FORWARD MARCH
Leonard Bernstein was introducing the next item at a summer concert on Long Island:
“I would give ten years of my life to have written ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ he said. I think he meant it. A man who had so successfully synthesized the unruly mob known as “American music” could afford to be mocked. Bernstein saw through the marching feet and gold braid.
Is there room in this country’s motley Pantheon of greatest composers for John Philip Sousa? Read on. There certainly seems room for nearly everyone else. We have the symphony-opera-art song crowd, described perhaps as “Europe with a green card.” We have the religion of jazz, the holy light from darkest Africa and its many denominations {New Orleans, cool, modern). We have the mad electricians, the truly American eccentrics. We have the slam-bang forthrightness of rock-and-roll and now a current wave of music that has
anointed itself with all of the above then put on its cowboy hat and picked up a few major and minor guitar chords. This thrIving art, often called rock, has rusticated the big idea, singing of NIetzsche not in pear-shaped tones but a feedlot twang.
We have also America’s enduring musical art form, the so-called popular song. A hundred years before its brief flowering during the first half of the last century Schubert had given us his lied “An die Musik,” a deeply touching hymn to art’s healing powers. We have canonized it, framed it in reverence. “Our love is here to stay.” was written by a cigar chomping New Yorker in the songwriting business. It’s easy to love both songs separately. I wish we could love them together. The Gershwin is a wonder of simple grace, melodic surges that never lose their balance. HIs brother wrote the words, clever yet wistful and discrete. Franz von Schober’s boilerplate effusiveness comes nowhere near the music Schubert gives him.
Context decides a lot of how we approach things like music. We frame “Widmung” in the gardens of lovesick lovers, “White Christmas” in New England snow. The sounds of Schumann and Irving Berlin sound the same in the other’s venue; the difference is with us. Putting bucolic old Europe and the dark of a 52nd Street night club together onstage simply isn’t realistic but we can keep the ”look” of a piece of music from distorting our judgement of its worth.
Consider Sousa. Marching bands are brutes. Why else do we use the word ”brass” to describe aggressive declamation? Fortissimo is their speaking voice. Sidewalk flag wavers are their audience. Now listen to Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis” It attracts your attention but in a different way. It cheers you up and is dutifully loud as brass bands must be but notice how you hear everything it is doing. The transparency is amazing given the instruments being used. The melodic writing is irresistible and how well it is used, crossing. intertwining, each new germ seeming to grow out of he last. I think the reason most of us can sing a Sousa march from memory is the imprint it leaves on us. Play recordings of Sousa marches one after there other. You will not lose patience with their relentless cheerfulness. They are so very beautiful.
And before I forget no one—not Schumann, not Brahms not Duparc— ever wrote a more perfect song than “White Christmas.”
BERNARD HOLLAND
TICK-TOCK
Stravinsky was asked “Is music mathematical?” Yes, he said, but every individual piece has its own rules.
An answer to warm the hearts of Einsteinians everywhere. Gone is the celestial metronome sitting atop God’s piano creating a single, perfect beat for all the unruly students of the universe to follow. Newton believed in it but he didn’t have the very, very tiny and the very, very big to measure. However small the difference your watch and a kitchen clock in Des Moines aren’t going to say the same thing.
Metronomes were invented to clear up confusions. You decide how fast you want something to go, you find the number on the tick-tock arm that corresponds and your colleague far away will know precisely what you mean. Not conveyed are a myriad of other things whose absence render metronomes of limited value. Like the lie detector they end up inadmissible in court.
One evening an architect I know gave me his music is math routine and seemed quite pleased with himself. I just looked. What I would have told him is that music not only isn’t math, it is an assault on math.
I doubt my architect’s interest in Italian baroque music but it would give him an argument to work with. My colleagues used to gush over the scrubbed clean symmetry. Those perfect sequences bored me to death. Vivaldi, wrongly accused of writing the same concerto 200 times, has emerged from all the mediocrity around him. Every movement of “The Seasons” is different from every other movement and different from any music outside it. The modern world has beat “The Seasons” nearly to death but it is indestructible.
