounced too?”

“Actually, he was in a way. And like Shostakovich, it was an opera that brought him down. Anthony and Cleopatra, which he wrote to open the new Metropolitan Opera House, and which was severely panned.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Probably not, though people try to revive it, periodically, and it always seems to get the same reviews. Flashes of great music, write the critics, which mean pages of not-so-great music. Anyway, the real problem seems to be that the director was Zefferelli, and he went nuts (as he often did). So it was completely overblown, and the sets were so heavy that they broke the stage. Nor did it help that Leontyne Price—who was at the top of her career—got trapped inside a pyramid, of all things. So there she was, poor dear, knocking around in the pyramid and trying to get out….”

“No, Marc….”

“Yup, and I think they had to bring down the curtain, and attack the thing with crowbars. Or maybe not. Anyway, The New York Times came out and said it was ‘a hair-curlingly awful production. … The night has gone down in the annals of opera as a landmark of vulgarity and staging excess. Mr. Barber’s score, as we discovered from subsequent exposure to revised excerpts in concert and on records, was to a great extent an innocent victim of the over-all fiasco"       

“Ouch….”

“Yes, the virtues of obscurity—is it better to be ignored or slammed?”

“Well, there is a third option,” said Lady. “But I presume that there was some licking of the wound to do.”

“Worse than that: Barber started to hit the bottle, and even though he puttered around with the score, it never quite got off the ground. Sad. He died at the comparatively early age of 70, and was buried in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Sort of sad, that….”

“Why so?”

“Well, it’s almost as if he never quite escaped. He could go to Europe, he could live with Menotti in upstate New York, but in death, he was still dragged back to his roots. You know, one of Barber’s best-known works is Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which is this tremendously lyrical and poignant piece of music and poetry. You know, it’s the world of childhood and small town America. But also tinged with the death of a father. Which is a good enough metaphor for what Barber have felt, growing up in his comfortable but conservative small town.”

“Do we know that?”

“Of course we don’t. Sadly, we have to imagine a lot. And you know, it’s very likely that being gay was not the only thing going on with Barber. In fact, Menotti says that Barber’s family welcomed him, but he soon saw that the proper exterior covered a lot of ‘terrible things.’ Among which he listed alcoholism and incest….”

“Time for another ‘ooops.’”

“Sadly, it does tend to be a package deal. Anyway, Barber was probably by nature morose and repressed—wouldn’t you be?—and adding being gay didn’t help. There is something about respectability, isn’t there?”

“Well, well—two sad men,” said Lady. “A shame, since they were obviously gifted. Although I sometimes think that happiness is of no great use to an artist.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Barber apparently never had to work: he just composed. Granted, he probably made money from his compositions, but there’s always the feeling that he had a nice nest egg, somewhere. And what a boon! He never had to teach in a conservatory, or write movie music. No—he was luckier in some ways than Shostakovich. But both men, I think, had demons aplenty, and suffered in their various ways. Hard to know which is worse, the internal or the external demons. Though both men had both sorts….”

“Well, maybe it’s the old question: are you better off being a race horse or a plow horse?”

“On that, I have no information. I can tell you, however, that it’s a special corner of Hell…”

“Yes?”

“…to be a race horse put to work as a plow horse!”   

    

A Month of Music, Day 10

“You’re not going to tell me that you don’t listen to Mozart, Marc,” said Lady. “You know that every serious music lover will laugh you unto derision….”

“I don’t dislike him,” I told her. “And I’m very glad to have played him, though the only solo things for the cello are in fact transcriptions of works for other instruments. But there is something about the style that forces you to be utterly clean and elegant. But no, the only things that I listen to of Mozart are a few arias from some of the operas.”

“Have you considered faking it?”

“Why? Look, I thought at least I could listen to the Great Mass, which is top of the list of Mr. Fernández. So I began the Kyrie, and then the video got stuck at about 4.36 and I thought, ‘oh, good—now I don’t have to listen to it.’ And the same thing with the Requiem. So there it is, and now everybody can call me a fraud and a philistine. I can admire it; I just don’t listen to it. There it is.”

“Now see here, Marc,” said Lady seriously, “you’re completely lax and lacking. True, Mozart died at 35 or so, but he got started early. And you’re telling me that out of the 41 symphonies, there isn’t one that you listen to? And the piano concerti—there are at least 20.”