Theory students at conservatories follow rules. The purpose is not to produce composers who sound like Mozart or Mendelssohn but to help musical minds develop the agility to find solutions, to work one’s way out of paint-surrounded corners and to do so according to rules. The 18th century found certain sounds ugly and to be shunned. Hence tritones (”The Devil in Music”) or maybe two lines traveling a fifth apart, become for our modern Mozarts-to-be targets of professorial red pencils.
There is a great irony here in the person of J. S. Bach. In all things contrapuntal and harmonic, indeed in most things musical, he towers over all of us and yet Bach
sets the obedient student a poor example. He is a bad teacher; he breaks all the rules. In a sequence he will at first respect a musical sentence’s measured proportions, but bored with repeating it he will begin violating its symmetries, shortening, lengthening, interrupting. I think he senses our boredom and wants to keep us interested. It is his violations that excite our interest.
One traditional student exercise is writing four part harmonies for hymn tunes. Bach the church musician wrote a lot of them. The student agonizes over unanticipated conflicts and procedural roadblocks finally arriving at tidy solution. The student looks at what Bach did first saying ”You can’t do that” and then “That’s absolutely amazing.” Mozart at great climaxes assembled and packed tight together dense globs of seemingly conflicted tones (remember royalty’s “Too many notes, Mozart”) that explode into something glorious.`
Given my primitive grasp of mathematic, extending all the way to not really knowing what mathematics is, I still assume than an equation is successful when it works for everybody. Great discoveries come so fast these days that often what we know suddenly isn’t. and that a piillar of consistency and logic may turn out be ambivalent, contradictory, vague, a little crazy, deceptive, hard to control, in other words, very much like music.
BERNARD HOLLAND
THROUGH THE YEARS WITH ALFRED
I came across Alfred Brendel by accident, at a Sunday afternoon chamber music concert in Vienna led by Paul Angerer. It must have been 1958. I noticed first the number of women string players in Angerer’s band, excellent sounding musicians who had presumably not been welcomed into Vienna’s two all-male symphonic ensembles..
The young piano soloist, Alfred Brendel, was also an outlier. Using my cheap student tickets I had been hearing much of Paul Badura-Skoda and Jörg Demus, the first a tidy, correct pursuer of Viennese tradition, the second a sweetly lyrical Romantic. Vienna’s music lovers doted on them both while Brendel who was from Graz, did not cut a suave figure. Sin of sins he was not Viennese.
The music was the Haydn D-Major Concerto. I was struck. Where was the Gemütlichkeit, the “Gnädige Frau”s and hand-kissing I had waded through over the last months? Here was a totally serious man with a fierce need to know what this music wants to say. Not a false gesture nor a superfluous one.
I followed his quiet progress over the next few years in Vienna. For some reason I recall a sighting, he dressed in an uncharacteristically elegant blue suit marching down the Graben briefcase in hand. I remember his wife at concerts and wondered how different they seemed. I remember him being lost in the cross-hand passage of a Schubert Impromptu and then sometime later in the season hearing him lost at exactly the same spot. In all my years of Brendel-listening I never heard another memory problem.
My next encounter was at Salle Gaveau, a drab, busy Parisian concert hall for hire. Brendel must have still been on my mind; indeed I can’t remember the music, only my half dragging classmates at the Conservatoire to hear him. I heard a lot of music at Salle Gaveau. I always loved the audience and its genteel culture clashes. Concerts began at 8:30 only they didn’t. At 8:30 the hall was virtually empty except for scatterings of German outlanders, many of them au pair girls there to soak up culture, all looking panic stricken at their watches. At 8:35 first locals began to trickle in. The concert would begin at 8:45 or 8:50. This was the way things were done.
Then came the Brendel recordings, lots of them. The long-playing record had been introduced. Postwar Central European culture was economically on its knees. I never believed the rumor of some musicians playing for cigarettes but here was a bonanza of musical talent available for very little money. New labels flocked to Vienna and points east and signed up every talent in sight. Westminster kept Badura-Skoda busy and the products were happily received especially in America. Brendel recorded the complete Beethoven piano sonatas for Vox, a release of musical substance at a budget price. The boxed set has had booming sales for decades.
The Vox affair was one of the major frustrations of his life. He had done these recordings for a flat fee and sales blossomed without profit for the performer. In the meantime his later and wiser Beethoven recordings for Philips cost more and sold less. I understand that he finally received some satisfaction in the courts but only after many years.
I met Alfred Brendel through marriage not music. My soon to be first wife and he had a friendship (he I think with a gleam in his eye. Alfred liked the ladies.) We three went to see Madonna in “Desperately seeking Susan” one afternoon. I asked him how he liked it. He–said he liked the girls. New in my job at The New York Times, I interviewed him several times, one piece a Q and A on why classical music had such a hard time being funny. On his annual trips to America he would telephone, just a word or two but always a gentleman.
Asked in his glory years why he always made time for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he said its manager Ernest Fleischmann had supported him in leaner times. Many musicians with rising careers change agents to match their new status. Both in Europe and America Brendel was loyal to old friends. He could be funny and did a wicked impersonation of Otto Klemperer. The last time we spoke neither of us knew what had happened to my first wife.
It is difficult to put in words the hold Brendel’s playing had on so many of us. One clue is in how he taught. A number of masterclasses survive on television. He was not Socratic, kind and patient but not involved in searching out and developing the student’s singularity. You play the piece. When you do something wrong he stops and makes you do it right. There is no debate. If you were hoping to learn some insight into how to deal with similar situations you were on your own. Disagreement would probably get you nowhere. This was troubling until you began to sense the intensity of his scrutiny and his passion to serve the music. Brendel showed good will toward all his masterclass students but overarching and primary was his desire to protect music from those who would do it harm.
Brendel could be troublingly brutal and blunt in his passions. His interpretive decisions, the length of his pauses, how fast or how slow, when to wait and when to surge, what voice should stand out, all of these had a soul-searching quality. At the same time they added a certain weight to his music making.
One longed at times to wriggle free. I remember listening to Brendel’s Schubert and then putting on Wilhelm Kempff playing the same music. The weight lifted. Kempff was Iike inspired sight-reading, like riding along on an unexpected breeze, like a sudden liberation. But in the end I would return to Brendel.
He played so beautifully, every note considered. Spontaneity was not among his virtues. Physically he had enough technique, but just enough. He was largely self-taught. Florid passagework sounded more determined than triumphant but he would get through the piece. At the separation and delineation of inner voices he was a virtuoso. There was a moral tone to the beauty Brendel created. He rescued Liszt from the scorn Americans had come to feel for his virtuoso antics. He said he played Chopin privately but perhaps wisely not in public.
Brendel thought Rachmaninoff was “movie music.” Horowitz appalled him.
Two famous pianists existing in separate universes. When Horowitz played one never knew what was coming. It was exciting. When Brendel played one knew what was coming and was enriched by the knowing of it.
BERNARD HOLLAND
The 45-yard line was as good a place as any to witness the Three Tenors at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Saturday night. Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Jose Carreras and friends looked like ants on their Temple-of-Karnak-comes-to-New-Jersey stage put up in one end zone, but two huge television screens and a roaring sound system let ticket buyers know what they were missing.
The Three Tenors tour -- now a familiar phenomenon in the athletic venues of world capitals and always a bulwark for pledge weeks at local public-television stations -- does seem to make people happy. More than 50,000 customers patiently fought horrendous traffic tangles of rented Lincoln Town Cars. Their cameras lighted up the stadium night like fireflies. With mouthfuls of popcorn, listeners chatted cheerily through the music and interrupted favorites like "Nessun dorma," "La donna e mobile" and "Moon River" with cries of appreciation.
The Three Tenors behaved like men who could not believe their luck. Amplification precluded any strenuous attempts at subtlety, and if all three took furtive peeks at the scores in front of them, who was to notice? Backed by members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under James Levine and duty bound to present enthusiastic renditions of music they and their audience know in their respective sleeps, these men stand to clear $10 million each for a five-concert series now in progress. Perhaps a more apt title for these events would be "Three Tenors, One Conductor and Four Accountants."
The format will be familiar to Three Tenors watchers: Mr. Carreras, Mr. Domingo and Mr. Pavarotti filing on and off with an aria and something more folksy, and then joining for a medley ranging from "Be My Love" to "O sole mio." A brief intermission allowed Mr. Levine plenty of time to fill out a deposit slip for the reported $500,000 he received for Saturday's event.