“Well, I listened to the 41^st symphony recently, mostly because the fugue at the end of the fourth movement is supposed to be one of the glories of Western Civilization. (Don’t know if I have to capitalize that, but it feels like it.) And am I going to butt heads with everybody and say that it’s not? Of course not. But rip my earphones off of my head and check out what’s accompanying my morning walk, and it won’t be that.”

“Fake it.”

“What! You ask me to compromise my integrity as a writer, to publish an errant….”

“Fiddlesticks! Writers do it all the time. You’re a wordmonger, nothing more and nothing less. Now then—find something and profess to like it…..”

“Well, the safest and easiest thing to do would be to pick a symphony, a piano concerto, and an aria or two and have done with it. In fact, I listened to all my favorite arias, I listened to the first movement of Symphony number 29, and I checked in on the d minor piano concerto. There—I’ve done it! Now, can I go now?”

“Well, surely you have to say something?”

“Do you know how hyped Mozart is? Do you know that there is an actual industry, still going on? You know, there are festivals and films and statuettes and even little chocolate candies—Mozart balls! And wherever there’s an industry, there’s hype and there’s marketing. So we have the myth: the genius who dashes off his masterpieces while sitting on the can! The tragic composer, writing a Requiem for his very own death! And which he will never finish! The starving artist who is ignominiously thrown into a mass grave!”

“Well, what of it? It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes, and sometimes only partially. Apparently Mozart did his share of crossing out and revision. And did he think he was writing the Requiem for himself? Well, you got a Ouija board? And the mass grave was apparently common in Vienna at that time: his memorial services were well attended. And his music was popular and became more so after his death….”

“So what did he die of?”

“What didn’t he die of? Do you know that Wikipedia says that 112 causes of death have been suggested? All part of the myth, hunh? Everybody else gets hit by a bus, but no, little Wolfgang has to have his mystery death!”

“Are we being just a bit peevish?”

“Well, he’s annoying me. And what’s even more annoying is that there are unexpected depths to him, and then he goes back to being charming again!”

“What?”

“Look, I listened to two piano concerti, both of which I have played….”

“You played the piano?”

“Nah, the cello in orchestras. But anyway, I’m fairly familiar with this stuff, and yes, they’re masterpieces. But the d minor has a first movement that is wild and impassionate. Oh wait—unless it isn’t. Because I just heard it again, and the new version somehow sucked out all the blood from it. Which may be the problem with Mozart: I can think of very few composers whose music relies so much on interpretation. And it is so very, very easy to have the wrong interpretation in Mozart….”

“Is that true?”

“Who knows? And maybe it’s also true that we are always interpreting Mozart according to the tastes of the times. When I was a kid, performances were staid: it was enough for the music to be ‘pretty.’ Now, we want the dramatic, the histrionic, and the self-revelatory. Which brings me to the other piano concerto—number 24. That begins with a perfectly pleasant, cheery first movement. But the slow movement that follows? It’s so painful, it’s almost hard to listen to. You feel, in a way, that you’ve invaded Mozart’s private hell.”

“Dear me….”

“I’ll say. And since I’m making an utter fool of myself, maybe I should go all the way….”

“And that is?”

“There are days I wonder whether Mozart wasn’t born in the wrong time. It must have been quite constricting, you know—to write in the classical style. It was all elegance and light. And is that why Mozart feels to me to be essentially an opera composer? As if, somehow, in opera he can let go?  Anyway, I think anybody would have to say that the ending to the Marriage of Figaro is just breathtaking—it’s some of the most glorious music in the world. It’s one thing that always gives me goose bumps….”

“And what else does?”

“The ensemble singing. Like the finale to Figaro, but also earlier in the Sull’aria. And then, of course, the trio from Così fan tutte. You know what? I could fake it, and say that I listen to the symphonies, the piano concerti, the sacred music. But why? Why bother? Trust me, the reputation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is not going to stoop in its track, shudder, and then utterly collapse because of one writer in Puerto Rico. In a way, it’s wonderfully freeing….”

“Anonymity does have its uses,” said Lady, and how does she know? She, who has over 6000 Facebook friends, and has only to breathe to earn applause.

“Ridiculous,” says she, “I feel entirely sure that Mozart is spinning somewhere, perhaps in his unmarked grave, over your words.”

“All right,” I told her, “All readers out there: Listen to the last three symphonies, as well as Symphony number 29. Check out the d minor piano concerto, as well as number 24 in A major. Listen to the Great Mass in C major, as well as the Requiem. And then you can go about your business….”

Just like me!