During the break, the New Amsterdam Singers, a Manhattan choral group, struggled haplessly for the stadium's attention, but most patrons were streaming toward the concession stands. Three Tenors neckties, T-shirts, watches and binoculars were there for a modest price. Underneath the grandstand, a line formed at the white-wine stand. Nachos supremes, corn dogs and Bud Lite moved well.
For people who live their lives in classical music, the Three Tenors is a kind of benign tumor: unsightly but not life-threatening. The argument that these events attract the new listenership music needs could not be proved on Saturday. This was clearly an audience that knew all that it wanted to know about tenors and opera and would live contentedly without knowing any more.
For all three of these variously aging singers, there was, in any event, the prospect of a golden parachute: further insurance for a comfortable retirement in some near future. They worked diligently. Mr. Domingo brought deep respect and musical accomplishment to even the most casual of his repertory; he still has years to delight us in the opera house. Mr. Pavarotti let us know that a generation-defining tenor sound is still available when he chooses it to be.
Luckiest of all among the three is Mr. Carreras. Not even the coarseness of amplification could divert one's attention from the leathery, wasted quality of a voice being pushed beyond all bounds of common sense. May we show deep respect and admiration for Mr. Carreras's vigorous and apparently successful war against leukemia, but may we also insist on leaving these considerations at the steps leading to the stage, where music must take over?
Mr. Carreras is an ambivalent role model for emerging singers. His early squandering of a fresh, marvelous sound to poor repertory choices and overambition (all happening many years before the more recent medical problems) remains a model of how not to conduct a career. On the other hand, look at all the money he is making.
CHIRP
Almost every spring Joe Lelyveld, my boss at The Times, walked by my desk and asked when he could expect my annual screed about nature versus outdoor concerts. I suppose I deserved a little mocking. Going to summer festivals and various outdboor events convinced me that music by human beings when placed unprotected in the middle of the natural world doesn’t stand a chance.
I’m not just talking about the obvious: distant Interstate traffic with Mahler under the trees, or blue jays giving a philharmonic brass section a run for its money. A British conductor I knew took a six month sabbatical to the South Seas. No Beethoven, no Mozart? He answered that Beethoven and Mozart were for people who couldn’t go to the South Seas.
We imitate bird song in classical music. We can figure out the patterns but Beethoven’s cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony beloved for its sound on a concert stage makes bland competition next to what comes down to us out of the trees Birds have no interest in equal temperament. Messiaen’s transcriptions of specific bird calls are ingenious, music in their own right. But no bird ever made sounds like that.
At least one of my screeds asked why we have concerts halls. One answer: to keep nature out. They offer refuge. We sit close together, pray for silence. The novelist Rachel Cusk writes of a concert hall built underground in a public park but whose defense against outside intrusion was thwarted by the thud of park goers walking over it. Sartre wrote that churches were built to protect God from people.
Music soothes and inspires but the sounds of the natural world consume us. I delight in turning on National Geographic television and seeing vast savannahs or ten thousand wildebeests in search of water but then when things are quiet I hear something else. It is not a beautiful sound or a dramatic one. It has no development section, does not modulate, boasts no intricate stretto. It is gutteral, brief in its message and endlessly repeats itself. I am talking about turtle doves calling across a field of high grass. I hear them and am jolted back to Africa.
Turtle doves serve there as God’s musicians. They are nature with its ear to the ground, a sonic fabric stretched over a thousand years before these I have just heard and those promised a thousand hence. Africa is a wondrous, careering confusion. Turtle doves singing across the Serengeti give it a calm and equilibrium of overpowering effect.
BERNARD HOLLAND
SILENT PARTNER
People love “Clair de Lune” because of how it sounds. They should pay attention to how it moves. What an odd place to begin—midway in a bar of 9/8 time, no downbeat, no opening statement. The music drifts downward, the figures tumbling over one another. They find a resting place only 15 bars along, settling in a series chords themselves unsettled by groups of two strokes against three strokes.
This at least is what I think he wanted. The danger is in taking his meanderings at face value. I of have been listening to many “Clair de Lune”s played by famous pianists. One hears from most of them a kind of motionIess plane underneath. over whIch beautiful little figures are scattered. These figures take on a life of their own; nothing else moves. Chopped-up “Clair de Lune” has its multiple charms but we find ourselves more on a sightseeing tour than a journey of discovery.
Beneath seeming inactivIty Debussy has written invisible music. I used to call it “thread” or “line.” I heard a better description recently “inner momentum” – It is less an established speed, more a pull, a tension that brings what was toward what is coming. Past, present and future live together. Debussy the quantum physicist.
The metronome is momentum in its crudest form. The exactitudes of straight lInes or ticking clocks lines are useful to humanity but not very human at all. When European colonizers first sent bright young africans to western schools many of the latter were puzzled by the idea of straight lines and right angles, things that happen in their natural environments only accidentally. The metronome polices movement. It is not very creative. The closest thing I know to inner momentum in music is human heartbeat. You can’t set your watch to it but it negotiates with what the rest of your body is doing. Excessive idling or engine racing not recommended.
Quiet is not nothing. Of all the “Clair de Lune”s I’ve been listening to I think Walter Gieseking understands that best. Browsers through Youtube can’t help but notice the recent inundation of Gieseking recordings. One explanation: he was a record company’s dream. Other artists agonized over takes and retakes. Gieseking walked into the studio, played it once and walked out. He said he never practiced. (“I would be too tired to play the concerts.”)
You may approach him as a hulking Nazi or as the gold standard of piano sonority but he was
astonishing in every way. He evidently played a Beethoven sonata cycle (all 32 from memory) as a teenager. He learned and memorized pieces on airplanes, playing them for the first time in concert. Some people thought those lavish sounds he created in Debussy recordings had to be technically manufactured. I heard him twice on a less than brilliant Baldwin piano and those noises were his. Overlooked was Gieseking’s respect for inner momentum. If some passages of his “Clair de Lune” seem at first to drag hear how they reach out to the passage to come. It is deeply satisfying music. This genius of pedal effects, by the way, recorded the Mozart repertory using no pedal at all. Was he making fun of us? Most of his Mozart works.
Let’s end with a little cold water to the face — the composer’s own adventure with the player-piano from 1913. It is rhythmically a little sloppy, or at least casual. Is Debussy playing his pIece for posterity or did he and his contemporaries simply misunders†and that one run-through could survive as a permanent record and not just die away as a moment? One thinks of Schnabel’s Beethoven whose recorded flaws could have been addressed. He wasn’t interested. And do composers, as some think, hear their own music faster than we? Is all my pontificating simply foolish? If you are looking for answers I don’t have them.
BERNARD HOLLAND
ORPHANS
When children ask where babies come from they enter the gentle world of genealogy. Parents have explaining to do for it is hard to truly know something and not know the circumstances that made it. For the Mormons knowing where one came from became a science. For the English aristocracy, also the old American South that produced me, it was a religion. Ancestor worship held the promise of reflected distinction, earned or not. My mother called it Shintoism.
Musicologists make livings in part by tracing a Bach or a Puccini back to ancient relatives. Histories are stories, threads between past to present. Perhaps thread-bearers (forgive me) find in Bach’s great-great uncle Detlef adumbrations of the B-minor Mass. Musical talent has to be genetic. How else to explain the unbroken line of composers and musicians that are the forebears of these two men?
Memorable composers are more easily remembered when we can write and talk about them, place them in the middle of some genealogical process. Wagner will always be close to us as long as critics like Alex Ross produce world-encompassing books about him. Separate libraries could be filled by words about the origins of Beethoven or Mozart. Then there are maddening puzzles like Chopin or Debussy both of whom would have a firmer place in the Pantheon of “World’s Greatest” if only we knew where they came from.
If we look past the suspicious belovedness of Chopin’s music he is clearly in the running for most original composer who ever lived. He rewrote the way the piano is played and not just a lIttle. A generation or so before Chopin piano teachers saw the thumb as a clumsy brute to be banished from the keyboard. Try that with a Chopin Etude. Lightly sounding, lightly built early pianos were more confidantes than public orators and certainly not the roaring monsters that accompanied his swift rise to fame. Chopin never really came from anywhere. The mazurkas wave the flag and local modes spice up major and minor keys. But I suggest that Chopin gave Poland as much national identity as it gave him.
For Debussy questions of lineage are not as clear cut. He himself said Liszt’s “Fountains at the Villa d.Este” gave him ideas. A lot of smart people think “The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” with its evasions of tonality, fluid meters and extraordinary orchestras colors, announces the coming of 20th-century modernism. The work of a 32-year-old, it inspired an uptick in composers using whole-tone scales and the once-dreaded parallel fifth but there is no School of Debussy.
I wrote all this after listening to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli play Debussy’s piano “Image” “Reflets dans l”Eau” on Youtube, once as a young man and then 30 years later. The first recording is an avalanche of beautiful piano playing, great surges of sound, crystalline sonorities, musical progress held back then violently pushed forward, a little like the finale of a fireworks display that amazes and confuses at the same time. The second version is slower, still brilliant but a calmer brilliance.
Young Michelangeli looks to his forebears for guidance and finds young Liszt and his Marvel-Movie-iike extravaganzas.The older Michelangeli looks back and finds a less obvious ancestor Mozart. A musician has come upon the intriguing possibility that approaching seemingly exotic music as if it were a Mozart sonata - respecting note values, maintaining coherent tempos, and with a minimum of editorial fiddling - elevates Debussy above the marginal status in which others hold him. They say you can’t pick and choose your relatives but Michelangel comes close. In any case “Greatness” evaluators should swallow hard and admit that "Afternoon of a Faun” sits comfortably next to Beethoven at his best.
BERNARD HOLLAND
November 7, 2024
Being currently incapable of writing, talking or emailing about other matters let me commend to you Paul Lewis, a Brit pianist all over Youtube. Especially the Schubert G-Major Sonata. Wholly genuine, not a single false move.
More later
BERNARD HOLLAND
NAMES AND WHAT’S IN THEM
A hymn to wistful old age— sweet, resigned yet restless and unsatisfied— is a piano piece by the elder Brahms. It is called Opus 118, No.2. Should we parse the name? Maybe the “1”s depict resolute uprightnessness in the face of decline. Maybe the “8” is a voluptuous daydream of feminine beauty. Accounting-wise “Op. 118, No. 2” works fine. It’s the second piece of what comes after Opus 117. Easy to look up.
There is good sense in disassociating the “meanings” of music from words and numbers, or indeed, colors (pace Scriabin). Beethoven never called his Opus 27, No.2 the “Moonlight” Sonata. The sound may offer a nice background to to a sundowner’s view of the night sky but who could hear thIs music then exclaim, “Hey, there’s moonlight”.?
There is no arguing against using music with nicknames as historical or geographic markers. The “Concord” Sonata” or the “Eroica” Symphony describe Ives and Napoleon, not what they created or inspired. “Goldberg” is not interchangeable with great swaths of variations. Goldberg paid for the piece.
I confess a weakness for the names themselves even when they drift away from their designated moorings. The five syllables of “Turangalila” send my mind racing to the jungles of the Maya and bloodthirsty rituals. I long to know more about the Fingal of “Fingal’s Cave”
Chopin’s “Black Key” Etude previews the technical horrors awaiting its performer while the finale of the B-flat minor Sonata comes close to true onomatopoeia, swirling with a blur a few actually might identify as snow or dust. Few opera titles have the swift rhythmIc punch of “La FORZA del DesTINo,” German-speaking opera houses dampen the effect by putting on Verdi’s opera as “Die Macht des Schicksals.” Same music, less poetry.
Satie gave us “Music in the Shape of a Pear.” Is he pulling our collective leg or is his oddly shaped mind teasing us with some previously unattended significance? Debussy explained by putting the titles at the ends of his Preludes not the beginnings.
If Bach is music’s greatest composer, “Almeria” must be its most beautiful name. I came across it as one of Albeniz’s exquisite piano pieces, the sound of the title floating over the composer’s inspired ornateness. Almeria is city in Spain. Say the word outloud accenting the next to last syllable. You will never tire of such unimpeded legato.
But what is Almeria? Google knows — a city in Spain, the hottest city in Europe, its last real snow 1935. There are urban Spain’s requisite number of ruined castles and ornate churches. Otherwise its citizens dig for iron, can fish, make cement, grow food, provide lots of desert in which to film spaghetti westerns. Its unusually bright skies tend to give touring sunbathers more sun than they bargained for.
My “Almeria” is elsewhere, halfway between fantasy and dream. I refuse to admit that the open pit iron ore of Minas de Alquifa exists. I have willed it not to.
BERNARD HOLLAND
SCHUBERT WINTERIZED
“Winterreisse,” Schubert’s doleful take on rejected love, is 190 years old but listened to more than ever. Its meager means —a tenor, a pianist and a piano— emanate world-engulfing sensibilities. When so much is produced by so little we somehow do not tire of it..
Old things invite a struggle between preservation and rejuvenation. The first has pretty much had its way in recent decades. The Early Music Movement was not just a trend, but a crusade. Doing old things the old way took on a moral tone. Change, god forbid adaptation, became the enemy.
Now that Early Music has taken its place at the table and its war drums become more muted, the adapting community has reemerged from its bomb shelters and is unashamedly fiddling with originals. Reincarnating Winterreise” is one popular project. Wilhelm Müller’s story poem in 16 verses-written in 1821 and set to music by Schubert six years later-reappears two centuries later in new surroundings.
One adapter was Hans Zender, a German who died five years ago. He seems to ask, what if we relieve a single piano of such heavy descriptive chores and call in help. Let’s wheel piano and pianist into the wings and fill the stage with an orchestra, albeit a small one, adding a rotary wind maker, homemade percussion and children’s toys. Lifted from the audience is the burden of having to imagine.
Zender was careful to say he was not improvIng Schubert, only seeing him from a different angle. I suspect, however, an unspoken Mahlerian lust, one that says, “Leave nothing unsaid.” Youtube is rich with examples of Zender’s version along with a rehearsal led by Simon Rattle. I wonder if you will find them as unsettling as I did. Schubert with spear in hand is an odd sight. He was a little man with a hotline to the afterlife which no one else has ever quite matched.
Zender gives us wind that really howls, re-creates a passable hurdy-gurdy with a plastic toy. For those who want the “real thing” Schubert’s piano must seem a frail attempt next to Zender’s fulsome weather report. Yet recitals work from bare stages. There is a storyteller and a listener. Listeners create their own howling winds from the teller’s word.
Zender’s enhancements feel more like impersonations, like tv comics “doing” Jimmy Stewart or Cagney. I remember a debut song recital whose printed program cited a stage director. The singer, as you can imagine, was busy. A nice voice, a shame.
What I miss most in Schubert-Zender is the loneliness, the bleak empty spaces that surround the traveler with such dread and despair. Mahler’s music craves company. Schubert’s does not. In Schubert’s music the big lies hidden in the small. He does not owe you an explanation any more than “Winterreise” needs central heating.
BERNARD HOLLAND
Chopin Nocturne in D-Flat, Opus 27, No.2
Journeying across the burning sands of Youtube I came across Maria Joao Pires playing Chopin’s D-Flat Nocturne (Op. 27, No. 2). I grew up with the Dinu Lipatti recording, a performance worshiped for its near-supernatural perfection. Ms. Pires is different.
How do emotion, sentiment, passion, desire or whatever you want to call them enter music and make their way to us? Lipatti made love to us through his passion for every contour of Chopin’s phrases--the right touch of rubato or degree of crescendo, the kind of impulsive and yet patient rush of acceleration that actually adheres to the moving line rather than interrupting it. Perfection, unfairly, can imply coldness: humanity and its fallibilities are denied. Lipatti denies the denial.
Pires is slower. She stretches expressive gestures almost to exaggeration but she too hears the moving line. Her touch on the keys conveys something so intimate it seems to lay hands on us. It becomes storytelling. There are 21 Nocturnes. This one is special for its reserve and elegance, also for one of Chopin’s most exquisite run-on sentences. Let’s say I used to have a favorite Chopin Nocturne and now have two, both with the same name.
BERNARD HOLLAND